

Lorelai, You'll Never Die

25 Tales of the Apocalypse

By

Laura Konrad

Copyright 2015 Laura Konrad

Some Material: Copyright Creative Commons 4.0 BY-SA

ISBN: 978-1942138136

Published by Dryden House

Cover Design: Tracy Vincent, Gavin Revitt

Original Image: Chris Sardegna

http://chrissardegna.com/

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Part 1 "A Slut's Guide to the Apocalypse"

Armageddon It On

You're Dead

Mono: An Aesoph Fable

Swear by the Styx

Blister and Bleed: An Aesoph Fable

The Outland Camp

Part 2 "A Baddass' Guide to the Apocalype"

Kill or Be Killed

Freak Like Me

She Whispers Sweet Nothings, I Scream Profanities

The Hanging Whores of Babylon

Blood Red Reservoir

Tabernacle

Part 3 "A Lover's Guide to the Apocalypse"

Enemy of My Enemy

Thanks to the Oil Boom: An Aesoph Fable

Boss Man

Machina: An Aesoph Fable

Seven Ate Nine

Lorelai, You'll Never Die: Nine's Dream

The Four Horsemen

Hit Me

With a Bang

Part 4 "A Lonely Girl's Guide to the Apocalypse"

The Same Old Song

A Motel in Limbo: The Hitman's Tale

A Lonely Girl's Guide to the New World

Armageddon It Off

About Laura Konrad
Introduction

I had the pleasure of meeting Laura Konrad through Joel Stottlemire of Dryden House. He'd just hired me on, and wanted me to work with Laura on her new book of short stories. He had taken some time and explained that it was just a bunch of short stories that were tied together simply because they were apocalyptic in nature. So, I sat down with approximately 15 stories, a few related to each other, but not to anything else. However, as I read, I saw a larger story emerge. This started Laura and my back and forth emails. And with some prodding from me for more stories (because I'm a greedy bookworm), and Laura's amazing imagination, Lorelai, You'll Never Die was born.

I will say that working with Laura has been amazing. She's a fun and engaging person to work with. She knows what she wants, but isn't afraid to take a shot with something that she didn't originally envision. I couldn't have asked for a better author to break me into the editing and publishing business. Thank you, Laura. And thank you Joel, for having the foresight to put us together.

Tracy Vincent,

Editor at Dryden House

Acknowledgements

This book came to be with the help of many people, more than I can name, but all of whom have helped me in one way or another. I can still try.

Joel, for the opportunity to do all of this. I never thought that I'd get the chance to work with someone who loves sci-fi worlds as much as I do and who would invest their time on little ol' me. This is all because of one message on Deviantart, and from the first posted story on the Dryden website to Sky Goddesses and to this, it's only become a greater experience.

Tracy, the best editor ever, who looked at my jumble of stories and brought out the best of it. I've learned so much from her and hope to continue learning more about this world I never thought I'd be part of.

Gavin, for the spectacular cover he and Tracy put together.

My parents, for being my number one fans even if they think there's too much swearing in my writing.

"Lecaptaindom" who isn't active on Deviantart anymore but whose prompt for an apocalyptic story about morals and laws was the spark that lit the fire which became A Slut's Guide to the Apocalypse.

All of my Deviantart friends who have helped me grow into a better writer over the years.

And to Jason, for everything.
A Slut's Guide to the Apocalypse

**Armageddon It On: A Lorelai Adventure**

I was going one way. He was going the other.

"The east has fallen," he said. He'd come from a sunken warship where the land was soggy and smelled like the gas that escapes from bloated corpses **.**

"The west is gone," I added. Behind me was nothing but flat land coated with dust, ash and cremains.

Where was there left to go?

"The south is rife with disease," I said.

We were sitting on a bench, just a bench in a simple town. It wasn't a special place, and before the shitstorm, it probably wasn't special to anyone but the people who lived there. They were all dead now, mummified against the window panes and flattened on the streets. I'd accidentally run over a fresher one on my way in, and the head had popped off like the cap on a full tube of toothpaste.

He smelled like dampness and rot. "We really did it," he said."There's nothing left."

"This place seems to be held together."

"By ghosts, maybe." I saw the gun in his pants, tucked between his back and the waist of his jeans, as I followed him into a decrepit pharmacy. He spoke about it before I could ask.

"I only have one, you have two."

Mine were nothing great, mostly damaged by water and sand. I had a rifle and a handgun.

"I'd rather have one and not need it, than need one and not have it."

He nodded at the intimate aids aisle as we passed it. "My gym teacher told us the same thing in high school."

I stocked up on lip balm and tissues, and he filled his bag with bandages pulled out of their cardboard boxes. We returned to the bench and sat down again. I tossed a small foil pack at his dirty face; I'd pinched it from the intimate aids aisle when he wasn't looking. He raised an eyebrow.

"You don't even know me."

"There's not much I know at all anymore," I said. "It's been eight months since I've seen another living soul. We can dance around this all we want, but I know what I want. What happens after is up to us."

He fucked me from behind, bending me over that bench. I was pointed towards an old hardware store, where the former owner was lying half out of the front door, staring me down and still wearing a red embroidered shirt.

He'd only pulled his pants down to his knees to do it, and when we were both done, he did them back up.

I was fixing mine when I noticed that he'd put his gun on the ground while we were busy.

We sat back down on the bench, closer together so I didn't have to sit on the spot where the wood was now damp, and wondered where there was left to go, and what there was left to say.

He had an idea. "How did you get here, through all of this?"

"It's a long story."

"I bet it's pretty interesting."

**  
**

**You're Dead: A Lorelai Adventure**

I didn't know that Tim had disappeared until the police came knocking on Saturday morning. They caught us all up on the events of the past sixteen hours. Tim had told his mom that he was coming to visit me, and if he would be out too late to walk home on his own, he would stay at Sam's house for the night. Sam was interviewed too—I could see the police cars parked in front of his house down the street—but he gave the police the same answer that I had.

"I don't know where he is."

He had last been seen by his mom, wandering out to their property's barn before supposedly heading in my direction. Tim spent a lot of time out there if he wasn't at school or with Sam and I. He always had some kind of art project going on, usually involving ceramic mosaics or glass stuck to the surfaces of household objects. He would come to school with cuts on his hands and arms and boast about the best thing ever. At the time, he'd been working on what he called his magnum opus.

"What does that mean?" Sam asked him during lunch once day.

Tim had only shrugged. "It's the big one."

The police left my house asking that I report back to them if I were to learn anything about where Tim was and what happened to him. After they left, my dad sat me down at the kitchen table, looked me in the eye, and asked if I had been telling the truth.

"Yes," I promised. "I'm just as surprised as everyone else." That was the truth. I really didn't know what had happened to him, and it worried me. Part of me hoped that if he knew he'd be leaving, he would have told us.

My dad wanted me to stay home for the rest of the day, but I ended up sneaking over to Sam's after I saw the police car pull away. I hoped he would answer the door and we could sneak off somewhere private together, but it was his stepmom instead. She wrapped her arms around me as soon as she saw me.

"Oh, Lorelai. I know it's hard, but they're going to find him. Everything is going to be okay."

The way she rocked me back and forth didn't help the twisting thoughts in my head about where Tim could be and what trouble he could have gotten into, but I let her believe that it was working with a sheepish smile. "Is Sam home?"

"His room, dear."

Sam was sitting at his desk, staring out the window. He didn't even turn to look at me when I walked into his room and sat down on his bed.

"Where the hell did he go?" he eventually mumbled.

"I was hoping you could tell me."

It was hard to continue our regular routine without him. Lunch wasn't the same. Some yuppie girls made his locker into a vigil. Sam didn't want his shirt to catch on fire from the candles so we ended up eating in the stairwell. English class was quieter without the sound of pages furiously flipping somewhere behind me. There was no exasperated huffing or swear words mumbled so that the teacher wouldn't hear.

Everyone asked if I was okay, of course, and if I knew anything about what happened. I couldn't answer either of those questions. I couldn't wrap my head around why they all cared now when not too long ago they hadn't given Tim a second thought, and when they had, it wasn't anything nice enough to repeat.

"We'd be lying if we said he wasn't troubled," Sam told me one evening, while we were watching bad movies in his basement. Tim had been gone for two weeks at that point, and as far as we knew, the police hadn't found any leads or any evidence. "People like to think that they could have helped out, saved him, seen it coming. That's why they all care now."

"Saved him?" I repeated. "You think he did this to himself? That someone else wasn't involved?"

"Who does he know besides us and his mom and brother?" Sam shrugged and answered his own question for me. "No one."

"Tim might not have been right in the head sometimes, but he wouldn't hurt himself, and wouldn't leave the two of us like this without knowing anything."

"Lorelai, I can't say that anymore."

At that moment, I realized Sam was lost. Tim was dead to him, thrown over a bridge or incinerated in a fire by his own doing. Perhaps he thought he was rotting in the forest underneath an oak tree with his arms flayed open. Until there was something, a hint or a lead or just a shred that I could believe in, there was no truth to what we thought. Tim was missing, but we couldn't say what happened and who was responsible, and we couldn't conclude anything. To me, he was just somewhere else, and the possibility that he hurt himself wasn't anything worth believing in.

Everyone moved on, or at least tried to. The candles were blown out, the missing posters wrinkled, and we stopped speaking about it because it only made us sad again.

That left me with no one to talk to.

I spent one whole night in my room, just lying in bed. Whenever I would hear footsteps coming down the hallway, I'd grab a book just so my dad would think that I was doing something. He came into my room one more time before calling it a night.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"I don't know," was the only thing I could say, though it was the truth.

He tried to get more out of me, but I turned over in my bed and pretended to fall asleep.

It was sometime after midnight when I noticed the sound of leaves crunching outside my window. I assumed it was only the neighbour's dog until there was a knock on the glass. I curled into a tight ball, and heard a voice outside.

"Lorelai?" It was barely a whisper, but I knew who it was. "Lorelai? Are you in there? The light is still on. I can see it."

I wished that I could disappear. I wished that I could be like everyone else, perfectly happy and given closure. Instead, I was being haunted.

The knock came again. "Lorelai? It's me."

I was scared—more than scared—but I managed to sit up and reached for the curtain. I knew what I was going to find out there, but I still had to cover my mouth to keep from screaming. On the other side of the glass was Tim, dressed in the clothes he'd been last reported wearing.

I scrambled to slide the window open, and once there was only a screen separating us, I could hear his breathing. It was heavier than I remembered.

"What the hell is going on?" I whispered. I could only imagine what would happen if my dad heard any commotion and wandered into my room. "Where have you been? What did you do? Why did you leave?" I could have asked him questions all night.

He nodded towards the front of the property, and then disappeared. I put on a sweater and tiptoed out of the house, locking the door behind me.

He was waiting for me on the front step, and I finally got a better look at him under the dim porch light. It had been weeks, and it showed. Though his ability to grow facial hair wasn't anything to be proud of, there was still a shadow to his face, and his hair was a little messier. His face might have been thinner, but he'd always looked a little gaunt, so it was hard to tell. His mom had reported to the police that she'd last seen him wearing his usual uniform of jeans and a black hooded sweater, and though he had a few copies of each at his disposal, it looked more like he'd been wearing the same clothes for as long as he'd been gone.

I probably just stared at him for ten minutes to make sure he wasn't a figment of my imagination that would slip away without a moment's notice, then I ran into a hug, so he could never leave us again. Up close he smelled strange, like something earthy with a chemical tinge, but I didn't think much of it. I was just glad that he was there and alive.

He held me just as tight as I was holding him, and stroked a hand through my hair. "It's okay."

I let go of him, finding that my eyes were damp. "What's going on?"

"That's why I came here. I couldn't wait to tell you." His tone was excited, but it only worried me.

"Tell me what?"

"You have to come with me. I have to show you." He reached for my hand, but I pulled it away. "What's wrong?"

"Tim, you were gone for weeks. We were all worried. Sam is convinced you hurt yourself. He thinks you're dead."

"I'm not dead."

"Everyone thinks you are."

"Did you?"

"No." He smiled, but I wasn't done yet. "Does your mom know that you're here right now?"

"No."

"If I come with you, do you promise to see her as soon as we're done?"

"Yes." He held out his hand again, waiting for mine. "I promise, Lorelai."

I was still worried about what he was going to show me, but I took his hand and let him lead me away, believing that after this, we could go back to the way it was before.

After five minutes I realized we were headed to the park, but Tim didn't say anything on the way there. He just held my hand and walked without turning to look at anything else, though I caught him glancing my way out of the corner of his eye once or twice.

It was well after midnight, so the park was empty and dark except for the glow of a few lamps. There was probably a law about how late you could be there, but Tim didn't seem too worried about that. We walked along the asphalt trails for a while until he led me into one of the grassy fields, toward the forest.

"Is it safe to go in there?" I asked him.

"Don't you trust me?"

"Of course I do."

"It's safe," he told me, and I believed him.

He still held my hand when we got into the trees, taking his time to help me navigate the twisted trunks and thick bushes. I scratched my leg on something, but it didn't stop me. Though I couldn't see very much in the forest, I could feel him holding my hand, and if I was about to lose my balance, he'd hold it tighter.

We finally arrived at a small clearing, where you could glimpse a small snippet of the stars in the sky if you looked up. I could make out Tim's outline, and I could barely see that there was something strange nearby. It was a bit taller than Tim, who had half a foot on me, and glimmered in the starlight beneath a large oak tree.

"This is my magnum opus," he told me. "My uncle was driving around one day and saw that someone was throwing it away, so he picked it up and gave it to me."

"What is it?" I asked.

"An outhouse."

"An outhouse?"

"One of those old wooden ones that people would use before running water, not just at the county fair or a bad concert. It's pretty old, so it doesn't smell."

My mind drifted back to before he went missing, and the last art project he'd told us about. "This is the big one?"

"Yes. I knew it was going to be good as soon as I started. I had some leftover ceramics and glass from my last projects, so I started making a mosaic around the hole in the front, painted the inside and outside a few times, and I even found some old canisters and jugs to fill up the seat. When I thought it was done, I figured that I should get inside and see if it was comfortable. Hell, it could even be used again." I wrinkled my nose at the thought. "Then it happened."

"What happened?"

"I traveled through time."

"Tim..."

"I know it seems a little far-fetched, but it happened. I got inside, closed the door, and I wasn't in the barn anymore. I was in some sort of vortex. It was so bright, and I think I saw every colour that exists in the universe. It was beautiful. And then I stopped. I wasn't here anymore. I was somewhere else."

My grip on his hand began to loosen. "Where were you?"

"It was a city like this, but it was different. It was bigger, and there were walls all around the buildings. There were soldiers in the streets and so many planes in the sky."

I was barely holding on anymore. "Then what happened?"

"Well, I didn't want to keep it in the barn in case Owen found it, so I brought it out here."

"How?"

He ignored the question. "I've kept going back since then."

"You've been out here for weeks."

"It feels like it's been years."

"It's been weeks, Tim. Have you eaten anything?"

"I've been eating while I'm there. It's a lot like the food we eat now, but it's not as good. It tastes like chemicals."

He started talking more about the future, and I could only think of possible explanations for why he was acting like this. He wasn't crazy, no matter what anyone at school or any doctor has ever said. I wondered if it was possible to just snap one day and lose your grip on reality, but that wasn't possible for the Tim that I knew. No one at school had been bothering him right before he left, and if someone had, he didn't tell Sam or me about it. He would have told us. There was no good reason for spending that long hiding in the woods, living off of god-knows-what, and that worried me the most.

"Can I show you?" he asked, and catching my attention again.

"You haven't traveled through time."

"Yes, I have."

"No, you haven't. You've been in that outhouse the whole time. I don't know how you haven't starved yet, but you have to go home. You have to go now."

"I just have to show you first."

I tore my hand away from him. "No!"

"Lorelai?"

I turned around, thinking that I could get back to the park by myself, but he grabbed me. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and held me tight.

"Let go of me!"

"The only way you'll believe me is if I show you. I have to take you there."

"Tim! Stop!"

He began stepping backwards to the outhouse, taking me with him no matter how much I squirmed to get free. "You don't have to worry about anything, I promise. Once I show you what I've seen, you'll believe it. You'll know the truth."

"Someone help me!"

The door of the outhouse creaked open behind me. "You'll like where I'm taking you." His voice was strained as he pulled me inside. "You'll just have to see."

He pulled me in and closed the door behind us. It was hot, tight, and smelled like his sweater. I couldn't see anything and could only hear his breathing and feel his heat radiating in front of me. His hand lightly stroked my face, and as soft as his touch was, it only worried me more.

Then it happened. It was first a small flicker of light in the darkness, so small that I barely noticed it, but then it began to grow. Spindly arms of light began to spread outward before me, and the air stunk of metal, chemicals and hot dirt. Outlines began to form within the light, and then there was the colour, like no shade I'd seen before.

I could still feel his hand at my face, but it slowly began to slip away. As the light continued to grow, it felt as if Tim wasn't there anymore. I could hear his heavy breathing between bursts of words that I couldn't understand, but there was something between us now that would keep him from grabbing hold again.

The color and light soundlessly exploded, and for a split second, I saw everything. I saw smoke and fire and ash. I saw bombs falling over the forest. I saw black rivers and black towers and rivers running red with blood. I forced my hand forward, trying to push it away from me, and felt my hand on the wood of the door, pushing it open.

I was back in the forest, lying face-down on the ground. I looked over my shoulder and saw him half-in and half-out of that chemical-soaked outhouse, body convulsing and his words nothing but tongues. I felt disoriented, but I managed to get to my feet and wandered back to the park in search of help, though I could hear the departing string of near-words long after I'd left.

**Mono: An Aesoph Fable**

One morning a black pillar appeared in the center of town, within the boundaries of the park and right outside of the library. It stood at least thirteen feet tall and was as wide as a mature oak. They deduced it was made out of some kind of polished stone. Some guessed it was obsidian. Others argued it was too strong to be such a fragile stone. It could have been granite, but when was the last time you saw black granite in that quantity, and in that shape?

"We should knock it down and drag it away!" someone shouted.

But they were too afraid to touch it.

"Why not just leave it here?" another suggested.

But they wondered what would happen if they didn't do anything at all.

Whoever put it there didn't do it alone. They'd need a truck to transport the thing, and they'd need some way to get it off the flatbed and stand it up straight. But why go to all of that trouble for a pillar of rock?

My mother fell into the category of townspeople who thought it was best to leave it alone. She ordered my younger brother and I back home, away from the crowd around the pillar. She said there was no use dwelling on things that we didn't, and couldn't understand. Someone else would know what to do. It was beyond the three of us, a single mother in a sleepy little town and her two teenage sons.

I said that I was tired and went to bed shortly after we returned from the park, though I lay in bed for a long time unable to close my eyes.

A knock on my bedroom window startled me at first, though it took a few more knocks to figure out that someone was throwing stones at the glass. I dragged myself out of bed to see who it was, letting in a flying pebble as I cracked open the window. Without my glasses, I could see Bryony's faint outline as she fished stones out from underneath the fence on the property line. It couldn't have been anyone else. Lucky for her, my gun-toting-conspiracy-driven neighbors had been gone since the pillar appeared.

I stopped her before she could throw another, and hissed, "What are you doing?"

She took a sigh of relief when she noticed I was leaning out of the window, squinting to see any discernible shapes below me. "Good, you're still awake. Get dressed if you're not decent and get down here."

"Why? Where are we going?" I asked.

I didn't have to be able to see her to know she had a sly smile painted across her face. "Where do you think?"

"Just give me one minute."

I couldn't blame her for wanting to get a better look at the black pillar. She had always been the adventurous type; that's why we worked so well together. If we weren't friends, I would spend every night in my room with my nose in a book, never seeing the world outside my window. I pushed my glasses onto my face and shrugged on a sweater before lowering myself out. My bedroom sat above the living room, and with everyone in bed, there was no one on the couch to see my feet dangling above the bushes.

"Just let go," she whispered. "You've only got five feet, six tops."

My fingernails were digging into the paint on the windowsill. I was afraid to let go for a moment, but I was more afraid of not doing so at all. I relaxed my hands expecting to land on my feet suavely, though have I ever been suave? I ended up landing with too much pressure on my heels and fell backwards onto Bryony. Better on her feet than I was, she kept her balance and kept me from crashing into her and the fence. The last thing we needed was for my mother to wake up, wondering why I was sneaking out with a girl late at night.

"Let's get going, smooth operator," Bryony joked, "before you almost fall on someone else."

My neighborhood was near the outskirts of town, and at that time of night it was quite quiet. We expected the park to be the same. Those who chose to ignore the pillar were asleep, and those who were riled up by it had filtered into town hall to decide what to do about it.

We passed town hall along the way, alight with chatter and yells from the people.

"What do you think of it?" Bryony asked me.

From where we were on the street, I could just make out the top of the pillar as it reflected light from the streetlamps. "I'm not entirely sure. You?"

"Maybe it's one of those government experiments, where they see how close we'll get to killing each other before they need to step in. Or it fell from space."

"And landed upright?"

"I think everything can stick a better landing than you."

Though the pillar fascinated the both of us, we still didn't get too close to it once we arrived at the park. Some caution had to be taken, of course. I couldn't consider Bryony's latter theory too much, only because it was hard to believe a perfect cylinder could fly through space and land perfectly without anyone seeing. Her former theory was more realistic, but just as puzzling to think of being true. I didn't have any interesting ideas involving the pillar's origin. It was simply an enigma. Was there a need to explain it?

"It looks stranger in the dark," I observed, "if that's possible."

"Looks kinda like a big penis," Bryony added. "It's not really the exact shape, and it's a little lonely without the twins at the bottom, but it's essentially a big cock."

"You think everything looks like that."

"I'm always subject to pathetic phallacy. Want to touch it?"

"You're the one who just suggested it's the dildo of the gods."

"Hey, we can stand out here all night and be immature about objects like this, or we can be the mature young adults that we are and figure out what no one else is smart enough to understand. Hell, you're only going to be seventeen once."

I figured that there was no harm, if it was in fact made of stone like everyone said it was. We kept getting closer until we were only inches from the monolith. It was even more daunting that close. I felt like a young child again, stuck in a world of giants where they knew much more than I could ever hope to know. This giant knew something that no one could guess just by looking.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" I sighed.

"Come on, Daff," Bryony smiled, "you wouldn't want someone else to be the first to touch it, would you?"

I noticed she was already reaching for it. I told myself that it was just another rock, and pressed my palm against it before she could.

I wasn't in the dark park with Bryony anymore. I was somewhere else. I was sitting down on a vinyl-covered couch in a room nearly the size of mine back at home. There were no windows, only a pendant lamp hanging above my head. A door was directly in front of me, varnished to be as shiny as the couch I was sitting on. I noticed that the doorknob was turning, and braced myself for what was about to come.

The door seemed to open on its own; I didn't see a hand wrapped around the knob on the other side. Instead, light poured into the room and I was forced to shield my eyes.

"I know you think I'm hot, Daff, but am I as bright as the sun?"

I peered through my fingers to make sure what I was hearing could be true. I could only see a faint outline through the blinding light. It hurt to look. "Bryony? Is that you?"

I heard the door close and the only light source was back to being the lamp above me. She was really there in the room with me, though it was not a Bryony I was familiar with. We'd been friends since we were five, but I'd never seen her out of her clothes, save for the occasional pool-hopping we'd do on hot summer nights. Now she was standing before me in nothing but a delicate, black bra and lacy underwear to match. She had one hand on her hip and the other hanging free at her side. She'd curled her pin-straight hair into rolling brown waves, and had even thrown on some makeup.

She didn't say anything at first. She just walked over to me until she was directly in front of me; our knees touching. She swung one leg up onto the couch, then the other, and lowered herself until she was essentially straddling me.

"What's going on?" I asked, a bit breathless.

She began running her fingers through my hair, the tips of her nails lightly scratching my scalp. "Isn't this what you want, Daff?"

The moment that her pink-stained lips met mine, the bright light returned and I was brought back to the dark park in our sleepy little town. I was being pulled away from the black pillar by an unseen mob that surrounded me and unleashed a barrage of questions.

"What were you doing?"

"Why did you touch it?"

"It was you, wasn't it?"

"What did you do?"

I still felt a bit delirious over what had just happened. I couldn't focus on the many faces around me, and I couldn't see any sign of Bryony anywhere. I just strung a few words together, as many as I could. "I saw...something."

I don't think a full second passed until others began turning around and hovering towards the pillar with their fingertips reaching for the polished stone. I found myself still in a bit of a fog over what I had seen, wondering what it was, and why I'd seen it to begin with.

"Daff! Daff!"

I picked out Bryony's hands waving back and forth as she jumped through the crowd. She stumbled through the back of the mob as everyone jostled to get closer to the pillar. I could see that people were already touching it, frozen in thought with their hand on the flawless monument. What were they seeing?

Bryony was visibly shaken. As soon as she was close enough, she stumbled into my arms, her pale hands clutching the loose fabric of my sweater. "What just happened, Daff?"

"Did you see something too?" I asked. She nodded frantically, a big yes. "What was it?"

A half-sane smile came across her face as she remembered. "I was back on the farm." I knew what she was talking about right away, though it had been nearly ten years since one of her disgruntled family members burned down her grandfather's farm to keep it from being sold by the bank. The crops were seared and the house was reduced to a pile of ash and debris. There were pictures in the paper for weeks. "Everyone was there, and everyone was happy." She made intense eye contact with me, to reinforce her seriousness. "You were there too."

"I was?" I questioned.

"What did you see, Daff?"

I stammered out a lie instead of telling her the truth. "I'm not too sure, there was a lot of light in what I saw. My head still hurts from it. It just happened so fast."

Bryony looked over her shoulder at the crowd of townspeople, fresh from their meeting at the hall, nearly comatose as they saw their own fantasies through the pillar. I was both puzzled by the revelation of its purpose, as well as troubled by what it could do. There were still unanswered questions, mainly Why?

"Let's go," I said to her. "You can crash on the couch at my place." I led her out of the park and away from the commotion, as voices in the crowd piped up that it was their turn.

I was so tired when we got back to my house that I thought I would fall right asleep, but that was far from what did happen. All I saw was the hallucination from the pillar. Bryony wasn't below me in the living room, sleeping soundly on the couch under my mother's quilt. She kept appearing in my room as she had in my head, spinning a finger through her loose curls.

I might have stayed in my room all morning if JB hadn't opened the door to find me sitting up straight on my bed with some blank stare on my face. It took me a moment to realize he was really in the doorway and that it wasn't just another illusion.

"If you want to eat, you have to go downstairs, space cadet," he said to me. "Mom also wants to talk to you about your overnight guest."

I threw off my blankets and got to my feet to get my glasses and sweater. "She didn't have anywhere else to go."

He snorted. "If I have anything to say about it, it's that you should have been a gentleman and let her stay here in your room."

I treaded lightly down the stairs to the kitchen, to find my mother shoveling piles of hash browns onto a plate in front of Bryony.

"Bry," she said, "you know our door is always open...but Daff, I'd appreciate if you gave me some head's up first."

"It's my fault," Bryony apologized. "I should have made sure it was okay with you before I stayed."

"Nonsense, you two have been friends for ages and I wouldn't turn you back into the street."

"It was a weird day," I defended.

JB came in behind me to the kitchen. "It's about to get weirder. Noah just called and said the mayor's having people line up to touch that crazy pillar."

"Why would they line up to touch it?" my mother asked, grimacing.

"Apparently you see cool things when you do," he replied, grabbing a seat at the kitchen table next to Bryony. "Wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing is covered in LSD, but now it's what everyone's talking about. They let you touch it for five minutes before it's the next person's turn. They're charging ten dollars, probably to cover money spent on the road no one uses."

"People are lining up?" I repeated. "And taking turns?"

"Wanna go check it out later?"

"No," my mother sternly answered for me. "No one's touching it and no one's going to see it. Just because something's there doesn't mean you need to drop everything and see it. I better not find out either one of you went there, you too, Bryony."

"Thanks, Ms. Ahern," she smiled in response.

I listened to my mother only because she was right. When people began lining up into the night to touch the pillar, I knew better than to give in to what I desired. It had been a cruel dream of something that would never be in the real world. I doubted that the townspeople understood that idea as the days passed and the same people kept returning to hallucinate. Some people saw what they thought was God. Others saw their dead loved ones resurrected for a window of five minutes. There were those who saw their life in a different light; successful in the big city rather than struggling to get by in a small town. It didn't matter what they saw; they kept coming back to see it again.

I kept coming back to what I saw in my own way. Though I was not drawn to touch the pillar as often as everyone else, Bryony in black lingerie still lurked her way into my thoughts and dreams.

Deep in my subconscious, she would whisper, nearly beg, "Why don't you come see me again?"

I eventually began to push her out of my mind, inch by inch. I was too fearful of what I would see if I went back to the park, and I knew better than to let myself become a slave to the fantasy. A day spent in a fog brought me to the realization that I would likely never see Bryony as I'd seen her in the small room on the vinyl couch, her hands running through my hair. It was not real, and never would be.

I took my head out of the clouds and put my nose back into a book.

About five days after our initial visit to the pillar, Bryony admitted to me that she'd been dreaming of her grandfather's farm ever since, though in the end, it would always return to a pile of ash in the middle of a charred field.

"I think I'm trying to subconsciously tell myself that it's not real every night," she said to me. We were sitting on a bench across the street from the park that night, far enough from the pillar that my mother couldn't complain but close enough to see people frozen in thought whenever they touched it. The line of patrons twisted out of the park and down the street past the library. "I still can't believe you didn't see anything but light."

I avoided eye contact with her, as she always found a way to get the truth out of me. "It's a shame, but I'd rather not have seen anything than see something and force myself to go see it again."

"Smart thinking."

"What was I doing in what you saw?" I asked.

"What were you doing?"

"Yeah, everyone you saw was doing something on the farm. You said they were happy. What was I doing?"

She thought for a moment, reliving what she saw for a brief moment and remembering her grandfather's farm as it was a decade before. "You were with me."

I was about to respond to her answer, but we both became distracted by an onslaught of yelling from the park, from the pillar. It brought the two of us to our feet, and we soon found ourselves walking closer to the shouting mob of people. I could pick out a few sentences.

"It's my turn!"

"We shouldn't have to pay for this!"

"We've been waiting all day!"

"It's my turn!"

"No, it's my turn!"

"Step aside!"

Everyone fell silent at the sound of a gun being discharged. On the front steps of the library stood the mayor, and on either side, two of his top men armed with what looked to be automatic rifles. The moment I painted a picture with both the pillar and weapons that could kill, I realized that there was no good outcome to the story.

"Everyone will get their turn," the mayor assured them.

"Why do we have to pay for it?" someone in the crowd yelped. "You're just being a greedy bastard!"

"The town needs the money."

"We need the money!" another person countered.

"I don't think this is going to end well," Bryony whispered to me as the fighting ensued. "It can't end well."

"I know," I mumbled.

"We have to do something, Daff. People are going to die."

Maybe that was the last straw. Not everyone would be able to disconnect reality from fantasy, and order from chaos. They would never realize what we had concluded. The pillar was going to draw blood from our town and wouldn't stop until it had every ounce.

My instinct turned my body around to see that the hardware store, down the street, was open. However, the owner was probably among those in the crowd. I couldn't risk leaving Bryony there when the guns were out, so I grabbed her hand and dragged her along so I could get an axe.

Everyone was still fighting when we returned, so engrossed with the argument that they didn't notice us step into the park. We made a wide half-circle to the pillar to ensure we weren't seen. Eventually there was nothing between us and the monolith but a distance of merely ten feet. I knew once I started, there would be no going back.

"Make sure you stay far away from it," I said to Bryony.

Before I went for the pillar, she quickly ran her fingers through my hair, her nails lightly scratching at my scalp, and said, "Don't die, Daff."

I took a long stride to the pillar. I was hoping it would come down like the dead tree it was. No one noticed me there until I took the first swing at it. The stone cracked under the force.

"What are you doing over there?"

Another strike. The crack was a series of thin white lines in the light of the streetlamps, spreading like a plague on the flawless monument. The throng of people began moving towards me.

"Stop it!"

The third strike of the axe doubled the size of the crack. The people were moving faster; there would only be enough time for one more hit at the rate they were going.

The mayor's voice could be heard over everyone else's. "Stop it, young man, or we will stop you."

I felt the fourth strike of the axe break the stone, and as the white veins spread on the black surface, something began to flow out of the wound I'd created. It was a thick black liquid, like oil left for eons to congeal. When I jerked the axe from the pock in the pillar, the liquid quickened and poured out from inside, staining the grass around it as it got closer to my feet. Everyone else froze at the sight of it, realizing that there was more to their godsend than heavenly hallucinations.

The fifth strike removed me from the park.

I still had the axe clutched in my hands, though the park had become another room of my fantasies. It was all made of shiny white marble, reflecting a bright light from the other side of the room. It was as if this room was in a close orbit to the sun, tidally locked. A figure was moving through the room towards me, though the glare on my glasses distorted it into a strange transit as it approached.

"Daff, why are you doing this?"

It was her voice again. The strange figure became Bryony when it was close enough for me to let go of the axe and touch, yet I kept my guard up. She was angelic in this white marble room, especially when the light revealed feathery wings that sprouted from her back. They were the same virginal white as everything that surrounded us. I was the only deviation from this color wheel; a black spot of dirt in a rather clean heaven. Bryony wasn't wearing anything on her pale ivory skin, forcing me to keep my eyes on either her face or wings.

"Why do you have to hurt me?" she pleaded, spoken so softly that she barely opened her mouth. "You're destroying what you love."

"I have to do this," I told her. "Everyone is going insane over this pillar. It has to stop."

"Why does it have to stop, Daff? Everyone is so much happier, seeing things they could never see in their real lives. I thought you cared about me. I thought you loved me."

"You're not Bryony."

"Don't you love me, Daff?"

I raised the axe into the swinging position.

"You're hurting me," she cried.

"I'm sorry, whatever you are."

Mid-swing, the pseudo-Bryony revealed itself for what it was. Its lips pulled back over a set of black teeth, fangs sharpened to pointed tips. It hissed as its green eyes went completely black, and it moved its arms into a cross between a defensive and attack position. It was ready for me, but I was ready to destroy it. It tried to grab the axe from me, but the blade still made contact with its collarbone, cutting a long gash into its ivory skin.

It became distracted by the black liquid pouring from its wound, the same viscous substance that dwelled inside the pillar. It looked almost sad that I'd ruined its perfect appearance, but I wasn't done.

The next strike got the other side of its neck and tore a wound that intersected with the one I'd just made. It screeched, making a sound that could only be from a nightmare. I got the side of its torso next, which brought it to the marble floor below. It held up its arms in an attempt to shield the remaining blows, but they were no use. I was prepared to hack it to a million pieces. The black humor that came from its gashes and wounds began to splatter on all of the surfaces around us as I kept going.

My last strike was to separate the head from the snake.

The moment the blade made its final contact with the stained skin of the creature's neck, an ear-shattering screech exited its body and everything disappeared into one last flash of light.

"It's falling!"

With a start, I found myself back in the park, the axe still in my hands as the white cracks on the pillar spread at an alarming rate. I could hear the stone begin to shatter as it bled black.

"Daff! Get out of there!"

I let the axe slip from my hands and staggered backwards. The crowd around me began screaming as they ran away. Someone grabbed me. It was Bryony, in a frenzy to get away as the pillar broke around the axe. We were well away from it when it came crashing down, shattering into countless wet pieces. Blackness pooled on the ground.

My frantic breathing became the only thing I could hear. Everyone had fallen completely silent, staring at the remains of the pillar with jaws dropped and eyes wide open.

"What have you done?" It was the mayor, brooding from the steps of the library, glaring at me.

Bryony piped up, her voice full of anger and rage. "Do you think we could have lived like this for the rest of our lives? Fighting over something that was tearing us apart? You were about to kill each other over it! You were wasting every penny you have to see things that would never happen! It's done now!"

Another long moment of silence passed until people in the crowd began to turn their backs on the remains of the pillar, returning home after five days of living in another reality. The mayor ran down to the street, trying to turn them back around, but they would not listen. They shrugged him off and continued home.

"Don't go!" he insisted, sprinting to the sticky black carcass. "We can still see everything we saw before!"

When he was at the remains, he reached out to touch one of the largest pieces of the stone, but he did not freeze as his mind was brought somewhere else. He never left the park. He tried touching it again, and again, and once more. But as much as he tried, he would not return to the fantasy. Just as the rest of his people, he turned around with his head hung, and left.

I noticed that Bryony had found my hand and was clutching onto it tightly. "We should go," I told her.

The following day, the town woke up to find that every last piece of stone that had made up the pillar was gone. All of the black ooze that had flown from its cracks had disappeared into the ground. Even the axe I had taken from the hardware store was missing in action.

I was supposed to meet Bryony at the library a few days later. While waiting on the steps for her, I found it hard to disconnect what had been there shortly before. The pillar had only been there for six days, but it was hard to imagine the park without its resident giant.

Someone walked past me while I was waiting, though I didn't think too much of them until they walked back to the step I was on. A hand held out a wallet in front of me.

"Is this yours? It was on the steps behind you."

I looked up at the man next to me, dressed in a long black overcoat that was loosely belted around his waist. The skin on his hand was as thin and pale as it was on his face, though his eyes were hidden behind a pair of round and very opaque sunglasses. I couldn't say he was a regular in town, likely stopping through on one of the charter buses. "No, sorry. If you give it to the front desk inside, they'll know what to do."

"Of course." He noticed me looking back to the park, where I had brought the strange pillar to its knees. "I have to say I'm glad that thing's finally gone. Goes to show you that even an ounce of uncertainty can bring out the worst in people."

"That's a good way of putting it," I offered. "Luckily it ended before blood was shed."

"Too bad we'll never know where it came from."

"Whoever put it there had a pretty sick agenda planned out."

"We may think it to be sick, but those behind it still got what they wanted."

"And what would that be?" I asked, my line of sight being pulled back to the park.

"A little insight into the human race," he said, and touched my shoulder.

For the briefest second I saw the last vision of them all. In the span of seconds, there was everything. Colour, sound and a bright white light exploded into something else, and then there was nothing but fire and blackness. As fast as I'd seen it, I found that I was sitting on the steps again.

I turned around to look at the man, but he had already vanished into the library. I looked back and saw Bryony sauntering up the steps towards me.

"Everything good, Daff?" she asked, half-laughing and half-concerned. "You look like you just saw a ghost."

I shook it off. "It's nothing. Ready to go?"

She held out her hand to mine. "Always am."

**Swear by the Styx: A Lorelai Adventure**

It had been pouring rain for three long days, so water was gushing from beneath the manhole covers and the morning clouds were perpetually a canvas of rippled slate. The airships wouldn't be flying again until the sky cleared, in the meantime we were stuck within the city walls.

They'd gone up when I was just shy of my twentieth birthday, closing us in and forever blocking out half of the sky. I couldn't complain, mostly because those who did were sent to jail.

Some desperate souls had spoken of trekking into the outlands to continue work and play without being confined, but no one was that insane. They would all be in the city until we were under clear skies again.

I got a call that said the police station was closed, so I wasn't needed to guard the evidence locker with a clipboard and pen. I went somewhere else instead.

I insisted to myself on walking over to his building through the dampness and the sludge. It came up to my knees in some places, particularly the troughs at the bottoms of hills. Motorists who passed me by, skimming the surface of the flood, either honked or gawked. One business woman asked her driver to roll down the window and then inquired as to if I needed a lift downtown.

"I'm almost there."

The lights of his building glittered through the rain. By the time I reached the beacon, I looked like some kind of drowned rat who'd managed to crawl her way out of hell. The doorman, under any other circumstances, would have sent me back to the pit I came from and perhaps phoned the police, but his duties had been relieved by the foot of water in the lobby. The gold-plated elevators were wrapped in yellow tape.

I found him waiting for me at the top of the stairs on the eleventh floor, nowhere near dressed for the weather with a thick cigar between his fingers. He was dressed in a dry white shirt, buttoned up to his neck, and well-pressed pants that probably never wrinkled. I was dripping on the carpet.

"Lorelai. I knew you'd come," he said. Was I that hopelessly addicted to him, that he knew I'd be around? "They let you in like that?"

"I think the doorman drowned."

"Come in and warm up with me."

I peeled my wet clothes off in the white marble bathroom, an ensuite, and stepped into a silk robe I always wore to lounge around with him. The building was quiet that afternoon, but now and then there was still the shuffle of feet across the floor above us. As he ignited the gas fireplace, he told me that a lot of tenants had moved north to higher ground after the lobby flooded.

"They're scared, that's what they are," he jibbed, inviting me to sit on the couch. "It's just a little water. It'll be gone by tomorrow."

"I heard it'll be another few days. By then it might be over my head."

"Maybe you should stay, then." I took a seat and he offered me a puff off of the cigar, but I had to say no. I already smelled like the sewer, and I didn't want to smell like ash. "I don't want you floating down the Styx with the doorman."

I had my nose pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows while he prepared something to eat for dinner. The city walls were obscured by the drizzle, and everything else was blurred by the water streaming down the glass. I was much warmer than I had been before, but my hair had dried into a tangled nest fit for the birds.

"We're in a big bowl," I mumbled. "What happens if we overflow?"

"We sail away."

"It can't all be bad behind the walls, can it?"

"Once this stops I'll have to take you out there, just for a stroll. As long as you know what you're doing, nothing bad can happen."

But was it that easy?

He was nothing but an accident, a man who wandered into the evidence locker when he was looking for an officer. He'd started out as all the others had, though after leaving his apartment the first time, I kept coming back.

The news on the TV was still the same that night. No travel outside, even less inside the city. The poor were dying and floating upside-down into the rich neighbourhoods. No one would put the poor souls to rest because the ones they usually paid to do such things were among the corpses. There were some other reports on the fighting out west, but we didn't pay much attention to that.

"I bet your building is underwater," he told me.

"Probably."

"Will you miss it?"

"Nothing there had much meaning to me. The furniture was second-hand off of the street and my clothes smelled like a dirty washing machine."

"Did you think you'd be leaving it behind for good today?"

"Some small part of me did, yes."

We slept next to each other in one small corner of a king-sized bed, sheets and blankets bunched up at the foot. He'd left the curtains drawn back so our naked bodies would be bathed in greyscale.

"Do you know what else is probably underwater?" I asked.

"Everything up to the third floor?"

"No...well...yes. The locker, buried under silt and sand and gravel and debris." He stroked the small of my back with his thumb. "We have a lot of memories underneath all that muck. I can't believe you came all this way through it."

"If I hadn't, I would be floating down the Styx with the rest of the poor."

"Do you miss them?"

"They're in a place better than this now."

"There's a place better than this bed?"

We slept with my head on his chest, ear pressed to his heart, the best love song to fall asleep to. Neither of us would wake in a restless state, tossing and turning. We both remained far in a land of dreams, where there were no walls to keep us in and no horrors in the great beyond. The floodwaters would recede and take the dangers with them.

Early in the morning, before the sun could rise over the walls, we woke to the sound of an airship humming overhead. The storm was gone, but another had started.

**Blister and Bleed: An Aesoph Fable**

It was a lovely day when the disease came in. A third of the people within the town limits developed bursting pustules and bleeding sores.

We put them all into a building with three nurses who had shown early symptoms themselves. But when they needed food and water, someone had to bring it to them. When they needed to bury their dead, one of us had to dig a hole. They were dying, but we still helped them.

Old John, the undertaker, began to blister and bleed after the fourth round of funerals. The disease gained momentum again and claimed those who were only trying to help.

"We can't do it anymore!"

"Why die for the dying?"

"We must do something!"

We did what we had to do. We rounded up anyone else who was getting sick and locked everyone in that building. We lit a dozen torches and burned that horrid place to the ground until the dying were long dead.

We never built anything new on the scorched earth, but the streets were no longer running slick with blood and pus.

**The Outland Camp: A Lorelai Adventure**

I could always see the city walls from the apartment building I frequented, and it seemed that no matter how high you went, you could never see over them. Though the bombings that knocked them and everything else to the ground wasn't nice, the idea that we were no longer prisoners of our own domain was nice. We was a bit of an overstatement. When I woke up in the rubble, I was the only one alive for miles.

We never thought the fighting would come to us. We'd been oblivious to what was really happening, and I can only say that we're lucky the city wasn't one of the few chosen to be gassed.

The world beyond the crumbled concrete and the twisted barbed wire fences was something from both a dream and a nightmare. It was new and it was natural, a world you'd never seen before where trees grow by the thousands and no signs tell you what direction to point in. At the same time, this world teemed with the unknown. What lies in the shadows? Were the rumours only circulated to deter people from leaving?

I took a risk, fully aware of what could happen. I still left, knowing that something in the pits of my stomach was calling me away.

I also knew that I wasn't the only one.

The poor within the walls always spoke of a supposed safe haven somewhere north of us, where the rain wasn't acidic and the army had no control over the common people. I found it after a month of walking through grassy plains, dense forests and rocky steppes. Other outcasts had turned a gaggle of mobile homes and logs into a makeshift settlement for the unwanted, nestled in a set of foggy hills.

Two men with guns stopped me at the entrance, a gate in an electrified chain link fence.

"Papers?" one asked.

I had them only because I'd woken up next to my purse after the bombings, but I found it to be an odd question as I showed him my documentation. "I thought you guys would let anyone in, especially now."

"We've been scorned before," the other told me. "It doesn't hurt to make sure everyone is who they say they are."

"You were a secretary before you left?" the first asked, reading through my work experience.

"Yes. It wasn't a terribly thrilling job."

"Any trouble on your way here?" the second added.

"Trouble, you say?"

"Weird things in the forest, oddities, and perhaps you saw someone who didn't belong out there. It happens."

"I haven't seen anyone or anything in the last month. Haven't you heard that the world has gone to shit?"

The first guard sighed and nodded. "We have, but we've always been careful. At least you're lucky now. We've got an opening next to Mr. and Mrs. Sands. Once you're in, head straight until you can't anymore, and then take a hard left. Someone should have painted a big 6 on the trailer."

One thing I had to get used to was sleeping on a bed, even if it was a musty mattress no thicker than a school textbook. Another thing was sleeping within the confines of a pop-up trailer, with just enough room to live when it was too cold outside to bear the temperature. A month on the ground had warmed me up to the openness of nature, and everything that was a part of it. It was too quiet inside the trailer. I missed the birds.

Supplies at the camp were in high demand, but the men with guns seemed to have trucks coming in every other day. A few older women were in charge of handing out food and cases of bottled water, likely pinched off a lost airship shot down with a harpoon. The children were fed first, followed by the women, and then the men.

Mrs. Sands was an exception to the rule, using what looked to be a seven-month-old fetus within her womb. Her husband always carried crates of ripe fruit and veggies to their trailer, a bit more spacious than mine, and would use the leftover wood to start a bonfire the next night. They invited me over one evening when a few other neighbours were admiring the fire, and while Mr. Sands was a man of few words, his wife was interested in knowing more about me, and how I made it to the camp on my own with nothing more than a knife.

"I don't mean to sound like a callous bitch," she started, her outie bellybutton glowing through her shirt, "but I was a secretary too. If it wasn't for Brannon, we'd probably have been skinned and propped up in a tree somewhere."

I shrugged. "Maybe I was lucky."

"Extraordinarily lucky."

"Have you heard what's been happening out there?"

"Yes, and it makes me happy that we got out while we could. I always had a feeling that it would come to this with the army, but I never thought we'd be stupid enough to fight back."

"The rebels went all in." With a nuclear bomb, I thought to myself, but I didn't want to stress out Mrs. Sands by bringing up things like fallout and nuclear winter.

The camp was always silent past midnight, though if you listened closely, you could hear the mattress squeaking in the Sands' trailer. It became what I was used to hearing when sleep grew difficult. It was hard to find any other fuckable men in the camp as well. Everyone there had a woman of their own, it seemed, even the guards.

I missed a good pounding, but I missed the open air of the boreal forest. If it wasn't so difficult to find food in the open and there were more men wandering around, I probably wouldn't have come to the camp. I could have stayed out there forever, fucking my way across the ruined country.

Monsters or not.

Mr. Sands finally made a formal introduction when I took a break to smoke one afternoon, as snow softly fell from the clouds. I'd quit the habit long ago, but a pack had been included in my rations from the last truck to camp. Mr. Sands had been chopping firewood in front of their trailer, but was in front of me by the time I took my first drag. He even shook my hand.

"My wife tells me you got here on your own," he said, "with no trouble."

I shrugged. "It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I laid low and tried to eat as much as I could when I found food."

"Is it really all gone? The city?"

"Yes. The soldiers left before the flood came, and then the planes came at night with the bombs. It was the army's last shot after the rebels blasted them to bits in the interior. The rebels showed up too late to save us, but by the time it was over, everyone was dead. No one won the war, and I haven't seen any signs to say either side has made it out alive."

He nodded solemnly. "What did you do before?"

"Office job. How about you?"

"I was in jail."

I suddenly felt a little more uncomfortable, but held my composure. Mr. Sands had kind eyes, but a hard face. Stealing a quick glance up and down, it made sense that he'd spent some time in prison. He still looked a bit scrawny, more than he should have been. The army used to starve political prisoners.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I'm glad they're all dead out there. I'm sure the west isn't completely gone. I wish we could grow as much food as they could."

He was suspicious of me for some reason. I could tell by the way he glared at me for the next few days.

Though I could live comfortably in the outland camp, I began to feel just as trapped as I had in the old city. I began to realize the extent of the war's damage a week later too, when the supply truck arrived with less to go around. The Sands got their fill, but by the time the women were ready to eat, I was left with a bag of soft apples and a frozen loaf of bread.

"Next week it'll be less," the woman beside me said.

And it was. I asked one of the guards where all the food had gone.

"It's all out west, but between that and us is a thousand-mile radius of nuclear waste," he said.

"You could go around," I suggested.

Conditions began to deteriorate as time continued to pass, and with no other options left, I slipped out through a fence in the dead of night, feeling a pair of eyes watching me from the Sands' trailer as I did, but I didn't look back from that place. I slept better on the ground and I felt more peaceful in the openness of the outdoors, with my eyes on the west.

I could go around too.

**A Badass' Guide to the Apocalypse**

**Kill or Be Killed: A Lorelai Adventure**

There was law and order before this. There were so many wonderful things to the world. Life had routine to it. You would do the same thing every day and never skip a beat.

Up at six-thirty. Shower, dry your hair, slap on some makeup and get a bite to eat before you head off to work. Depending on how early you get out on the street, you could make the early bus and get first dibs on fresh coffee, but did it ever turn out that way? It was always the rush hour route. Then there was the eight-hour shift at work. You'd think your boss was being a little too friendly, and he probably was, and you'd analyze his motives on the bus ride home. White wine would go with frozen dinners and evening dramas, and then it was time to go to sleep and begin the cycle all over again.

Not anymore.

My love life hadn't changed too much since the bombs were dropped and the city and its walls fell. I couldn't bring men back to the apartment for obvious reasons, unless they had a thing for piles of rubble and crushed bodies. I didn't. All of the big cities were ghost towns now, so the country was an easier place to find other survivors and gather supplies. If I could get some exercise in by sneaking in a fuck or two, all the better. There were more men out there than there were at camp.

I often ran into men heading in the opposite direction, claiming that the seaboard offered more than the open wasteland of the interior. I tried to tell them otherwise, but all of the people who survived the attacks were stubborn. It worked in our favour earlier, but not too much now.

After leaving the outland camp, I lost track of the number of men who trod off to the east in the midst of hiking up their pants, leaving me half-naked on the bare ground. Every time, I've put my pants back on one leg at a time, and kept going west.

I didn't have a concrete plan when I first realized what was going on, and I can't say I did for a while. The world had simply ended, but I'll always be a young woman with restless feet.

I found a nameless man in a small, swampy town in the south that had succumbed to toxic gas. I marched down the main drag and could hear him chopping wood behind one of the only homes that looked structurally sound. He'd kept it up since the human race went out with a whimper. A wood-burning stove kept the house warm, and there was enough gasoline lying around those days to power a generator when it was needed.

He stared at me for a long time to make sure I was real. Most men do when they first catch me wandering through this wasteland. Judging by the decomposition on the numerous corpses in this ghost town, it had been a while since he'd seen another living person. "Son of a bitch," he marveled with a southern drawl.

I'm not the secretary at the evidence locker anymore. I'm a thin thing with dirt on my legs and dust in my hair. I traded my purse for a backpack, and ditched the pencil skirts and button-ups for denim cut-offs and an oversized plaid shirt I pinched from an old conquest. Don't ask for a name, because I don't remember.

I offered a wave as I sauntered over to his outdoor working area. He held an axe in both hands, with a large pile of chopped wood behind him. "Hey there. I'm just passing through on my way to the west. Got any water to share?"

He smiled, almost laughed. I'd call him a rugged outdoorsman; someone who continued living long after everyone else had died. The knees were worn out in his jeans and he'd let a decent beard come in within the last four months. He probably got through the worst of the rolling barrage the same way the other survivors did: by keeping a low profile and only coming out once everything had fallen silent. In that town, it didn't hurt to have a gas mask either.

He kept his axe in one hand and began walking over to me. "Yeah, I've got a pump on the other side of the house you can use." He smacked his lips together. "But you know, I'm an old fashioned guy. Just because everyone's dead doesn't mean that everything's free. It's not. Maybe we can trade something."

I noticed the glint of intrigue in his eyes and met him halfway. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, which is true. My tricks have worked so far. I wrapped one hand around his belt buckle and got his fly with my other. "I think that can be arranged."

He smirked and wrapped his free hand around my wrist. "Go help yourself to a drink, I've just gotta finish my work, or it'll never get done."

"Just be careful, or I'll finish your wood for you," I offered, letting go of his pants and stepping around him to get to the back of the house.

I was always chided as a kid for running into the streets, but never got the don't turn your back on a stranger with an axe line from my mother. Oh, how I wish that I had.

I remember being hit in the back of the head with what I assume was the butt of the axe head. I felt it strike me, but there was little pain. Instead, the view of a soggy ground meeting a marshy river faded to blackness as I lost my balance.

The blackness became a strange land as I remained unconscious, where screams interrupted silent moments and everything always seemed to be spinning around me at the speed of light. I was a top spinning forever in the deepest reaches of the universe. The stars were going by too fast to see anything, and there was no one to hear me scream.

There have always been sick people out in the world, functioning to the same capacity that the rest of us did, but it never crossed my mind that one would cross my path. I suppose I had too much faith in humanity following its demise. I've always had issues with trusting too easily, and letting my G-spot speak before my brain could act.

I woke up sometime later to find my wrists tied together and chained to a damp brick wall. The ground below me was simply bare earth, and the only source of light hung above me in the form of a lone light bulb. I guessed I was underneath his house, but the only way out was one rotting wood door in front of me.

It took me a moment to notice that my shorts were around my ankles.

Confined to a room not fit to house anything less than a person, I found myself contemplating a number of things. I could not ignore the will I had to stay alive, but had to face the realization that there was no way out. There was only one door, and the map ended there. It was no-man's land after that. If I could even get out, how would I be able to escape that house of horrors? The man with the axe obviously had no morals and no sense of right and wrong. Part of me knew that he'd kill me once he got all that he needed, but the rest of me was what he was not.

Just.

When I first found myself the lone survivor in the city of the damned, I asked myself what I was willing to do to survive. Fuck a guy for water? Sure, that was a no-brainer. But would I ever kill someone if it meant staying alive myself? I once worked behind the scenes of the justice system, cataloguing boxes of bloody sheets and knives used to chop infants into small pieces. The remains of man's worst crimes passed through my hands. I knew I wasn't capable of such heinous acts. I was just a promiscuous secretary, and would never be anything else.

Unless I had to be.

There are no police. There are no judges, and there are no juries. But I was not about to become another victim. That was the moment I shed my former self and knew there was a new golden rule. Kill, or be killed.

It was hard to keep track of time, but less than an hour must have passed between the time I woke up and when the rugged man entered the room with his axe in hand. It hurt my head to look at the thing, but it was either look there or down at my bare ass in the dirt. I did not let myself look fearful of him, and instead kept an expression of determination on my face.

He leaned the axe against the doorway and took another step into the room.

I'd survived without a plan up until that point, but I needed one then. I knew I couldn't do it with my hands tied to the wall, but I also knew that he wasn't dumb enough to let me go unless he was sure he could overpower me. There were countless variables to consider, but I had one thing on him; a set of skills I'd been using to get through life long before it was taken from the world.

Everything done after that was for survival, trust me.

The man stopped directly in front of me and got down on his knees. "I never wanted to hurt you, little lady, but this way we both get what we want. You get food and shelter, and I..." He trailed his words off as he reached to touch my neck.

As much as I wanted to recoil, I couldn't. I had to let him touch me, and I had to keep my legs from kicking up as he leaned closer to me. He pressed his hot mouth against mine and proceeded to stick his tongue down my throat, exploring every square inch. Lucky for him, I got the nickname "The Abyss" in college, or I would have been forced to gag. I told myself that he was just another number on the list, just another first date fuck of mine. I kissed him back only because I had to. It was to get him excited.

And it worked.

I began tugging on the rope that tethered my wrists to the wall.

And he fell for it, frantically untying the knots with one hand as he placed the other on my right breast.

I didn't go for my escape as soon as my hands were free. I needed to gain one ounce of trust before I got out. I reached down to get a hold of his lesser half, and knew my plan was working when he began moaning.

"Oh..."

Before everything; the near-extinction of the human race, an adulthood spent between a catalogue of evil and beds of demons, I was something else. I was an innocent young girl who thought I'd marry a virgin and devote myself to the fictional son of a fictional force. I believed in rules. Perhaps we always need some sort of order and justice for things to run smoothly, and to combat the twisted pieces of shit out there. I don't think I could have lived out my days in that basement as a sexual object.

I wouldn't.

I guess it came down to one thing. A man is only as strong as his weakest part. For some, it's the knees. Others have issues with upper body strength. But most of the time, it's the obvious choice. With my hand in his pants, I played around with it until it broke. Of course, I didn't know I'd done it until he started yelling. He rolled onto his back and I scrambled to my feet. Having my shorts up was the least of my worries, or at least until I knew I was safe.

I got that axe into my hands before I did anything else.

He was still writhing in pain when he noticed me standing over him, half-dressed and a mess beyond words. He didn't beg for his life, and he didn't try to bargain with me. He laughed.

With a strained voice, he taunted, "What do you think you're gonna do with that thing?"

I'll tell you what I did. I hit him once in the neck, twice in the chest and once in the face before he stopped shouting, and went upstairs to the first floor of the house. There I found a few bottles of whiskey, some food, and a large barrage of weapons. I settled for a hunting rifle, a revolver, and two handguns that I could tuck into the pocket of my shorts, and set out with the west on my mind.

**Freak Like Me: A Lorelai Adventure**

Since I was armed for the first time in my life, it took a little getting used to the power of a handgun, let alone the rifle. I tried using that thing to kill a rabbit only two feet away from me and ended up scrubbing cranial fluid and blood out of my shirt at the first creek I found.

I quickly learned that you couldn't just decide you would be badass out of nowhere and expect everything to be easier. Just because I had some guns didn't mean I knew how to shoot them, and my chances of surviving to the west weren't going to rise until I did.

It started simple enough. With the handgun, I would give myself a target and shoot. The targets would start as rocks, and move to stationary large animals before small moving creatures. Sure, a deer was easier to hit, but what the hell would I do with an entire buck?

As my skills improved and I picked up a trick or two about hunting, I was living off of rabbits, squirrels, and anything else that crossed my path.

I wasn't too worried about ammo back then. That basement monster had stockpiled enough to last through a war, though it was all in my possession. I had the rifle, a revolver, and two other handguns.

There are few things in life I consider myself good enough at to be a hobbyist. Obviously, the first one is that I can have sex, and have it well. That took practice, just as it took practice to know how to handle each and every one of my guns.

You could probably say that I was good at my job before the city was reduced to rubble, though I could never say sorting evidence and filling out paperwork counted as a hobby.

Knowing how to shoot made me even more determined not to fall into the trap I'd just dug myself out of. This girl was ready to take the world on, one freak at a time.

Learning to hunt also helped me learn a thing or two about the animals that survived the attacks. I could recognize their tracks, keep an eye out for droppings, and after spotting one, move slowly enough as if not to startle them.

I always thought to myself, if only my grandfather could see me now. The old man was never too happy that his only daughter's only child was also a girl. Though he and I rarely saw eye to eye when he was living, I couldn't help but imagine his reaction if he saw me roughing it in the wild, surviving on what I could and shooting to stay alive. I'd probably get the usual stop fucking around and do something with your life bit, but perhaps it would only veil his true admiration.

That was one of the rare times I actually thought about my family. The rest of the time, I didn't let their deaths get to me. It would have only hurt me in the long run.

I was lucky not to find any freaks in the immediate area. It gave me some much-needed time to relax and not have to worry about running into another rapist or struggling for my life with a cannibal. I was nearly about to consider that, for once, things were becoming normal. As well, I was beginning to wonder if it would be a while before I found another living person.

Then I found the house.

It wasn't anything special compared to the other abandoned homes. The homeowners were killed with gas and died hand-in-hand on the living room couch. They weren't quite skeletons, but weren't rotting in place either. You could say the devoted husband and wife were holding onto the last bit of life before it left them in the form of dried flesh crusting off onto the floor.

The house had been the victim of some looting, though nothing too serious. The drawers in the bedrooms had been turned inside out, and that's when I discovered that there was a bedroom with no body to match. It was clearly a teenage girl's room, with pastel-pink walls and lacy bedspread, though it took another walk through the house to realize she hadn't been home when the gas came through. I even took to the outdoors to look for any remnants of a skeleton, but there was nothing. She wasn't there.

I knew better than to go looking for ghosts, even if she had died in the immediate area. I could have gone in the shed at the back of the property, but I didn't. Even if I found a pile of bones, what would I do with them?

A few sounds brought my attention back to reality. The first was like the crack of a whip, or the snap of a very tight string. Then there was the dull sound of something small striking something larger, though with not enough force to cut through the air on its way.

Then, "Dammit!"

I whipped my head around to see the source, or to just make it out. I could just see her through the trees, rushing back and forth.

She was a young thing, no older than eighteen, and had set up some kind of rudimentary target practice in a clearing near the house. A gun wasn't her weapon of choice; she brandished a very-expensive looking bow and arrow, though judging by the broken arrows and unmarked bark, she wasn't very good at using it.

Her eyes immediately fell onto my guns. "Who are you?" she stammered.

I held my hands up and insisted, "I'm not going to hurt you, I promise. I was looking around the house back there and heard the commotion."

"Where did you come from?"

"The east coast. My city was destroyed by the bombs." She seemed to relax upon realizing I wasn't going to hurt her. She nodded in understanding, and held onto the bow a little looser. "How did you survive?"

She sighed. "Dad only had one gas mask. He strapped it on me and put me in the shed, and I didn't come back out until it was quiet."

"That's your house?" I asked, gesturing back to the ghostly structure.

She nodded again. "I stay in the shed, though."

I eyed the weapon in her little hands. "I hate to say it, but it doesn't seem like you know how to use that thing."

"I ran out of canned food not too long ago, and figured I would try my hand at hunting. This is my dad's bow, but I never learned how to use it."

You could say that I saw a bit of myself in that girl. It wasn't long ago that I was living off of canned food picked up from fuck buddies, or trying to eat raw baby rabbits because they were the only thing that didn't run from me. Just as I owed it to her to take care of the freaks of the world, I owed it to her to help learn her way around the bow.

"It can't be that hard," I said, shrugging off my backpack and rifle. The remainder of the guns were packed away that day. "Do you mind?"

Shaking her head, she handed me the hulking bow and the arrow, the tip so sharp and pointed that it probably could have passed right through me if I took a hit. Though I had never used one myself, one try from left field wasn't going to hurt. I put the arrow in place, pulled back the string of the bow, and as the projectile flew through the air, I realized that wearing gloves probably would have been a good idea. The arrow didn't escape me as fast as I thought it would, but it struck the tree trunk near the ground.

"Are you hurt?" the girl asked, taking the bow from me. I looked at the underside of my fingers, a thick red line intersecting all of them, though it didn't draw any blood. "The string can be sharp, I know."

I shook out my hand to relax my rigid fingers. "At least we're on the right track."

"I've built up some calluses on my hands," she said, showing me a palm that probably should have belonged to a weathered fisherman, not a young girl. "I was a gymnast before the gas came through, and sometimes I still go into town to practice my routine."

"It's always good to stay in shape. Want to try it for me?"

The girl picked up another arrow from a nearby pile on the ground and put it into place in the bow. She pulled it back far enough to gain some speed, though it missed the intended target, only nipping at the dried bark before hurtling into the forest.

"Not bad," I offered. "If you keep practicing, soon you'll be hitting deer and feeding yourself for as long as you have to. Moving into your own place might not be a bad idea either."

She shrugged. "If you were inside the house, you saw them. I don't know if I could leave them here."

"Understandable," I replied with a nod. "Have you ever seen other people come through here?"

"Now and again, but they never stay long. They just go through the house, probably looking for food, and then go on their way. I've never seen another girl come through here though."

"We're few and far between now. But you're doing fine on your own?"

"Yes. My dad wanted me to survive for a reason."

"That's good."

"What do you do now that everything's ended? Are you just wandering the world?"

"You could say that," I answered. "There's not much of a world to wander, but I'm moving in a general westerly direction. The east coast might as well not exist anymore, so I'm hoping there's something good for me out there."

"I hope you find whatever you're looking for," she smiled.

I liked that she was so independent for a girl so young. There was never the assumption that the two of us would join together on a difficult quest. She was fine living in the shed close to her parents' tomb, and I actually felt fine leaving her there.

She tried shooting again while I reached for my backpack. I noticed that this time, as she was aiming, she was mumbling a few soft words under breath. I listened carefully until I made out a few key words, and figured out that she was praying before she fired.

I used to be religious. I used to attend church every Sunday, and just as that girl, I used to pray to God whenever I needed a little help.

That time her arrow struck the dead center of the tree; a flawless shot.

I dug to the bottom of my backpack for one of the other handguns; it was a thirty-eight if I'm not mistaken. I picked out all of the gun's ammunition from my hefty cache and offered it to her. "Here, for when a bow and arrow won't be fast enough."

Though she was hesitant at first, she set down her father's archery set and took the gun and bullets from my hands. "Thank you. I mean it."

I threw my backpack over my shoulder and then grabbed the rifle from the ground. "It's no problem, really. We're not that different, you know."

She nodded in agreement. "Yeah, I know."

"You stay safe here," I told her, "and if you're ever in the west and in need of help, don't be afraid to holler."

**She Whispers Sweet Nothings, I Scream Profanities: A Lorelai Adventure**

I found Beattie within the confines of a ruined church in the heart of the swamp, cowering underneath the front row of pews with her hands over the back of her neck. She was convinced that the whole place would come down on top of her, and she always had to be prepared to protect her spine. I couldn't blame her for that, only because you couldn't get far in a ravaged world if your legs and arms didn't work. She'd been dressed in her Sunday best for six months, though one of her white shoes was missing a heel.

"You should probably go somewhere else," I advised her. I set my guns down first, knowing that a girl like Beattie wouldn't try anything dumb with me. If she did, I knew that I could take her head-to-head. "The insane people always scope out churches, thinking that God will save them."

"God will save us," she whispered, voice as quiet as a mouse in a fitting location.

"He's a little late."

Before the bombs and before the fires, Beattie would have been someone I'd been friends with in high school. A lot of things had changed since then, and I had the scars from my time in a psychopath's basement to prove it.

When I turned to exit the church, I expected her to return to the hovel underneath the pew, not for her to pipe up with a question that likely took both of us off-guard.

"Can I come with you?"

I almost didn't, but I allowed her to, mostly because I felt sorry for the poor girl. Part of me knew that if I said no and left her there, she would die. She wasn't like the girl I'd found with the bow and arrows.

The world may have gone to hell, but having a death on my conscience in any way wasn't what I wanted. Even though I had my guns, I still wasn't very good with them. I'd been counting more on the intimidation factor.

Usually.

There was one condition to Beattie's presence, however.

"Don't get in my way."

She got chatty as we travelled, asking a lot of questions about where I came from. I gave her the bare bones of my story, just enough to get the idea but not enough for her to feel sorry for me. I wasn't some charity case for losing everyone I loved and leaving their bodies behind. I couldn't do what she had, festering in a place of death and decay.

"Four months isn't long," I told her, as we hiked through a muggy forest one evening. "It's going to be like this for a while, after all. I don't care if any god told you otherwise."

"Didn't you believe once?" she asked.

"Once."

"Why not anymore?"

"Because there's too much evidence proving that there is no god. That's what I choose to believe in."

"You believe in nothing?"

"Nothing is still something. Besides, what kind of god would watch the world die like this?"

Beattie wasn't much for hunting, being adamant about not breaking the neck of anything living. She still wanted to be useful, and would venture into old homes to raid the pantries while I tried my hand at shooting squirrels and trapping frogs.

Being in a good mood one day, I finally asked about where she came from.

"You pretty much saw all of it when you found me," she answered, as we sat together in a clearing for a water break. Her Sunday best was beginning to show serious signs of wear-and-tear. She would need to get rid of the yellowed white dress before it fell apart on her. "I'd been in that church since it started. I was the only one who made it there after the fire and gas."

"What did you do for food?" I asked.

"The pastor was a paranoid man. He'd been planning for the end long before it happened, and had enough food to feed the congregation for a year. I was set for life."

"Even things in cans will go bad."

"I know, and I also knew that I couldn't stay there forever, as much as I didn't want to admit it."

"That realization is always a good thing to come to." I'd had the same realization back at the outland camp, which seemed like a very long time ago.

"What made you so sure of what was out there?"

I shrugged. "Sometimes you just know."

We kept going on through the swamp, keeping an eye open for food and water while looking over our shoulders and whatnot. Well, at least that's what I did. Beattie didn't like to always be looking out for bad things. I'd be investigating strange sounds and she would be smelling wildflowers.

"Why always look at the bad things?" she would say.

"So we don't die."

There were bad things out there, as quiet as the space between the trees always seemed. There were people that believed that no laws meant no order. There were people so starved and deranged that roasting young girls over an open flame was their only way to live. I hadn't seen it, but I had a feeling that there were more baddies than that one rapist in the swamp.

"Would someone actually...eat us?" Beattie asked me.

"Yes, and they'd probably save you for last. My meat would be a little stringy. Well, yours will be eventually, if you keep at it."

"Keep at what?"

"This."

She cried a lot at first, and tried her best to hide it from me. I knew. We'd be sleeping in a tuft of grass and I'd wake up in the night to hear her sobbing into the ground.

One night I told her, "You don't have to cry."

"Don't you understand?" she asked, her voice quivering. "We don't know where we're going, and I don't think we even know what we're doing out here. We're going to die doing this."

"Do you think I want to die, Beattie?"

"Well...no."

"If I'm not dying, then you better not start. Besides, I know where we're going."

"Where?"

"West."

Eventually, as we kept travelling, something changed with Beattie. We raided an old big box store and she ripped off her church dress in exchange for a pair of shorts and a burgundy tank top. We both traded in our shoes for new pairs of boots. I checked out the small, but well-stocked hunting department and asked her if she wanted to carry a knife.

After a moment of silence, she nodded with a sheepish, "Sure," and strapped it to her thigh with a piece of her old dress.

She stopped going on about Jesus and his gaggle of saints as we kept going, much to my enjoyment, though I spotted her praying when she thought I wasn't looking. She started breaking necks and cutting flesh, and before you knew it, little Beattie had nearly turned into someone familiar.

Me.

She no longer cried in the night. Instead, we would stay up and talk.

"What happens when we run into someone else?" she asked me. At the time, it'd been a terribly long time since I'd spotted another soul. The last had been nearly a month before, when I was sure that I'd seen feral children climbing in the trees. People were becoming an anomaly. "What if they're dangerous?"

"It won't be anything we can't handle," I assured her.

A few nights passed before it came, as we were both lying close to each other in a thicket of bushes.

We both heard the crunch. I couldn't see Beattie's face in the darkness, but I knew that she knew. I could hear her breathing quicken.

She whispered, "Could be an animal."

I shook my head through our grassy bed. "Sounds heavy."

Crunch.

"Armed?" Beattie asked.

Crunch.

"Can't tell."

"What are we going to do?"

"I'll tell you what," I started, reaching behind me for my handgun. It took some fiddling, but soon enough it was in my hand on its way to Beattie. "We're going to find out who else is out here this late at night. I don't care if they're a danger or not, we're going to make sure they don't hurt us."

She gulped when her fingers touched the cold metal, but still took the weapon. "I don't know how to fire this."

"You've seen me do it enough times. You've got this."

Whispering even quieter, she said, "I don't know."

I might as well have been screaming, but I kept my quiet voice stern when I told her, "Fuck, Beattie, you've got this."

We got to our feet and the shooting started.

I ran one way, but she ran the other.

I crouched low to the ground as I tried to follow her, but the dark made every tree misleading, and the gunshots distracted me from following the path. I shouted her name a few times, but could barely hear myself over the noise.

Whoever it had been, they didn't stick around too long. Though the shots were loud, they got farther away, and I was hoping whoever it was wasn't smart enough to keep coming after me. I wasn't too focused on whatever insane idiot was trying to kill me. I needed to find Beattie.

I found the idiot standing over her with their guns pointed at each other. She was on her back on the ground.

I tiptoed towards them, my weapon drawn. My aim wasn't good enough to shoot in the dark yet.

"Why don't you put that gun down, little lady, and we'll just talk about this?" Beattie's assailant asked her. "We don't mean you any harm, but you see, this is our land. It's always been our land, and we don't care if the world has gone to shit."

"I'm not letting you kill me!" she shouted.

I was getting closer, ignoring the use of we. I was too focused on not missing, and caught Beattie's eye from behind the idiot. I nodded and fired at the back of his head, and she rolled out of the way to avoid any accidental firing. He didn't even fire as he was bleeding out.

I helped her up. "Next time, we go in the same direction."

She was out of breath, but she nodded. "Agreed."

We. There was more than one idiot out there, and I only remembered that with one last gunshot.

Beattie probably didn't feel it obliterate her skull, or at least, I like to tell myself that. It came from the right, and though it was dark, I felt the spray of blood when she went down.

I stood frozen for what felt like minutes, hearing a few gurgling breaths on the ground below me, but I bent down to retrieve the gun I'd given her. "You were amazing out there, Beattie," I whispered, and for her, crossed myself.

I found the other insane idiot soon enough, and believe me, I let him linger longer than she lasted.

**The Hanging Whores of Babylon: A Lorelai Adventure**

I had been moving slowly along the swampy coast for a few reasons. One, I was cautious about having to move across the desert to get to the western seaboard, and wanted to plan out my trek before I dove into the sand. Two, I was alone once again, and still grieved for Beattie. Three, I was hunting a freak.

Nature took over man's proudest achievements after the rolling barrage came through. Towns too close to the ocean have been consumed by briny seawater. Levees have burst and waterlogged buildings have crumbled. Everything seems to be covered in moss and algae. It's a jungle out there; a garden where the groundskeeper decided he couldn't keep up any longer and abandoned ship.

There was one period in which three weeks passed between seeing other survivors. The first was of no harm to me or others. He was a man in his early sixties who lived as if the world had never ended. He pumped his water from a well and killed and cleaned his own food. He fed me, offered me a new shirt, and let me sleep on his couch before I left the next morning. If there were more people like that left in the world, I would have been very bored on the coast.

The three weeks after that were quiet ones, aside from birds chirping in the trees and the occasional splash of a reptile in the water. Though by then I was used to being on my own, it was different in the tangled trees of the swamps. If there was any evidence that the human race had fallen, it was those three weeks. Sure, you could make an argument that my random acts of bloodshed weren't helping us bounce back, but even if I left the lunatics alive and kicking, we still wouldn't have much of a chance. Life was recoiling back into the sea.

More specifically, I didn't see another person since the old man for two weeks and six days. I had been navigating through mangrove islands and ramshackle small towns when I spotted something that didn't belong in the swamp. At first I thought it was a very large animal, swaying back and forth with each step as it wove through the trees. Upon closer inspection, tiptoeing across tangled roots and pushing through branches, I found it to be the decomposed corpse of a woman, hung from the top of a tree by a noose.

She was far too fresh to predate the bombs. If she'd merely been a dressed skeleton, I'd have a hard time guessing the age, but there were still bits of skin stuck to her bones, and she sure smelled fresh. At first, I suspected it was a suicide. Those weren't very uncommon. I continued to think that the poor girl had killed herself, seeing no way out of this horrible world, until I found another half a mile later. Also a young woman, she had been hung with a noose too. She was not as decomposed as her sister, though the animals had still staked their claim of her corpse. There was one more after that.

I had stumbled upon the personal graveyard of a madman.

The old me, the evidence locker secretary that was still warning me from the pits of my gut, insisted I turn around and find another route through the swamp. The rest of me didn't want one more girl to be hung from the mangroves, and moved swiftly with my rifle drawn.

I found him the next day, after a sleepless night under the stars. I wasn't about to let myself become the next trophy in the case.

I spotted the home shortly after the sky brightened to its daytime gray. It sat on stilts above the swamp water with a narrow ledge along the front half, and a small motorized boat tied up next to it. Had there not been a thin pillar of smoke emerging from the roof, I would have brushed it off as an abandoned residence. I waited a long time before the front door of the house opened and he emerged with a cigar clenched between his teeth.

He was the kind that strikes you as off. The dirty clothes, the unlaced boots and the grime on his skin. Still, I waited until he was on his boat and speeding away before I went to confirm my suspicions.

I did my best to avoid stepping in the water on my way to the house, though I still managed to slip my boot in once or twice. Climbing up to the house was a problem in itself, especially when baggage for travel included a rifle and backpack filled with handguns, bullets and scotch (for special occasions only). Eventually I was able to get inside, though it had nearly taken the wind out of me. I was surprised I didn't drag the house into the water; the wooden stilts that held it up were rotten to the core.

Survivor homes, in that time, generally looked the same. That house was no different. There was a spot for cooking, a spot for sitting, and a spot for sleeping. The floorboards creaked under my weight as I looked for anything out of the ordinary, though nothing caught my eye immediately. There was no trace of blood in the sink, no knives left out, no evidence that anyone other than one man had ever been inside.

While I was still willing to kill to make the world a better place, I needed to know for sure before I shot his brain from his skull.

I was sifting through drawers when I heard the sound of the boat pulling up.

There was no way out of that house without him seeing me, and either way, I was screwed. If he was the one killing women in the swamp, he was going to string me up in the mangroves just like the others. Even if he wasn't a killer, trespassing and breaking and entering still didn't fly in this world. If anything, people got angrier if you started going through their homes without their knowledge. Hiding in that house wasn't going to get me very far either; he'd find me eventually. I just had to confront the issue head-on. If he put up a fight, he was guilty. If he let me go, he was innocent.

I stood with my feet planted firmly on the floorboard in the living-kitchen area when the front door began to squeak open. I waited until he had stepped through the doorway before cocking my rifle (I do know a thing or two about cocking). The sound froze him in place instantly, leaving him mid-stride and only part of the way inside. His eyes were locked onto mine. He wasn't angry, just very confused.

"It's not every day this happens to me," he muttered. His left hand was still on the doorknob. I kept a good eye on his right, as I suspected there was a handgun tucked into the back of his pants.

"It's not every day that I find dead bodies in the swamp," I said to him. "Now, why don't you come all the way into the house, very slowly, and we can have a little talk?"

"What are you, the police?"

"I'm not going to shoot you if you're not who I think you are. And I think you know exactly who I'm talking about."

The moment I saw the confusion drain from his eyes, I knew who he was.

It was rare for the criminals in this world to run. Usually, they saw it as a free-for-all, and if it was little ol' me trying to stop them, they tried to do whatever they could to get me out of the way. This guy was smart for trying to get away, though. I was going to shoot him without hesitation anyways.

With his hand still on the doorknob, he quickly backed out of the house and slammed the door just as I fired my gun. The blast went through the rotting wood, but I knew he was still out there. I could hear him breathing.

I acted before I could think. I rushed through the broken front door and he jumped me, knocking my rifle into the water below us.

He had me right where he wanted me. He was on top of me with his dirty hands around my throat, slowly tightening his grip. I was doing my best to dig my nails into the skin on his arms, but it didn't seem to bother him.

"You're not like the other girls," he said to me, his hot breath sinking down to my face. "They didn't come here looking for trouble. They were begging for food and water, not able to do a goddamn thing for themselves. They were dead when they came to my door."

With the breath being choked out of me, I told him, "I'm not dead yet."

I recoiled my leg hard enough for my knee to make contact with his ball sac. As I've said before, a man is only as strong as his weakest part. The moment he rolled off of me, I rolled into the swamp below. It didn't take long to find my gun in the shallow water, but I found myself at a bit of an impasse. I couldn't get out from under the house without exposing myself; he couldn't leave without giving himself up.

I also found another dead girl. She was tied to the bottom of the house, and at a stage of decomposition between the other two that I'd found.

He was still walking around near the front door, creaking the entire house as he moved. I raised my rifle into the firing position and aimed for one of the stilts holding up the front of the house. I picked the more decayed and rotten of the two as I quietly moved towards it in the water. I needed to be close, but not close enough to become the Wicked Slut of the East.

"You can't stay down there forever," he called out to me. "Sooner or later you'll have to come out, and I'll be waiting for you. The ones in the trees thought they could fight me off. You think you can too. It won't be very long until you swing in the breeze with them, sweetheart."

I was quick with my gun. It took two shots to break the stilt that held up the left side. As soon as it was severed from the base, that corner of the home tilted downwards to the swamp. It wasn't steep enough to get him in the water, but it was going to be. One lucky shot went through the wooden boards and must have hit his foot or leg, since he toppled into the water screaming in agony.

I was confident walking over to him. He was in too much pain to do anything with the gun in his hand; I knocked it into the water quickly. He didn't get his final plea; I didn't give him much chance to do anything. I placed my boot on his chest and lowered him to a watery grave.

**Blood Red Reservoir: A Lorelai Adventure**

I only decided to head into drier land once I got tired of the swamps. I was being called to keep moving after a good five months of fucking, wandering and killing. Either I was headed for the promised land, or headed right into the heart of hell. Turned out to be a bit of both, but I'll get to that still. Whatever way the road led, it was going to be interesting.

I still had my basic knowledge of geography. I knew that separating the desert from the swamps were two big rivers. I'd crossed the first one long ago, before my run-in with Beattie, and it had been simple. I'd been lucky enough to find a bridge.

I wasn't so fortunate further west.

I ended up at the widest part of the most westerly river, which I found out acted as a reservoir. There was the option of trying to swim across or looking for a boat, but I didn't know how wide it was, and I wasn't in much of a mood then to be looking for a boat and teaching myself how to operate it.

I considered heading south to find a narrower piece of the river that I'd be able to swim or wade across. I wasn't too enthusiastic about the prospect of another bridge; most of those had been destroyed when the bombs fell across the country, and the ones that were still standing were either about to fall or sheltered more insane freaks. I was too anxious to get into the desert to head south, though. I'd put it off for too long.

Before scouring the area for a boat, I took a quick bath in the reservoir. In the still-swampy wilderness that I was in, there were no signs of freaks and no reason to be worried about being naked on my own. However, whenever I bathed, I always brought a handgun into the water with me. Trial and error led me to find that the man who raped me had one handgun that still fired flawlessly if it was wet. It was easier than dragging the rifle in with me. I stripped down to nothing, piled my things near the edge of the water and stayed close to the shore.

I was feeling around the gravelly bed of the reservoir with my toes when I felt something out of the ordinary. I know what rocks are like on my toes; I'm not stupid. What I felt seemed like a rock at first, but was strangely long and narrow upon closer inspection. Eventually curiosity got the best of me and I reached down to retrieve it.

A human femur had been resting underwater. Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time I'd seen one. Two years into my job at the evidence locker, a policeman brought one in that was covered in blood and sealed up tightly in a plastic bag. This one was stripped down to nothing but bone, but I couldn't ignore the teeth marks, as if something or someone had been gnawing at it. I placed the bone back in the water, got dressed, and decided that it was time to find a boat. Though I was carrying my rifle, I tucked the handgun between the waistband of my shorts and shirt.

If there's one thing I hate more than anything, it's cannibals. In a close four-way tie for second are rapists, psychopaths, arsonists and mercenaries. A great man once told me, "You've gotta be fairly fucked in the head to kill a person and eat them."

I continued my search for a boat, sifting through abandoned towns along the shoreline, though little was coming up except for half-sunken rafts and rotting catamarans that were not fit to sail. It was a desperate time that called for desperate measures.

I know what you're thinking. Why not go north instead of south? Surely there can't be any cannibals there, and the reservoir will become a river.

Those were my thoughts exactly. I trudged on north for a few days with my eyes peeled for anything that could float and take me to the desert.

Following my awakening in the basement of that rapist's house, my methods for acquiring food changed from sleeping with hunters to hunting on my own. Some fox tracks on the shore of the reservoir led me into the nearby forest looking for the den. There weren't many fresh droppings, so I was beginning to think that the tracks were old until some rustling noises drew my attention elsewhere. Keeping my guard up, I wove through twisted branches and intertwined trees until I saw her.

A woman was in the forest, wandering through a few clear trails and picking up pieces of dried wood, likely for a fire. I knew better than to approach her right away. Who knew what man had his claim on her, and who knew if she was dangerous herself? I remained in the branches and observed her quietly.

She was a bit older than me, by at least ten years, and dressed in simple but dirty garments. There was no way she lived by herself, the judgmental voice in my head told me, though if she was, I was in for a surprise.

When her arms were filled with thin splinters of wood, I followed her back to the shore at a distance.

I was surprised to see an intact cabin built just after the boundary of trees on the shoreline. I was even more surprised that a thin veil of grey smoke was curling up from the chimney.

The woman set down her firewood outside what looked to be the only door as a pitter-patter of tiny steps erupted from inside the home.

She had a child, a living and breathing child. It was a boy, no older than ten. His clothes were very plain and showed the same signs of wear-and-tear as the woman's. He caught his mother in a tight embrace upon her return. She laughed as she rubbed the top of his shaggy head with her hand.

A short breeze blew down the shore and through the first few rows of trees that I was squatting in. I could hear wind chimes around the other side of the house, clinking and crashing into each other in the gust. They didn't sound like they were made of metal to me.

I knew there would be one more family member, judging by the size of the boots left outside the door. Half an hour couldn't have passed until the big, burly father walked over from the north. He was the reason that they all survived that long. Not that a woman couldn't hunt and keep up the house on her own while raising a son, but it all made more sense when I saw him. The young boy hugged him as well, and was greeted with the same welcoming rub on the head.

There was nothing wrong with them.

I was still cautious about making an entrance. If I've learned anything from the previous thousand miles, it was that everyone who survived the bombs didn't like to change their way of living. May it be the killers, the normal families, the cannibals or the hermits; they didn't want to change what worked for them just because little ol' me came into the picture.

I decided that emerging from the trees would make them wonder how long I'd been watching. Instead, I moved north and looped back around to the shoreline, to follow it back south to the cabin.

As I approached, I noticed that there was a beached canoe on the other side of the structure, along with an oar leaning against the bow of the vessel.

The woman instinctively grabbed her child and had him stand in front of her after she saw me coming. It was the good old human shield move, though by doing that she assumed that I was a kind enough person not to kill a child. The man kept a straight face, but did not appear too stern. They had their guard up just as I'd put up my own. I couldn't blame them for that. How would you react if I came walking up to your house with a rifle over my back and a handgun tucked into the waistband of my shorts?

"Hello there," I offered the family with a wave. "I'm not looking for any trouble, trust me. I'm just looking for a way across the reservoir."

The man and woman looked at each other in what seemed like relief, exchanging words with their eyes as a conversation took place before me. The young boy was harder to read. His mother still held onto him, but he was a blank canvas. There was nothing in his eyes after I entered the picture.

"We do have that old canoe," the woman said with a quiet chirp. "I don't think we have much use for it anymore, do we?" She looked to the man, craning her neck to meet his gaze.

He shook his head. "No, I don't think so either. It's all yours if you want."

I nodded a thank you and continued walking, now towards the canoe. I thought then that they were nice people doing what the rest of us normals were trying to achieve: live like the world had never ended. And they'd offered their canoe so I could finally get into the desert. I told myself that the day couldn't get better.

I was right. It couldn't.

Another breeze came after I passed the family and was only a yard from the small boat. It blew the same wind chimes as before, though I could see them that time. My eyes were drawn to the far corner of the cabin, where the chimes were hung off the rain gutter.

The unique sound they made had to do with the material they were made from. An odd dozen human arm bones had been strung up and painted with a variety of colors.

I pulled my handgun from my shorts as I turned back around.

The man and woman were both coming for me, the son watching from the other side of the cabin with wide eyes. Luckily they hadn't factored in my instincts, and I was ready. I focused my efforts on the man, as he was the biggest threat, and fired three times at his abdomen until he fell over. That didn't faze the woman as much as I would have liked, and she jumped on top of me before I could shoot her.

Much like the killer in the swamp, she got me into a position where she could try to choke the life right out of me, though she was nowhere near as strong. It crossed my mind that the young boy was still watching, but I wasn't about to become their next meal for the sake of protecting his innocence. I whipped my hand up, knocking my gun against the side of her head. The force threw her off of me; once her hands were peeled from my neck she tumbled onto the gravelly shoreline. The moment she looked up to see me, I put a bullet between her eyes and left it at that.

The boy was still standing near the cabin when I got to my feet and brushed myself off. Once again, he was a blank canvas. I walked over to him, and bent down so that our eyes were at the same level.

"I'm sorry that you had to see that," I told him, "and I'm sorry for the things you've seen since the world has come to an end. But I can help you. If you'd like, you can come with me to the west." The boy nodded solemnly, a yes. "Great. Let's go." My eyes were drawn downward, noticing that he had his hand in the pocket of his pants. "What do you have in there?"

He removed the handle of the knife, revealing it to be a switchblade with the push of a button. The blank canvas suddenly became something else. I saw something in that boy's eyes that troubled me more than the thought of his parents being cannibals.

He got me before I got him, reaching behind me and scraping the blade across my shoulder. It was deeper than any cut I'd gotten before, but the sheer pain of it propelled me to push him away and shoot.

I found the canoe behind their house, and left them as they were on the shore.

**Tabernacle: A Lorelai Adventure**

The canoe was dusty and full of spiders, but it did its job in getting me across the reservoir. I'm not sure how long it took me to get to the other side, but it was nearly nightfall by the time I got there. Thankfully the wound in my shoulder didn't require stitches; I simply tied a few spare pieces of fabric around my shoulder to keep some pressure on it. I didn't let it slow me down once I set foot on solid ground again.

It wasn't long before the damp soil turned into dusty dirt, however. Before I knew it, I was far from where rain would fall and wandering through the desolate desert under a sky veiled with dust. They say it was all the ash and volatiles thrown into the air from the bombs that messed up the weather, but the chemical spills and oil fires before the war didn't help much. Some nights would be clear enough to seek out the brightest stars.

In reality, all I had was my gut to bring me west.

As it turned out, the interior of the country wasn't too different from what I thought it would be. People used to joke that we had the west and east coast but a hollow land in between. Yes, compared to the swamps that ran along the gulf, it was hollow. The land was very flat, everything was covered in dust, and there was barely any sign of life, save for a stray rabbit or two.

Every human was dead, likely by gas, and there was a chance that radioactive fallout from the plains had encroached on the desert. I never got sick, but sometimes that stuff can grow and fester inside of you. Most of the bodies I found were skeletons devoid of any tissue, picked clean by scavenging animals. I didn't see any human teeth marks, so I wasn't in cannibal country.

Yet.

I wasn't a fan of the lack of water, believe me. I resorted to drinking the last of the booze I stole from the basement rapist, but eventually that ran out too, and being alone and drunk only made me sad. When the buzz wore off I was still alone, though on the roof of a three-storey apartment building looking over a ghost town. It was a little unsettling, being among so many dead souls, but they were better company to keep than some of the other freaks out there.

Several days later, I finally found my salvation.

Between small desert towns were a few dusty cattle farms, but not much else. You knew the next town was coming up when other buildings would pop up and remnants of center lines appeared on the road. That particular town started with a building that surprisingly comes few and far-between in this world.

A church.

Most have been destroyed by the bombs; you can tell by the piles of rubble that blanketed statues of the saviour or pieces of stained glass melted onto the skeletons of parishioners. The church I found in the desert was essentially untouched compared to the others. I say essentially because it had been painted with a coat of blood sometime before I arrived. It was dark brown now, but there was no denying what it was. The scattered shell casings on the ground outside suggested that the military had come through there at some point, though there was no way of knowing who the blood belonged to. Army or civilian, it wasn't good either way.

Though the memory of Beattie and her death was still fresh, something drew me inside, hoping I'd find another friend hiding under the pews.. Whatever it was, I pushed open the crusty doors to let myself in.

I found the assumed source of all the blood in the lobby, where two dozen or so skeletons were piled on top of each other in a nearly-impassable barrier. I usually try my best not to disturb the dead, and on a typical day I would have simply turned around and gone back outside. However, I still had the nip of scotch in my veins, and that alone drove me through the tangled bones. I was still as respectful as I could have been. I did my best not to disrupt their tomb as I entered the sanctuary.

There were no skeletons there. There were only dusty pews and dim grey light coming through the stained-glass windows. I noticed a few boards had been nailed across the windows from the inside. Sure, you'd see that kind of thing on the outside of buildings everywhere, and you still do, but on the inside? It made me think that whoever did it was trying to keep something out. Closer inspection revealed the boards had been nailed in place where the glass was broken.

It was quite eerie, being alone in that church, that mass grave.

But I wasn't alone.

My eyes were torn from the windows at the sound of a floorboard creaking across the sanctuary. I whipped my head around to look, but no one was there. I still seemed to be the only living thing in a church full of skeletons.

"Hello?" I asked. It's instinct, I've found, to ask if someone's there when you know there is anyways. Of course, it could have been something else in that church. A raccoon, maybe the floorboards settling from a temperature change. It wasn't.

Someone cleared their throat.

In the back corner of the sanctuary, a figure was slowly rising in the shadows. The same instinct that calls out for anyone forced me to raise my handgun. The figure frantically raised their hands in response and began mumbling.

"Please don't shoot me, I'm not crazy. I swear."

I had to squint to get a better look at the guy. It was too dark in there to tell your right from your left, let alone a sane man from a maniac. He was a scared little thing, though not very little at all, with his dusty hands held in front of his face. His clothes were covered in more dust, like everything was outside. He didn't appear to be armed, and I was fairly sure that if he was insane, he would have tried to kill me instead of revealing himself.

I lowered my weapon.

"Thank you," he sighed, lowering his hands to match.

Still suspicious, I asked, "Do you...live here?"

"Yes, I do."

I looked around the ramshackle sanctuary, and peered out into the lobby where the skeletons still had full control. "I love what you've done with the place."

"Stopping through?"

I nodded. "I'm on my way west, coming all the way from the east coast."

"Impressive."

"Have you been here the whole time?"

He was calming down; good for me. Even fear and unsettled nerves could drive a sane man off the deep end. He took a deep breath and began walking towards me at the front of the sanctuary, though I wasn't putting my gun away until I was one hundred percent sure he wasn't going to come at me with a knife. I'd had enough of that to last me a lifetime.

"I've been here since the first bomb fell. I locked the sanctuary doors, crawled under a pew, and prayed to survive. Someone must have heard me, since I'm here now." He took a moment to glance upwards to the heavens, though all I saw were rafters covered in cobwebs. "My father was the preacher here."

"Was?" I repeated.

"He was out east when it happened, waiting to board a plane for some mission work. I assume the worst, naturally. I can't do much else."

"Of course. And the people out there in the lobby?"

"I can't say much about my actions. I'm alive and they're not, and I'd rather leave it at that."

"Fair enough." I couldn't help but hear their pleas and cries at that moment. Those people would have been banging on the doors until they couldn't any longer.

"What brought you here?" he asked, thankfully changing the subject.

I smirked, a force of habit. "It's been a long time since I've seen a church standing."

"Is it that bad in the east?"

I nodded my answer, a big yes. "It's been an even longer time since I've attended on my own free will, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to look."

"Would you like to take a seat? I have some water."

"Water would be very nice."

Church, seven years after my last attended service, was nothing like I thought it would be. I was sitting on the very front pew, only ever reserved for special guests of the preacher (I was told), sipping water from a communion cup. The preacher's son added a few drops of scotch to his. Though his father rarely drank before the bombs fell, he had saved that bottle in the basement of the church for a special occasion. I shook my head when he asked if I wanted some. I was done with drinking for the time being.

"Why do you stay here?" I asked him. "Even though it's a church, I can't say it's the most inviting place in the world."

"You must have seen the coat of blood on the outside," he mused.

"It could use a touch-up or two."

He chuckled under his breath and began drinking his water-with-scotch. "That actually happened after all of the bombs fell. The army never came through here on foot."

"Then who did?"

He leaned back on the pew and sighed as he thought back to a different time. "It was about three months ago, still fairly early after everything had fallen silent. I was sitting here, on this exact pew, minding my own business, when I heard the roar of an engine. Now, I don't know about you, but it's been a long time since I've heard anything like that, and so far, it's been the only time for me. I rushed to the window to see what it was, looking through one of the holes created by flying debris when the shells came through."

"And what was it?"

He leaned in close to me to utter the word, "Mercenaries."

"Mercenaries?" I repeated.

"There was a big truck full of them. I couldn't see too well, since it was close to nightfall, but it looked like they were chasing a few people. By the sound of it, it was three or four women. They were screaming for the men in the truck to stop, but eventually they all poured out of the vehicle and overwhelmed them."

"And then killed them?"

"Not before raping them."

"Remind me to keep an eye out for these guys," I huffed.

"They dismembered the poor girls when they were done with them, and used the blood to paint the outside walls of the church while I stuck it out in the basement. I didn't come back out until three days later, at least. The girls' bodies were gone, though I heard from a wanderer much like yourself that cannibalism is running rampant these days."

"That's how I got this gash on my shoulder."

He seemed to be aware of my wound for the first time since seeing me, peering at the makeshift bandages that poked out from underneath my shirt. "I have a first-aid kit downstairs. It looks like it wouldn't hurt to clean that up a little."

"Thank you."

When he disappeared into the basement, I peeled off my plaid shirt and slowly unwrapped the fabric from the cut. It wasn't infected, but it didn't look any better than it had a few days earlier. The preacher's son returned with a bottle of water and a white plastic container, but was frankly surprised to see me sitting there in nothing but a black camisole and shorts. Something told me that the church had a very conservative dress code when it was still operating.

He sat back down next to me and cleaned out the wound with some gauze from the first-aid kit, damp with the water. It stung, and to distract me from the pain, he got me talking.

"So what's your story?" he asked.

"I used to be a secretary at an evidence locker. I was for three years, going on four, when this blowing-up-the-world business started."

"So you're used to the sight of blood?"

"And the smell of death," I added. "After my city was destroyed and the walls fell down, I figured I would be better off on the west coast. I mostly just needed a change of scenery."

"Don't blame you there. So how exactly did this happen? Looks like someone tried to cut you open with a knife."

"It makes me wonder if it was ever worth it to invest in the nation's children. The kid couldn't have been older than ten."

"What were they feeding him, crack?" Done cleaning my wound, he reached into the kit for a bit of antiseptic. "Luckily it's not deep enough to require stitches, and even luckier, you haven't made it any worse or torn it open."

"Were you a doctor in the last life?" I asked.

"I was only a quarter through medical school when the bombs fell, but I've done my share of first aid on mission trips." He pressed the antiseptic ointment into the still-open wound. It quickly did its job, stinging my skin like a white-hot flame, but the sensation didn't last long. "You'll make a full recovery, I promise. Just let it breathe a little, but still wash it to keep the dust out."

"Thank you. Again." I reached for my plaid shirt, folding it up nicely to save for when I had to leave. "It's always comforting to know I'm not the only good person left in the world."

"We're few and far between, I'll tell you that much."

There was a pause in our conversation as he cleaned up the first-aid kit and tossed my dirty bandages underneath the pew, but I figured that it was time to bring up the inevitable topic.

I cleared my throat. "I hate to intrude, but seeing as how it'll be dark in a little while, do you mind if I spend the night? I'll be out by the morning."

The preacher's son was caught off guard at first, but then nodded a yes. "I'd be happy to have you."

He lived in the church basement in crowded conditions, among stacked chairs, spare pews and looted supplies from the rest of the town. All of the windows had been covered by more boards or black paint; the preacher's son had been paranoid ever since the mercenaries came through. He offered me his cot, insisting that he'd sleep on a pew, and began lighting a few lanterns hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the space.

"I don't want to displace you," I said to him, setting down my guns and backpack near the foot of the cot. "I'm fairly used to sleeping on the ground."

"Just because people are out there eating each other doesn't mean that I don't need to be a gentleman anymore. I insist."

"I don't think I can thank you enough," I said, shaking out the sheets on the cot.

"Just thank me by using your gun on the mercenaries if you run into them, and I hope you don't. No one should die by dismemberment."

"I suppose the end of the world brings out the worst in everyone."

"The best and the worst, I've found," he offered with a smile.

A Lover's Guide to the Apocalypse

**Enemy of My Enemy: A Lorelai Adventure**

I was expecting a few things to happen over the next little while in the desert. I knew it wouldn't be long until I ran into the rumoured band of mercenaries, likely parading around the in their truck after a fresh kill and meal. I knew that once I found them, I was going to have to kill them, which would be harder than doing the other option, letting them kill me. They were going to be the impassable mountain range, the biggest river, the final battle before the west coast.

Instead, the desert before me remained the barren wasteland it was. I did not stumble upon any other smouldering towns, and did not find any bodies that had been subject to violent deaths. Obviously, there were bodies everywhere from the gas bombs, but no new souls lay among them. Everyone was accounted for. Either I had evaded the mercenaries, they'd found themselves busy with someone else to rape and eat, or I was just riding a streak of dumb luck.

Also obvious, I knew better than to let my guard down. I still travelled while it was dark, and I still inspected every house thoroughly before I let myself fall asleep.

I stayed in one town for a little while, nodding off in the wee hours of the morning underneath the second-floor bedroom window of a home. The desert always made me tired, because it seemed to be never-ending. It crossed my mind more than once that I was simply going around in circles, destined to never leave that dusty realm.

I woke up late one afternoon, but not of my own accord. Something had stirred me from my sleep. It took a moment for my ears to fine-tune the sound.

First there was the sound of steps in the dusty street. Dirt crunched under the weight of more than one person. I knew it was a group because of how loud it was. My first thought was that the mercenaries were coming through, and then I remembered that they had a truck. Besides, the sparse knowledge I had of them told me that they weren't ones for marching through the streets without saying a word. I was expecting a lot of hooting and hollering. People were definitely walking around outside, but they were doing it as quietly as they could.

It took some time to decide if I wanted to look or not. Even if they weren't mercenaries, they still could have been trouble, but how would I ever know if I didn't just take a glance outside? I crouched on my knees underneath the windowsill. Luckily the glass was still intact, obscuring me if one of them happened to be looking my way. I got the rifle in my hands and slowly looked out into the street.

No, they weren't the mercenaries I was expecting. In fact, they didn't seem to be mercenaries at all. They were soldiers, twelve of them, dressed in their fatigues with vests and helmets, carrying their hefty backpacks and weapons, marching in formation. I cracked open the window to get a better look, no longer worried about being spotted as they got further away. Even though soldiers were the enemies of all civilians, I still had a vantage point over them. They all seemed to be rather young men; no one could have been older than thirty. So where was their captain? Who led them?

I followed them for a few reasons. One, I was curious. Don't give me that curiosity killed the cat crap, because there was a reason to be curious. What if they were just as bad as the mercenaries? Twelve men would be easy for me to take if I had to, easier than the numerous men in trucks that I'd heard about. And if they weren't hell-bent on destruction, then maybe they would be of some help to me after all. They were also moving west, and twelve senses of direction were better than one. What was the worst that could happen?

Well, that question had an obvious answer, but I decided that it was worth the risk. Sure, the army hadn't helped us when we needed it. If you wanted to, you could blame them for the end of the world and not protecting their country. But what's done is done, and you can't accuse twelve men of sending the planet to hell. You can blame the men who trained them.

Following them was easy when going through towns, though the men moved at a faster pace than I was used to. Between once-populated areas, where the land was open and barren, I stayed far behind and relied on their footprints to guide me. A few of them were smoking, as I discovered from the trail of butts they were leaving behind, and at least one of them was taking shits in the open. It made me wonder if they were aware of the dangers the desert hid, but to know that, I was going to have to ask them.

The twelve soldiers had a routine to their days. As much as I disagreed with it, they marched when it was light outside and slept under the stars. Further into the desert there were less cloudy spots from the kicked up ash and volatiles of the war (I assume it's because there were fewer large cities in the desert; less of a need for the big guns). They were asking to be ambushed, and asking to be dismembered and eaten by a bunch of insane cannibals. I wasn't planning to be around when that happened, but something kept me on their trail. It wasn't the giant piles of crap they left in the middle of nowhere, or the increasing number of cigarette butts scattered on the dusty ground. It was the need to know what happened to what we all thought was the greatest army in the world.

I was fourteen years old when my mother suggested that I go to a youth gathering at church, to converse with young Teddy Browning, a strapping young lad that would make a fine husband. My dad scoffed upon hearing his name, letting me know that Teddy's dad was filthy army scum.

One night they slept in the middle of another mass grave town. They never went into homes, I noticed, so I considered that they might have been superstitious. Me, I didn't mind squatting among the dead, and watched the patrol's evening activities from a nearby home, sharing a room with a skeletal man in a rocking chair.

Regardless of the fact that I was following them, and intended to learn more about them, I initially had no objective of interacting with them. I'd had too many close calls along the way to the desert, as well as too many times where a stranger tried to choke me to death. I figured that I would eventually exhaust all reasons to keep up, get the closure I wanted for some damn reason, and move on.

At the next town, they did the same thing they always did. They marched down main street, set up their sleeping arrangements, and started a small fire. A few were carrying cans of beans and some meats in their backpacks; I had yet to see them do any hunting. As much as I wanted to join them in their fire that evening, I stuck to the tepid preserves I found in a house down the street, licking the mason jar clean before setting up a perch on the second floor.

The house I was in was nothing special. Dead family. Dead pets. Everything left untouched, save for where the valuables once lay. My spot for the night was the little girl's room. She was huddled in the living room with her family in a skeletal entanglement. Her room offered a good view of the street, and I was far enough from the patrolmen to avoid suspicion.

I was too tired to look through the whole house that night.

I found a pair of binoculars in the room, their pink color and princess decals denoted them as for play use only. I kept an eye on the soldiers as the sky darkened from light gray to black, though there was still no reason to be alarmed. As far as I knew, they were just twelve normal men doing the exact same thing that I was doing: surviving.

The very loud sound of floorboards creaking in the house took my eyes from the binoculars, and to the open door. Before I could have my gun ready, a shadowy figure exploded from the hallway and towards me, knocking the back of my head against the wall in the struggle. My rifle, which had been near my feet, skidded across the room. Soon, the all too familiar feeling of hands around my neck took over as I was pulled to the ground.

Though it was dark in the room, I could make out the ghoulish man on top of me. He still didn't have anything on that freak from the swamps who strung up poor girls in the trees, but he reeked of death and felt as gritty as gravel.

Remembering that my rifle was gone for the moment, I swung my arm up and punch him in the nose. He pulled his hands from my neck to hold it, groaning "you bitch" over and over again, long enough for me to shuffle away from him. Once my leg was in the right position, I got him in the face with the heel of my boot.

Unfortunately, that made him angrier rather than subduing him. When I turned over to get my gun off of the floor, he grabbed my ankle and pulled me back to him, his bloody nose making a further mess of his face and my clothes. I screamed when he got me, something I rarely did in my journey, but that time it was with good purpose.

I still had time to buy, however.

Even though that insane idiot had worked his way on top of me to hold me down, I was still on my stomach and still trying to reach for my gun. I was elbowing him in the face, trying to kick my legs, anything to keep him from doing what he wanted to do before help could arrive. It was clear that he wasn't armed, but I could feel the bulge of a switchblade in his pocket next to another unfortunate bulge.

I thought for a moment that he was going to be able to do it. I was too far from my gun to reach it, and my backpack was across the room with my other belongings. He was also too heavy to do anything worthwhile when I wasn't on my back.

As it turned out, all I had to do was scream.

A succession of footsteps erupted in the house as the patrol searched for the source of the commotion. The man on top of me was frozen with both fear and confusion, but I was lucid enough to shout, "Help me! I'm up here!"

The man scrambled from on top of me and rushed to his feet, grabbing my gun before I could get to it. The moment he stepped into the hallway, the blast of another gun sent him the ground, turning his face into the same bloody pulp that I'd already made of his nose. Once again, the house had fallen completely silent, except for my frantic breathing. I didn't like guns going off unless I was the one firing them.

"Did we shoot the right guy?" a quiet voice piped up.

"I fucking hope so," another sighed.

There was another voice as the men began moving around. "Hello? Is anyone home?" Under his breath, the same man insisted, "I could have sworn I heard a woman scream."

I was too out of breath and cramped up from having a heavy weight on top of me to get to my feet, but sighed when I realized that I wasn't going to be following them any longer. "In here." Cautious, the men slowly walked down the hall and stepped over the body to get into the bedroom, and a few remained in the hall. I noticed one had picked up my rifle. "That's mine."

One stepped forward to help me get up. He only had nine fingers, the right index digit missing. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yes, but I'd like my gun back." They were obedient, that was for sure. The gun made its way back to my hands, and I slung it over my back before shuffling to my backpack. "Thank you for your help. All of you."

"Would you like something to eat?" another asked.

"Yes, I would."

I followed them back to their fire, and while beans and I had never been the best of friends, I took some when offered. They also had a decent supply of water, which they shared as well. After I was fed and replenished, I asked the men the question that had been on my mind for a long time.

"So, what are you guys doing here?"

They danced around the question for a bit before answering it piece by piece. Most of the story came from one of them, but the others chimed in when they had something to say.

It seemed that they had all been part of one large patrol long before the war began. One of the men even boasted that he'd been in the service for ten years. They all served overseas together and made it out alive, but they all got a bad feeling about the coming battle on their home turf. I couldn't blame them there. When things started to get ugly and the rolling barrage included gas bombs, they abandoned their post in the central plains and took to living in the wild, joining the civilian resistance for a short time. When they heard that the fight was going to get nuclear, and that the civilians were willing to fight back, they took to the desert, far from the intended targets of the cities.

It became startlingly obvious to me that they were a pack without a leader, as they never really mentioned where they were going now or what their ultimate goal was. I suspected that they were still riding the high of the I got out alive before everyone died feeling. They were essentially twelve versions of me (though I was headed for the west coast, there was still the question of then what?), with bigger guns and smaller tits.

I asked, "Have you guys run into the cannibal mercenaries yet?"

There was an uneasy silence among the men, before one groaned, "Hell yeah."

"You got away?"

"By the skin of our teeth."

"There were too many to take on at once, even with our guns," another added.

One of the men who was smoking turned the question period on me. "What's a little thing like you doing in the middle of hell?"

"It's simple. I came from the east, and I'm going west," I answered.

After another strange silence, one of the soldiers said, "You know, we're kind of moving west too. If you can keep up, we wouldn't mind it if you tagged along."

I thought for a moment, asking myself if I wanted to join them, and remembering that they were terrible travelers. If I was going to become a travelling companion, I wasn't going to stand for shitting in plain sight or dropping cigarette butts wherever the wind allowed it. However, I got the feeling that it would benefit me to tag along. Even though I preferred travelling alone, it didn't hurt to have a dozen other guns on my side, especially when cannibal mercenaries ran rampant through the desert. We could always part ways when the coast was clear.

"I think I'll be able to keep up," I said.

"With a gun like that, I would think so."

**Thanks to the Oil Boom: An Aesoph Fable**

For a moment, while I sat filtering and boiling black water by the falls, I think I saw a real living elk. Half of me knew that I was hallucinating; all of the elk and caribou had dropped dead overnight like everything else in the forest. Even so, the other half of me believed it really was there, dipping its head into the stream and lapping up the water. The same half of me believed that it was a sign that things were getting better, as much as the first half screamed, "Everything is dead and you know why, you twat!"

The falls continued to churn upstream as the hours passed. I was crouched down until the dingy water finally turned clear, the sediments settling to the bottom of the pot.

"Finally," I grumbled. When my bottle was full again, I left the fire smouldering and continued along the poisoned stream.

The pseudo-elk appeared again when I rounded the bend and headed into the marsh, the brackish-blackish water clinging to the sides of my chest waders. It observed me from the shore, and I took a moment to observe it, the figment of an imagination that still lived in a world of hope. It was a pretty little female. She still had some heft to her, something that the last of the dying animals never had. It was almost as if she were a real-live healthy doe, back from the dead. The only reason I knew she wasn't real was because she always drank the water straight and walked with a tremor.

We all know better by now.

She didn't follow me home.

Half a mile from the edge of the marsh was the ol' homestead, a mobile home that sat five feet above the ground on stilts. Annabeth was where I'd left her on the small front deck, bundled up in seven quilts. I stripped my waders off and helped her trickle the clean water into her mouth. Her pale lips trembled, though not nearly as much as her hands, which always seemed to be tinged grey. Mine weren't as badly discoloured, though I never worked in the pits as much as she did.

We used to be chemists.

"Thank you," she muttered, and I replaced the cap on the bottle. "How is it out there?"

"The same."

"How are the falls?"

"Lovely, though there's something about all that dark water that's sad."

"Can you bring me inside? I'm getting a little cold."

I carried her inside to the couch and threw a few pieces of wood into the oven to warm up the entire room.

"I'm going to go into town again," I told her over lunch. I had a can of beans for myself, and Annabeth didn't feel like eating. "You need some more medicine, and who knows, I may find a generator this time."

"You'll need a truck if you bring something like that back."

"There's no shortage of those lying around."

She forced a smile through her pain. I couldn't smile back. "How long will you be gone?"

"I'll leave tomorrow morning and be back by nightfall. There's plenty of water for you, and I'll put some food next to the bed if you get hungry. You probably won't even notice I'm gone."

"But you'll be back?"

"I'll always come back for you."

She was asleep when I was getting ready the next day, softly breathing within her cocoon of blankets. I loaded a gun, packed a bag, and left. The elk was watching me from the trees as I headed east towards town, but I didn't stop to look.

It was only a few hours before I reached the outskirts, where a few grubby cabins still stood. The miners and truck drivers lived there in fours or fives, though most of the roofs had since caved in from heavy summer rains. All of the grass out there was long-dead, blackened by groundwater and left barren by the toxic chemical cocktail that we'd succumbed to as well.

The elk watched me tentatively from behind one of the intact cabins, nibbling at the ground.

Most stores had been picked over when chaos broke out, but I always found something worthwhile when I ventured into town. Not so long ago it had been alive, though maybe not when we were all working during the day. It was only at night that you could hear everyone unlace their boots and clank their plates and knives together in anticipation for dinner. By day we were far away from that place, up to our knees in bitumen.

Annabeth's list for the pharmacy included painkillers and a couple of inhalers to clear up her lungs. I'd been sorting through the mess of overturned aisles when I saw the elk watching me through the window.

"Get out of here!" I shouted. "Go home!"

She didn't move, and I grabbed a pack of sleeping aids for myself.

I scoured the hardware store for a long time, looking for anything that could keep us heated through the winter. Dry wood would be hard to find come January. There was nothing there but broken hammers and petrified animal droppings where the floor should have been.

I took a look outside, where the glow of the sun was two hours from falling through the haze on the horizon.

There she was again. That damned elk. It stood only ten feet away from me on the sidewalk, only watching.

"What is it?" I asked. "Why can't you decide what to do with me?" I half-expected her to answer back, but she only licked her lips. "You're just a stupid elk! You drink from the damned river and then look at me like I'll make you better! Don't you know? I can't do that anymore! It's not like I can go back into the lab and conjure miracles! I can't save you. I can't save Annabeth either. I..."

I realized that I was out of breath. The wind had picked up, and yelling with all of that volatile dust in the air was never a good idea. I reached into my bag for the gas mask and shakily strapped it on. The elk watched.

"You're not even real," I mumbled, my voice warped by the filter pressed to my lips. "You were never real."

I raised my rifle in line with her face, just for one moment, before turning around to leave. She followed behind me—from a distance but I knew that she was still following—and I left that horrid place behind one more time.

Annabeth was where I'd left her again, though she'd dragged an old magazine into bed with her somehow, which meant she must have been feeling okay. As she breathed in from an inhaler and her lungs tried to clear out the toxic dust, I took a look out the window of our bedroom, seeing the elk watching from far away in the trees.

"I didn't find anything to heat us in the winter," I sighed.

"We'll figure something out," she said. "We always do."

"I'll have to stock up on water and wood then, before everything begins to freeze."

"Maybe I'll be better by then, and I'll be able to help you." She forced a smile again, and I wanted to believe her. "Can you pass the magazine back to me?" It'd been tossed across the room when I brought in the bag of medicine. "I was reading an article about summer camp. You remember summer camp, don't you?"

"I remember," I said, bending down to retrieve it.

I took a look at the page the magazine had been left open to, and where there should have been a gaggle of children in life vests laughing until their stomachs hurt, all I saw were elks in their place.

**Boss Man: A Lorelai Adventure**

While following twelve men dressed in the same fatigues with the same boots and the same backpacks and the same guns, I eventually had to come up with a way to tell them apart. They had their real names, but since their wandering began, they'd all gone by nicknames.

Boss was the easiest to pick out. Picking out a leader among the twelve was a task best carried out after our first week together. Though they were still without direction, my assumption that they were a pack without a leader couldn't have been more wrong. He was always in front, always suggesting the first plan of action, and didn't seem to take orders from anyone. Never far behind him were The Dome and The Giant. Both were gargantuan in their own right, but The Giant had a good half a foot on the only soldier who maintained a clean-shaven head. I never asked if The Dome was bald by choice.

There were the four colors; Red, Green, Brown and Black. Red and Green each sported bright hair colors, the result of losing a dare in their travels, as I later found out. Brown and Black both sported long locks, opting not to cut it the months following their abandonment. All of the other men used an electric razor whenever they came across a working generator. I can't blame the others for keeping it short. The desert heat made my hair seem eight feet long and as heavy as a bag of bricks.

Oz always seemed to be over the rainbow. He wasn't insane, I assure you that, but he had a vivid imagination. I found out that before joining the army, he was an avid surrealist painter, pushed to military service by his Officer father. Doc got his name by being, obviously, the doctor of the group. He was the only one to have gone through serious medical training, if you can believe that, but I was told that everyone knew a thing or two about first aid. Corkboard was a few things. He had a taste for wine, he'd believe anything you told him, and he was always the last one asleep, bouncing off the walls until you told him to shut up.

Aesoph was the storyteller, the one who had explained most of their story to me during our first night together. He had more up his sleeve, most of which were wild tales about how he guessed other people were living after (and before) the world ended. I didn't believe half of them could be true, but he enjoyed telling them as much as we enjoyed hearing them. The one about aliens struck a chord in me, but I couldn't exactly pinpoint why.

Then there was Nine.

As I said before, he had nine fingers, missing his right pointer. There was something about him that set him apart from the others, but I had trouble putting my own index finger on it. Perhaps it was that he was the one to first help me when the patrol found me, or that he was a proper gentleman. Even after I complained that they were leaving behind an easy-to-follow trail, he was the only one who pissed or crapped behind a building when I was with them. He was always glancing over his shoulder as we walked, looking at me until I noticed he was.

I told myself no from the get go, because I knew that the moment I slept with him, I would have to leave. Though the patrol functioned in a way that I didn't always agree with, they were functioning. Any drama between them would disrupt their already fragile balance between military training and simply not caring anymore.

That didn't stop one of them, however.

After a few days together, we found an outdoor supply store that Boss suggested we check out. The patrol split up as soon as we entered the store. I wandered over to the rather small ladies' department, intent on finding a new pair of socks that would likely have to last me to the west coast. It wasn't like the old days, where shopping involved doing quick math to make sure I had enough cash on me.

I was slipping my feet into a new pair of socks, relishing in the feeling of clean fabric against my dirty soles, when someone stepped directly in front of me. I could have punched Boss in the groin right there and then, but first and foremost, I'm a lady. Second of all, I noticed a slight bulge and didn't want to risk breaking my hand against it.

"Those are some boots," he marvelled, and though I kept my eyes on the ground, I had a feeling he was really looking down my shirt. He was one of the smokers, I could smell a new grimy cigarette pinched between his teeth. I'd already made my comments about leaving behind cigarette butts, without much avail. "They're military-issued if I've ever seen 'em."

"Got them from a nice store back in the swamps," I replied. "They've served me well since then, but haven't been the right fit for the desert. The sand keeps getting in."

He was uninterested in my story, giving me a grunt with, "Huh. Well, you know..."

"Beating around the bush for something?"

"I'm beating around the bush for beating around the bush."

With a new pair of socks, I quickly slipped back into my boots and stood up. "I'm sure that line worked before the world fell, but these days it won't fly."

I quickly got away from him, even keeping my composure in the process to show him that I wasn't afraid. I'd dealt with men far more insane than him out east. The men who were the closest to the ladies' department were Nine and Red, playing around in a green canoe. Nine had a few new hunting knives on him that day, lifted from the weapons department.

"New socks?" Red asked me.

I pushed Boss to the back of my head for a moment, and twirling my ankles, showed them off.

"You've gotta be the most badass chick roaming these parts," Nine awed. I couldn't hide all of my worries, apparently, because he asked me, "Something wrong?"

I sighed. "No, everything's fine."

"Sure about that?" Red asked. "Last time someone told me "everything was fine", I saw an h-bomb rolling out of the warehouse behind them."

"Really, it's all good." I forced a smile to appease both of them, and it seemed to work for the moment.

The bitch between my legs was beyond screaming when it came to Nine. He was a fuck to her, and she was about to wield weapons to get her hands on him. I had to ignore that voice for the time being, at least until I was certain that my trek through the desert was nearly over.

That night when we slept in the street, Boss sat down next to me while I was French-braiding my hair into pigtails. Sure, I could have gotten up and moved somewhere else, but I was already on my second try for the right side. Had the desert heat not been unbearable the further we moved west, I would have left it down the entire time. I'm surprised I never tried to cut it off. Boss puffed smoke like the small fire before us, sucking on a cigar he'd been saving at the bottom of his backpack.

"We're not the first guys you've run into out here, are we?" he asked.

I reluctantly entered his conversation, adding, "How do you think I know about the mercenaries? I've never seen so many travelling together, though."

"No man gets left behind."

"That's a good thing."

"No woman either, now that you're here."

"Also good." I finished the last few braids on the right side of my head, wrapping up the ends with a thick elastic.

"What did you say you did before the war?"

"I didn't, and I was a secretary at my county's evidence locker."

"So you've seen some bad things?"

"I touched everything that came in, and touched everything that went out, through a bag of course. I never thought I'd be the one making evidence." It was time to intimidate him. Though all the men knew that I carried weapons and knew how to use them, I had yet to tell them about my run-ins with the criminally insane.

"Making evidence?" he repeated.

"I've killed people."

I expected him to recoil in horror. Even though the patrol carried guns as well, I highly doubted they ever used them against anyone but the mercenaries. Instead, he leaned a little closer to me, and said, "Go on."

I was the one recoiling by that point. All of the other men were occupied with something else, except for The Dome and The Giant, who kept looking at us over their shoulders every so often. I gathered my belongings and told him, "I'm not interested in you," before moving somewhere else.

I might have been all over him in my secretary days, but something about the Boss creeped the hell out of me. He was like the precursor to everything that was bad in the world, capable of becoming just as evil as the mercenaries with the drop of a hat. He was the kind of person that, if he was alone and not with eleven others, would find himself at the wrong end of my gun. I had no intentions of letting him use me for his sexual desires. I was done with that chapter of my life. I was done with being that girl. The slut.

That night I slept far from Boss and his cronies, close to Nine, Oz and Aesoph. Though, at that time, the only thing that got me through the night was hoping that the twelve of them weren't about to gang-rape me as soon as I closed my eyes. Some of them had to have morals, I told myself. If they were the soldiers that abandoned an insane army, they must have had something worth believing in.

I could have killed him then and there, there's no mistaking that. But I couldn't risk it if all the men turned on me afterwards (they obviously let him lead for a reason), or if Boss got the upper hand on me before I could finish the job.

My best bet eventually seemed to be that I had to leave them. As much as I enjoyed the company of the more stable patrolmen, it was clear that our time together would near an end soon. I would have to continue west alone, even if it made me more susceptible to the mercenaries. I just couldn't live with the vibe I got from Boss any longer.

I decided to give them a few more nights, and then quietly slip out while they were all asleep.

On the night I hoped to leave, and around a good week after my last encounter with Boss, we found a shrubby forest to call our home until the sun came up. Not all of the desert was completely barren, or so it seemed. Now and again it wasn't uncommon to find an overgrown golf course or even a botanical garden that had gotten out of hand. It still beats me how everything stayed alive. I was in the desert for a long time, and it hardly seemed to rain.

All of the soldiers carried thin sleeping bags in their backpacks. I can't imagine they did any good, but it was just another part of their routine. As much as they insisted I use theirs, I insisted even more than I was fine with sleeping on the bare ground, my own backpack serving as a pillow. The climate wasn't an issue at night; the temperature was rarely below seventy at that time of the season. Just as they were used to dragging their heavy equipment around, I was used to little baggage. The ground could be comfortable at times anyways, especially when there were no beds in sight.

My plan was to wait until everyone else was asleep before making my move, and it didn't take long for all twelve men to begin snoring. As much as they boasted that they were in-shape machines programmed by the crumbling government, they sure were exhausted at the end of every day. Of course, Corkboard was the last one to finally nod off. As soon as he was down for the count, I collected my things and tiptoed into the shrubs.

As it would turn out, I wasn't the only one with a plan that night.

I was navigating through the shrubs when I heard the unmistakable sound of heavy feet crunching the dry branches and leaves. Before I could get my handgun from my pocket, someone's big ugly paw was on my shoulder, and then around my mouth, soon dragging me off in the wrong direction.

There were two assailants. One had a thick arm wrapped around my shoulders, their hand keeping my mouth shut, and the other, after knocking away my handgun, was holding onto my legs for dear life. I was trying to fight back and scramble to safety, but they were both too strong to overpower. In the dark it was difficult to make out features, but I had a strong suspicion that The Dome and The Giant had me right where a certain someone wanted.

Before they threw me to the ground, they peeled off my backpack and rifle. I was looking for any way out of their grasp, but they weren't giving me many chances at all. Eventually my weapons were all removed, and I was soon falling down to the dusty ground.

I tried rolling over once I landed on my back, but they were prepared for that. Moments after finding myself on the ground, a big scary somebody found themselves on top of me, pinning my arms above my head. I could smell the nicotine on Boss's breath.

"You better get the fuck off of me," I said through my teeth.

He laughed at me. "What are you going to do, huh? Kill me? I don't believe you've done it before, honey. I think those guns you carry are just for show."

I tried squirming away from his hot breath, but his weight on top of me was enough to keep me from moving more than an inch. "You're exactly who I thought you were. You know that?"

His left hand snaked down my body, to the waistband of my shorts. "I get that a lot."

"I'm going to kill you. I'm going to slice your throat."

His lips trailed down my neck, moving south to my breasts. "Not before I get yours."

Once I realized one of his hands was no longer holding one of my arms, I tried again to squirm out of his hold, this time shuffling backwards on my rear, but that made him press himself even closer to my body. It was really the crushing weight of reality coming down on me. I'd grown too comfortable in the desert. I wondered if he was going to give those tall fiends a chance at me too.

Any attempt at movement was of no use. He was undoing my shorts with my right breast in his mouth, biting until I screamed. I still have that scar too.

"No!"

Boss didn't stop because I was shouting, as I originally thought. He stopped and looked over his shoulder because of another sound. Gunfire, and by what I could hear, a lot of it. My first thought was that the mercenaries had found us, and were going to eat all of the patrol before finishing me off.

It was something a whole lot better.

He shouted for The Dome and The Giant, but there was no answer from either. Though I had trouble making out his face in the darkness, his body language signaled worry. He sat up on top of me in the defensive position, prepared to run. Before I could scream again, he put one free hand over my mouth. I bit his fingers, but it did nothing to distract him.

"Who's there?" he called out. "Answer me!"

There were footsteps following his plea, a lot of footsteps crunching through the desert bush. That seemed to be enough to propel him off of me, however Boss didn't get very far once he was on his feet. Another hail of gunfire erupted. I still couldn't see who it was coming from, but I could see the sparks fly from some automatic weapons behind the trees. Boss was hit a few dozen times, everywhere from his face to his legs, and went down like a rotten tree trunk.

I was worried at first. Very worried. I thought that whoever had gotten those three clowns was coming for me next. I was alone, unarmed, and vulnerable; the one position I never wanted to be in after what happened to me in the swamps. Doing up my shorts, I scrambled along the ground to more shrubs, too afraid to stand up straight and ignite more shooting.

"Wait!"

I looked over my shoulder to see something I didn't expect. Emerging from the dry desert bushes were the remaining nine members of the patrol, only carrying their weapons. Nine had my backpack half over his shoulder, along with both of my discarded guns.

"Sorry to spook you," Green sighed. "The only way to get them was by a surprise attack."

"What just happened?" I demanded, nearly breathless.

Corkboard, another of the smokers, reached into his pocket for a cigarette to light between his lips. "Those three haven't been the same since we ran into that damned troupe of cannibals. We've been looking for a way to knock them down a peg."

"This was the last straw," Brown explained, helping me to my feet. "I wish we would have gotten here sooner, but the not-so-friendly giants returned fire."

"Either way, I'm glad you guys showed up," I replied. "Thank you, really. I thought he was acting as the de-facto leader of this group."

"You could say that's one of the reasons why he needed to go," Nine offered. "Aside from defaming the name of the army further by doing what he did to you, he seemed to think that this new world revolved around him." A few of the other soldiers rearranged Boss's body. They laid his body out straight, closed his eyes, and folded his hands over his chest. Nine returned my guns and backpack to me. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," I sighed. "Again, I'm glad you showed up. All of you." I found myself only looking at Nine when I said that, and he was looking right back at me.

"Nothing like that will happen again," Oz said. "We promise on all that we are."

**Machina: An Aesoph Fable**

The world had been silent for three entire months, so don't blame me for being jolted awake by the sound of an engine roaring. It was only a quick growl from the beast, but it had happened.

I rose from the thin mattress on the floor to wipe the grime from the window. A pillar of black smoke wafted over the remains of the suburban dream; from the coal plant, I assumed. It was downstream, over the hills and across a field of rotting soybeans. To my understanding, she was supposed to be as abandoned as the rest of the world, but the giant was awake and writhing. I grabbed the biggest gun I could (automatics aren't for criminals anymore) and began the trek without thinking twice.

I'd been comfortable in silence because I knew that was all there was left. A roar from a most unlikely place warranted investigation.

Downtown was still a bone yard. I was a bit naive for believing that one day it would be different, and not realizing how unsettling it would be if someone removed all the remains from the streets. Skeletons were the new neighbours, never to move away.

They were all reduced to rubble overnight, many within the time span of a few hours. Most of that time involved incessant moaning and groaning in the streets, which would not go away no matter how hard I pressed my palms to my ears. Mrs. Key, the widow next door, called it the "bug" and swore she wouldn't catch no damn disease the army tries to give me.

Throughout time, each epidemic has seen a small group of people immune to the negative effects. This time around, it had to be less than one percent of the exposed population. I was one of the lucky few to not have the life asphyxiated out of them. Pestilence even left bruises on their necks before it moved on to the next victim.

The coal plant grew quiet a few days after the townspeople did. I had anticipated an explosion, but when the fuel ran out, the cogs came to a halt. It took three months for it to all start again. But how?

Black brume was still rising from the smokestack by the time I made it to the edge of the field. I should have been leerier than I was, but curiosity has always gotten the cat.

You can run from interest, but you can never hide.

I waded across the river and went in through the breakroom door.

I hadn't show up for the last day of work, only because my boss was choking out his words on the phone when I called. "Well...if...you can...make it..."

Machinery hummed and pulsed as I drifted through forgotten halls. Angus, the plant foreman, was the first corpse to greet me, sprawled across the doors to the generators. The droning was loud enough to drown out the sound of me attempting to clear my throat, a test. I could feel the vibrations in my chest.

I wondered if Angus and the executives had concocted some fail safe or other fantastical plan to restore a broken world, but they'd never been smart enough for something like that.

I did not realize until I had a hand on the door, prepared to push it open, that I was no longer alone.

I thought that everything was covered with a thick layer of vines before I discovered they were instead cables. You could barely see the generators through them, but the turbines were doing their job nonetheless. Power was flowing through the grid for the first time in three months. I took one small step onto the carpet of cables, and another sound could be heard over the growl of machinery. Blink, and you would have missed it.

It was a yelp from a woman.

"Hello?" I shouted, hoping it was loud enough to be heard. "Is anyone in here?"

The rustle of cables drew my attention back to the doors, but I saw no one behind me. She was in front of me when I turned back around.

Her back was the plant's switchboard, all the cables plugged into her spine.

The young woman less than a yard from me took a delicate step forward in my direction, wincing slightly when her foot made contact with the bed of wires. Her bare breasts heaved with the action. It was clear to me that they were not part of the typical female anatomy. No nipples, after all.

Her creators had been nice enough to give her a full head of auburn hair and lips that could pout, along with a set of eyes as blue as the river water outside.

She was about as human as the bones in the street.

"A survivor?" she observed, continuing on a path that would eventually bring her closer to me. Instinct drew me to take small steps back to the door.

"What are you?" I asked.

A smirk dented her face. "I am the factory. I am the wires. I have a penchant for choking the life out of life itself."

The disease.

"You did this?"

She didn't answer my question, and began to ask her own. "Why would you bring a gun here?"

"You did this."

She did all of this.

With realization came fear.

"Did you really think you could solve your problems with a gun?" she asked, and then let out a low chuckle at the thought. "You're just like the others."

"They tried to stop you?"

"They wanted me to do this at first, you know. They wanted me to flourish in a new world, only as long as they were at the helm of the ship. They needed to win the war, but they gave me too much power."

"Then why have you been hiding in here so long?" I asked, hands gripped tightly onto my gun.

A free cable snaked its way up from the floor to wrap itself around my ankle.

She looked right into my eyes and said, "I knew someone was still out there."

I began firing, not thinking about aiming so much as hitting her as many times as I could. She yanked the cable around my ankle, which brought me to the floor, but I kept shooting as she dragged me towards her.

The bullets only bounced off of her.

"I told you that guns couldn't hurt me," she hissed, standing over me. "Do you know what they did to me when they realized they couldn't shoot me? They locked me away here, under the ground where there was no power to keep me going. They should have buried me deeper."

Of course! I saw all of the cables in a different light now, and the way they all snaked towards the generators and turbines got me thinking. I didn't have many bullets left, but I hoped that I had enough.

"They should have put you out of your misery," I said, and opened fire on the source of her power.

A spray of bullets pierced the cables, and with a loud hiss and a strong rumble, sparks began to erupt from the turbines.

The cable around my ankle loosened. She screamed. I fired more.

"No!" she wailed. "No!"

I scrambled to my feet and ran for the door.

"No! Come back here!"

The turbine I'd hit was sputtering, while the others were beginning to surge. I looked over my shoulder to see her caught between them, crumbling to the ground weakly and then rising with too much energy. She was a puppet of the electricity now, continuously coming back to life after death.

I used the rest of my bullets to damage the turbine even more, before getting out of there and running as far and fast as I could, not looking back when the scent of smoke caught my nostrils and the ground began to rumble.

**Seven Ate Nine: A Lorelai Adventure**

Black was my unofficial tour guide of the west. He seemingly came out of his shell once Boss and his cronies were gone. He pointed out plants that could be eaten, water sources that likely weren't contaminated, and taught all of us how to tie knots when we weren't travelling.

"You must have been a boy scout in a past life," I told him one day.

"Or this one," he said. "After I got all of the badges I could, I enlisted."

"We all have a bit of a similar story," Doc added. "Went through our lives for eighteen years doing something that led us to the army. Boy scouts, cadets, medical internships..."

"And that's what brought you here?" I asked.

"My mom wanted me to be a heart surgeon, but I was looking for a venue outside of the operating room. I was a bit skeptical about joining the army at first, but I was convinced that they needed me just as much as I needed them. Of course, everything went to hell not long after."

"It's a good thing you guys got out, though."

"By the skin of our teeth," Oz groaned. "Getting twelve soldiers off of a base in a time of pandemonium is a lot harder than you'd think. There was a lot of jumping over a fences and a lot of returning fire until we were in the clear."

"But are you all happy now, even if the war ended life as we know it?"

"Yes," Nine answered.

"Why?"

"Because we survived. Don't you feel the same?"

I did feel the same way, and I noticed him smiling at me as the ten of us continued on through the desert. Without Boss leading, we were covering even more ground. Though I hadn't discussed leaving the patrol, nor had they brought up when they would leave me, it seemed that we had a bit of an understanding that it might be a while before ten became nine. We all enjoyed each other's company too much.

Some more than others.

Nine began asking me more about what I was doing before our first encounter, even going as far back as before the bombs fell. I was honest with him, letting him know that I carried guns for protection and had to use them, something I never thought I would do back when I was filing bloodied evidence at the locker.

"I can respect that," he said to me. We were walking with the others, as usual, on an old highway towards another town where we planned to spend the night. "It's not necessarily a good idea to wander around unarmed anymore, especially when you're in the desert."

"I thankfully came to my senses before I crossed the big river. Got these guns out east in the swamps. There are sick people out there, and we all know that."

"Sickest you've met?"

"Three-way-tie between rapist with an axe, serial killer who hung women up in the swamps, or the family of cannibals."

"Wow."

"But here's hoping I don't have to run into the mercenaries. On my way through the desert, I've heard some interesting stories that have already given me a good first impression of how they operate. My goal is to not be roasted and eaten in the desert."

"You don't have to worry about that, they eat human meat raw nine times out of ten."

"Where do you think they came from?"

He sighed trying to think of the right answer, because I'm sure he knew just as much as I did about the group. "Hard to say, but we've deduced that they're just a bunch of crazies that survived the bombs, and saw that survival came with killing the innocent. I can't say for sure how they got the idea to eat people, but food is scarce out here to begin with. Perhaps it was the only way, but you've gotta be fairly fucked in the head to kill a person and eat them."

"Tell me about it. I had to deal with a whole family of them."

I showed him the scar from my last cannibal encounter as we stopped for a water break on the edge of an old drainage ditch. The wound had healed up for the most part, though the sight of it made it hard not to picture a bloodthirsty ten-year-old wielding a knife and aiming for my shoulder. Nine was interested by it, and I thought he was going to reach out and touch it before Corkboard came over picking a bug out of his teeth.

"Nice scar," he observed. "Looks like someone got into a knife fight."

I pulled my plaid shirt back over my shoulder and allowed him a nod. "You guys aren't the only ones who get out by the skin of your teeth."

Brown and Green sang an old military chant the remainder of the way down the highway. They were both from the same pre-war town and had been together since enlisting. It showed in their mannerisms and was easy to see as they harmonized their words. I should have been worried about running into mercenaries then, but it had been a long time since the last evidence of their existence lingered in the desert, and I was in the mood to let my hair down and relax.

Brown began, "One, two, three, four, hey."

"One, two, three, four, hey," Green echoed.

"One, two, give me some more, hey."

"One, two, give me some more, hey."

"C-130 rollin' down the strip."

"C-130 rollin' down the strip."

"Ten fightin' rangers on a one-way trip." Brown got a few chuckles from the rest of the soldiers; it was an apparent change in the lyrics.

Green clapped his hands together and repeated, "Ten fightin' rangers on a one-way trip."

They continued for a while, Brown going through one line and then Green repeating (with a bit more soul in his words, in my opinion).

It was all fun and games until I caught a sharp scent in the air. It wasn't necessarily smoke, but something had definitely been burned. Wood, most likely. I knew what a charred town smelled like and I had that strange feeling that our hopeful stop for the night was nothing more than ash.

Nine noticed the strange look on my face. "Yeah, I smell it too."

What was once a quiet town on the highway, a stop for weary travelers and desert nomads alike, had become just like the other scars on the landscape. Everything had been burned to a crisp, and it was probable that the fire had died down only a day or two before our arrival. There were no fresh bodies among the debris, just old bones from gas barrages, but the sight unsettled the patrol nonetheless.

Aesoph examined some of the ashen remains, rubbing the fine gunmetal powder between his fingers. "They can't be that far ahead of us now. I'm surprised they haven't left any bodies behind them on their way."

"Unless we're missing them," Red sighed.

"They're obviously eating whoever they run into," Corkboard huffed between puffs of a cigarette.

"Cannibals still leave behind bones," I pointed out. "Maybe they're taking prisoners now."

"I'd hate to be on that boat."

"We should still make camp for the night," Doc said from the back of the group. "If they've gone through here once, they won't be back for a while. They're probably off burning down another old town."

"I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep in a place like this," Brown added.

"Just close your eyes and get used to the smell."

As much as I wanted to sleep in the middle of the street, I was far too awake that night to lie down on the ground. I instead left my things behind with the soldiers, only taking along one handgun for basic protection. I walked out of town and began to circle around it underneath the stars, partly for the exercise, but mostly just for a moment on my own. Spending every day with nine men still warranted girl time, even if I was the only woman around for miles.

I was nearly back to my starting pointing, somewhat close to the men's campout site, when I saw a dark figure wandering towards me from the other direction. I immediately drew out my weapon.

"Hey, put that thing down. I don't even have my gun."

Though he was still in his fatigues, Nine was without his helmet and all of his other supplies. "Stepping out for a leak?"

"No, the same as you. Couldn't sleep, thought a walk around would settle me down." He paused for a moment, and then added, "I was looking for you too."

"You were?"

"Come on, let's find a place to sit down."

The place was a flat spot of ground next to a cactus. I do admit, that for the first time in a very long time, sitting next to Nine, I was nervous.

He held up his right hand, the one missing the index finger. "Want to hear about how I lost this bad boy?"

"Sure."

"It was when we ran into that goddamned mercenary brigade." He whistled remembering the story, half amazed and half disappointed in himself. It was easy to know why, if his finger was gone. "They're a savage group of people, that's for sure. One minute I was in a knife fight with one particularly ugly thing, and the next thing I know, he's got my hand in his mouth and is chomping down. A finger is like a baby carrot in the sense that it doesn't take much force to bite it in half. He would have gotten the rest of my fingers if the other guys didn't pull me out of that scuffle, and shoot the bastard."

"A cannibal ate your finger?"

"He didn't really get the chance to eat it. He kind of just gnawed on it before he got a bullet between his eyes."

"It seems to have healed up nicely."

"It was a clean bite, and thank god he didn't have rabies or anything else. I wrapped it up and kept going."

"Want to hear about why I'm the person I am today?"

"You briefly mentioned that insane maniac who kept you in his basement, but was there something else?"

I'd let the soldiers know a bit about the obstacles along my way to the desert. There was the family of cannibals, of course, and I threw out a few other things, but at that point, I was still a bit of a mystery to them, and to Nine.

"I lived a strange life before the bombs fell. I was a perfectly normal girl until I watched my friend lose his mind and then found out I had ovarian cysts the size of tennis balls. They did all they could, but said children would be an iffy subject. I stopped going to church, started sleeping my way through criminology school, and found myself the cataloguing secretary at the county evidence locker. It was a job I never thought I'd do, but it seemed fitting."

"Because of what happened to you?"

"And the person it turned me into."

"No more church?"

"A just god wouldn't let anything like this happen to the world. He wouldn't let an army of monsters, no offense, kill almost everyone, and then let the survivors bomb them to smithereens with their own nuclear weapons."

"You left out the part where the civilians shot down every fighter jet they could."

"Of course."

"What about after the bombs? What did you do then?"

"I travelled some of it doing what I did before my old city was a wreck. I tried to get something out of every person I ran into, and when one tried locking me up in his basement as a personal sex slave, I saw it as justice to hack him to pieces. When I was out of his house, I was a different person again. I'm not just someone who wants to survive. I want to thrive."

"That's a great way of putting it," he offered with a smile. "If only everyone lived that way now, I think we'd all be a little happier, and safer too."

"Do you think we'll run into the mercenaries?" I asked.

"Chances are we will, the farther we keep going west."

"Where do the nine of you intend to travel?"

"It seems we've been almost everywhere since we left the base, but there's always something new waiting out there. Maybe once the mercenaries are out of the way, we can keep going. I've heard good things about the west coast."

One of my problems with Boss was that I didn't want to break up the dynamic of the group, aside from how much he disturbed me emotionally. I didn't find that to be an issue with Nine, no matter how much I looked for a reason to get up and go to sleep by the others. The fucking bitch that rested between my legs was ready to drag me onto Nine's lap herself.

She didn't need to, though.

I leapt onto him and kissed him, bringing the two of us to a position sprawled out on the ground. He was surprised at first, believe me, but eventually wrapped his arms around me and reciprocated.

Breathless, he pulled away and insisted, "You're one of the strangest creatures I've ever met, you know."

I was already unbuttoning his fatigues. "Interesting choice of words, strange even."

So we did it right there and then, in the middle of the desert underneath the stars. He might have been missing a finger, but Nine still knew how to use each and every one that he had. For one night, there was no crumbling, burning world around us. There was no troop of mercenaries. Hell, there weren't eight other men sleeping a mile away. It was just the two of us.

**Lorelai, You'll Never Die: Nine's Dream**

Daniel sliced his finger open with his train ticket; the delicate skin between the nail of his right ring finger and a callous pressed against it. He sucked the wound clean and swallowed before he could taste his own coppery blood on the top of his tongue.

"Attention mesdames et messieurs, c'est votre premier appel et dernier numéro du train quatre-vignt cinq."

There wasn't time for a bandage. Daniel gathered his belongings and made his way to the platform as train eighty-five grunted to a stop, puffing smoke like a factory at high noon. A balding man had his head sticking out of one of the doorways, shouting at the top of his lungs en Franҫais for everyone to get into the last car. Daniel jostled past old businessmen and some women and children until he was able to climb aboard.

It seemed as if not much time passed between him sitting down and the train roaring to a start again. After a man had come by to punch his ticket, Daniel placed his hat on the empty seat beside him and opened his briefcase, removing a thin notepad and an old pencil. Held up close enough, he could see teeth marks from another time, another deadline.

He flipped through the pad until he got to the first empty page, nearly halfway through.

The hills rolled past, and the sun yellowed to a bright golden shade as time passed. Daniel began to write a few short strings of words on the blank canvas before him, nothing too concrete. The paper-cut stung with the movement, but he allowed it.

The lilac tree was our domain, a vantage point on the ridge that men died for long ago. You laid out underneath lavender clouds as your lungs heaved in the cool evening air. "Let's go on an adventure," you told me.

"I thought we were already on one."

A delicate white hand removed Daniel's hat from the empty seat next to him. "Still wearing this old thing? I would have thought you'd have a new one by now."

Daniel halted his pencil and glanced left to see Lorelai standing in the aisle, examining his hat from every angle while she tried to balance herself. The train shook every now and then; it wasn't enough to throw you into motion sickness, but just enough to knock you to the ground if you weren't careful.

"Didn't see you sneak up on me," he said quietly, as she claimed the empty seat and continued holding onto his hat.

She craned her neck to look past him, out the window. "Where are you going?"

"Somewhere very dear to the both of us."

Her eyes fell to the piece of paper in front of him. "What are you writing?"

"Something about you."

It was an hour or two until sundown when the train began to slow to a new station. She'd already gone before they even came to a stop, but Daniel knew she would be waiting outside on the platform. She was, naturally, and he was flustered by the sight of her standing among the crowd, hair and dress blowing in the wind, eyes only on him.

"How much more adventurous could we be? We came all this way together."

"There's always something out there."

She held out her hand and once he had it, she began to lead him away from the small station to the parking lot, where a few rural taxis idled in place.

"La crête, s'il vous plaît," he told the cabbie through broken French; he'd always been a bit rusty with the language. Before beginning this excursion, he'd found the necessary phrases in a French-English dictionary and wrote everything down.

He was much closer now than he had been before, and quietly mulled over the thought as he sat alone in the back seat of the cab, hat atop his head.

The vehicle did not cushion any bump or lump in the dusty road, and Daniel found himself tightening his seatbelt every time it sent him hovering above his seat. It was too turbulent to write, but he knew what he would put down later.

"Have we done all we can here?"

"I have. Have you?"

"You should see some of the things I've written."

"What are they about?"

"You."

"Are you American?" the cab driver asked with a heavy French accent. He was a leathery old man who gripped the steering wheel with both hands, though would raise one now and then to fiddle with his salt-and-pepper moustache.

"Canadian," Daniel shrugged.

"You must have family who fought on the ridge, non?"

"Non," he repeated. "It's something else."

Lorelai was waiting for him when the cab rolled to a stop at the bottom of the ridge, where a bronze statue had been erected some time ago to honour those that died. Daniel paid the good man, who then asked how he was going to get back into town once he was done paying respects. He could not answer, but spotted a cottage down the road and assumed he could telephone a service once he was finished.

"I don't know how long I'll be," he insisted, and watched the old man drive away into the rolling hills.

Daniel put his briefcase down, next to the statue, and took a seat in the grass to finish his writing. Lorelai watched patiently, though now and then let her gaze wander to the golden sky above them.

"I remember when we first got here," she said. "We almost didn't want to go home."

"We almost went off somewhere else," Daniel added.

"I would go anywhere with you, for you," you said. "Even if we get lost, at least we always have this place to look back on."

"I never would have thought this time would be what it was. It's exceeded my expectations, you know."

"What did you expect?"

"Perfection, but you still managed to outdo it. This place will always be ours, no matter what happens."

"Even if there's another war?" you asked.

"Even if there are a thousand more wars."

Daniel scrawled the last few words down and ripped out the entire section, before beginning the trek up the ridge to the lilac tree at the top. He nodded a thank-you to the memorial, a tired-looking soldier who carried the weight of the world and more. Daniel's great-great-grandfather could have been a comrade in arms with the Frenchman, but who knows now?

Lorelai followed closely behind; when the ridge got steep enough she had to dig her hands into the ground to keep from slipping. Daniel offered assistance, which she took with a beaming smile.

The lilacs were in bloom. Lorelai ran right to them to take in their aroma and feel the delicate petals with her fingertips. Daniel folded the spare sheets of paper and placed them at the foot of the trunk, and plucked a sprig of lilac from a nearby branch to place on top.

He caught Lorelai's glance from her elation in the tree, and told her, "You will never die."

**The Four Horsemen: A Lorelai Adventure**

I'm sure the other men were aware of what Nine and I were doing. No one openly spoke of it, but we all knew the truth. Keep in mind, we didn't make it obvious. It wasn't like we held hands when we walked or kissed in front of the rest of the patrol. After that one night under the stars, we kept moving.

You could call what we had a relationship if you really wanted to. The rare moments that we were able to get some alone time, mostly when the other men were asleep, we would tell each other whatever came across our minds. He even dreamed of me.

I eventually grew to know everything about that man, more than I'd ever known about anyone I'd let into bed before.

He was an army brat, born and raised. His father was a staff sergeant, and his mother was a nurse for the navy. He had three older brothers; two in the Air Force and the third was a Marine. They're all dead now, one having died before the war when his fighter jet exploded due to faulty wiring.

"My parents sued the shit out of the company that built that plane," he told me. "They never told me how much the settlement was, but I know they donated a boatload to the military graveyard and half of a boatload to other military charities in his name."

"How does it feel to be the only living member of your family?" I asked.

"Probably the same as it does for you. You wonder where all of the time went."

"Every day I can't help but think, or even just let it cross my mind that I used to be a city girl, stuck in a rut."

"Who would have guessed you're so much more than that now? Though I bet you always have been."

We did have lots of sex too. The thing about Nine was that he was a very passionate lover, and had stamina that I'd never encountered with the men out east. He boasted that he could do three hundred sit-ups without stopping, and it only took one night with him to know that was true.

Oz caught me when I was filling up an empty scotch bottle with water at a river, while Nine was using one of his knives to kill lizards with Aesoph and Green. In the desert, you have to get used to eating a lot of lizards.

"You're the only person I've run into who keeps water in one of those," he said.

"Gives it a little bite," I replied, "though it doesn't last too long anymore. Something on your mind?" I couldn't help but notice what was going on behind him. "You're not shy about the guys taking a shit out in the open, are you?"

He glanced over his shoulder instinctively, but recoiled right away at the sight of Red squatting over the ground with his pants around his ankles. "No, that's not it. Well, it is...but I just wanted to say we're all glad you've stuck with us this long. Believe it or not, we can get tired of each other."

"Especially if someone's shitting out in the open."

His face wrinkled, but then he caught me taking a quick look in Nine's direction before bringing my line of view back to him. "He'll take care of you, you know. No matter what, he won't let anything happen to you."

"I know."

Thoughts of the long-term crossed my mind now and then. Would I be with these men forever? What would happen when we went as far west as we could go? What would become of Nine and I as our travels continued? I'd never been in the position where I had to look into the future, and honestly, it scared me. It'd been roughly seven months since the bombs fell. So much had changed in that time, so what was going to happen in the next seven months?

Fate brought us to another graveyard of a town nestled in the desert, where no plants grew but cacti and everything was covered in red dust. I spotted the first of many skeletal bodies; a couple lay across the rock garden in front of their house. Black found the next ones, propped up against a wall peppered with bullet holes that all of the guys insisted were done by army-grade weapons.

There were early reports of soldiers marching into rebellious towns to squelch resistance before the real war began. I've yet to tour the radioactive wastelands in the central plains of the country, where the army was cornered and mercilessly killed with their own weapons, just as they'd done to everyone else.

You can blame them for what happened. You can blame them for dropping bombs, poisonous gas, and poisoning the water, but what's the point anymore? We might as well blame ourselves for giving them the power to do it, for trusting them.

The men found a small corner store that hadn't been raided yet. There were still cans of tuna, beans, and what seemed like everything else they were looking for. Not terribly thrilled by canned food, I decided to wander around on my own. I was in desperate need of a change of undergarments. My bra was hanging on by a thread and my underwear had seen better days.

There was no sign of a lingerie store in that town, but I didn't have much use for frilly lace bras or cage panties anymore. Function outweighed fashion now. Luckily the old co-op did have something to offer in a few sportier pieces. I've seen bigger boobs and I've seen smaller, but running for my life without a bra means I pay for it later.

I stepped out of the co-op, fresh undergarments settling into place under my clothes, when my nose caught the scent of something strange in the air. It smelled like something was burning, but I saw no smoke rising to the sky, and heard nothing to suggest there was a fire being started in the immediate area. The odour disappeared for a moment, but just before I was about to shrug it off, I could smell it again.

I could have gone back to the soldiers first. I could have told them that I was suspicious and we could have all worked together. We could have turned around and left. We could have hid somewhere. But I went off alone. I could still hear them murmuring from down the street; sorting through canned food.

I wandered for a short little while, not sure where the smell of fire was coming from, but convinced I was getting closer.

I found them in the old business district. They'd parked their hulking truck halfway on the curb and halfway on the dusty road, so it was nearly tilted. There were four of them with their backs turned to me, marvelling at the beginning stages of a big blaze. They'd piled old wooden chairs and tables on top of each other near a few buildings, making the spread of fire imminent. I don't think they could have been there for more than an hour before I found them.

They were all armed, and though I had them with their backs to me, I knew better. I certainly could have tried with my rifle, but I think I was scared off by the human skulls they had hanging from their belt loops; proof of their many kills and conquests.

I ran back to the patrol. My patrol.

Corkboard and Aesoph were outside of the corner store, both smoking. They didn't have to jump right into a question period to know something was wrong. They could read my face like an open book. Corkboard's cigarette fell out of his mouth when he saw me running up to them.

"They're here," I panted, nearly every breath of mine gone from the run over. Three guns and a backpack could feel like a thousand pounds if you were running on little sleep and even littler food. "They've already started their fire."

Aesoph dropped his cigarette to grind it into the ground, seemingly ready to tell the others about the new revelation, but a few split seconds later, his life would be over. I heard the bang. It was a loud one, shaking the dust from every surface of that old town. The bullet entered somewhere under his left ear, taking out his jaw as he fell towards the front wall of the corner store. I had barely realized he was dead when Corkboard started dragging me inside. I might as well have been dead weight.

It was the same as seeing Beattie die. My stomach boiled with the feeling that I could have done something to keep him standing and breathing. Aesoph was dead, and every story he held with him.

Time moved in blurs and bouts of screaming. Corkboard dragged me somewhere behind the storefront counter as I noticed some of the other men leaving. I didn't even consider that one could be Nine.

Gunfire was erupting at that point, louder than I could scream. It was a chorus of snare drums at five times their normal speed. Instinct made me plug my ears and close my eyes until a pair of strong hands forced me to listen.

He shouted my name over the noise and confusion until I opened my eyes.

Nine looked right into my eyes, and said, "Don't you move until you don't hear anything at all."

I reached out to him as he got back to his feet, but he was already too far away to grab.

I asked myself something then. Why are you scared? Why are you hiding when you should be helping? These men saved your life. I couldn't argue with the logic, as much as the mercenaries scared me at that moment. I had to remind myself of the things I'd already done, the people I'd killed to keep myself alive. The rapist, the killer, the cannibals. I'd done it all before; I'd stopped them from ending my life, and now they were only melded into one entity, a triple header. I got to my feet before I could change my mind, and readied my rifle.

But by the time I was up, the town had already reverted to its silent stance. The only evidence that something had actually happened were the bodies, the blood, and the bullet casings. I approached the front door of the store with caution, for there was no longer a door. That was on the ground nearby; they'd shot it off the hinges. The front window was broken too, shattered into countless tiny pieces on the floor inside and ground outside. It crunched under my weight; the only sound around.

I heard the crackle of fire eventually.

They were all dead.

I counted the bodies.

No, only five were dead.

Aesoph was still near the doorway. I couldn't look at him for very long. Red and Green were both lying face-down on the ground. I only knew it was them by the color of their hair peeking out from underneath their helmets. Corkboard was another casualty, his face a canvas of bullet holes and his bloody helmet nearly ten feet away from him.

Doc was the last. I thought he was as dead and gone until his chest began to heave. I ran to him.

He'd been hit in the right side of his chest, missing his heart but likely puncturing a lung. He was struggling for breath, blood dribbling out from the corner of his dusty mouth. I fell to my knees and grabbed his hand as he held it up, the both of us holding on for dear life.

"Where did they go?" I asked.

He couldn't move his head, his eyes only glancing in the right direction. West. He sputtered out "I'm sorry," more blood flowing from his mouth.

"No, I am," I told him. "I could have helped. Did they go west?"

He struggled to nod, but I understood. Doc's final words, spoken as the life drained from his eyes, were "Save them."

I shut his eyes and crossed his arms over his body, the respectful position I'd picked up from the patrol. I retrieved Corkboard's helmet to cover his peppered face. Red and Green were hard to turn over on my own, but I couldn't leave them like they were. I arranged Aesoph as the others, but left him right where he had fallen. I did a quick search of the corner store and found a few canvas sheets to cover their bodies.

Those men saved my life, and there were four more of them out there. I would not let the mercenaries turn them to skulls on their belts. I would not leave them behind.

I would not forget Nine.

I went due west.

**Hit Me: A Lorelai Adventure**

As the town burned and I left five dead friends behind, my only guide to the west was a set of tire tracks in the dust. Only a few hours of running (though you couldn't call it running if you actually saw me; I think my body forced me to hop along the desert ground once it grew too tired to do much else) later, the tracks disappeared and I was alone in the middle of the great big nothing, below a set of circling vultures.

I kept going, thinking I was still moving in a general westerly direction. I was looking for anything. Cigarette butts. Shit. Fires. Blood trails. Bones. Bodies. There was nothing. The mercenaries had disappeared into the desert.

I had a little bit of water on me, but eventually that was gone, along with anything I had that resembled food. Not only was I alone and chasing a band of ghosts, but I was going to die of dehydration if I didn't find a source of water.

I got desperate and shot a cactus open so I could suck out the water from its flesh.

I had a lot of time to think as I wandered. I asked myself if it was really worth it, to do what I was doing. The fact was that I was marching to certain death because I thought little ol' me could save the lives of four soldiers. Was it worth it? Was I really thinking straight? I was thirsty, starving, hot and bothered; could I really take on every mercenary I ran into?

One question kept me going, and kept me from turning back around. Would they have done the same for me?

And then another question. Would Nine have left you for them to kill and eat?

I owed them everything, and the least I could do was try.

Trying, as it turned out, was harder than I thought it would be. My wandering led me to another ghost town that showed no sign of mercenary activity. I figured since it wasn't a charred pile of ashes, they hadn't come across it yet, and perhaps they would soon.

When one day had passed, I began to worry that I would never find them, and if I did, everyone would be long dead.

I slept for a very short time, maybe four or five hours while the sun was down, but it wasn't long before I was back on my feet and jogging through the desert. Jogging turned out to be a bad idea as the day passed and the temperature rose. I was still without drinking water, only getting by on what I could suck out of cacti, and food sources were few and far between. I should have expected that my body would give out on me eventually; I was only surprised that it didn't happen sooner.

First I felt cold, for the first time in a long time. My stomach began to lurch and my head began to spin. The desert became one giant rotating top, and it wasn't long before I was falling towards the ground face-first.

I thought for sure I would become vulture food out there, or easy bait for more mercenaries or other evil desert creatures. As fate would have it, a different kind of creature found me first.

One minute I was in the middle of the desert, an eventual cadaver, and the next I was within the boundaries of yet another ghost town, gazing up at the sky from a comfortable position on the ground. The sun was obscured by a few hazy clouds, but it still felt scorching. The moment I raised my hand to shield my eyes, a shadowy figure eclipsed the light for me.

My first reaction was to jump, though I still felt too tired to scramble to my feet. The figure reached down to my level, offering a canteen wrapped in leather. I only stared up at the sky, a look of confusion painted across my face.

"Drink it."

I was too thirsty to care at that point. I grabbed the canteen and let the water tumble into my parched mouth. I was too frantic for my own good and ended up choking when it went down the wrong tube. The motions my body made, heaving the water from my trachea, forced me up into a sitting position.

"If you don't pace yourself, you'll be choking a lot."

I cleared my airway and wiped the excess water from my mouth. I was still a little dizzy, but was aware of the man standing in front of me. Just like all of the objects in the desert, he was covered in a fine layer of dust. It worked its way into every wrinkle in his skin, and every crevice of his clothes. He was a younger man, but older than me, thirty or something. He'd let his hair grow long since the world ended, but the thing I really couldn't take my eyes off of was the bullet clip around his torso. I, then, noticed the gun in one of his jean pockets.

"Who are you?" I spat out. I immediately began scanning the area around me for my belongings, but more importantly, my weapons.

"Relax," he said, "I put your stuff over there." He pointed behind me; I whipped my head around to see my rifle and handguns piled on top of my backpack. "You're lucky I came across you before the vultures got your eyes."

"Who are you?" I repeated.

He still didn't answer my question. "So what's a little ol' thing like you doing wandering through the desert by yourself?"

I wiped my mouth again. "You tell you who you are first."

He chuckled. "Who do you think I am?"

"I don't have time for games."

"Why the rush?"

"If you aren't aware of what's going on in this desert, there are bloodthirsty cannibals driving around in a truck, and they have four of my friends."

"Your friends are as good as dead, little lady."

"I'm not little, and they're not dead."

"So you think you can take on all of those men by yourself?"

"Yes, but first I need to find them."

He nodded in understanding, and said, "Oh, I get it. You're lost."

"I'm not lost. Who are you?" I asked again.

For dramatic effect, he gazed off into the distance as he finally answered me. "Oh, I'm a little bit of everything."

"I need to go."

"I know where you're going, and I doubt you'll find it."

"How would you know?"

He crouched down to his knees and put both fists underneath his chin. I was having trouble reading him, and that was what troubled me the most. "I know these deserts better than anyone else. I know where everyone hides, and I know the paths most travelled."

I wished my guns were closer. "Tell me where they are."

"I don't think we know each other that well enough yet."

"What do you want from me?"

He licked his lips as he thought, then wiped his mouth with the end of his sleeve. "I've run into those guys before, the cannibals. I put up enough of a fight to keep them off my back, but I know better than to get involved with them again. I found out where they've set up camp so I can keep avoiding them. But these days, it's hard to let things go for free."

"Last time I heard something like that, I was hit over the head and dragged into a basement."

"I'm not like that," he insisted. "I saved your life, remember?"

"But there's still something you want from me," I reminded him. "Is it my guns?"

"I would have taken them already if I wanted them so badly. Besides, they seem to be clogged with sand and show signs of water damage. Now...you're a woman, I'm a man..."

I rolled my eyes. "So it is sex then?"

"Women are few and far between these days."

Believe me, I was disgusted by his proposition. I didn't have the desire to sleep with someone who I'd known for minutes. I wanted to find the four remaining patrolmen. I needed to find Nine.

But was it the only way to get what I needed from him?

An idea came to mind.

"How about a handjob?"

He looked less than enthused. I suppose women really were few and far between in the desert. They were either hiding in their homes or wandering around with a group of men with guns. It was the most he was going to get from me for a reason.

"I've been told I'm the best at it," I offered.

In the end, he was too enticed to pass anything up. He nodded and said, "That'll do."

I was still a little dizzy from my fall, but was able to get to my feet, and then got my hands on that stranger's pants. Regardless of the bullet clip and gun being right there in front of me, I wasn't too worried about being killed. I was weak, but I could have taken him if I had to. I made some small talk as I undid the button and zipper of his jeans.

"What exactly did you do before the bombs?"

"I was a hitman."

"Of course you were."

He was a thick one. I had trouble getting my hand around that thing at first, but when I did, I knew it was in the right spot. It'd been a very long time since the poor guy was touched.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I still had mine.

"Why did you stop?" He was nearly out of breath as he spoke.

I held on tightly, looked him in the eye, and said, "I've broken one before. It doesn't take that much effort to do it."

His face fell almost immediately. I tightened my grip a little more. "You bitch."

"You tell me where those fuckers are keeping my friends, and I'll consider leaving you with your dick today so it doesn't hurt when you need to take a piss or jack it behind one of these buildings. So what's it going to be?"

"They're in a canyon."

"A canyon? A canyon where?"

"Due west of here. It probably won't be long until you see a truck of them go by, or find a trail of bones. You're not that far off."

"Got a compass on you?"

"No, can't you just follow the sun?"

"I don't think you're in the right position to be asking questions."

"Just let me go if you're done."

I was done. I'd gotten everything I needed from him. With a push, I let go of his lesser half and slowly paced back towards my things. I knew a helluva lot better than to turn my back to a man with a gun. He didn't say anything else. He stared at me as I moved back, and that stare turned into a glare once I started putting on my backpack and guns.

**With a Bang: A Lorelai Adventure**

I followed the sun for a long time, hoping that it wasn't leading me off the trail, though at the same time I assumed a canyon would be hard to miss. When the sun went down and I forced myself to stop for a few hours of sleep, fate led me to a drainage pipe that still trickled with some fresh water. I drank all I could, filled up all of my bottles, and wedged myself between the pipe and the ground to protect me from the elements, among other things.

The next day I didn't do much except move west.

The hitman's account of a trail of bones proved to be true after all. The first thing I found was the shattered remains of a human skull, too damaged to carry on a belt loop. Not too far away was a femur, subject to teeth marks from some hulking mercenary gnawing off the flesh and meat. The sparse desert eventually turned into an ominous bone yard, where ribs tangoed with clavicles and tibias curtsied with collarbones. I found a few complete spines, and a few more that lay in fragments. The mass graveyard in front of me was their garbage disposal, and their welcome mat.

I thought that the only things there would be decayed remains, but I did find one thing that was fresh enough to call entrails. A few vultures I stumbled upon were snacking on what looked to be a pile of human intestines that buzzed with flies and smelled putrid from twenty feet away. I held my nose to get a closer look, and found it obvious that the remains had not been there longer than a day, and even that was pushing it.

I was close.

The sun was easier to follow when it was directly in front of me, approaching the edge of the horizon. The bone yard didn't entirely disappear as the end of the day neared. Sure, it thinned out, but I still came across all of the discarded body parts that once belonged to living people. I couldn't help but wonder who these people were. Scared souls? Other nomads? The tiny bones were the most troubling to find.

It all led to one thing: the behemoth of the desert, the biggest scar in all of the land. Under the dimming sky and twinkling stars, the fabled canyon was a bottomless hole, but what I was looking for lay at the bottom. It was where the bones stopped.

I crouched down on the very edge as the sun finally disappeared for the night. I could make out the river snaking through the canyon, as well as several fires that dotted the banks. There was probably a gentler slope to the east or west, where they would drive down their trucks, but those routes would be the riskiest of them all. My only chance of getting to the bottom was to go straight down.

There was no point in putting it off. I just had to do it. I looked over the ledge carefully, searching for spots to place my feet and hands. The drop was impressive, probably more than fifty feet, but I tried not to think of it too much. It was just another leg of the long journey to the west, but worth it for the men at the bottom who were much more than men to me. Friends and a lover.

The edge of the slope was rough, and the rocky parts that stuck out were jagged enough to scrape and cut my skin. I had to ignore the pain, just as much as I had to ignore my fear of slipping and falling. Even if I survived to the bottom, there were the problems that arose from being surrounded by mercenaries. Luckily, it was dark enough that I couldn't see any people at the bottom of the canyon, and I hoped that in turn, they couldn't see me.

On my way down, I had time to think of how to go about things. First, I asked myself what the hell I was doing. It was a suicide mission, of course, but how was I going to pull it off? There would have to be no enemy survivors, and to do that, I was going to need a little help. I decided that I would have to arm the men somehow, still believing that they were alive and being held captive. Even if they weren't alive, someone down there had to be. The mercenaries were cannibals, and anyone who ever got hungry needed a food supply on hands at all times.

A good fifteen feet from the base of the canyon, I noticed two mercenary guards standing directly below me, taking a quick smoke break. I could see things better now that I was further down the side. Among the various fires, there were several large tents set up along the side of the river. Upstream I could see the headlights of a truck getting closer.

"Looks like grocery shopping went well," one guard grumbled between drags. I was motionless as they spoke, my body pressed up against the side of the canyon.

"Back just in time for dinner," the other observed. "Hope they brought dessert."

Sick bastards.

While I listened, my foot slipped enough to send a small rock tumbling down to the ground below.

"Did you hear that?"

I uneasily took one hand off of the canyon wall to reach for my handgun. Shooting it would have drawn a lot of attention to my general area, but it was all that I had.

"Hear what?"

"Sounded like...you know, never mind. Let's go see what they brought back."

I sighed with relief and raised my hand back to the small extrusion that had kept me balanced on the wall. The guards crushed their cigarette butts into the ground with the heels of their boots and wandered towards the approaching truck. I shimmied my way down the remainder of the wall until I was near the six-feet mark, and too anxious to make a one-hundred-percent-safe dismount, I sprung off the canyon wall backwards. The landing was shaky, but it was on two feet. Good enough for me. I was running away from my entry point as quickly as I'd stuck it.

I stayed far away from the firelight, choosing to stay hidden in the shadows as I neared the truck. The mercenaries were braying with welcome back's and about time's. I was hiding behind a few dry shrubs close to the canyon wall, trying to see over the crowd. There had to be thirty of them at the bottom of the canyon, not counting the men coming out of the truck, and however many were still roaming the desert. There were no women among them that I could see.

Someone opened up the covered flatbed and began removing people from the dark prison, passing them forcefully on to the next mercenary. There were ten or so poached humans in that truck, all fearful looking men who'd been stripped of any weapons (and in a few cases, their clothes as well). The mercenaries passed the prisoners through the crowd, though I lost track of them as those monsters jostled among each other.

Eventually they began to dissipate, heading back to their tents and fires with the returned comrades. The truck was left unguarded, so I tiptoed over to look for anything that might be of use. The back had been completely emptied, of course. Prisoners couldn't have anything to overthrow their guards. The cabin was mostly devoid as well, though I did find a handgun silencer that I forced onto my own weapon.

While all of the mercenaries were huddling around the fires, I noticed that on the other side of the river, a few had stayed back. There were two of them, to be precise, standing against the canyon wall a good ten feet apart. A closer look revealed that they were in fact guarding the entrance to a cave. If I knew any better, that was where they were keeping everyone.

I could have done the stupid thing. I could have killed both guards with the silencer on my gun and freed everyone, but then what? I didn't know how many people were in there. Hell, I didn't even know if that's where everyone was. There were too many variables to simply jump into it.

I needed a diversion.

I returned to the shrubs I had previously been hiding behind, and fished through my backpack for my lighter.

I crouched down with my back to the other fires, and began frantically flicking my lighter underneath the dry limbs of those shrubs. I'm not sure if the fuel had leaked out, if it was a dud, or if I was just too nervous to get it to work, but the flame wouldn't hold. It would flicker out before I could hold it against the plants for a decent amount of time.

Before I could think of something else, a husky voice began to shout, loud enough for the sound to bounce off every rough edge of the canyon.

"Hey! Who is that?"

I didn't think. I just threw off my backpack, stuffed my handgun into my shirt (the co-op bra was good for something after all, and my shirt was baggy enough to conceal the weapon as well) and ran with my rifle.

They were coming after me. I could hear them screaming and shouting. I was surprised that they didn't start shooting at me. It only made me realize that I was going to be raped and eaten like all of the other women they ran into.

I worried that the end was near, and became pretty hard on myself for that fact. I wasn't going to make it to the west, and I hadn't even gotten a chance to save the others. Oz, Brown, Black and Nine. I was apologizing to them all then.

"Get back here you bitch!"

Unless...

Call me crazy for what I did. I'd been safe for most of the two thousand miles it took me to get there. I made safe choices and done everything I could to stay safe, but I'd never been one to lay down and die. Even if it looked like I was giving up, it was all part of something bigger. In that case, as I slowed down my running, I was doing anything but giving up. Letting them take me was a risk that could have cost me my life. I tossed my rifle aside and waited.

They got me.

First thing they did was club me with a gun in the back of my head. The blow sent me to my knees, and then they grabbed me.

"Where'd she come from?"

"I don't know, but she dropped her big gun back there."

"She's got another one in her backpack."

"Must think she's some kind of vigilante hero."

"Dibs."

"Fuck that! I hit her, she's mine first!"

"Shut up, guys! We're putting her with the others in the cave."

"Shouldn't we ask Boss?"

Fuck Boss. Fuck anyone named Boss, to be honest. I'd never met a Boss that I liked, and being half-conscious at that moment, I doubted that I'd like the next Boss I met.

Just put me in the goddamn cave, I thought.

"No, he'll pick one of us to roast if we don't at least show him what we found. Another filthy spy."

"Bitch."

One of them grabbed my ass. "Not bad."

"Fuck, get her to his tent and then fuck her once he's done, you idiot."

"Listen here..."

For bloodthirsty raping cannibals, those mercenaries had a lot of inner turmoil between them. The sense of kinship and brotherhood was gone when a fresh piece of meat came along. They were wild animals with brains the size of peanuts. Dinosaurs, even, the way they thought.

I was still recovering from the hit to the head, when they threw me into one of the tents. I didn't get a good look at the outside, but it was fairly spacious inside, as well as being well-lit with some gas lamps.

There was one large cot, one desk, one unassuming chair, and one man inside. I got a quick look at him before the bottom of a boot came down on my back to hold me in place. He was probably older, though his age was hard to guess. If he was an older man, he looked good for his age. If he was as old as I was, then he needed to stop eating people. He was thin, had no hair on any part of his body, but had bulging eyes that questioned every part of me on the ground in front of him.

"Who's this?" he asked.

A voice above me replied, "Found her trying to start a fire by one of the trucks."

"She had this, and these," another voice added. My backpack and guns were thrown onto the empty desktop. "There's enough ammo in that backpack to stop a small army."

The bald man mulled that over for a minute and then said, "It's been a while since they came to us."

"What do you want us to do with her?"

"Leave her here for now. I'll see what I can do and then have someone put her in the cave if she behaves. In the meantime, pick someone out and see how big you can get the fires. It's a perfect night for a pig roast." I felt like throwing up at that comment. I must have made some kind of noise, since the man snorted, looking down at me with my face pushed into the grainy ground. "Thank you, gentlemen."

The force keeping me on my stomach eventually subsided as the two men left the tent. I remained on the ground.

"It's very rare for people to come to us, but I suppose there's a first time for everything. Get up, will you?"

"No," I mumbled.

"Stand up, you whore. I don't have all night. I have to eat."

My arms shaking, and my knees beginning to quake, I pushed myself off of the ground. That ugly Boss just stared at me for a long time. I should have been concerned about what he was going to do to me, but he should have been just as concerned about what I was going to do to him.

"What do you want with me?" I asked.

"How did you find us?" he inquired, not being able to help himself from eyeing my hunting rifle on his desk. "And where the hell did you get that from?"

"I'm not sure if that's an important thing to know."

He reached for my rifle and immediately pointed it at me, at my face. "Where did you come from?"

"The east," I mumbled.

"And how did you find us?"

"A friendly stranger gave me directions when I threatened to snap his dick in half."

That ugly boss chuckled at the mention of one of my many talents. "You must have a good reason for wanting to find us so badly if that's how you get information."

"The world can't exist if both of us are alive."

"I agree." I did think he was going to shoot me at that moment, but a man is only as strong as his weakest part. He lowered my rifle, and took a step closer to me. "Have your weapons been underwater?"

"Yes, but they still work fine."

"I'll have to test them later then, after we conduct some final business."

"What would that be?"

"I need to see what you're hiding underneath those clothes."

"Bite me."

"Take your clothes off, or I'm going to see just how fine your guns are right now."

I began unzipping my shorts, and told him, "You and your men are a plague on the land. You won't get away with what you're doing for long."

"We'll see about that."

I let my shorts fall to the ground and then reached underneath my shirt, into my bra. "Yes, we'll see."

When I had my hand around the handle of my gun, I yanked it from the binds of my bra, shooting him between the eyes before he could even register what was happening. The silencer worked fairly well, as it turned out, making the shot sound just like a dull whistle. I probably didn't have much time until more men let curiosity get the best of them, but I still needed a plan before I went rushing into things. My life wasn't the only one at risk.

Pulling up my shorts, I threw on my backpack and my rifle as the smell of smoke began to waft into the tent. Judging by the shouting and hollering from outside, the men were getting ready to eat.

I did some quick rifling before I left, looking through the drawers of the desk. More knives; I put a few into my pockets in the case I'd have to whip them out later. Bullets; none for my guns. The last drawer I opened was significantly more deadly than the others, filled to the brim with shiny new grenades. Back then, I couldn't say I knew my way around one of those, but it seemed like one of the only ways to take out a lot of mercenaries in a small time frame.

I didn't go out through the front entrance of the tent, of course. I crawled underneath the rear wall, leaving that ugly Boss dead on the ground in my wake.

It seemed that most of the men outside had gathered around one large central fire. There were no straggling mercenaries running between the tents. They were all anticipating their dinner, except for the two guards at the cave. I hoped that it wasn't any of my men on that night's menu, and needed to make sure for myself before beginning the heist. As long as they were all distracted, I would be set.

I got as close to the crowd as I felt comfortable getting, and was able to see the men they had roasting over the fire on a spit.

One was already a blackened cadaver, nowhere near being identifiable.

The second was still alive and screaming as the flames lapped at his skin, blistering it with each yelp for assistance.

The final was Oz, still dressed in the remnants of his fatigues.

It took everything I had to keep from throwing every knife, grenade and bullet into the crowd of mercenaries, but giving myself up would seal the fate of the others I could still save.

Under the cloak of darkness, I was able to move undetected. The river wasn't very deep, and wasn't terribly strong either. I guessed that the dams that kept it healthy had quit doing their job a long time before.

The two guards were still on either side of the cave. The plan was to kill both with my handgun, even though the silencer would likely be obsolete with all of the hooting and hollering on the other side of the river. After they were dead, I wouldn't have long to get everyone out, and hoped that with ten grenades and the guards' guns we could hold off any resistance. It was a long shot, but I was convinced that it would work.

It's funny how out of hand you can let your mind get in a situation like that. Sometimes my imagination doesn't take reality into consideration.

I hit the first guard without hesitating from a good twenty feet away, one of my more impressive shots with that gun. The bullet entered his neck, and by the time his partner noticed what was happening, I was running and firing at him at the same time. He went down when the bullet went in through his ear.

If the clock hadn't been ticking before, it sure as hell was then.

I stepped into the cave, not exactly sure what to expect. A few yards in were about twenty men, cowering against the back wall of the structure. Twenty is an easy number to work with, I thought. I was expecting a lot more men packed into that cave, but no matter how big or small the group, getting out of the canyon would still be difficult, and fighting off the mercenaries would be even more of a challenge.

At that point, I wasn't as concerned about killing those monsters as I was about saving as many as I could.

"Where are you?" I called.

I could see the faint outline of four fingers reaching up from the back of the cave, pushing their way to the front.

Nine was alive. I had done a quick scan of the crowd and saw two men I was fairly sure were Brown and Black, though no one looked good there. Everyone was covered in dirt, their clothes tattered and torn, with no possessions other than a shrinking will to survive.

The first thing he said was, "You found us."

"There's no time right now," I said. "We don't have long." I handed him the grenades, all linked together, along with one sharp knife. "If we can get away while they're eating we'll be golden, but we may encounter hostile fire. There are at least two guns outside on the guards, and they might have a few smaller ones on them too."

"Goddamn grenades," someone in the crowd marvelled.

"Let's move, before it's too late."

As the men tiptoed their way out, Nine grabbed my arm to keep me from getting too far away. Without giving me the chance to stop him, and without saying anything, he kissed me. It was one of those kisses that shake your very core. I felt it in my bones, with every ounce of my being.

We all made it out of the cave without the mercenaries noticing. Black got one of the guards' guns, and the other one fell into the hands of a dishevelled man (he must have been pulled out of a hospital; he was still wearing scrubs). He wasn't someone I'd trust with a gun at first glance, but there wasn't time to worry. We began moving along the canyon wall in single file under the shroud of darkness.

Nine whispered, "Are we just going to leave them?"

"I'm not sure if we can take them on and win," I replied.

"I know they have one truck that's got a machine gun mounted on top."

"Are you insane? We need to get out of here before they realize what's going on."

"Did you see who they're about to eat on your way over?"

"Yes."

"Then you know how serious I am about this."

"I don't want any of us to get hurt."

"I don't want these guys to hurt anyone else."

I let him do what he wanted because I knew he'd do it anyways. That night I saw something in Nine's eyes that I'd never seen before. It was some kind of strange determination, though I couldn't really blame him for it. Their patrol of a dozen men was down to three. Nine had lost nearly everything, and was set on getting it back.

"Okay," I said. "We can get the others out and double back."

"You can't come."

"You're not going anywhere near them without me. This time I might not be able to come back for you."

He didn't say anything else to me until we found our way to the trucks. By then, most of the men had realized they were safe enough and began running out of the canyon. I wasn't going to feel safe until I was out of the canyon completely, and as long I was planning to stick with the patrol, that wasn't going to happen.

Brown got to hotwiring the truck with a mounted gun while Black climbed up to the top and Nine claimed the driver's seat with the grenades. Before he could disagree, I got into the shotgun position and locked my door shut.

"I don't want you to get hurt," he said to me, Brown nearly beneath him touching wire ends.

"The feeling's mutual," I said. "I came this far to save you guys, and I'm not going to turn back now just because you tell me to."

"She's got a good point," Brown added. "She's one of us now."

"I'm armed and ready to go. As soon as the engine starts, you better be ready to drive."

With every finger but one on the steering wheel, Nine nodded. "And if we don't make it out..."

"We're going to. End of discussion."

The engine revved to a start, and we were moving. Brown shut Nine's door and rode holding onto the side-view mirror, toting the automatic weapon that he'd pinched off the guard's body. I rolled down my window and let the barrel of my own rifle snake out.

Of all the things I did in the desert, driving into a crowd of cannibal mercenaries had to be the craziest.

Nine navigated the truck across the river and sped it towards the mercenary camp. Only a few seconds passed before Black began firing from the roof. I'd never been that close to a firing machine gun before; it sounded like hail the size of golf balls was pounding against the truck. The mercenaries quickly began returning fire with their weapons. Nine tried to get me to duck, but I was firing out of my window into the crowd.

For Oz, I told myself. For Oz, Aesoph, Doc, Red, Green, Corkboard, and all the others these men have killed.

It was hard to see, but I just kept firing.

I looked over my shoulder once at Nine, to notice that Brown was no longer hanging on to the mirror next to him.

Enemy fire continued as we got closer, even after the hail of gunfire coming from the roof came to a sudden halt. We were headed right for their largest fire, where the remains of Oz and the other men still hung.

"Get out of the truck before we get there," Nine said to me coldly as he drove.

"I'm not getting out."

"If you don't get out, then neither of us will make it out."

"I'm not going to let you die."

He looked right at me, right into my eyes, and said, "I have to do this. This is what I trained for, and I don't want to take you with me."

"Did you ever think you'd get out of this canyon alive?"

"You need to get out sooner rather than later."

I noticed his free hand, the hand with four fingers, resting on top of the grenades on his lap. "Thank you," I told him, "for saving my life, for everything."

"You're an amazing woman," were the last words he ever said to me.

Truck still moving, I rolled out onto the sandy ground of the canyon floor. It wasn't the best landing, but it was a landing. Realizing I was too close to the mercenary camp to survive an explosion, I began running back up the river. I stopped less than a minute later when all hope of leaving with one live patrolman died. The explosion was a loud one, shaking the ground and nearly throwing me from my feet. I was far enough away to avoid shrapnel, but close enough to watch the fire consume everything.

Everyone.

The last time I cried was long ago. That night, or depending on what time it really was, in the wee hours of the morning, I cried watching that fire. It wasn't any hysterical sobs or something like that. A tear or two streaked down my face, immediately warming from the heat of the blaze.

You can make an argument that I felt something for Nine, more than I felt for any man before that night. But now he's dead. Dead and gone.

When I saw some movement coming from near the fire, I didn't hesitate to investigate. I knew there was no chance Nine was one of the mangled survivors. They were all mercenaries, horribly burned by the fire but still writhing in the mess that was once their camp. The first I found was on the outskirts of the crowd, though close enough to be singed to a crisp. He was groaning, and I put him out of his misery with the hunting rifle.

The next was pinned to the ground underneath one of the doors from the truck. He died at my hand too.

I think the third man was dead when I found him, but I shot him anyways.

I didn't find the fourth living man. He found me. I was close to the edge of the fire when I heard his footsteps crunching all of the wreckage and remains on the ground. I looked over my shoulder to see him walking towards me, a gun with a very long barrel in hand. He must have been far away enough to avoid the explosion.

I went to shoot him before he could shoot me with that excuse of a gun, but it seemed that I was out of ammunition, the remainder of it being in the bottom of my backpack.

I froze.

A gunshot from the heavens saved my life, while ending the last of the mercenaries. The man with the gun toppled to the ground, and I could have sworn I saw something at the top of the canyon reflecting the firelight.

It was time to go. I kept moving forward, around the fire, but no other living soul except for me at the bottom of the canyon.

The last thing I did was come across a knife sticking out of the ashes. It could have been his knife as much as it could have been someone else's, but I still emptied the remaining mercenary blades from my pockets to bring that one along with me.

A Lonely Girl's Guide to the Apocalypse

**The Same Old Song: A Lorelai Adventure**

I followed the river for a long time, not finding much to work with as the sun began to rise over the canyon walls, which gradually gentled as I kept moving. I didn't know what direction I was going, nor did I care. I hadn't planned on leaving that horrible place by myself, with my head hung and guns slung, but there I was, on my own again.

I had the knife, tied around my thigh with a piece of string.

The river eventually emptied into a nearly dried-up reservoir, nothing terribly spectacular, it just felt a lot better not to be confined by the canyon walls. We couldn't argue that all of the mercenaries were dead and gone (though I never ran into another convoy, there had to be one or two out there), I felt a lot more comfortable stripping down and bathing in the cool water without bringing a gun along.

With the extra time to myself, I scrubbed all of the stains out of my clothes. All of the blood, all of the sweat, and every last tear.

I took as much water from the reservoir as I could in my glass bottles, and once again, moved on.

It was a few more days before I came to the first town, and I was relieved. It's easy to get tired of the desert. Dust. Rock formations. It all becomes the same thing in a short amount of time. I explored the town briefly, finding a few dozen bodies from the beginning of the war. I wouldn't be surprised if they numbered in the hundreds behind every other corner.

They were tourists, I deduced by their broken cameras and flowery shirts. Canyon country always drew large crowds, but any sign of civilization was good in my books. I needed some food before I moved on.

I wasn't alone in that ghost town. I found my favourite former hitman sitting on a bench outside of a grocery store, sharing his seat with a rather nice sniper rifle and sharing the view with piles of skeletons in the streets. With a cigar between his lips, he didn't seem too surprised to see me wander over.

I can't say I was too thrilled to see him either. "I found the canyon, but what I wanted to do there didn't go according to plan."

He nodded. "Does it ever?" he asked rhetorically, keeping the cigar in his mouth with his teeth.

"Is this what you do when you're not following a patrol of soldiers? Smoking in a mass graveyard?"

He removed the cigar and said, "When I'm not following a patrol of soldiers to their deaths, I'm following the chick they brought along to a canyon of cannibals."

My eyes fell onto his sniper rifle. "I'm not sure if I should thank you for saving my life down there or be worried that I've got a hitman following me around."

"Just because the world has ended doesn't mean I need to stop doing my job. It entertains me, or in a less psychopathic sense, keeps me busy. And you're welcome. I owed you for not breaking my dick."

"Do you plan on following me forever?"

"No, that's why I'm letting you see me now."

"Letting me?"

He shrugged, and then said, "Just as you've got to move on from what happened, I have to move on to the next chapter of my story."

"I'm not sure that you can compare those things."

"You seem to be going west. You don't have too far to go until you hit the ocean, but I've been out there before." He shook his head as he said, with some distaste, "Don't like it much." A puff of the cigar. "I think the wind is going to bring me north. Nuclear winter's almost over up there."

"What's the problem with the west?"

"You think this is bad?" With his free hand he gestured to all of the bodies around us. Hardly people, but still remains. "They're piled up to your knees out there. Nothing but death. I'm getting tired of death, aren't you?"

"The whole west is like that?"

"I'm getting the feeling that you don't believe me."

"I don't believe anything until I see it."

"Go there yourself and see it then. Head west, young lady, and start the next chapter of your life as I start mine."

"What makes you think that you can write the last words of my book?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Your last words were written when you dove out of that truck at the bottom of the canyon. I think that's why you look so down in the dumps right now. Your sweetheart must have been taken by those psychopaths."

"Haven't you ever cared for someone in your life?"

"A long time ago, before all of the bombs fell and the gas came through, I had myself an old lady. I met her on the job. She was in the same line of work, and I was hired to finally track her down."

"And then you fell for her?" I guessed, crossing my arms in front of my chest.

"She died shortly after our son was born."

"I'm sorry."

"It happened a long time ago. Something I've learned is that bad things become a lot less bad as time passes."

"And what happened to your son?"

"I wish I knew."

Eager to change the subject, I offered, "Thank you again, for what you did back there. Maybe the two of us aren't as different as I thought when I was threatening to break your cock."

"I have to agree with you," the hitman nodded between a few more puffs of the cigar. "We're actually very close to being the same. I didn't think anyone was as crazy as me, thinking they could fuck with those crazy cannibals."

"You picked a fairly good time to come in," I added.

"You're no good to me dead."

He still wanted to get into my pants, there was no point in either of us denying that. I raised my eyebrow, and looked west. "I'm tired of death too, you know. I'm tired of bodies and I'm tired of blood and I'm tired of all of this."

"You could join me up north."

"No. I do have to see it to believe it."

**A Motel in Limbo: The Hitman's Tale**

It wasn't as bad back then. There were a few pockets of disease and some flooding along the coast, but the tar pits hadn't gone south yet, and the central plains didn't glow with plutonium under the stars. I travelled as much as I could in a jeep that had lost its top long ago, and went wherever my line of work took me. I was freelance, mostly, not tied down to a mob boss or an international gangster. Those kind of people still hired me to take out their enemies, but I didn't like to stick in those circles for long for good reasons.

Someone was paying good money to blow the lid off a motel in the desert where all the bad guys congregated, mostly from one crime family, but there was also a prostitution ring leader and a few lesser gangsters spending the night there. My jeep was loaded up with C-4 to do the job, which worried me, but the payout was what got me through it.

Halfway there, I got a call.

"Yeah?"

An old man cleared his throat. "I'm in need of your services, sir."

"I'm on a job right now, so it'll be some time until my schedule opens up." I still had a week until D-Day, but I wasn't in the mood to be driving into any big cities with that much C-4 in my trunk.

"I can meet you somewhere. This is urgent. They told me you were the best at finding people."

"Finding and what I do are two different things."

"It's my daughter. She's in trouble."

I sighed. "You'll have to come to me to discuss this."

He flew out that night in order to meet me in the morning. He rented a car at the airport and drove into the middle of nowhere to meet me at a grimy diner. I parked near the window and kept a tarp over the trunk, and kept my sunglasses on so no one would see me keep looking at it, and ordered a whole pot of coffee.

I knew who he was when he came in. He had no hair on his face or head, but his skin sagged with age. He sat down in my booth and slid a photograph across the table to me. The girl in the picture was in her early twenties, posing in the forest with a pair of skis in one hand and a rifle in the other.

"She was a biathlete," he told me. "She's been gone for two years. She came home one morning, after being gone all night, and told me that she'd gotten a job with the government, training soldiers or something like that. She gave me a number to call, and I got her a few times, but for the past year it's been nothing. I don't know where she is and I don't know who she's with, but I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that she's in trouble."

"She could have run away."

He shook his head. "No, she'd never do that. She got herself into something she couldn't get out of, I'm sure. I'm an army man, you see. I'm no longer in the service, but something big is coming and this world isn't going to be the same forever. I want to save her while I can. I need you to find her and bring her home."

"What's coming?"

"Something that'll make you want to get out of the county while you can, after you find my daughter."

"What's her name?"

"Kylie Gail."

"Say I do find her, what makes you so sure she'll come with me to bring her back to you?"

"Take the picture."

"I've done this before. She'll think I stole it."

"Then tell her Stonewall sent you. She'll know what that means."

"I'll do my best, but if she doesn't want to be found, I can't make any promises."

"I just need to know that she's alive. If she's in trouble and you can't get her out, I understand, but time isn't something we all have anymore. Do you watch the news?"

"Sometimes."

"Things are changing in the world now. The army can't hold the rebels back. Soon there may not be a world left."

I was sitting in the jeep at a truck stop, looking at the picture of Kylie Gail with her gun and her skis, when I called Morty.

"I thought you were on a big job," he said when he picked up. I could hear the hum of a drill in the background.

"I still am, but I'm gonna need your help with something else. I got a guy looking for his daughter."

"I thought you didn't look for missing people anymore."

"I don't, but he's a vet, and I've got a funny feeling about this."

"Well, I'll see what I can do." Though I worked alone, I still couldn't do everything by myself, and Morty was the best at just that. Everything else. "What's her name?"

"Kylie Gail Jackson. She told her dad that she was leaving to work for the government."

There were some keys clicking on the other end of the line. "Ah, a northern girl. It looks like she hasn't been very active for the past two years, but there's a driver's license for Beulah Farrow that is a match to her face, and it's been issued recently. Actually, there's another one that matches her face too. You should see this. Different names, and she's styled a little differently in each one, but my computer says it's her."

"How could she have more than one license in the system?"

"Usually you need someone on the inside, but all the fake licenses are from states out where you are. She's been in the desert these last two years."

"You'd think I'd have run into her out here."

"You might soon. Give me a day and I should get a few more concrete details, but this chick is giving me a funny feeling too."

I was a few days out from the motel, taking my time on backroads to avoid speed traps and prying eyes, and the call from Morty came in when I was alone on a dusty street.

"You're never gonna believe this," he said.

"Try me."

"I might have done some illegal hacking to find out what's been going on, but I've got her. She's working for the government alright, and she's in the same line of work as you."

"No."

"Yes. I'm not sure how she got into it, but she's a government-employed sniper for hire. Better yet, you'll see her soon."

"No..."

"Unless her mission's changed, she's going after Hack." A mobster, and one who was slated to die at the motel when a hundred pounds of plastic explosives went off.

"This certainly makes things interesting."

I tried to get there before she did, so I could unload my cargo and avoid too much suspicion. I had to lug everything up the second floor, and it took two trips.

Being in the same line of work was one thing, but working for the government that her dad feared would destroy everything was another. There was a lot to consider. Was she in too deep? Would she want to leave? Was I going to be another name on her list?

I didn't like getting involved with the government or army. If you didn't fall into line with them, you'd end up on a jail island or buried somewhere in an unmarked grave.

I bided my time by smoking and wiring the detonator in my room until she arrived. I also kept tabs on the other targets around the hotel, watching them shuffle from one room to another.

Kylie Gail Jackson arrived the next afternoon in a battered pickup truck. I watched her pull up from the window in the back of my room. The motel was one big square beside its parking lot, with a pool smack dab in the middle.

She didn't look much like the picture I had, but I knew it was her. She'd dyed her hair darker since leaving the north, and was more lean and muscular now. I couldn't imagine there were many places to ski in the desert, but she'd probably done enough running to stay in shape.

She was also toting a few bags, and smart enough to make it look like a sniper rifle wasn't inside them. I could picture her on the roof putting one together.

She got a room two doors down from me.

My strategy was simple. Let her finish her job, finish mine once she was out of the blast radius, and then follow her to her first rest stop. The first rule in the assassin book was to always finish the job you were paid for, and let others do the same.

That night she took a smoke break on the balcony, looking down at a room I could only guess was Hack's. To get a better read on her, I went out of my room with only a cigar, and stopped next to her.

"Can you offer a light?" She gave me a quick up and down with a cigarette in her mouth, then tossed me a lighter. I gave it a quick glance before I used it, noting the designs on it that suggested she'd pinched it from her dad. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it," she exhaled, and I tossed back the lighter.

She doesn't give me a second thought until I ask her, "What brings you to the desert?" between puffs.

"Business."

"There's not much business around here."

"I know." She'd probably been trained to kill a man seven different ways before he hit the ground.

I took a new approach. "I'm just stopping through for a few days of rest. I'm on my way across the country."

"Road trip?" she almost sighed.

"Something like that." If you could call ferrying a hundred pounds of C-4 across four states a road trip.

"Let me guess, you're the one who drives that dirty jeep in the parking lot with the all-terrain tires."

"How did you know?"

"Road trip or not, you don't seem like someone who likes to stay on the map." She flicked the end of her cigarette towards the pool and turned towards the stairs. "See you around."

She went down to buy a can of pop, but was also keeping eyes on the parking lot through one of the hallways. I retired to my room to practice putting my gun together.

She spent the next day--D-Day--sitting next the pool, never going in. She smoked and read from a yellowed book, staying in the shade. I went out for a few smoke breaks in between wiring to keep an eye on her, but didn't waste too much time. The last thing I needed was something faulty blowing me up along with everyone else.

My room was finished by nightfall, and thankfully, Hack was still alive. I locked my room and waited in my jeep in the darkness, waiting for one gunshot before I could finish my job.

Just before midnight, I could see her shimmy out of the back window of her room with a rifle on her back. She was awkward trying to get onto the roof, so maybe she wasn't as on her toes as I'd expected. I still had the feeling that she was in too deep to save, but for Stonewall and a full payout, I would try.

I was eating some trail mix when her shot rang out, the detonator (an old cell phone) sitting on my lap. She must have gotten Hack when he came out of his room for some air, but it didn't matter. I scrambled to get myself together, not aware of whoever it was running up behind me and pressing a handgun to my temple.

"Shit," I huffed.

"You were watching." It was her. I tried tuning my head to get a better look, but she pressed her gun harder against me. "I saw you building some guns yesterday too. Who are you?"

"No one."

She put down her gun, but then vaulted over the back of the jeep to get in beside me. The sniper rifle was still on her back. "Drive, and then you'll tell me some more."

Hostage or not, I wasn't wasting time. I put the truck into gear and got out of there, leaving that damned motel and the C-4 behind me. She hadn't noticed the cell phone, but when we were on the road and getting farther away, and she was dialing on her own, I pressed the call button.

She jumped, and whipped her head around to see the motel go up in flames. I could see it in the rear view mirror, the only source of light in a darkening desert. I tossed the cell phone into the sand.

"You..." she started.

"You know, it's..."

"Don't say anything." She dialed again on her phone, and a few moments later, began conversing with someone on the other end. "It's me. I'm done, but you're going to find out soon that the whole place has gone up in flames, and I've got the guy who did it. I don't know who he is, but I'm prepared to bring him in. Yeah. Uh huh. Okay. I should be there by the morning. Bye."

"What I was trying to say is..."

"Don't say anything. Just keep driving and I'll tell you where to go."

"Where are we going?"

"Nowhere. Are you the one that tampered with my truck? Was it rigged to blow too?"

"What? No!"

"Hmm...it must have been one of them at the motel. I would have hotwired your jeep if you weren't there, but you were, and now it's two birds with one stone."

I laughed. "Classic government crony."

The gun was on my head again. "What did you say?"

"You're not going to shoot me when I'm driving this fast. We'll both die that way, and I know that your dad wants to see you alive again."

"You better watch what you say..."

"What I was trying to say earlier is that usually I'm the one finding people who don't want to be found, not the other way around. This is going to be a lot easier now that you're in my jeep."

She didn't say anything, but still held her gun to me.

"I'm not sure how you got yourself into this mess, but he's worried about you. When you stopped taking his calls, he knew something was up, and eventually reached out to me. He doesn't know how deep you are into this, but he wants you to get out and go back to him. He said something bad is coming, and it has to do with the people you're working with. The government and the army are going to send us all to hell soon, and there's going to be no need for assassins after that, Kylie Gail."

"How do you know my name?"

"The government isn't the only group that knows how to use a computer."

"Why should I believe any of this? You could be some drug lord crony trying to bring me in for a revenge hit. You could be anyone!"

"In my bag in the back I have a picture from your biathlete days. Your dad gave it to me, but he said if you didn't believe me after that, to say he calls himself Stonewall."

The gun dropped.

"One of his friends used to call him that," she mumbled.

"I can take you to him. He'd like that a lot, and I wouldn't like being taken in by the government."

"I'm not sure if I love my dad more than I fear my employers."

"Didn't you hear me say that the people in charge around here are about to do something bad? Your dad told me that something big is coming, big enough to give us a reason to get out of the country."

"What exactly did he mean by something big?"

**A Lonely Girl's Guide to the New World: A Lorelai Adventure**

I was nearing the end of the great big nothing when the clouds began to grow in height and the sky began to darken. A distant rumble signaled the commencement of the storm, and then the rain began to fall from the heavens in droves. All I could do, in the dead center of a wide expanse of flat land, was raise my hands and let it drench me.

I didn't care about water damage to my guns anymore.

I'm not sure how long it took me to get to the west coast from the edge of the desert. It could have been a month, maybe two. Time was hard to keep track of when everything looked the same, but it didn't seem like very long before homes started appearing in greater numbers, and then towns came up. They were all graveyards, like expected, though the hitman had been right about the quantity of the dead. I knew all along that the west had been hit hard by the bombs and gas, and a few rumoured nuclear warheads, but I'd convinced myself that it wouldn't be the worst thing I'd ever seen.

It was, unfortunately. You think that once you've seen a few dead children, you've seen them all, but hundreds piled in the streets with their family members was only the tip of the iceberg. The piles got higher the farther west I went.

It's reasons like that which make me feel better about my own situation. If I had a baby, how would I have survived the bombs? If I survived, how would I have gotten so far with another life in my hands? My seventeen-year-old self, had been secretly crushed over the news that I could never conceive. It was times like that, that reminded me, everything happened for a reason.

Fate wasn't done with me yet.

Not in the least bit.

Eventually the desert got a little less dusty and a little grassier. I was still a way from the ocean, but I was officially in the west. Unfortunately, the body count was still very high.

Another thing the west had in significantly greater numbers was churches. They weren't in very great shape, don't get me wrong, but they were still standing nonetheless.

I found that most of the churches were full of more dead bodies. There were remnants of gas bombs outside of most of them, which explained a few more things about the army to me. Did the people hear the jets coming? Did they wonder whose side they were on?

Or did they know what their fate would be all along?

One I found was a little less occupied and had a big glass roof, like nothing I'd really seen before. I was surprised that the original structure was more or less standing, as though a steady growth of vines and shrubs were likely keeping it up.

For old time's sake, I went in, though I knew I wouldn't find another Beattie cowering underneath the pews.

The church exhaled when I pushed open the crusty front doors, a thin cloud of rancid dust wafting back at me. One of the few bodies I found in there was a skeletal man in the lobby, cradling his bible on the floor, still dressed in his Sunday best. The carpet was damp, and wet enough for a few sprouts of grass to begin growing. Nature was the quiet winner of the new world, slowly claiming back every square inch that we once thought was ours.

There were four people in the pews of the sanctuary. I guess that no one wanted to know when their deaths were coming. I never saw the planes. My last night on the east coast, I closed the blinds, turned up the radio as loud as it would go, and hoped that my lover's arms would keep me safe.

I flipped through the musty bible still resting on the front podium. There was no sign of a priest or minister anywhere in the sanctuary, and the thought that the captain must go down with his ship usually stood. The pages were damp like the rest of the church's surfaces. The glass ceiling had made the entire building one big sauna; even after just five minutes inside I was starting to break a sweat.

I closed the bible and left everything in the church as it had been when I came in.

When I first saw the tall buildings of the big cities on the horizon, I knew it wouldn't be long until I made it to the ocean. But then what would I do? Where would I go?

I wasn't alone out there. There was another person wandering through the far west, among the tangled highway bridges and crumbling high-rise condos, but I didn't find them. They found me.

In the city there were, of course, more dead bodies, but I was really able to see how hard the west was hit by looking at how destroyed everything else was. The roads were peppered with blast craters, and if a building hadn't been levelled already, it was leaning far enough over to avoid. The hitman was right. It was a terribly ominous place. I could hear the crash of the ocean waves and smell the salt in the air, but I was still far from it. When I thought I was getting close, more wreckage would appear before me.

I took a break in the middle of the day to sit in what used to be a park, on a nearly-rotting bench in front of a weathered statue. It had to be of someone famous, but I couldn't place him anywhere. Some shrapnel had ruined his face. The grass wasn't green anymore, about as dry as the desert, but the bushes had grown out of hand. I never had a big thing for palm trees. They used to grow them in my old city for the heck of it, since we never really got any kind of winter weather, but I always thought they were out of place. Palm trees belonged on deserted islands, not sandwiched between concrete monuments.

I thought I was going crazy at first when I heard the music. The only music I'd ever heard in the new world had been the rhythmic chanting of Brown and Green in the desert. It was soft at first, but as it got closer, I recognized it as the smooth jazz of a saxophone. I looked over my shoulder, but there was nothing. I looked all around the park from my cozy spot on the bench, but could not see the source.

I wasn't too worried about an ambush. You have to be pretty twisted to lull someone with jazz before surprising them with a machine gun.

When the source did show up, it came from behind me in the form of a shabby man, brandishing the somewhat-tarnished instrument. He definitely wasn't who I expected to run into in the west, but anyone was welcome to cross my path as long as their plan wasn't to rape, kill and eat me. It was easy to imagine him as a street musician when the city was a bustling metropolis. He had the tattered clothes, the overgrown beard, and even the dark sunglasses.

He knew I was there as he played and got closer, though I'll never know which of us had spotted the other first. My rifle was out, but that didn't stop him from playing the saxophone.

When he finished, I clapped my hands and he offered a grateful bow.

"Finally, an audience," he choked out with a husky voice. He sounded like a smoker to me; there was probably a pack or two in the pocket of his coat. "I've been waiting a while for this day."

"You and me both," I replied, shaking his hand. It was clear that neither of us meant any harm. At that point I was tired of killing people, and he probably didn't want to excite any girl who carried a gun.

He asked me the usual question: "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

My eyes were drawn to the west. The remains of some high-rises and other monuments to human design were in the way of the ocean, but it was there. "I came all the way from the other side of the country, convinced that making it to the ocean would be some kind of victory."

He seemed surprised by my answer. "All the way from...over there?" he asked, whispering the last two words.

"Yeah. Over there."

"You make it sound like it was easy."

"It wasn't. Believe me." My eyes moved to his instrument, secured around him with a dusty black piece of fabric. "Been playing that since everything ended?"

"Since before the music died." He saw that as an opening to play a few notes, caressing the keys of the saxophone with calloused fingers. I gave him a smile and a nod for the short selection. "Though it's no reason to stop."

"I hear that."

"Can I interest you in a walking tour of the city on your way to the ocean?"

I shrugged. "Why not?"

Oh, he was a natural at it. We left the park and my guide pointed out every pile of rubble that had some sort of history behind it. I had my suspicions that he'd been a homeless man when the bombs fell, because he knew every corner of that wrecked city like the back of his hand and pointed to everything with confidence shooting from his right index finger.

"The library was once something stunning," he explained. "You could get lost among the shelves, and then lost within one shelf of good books." The library was the victim of a rather big bomb, still in pieces among the concrete. A few pages were stuck under rocks. "Nice and warm on a chilly night too."

The jazz club he pointed out, an old favourite, was the brown and blue pieces of wood and painted cement underneath the old laundromat. One of the downsides of a basement club, I suppose. It had been crushed by washing machines. "We had a sign," he insisted, "and we were happy to have it."

"How did you survive all of this?" I asked about halfway through the walking tour. The scenery was beginning to remind me of my old city, from the dusty streets to the gentle breeze blowing past us as we moved.

"You could say I was lucky," he answered, both hands on his saxophone. "All of us that survived are in some way. The bombs were falling, people were screaming, blood ran through the streets, and I found myself in the middle of all of it. I eventually got caught underneath a concrete wall as it fell over." He mimicked the action with one hand, showing me how the wall came down. "There was enough space for me to make it, and stay safe from what was going on out here. When I came out, I was alone."

"And you've been here since?"

"Yes, ma'am. And I wouldn't have it any other way."

"Why not?"

"It takes a certain kind of person to survive in this world, but another entirely to thrive. You've just gotta live like the world never stopped existing."

"You're a smart man."

"Doesn't hurt to be one of those now."

The smell of salt was getting stronger. My heart began to beat a little faster. "Do you plan on staying here for a while?" I asked.

"As long as the city needs me, and she always needs someone."

The sound of the waves was getting louder.

He played the saxophone the rest of the way there. It was still something jazzy, but slowed down significantly from his earlier selections. It wove around every rough corner of the city and looped back around to the two of us, aliens in that ruined place. Surely, life cannot exist where there is so much death, but it still finds a way.

I first saw the bluish-grey swells between the skeleton of a condominium and what had once been some kind of seaside office building. It was just a piece of the entire puzzle, a sliver of the sun, but it was the first time I saw the ocean since leaving it behind twenty-five hundred miles ago.

I wasn't prepared to see that the beach had become the war's garbage pail. Before the bombs, there would have been young families, old couples, groups of teenagers and the like, all soaking up the sun with sand between their toes.

A fighter jet had come down from the sky on top of the lifeguard's stand, likely from the people's resistance following the first wave of the barrage. I checked for the pilot, but he'd ejected before it was too late.

Looking south I could see a beached navy boat, still mounted with its guns, and even one unexploded torpedo. North was a graveyard of smaller ships, probably civilian vessels from when the fighting took to the sea, but now there was no winner.

There was only me, a homeless saxophone player, and the ocean before us.

"Thank you for taking me here," I muttered.

"You gonna be fine on your own now?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yes, I am."

He nodded and began playing his instrument again, this time as he walked south down the beach, towards the navy ship. I watched him for a long time, until I couldn't see him and couldn't hear the music any longer.

I put my backpack down in the sand, and then my rifle. I kicked off my boots and peeled off my socks, and felt the sand between my toes for the first time in a very long time. Looking to the horizon, I took a few steps towards the edge of the beach, to the ocean.

Five years before that moment, I was a seventeen-year-old girl slowly losing my religion and still reeling from the fact that I would never be a mother. If you told me that I would walk across the country, toting guns for most of the way and killing to stay alive, I would have told you that you're crazy. I would have said that I'm not capable of murder. Even after war broke out, I never thought I would be one of the only survivors. I never thought that I would thrive.

But I am.

The water was cool that day.

"Now what?" I asked myself out loud.

What had it all been for? Getting out of the outland camp, cutting that rapist into pieces, helping Beattie, giving that girl a gun, drowning a psychopath, shooting my way out of a knife-fight with a ten-year-old, the mercenaries, the cannibals, and all of the fucks in between.

And Nine.

I thought he was going to be the first person I saw as a hallucination, but it turned out that the first would be Aesoph, knee-deep into the ocean, still in his fatigues, most of his face taken out by the bullet that took his life.

"What do you think is next?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I replied, still close to the shoreline with only my toes in the water. "I never really thought about where I would go after this. I don't think I ever thought I could do it."

"We all knew you could, and now look where you are."

I did look. I looked all around, up and down the beach, and then out to sea.

"We all knew you were destined for great things," he continued. "We knew that from the moment we saw you were armed."

"Where are all of you now?" I asked.

He turned his head and joined me in looking out to the horizon. "Somewhere over there, beyond all there is. We're all there, and we're all happy."

"I'm glad."

"We know that wherever the wind takes you, you will be okay. The nine of us will be with you every step you make, and every stride you take. We've done our best to protect you since we began travelling together, and we will continue to do so."

"Thank you."

He nodded back to the city and asked me, "Now that you've seen it for yourself, why don't you go back home?"

"Back east?"

"Too much disease down south, and the north isn't much better than this. You've done so much, I think you deserve to go home and relax."

"Do I even have a home left?"

"You'll find out."

I put my socks back on, and then my boots, and gathered up my belongings as he watched me. I turned back once before I left the beach, but instead of only Aesoph, there were eight men standing in the water behind him. I still believe it was all in my head, but it was what I needed to keep going, to keep living. They each gave me a nod, and Nine, with his scorched skin from the explosion, waved with four fingers, a smile on his face.

I left the death and destruction of the west behind.

It was a long way home, and I took my time doing it. I wasn't using a map, so I didn't end up anywhere I'd been before. My path twisted and looped and turned through new places and new mass graveyards. Back in the desert I found myself wandering far enough north to see the glow of green light on the horizon, lasting evidence of the nuclear warheads. After that, I tried to stay farther south.

There was no one living left in the world, it seemed. No matter how many homes I looked through and how many fires I started in the open at night, no one found me and I found no one.

It was a long time before the desert disappeared behind me, once and for all, and then I was somewhere I hadn't been in a longer time. The soggy towns and briny swamps still reminded me of hung girls swinging in the breeze and crazy men with their basements. I sifted through each place, looking for nothing in particular.

I found something, or someone, eight months after being told to go home.

**Armageddon It Off: A Lorelai Adventure**

He fell back onto the bench, took a deep breath, and then looked at me. "You tell quite the story, you know."

I chuckled. "I've had a lot of time to think, and more time to let my imagination run wild."

He looked around the empty town, and asked me, "So what do we do now? Where do we go from here?"

I reached into the back pocket of my pants, removing a shiny packet that glinted in the sunlight. "Well, I've got one story that isn't finished, and these come in packs of three."

About the Author

I'm Laura Konrad and I'm a 22 year old writer from Canada. I love science fiction and apocalyptic stories and my first book was published with The Dryden Experiment, a set of stories that were illustrated by Danielle Evert. When I'm not writing, I'm reading copious amounts of books in a search for inspiration. My favourite writers are Stephen King, John Fowles, Orson Scott Card and George R.R. Martin

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