Me (45f), my husband (41m), and kid (9f) adopted a dog last year. My daughter had been asking so we went to a shelter and found a great dog. This is the only pet that we have. She’s been with us for over a year now and we adore her. Three days ago, my husband randomly came home with a stray dog. My kid and I were in the back of our property walking our leashed dog (we don’t have a fence) while my husband was near the back of our house with the stray. I asked him to get it out of there as our dog was barking and trying to lunge at the stray. (We were probably 30 yards away or so). I got our dog back into the house safely and asked him what he was doing. He said he found it walking in the middle of the road near our house and thought it looked like it needed help. The dog did look a bit skinny. He gave it some water and a bit of food. The dog hung around my yard and didn’t leave. The next day, the dog was still there. I asked my husband what his intentions were as my dog is very reactive to it and does not seem to want to positively interact with it. He had to walk away to get the stray dog from my yard every time I needed to take my dog to go to the bathroom because she was still freaking out every time she saw it in our yard. The stray dog had no collar or tags. He took the stray to the vet to see if it had a microchip. It does, but the owner never called back and we were unable to speak to them. My husband then borrowed a crate from his brother to lock the dog up. We were then keeping the dog in my carport in the crate so it wasn’t running loose. I told him we can’t keep the dog indefinitely. He said that he wanted to find someone to take it or wait for the owner to respond. This morning, I took my dog out for her morning potty break while my husband took our daughter to school. The stray came running up to us (apparently it busted out) causing my dog to go ballistic. She pulled me off of my feet lunging at the dog. I’m laying on the ground trying desperately to hold on to the leash and pull her away. It took several minutes but I managed to get her back in the house. The other dog was still loose outside. My husband came home and I told him what happened. I told him the stray had to go. If he can’t contain it outside, it can’t stay while he finds it a home. He told me that I was overreacting. I told him he wasn’t there and didn’t see how bad it was. He refused to take it somewhere, so I called animal control to come pick the stray up. Now he is mad at me. AITA?

Have had issues with tooth pain from the area of 2 molars for the last week, 1 crowned and one with a filling. Dentist tried antibiotics for the crowned tooth at 1st due to the x-ray showing a 'gap' between the tooth and the crown. This had no effect so the dentist tried beginning a root treatment of the other molar, this also had no effect on the pain so today the dentist removed the crowned tooth.
This has caused the pain to intensify dramatically, shooting from a 3 to a 7 out of 10, the procedure was only 5 hours ago but it still seems extreme compared to previous extractions I've had. I've also noticed the tooth which the dentist began the root treatment of is now extremely sensitive
My question is, what are the chances the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and how soon should it be left before being considered the problem?

From nothingness to sanctity
One day, in the folds of time, a person was born in the city of Marrakesh. They all had many brothers, and they were poor and their condition was miserable and extremely poor. This person, whose name was Ibrahim, worked the entire summer to buy school supplies for the next year, and if his shoes were torn, Or he sewed his clothes, but he had no shoes, so his clothes were worn out and old. Ibrahim’s father was in the service, so he was absent from the house, not being with his family much. Days passed and Ibrahim grew up, so his father gave him two choices: either to go to the Education Academy to study and graduate as a professor, or to enter the service. The military, and this choice was not recommended by the father, Ibrahim, because he did not want his son to go through a difficult experience like him, but Ibrahim had an opinion and was very stubborn, so he chose military service, so he went, and after a few years he graduated with the rank of colonel, and at that time his mother proposed to him, a girl from the neighborhood in which he They lived in it, and at that time he married a son, and after that she became pregnant and they had a son, a male, and they named him Muhammad, and from here our story will begin. Muhammad was an ordinary child, and he studied well and excelled in his studies. He always went to the mosque in order to memorize the Qur’an, and he was not an honest, trustworthy child with good morals. He respected people and never insulted anyone. He was a pure and pure child. As the years passed, Muhammad grew up and took the baccalaureate degree. And all these years, Muhammad was influenced by the Islamic conquests and the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, and the Companions, may God be pleased with them, especially Omar ibn Al-Khattab and Ali bin Abi Talib, so he devoted himself to reading the biography of the Prophet and watching videos whose topics were Islam. The important thing is that we go back and said that Muhammad reached the age of 18 and did not find in Morocco job opportunities or even a good position, so he decided to immigrate to America like other young people, so he was registered in the American lottery and after a few months had passed. Acceptance came to him, and he was very happy because he would find a decent living and a decent life. But in reality, there is something else. The important thing is that Muhammad collected all the documents he would need and applied for the visa. Before and after that, he collected his beliefs and booked the plane ticket. On the night of the flight, he was so excited that he did not sleep a lot, and in the morning. He went to the airport, his parents said goodbye to him, and he went to the plane, and after hours he found himself in America, and the reality was something else. There were many racists, and they always insulted him with the name Muhammad because he idolized the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, and they even called the Messenger lustful, and he married Aisha for 6 years. And God forbid, as they curse the honorable companions, may God be pleased with them. The important thing is that Muhammad completed his studies in America and obtained several certificates, so he submitted his application to enter the police because he had just obtained American citizenship. The important thing is that he submitted his application and they approved it, so he took the written and physical test and passed it, so he passed them, and now Muhammad has become An official policeman for the state of Chicago, Muhammad was sincere in his work and dedicated to it. He always did not accept bribery and punished criminals severely. Years passed and Muhammad rose in his position and became in the anti-gang department. He became the one carrying out executions and began killing and exterminating everyone. Killer gangs because the state gives him the decision to kill them because they incite fear in people, kill them, and rape their daughters. Muhammad killed, or rather executed, thousands of people, and he exterminated hundreds of gangs from existence, and all the criminals feared him and were afraid to even mention his important name. Hours passed, and one day of the daysOne day, Muhammad found a volume containing the story of the revolution and the Soviet Union. He read it all and was influenced by revolutionary thought. He began to imagine himself as the king of the world, and he was one of the most supportive of the Palestinian cause. They always sent thousands of dollars to Palestinian associations, and Muhammad was stable even though he was stable. In America, but he hates its corrupt regime and the racism towards foreigners that is abundant in it, so Muhammad decided to go to Russia in order to settle there and submitted his application to Russian intelligence and gave up his service in America, but he still possessed American citizenship. The important thing is that Muhammad worked in Russian intelligence and began every day. It is getting more and more popular and everyone loves it until one day there was a parade for President Vladimir Putin And then Muhammad met President Putin, and Putin liked Muhammad’s personality and the way he treated and respected him, so he decided to hire him as his bodyguard, and Muhammad was very happy with this news. The next day, he started working with the president, and he accompanied him wherever he went. The president was subjected to a series of assassination attempts, and Muhammad was always He was his savior. Meanwhile, Muhammad became a loyal friend of Putin and became Vice President. One day, Putin became seriously ill, and when he was on his deathbed, he said goodbye to Muhammad. Muhammad was very affected by his death, but he moved forward and now he has become the President of the Republic of Russia, so it began. His ambitions to reshape the Soviet Union, so he began to forcefully occupy the countries that were on his side. He did not kill innocent people or women. He implemented the commandments of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, to the letter. At this time, America began to threaten Muhammad that it would occupy Russia and destroy it. Muhammad was aware of this matter and was He planned in advance, as he intended to obey America and eliminate it, and the opportunity came to him. He restored the Soviet Union a hundred times stronger and stronger than it was during the era of Stalin and the other leaders. He only developed the nuclear arsenal and developed advanced weapons, and at this time Muhammad brought his father because He had experience in the army and gave him the position of first commander of the army staff, so his father trained the armyHis father was very strict, and he trained the soldiers very hard, and this would benefit them later. Muhammad also gave his grandfather the position of the chief president of all the central banks in the Soviet Union. He was the state’s accountant. All of the revenues of the Soviet Union passed through Muhammad’s grandfather. He also gave his great uncle the position of governor. He was in charge of all the car factories in the country, so he was in charge of all the car factories and all the companies. He was the president of them and the first factory because he had experience. He also entrusted him with the tasks of building power plants and manufacturing high-precision surveillance cameras. Muhammad gave his middle uncle the position of president of the iron and aluminum mining companies. All types of metal. He also gave his younger uncle the head of the taxi unions, as he is responsible for companies and all taxis and driving licenses for taxis, as well as their taxes. Muhammad also gave his younger uncle the position of head of the Ministry of Education and responsible for all schools in the country, as well as the head of the professors’ body. As he is responsible for the education and study sector, Muhammad also gave his great uncle the position of head of the body of lawyers, judges and courts in the state because his great uncle had more than 20 years of experience in the field. Muhammad also gave his other grandfather the position of head of arms manufacturing and export companies because his grandfather also had In military service, he had a lot of experience in questions, because this is all his specialty in politics Thanks to these positions that he gave to some members of his family, each of whom had great experience in the field in which he specialized, which helped the Soviet Union develop greatly and become stronger and stronger. At that time, Muhammad consulted his Soviet advisors and his father in his capacity as Supreme Commander. And the highest ranks of the army, intelligence, and security in the country. Ibrahim, Muhammad’s father, was the second most important authority in the country after his son Muhammad. The important thing is that after the long Shura period, Muhammad took the appropriate decision, so he bombed Washington, D.C., with a large nuclear bomb, which led to the erasure of Washington from the map and the destruction of the White House, so America rose. He responded with a nuclear missile, but Ibrahim, Muhammad's father, was able to dismantle it, repel it, and turn it towards America. From here, a fierce battle began between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. In the end, the Soviet Union was able to overthrow and eliminate America. It also occupied Canada and South America and brought it back. Alaska to Soviet ruleThe Soviet Union seized all the wealth of North and South America, and even Canada, and annexed them to the Soviet Union. Muhammad rebuilt America on the Soviet system, and even Canada and Brazil. The power of the Soviet Union increased 1,000 times, and the Soviet Union became the most powerful country in the world. Muhammad’s ambitions increased, so he occupied North Korea. He eliminated President Kim Jong-un and also occupied South Korea, Japan, and China. The thing that distinguished Muhammad was not killing innocent people. He only killed those participating in the war, and when he occupied the country, he rebuilt it and employed its citizens with a better salary than they had been, so everyone saluted him. There were also those who hated him, but they were very few. The important thing is that the Soviet Union became from the Republic of Russia to the most powerful country in history. Muhammad also liberated Palestine and gathered all the lions of the world and burned them, slaughtered them, and exterminated them from the globe. Only Muhammad eliminated all the Jews and it was Palestine. It was filled with ululations and joy at her liberation, and all the people were chanting the name Muhammad Muhammad and calling him Muhammad the Savior. Meanwhile, the grandfather of the first and second Muhammad died of old age, so Muhammad became very sad for them. At the funeral, someone poisoned Muhammad’s food with the most severe type of poison, and when he ate it, he choked and died. He almost died, but when he came out of the coma, the doctor told him while he was crying, “The poison has spread through your body, my lord Muhammad. You have only a few days left of your life.” Muhammad began to cry, but he was patient. Then Muhammad made his farewell conference in which he gave a speech and advised the people. When he dies, the rule will pass to his father, and when his father dies, it will pass to his great uncle, and this sequence will remainAfter a few days, Muhammad died and was buried in a grave of gold and diamonds. He became the most important figure in the world, so people began to visit him from all parts of the Soviet Union and even from the Arab countries. Millions of people visited him daily. As for him, when he died, power passed to him and he ruled with justice. Here the story of Muhammad has ended and has been folded between the pages of the past I forgot to mention that Muhammad was fighting with the soldiers, but he was covering his face with a mask so that the opponents would not recognize him and focus on him to kill him. If the president was killed, the Soviet Union would collapse. Muhammad was fighting with the soldiers and killing a lot of the enemy. He and his father were fighting, even though his father He was old, but he was stronger than Muhammad himself. Muhammad’s father was fighting 10 soldiers at the same time and killing them. Muhammad also occupied France, demolished the Eiffel Tower, and occupied almost all of Europe. Muhammad donated billions of dollars to Palestine until Palestine became very advanced and became a more ornate city. Muhammad also occupied Iran and exterminated the extremist Shiites. The one who poisoned Muhammad was a black man from Ethiopia, and the soldiers shot him dead when Muhammad died.Also, Muhammad could also have eliminated Morocco and wiped it from the map, but Muhammad did not want to do that out of respect for the Almoravids, Almohads, and Idrisids. When Muhammad died, power passed to his father and he began to rule the world. Muhammad’s tomb, built of pure gold and all precious stones, became a place of pilgrimage for millions of people every day, to the point that airports were filled with people and thousands of people were lining up in queues to obtain a visa. There were also thousands of people in the street chanting the name of Muhammad the Leader. The great and even they are queuing up to go to the Soviet capital, as there are people from far away places in the world such as Australia who go to the Soviet capital to visit the grave of Muhammad, and he was the most important and holiest person in the world after the Prophet Muhammad. And his companions, I am talking about his military clothes and weapons, all of them were sold for millions of dollars to Arab museums. As for the Soviet museums, they contain Muhammad’s necklace and his favorite weapon, and even the Soviet museum is crowded with people every day just to see its antiquities. Mohammed. Everyone loved him, so Muhammad became the second legend that history will not repeat. The first legend is the Prophet MuhammadWhen Muhammad died, they wrapped him in very advanced materials to prevent his body from decomposing. Muhammad's body did not decompose, but remained as it was. One of the materials used to preserve Muhammad's body was formalin, so Muhammad's body remained intact throughout the years.There are also some very wealthy Arabs who wanted to move Muhammad’s grave from the Soviet Union to Mecca in order to increase the state’s economy, but the entire world, billions of people, categorically refused, whether from within the Soviet Union or from outside it, and they wanted to buy his body for billions of dollars, but the entire world categorically refused. A wave of anger has erupted against Saudi Arabia because of this, because a person like Muhammad cannot be violated and his grave opened When Muhammad's father, Ibrahim, assumed power, and due to his old age, he was 61 years old. He found many difficulties because he found himself facing a great challenge in front of him, ruling millions of people. The Soviet Union, during Muhammad's era, was at the height of its power. He had sat on the throne of the most powerful country in history. Only the area of the Soviet Union was estimated at 400 million kilometers, so Ibrahim had to make a lot of effort, and in some of the Union’s colonies, some civil wars broke out between supporters of Muhammad and his supporters and among those who hated him, as most of those who hated Muhammad were from Central Europe, from the Greek islands and elsewhere. Next to it was the leader of the movement named Johann Gospiel. The latter sought revenge on Muhammad’s followers, and they all wanted to kill Ibrahim and destroy the Soviet Union. He was very hateful, and events will show you why the latter was so hateful of Muhammad and the main family. We will go back in time a little to when Muhammad committed mischief. America and occupied North and South Korea. His ambitions began in Europe, and he started with Italy, so he overthrew it, even though he respected Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, but Muhammad’s ambitions were to occupy all of Europe, so he occupied Italy, eliminated its leader, and demolished all the ancient Roman idols and gods, and when he headed to occupy the Vatican. Muhammad remembered the words of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, at the sign of the Hour, that in the Vatican there is the staff of Moses and the Thapoth of the Covenant, according to what the commentators and hadith scholars say, so Muhammad retreated.With his army, he went to occupy Greece and wanted to destroy Athens. He met the other army, headed by Johann Gaspiel's brother, called Nicholas Gaspiel. The two armies faced each other. Nicholas' army consisted of 45,000 tanks, a fleet of planes, and 980,000 soldiers, while Muhammad had 60,000 tanks. 2 million soldiers, and the two armies faced each other at the famous Evros River in Greece. The war began, and it was so bloody that the Evros River was filled to the brim with corpses and its color became red with blood. Muhammad was killing the enemies, and his father Ibrahim was also fighting, as he was 51 years old and he was very strong. Stronger than Muhammad himself. The important thing was that Muhammad was fighting. He tore off his mask. Nicholas the commander saw him and said: Here you are, Muhammad. I swear to Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena that you will not survive today. Medusa's curse will fall on you. Today I will hang your head before the gods. Muhammad did not answer him verbally, so his response was to arrest him, cut off his head, and hang his body on a treeThey continued fighting for several hours, and Muhammad was able to eliminate the entire army and occupied Greece at five in the morning. He prayed dawn in the city and began his entry with the soldiers. 200,000 soldiers had died in the war. Muhammad made a broadcast on television and consoled all the families and gave them a salary. For life and huge sums of money. The important thing is that Muhammad passed by the fields and saw some peasants. When they saw him, one of them called out and said, “Where is Muhammad?” Muhammad said to him, “Here is Muhammad.” The man came to him and hugged him and said, “O Muhammad, we have been saved from a tyrant who was torturing us and making our lives miserable.” Nicholas Gaspiel) and gave Muhammad some apples and lemons, so Muhammad bought 300 cows from him and the soldiers slaughtered them, so they ate until their stomachs were full and they slept that night while Muhammad was standing praying. This is just going back in time to explain to you why Johann Gaspial hates Muhammad.Johann Gaspel was telling his experience when he saw Muhammad and saying when Muhammad conquered all of Greece, and the people were chanting his name. I said that Muhammad was not killing ordinary citizens and women because he was carrying out the orders of the Prophet Muhammad and his law of war. Johan Gaspel was 12 years old. He said: “I saw large crowds chanting the name of Muhammad, then I was looking out the window, and suddenly I saw Muhammad passing in front of me and hundreds of thousands of people.” Behind him were hundreds of thousands of soldiers armed with the most modern weapons in the world. He said that Muhammad was strong, broad-chested, not more than 180 centimeters tall, and had a black beard, black hair, and brown eyes. Dark brown, and when Johann saw him, he felt an unusual tremor and said that Muhammad was a person that everyone feared
guys This is a fictional story written by me. Give me your opinion in the comments

Alright, comrades! Today's film is one of the most infamous of the 1980s: Red Dawn. Directed by John Melius, fresh off producing Uncommon Valor, it's a highly entertaining picture that also happens to be a blatant piece of propaganda, much like Missing in Action and Exterminator 2, which we watched this week. All these films glorify vigilantism as a patriotic cause: taking the law into your own hands to incinerate petty criminals, flying to a foreign country based on second-hand information and conspiracy theories, and in Red Dawn, celebrating the American militia as the last defense of truth, justice, and the American way!
Released on August 10, 1984, this was the first film released with the PG-13 rating. This new rating system attracted many teenagers to see the picture. According to many people who were teenagers in the eighties, this was a must-watch. The record-breaking 134 acts of violence certainly didn't hurt viewership. Neither did the cast. Boasting an all-star lineup with huge names like Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Darren Dalton, Jennifer Grey, Powers Boothe, Brad Savage, Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton, and many more familiar faces.
In the face of a sudden invasion by Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan forces, a group of American teenagers in a small Colorado town find themselves thrust into a fight for survival. Escaping the occupied town, they form a guerrilla resistance movement called the Wolverines, utilizing their resourcefulness and courage to fight back against the invaders.
The screenplay, written by the duo of Milius and Kevin Reynolds, features interesting characters with admirable tenacity and will to survive. However, the film itself falters. It raises numerous unanswered questions and leaves loose ends unaddressed. The focus leans heavily toward far-right propaganda rather than developing relatable characters or exploring themes of humanity. Steeped in 1980s ultra-conservative views, the film presents an alternate universe where the world descends into chaos due to liberal policies and nuclear disarmament. This world supposedly finds salvation only through nationalism and anti-socialist ideals.
John Milius has gone on record as saying that a lot of the script was cut down significantly. This was a combination of efforts from the studio and Milius himself to prioritize action sequences. This results in a lot on the viewer to understand the film's world and understand the whole setting. The teenagers learn how to become a cohesive fighting force in just a few months time. However, we don't see this training or even a mention of how they plan their attacks and ambushes. Leaving viewers to fill in these gaps.
The cast is a promising bunch of young actors, many on the cusp of breakout roles. Patrick Swayze delivers a decent performance as Jed, but Charlie Sheen's acting is underwhelming, particularly the scene where he cries to his father through a cage. Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey were underused. Thompson mentioned her character originally had a more significant role and a romantic arc with Colonel Andy Tanner, which would have been unusual given the age difference. However, the film prioritizes macho posturing and gun-fights, over character development. It's clearly a popcorn flick and not an Oscar contender.
Red Dawn's Cold War anxieties feel eerily relevant today. Multiple global conflicts rage on, and Russia's aggression under President Putin echoes the film's portrayal of a surprise invasion. The rise of right-wing extremism in the US and the ongoing debate over gun control in the face of mass shootings fuel the film's themes. In this climate, the movie's portrayal of a youth militia fighting back feels more provocative than ever. With logic and common sense seemingly under siege, the threat of civil unrest hangs heavy in the air.
That being said, it's important to remember when watching movies like this that it's all for entertainment. You can appreciate it simply as a movie. It's funny! Despite my strong liberal leanings and my aversion to conservatives and right-wing extremists, I also really love watching this movie. It's a cheesy delight, fun in a nostalgic cable-TV kind of way. Like many movies from this era, it's not perfect, but undeniably entertaining. Three stars.
Red Dawn
Release Date: August 10th, 1984
RottenPop Rating: ★★★
Director: John Milius Writer: John Milius and Kevin Reynolds Starring: Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Darren Dalton, Jennifer Grey, and Powers Boothe
Studios: United Artists and Valkyrie Films
Country: USA
Genres: Action Thriller

I am trying to find an obscure movie from I think the 90s. The only thing I remember is one specific scene: There's a natural disaster causing a huge forest fire and fire fighters are trying to get residents to evacuate but one guy insists on staying and trying to save his home. In the scene he's hosing down his house trying to get the firefighters to use their truck to help him. When he refuses to leave, the firefighter talking to him says something like "If you refuse to evacuate then I'm going to need you to fill out one of these" and he hands the guy a toe tag for the morgue.
Does anyone know what movie this is from?

Hi all, just joined this group as I thought maybe someone here can help! So we moved into a rented bungalow 5 months ago. My partner and I are in our 20s and our neighbours are all 60+ years old.
Ever since we moved in it’s been complaint after complaint.
The first complaint was about our modified cars. We don’t drive these cars often (maybe 2 times a month) but when we did the neighbour decided to record it and send it to the landlord stating we drive them at unsociable hours every night, rev them and “drift them around the village” which is of course not true in the slightest. Obviously us not wanting to cause any arguments spoke to this neighbour and said we would no longer drive the cars and they’ve been sat ever since. (Just an fyi, this man drives a very noise 1960s car)
The second complaint, I parked my car in the village parking and was harassed by a lady who followed me back to my house SHOUTING at me that I wasn’t allowed to park there because I’m not a true villager because I rent!! wtf.
The third complaint , the postman (who lives in the village) complained to not only his manager who contacted us but also our landlords. To say our dog was “ biting his hands and almost smashing the glass” when he delivers the mail. Which again - is not true as we have all evidence on video of this. So the complaint that came from the post man’s manager only said the dog was barking at him and that was it however his complaint to the landlords stated completely different.
In all honesty, we want to just leave. It’s obvious why the previous tenants moved out so quickly. The main question is how without massive fees to come with it? From what I can see , if we leave early we still need to pay rent for another 6 months even without living at the property. Is there any way around this if we have neighbours that are harassing us and we feel unsafe? What’s the best cause of action here. We just feel so upset over it all. We’ve tried our best to fit in but it just doesn’t seem to work out for us no matter what we do to resolve issues. I feel we’re on the edge of loosing our deposit because of all these complaints. Obviously we have nothing against the landlords because they’re not our issue. It’s our neighbours. !

This is going to be a long one so I suggest sitting down and eating a snack lol. This honestly starts back from kindergarten when I first met my boy best friend (21M) who I'll call Joey to keep things private. Joey and I grew up together, we've lived across the street from each other for the past 15 years. I would say our friendship didn't start to pick up till the 4th grade. It was me, Joey, My brother (18M), Tom ( 21M), Diana (21F), and Joey's little brother (18M). Diana was my best friend the girl I hung out with everyday and spent all my time with, shared secrets with. Tom was that type of person to joey. Joey and I have always had some form of mutual crush towards each other and I honestly I believe it started in the 4th grade. Growing up our parents were best friends and to this day still are. So Joey and I spent a lot of time together, we would watch movies, go to the park, go on trips together, go to the the local community street and just hang out we spent all of our time together. The first time I told Joey I liked him was in 5th grade, I've always known I loved him, He was my first love, my first kiss, the first boy I cried about, the first boy who made me jealous although we never dated, there was a lot of first between us. Joey use to be really mean to me, would always make fun of me, constantly chase me, and just in general say mean things and always shut me down whenever I confessed my love to him. Everyone knew I liked him, I would never stop talking about it. Our friends would have us kiss during truth or dare or have us confess our love for each other. Thats just how it was growing up. In middle school is when things started to change and I started to get involved with other guys. It was nothing more than the middle school relationship, just people I liked. I can't remember exactly what summer it was but I believe it was 8th grade summer going into 9th grade when things between really started to pick up. During that summer our family went on 2 week long camping trip and joey and I got really close and he confessed his love for me, but nothing came from it and when we got back from that trip we shared our first kiss together during a scary movie we were watching at my house. After that there was nothing. I started high school and we really drifted apart. I remained with Diana and some other close friend while Joey made new friends and kept his distance. It was like that all of high school. But a lot happened during that time. I dated my first boyfriend who i broke up with within a year and I dated my second boyfriend who I broke up with 3 years ago. My second boyfriend is honestly the root cause to things getting messy. I started dating my second boyfriend at the end of 10th grade, and that summer I went on a trip and Joey and his family and some of my cousins. That trip joey and I flirted a lot, spent all our time together and just got really close. But when it was over it was if nothing had ever happened and I went on to continue dating my boyfriend. Without getting into too much details about my ex lets just say he was a horrible person who physically and mentally abused and manipulated me and basically turned me into the person I am today. He ruined a lot for me and he tore apart my friend group. Joey, Diana, and Tom all saw how much my ex was hurting me and they tried multiple times to get me out of the relationship but It just never really happened and things got messy. Joey continued to distance himself from me and Tom started to fill joey's mind with horrible thoughts about me which honestly really turned joey against me. The summer of 2021 is when I was finally able to escape my ex but the way it panned out wasn't good. My friends first tried to force me and joey to date even if It was as rebound, they used our history as an excuse to get me out of the relationship and well that didn't work. And a month later I tried to kill myself, I ended up in the hospital with 11 stitches in my wrist and lots of therapy. I ended up going back to my ex a few days later. Thats when I saw joey and tom distancing themselves and honestly they said some hurtful things to me. My now boyfriend is the reason I was able to leave the relationship. 3 days after I broke up with my ex, my best friend Diana got with him and yeah thats another story for another time. But basically to keep it simple after that happened they all left me and I was just left alone in pain with my now boyfriend picking up the pieces. Everything went well since then. I grew up and I really matured and got my life in order. But last week something unexpected happened. Joey entered my life again. I was at the bar with my parents when he arrived with his parents, I would be lying if I said I wasn't already drunk, But I was way drunk. And I got wasted even more after joey arrived. But we talked for hours that night and I found myself confessing my love for him all over again. And he started confessing his love and basically he had to carry me home cause I was wasted. I waited 10 years for this boy to tell me he loved me and now I don't know what to do. He went on to apologize for all the things that happened and how he was never there for me and he basically was just sorry. I kept asking him why he never dated me or why he never took the chance when I gave him chance after chance. And he told me he was jealous and mad at me for all the times I went out with other guys and he thought that I didn't genuinely care for him. I basically told him I felt like you constantly played with my feelings. Now I am in a relationship. A very loving relationship fully committed one too. We live together already. But after hearing joey's words and the things I said when I was drunk I feel so conflicted and have no idea where to go from there. Joey told me he would wait for me as long as he is still in love with me. He told me he's been in love with me for that past 14 years and that there's never been anyone else for him. He's never dated anyone the closest he's ever came to was me. My boyfriend knows some of the story he knows basically all the childhood drama and everything that happened, and he knows Joey is back in my life as a friend. I don't know if the love I had always had for joey is the same or if i'm acting based off old emotions. I don't want to hurt anyone but I know someone is gonna get hurt. And for more reference tom joined the marines and isn't really in anyones life atm and diana is getting her veterinarian license. Joey just graduated from college and is joining the army in 3 months. I am just focused on my career and planning out my future with my boyfriend. What should I do. Joey and I have talked a lot about just rebuilding our friendship and getting to know each other again because the last we talked like this was 6 years ago so we definitely have grown and matured since. I love my boyfriend but I worry I still love joey.
TL;DR! - To sum everything up my first love confessed he's still in love with my and is willing to wait for me as long as he loves me. I confessed I still loved him when I was drunk. But I am planning out my future with my boyfriend.

I'm a 29 year old male and i will try to summarize the horrendous situation I find myself without leaving to many crucial details out. I was with my ex girlfriend for nearly 6 years. The red flags were present fromn the beggining but looking back I had no way to understand what they were at the time partly due to my young nievete and partly due to the fact that coming from a emotijallyabusive household I had normalized many of the more subtle behaviors and therefore they fell within a blindspot of my cognitive distortions at the time. From the very start she would begin punching herself in her own head if i ever became upset with her in any way or during any attempt to verbally work a problem out. I thought she was just a bit flippant and intense. Dare I say I almost found it attractive in a strange sense. She was and still to this day, stunningly beautiful and menacingly seductive and knows how she can have a significant effect on males especially without doing very much in the way of actions. Fast forward she unknown to me at the time discontinued her birth contorll pills while still assuring me she was taking them and ultimetly lied by telling me she had just to fund out she had become pregnant herself after missing a period. We were both in our mid to early 20s still more or less financially dependant on our parents and were living on public city streets in our tow behind rv with our 2 dogs. She was idealizing me and to be frank I remebr this period of time as the happiest iv been eever before and up untill now. This memory of "happiness" I think was the biggest reason it took me so long to finally start trying to advocate for my self respect instead of hanging my head and just ignoring the abuse so that I would get the sweet reward of psedo- intimacy with her a few times a week. Despite my fond memories looking back I see now what could only be described as patterns if coercive control that seriously escalated over the 5 years we were in a relationship with each other and included her beggining to cheat early on and the resulting systemic lies and relational damage from needing to formulate and bend the nature of reality around those lies. Her hot and cold treatment of me with any postive(hot) behavior usually at least in the last few years being exclusively sexual in nature and cold behavior usually manifesting as her stonewalling me and or simply disappearing for multiple days at a time sometimes. The day my son was born i accompanied her to the hospital and sat with her the entire time helped her push ans enouraged her with love. She treated me with indifference and disdain. Once our wonderful little boy came along this a became even worse. The sense that she was making it about him and her vs everyone else including me was strong. She became quite introverted secretive and "cliquey" with my newborn and at the same time seemed to loose all desire to be physically or emotionally intimate with me. (Of course i gave her plenty of time and space right after she gave birth amd was understanding that it might be a while before things were back to normal).it was almost like she had a new partner-our child. she refused to fully move in to the apartment my grandparents had spent a huge amint of money on to give us a chance at raising our soon in a healthy environment. She would start random and seemingly pointless arguments often escalating into her screaming mean things at me innfront of our 3 month old son like she ****ed me and then raging followed by quickly slamming the door and taking our infant son backto her mother's house where she would stonewall me for a few days then send me. A message that emotionally blackmailed me into taking full blame for the rupture and apologizing profusely. In addition she did not trust me with our son but had no reason not too and as a result gatekept him in an extremely overcintrolling and damaging(for him and for me) manner. to this day (he is 3.5] I have never spent the night alone with him and have had him 1 on 1 dad and son time signifigantly less than I should have and not for lack of trying on my part. Despite her overcontrolling coercive sabatoging and alienating actions my son and I formed a loving and beautiful bond that up untill I saw him last a few months ago has amazingly endured through the storm. The tradegy goes on and on but to wrap up ultimitely she purposefully betrayed me by starting a relationship with my good friend and had him suggest to me that he should move in so he became my roommate all the while lying to my roommate that I ht her and simultaneously having him report back to her on my whereabouts at any Givin time and the things I said about her when venting after a prticulringly humiliating attempt to see my son or similar interaction and also give her info about what I was doing during the day. He became quite controlling himself and severed to further isolate me from people that weren't trying to ruin my life. They started to play mindgames with me that ibsee now attempts to gage how much I knew or suspected about what was going on. Mind you my son who was around 2 at this point was privy to the whole thing it was only kept a secret from me and due to this my son was coached to not tell me about it although what was actually said I will never know. Eventually a mutual friend of my roommate and I reached out and told me he had seen my roommate "playing dad" with my girl and son at dollar tree that day. I remebrr that day I sat at a local park in my car sullen and confused having been led on via sms from her only to randomly stop responding and never managing to get any time with my son. This sort of thing had become a regular occurance She then began withholding my son all togethar simply not answering at all or lying about him being asleep ridiculously early in the afternoon etc etc. My own parents failed to suppprt me and are still failing to show any sort of care other than somehwat monitarily. In fact my mom and her were two peas in a pod and my mom activly participated in the emotional abuse partly becauee of being manipulated by her partly because my mother is emotionally abusive. If I had better support or access to court resources at the time I'm confident things would have gone much differently but I was so isolated and lonely and in a deep state of despair at this point and the only thing I still was enduring for was the brief and inconsistent times i got with my boy whom I love more than life itself. I managed to get a hold of her via phone at this point and said i was going to go to court and pursue custody since she seemed unwilling to value my valid role as father. Her mom and her immediately became overly nice and invited me over where they sat me down and offered to make a visitation schedule and kindly suggested I dident go to court. It wasent much but it was signifgantly more respect than I had been shown any instance prior so I gobbled up the manipulations and left feeling invigorated and hopeful. The schedule was never adhered too and within a few days it was back to me not even be able to get a hold of her let alone see my son. The final day I saw him before things blew up I went over to her house in the evening. My son wanted to play hot wheels so we began to line them up on the floor but my ex was hovering over us with a hostile air. I asked if we could have some space or if at least she could sit down and play with us and she just kept standing there glaring at me. This made me uncomfortable and my son noticed this by sayig daddy play with me! Upon hearing this she in a angry tone said "play with your effin kid isent that what you wanted to do soooooo badly" right in front of him. I asked not to be spoken to in front of him like that and she went and got her mom and started whispering abut me to her mom in the hallway while they watched my son and I. I got up and said I'm leaving this is innappropriate and she said "wow that checks out you harrass me to see your son and then you don't even wanna see him. how pathetic and typical" " you just want to stress me out dont you" you don't actually give 2 you know what's about him" right in front of my son again. I speechlessly went to leave and my son comes running after me begging me to wait. I'm on the verge of tears and i picked him up cherishing how warm he was and how lovingly he was clinging to me. I tentatively requested I be allowed to go for a walk with him around the block and her mom this time dismissively says ya go and shoos us out the door. I get down the driveway and my ex comes sprinting out of the house tears streaming down her face and a look of rage and starts hitting me while I'm holding our son. Amazingly he start4d pushing her away saying mommy stop mommy stop. She says you have 5 minutes or I'm calling the cops and goes back in. I walk him around the block and say "mommy's feeling sad right now but it doesn't mean that either one of us loves you any more or any less than we used to and it's absolutely not your fault." I go back inside and without saying anything I walk up to her and give her a hug wich my son joins in too. All the sudden she is happy again and trying to speak to me in a casual tone but I basically just leave without saying much else. After this a week of no contact with my son occurs which at the time was the longest we had gone apart I felt like I had no choice but to confront her and assert my rights AGAIN although looking back I feel terribley silly for thinking she was going to repsect me at that point. Keep in mind i ALWAYS was extrmely respectful of her space and never would just show up at her moms house even though our relationahip by many accounts was more than informal ennough to make an occasionaI drop in to say hi. In addition she on Many occasions had told me that I could just come by if she didn't Answer her phone or simular situation arose. I texted her I was coming by to say goodnight to my son and phrased it as a statement not a question or request. I was already on the way when I sent the message and so I arrived (unintentionally)before her being able to fully respond to it to see my romate come running out of the front door (this is when I first had proof ab about all the stuff I mentioned earlier about their secret relationship) and go hide in the bushes, her poke her head out the door and then shut and lock it and turn all the lights in the house out and close the blinds. I walk up to the door and knock to no avail and so I confront her about what i know and saw via sms. She directly denies all my proof and accusations and then after calling me crazy and a stalker blocks me on all channels of communication. I go back to my car and collapse in tears and ultimtly fall asleep. I wake up to see her quickly shoving a duffel bag and my son into her moms car and her and my roommate get in and she pulls quickly away. Upon passing me on her way to the main road she becomes aware that im still there in my car and she burns rubber and begins driving extremely fast and erratically. In a moment of panic I knew she was probably trying to go into hiding with my son to prevent me from evrr seeing him again and I fearing for the safety of my son and our relationship I regrettably felt compelled to follow. We got on the freeway where she initiatied speeds of 100 plus miles perhour weaving in between semi's and this sort of thing continued d for an hour in the interim I had called 911 and also she had pulled up too a gas station casually got out and pumped gas upon her getting back in the car I witnessed my roommate making derogatory and taunting sexual gestures referring to my ex and also what i can only describe as cuddling with my son in the back seat and became enraged and made some threatening motions with a large wooden shovel handle while standing next to her car that were directed at my betraying friend and I feel terrible for doing in front of my child but in the moment I was so desperate and upset by the psychological torture i had been through it clouded my normally good judgment. In the end the police couldn't locate us due to my 911 call continually being transfered fron highway patrol dispatch back to whatever city we were in at the times dispatch. Also ultimetly no physical harm or even any other attempts happend or anything to anyone of the people involved and eventually I gave up and drove back to my hometown. She immediately filed for a domestic violence restraining order and used a recording she took of me looking aggressive and threatening outside her car as proof im abusive and violent even though i have never been either of those things. Especially not violent. I may not have been the most mature or experienced or attentive partner for some of our relationship but anything I did was truly a far cry from the serious emotional anguish I have ben subjected to here and not abusive. I did not lie, cheat,manipulate, gaslight, trick, triangulate, turn family againts or ever feel superior or entitled to harm or use her in any way. I loved her and she did all those to me and now is trying to steal the most precious thing I have left in the world from me so she can emotionally scar him with her idea of what good parenting is which in truth is emotional abuse.. She moved my old roommate in to her moms house full time the very next day and from what I hear they both are abusing meth and who knows what else currently plus this guy is not somone that is safe around my son to that degree. He is not a healthy safe adult for such a young boy and in addition he is vindictive and dislikes me mostly because my ex told him I hit her and abused her which are absolutely complete lies. I'm facing a situation now where I have to sit by and watch my son turned agsints me and withheld from me and abused and eveyone treats me like im the abuser. I have tried to contact every dv organization in my local area and as soon as they hear what happend it's almost like I can Feel the switch flip and in the moment it's evident that all the abuse that I had recounted surviving through doesn't matter because I'm some "unhinged abusive guy that chases people down the freeway" eveyone I have reached out to locally has invalidated me and berrated me for "what I did" and successfully pathologized what I consider to be a huge mistake that I feel very regretful for loosing my composure but also a rather understandable emotional reaction to severe mistreatment and fear for my son. I'm beggining to feel so isolated riding the emotional Rollercoaster of self doubt and powerlessness that this abuse at the hands of my ex but dare I say worse yet the abuse by way of victim blame and invalidation from these people and organizations that exist to help dv survivors has caused me. which because I reacted I'm not worthy of being included as a survivor. Cn you offer any advice or support or suggestions? I'm terrified for my sons wellbeing currently and haven't been able to see him in going on 2.5 months now clear and to be clear the domestic violence restraining order is still temporary. I have the final hearing in August.i

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

The pain was the worst thing`Dominick Mason had ever known…and he knew what it felt like to die. It felt like his brain was in a blender, being chopped to liquid for a Jeffery Dahmer smoothie and though it seemed melodramatic, he imagined he could feel himself losing brain cells by the minute. The sun, Merrick told him, would not burn him, but it would decay him faster, so sleep or rest during the day. With the sick, throbbing agony in the center of his brain, however, that was impossible. He spent most of the day curled up on his side, hugging his knees, and moaning. He had flashbacks to dying in his apartment, and that made things even worse. The room became too small, too close, the air too stale. His heart, filled with the blood of last night’s meal, pounded in his chest, and he went from slightly chilly to hot and feverish as blood was forced through his circulatory system. It mixed with the embalming fluid and left him feeling full and constipated. He didn’t want to get up, but he also didn’t want to go on lying there. He was the definition of miserable.
Before long, the pain became too great and he got up to pace, pressing his hands to the sides of his head and gritting his teeth. Merrick, who slept very little if at all, sat in his chair and watched, trying his best to talk him through it. “It’ll be over soon,” Merrick said. “The pain receptors in your brain are the first to go. When they burn out, you won’t feel anything.”
“When?” Dom asked, his voice raising with the tide of pain.
“A couple days?”
“A couple days???”
“The pain will lessen gradually,” Merrick said, “this is the worst of it.”
Dom believed that this was, indeed, the worst of it, but he doubted it would lessen gradually. For the rest of the day, the pain got worse and worse until every light blinded him, every sound turned his stomach, and the smell of anything made his gorge rise. The cloying smell of the embalming fluid, the light but unmistakable odor of dead flesh, and the scent of stale blood sitting in decomposing stomachs made him want to vomit, but he was afraid to. He didn’t think he could handle the sight of blood rushing from his mouth and splattering the floor. He still possessed enough of his facilities, he believed, to go insane.
Pain has a way of darkening one’s mood, and by the time the sun began to set, Dom was in the most sour mood possible. Even Merrick’s calm, fatherly voice was beginning to get on his nerves. When he took the oath to him the day before (or was it the day before that?), he turned his faith and trust over to Merrick entirely. He was finally accepted, included, finally had the love and fellowship that, in the pit of his soul, he had always wanted. Merrick understood him, Merrick was kind to him.
But deep down, Dom realized that he didn’t fully trust him. He said that his brain didn’t rot because he was “lucky.” That sounded like some bullshit to Dom. Why wasn’t Joe a blithering idiot too? Was he lucky as well? Did lightning strike in the same place twice? In life, people had done nothing but hurt and lie to Dom. Why would death be any different? He thought back to the strange liquid that always seemed to leak from Merrick’s nose, and Joe’s. He thought it was embalming fluid, but it never leaked from his own nose, or from anyone else’s. He tried to tell himself that it was far too soon to judge, but once he began to doubt something, his mind raced away. He felt a twinge of guilt, as Merrick had done absolutely nothing to deserve his doubt, but goddamn it, his head was on fire and he wanted it to stop. Anything to make it stop.
Just after sundown, the music began as Club Vlad opened for the night. It throbbed in the center of Dom’s head and made him want to claw his eyes out. When it became too much for him, he slipped away and stumbled into the sultry summer night. He came out in the alley running behind the club, clutching his head and breathing through bared teeth. He staggered, bumped into a metal trash can, and roared at the top of his lungs, as if he could purge himself of the pain by screaming.. His voice echoed and came back to him, making the pain worse.
Merrick was lying. He knew it. People always lied to him. His brain was rotting and PEOPLE WERE LYING! Flashing with anger, he slammed his fist into the brick wall of a Chinese restaurant. He barely felt anything so he did it again and again until his hand was lumpy and shaking. He sat heavily on the ground and pressed his hands to his head. It felt like maggots were burrowing into his brain, and he was suddenly terrified that they really were. He needed to stop this awful pain, but how?
An idea came to him.
The funeral home.
Maybe there was something there.
He was on his feet and lumbering there before the thought had even finished reverberating through his mind. It was a long shot, but he was desperate. On the way there, he stuck to the shadows, staying out of the light cast by the streetlamps and avoiding people. When he passed them, he kept his head down. When he reached the funeral home, he went to the back door where he and Jessie had gone the other day. He tried it, and it opened.
Inside, he bounced off the walls like a pinball, knocking over an end table and tearing at the flesh of his head, pulling it away in long, gray strips. He panted like a wild animal, his body a raging tempest of emotions. It was reaching a crescendo, he thought, his brain was about to go supernova. The world dimmed, things got really echoy. The young man he’d picked the embalming fluid up from was there, looking scared.
Flashing, Dom grabbed him by his shirt and slammed him against the wall, knocking a painting of a flowery field to the carpet. Everything seemed to go in slow mo. “How does Merrick keep his brain from rotting?” Dom heard himself demanding from far away. “How does he keep the pain away?”
The man trembled. “I-I-”
Dom slammed him again. “Tell me or I’ll make you like me.”
“No!” the man wailed. He shook his head from side to side, his eyes wet with fear.
“How?”
“He-He uses a solution,” the man stammered. “Some kind of special thing. It preserves his brain. That’s all I know.”
An idea occurred to Dom.
Holding the man by the back of his neck, Dom dragged him into the embalming room and pushed him against the table. His head felt like it was swelling. Hot, screaming, getting ready to explode. He looked around, found the embalming machine, and grabbed the hose. There was a sharp tip on it so that you could jam it into a body. He held it in his hand, hesitating for just a moment before pressing it to his temple. The man watched in horror as Dom slowly shoved the tip into his head. It tore his flesh, broke through his skull, and sank into his brain. He felt no pain, only pressure, but cried out anyway. His eyes rolled up into his head and a shudder went through his body.
“Turn it on!” he yelled.
“That’s not what he -”
“TURN IT ON!”
Starting, the man turned the machine on. Cold embalming fluid squirted directly into Dom’s brain. Almost at once, the pain began to ebb away, replaced only by a fuzzy sense of numbness. His knees buckled and he sank to the floor, looking for all the world like an addict taking a hit of his favorite substance after a long and trying day. Fluid leaked from his nose, ears, and eyes and dripped down the back of his throat.
The man waited for a long time, then turned the machine off.
The pain was gone.
At least for now.
“Tell me again,” Dom said.
The man did. Merrick used a special preserving agent to keep his brain intact. Joe, the man suspected, got it as well. So Merrick had lied to him.
Dom felt betrayed.
And angry.
Leaving the man (Dom realized that he didn’t even know his name), he walked back to Club Vlad, his hands fisted in his pockets. All his life, he had been hurt, lied to, and ignored. All his life, people had done wrong to him. And all those years, he just took it.
He resolved not to be so accepting in death.
At last, he was going to stop being a sniveling little bitch and stand up for himself.
When he reached Club Vlad, he slammed through the back door and took the stairs two at a time. At the top, he called out Merrick’s name. The old man was sitting in his chair, being attended to by Jessie and Matt. He looked startled when Dom came in. “You lied to me,” Dom said, stalking over to his benefactor.
“What are you talking about?” Merrick asked, doing his best to sound innocent.
“You lied to me!” Dom screamed. He bent over and got so close to Merrick’s face that he could have kissed him. “You told me there was no way to save my brain, but that’s not true. You’re pumping your head full of shit and letting the rest of us rot.”
A dark shadow flickered across Merrick’s face. “Watch your tone when you talk to me,” he said. His voice was low, menacing.
“Fuck you,” Dom said. “I should k -”
Suddenly, Dom was being grabbed from behind and yanked back, an arm around his neck. He cried out in alarm as Joe swung him around and slammed him face first into the wall. He heard his nose crunch, felt his teeth shatter. Next, Joe wrestled him to the glitter-sprinkled floor and wedged his knee between his shoulder blades.
Merrick watched with a sneer of disgust, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. He wheeled himself over, Jessie holding his IV stand steady and following behind. “Listen, you son of a bitch,” Merrick said, “you’re lucky to be a part of this family.”
Cold fear filled the pit of Dom’s stomach, yet he wouldn’t back down, couldn’t back down. He had lived his entire life like a mouse in a burrow, he wasn’t about to live his entire death the same way.
“Fuck your family,” he said defiantly. “And fuck you.”
Merrick’s face darkened and he sat back in his chair. He looked at Jessie and nodded. She went away and came back a moment later holding something in her hand. Dom’s eyes widened when he saw what it was.
A wooden stake, one end honed to a razor point.
Why they had one of those lying around, Dom didn’t know; it’d be like Superman keeping a piece of kryptonite on the mantle over the fireplace. Merrick directed Max and Matt to hold Dom’s arms down/ Joe pivoted, kneeling on his head now so that Dom’s back was exposed. Dom’s heart slammed with terror and tremors raced through his body.
“Is this what you want, Dominick?” Merrick asked. “To die? To truly die?”
Dom swallowed hard. No, it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to live, to love, to have a family one day. He wanted a happy, normal life, the life TV and social media had been promising him since he was a little boy.
But all of that went out the window the night he died in his little apartment. There was no life anymore, just a grotesque parody of life. What was there for him other than death? Clinging desperately onto life for decades like Merrick? Stuffing himself full of embalming fluid and moth balls? Grinding for one more minute just so he could sit hooked up to a machine?
Dom spoke.
“What?” Merrick asked, not having heard.
Dom licked his lips. “Just fucking do it.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Expectation hung in the air. Finally, breaking the tension, Merrick nodded to Jessie. Kneeling down, she brought the stake up, and Dom closed his eyes.
This was it.
He braced himself for death.
Jessie brought the stake down just as a shot rang out, deafening in the small space. Her head whipped back, embalming fluid, skull fragments, and gray, sickly pieces of brain showering from the back of her head. She flopped back and landed on the floor with a sickening thud.
A woman cop, her black uniform in stark contrast to the burning white light, stood in the doorway to the hall, her gun drawn. Everyone did, indeed, freeze, more out of surprise than respect for authority. They all looked at her, their dead mouths agape, resembling children who’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Everyone on the ground!” she barked.
No one knew what to do. They hadn’t expected to be raided by the police so had not prepared. She jerked her gun and everyone instinctively flinched. “On the ground!” she repeated. To Max: “You too, bone boy.”
The first one to react was Joe. He sprang at her like a big, undead frog. She brought the gun around and fired, but he was already crashing into her. The shot went wild and struck the IV bag next to Merrick; he ducked and let out a sound of fear. The others rushed her, and Dom got quickly to his feet. Jessie lay on the floor, her mouth open in a silent scream and her bony fingers frantically examining the ragged hole in the center of her forehead. For a moment, he was frozen; everything was happening too fast. Then, when Merrick saw him and cried, “Stop him!, he came alive. Jessie tried to grab at his leg, but he kicked her hand away and stomped on it like it was a giant spider. On the other side of the room, Matt, Joe, and Max had forced the cop to the ground. Perhaps excited by all the action, perhaps just hungry, they began to tear her apart. She howled in pain, and the last thing Dom saw before he fled was her open, blood-filled mouth. Her eyes were filled with pain…with terror.
After that, Dom ran.
***
When the interloper was dead, Merrick directed Joe and Matt to dispose of the body. “Get rid of it,” he said wearily and rubbed his temples, “make sure it isn’t found.”
They rolled her into a carpet from the office, and the way her feet stuck out may have been comical under other circumstances.
Goddamn it, this was bad. Merrick’s entire philosophy rested on avoiding detection. He had done well in that regard. Whereas other vampires had attacked their villages and gotten themselves dug from the ground and staked, he had made it four decades. He never shat where he ate, and there is no bigger turd than killing a cop. They might dawdle on all the boys who’d gone missing - taken because their blood was stronger and more robust than the blood of girls - but they would not take a cop dying lightly at all.
Merrick owned various businesses around the country. He and the others would simply move on. Tomorrow night, they would disappear into the night. They had done it before and they would likely do it again. Once things were settled at their new base of operations, he would have Joe killed for all the trouble he’d caused.
And Dom?
Let him go.
The little rat wouldn’t last a month on his own.
“Jessie?”
Jessie sat against the wall, gazing into space.
“Jessi…start packing. We’re leaving tomorrow.”
She didn’t move, didn’t seem to hear. The shot had all but lobotomized her.
Damn it.
Joe backed the van up to the back door of Club Vlad, and then helped Matt carry the carpet-rolled body down the stairs. They loaded it in and closed the back doors. Together, they drove around looking for a place to dump it. Merrick wanted it to go unfound, but Joe doubted there was anywhere isolated enough in the city. On a whim, he drove to Washington Park, a vast expanse of green trees and shadows. There was a large pond there. It seemed the best option. They were leaving tomorrow anyway, so did it really matter?
Joe backed the van to a railing overlooking the dark water and put it in park. He and Matt got out, fetched the body, and carried it to the railing. They lifted and heaved it over. It splashed. Thus, they rid themselves of Vanessa Rodregiez.
***
Bruce sat anxiously up in his easy chair and waited for his cell to ring.
Parked in front of the TV by warm lamplight, a beer wedged between his legs, he’d been watching the 11’o’clock news when the phone rang. He picked it up and it was Vanessa. “Hey,” she said, “I think I found our body?”
“Which one?” Bruce asked and took a drink. “We have a lot of those these days.”
“Dominick Mason.”
Bruce sat forward in his chair. “Dead Dom? Where?”
“He just came out of a funeral home, ironically enough.”
“That sounds about right,” Bruce said. “Where are you now?”
“I’m following him east on Central.”
“Are you sure it’s him?” Bruce asked.
“I think so, but I’m not sure. I’ll call you back when I’m done.”
Bruce sat the phone aside and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
At some point, he fell asleep sitting up, his head lulled to one side and his mouth open. He snorted himself awake, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. He checked his phone and was perturbed to see that it was past 2am.
Vanessa hadn’t called.
He dialed her number and let the phone ring until it went to voicemail. Sighing, he ended the call, then waited a few minutes and called again.
Still no answer.
It was possible she had forgotten. Maybe the guy turned out to not be Dead Dom after all. She followed some random guy around, realized it, and that was that. Hell, she was probably too embarrassed to call and tell him about it.
Something told him that wasn’t right, however.
There was something else going on here.
Something…darker.
Just before 3am, his phone rang. He snatched it off the end table next to the chair and answered it. It was Burt, the night sargent. “Rodriguez is missing,” he said simply.
Bruce’s heart sank. “Missing?”
“Yeah, she hasn’t checked in for hours and she isn’t answering calls.”
“I’m on my way,”
Bruce tore through the house, pulling on his uniform, socks, and shoes in less time than it took a Daytona 500 pit crew to service a car. In ten minutes he was speeding down 787, the Albany skyline rising in the distance. As he hurried to the station, he thought back to his last conversation with Vanessa. She’d found Dom the Dead Man, the “corpse” who’d scared Ed Harris out of a 20 year career. Despite all their talk about vampires and the living dead, Bruce didn’t believe it, not really. Even so, he was sure that Dominick Mason had done something to Vanessa.
He checked in at the station before doing anything else. They had triangulated Vanessa’s last known location via cell towers. Cops were already out searching the streets for her. Bruce went out as well, intending to start from her last known position and work his way east on Central. The closest funeral home was Tebbutt and Frederick on Central. There was also Lasak & Gigliotti on North Allen Street. Bruce didn’t know which one Vanessa had seen Dom come out of, so he checked both.
Both were deserted at this hour.
Undeterred, Bruce drove up and down Central Ave. At one point, he noticed a shape in an alleyway that looked human. He hit the brakes, jumped out, and pointed his gun at it. “Freeze!”
An old wino stepped out of the darkness. “Alright, you got me,” he said, hands up. “I started COVID. It was an accident, I swear.”
Bruce sighed and put his gun away.
For two more hours, Bruce searched the streets of Albany for Vanessa. At 4am, he spotted a squad car abandoned in the rear parking lot of an abandoned gas station on lower Lark Street. He called it in and the desk sergeant confirmed that it was the one Vanessa had signed out that night.
Still there was no sign of Vanessa herself.
Just after dawn, as the city came alive and CDTA buses began lumbering up and down the streets, Bruce got a call on his cell. “A jogger found a body in Washington Park.”
Bruce was in his personal car. He had no bubble light, no siren. Even so, he sped through the streets like he did, blowing through red lights and stop signs with little care to himself or anyone else. When he got to Washington Park, he found an army cops by the pond, the scene cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. He slammed on the brakes, threw open the door, and jumped out without even turning off the engine.
The body was rolled up in a carpet and lying on the bank. Two beat cops unrolled it at Bruce’s direction. “We should wait for -” one of them started, but Bruce cut him off.
“Do it.”
They compiled, and at the carpet’s center, like a rotten cream filling, was the body of Vanessa Rodregiuez. Her head was tilted to one side, her eyes wide and staring. Her throat had been mangled and ripped away, her head nearly severed. Even in the black and red mess, Bruce could make out the teeth marks and puncture wounds. They may have looked like something else to anyone else who saw them, but he knew, in that moment, what they were dealing with.
A sharp pang of horror sliced through him, and his knees went weak.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the beat cops drew.
Bruce fell to, rather than knelt on, one knee. He bent over the body, a mixture of horror and grief welling his throat. He wanted to reach out, to comfort her in death, but he stayed his hand. Instead, he visually examined the body. She had bruises on her face, defensive wounds on her hands, and her gun was gone. Whoever had attacked her, she put up a fight.
Something glinted on her pants.
“What’s that?” one of the cops asked.
“I dunno,” the other replied, “but it’s all over the carpet.”
Indeed, there were glinty little specks all over it, winking like mocking eyes. Nice work, eh? We really fucked her up, didn’t we? Wink wink.
“It looks like…”
The other cop cut him off. “Glitter.”
Bruce flashed back to his visit to Club Vlad the other day.
There had been glitter everywhere.
Bruce stood up.
He had work to do.
***
Instead of going back to the station to start his shift, Bruce went to Lowes. There, he bought a mallet, a gas can, and a dozen sticks of wood. An employee in a blue vest used a machine to sharpen them to a wicked point and he took his purchases to the car. Next, he drove over to the Mobil station and filled the gas can. He was so hellbent on revenge that he sprang for premium, the good stuff. No expense shall be spared.
His final stop was at a Catholic church. He filled a canteen with holy water from the marble font by the door, then swiped a crucifix from the wall. He stopped by the station, went inside, and grabbed a black duffle bag with POLICE written across the front in yellow. He opened the gun cabinet in his office, took out a shotgun, and loaded it with shells. He grabbed a handful from the box and stuffed them into his pocket.
He was just finishing up when Bertha came in. “There you are,” she spat, “I’ve waited long enough for you to do something. I demand -”
Bruce shoved the duffle bag into her arms. “Make yourself useful.”
“What?” she demanded.
“We’re going to get your granddaughter,” Bruice lied. Kind of.
Bertha’s demeanor changed. “Good. It’s about time. I was starting to think you were a complete incompetent.”
Bruce didn’t answer. Outside, he plucked the bag out of Bertha’s hands and tossed it into the backseat. He slipped behind the wheel and Bertha sat in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Club Vlad,” Bruce said and started the engine.
“I want all of them arrested.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bruce said.
She barked orders the entire way there. Bruce was so deep in his thoughts that he barely heard her. The image of Vanessa’s ruined throat and terror-twisted face haunted him, and he felt a lump forming in his throat. Hot tears filled his eyes but he blinked them back and forced himself to calm down.
I’ll cry when I’m done killing, he thought.
A few minutes later, he pulled to the curb in front of Club Vlad. It was a hot and sunny day and the place seemed even more ominous because of it. The windows were black, the front cast in perpetual shadows by the old marquee from when it used to be a theater. The place was surely closed, but Bruce could hear music still playing from inside, some techno dance bullshit. “Alright,” he said, “let’s go.”
Getting out, he slung the dufflebag over his shoulder and carried the shotgun, the canteen full of holy water clasped to his belt. Bertha carried the gas can, looking confused. “Why do we need this?” she asked.
“We’re burning the place down.”
Bertha blinked in surprise…then an evil grin carved across her face. “That’ll show the bastards.”
Unlike last time, the door was locked. Bruce used the butt of the shotgun to break the glass, then reached inside and unlocked the door, being careful not to cut himself. This was the point of no return. What he had in mind would probably get him kicked off the force or even thrown in jail - and we all know how tough jail can be for a former barnaclehead. The memory of Vanessa’s contorted face pushed him on, however.
He’d suffer any consequences he needed to just so long as he got the sons of bitches who did this to her.
Inside, the club was cool and cave-like. Strobe lights flashed, on and off, black and white, dazzling Bruce’s eyes. The bartender was at his station, cleaning up from the night before. When he saw Bruce and Bertha come in, he started. Bruce pointed the shotgun at him. “Don’t fucking move,” he commanded.
The bartender hesitated, then reached for something under the bar.
The shotgun kicked in Bruce’s hands, and the bartender flew back, turning as he crashed into the barback. Bottles, glasses, and mugs crashed to the floor along with the bartender. Bruce racked the gun, and the shell flew out. He moved low and fast now, expecting to be swarmed by vampires, living thugs who worked for vampires, or vampire thugs who worked for themselves.
Though the shot had been like thunder, no one came.
Bruce had no idea where to go, but he imagined that vampires were naturally gravitate to the lowest part of the building. Was there a basement? Shit, he should have looked up the building plans at city hall. Damn, this is what happens when you go off half-cocked. He searched around a bit, opening doors and sweeping the rooms beyond with the shotgun. He found no basement, only stairs leading up. “Stay close,” he said to Bertha.
In the lead, Bruce crept up the stairs, the flashlight on the shotgun providing a cone of clean, white light. At the top of the stairs, he went right, and came to an office and a store room. Backtracking, and bumping into a bungling Bertha, he went into the next room. It was large and open with a vaulted ceiling, almost like a ballroom. Here the same strobe lights throbbed on and off, making him dizzy. Was this to dazzle prospective vampire hunters?
Either way, this was the place. Bodies lay strewn across the floor, some curled up on their sides and others in the classic vampire pose: Flat on their backs with their hands laced over their chests. In the center, like the sun to the planets, Merrick Garvis lay slumped back in his wheelchair, his neck exposed for any potential assassin to come and cut. Not that it would kill him. At least Bruce didn’t think it would.
“They’re all dead,” Bertha whispered. She looked around and gasped. “There’s Jessie.”
Jessie lay on her back, her hands folded on her chest. She had a ragged bullet hole in the center of her forehead. “Oh, God,” Bertha wavered, “someone shot her.”
He hoped it was Vanessa. And he hoped it fucking hurt.
Looking around, Bruce couldn’t find Dominick Mason. Was he the one who killed Vanessa? Was it a group effort? He wanted the little son of a bitch bad, but it looked like he’d have to go on without him. They didn’t have much time.
Unshouldering the duffle bag, he knelt down and rummaged around. “Start splashing that gas on the bodies,” he said.
“But -”
“Just do it,” he snapped.
There must have been a harder edge in his voice than normal, because Bertha jumped and did as she was told. She upended the can and began to splash gasoline onto the sleeping forms, the smell of it acrid and strong.
Taking out a stake and the mallet, Bruce went over to Merrick and knelt down. He gripped the stake in one hand and placed it firmly against Merrick’s chest. He brought the mallet up and hesitated, the gravity of what he was doing finally reaching him. What if he was wrong? What if -
Merrick’s head whipped up and their eyes locked.
Too late.
Bruce brought the mallet down as hard as he could. The stake drove deep into Merrick’s heart, and the vampire let out a howling screech that rang through the chamber like the cry of a banshee. His bony fingers clawed at the stake and his head whipped from side to side, his back arching and his robe coming open. In the quick strobe pattern, Bruce was shocked to see that his body was little more than a wood frame, chicken wire, and cotton balls. His blacked heart was hidden behind a screen of mesh that the stake had easily torn through. It throbbed, seemingly in time with the strobe lights, and Merrick let out another wail.
Bertha screamed, and Bruce jumped to his feet.
The vampires, drawn by their master’s cries of distress, were rising to their feet. Two, four, six of them, pale and ethereal like ghosts in a gothic mansion. They came toward Merrick, and Bruice fell back a step. The old man had gone still and lay slumped to one side, his eyes open and his mouth slack, embalming fluid leaking from the corner of his lips. Jessie bent over him and touched his face. Though she moved like a zombie, with no human emotion, Bruce was crazily sure that it was a touch of tenderness and love. Merrick didn’t stir.
He was dead.
Jessie looked at him. Yellow liquid leaked from her eyes like tears. Instead of attacking him, she turned on her grandmother and slammed her against the wall. Bertha screamed and dropped the can. It landed on its side, its contents sloshing out onto the floor. A man that resembled the pictures Bruce had seen of Joe Rossi only deader rushed him, slamming into him and knocking the shotgun aside. It hit the floor and skidded away. Joe grabbed Bruce around the throat and squeezed. Still the lights flashed, off and on, off and on. The walls thrummed with the mechanized beat of dance music, pierced only by Bertha’s screams as Jessie ripped out her throat.
Joe leaned in, his fangs wicked and glowing in the light. Bruce clawed at the monster’s face, tearing away strips of dead flesh. Joe turned his head to the side, and Bruce kneed him in the groin. Even dead, getting kicked in the balls hurt like hell, apparently. Joe’s grip loosened and Bruce was able to shove him off. Bruce unclasped the canteen and frantically screwed the cap off as Joe recovered. Joe sprang at him again, and Bruce splashed him in the face.
A sound like sizzling meat filled the air, and Joe screamed at the top of his lungs. He pressed his hands to his face and danced around the room, his skin liquifying and oozing between his fingers. The others were coming now, led by a terrible skeletal thing. Bruce scooped the shotgun off the floor, brought it around, and fired. The blast hit the thing dead center, tearing it literally in half. The top half flew back, an all too human look of surprise on its face, and the bottom half fell over with a wet thud. Another vampire came at, and Bruce slammed it across the face with the butt of the gun. He heard its jaw crack, saw teeth flying.
Bertha lay dead on the floor, Jessie bent over her. The smell of Bertha’s blood attracted the others, who seemed to forget about Bruce, Merrick, and everything else. Joe was on his knees, wailing in pain, and the skeletal thing was pulling itself toward Bertha. A feeding frenzy broke out as vampires fought to get a piece of her the way piglets might fight over their mother’s teat. Bruce watched in a mixture of horror and fascination, but recovered himself. He grabbed the gas can from the floor and dumped the rest of its contents on Merrick’s body, the feeding vampires’ backs, and the floor, using the last of it to make a little trail to the door. He tossed the can aside, bent down, and stuck a match.
A huge, fiery whump filled the room, and fire streaked along the trail. The vampires all went up in a huge ball of flames, and fire shot up Merrick’s body, catching his robe, his hair, and the wooden frame that had kept him semi upright for God knows how long. Letting out inhuman screams, the vampires broke from Bertha’s corpse. One stumbled around, bounced off the wall, and fell; another toddled toward Bruce before falling to its knees. The half skeleton kept drinking from Bertha’s neck even as it burned.
The heat was enormous, baking. Bruce backed away, and the last thing he saw before smoke obscured his vision was Merrick Garvis.
He was literally melting.
***
Dominick Mason tried to go home, but he no longer had a home. All of his worldly possessions sat on the sidewalk in front of his building, discarded coldly as easily. His key didn’t work in his door and there was a FOR RENT sign on it. Why would it be any other way? He was dead. Sooner or later, everyone forgets you when you’re dead, and all the things you held so dear wind up in the trash. It was a hard pill to swallow, but most people aren’t around to see it after they die.
He was.
From his building, he walked east toward Washington Park. In the distance, thick, black smoke billowed into the air, and sirens rose. He barely noticed and wouldn’t have cared even if he did. No more rubbernecking for him. That was for the living.
The pain that had plagued him so the previous day came back, only less this time. Maybe he was imagining it, but it was getting harder to think. Not that he cared, really. What was there to think about anyway? How he had no one to mourn or miss him? How he died and not one single person, except for maybe his mother, cared, or even noticed? How he had done nothing with his life? Even to the women he’d slept with, what was he? Just another dating app hookup. They probably didn’t even remember his name.
Merrick had been right about one thing. Death was easy. It was life that was hard…life that hurt.
With that in mind, Dominick made his way to Washington Park. It was a vast and deep place with many small caves and thickets. Kids played on the playground, their cries of laughter scenting the still air. It had grown cloudy and began to rain. Still, smoke poured into the sky in the direction of Club Vlad. Dom didn’t wish ill on Merrick and the others, didn’t hope it was them burning. He didn’t care anymore. Not about them, not about anyone. For better or worse (and he would argue it was worse), his life was over. His time came days ago, he just missed the boat.
Picking out an isolated little area, Dom sat against a tree with his legs splayed out in front of him. He titled his head back and closed his eyes. Yes, thinking was hard now. His mind felt sluggish, cold. He was thirsty…so, so thirsty, but he ignored it.
Slowly, the bugs found him. Flies buzzed around him and laid their eggs in his skin. Beetles scuttled over him, followed by worms.
Next, it was the birds. They ate out his eyes and nibbled at his blue, bloated skin.
The animals came last.
Their appetites were bigger.
And they left little remaining of poor, outcast Dominick Mason.
***
That night, Bruce sat alone in his little trailer, a bottle of whiskey wedged between his legs and unshed tears in his eyes. He stared at his reflection in the darkened TV set and took long swallows from the bottle. He planned to drink until he forgot or passed out, whichever came first. He tried to not think about Vanessa, but in his addled state, he couldn’t control himself, and began to cry. When that storm passed, like the others before it, he chugged from the bottle.
As distant church bells clanged the hour - midnight - a feeble knock came at the door. Bruce took another drink and it came again. Getting up, he stumbled, nearly fell, and gripped the bottle tightly. He didn’t want to lose one precious drop.
Again, the knock.
“I’m coming,” Bruce slurred. He staggered to the door and fought with the lock. He was dizzy and seeing double.
When he got it, he opened the door.
The bottle dropped from his hand and clanked onto the floor.
Vanessa, clad in a puke green hospital gown, stood on the step, her hands pressed to her chest and a look of anguish on her milk white face. Her head tilted to one side, the wounds on her neck cleaned but open, gaping. Her dark eyes shone with tears. “I’m dead,” she said.
Breaking down in tears, she collapsed against him and they sank to the floor. She was cold and smelled. Bruce wrapped his arms around her and held her to his chest anyway. “Shhh, it’s alright,” he said drunkenly. “Hey, it’s alright.
“I’m dead,” she repeated, and her voice broke. “I don’t want to die.”
Bruce held her close, trying to warm her icy skin. He didn’t know what to say, so he cried with her.
“You’re safe now,” he said, “it’s going to be okay.”
“I want blood,” she said and sobbed harder, “I want to hurt people.”
“Shhh,” Bruce said again. “It’s okay.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a utility knife. He flicked the blade across his wrist and searing pain shot up his arm. “Here,” he said and offered her his blood, “drink this.”
He did this without care and without thought. She needed him, and one barnaclehead always backs up another.
Vanessa hesitated, looking from his face to the oozing blood, unsure.
“Go ahead,” he told her.
Vanessa brought his wrist to her mouth.
And began to drink.

First/Previous
"Watch out!" Jack yelled out to the crowd as the now-glowing overhead turrets, long dormant and forgotten, suddenly whirred to life with a mechanical hum, tracking his movements as he ran, shoving past a group of unsuspecting Xarak to the side as he moved to dodge the torrent of rapid fire aimed right at him, kicking up smoke as the superheated plasma churned the ground underneath him, before the sound of gunfire abruptly stopped.
"Fucking overheating shittubes!" the voice on the speakers cursed. "The Outsider is by the two broken pillars!"
"I see him!" a voice replied from out of the crowd as Jack got his bearings, spotting a group of three uniformed soldiers rushing towards him. As the leader moved to stab him with a nasty-looking barbed shortspear, Jack quickly juked the direction he intended to dodge, dipping to the right as he smashed the avian in the stomach with a vicious kick, shuffling back as he caught the blade of the second soldier with his bracer before throwing them off balance, lashing back at the first with his elbow as he did.
He moved to check the third that was moving to take a swing at him with a bat, but before Jack could do so the soldier was suddenly yanked back as a long, coiled leather whip snapped around them. Following along, Jack spotted an older grey-skinned ganger in black leathers with a coarse, black beard to match his scraggly hair sat down with his back to a wall, casually drinking a beer as he observed the chaos with a mischievous smirk.
As the soldier pulled back his bat to strike the interloper, the ganger grinned and looked down where his legs were already spread wide, revealing a strange metal crotch plate. Suddenly making a jerking motion with one of his legs, the plate flipped up to reveal the barrel of a huge codpiece gun that flipped up to point directly at the soldier, before it fired once, catching the solder completely by surprise as the top of their body was utterly obliterated by a bolt of powerful plasma energy. Smirking, the ganger gave Jack a wink, chugging down the rest of his drink, before charging into the brawl.
Hearing an almighty roar, Jack turned around only to be knocked back yet again as a broken, avian body was roughly lobbed at him, staggering him backwards as the Redeemer turned to the last of the bird-like gangsters, picking him up with immense strength and smashing them to the ground before advancing towards the human more cautiously this time, shoving drunken brawlers out of the way.
“I have long waited for this moment, Outsider. With your death, my King shall grant you redemption!” The Redeemer snarled. Now having a good look at him, Jack couldn’t see any visible weapons on him, which was strange. Last time, he’d brought a gunship and was taking potshots at him with some kind of high-powered rifle. Then again, considering what happened last time, maybe The Redeemer wanted the satisfaction of using his bare hands to beat him to death.
It wouldn’t be a terrible plan considering everything the Ogar had pulled off so far…
While sports on Earth were often separated by gender, despite some resistance from the more liberal-minded, due to biological differences between men and women, combat sports were a whole different game, with mixed martial arts organisations having very specific weight classes for fair competition between athletes, with two fighters of similar size and weight less likely to cause serious injury to each other.
But if you placed an experienced lightweight against even a novice heavyweight? That would introduce major problems for the smaller fighter, who would need to contend with the extra size, reach and power of their larger opponent. Not an impossible fight, but a tough one.
And Jack very much felt like a lightweight here.
Though of course, he had faced larger opponents before. Even an Ogar, though they had defeated the Laird with a cunning trap. However, he didn’t know how well matched he and The Redeemer were in a fair close-range fight outside of the opening moments of the ambush.
Still, he had little choice but to find out. He didn’t have an easy way to escape, and he didn’t know what the status of the others was. If he ran while they were still here then The Redeemer and the Regulators would simply go after them instead to get to him…
No. He couldn’t allow those thoughts to shake him. His friends knew what the hell they were doing, and they could handle themselves just fine. He had to worry about himself right now.
He couldn’t run, so he had to fight.
With a speed he didn’t expect from The Redeemer, they grabbed a nearby chair and lobbed it right at Jack in one smooth motion before following through with another charge.
‘Aegis!’ Jack yelled as he brought his forearm up, as his new and improved shield eagerly sprung up to take the hit from the chair, before a fist smacked into the side of his head as The Redeemer used the chair as a distraction to change his angle of attack.
Spinning with the blow, Jack fought in his mind to stay in the fight as his vision blurred, with the powerful strike threatening to knock him out then and there, before another fist caught him in the stomach, with his battleskin dispersing a hit that would have otherwise easily taken the air out of his lungs.
Retracting his shield, Jack ducked another punch that threatened to decapitate him as he skidded under the blow, parrying a backfist with his forearm that tingled painfully as he ate the blow, before clocking the Redeemer with a punch to the jaw, his gauntlet extending to cover his knuckles with a well-forged plate of metal to add their power to the strike, before the Redeemer threw out a punch that caught him on the shoulder, sending the deathworlder reeling back.
Jack grit his teeth as he fought through the pain, adrenaline rushing through him. He wasn’t out of the fight yet, but he knew he’d gotten the worst of that engagement.
The Redeemer clearly understood this as well, as the zealot strode towards the human with a confident, wicked grin.
But this time, Jack was ready.
‘Caltrops’ Jack whispered the command word, as his gauntlets gave him a good handful of them, subtly tossing them in front of him with an underhand throw, which had gone unnoticed by the Redeemer as they stared at the human with hatred.
Suddenly dashing forward to quickly close the remaining distance between them, the Redeemer roared as he charged Jack again, suddenly grunting in pain and stumbling as his full, heavy mass sent a sharp, painful spike straight through his armoured boot, causing him to lose focus as he looked down at his foot for just a moment to see what had happened.
A moment of distraction that Jack used to its fullest, as he quickly swung his axe down right at The Redeemer’s head.
However, the Ogar reacted with surprising dexterity as he used his forward momentum to avoid the full force of the axeblade, his metal helmet taking a glancing blow as he shoved Jack off balance, causing him to stumble. Quickly predicting what would come next, Jack dropped his axe on purpose as he prepared for a takedown attempt, dropping low and widening his stance as the Redeemer tackled him around the waist to try and bring him to the ground for a quick finish.
“There will be no salvation for you, human!” The Ogar growled through his pain as Jack was forced back by the Redeemer’s superior strength.
“Aww, did you miss me?” Jack taunted, holding on and walking back with the ever increasing momentum The Redeemer was building as he was pushed back along the dancefloor. “I saw your tantrum on the TV afterwards, didn’t know you were a bitch too!”
‘That’s it, asshole.’ Jack thought to himself as he felt his axe clip back onto his back. ‘Get mad. You showed me last time that you like to talk too much. I need to time this right…'
“Your blasphemy ends here Outsider! I shall smite you in the name of my King!” The insane zealot roared out in an enraged challenge.
With a roar the Redeemer pushed with much greater strength, forcing Jack to change his slow backpedalling into a full on sprint as he scrambled to stay on his feet, fighting to keep his grip above that of the Redeemer’s to maintain his control of the grapple for as long as he could as he was gradually being put off-balance, almost being lifted upwards.
‘I’ve got to hold on until the last possible moment…’ Jack thought to himself, as tables, chairs and people alike were battered to the side.
‘Now!’
As the wooden pillar supporting the balcony passed them in a blur, Jack shifted his weight to the left and relinquished the grapple, using the Redeemer’s momentum against him as he shoved the Redeemer off balance, as they smashed into the crumbling brick wall head first with an almighty crash.
As they stumbled back, yanking their head back out through the newly formed hole, Jack growled as grabbed the Redeemer around the top of one of his legs, yelling with effort as he was only just able to lift the Redeemer up and over him, slamming the Ogar down on the top of his head as hard as he could in a vicious suplex that gave a satisfying crack.
Growling with effort, the Redeemer pushed himself back into a crouch and looked up just in time as Jack’s foot smacked into the side of his head in a savage kick that cracked his metal helmet and dislodged one of his fangs. Roaring in rage and pain, the Redeemer got to his feet only to meet a flying knee that shattered his nose as his helmet cracked and dented with the heavy impacts.
“Redeem that you ugly cunt!” Jack growled, moving in for another strike as the Redeemer shoved him away, showing no signs of faltering as he slowly got to his feet, even after the devastating blows he just took. The Redeemer simply gave Jack a wicked grin of satisfaction, before it fell slightly upon seeing something to Jack’s side.
As Jack’s Ring of the Berserker vibrated again, he spun around to spot a large, lanky Vivren with several piercings in overt heavy armour grinning at him with malicious intent as she pointed a wand at him and cast a word of power.
Before he had any time to react, Jack’s entire body erupted in a wave of agony unlike anything he had ever felt before…
*****
“Fuck! Alora! Sephy? Chiyo? Dante?” Nika coughed as she got up from where the balcony had collapsed from under them.
Looking around, she could see even more patrons fighting around them, revelling in the chaos of the brawl, but she couldn’t spot any of her friends in the immediate aftermath, as thick dust plumed out from the wreckage below her.
‘At least the crew of the ship we’re meant to be travelling on are probably out by now.’ The Kizun thought to herself. ‘Can’t go back, the CorvMart crew will have moved on by now, so sticking to the original plan is probably the best move, unless we can steal a vehicle one of us knows how to pilot.’
Assessing the situation before her, Nika went for her bo staff, though made sure that her shotgun was well within easy reach. Though many of the people fighting around her looked rough, they weren’t attacking her or her friends, and until that changed they could make good allies of convenience, or for a smokescreen to give their enemies the slip if they had to run.
Though slaying as many of their attackers as they could would be preferable.
‘Best way to do that is link up with the others, we’re better as a unit.’ She reasoned, hearing an almighty crash. ‘Well, that’s probably Jack.’
Dodging a thrown bottle as a Squarri ganger missed their intended target - a pissed-off looking quadrupedal furry species that Nika didn’t recognise - before dodging a swing of a bat from a Xarak that saw her as an easy target. Quickly raising her staff she parried the backswing before cracking the other end of the staff across the reptilian’s face, knocking the rough-looking thug out as he collapsed to the ground.
Yet before Nika could think to move on from the conflict, she had to dodge out of the way using her tail as a large Balnath with some kind of cleaver-like sword took a swing at her. Recognising the sigil of the Regulator group Chiyo had told them to watch out for - a stern-looking demonic rune surrounded by a neon-red triangle - Nika parried the next sword swipe from the figure.
“Let me guesth, you want to get to the Outthider?” The Balnath sneered at the Kizun with a lisp so thick that in any other situation she’d have to stop herself from laughing. “I’m stho thorry, but we can’t let you have sthilly ideas like that!”
“Are you for fucking real?” Nika asked as she dodged to the side and put some space between them before quickly switching to her shotgun, letting loose a powerful blast that the Balnath was able to raise his shield up to block.
‘Skill like that? Probably the leader or an officer of some kind.’ The Kizun noted to herself. ‘No choice. I’ve got to kill him.’
“Yeah, I know that you’re finking! You fink my teef make me sound sthupid?” The Balnath growled, with a few experimental chomps. “Well these teef like to gnaw and gnasth on Kizun flesth!”
“Come and try it!” Nika snarled as she twirled her staff around her in a well-practised flourish, eagerly accepting the challenge.
The Balnath charged forward with lightning speed as it came at Nika with a series of feints, before swiping at her with a brutal overhand chop, using both hands. The Kizun was able to deftly parry with her staff, the kinetic modules battering her opponent’s grip to the side, though she felt the strength behind the blow and knew that the Balnath was stronger.
Still, she knew she could take him.
Ever since she was little she had roughhoused with her brothers and the local boys in fights around their ranch, and had learned the hard way from an early age that her gender and short build worked against her when facing her peers, so she had trained to be the strongest she could be, and learned to be quick and tactical to make the best use of that.
She had eventually kept up with the neighbourhood boys, using holds and precise strikes until her elders found out what she was doing when she was meant to be working on the ranch to help the family scrape by, and quickly put a stop to the shenanigans.
When she moved to the city, she only got better from there.
The tip of her staff thundered against the Balnath’s shield like the striking of a gong, forcing the larger being back as Nika could tell he was already tiring. Though she wanted to finish this fight quickly and get to her friends, she knew she couldn’t allow herself to give her opponent an opening, even as she sought to exploit an opening of her own. She had to be patient.
Her staff rattled against the shield again and again, as she felt her opponent’s defence get weaker and weaker, with the powerful force of her kinetic module focusing the strength of her strikes into a single point. Eventually something would break, his shield of his arm. Once his defences were finally down, she would go in swiftly for the kill.
Her opponent’s frustration won out as his shield shattered and fell to the floor, forcing him to attack Nika with a vicious two handed swipe. She blocked the strike handily, before the Balnath grabbed her staff, locking them in a clinch.
“Giff me sthome help over ‘ere!” The Balnath called out, as Nika reached for a knife, forcing the Balnath to adjust his stance as she stabbed blindly, glancing off armoured plates before finding purchase somewhere, causing her attacker to grunt with pain as he shoved her back, holding her up against a wall.
‘Shit.’ She cursed in her mind. ‘He’s stronger than me, but all I need is a moment to take him by surprise and I can break away and kill him!’
She held strong with her arms, holding the Balnath back as his jaws snapped shut barely an inch away from her neck. He tried again, and she pushed back harder, the jaws snapping shut around nothing, but much closer this time.
He tried again, bringing his vicious maw even closer still…
‘Gotcha!’ Nika thought to herself, as she jerked her head forward in a headbutt, catching the Balnath by surprise and giving the Kizun the space she needed to bring her knees up to her chin, before kicking out as hard as she could into the face of the Balnath, knocking him back with a roar of pain, before he leapt forward with a side swipe that Nika used her tail to quickly dodge, before in the same motion she brought the tip of her staff round and smacked the Balnath as hard as she could, right in the face, the powerful strike shattering its lower jaw completely.
“My fathce!” the attacker got out, clutching what little remained of his lower jaw, before looking up in the next moment as they stared down the barrel of Nika’s shotgun.
“Plea-” They got out, before their head was obliterated in an explosion of dark, blackish blood as their body clattered uselessly to the ground.
“Fuck you.” The Kizun retorted. Using her tail to quickly clip the sword to the magnets of her armour, Nika could see more Regulators in the crowd heading towards the DJ booth. Quickly checking her weapons, she headed right into the brawl!
*****
“You don’t belong here, girlie!” the thug cackled as their cybernetic arm crackled with electric discharge.
“Replacto!” Alora snarled as she swiped her wand out, blasting her attacker with a sudden flash of light that sent him stumbling back, clutching at his eyes.
“Anyone else?” Alora asked, trying her best to channel Nika’s cool, calm demeanour, crossed with Jack’s intimidating presence as the cluster of gangers and mercenaries all looked around at each other for just a moment, before deciding that the Eladrie wasn’t actually that intimidating, as one tried to rush her with a broken chair.
‘Oh by the Mother Tree! How do those two do it?’ Alora cursed in her mind as she summoned her spiritual weapon - a spear of light - that she quickly stabbed at the fish-like Osi, gutting them in the stomach which quickly made them drop the chair, while Alora wisely moved to the side to get out of the vicious melee happening all around her. Where were the others?
‘I have to make sure they’re all right.’ the Eladrie determinedly told herself as she began casting another, more complicated spell…
“Attention all idiots!” The voice over the speakers sneered out over the ever-changing music that the DJ didn’t seem to have any control over. “We discussed this. Though the Outsider is a priority, you target the spellcasters first if you can! Must I do everything myself?”
Thrumming with sudden power, the turrets above them finally opened fire, shooting almost indiscriminately at the crowd below, cutting several of the brawling patrons down before they even knew what hit them.
Chanting and waving her hands around as quickly as she dared, Alora maintained her concentration of her spell, completing it just in time as the turrets finally tracked her as she summoned a great holy aura of light to cover herself that would give her the protection she needed, the Armour of Faith deflecting the lights of the laser turrets harmlessly aside.
A loud bark sounded out, and knowing Dante’s warning for what it was, Alora spun around to see two Regulators, who were both Vulstas fighting through the brawl to get to her. Unlike Rena, these two were males, both carrying plasma shotguns but unable to get effective shots off through the crowd. Not that something like that stopped them from trying…
“Stevarin!” she yelled out, pointing her wand at one of the two who was about to open fire on a downed ganger, as with a flash of yellow light their movements slowed, quickly freezing stiff as a board as they failed to resist the Holding spell, their eyes widening in sheer terror as the gang-mates of their would-be-victim set upon them in a fury with fists and clubs, before a spell cast from the rafters sent all of them clattering to the ground clutching at their minds.
‘One of the enemy mages providing overwatch.’ Alora noted as she quickly looked up for any sign of them, but not seeing them. ‘Under a veil of invisibility no doubt.’
Feeling the dull impact of a shotgun blast dissipate harmlessly against her magical armour, Alora spun round to the other Regulator, cursing her moment of hesitation as the Vulsta drew a long knife with which to get in close with.
Remembering her fight with Izadora all those weeks ago, Alora waved her arms around quickly to summon a bubble of light to engulf her, before quickly following it up with an explosive flash that thundered all around her like a flashbang grenade, while leaving her unharmed.
As the light dissipated, she deftly avoided the blind lunge from the temporarily blinded Regulator, before jamming her spear into his stomach, using her reach advantage to dodge the desperate swipes he sent her way.
“Garrash!” Alora spoke a quick cantrip, using her affinity with life magic to channel poison through the top of her spear. Her already-weakened attacker quickly slumped to the ground as the debilitating effects took hold, but before Alora could pull her spear back, she was hit by a spell that came from above, disrupting her magic and causing her magical spear and armour to disappear.
‘Damn! It’s that mage above me!’ Alora cursed to herself as she quickly ran underneath one of the balconies, as the turrets chased after her with gunfire. ‘You want to hide in the shadows like a coward? I’ve got something to fix that!’
Quickly making sure there weren’t any immediate threats around, Alora quickly rummaged through her pockets for a wand of white crystal she had prepared about a year ago that still had a few charges. Casting quickly, she levelled it towards the ceiling and prayed to all the gods that she was aiming it at where the enemy mage was hiding,
“Glitasha!”
A spray of shining, sparkling particles of light shot out of her wand, puffing out to cover a good half of the ceiling, and as they began to fall to the floor and latch on to the people below, Alora spotted a huddled form by one of the rafters.
‘Got you!’ She thought with satisfaction.
“Ilthax! Get out of there!” The voice over the speakers warned, presumably the name of her target, but it was too late…
“Solaris!” Alora yelled, throwing her palms out in a thrust as a great javelin of light shot out of her palms. The enemy mage had barely moved before it impaled their centre of mass, sending what must have been a fireball spell way off target which blasted apart a huge, gaping hole in the back wall.
The invisible form of the glitterdust-covered mage slowly began to materialise as the blue-furred, ape-like Regulator clutched at their chest in pain, with wide eyes of disbelief at the spear of hard light that had gone right through their torso. As their flight spell dissipated, their lifeless body fell three stories from the rafters to slam down on the ground floor below.
“Nice one Alora!” the Eladrie heard the voice call from behind her as Nika came up next to her, the Kizun bleeding from a cut on her face. “Where are the others?”
“I don’t know. But we need to find them now!” Alora frantically told them as she took in the sheer state of chaos around them. Many broken bodies lay amongst the carnage, and though the Eladrie knew some would likely be still alive at the end of the night, she knew that many would not.
“You don’t need to tell me twice!” Nika agreed with a grim expression.
*****
First/Previous
Looks like Jack, Nika and Alora are holding on for now! But how long can they keep it up?
Don't forget to check out The Galactic High Info Sheet! If you want to remind yourself of certain characters and factions. One new chapter a week can seem like a while! Don't forget! You all have the ability to leave comments and notes to the entries, which I encourage you to do!
I am now on Royal Road! I would appreciate your support in getting myself off the ground there with your lovely comments, reviews and likes!
If you're impatient for the next chapter, why not check out my previous series?
As always I love to see the comments on what you guys think!
Don't forget to join the discussion with us on Discord, and consider checking me out on Youtube if you haven't already! Until next week, it's goodbye for now!

Everything has been tested and works properly except where noted! Additional pics/timestamps available on request. Forgive me if I'm slow to respond, I'll do my best to get back to any comments in a timely manner. The person with lower rep sends first. Willing to add/accept PayPal to fill in any gaps in value, especially for my higher priority wants.
​
Switch

• Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (sealed, SEA variant)
• Monster Hunter Rise Pro Controller (w/ box only)
• VORI Black Foam Carrying Case
  • includes strap, case is better for stationary storage than transportation though

​
Wii

• Black Nintendo Wii Box ONLY
  • Nintendo & American Heart Association Edition (link to page on ConsoleVariations)
  • overall fantastic condition, been in storage since the console was opened
  • comes with inserts and sleeves only, no console/cords/Wiimotes, manuals, or games included
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (disc and box)
• Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (CIB)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (no manual)

​
Nintendo 3/DS

• Super Mario 3D Land (CIB, Nintendo Selects)
• Super Smash Bros 3DS (loose)
• Pokemon Y (loose)
• Pokemon Pearl (w/ box and manual)
• Pokemon White (CIB)
• Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (loose)

​
PS2

• All games include their box unless noted, any that include a manual/inserts are noted. All stickers are on the outside of the box plastic, not on the cover art!
• Driver 3 (w/ manual)
• DT Racer (w/ manual, back of cover art punctured)
• Fight Night 2004 (w/ manual)
• Fight Night Round 2 (w/ manual)
• Fight Night Round 3 (w/ manual)
• God of War 2 (Greatest Hits, w/ manual, no bonus disc)
• Gran Turismo 4 (w/ manual and insert)
• Heroes of the Pacific (w/ manual)
• History Channel Civil War: A Nation Divided (w/ manual)
• Hitman: Blood Money (w/ manual and bonus disc)
• Knockout Kings 2002 (w/ manual)
• Madden 06 (w/ manual)
• MLB 2k5 (loose disc only)
• Mortal Kombat: Deception (loose disc only, many scratches)
• Nascar 06: Total Team Control (w/ manual)
• Nascar 07 (w/ manual)
• Nascar: Dirt to Daytona
• NBA Live 2005 (w/ manual)
• NFL Head Coach (w/ manual and insert)
• Pro Race Driver (w/ manual)
• Red Dead Revolver (Greatest Hits)
• Rock Band (no instruments)
• Scarface: The World is Yours (Collector's Edition, CIB)
• Short Track Racing: Trading Paint (Gamestop case)
• SOCOM US Navy Seals Combined Assault (w/ manual and insert)
• Spartan Total Warrior
• Sprint Cars: Road to Knoxville (w/ manual)
• Sprint Cars 2: Showdown at Eldora (w/ manual)
• Suzuki TT Superbikes (w/ manual)
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 (w/ manual)
• Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 (Greatest Hits)
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (w/ manual and insert)
• UFC Sudden Impact (w/ manual)
• UFC Throwdown (w/ manual)
• World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions (w/ manual)
• World Soccer: Winning Eleven 9 (w/ manual)

​
Other

• PC - Dungeon Siege 2: Deluxe Edition (w/ map and game keys)
• PC - Battle Realms (loose)

​
Accessories/Merch

• Accessory - NYKO Xbox One Direct Console Charge Base w/ batteries
  • fits flush with Xbox One when plugged in, batteries are well used but still hold a decent charge
• Guide - Prima Games Official Pokemon Diamond & Pearl Scenario Guide (no poster, fair condition)
• Merch - 2007 Diamond & Pearl Box Tin - Holiday Empoleon
• Merch - 2016 Triple Power Tin - Shiny Gyarados
• Battery - 3x OEM GBA SP batteries
  • all tested and working, all have small bloat

​
Free w/ Any Trade

• Wii - The Bigs (loose, heavily scratched)
• PS4 - Fallout 76 (PAL, CIB)
• PSP - Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow (loose, no casing, untested)
• Headset - OEM PS4 Mono Headset (never used)
• Accessory - 2x Nintendo Switch Lite Tempered Glass Screen Protector
• Accessory - 3x Unbranded GBA Cartridge Holders
• Battery - Non-OEM GBA SP battery (working fine)
• Battery - Dead OEM GBA SP battery (tested & not working)
• Other - Replacement GBA SP buttons & membranes
  • from RetroGameRepairShop, not OEM, buttons are clear black

Wants

Higher Priority	Lower Priority
Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness (CIB or box w/ all inserts only)	Pokemon Let's Go Eevee (w/ box)
Pokemon SoulSilver CIB or Big Box only (great condition, few signs of damage)	Bayonetta 2 for Switch (sealed)
Pokewalker stuff: two foam slips for Pokewalkers, will consider Pokewalkers in good condition (lower priority than the foam slips)	Pokemon Stadium 2 Box w/ Inserts (any condition, little to no tears preferred)
Pokemon Black or White edition DSi console (loose or CIB)	Cases/boxes/inserts/games to complete my loose items listed
JFC Brand Grip for PS Vita 1000 (new/used)	PS2 game offers (Current specific wants: Bully, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Kingdom Hearts, Fullmetal Alchemist: Curse of the Crimson Elixir)
"New" 3DS OEM Faceplates (preference for Pokemon but feel free to offer me any)	BoxyPixel Unhinged Shell (Black or Purple preferred, open to offers on other colors)
GameBoy Micro OEM Faceplates (any except 20th Anniversary)	Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Switch Pro Controller (w/ box)
GameBoy Micro OEM Charger	Special Edition 2DS Consoles (slate model)
OEM PS2 Compatible Component cables (NOT composite cables)	Phat NDS (screens must be in great shape, very few/no scatches, no dead pixels)
LoZ: TotK Pro Controller (w/ box)	Pokemon GB/A with dead batteries
Waterfield City Slicker Case for "New" 3DS	Pokemon Merch (plushies, pins, etc, just show me what you got)
Pokemon Crystal (any condition)	Black Joy Con wrist strap (only need one)
Broken/Non-working handhelds (GB, GBC, GBA, PSP, etc), broken Nintendo consoles (old to new), non-working Pokemon cartridges	Offers/Lists

​

As the last orange light of day drained from the sky, the living dead in Club Vlad rose. Max the skeleton and Jessie the…not skeleton…sewed up the gaping Y-shaped incision on Dom’s chest under Merrick’s direct supervision. Dom sat there, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. He’d woken with a headache and a feeling of cold, and even now, he could feel the dull throb above his left eye. It felt like someone was tearing his brain apart with a fork. He had told Merrick, and Merrick had nodded sadly. “Is my brain rotting?”
“Most likely,” Merrick had said.
There was a certain peace in the idea of losing his cursed humanity. As Merrick had said, he would feel no pain, know no quandaries. He would live only for the night and for his master. On the other hand, watching someone like Matt sit and stare into the distance, drool coursing down his chin and nothing happening behind his dead eyes, scared Dom. He didn’t want to be a braindead idiot. He didn’t care about keeping his emotions, he just wanted to function.
Like Merrick.
There wasn’t much he could do, however. He was dead and that was the end of it.
Once Dom was patched up and dressed in a pair of jeans and a hoodie, Merrick called his children before him. “I have done my best to love and protect all of you,” he began. “Jessie, you were miserable with your grandmother, were you not?”
“Yes,” Jessie said tonelessly.
“You were depressed, bipolar, and cut yourself. Now you’re happy.”
“Yes,” she replied again.
“Joe, you were a two bit nobody staring down a ten year stretch in jail.”
“Yes.” Thin yellow liquid dripped from his nose.
“But now you are free.”
“Yes.”
“You appreciate what I’ve done for you.”
“Yes.”
Merrick flashed then, slamming his fist onto the arm of his wheelchair. “Then why do you keep fucking up? The police were here earlier. They have messages between you and Jessie. I told both of you to delete those. Then I find out that you bit someone and turned them despite my orders. We have an endless supply of blood here but you still went off on your own. How many are there?”
“Just one,” Joe said.
“Are you being honest with me?”
“Yes.”
Merrick sagged back in his chair, looking somehow older. “Joe, take Matt and go to her. Bring her back here before she causes any more problems. God alone knows how many people she’s changed. Too many vampires without a father will bring heat on us, and you know what happens in that case? We get pieces of wood shoved in our chests.”
Turning to Dom, Merrick said, “I have a job for you and Jessie. We’re nearly out of embalming fluid. You haven’t had your first dose and the rest of us are starting to get ripe as well. I have a contact at a funeral home. He texted earlier that the order he placed on my behalf has come in. I want you to pick it up and to pay him.”
Dom had never been picked for anything in his whole life. No one had ever wanted him on their team and no one had ever placed their trust in him the way Merrick was now. He was honored, proud, and would do anything to not let Merrick down.
“That cop who came here might be a problem,” Merrick went on. “We may have to deal with him, but we’ll leave that for another night. In any case, I want this place cleaned from top to bottom. If the police come, I want them to see nothing out of the ordinary.”
Now that everyone had their marching orders, they dispersed. Merrick handed Dom an evelope stuffed with cash, and Dom slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie. The other team - Joe and Matt - left, while the remaining vampires began tidying up.
A fleet of vehicles waited in the parking lot behind Club Vlad. Dom and Jessie took a black pedo van with no back windows. They drove in silence, the radio off. Dom did not want to hear music, nor did he wish to speak to Jessie. Their kinship was one of blood and circumstance, not one of words and emotions. He had no questions for her and wished to answer none of his own. The only thoughts he had were of the mission ahead and of the growing pain in his skull. He thought of the staring stupid Matt, of the decayed Max, and a shiver went down his spine.
What was left of his humanity recoiled at the idea of becoming like them.
The pain grew hotter, more intense. He forced it away and focused on driving.
The funeral home was on North Allen Street, next to a restaurant called Pepperjack’s. A tall, white house with dark shutters and a sign out front, it looked like a quiet, peaceful place. “Pull around back,” Jessie said.
Dom pulled the van around back and parked under a balcony, killing the headlights. They got out and went to the back door, Jessie in the lead. He assumed that she had done this before and that the seller would recognize her. She knocked, and a few moments later, the door opened. A youngish man with a shaved head appeared, wearing an apron and gloves. He saw them and tensed a little. Dom could smell, rather than sense, his fear, and his throat panged with thirst. “Come on,” the man said quickly. He stepped aside and allowed them to enter. Dom noticed that he walked behind them, wary of putting his back to them. “Do you have the money?”
“Do you have our order?” Jessie countered.
“Yes,” the man said, “I’m really risking my neck for this. They don’t just give embalming fluid away, you know. They keep track of it and if they realize I’m over ordering, someone from the state’s going to come down here and check.”
He led them into an embalming room. Three boxes sat on a table. Dom gave the man his money, and he and Jessie carried the boxes outside, loading them into the van. The whole time they were there, the man was edgy, like he was afraid they were going to attack him. Dom would be a liar if he said that the hot smell of the man’s blood didn’t excite him. Perhaps once his brain rotted away, he wouldn’t be able to control himself, but for now, he could.
A lightning bolt of pain shot through his head and he nearly dropped the last box onto the ground.
Once the man was paid, Dom and Jessie drove back to Club Vlad. In fifteen minutes, they were drinking side by side from two passed out partygoers, their reward for a job well done.
Meanwhile, across the city, Joe and Matt weren’t doing as well. They were standing outside of Heather’s apartment. Joe, slightly annoyed (anger being another emotion vampires could feel, along with fear) pounded on the door. He knew she was in there; he could smell the putrid odor of decay. “Let us in,” he said. “We won’t hurt you.”
Joe could barely remember changing her. He didn’t mean to, it just…happened. Like an unwanted pregnancy. You can bite someone as much as you want and drink as much as you want, but if you take too much at once and they die, you get the vampire equivalent of a baby. Joe liked the hunt. It was exciting. Having his meals brought to him Club Vlad didn’t arouse the same level of excitement. It was like shooting an animal tied to a tree. Or hiring a prostitute instead of wooing someone. No real satisfaction to it.
That was probably his greatest downfall. He had lured Jessie the same way, though Merrick was indeed interested in rescuing her from her grandmother. People you have saved obey just as well as people with no brains.
He felt fluid on his upper lip and sniffed. “Come on, let us in,” he said.
No response.
He looked at Matt and nodded to the door. Together, they rammed their shoulders against it. It shook in its frame. They were both dead and weak, but modern American architecture is even weaker, and the door eventually slammed open. The apartment beyond was dark, messy, and reeked of death. They searched high and low, and eventually found Heather huddled in a corner, trying to hide. She was naked save for a pair of panties, her body bloated and beginning to turn black. Her skin hung from her frame and her eyes were filled with blood and fear. It was a wonder no one had called the police yet. The smell was overpowering. “We’re here to help,” he said. “You have to come with us.”
She shook her head and trembled. Maybe she remembered that he was the one who did this to her. Maybe her memories had rotted away. Those were usually the first to go. Then your emotions, then your personality. Finally, your capacity for higher reasoning. “I’m sorry I did this to you,” he said. That was a lie. He was not remorseful. Nor was he proud, for that matter. It just happened. Like rain. “But I want to help you. We can fix you.”
No amount of coaxing or conjoling could induce her to move. Joe weighed his options. He doubted anyone would call the cops even if they heard the door coming down - people who lived in places like this rarely called the cops, which helped Joe and his cause immensely. Even so, there was the possibility. Every minute they spent here was a minute that something could go wrong, and Joe had a lot to lose.
So, too, did Merrick.
Giving up, Joe took out his cellphone and called Merrick. “She refuses to come,” he said simply.
The line was quiet for a moment, then Merrick’s voice came back. Cold. Calculating. “Then do what you must.”
That was the go ahead.
Hanging up, Joe looked around the apartment and found a wooden chair in the kitchen. He lifted it over his head and slammed it on the counter, shattering it into a million pieces. He selected the longest, sharpest, and sturdiest looking one. He went back into the room and directed Matt to hold her down. She fought, kicked, and spat, but she was weaker than even they were. They had been embalmed. She hadn’t.
Matt pinned her hands above her head and Joe straddled her. Animal terror filled her eyes and she whipped her head from side to side. Joe lifted the makeshift stake with both hands, and brought it down as hard as he could, driving it deep into her heart. Her eyes bulged from their sockets and a high, otherworldly scream ripped from her throat. She bucked, thrashed, and kicked her feet. Her resistance began to ebb away until she was twitching…until she was still.
Heather from OKCupid was dead.
Truly dead.
Joe couldn’t help wondering what it was like.
Pulling the stake out, he tossed it aside and got to his feet, Matt doing likewise. A soul petrifying scream might be cause for even the tightest of lips to start talking. “Let’s go,” he said. And together, he and Matt fled, leaving the poor, dead body of Heather behind.
***
As it turned out, one of Heather’s neighbors did call the cops. At 10;13pm, Vanessa Rodregiez arrived with two patrolmen and found the front door of Apartment 237 knocked down. Guns drawn, they entered, Vanessa at the head. The first thing she noticed was the smell. It jammed itself into her nostrils, shoved its tongue down her throat, and violated her - all without even buying her dinner first.
Vanessa hadn’t been at this as long as her buddy Bruce had, but she knew a dead, rotting body when she smelled one. They searched the premises, and sure enough, they found a vic in the bedroom, lying in the gap between the bed and the wall; it looked like the former had been moved, perhaps in a struggle. Vanessa knelt down to check the vic’s pulse, but stopped.
There was no need.
The vic - who looked like a female but could have been an overweight male - hadn’t had a pulse in a very long time.
Examining the body, Vanessa found a wound in the chest, just above the heart. Black, stinking goo leaked from it, and Vanessa gagged. She fisted her hand to her mouth, retched, and then ran for the kitchen sink. Her partner for the night, Jim Walsh, stared down at the stiff before him, and his face turned a sickly shade of green. He avoided puking because he didn’t nose fuck the wound like Vanessa had, but he wasted no time in getting out there, dry heaving in the hallway where the air was somewhat fresh.
After leaving her lunch in the sink, Vanessa radioed back to headquarters, and before long, the place was crawling with cops. The assistant medical examiner - who had taken over after Ed Harris quit the previous night - knelt over the body and studied it. A solidly built black man with a mustache, his name was Leon and he knew death just as well as his old boss, so when he said the vic had been dead nearly two weeks, Vanessa accepted it.
That begged the question: Who broke in and screamed just now? A relative? The caller clearly heard screaming and peeked out her door to see two males fleeing on foot. Maybe they found the vic and freaked out? Or maybe they were the killers returning to the scene of the crime. After all, the vic had clearly been murdered.
In fact, they found a likely murder weapon. A long sliver of wood soaked in black goo. Blood turns black after a while, but there was something different about this stuff. “What is it?” Vanessa asked Leon.
“I’m not sure,” Leon said and pulled off a pair of Latex gloves he’d donned to examine the vic, “could be blood or…”
“Or what?” Vanessa asked.
“Or something,” Leon said. “Give me a few hours.”
And a few hours it was. Just before 1am, Leon called Vanessa at her desk. “I think you should come down here,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, Vanessa stood over Leon as he pulled the vic’s chest open with a pair of tweezers. “That’s the heart,” he said, “whoever stabbed her scored a direct hit, but this…this is what concerns me.”
He prodded a furry lump with the tip of his scalpel.
“What is it?” Vanessa asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it looks like mold.”
That word - mold - triggered a memory in her brain. “Ed said something about mold last night. He found it in -”
“The Mason boy,” Leon finished.
“Yeah. The one who got up and ran off.”
Leon turned away from Vanessa and looked at the dead woman - for it was a woman. Vanessa got the impression that he didn’t want her to see his expression. “I’ve known Ed ten years. I know something happened last night, but a stiff getting up and walking off? I thought he was confused. Now…I don’t know. That makes two bodies in 24 hours. And get this. The chest wound? It was done post-mortem. I can’t find a cause of death anywhere. Except maybe blood loss but it’s hard to tell at this point. And speaking of blood…”
“What?” Vanessa asked quickly.
“When I opened her stomach up, a whole shit load of blood spilled out. And a lot of it was a lot fresher than she is.”
Vanessa furrowed her brow in confusion. “You mean…?”
“It’s not hers,” Leon said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure until I run tests, but I’d put money on it.”
Vanessa’s head spun with information both new and old. You know that full, heavy feeling you get when a poo is brewing in your guts? That’s kind of what Vanessa was feeling, only in her head instead of her stomach.
Leon was just as mystified by the whole thing as she was and stayed up late to run a few preliminary tests. By sunrise, he had confirmed that the blood inside of Heather’s stomach was not hers. In fact, it had come from at least three different sources. “Is it human?” Vanessa asked over the phone.
“Yes,” Leon said, sounding troubled, “it’s human.”
In the cobalt hour before sunrise, Vanessa sat at her desk and tried to piece this whole thing together. They had:

1. A corpse that (allegedly) woke up and dipped out
2. A dead girl who’d been stabbed in the heart with a piece of wood after somehow ingesting the blood of three different people.
3. Some missing kids
4. Oh, and both bodies - the girl’s and the runaway corpses’ - had the same weird fungus in their heart cavities.

All of this - even the missing kids, Vanessa felt - was related. She just didn’t know how. The only answer that half way fit was that both of those bodies were vampires. Like…what’s a vampire but a dead body that gets up and walks around at night? And how do you kill a vampire? Why, you drive a piece of wood through its heart.
The idea that vampires were real was dumb, but the more she turned it over in her mind, the more she became convinced that it was at least an option. A lot of things people thought were fantastic and made up turned out to be real, so why not vampires too?
Shortly after 8, Bruce came in. He was just sitting down when Vanessa came in and slapped her report on the desk. “Buckle up, bitch,” she said, “things just got weirder.”
He stared up at her with one of those grumpy - but cute -expressions he was so good at putting on. As he read, however, his brow knitted. “Jesus,” he muttered to himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a weary sigh.
“I have a theory - kind of,” Vanessa said, “but I don’t want to say it.”
“You might as well,” Bruce said. “It can’t be more kooky than reality these days.”
“Okay,” Vanessa started, “what if - and I’m just thinking out loud here - what if there are vampires in Albany?”
She expected Bruce to give her a dirty look, but he chewed it over, actually taking it seriously. “And those missing boys are victims?” he asked finally.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “That girl’s been dead two weeks. Maybe she bit Dominick Mason and he came back for revenge after realizing he was cursed to be a goddamn shit sucking vampire forever.”
Bruce nodded. “Yeah, but who turned her?”
“I don’t know,” Vanessa said, “I don’t know.”
***
Before dawn painted the eastern sky, Merrick Garvis sat in his chamber like a withered king, a mess of IVs hooked into his arms and neck. The vault was silent save for the soft noise of the machines as they filtered out the old embalming fluid and replaced it with new embalming fluid. Embalming fluid always made him spacy, like a drug. The others had gone first, and even now lay near comatose around him like addicts in an opium den.
As far as he knew, Merrick was the oldest vampire in the world, perhaps, even, the oldest vampire to ever live. Though he was not fully honest with Dom, he was not lying when he said that vampires rotted like any other dead thing. Conditions considered, you had a few weeks tops if left untreated. There may be living vampires in remote corners of Egypt or the northern most reaches of Russia, where the climate preserved dead things, but unless you made it to one of those places, you were pretty well fucked.
Merrick was not a proud man, nor was he concerned with saving face - the dead have no need for that. He was being truthful when he said that he feared death. What’s more, he feared being helpless. Deep down, vampires are people, and people don’t exactly have the greatest track record with caring for their infirm. He read once that the first sign of a civilization was a broken leg that had healed, as it showed that someone stayed with and cared for a fellow human long enough for them to get well again. In Merrick’s opinion, that was true…and thus there was no civilization. Merrick was fifty-one when he died in the year 1982. In his lifetime, he had seen The Great Depression, World War II, and a million small acts of cruelty and selfishness in between. He’d seen beggars starving in the streets, abused children shuffled out of sight and out of mind, and disdain for the poor and the weak.
The living were awful, and the living dead were no different. Once their humanity rotted away, they cared only about filling their stomachs. They were like ticks - they would drink until their bellies literally ruptured…and then keep on drinking.
That left him in a precarious position. He was old, his body was weak. He couldn’t stand unassisted and if left to fend for himself, he would decay into a pile of bones within days. He would be cursed to lay in one spot for all eternity, aware and hungry, little more than a ghost tethered to a black and still beating heart.
He refused to let that happen to him. Thus, he had created a family, a clan of vampires loyal to him and to him alone. He did this through acts of simple kindness and understanding…but also through deception. He knew, for instance, how to preserve the brain. He’d figured out how to do it early on - you pickle it. Like a fetus preserved in a jar. He sawed off the top of his own head and filled it with a special solution that kept his brain - and his intelligence - intact. It slowly drained out through the nose and ears in a thin, yellow liquid, but it worked well enough. He couldn’t save everything, however, and had lost vital things in the process, such as most of his human memories, his sense of humor, and some motor functions. He shared this secret with only Joe, and a few others before, because he needed a strong captain. He kept the others in the dark because vampires - like people - are easier to control when they don’t think for themselves.
Right about now, however, Merrick was beginning to regret sharing the formula with even Joe. Joe had brought him nothing but grief. Joe, you see, could think for himself. He could make decisions. He could go behind Merrick’s back. Joe had something called free will, and free will is a worse affliction than vampirism. Free will is messy, free will is dangerous.
Free will could very well turn Merrick into a pile of bones.
That was, of course, if they weren’t discovered first. Joe had made several mistakes lately, not least of which was the turning of Heather. Sitting there in the predawn hour, attended by Tony, his gay bartender and human familiar, Merrick decided to have Joe killed. There are only two ways to kill a vampire: The stake and the flame. The latter seemed somehow appropriate in this case. After Joe, there would be no more captains, only him, one father with absolute power. That was how it had to be. One man, one vision. Democracies didn’t work. That was especially clear today. Everyone was so divided and nothing ever got done. If the humans had one strong leader, they might go in the wrong direction, but at least they would go somewhere. Instead, they stagnated.
Merrick didn’t particularly look forward to killing Joe, but it had to be done. To protect the family. To protect him.
And Merrick would do anything…anything at all…to protect himself.
***
Vampires.
Bruce kept coming back to that single wor, hoping each time that he would chuckle at the absurdity of it.
But he never did.
Did that mean he believed it? Not necessarily, but damn it, he considered it a possibility, and that alone was enough to make him feel like a fucking clown. All the evidence he had pointed to vampires, but then again, it might point to other things as well. Like aliens.
But let’s say the whole vampire thing was real. Who, like Vanessa asked, was patient zero? Who started this whole mess?
A name came to mind.
Merrick Garvis.
He had not had time to check into Garvis the previous day, but by God, he was going to do it now. He ran his name and social through the system and everything seemed to check out. Merrick Garvis was born on June 31, 1963 in -
Wait a minute. Weren’t there only 30 days in June?
Bruce checked, and there were, indeed, only 30 days in the month of June. Hm. Bruce did a little digging and found something out. Before 1987, social security numbers weren’t issued at birth. You had to sign up, using other forms of ID. Merrick Garvis applied for his in April 1984 and the date of birth on his state issued driver’s license was June 31. Bruce spent an hour on the phone with the DMV and learned that they had never issued a license to a Merrick Garvis. He then spoke to the Social Security Administration, and after much wrangling and frustration, he managed to get a photocopy of the license Garvis used to get his social security number. It was dated 1983.
The face staring back at him was almost exactly the same face he’d seen at Club Vlad, except maybe a touch less stiff and waxy. Though not as rough looking, there was no way in hell Garvis was 20 in that picture. It had to be a fake,
Bruce thought back to the events of the previous two days. Missing bodies, staked corpses, hearts that still beat after death.
Vampires didn’t seem like such a crazy explanation.
And if anyone was a fucking vampire around here, it was Merrick Garvis.

I have a very valid misdiagnosis issue which caused me around 24 hours of absolute misery and pain. 2 other doctors diagnosed me correctly and prescribed me correctly and I am feeling better now. My doctor visits were in this order: Telehealth, Urgent care (this is the doctor I want to report and sue), and then ER (this could have been avoided if I was diagnosed correctly at urgent care).
I want to absolutely make this guy's professional life a misery, and also prevent him from mistreating other patients. When you compare his diagnosis to the valid ones, it is very obvious that he did not care to treat me even when I was in an urgent care room putting out a cough that filled the entire wing and would cause me to black out. I really truly believe this DO needs to be disciplined for how he treated me, and possibly others. It was an obvious misdiagnosis designed to just get me discharged, and I have the medical records to prove it.
Without going into much more detail on my issue, I am wondering if anyone here has experience with reporting a doctor specifically to the Osteopathic Medical Board of California. What should I expect regarding timeline? I don't want to refresh his license info page every day for a year, I would like to know a status of some sort. Am I going to get that?
I also plan to sue this doctor directly, and I am already talking to my attorney about it. Is it ideal to wait until after a medical board decision, or is it better to do the lawsuit asap and closer to the actual event?
I appreciate any thoughts and advice on all of this.

Its been three years of me starting a new chapter of my story, it all started with a magical date, 17th of May 2021.
Three years ago today, my journey with her began, and it's been nothing short of magical. As I look back on these incredible years, my heart is filled with gratitude and love for all the moments we've shared. My first year was like a beautiful adventure. We explored new places, tried new things, and learned so much about each other. From our first date to our first trip together, every experience was a building block in the foundation of our love. I remember the excitement of discovering how much we had in common and the joy of finding my best friend in her. As I look back on these incredible years, my heart is filled with gratitude and love for all the moments we've shared.
My second year with her brought its own set of challenges. I made mistakes that hurt her and shook the foundation of trust between us. It was a tough period as we tried to navigate through misunderstandings and rebuild what was broken. Despite the difficulties, our strength and patience shone through. Our willingness to give each other a chance to make things right means more to me than words can express. This year taught me the importance of trust, communication, and the deep need to cherish and respect our bond.
2023 was undoubtedly the most challenging year of our relationship. We faced numerous obstacles that tested our love and commitment to each other. There were times when it felt like everything was falling apart, but we managed to hold on. Through the tears and the heartache, we found ways to support each other and keep our love alive. This year has been a testament to our resilience and the depth of our connection. Despite my best intentions, it seemed like we were constantly facing uphill battles, this year was hard on both of us, and it hurts to see the disappointment and pain it caused. Yet, through it all the resilience and patience was incredible. I lost almost everything in 2023 but all I had was hope. Hope to overcome everything and hope to get everything back on track.
In 2024, I faced the most difficult moment of all – parting ways. Losing her has been the hardest thing I've ever experienced. The pain of not having her by my side is profound, and I miss her every single day. Despite our separation, I want her to know that the love we shared will always be a part of me. I will forever cherish the memories we made, the lessons we learned, and the love we built together.
As I reflect on our time together, I am filled with both sadness and gratitude. Sadness for the loss, but gratitude for the love and growth I experienced. I hope that as time passes, both of us can find peace and happiness, and that we can carry forward the lessons we learned from each other. She will always hold a special place in my heart, and I wish her nothing but the best in her journey ahead. I part of my heart will always skip a beat whenever her name will come ahead me.

My previous post was removed because I didn't specify clearly enough that I have been diagnosed with IBS by my doctor. But I've some doubts since I don't experience any pain. Here's what's going on:
About ten years ago I first started to deal with severe digestion issues. Luckily, after a year of testing and talking with my doctors, I got better after starting antidepressants. Back then I was under a lot of stress and suffered from depression. I have been doing really well mentally for the past 8/7 years or so. Low stress, good mental health, finished my degree and landed a stable job.
Yet, for the past 2,5 years my digestion has been deteriorating rapidly. My issues currently are:

• daily foul smelling gas, starting around lunchtime and sometimes going on until late into the evening/night
• concurrent with the gas; bloating, fatigue and brain fog. I regularly have to lay down and often even fall asleep (this is start to interfere with my work as well)
• soft or sticky stools, often (not always) diarrhea-like. However, frequency seems somewhat normal (once or twice a day)

I am happy to say that at least I don’t have pain, cramps, constipation, burping, sudden diarrhea (having to run for the bathroom), and fortunately this time around I’m not loosing weight like I was last time. However, due to the lack of pain and cramps I'm also doubting whether this really is IBS. [Even though my GP has said it's IBS after excluding other possible causes, such as celiac disease, Crohn's, etc.]
My GP and I are at a loss of what we can do to improve my situation. We’ve tried lots of interventions and treatments by now, and my GP said we’ve run out of treatments and tests. So far we’ve tried:

• FODMAP elimination (no clear triggers, as symptoms hardly subsided during the elimination phase)
• caffeine elimination
• gluten elimination
• bloodtests for allergies / celiac disease as well as Crohn’s disease
• elimination of sucralose and other sweeteners
• digestive enzymes supplementation
• betaine HCI supplementation
• l-glutamine supplementation
• ginger extract supplementation as well as consuming lots of ginger
• psyllium husk supplementation
• s. boulardii supplementation
• simethicone supplementation
• zinc supplementation
• sertraline (50 mg)
• amitriptyline (10 mg)
• enteric coated peppermint oil
• mindful eating and breathwork

I eat a vegan diet (quite varied albeit less so since the FODMAP diet) and my bloodwork is all good, I workout 3-4 times a week, get 8 hrs sleep/night, and never consume alcohol. I make sure not to swallow excessive air when eating and I chew my food well. I also used to meditate for 10-20 min a day, and tried self-hypnosis techniques learned in therapy (but lately have given up on that, as tbh I’m starting to get really tired with trying all sorts of things to improve my situation when nothing seems to work). I am considering trying some sort of oregano oil/berberine supplementation regimen as I’ve read that for some people who suffer from hydrogen SIBO this could help. However, there isn’t really a good way of testing for SIBO in my country, and my GP says that at home breath tests are too unreliable at this point in time. So I’m not sure if oregano/berberine supplementation is going to be of much use. (GP discourages it atm anyway, although they also understand my desire for relief/treatment.)
I was in a very good place before this “relapse” and it’s really starting to take its toll on me. I wonder if anyone has any further ideas of what could be going on or what I might be overlooking. I may just have to accept that I’m never going to get rid of this, but I am really hoping for something that can alleviate my symptoms. At this rate it’s starting to affect my mental health as well and I’m also running into issues at work because of my fatigue.

My NOOM subscription expired today. It helped me reach the goal I targeted, and while I'm still looking to loose more, I've worked through nearly all the lessons, and don't see the need to continue paying...instead looking to use the free option.
As of yesterday, the last day of my paid subscription, my calorie Weight Loss Zone BEGAN at 1790 (often up around 2050 after my daily exercise) with the top end being around 2,500. I would typically go just over the minimum of my zone each day, so I know I'm remembering my numbers.
Today, the first day of my free use and the Weight Loss Zone starts at 1,560! A little more than 200 calories less...and it tops out at 2,070.
As I've gone through my journey, I would notice the bottom end slowly lowering, but never a jump like this. My weight hasn't fluctuated more than 2-3 pounds for the past few week, so I know nothing happened that would warrant a drop like this.
The only thing that's changed is I quit paying...and now I'm getting different numbers. I'm not afraid of going in on lower calories, but I am afraid of not eating enough calories to get into my zone.
Anyone know of what could cause this? I've double checked my info in settings, and it's all correct. Welcome any thoughts.

Apologies if i have posted in a wrong thread not sure what else to do.
Hey everyone. so i recently moved to denmark and been using Lunar bank as i did not have a chance to setup a proper bank account from get go, which i have done now.
About 3 weeks ago Money was spent from my account in Copenhagen, although i live in Aarhus. i called the bank right away, followed the steps (close bank account, change MitID etc. ) Filed a police report, filled out they dispute.
They got back to me saying i am at fault, and since the amount is below 8K they are not required to pay me. Now i moved from London where scams are part of daily life. I found it odd you have to write your address on CV, cause that is something we dont give out lightly let alone share bank details. This is what they sent me after i asked how they reached their conclusion so fast.
The transactions have been approved with ApplePay, where personal security measures have been used. You explain that you have not carried out the transactions yourself, which means your card must therefore be connected to another device. A payment card can be linked to a new wallet on a new device in two different ways.

1. Via the Lunar Bank app, where you log in to your bank app, either with MitID, Biometric login or by entering your 4-digit code. Inside the Lunar Bank app, you will be able to press a button under the card section, which adds the card to the device you are logged in with. When this happens, you will be asked to enter the code for your phone to confirm the connection to the wallet.
2. You enter card information in your wallet app on your phone, after which you will receive an activation code via SMS, which must verify that you want to connect your card to a wallet.

I have Lunar on my personal apple wallet, but how that translate to another device i do not understand. i have not given anyone my details. Have never been to Copenhagen. I feel stuck, i lost 4k they used it in 7/11 at DSB Copenhagen at 10pm.
What can i do? Is this a hard lesson learned and move on or can i fight this? Would appreciate any advice. I have already opened an account at Dansk Bank.

*Warning, long post*
Something that I have been pondering my orb about for a long time, is the (causal) relationship the planes have with each other and how they affected another, either directly or indirectly.
I will start with an overview of the planes and their known (meaning explored in canon and kanon sources) relationships with each other. I added sources for some of the statements, because I am a nerd, mainly Exploring Eberron. They might not be perfectly precise though, and some parts of my statements may be from other sources, so sorry if I forgot to add them.
It is a common theme of eberron that the planes are largely self-contained, unchanging, concept-dominated realities, safe for a few exceptions (Dal Quor, Thelanis, Dolurrh), and that they do largely not interact with one another. Furthermore, their inhabitants either don't care about the happenings on other planes (ExE 144) or simply study/monitor them, like the panopticon of Daanvi (ExE 151) or the schoolars of Syrania (ExE 189-190, 193). (Addition: Curiously, this part is a bit contradicted by the astral plane section of Chronicles of Eberron (Page 113), which states that outer planar immortals use the astral plane to travel between the outer planes. Examples are an archfey being transported to daanvi for judgement or a syranian virtue traveling to the infinite archive. So there appears to be some kind of interaction and interest for another among the outer planes.)
The material plane is the centre of the planar system where all the planar concepts come together, and it feels the effects of the planes the most, due to manifest zones, wild zones and the lunar phases.
The likes of Daanvi, Kythri, Xoriat, Lamannia, Mabar, Irian, Fernia, Risia, Shavarath and Syrania are not affected by happenings on neither the material, nor other planes. Events that transpire in the material, for example, no matter how cataclysmic they may be (like the eon-spanning reign of the overlords, the reality-transforming experiments of the Daelkyr and the destruction of the moon cyra, are simply (seemingly) inconsequential to them (Except for Daanvi's Solar of Dal Quor, Tyrala, who vanished after leaving to investigate Dal Quor after Cyra's destruction (ExE 150)).
On the other hand, the likes of Dolurrh, Dal Quor and Thelanis strongly feel the effects of events on the material, and to some degree even another.
Dal Quor's dream of the age is very likely (We don't entirely know) determined by the collective emotions and dreams of the mortals of the material plane, over extended periods of time (ExE 153). The Age of the Dreaming Dark was probably ushered in due to the destruction of Cyra and the detremential consequences it had for the giants and the material world as a whole.
Similairly, Thelanis is affected by the stories mortals tell, and their archfey are actively manipulating events on the material plane to make sure that they stay in power, grow in power, or that a rival looses power (ExE 195). Furthermore, the Feyspires of the Moonlit Valey manifest regulairly in specific manifest zones of the material plane, during the coterminous phases of Rhaan, leading to even greater interaction with the material. Thanks to the mourning, some or all of these might even be (If one wants it to be so in their eberron) permanently manifested on the material plane (ExE 196). Additionally, some of the Feyspires are even linked to other planes, like Shae Tirias Tolai to Dolurrh (https://keith-baker.com/silver-and-bone/) or Taer Lian Doresh (ExE 154).
Dolurrh is logically affected and based on the continued precept of mortals dying. The mortal soul passes to dolurrh after death and is proccessed through the planes natural effects (ExE 156-157), and later on through the more precise processing by the librarian, the smith of souls or the queen of the dead herself (ExE 157-158). All in all, every event that transpires in dolurrh is connected to the precept of mortal death, which makes sense, as it is its purpose to serve as the end of the journey, or the beginning of the next (ExE 156). While something like this has probably never happened before, if by some means no mortals would die anymore, dolurrh's existence would essentially be defunct. This is more of a strong hypothetical, yes, but my point for these planes stands.
Drastic changes on the material will change cause drastic changes to the three aformentioned planes. Mortal dreams and feelings change the theme of Dal Quor's heart, mortal stories and tales change the themes of thelanis and mortal soul processing is essentially the entire 'economy' of dolurrh, so to speak.
For the final part of this overview, I want to talk about Xoriat. In Exploring Eberron (Exe 199) it was established that the Xoriat exists out of time and that the daelkyr can reshape the material plane as they see fit, by manipulating its position in the maze of reality. This happened at least once and possibly even numerous times. When the prime material plane is changed and the former incarnation discarded, it does not simply change the present, but also the past and the future. Thus Xoriat's influence is not simply limited to time-travel, but even the alteration of the timeline itself into an alternate reality. When this happens or happened, some things remain(ed) unchanged. The progenitors, as the creators of the multiverse, always remain, but their battle might have transpired differently. As described in the Keith's blog post on Gem Dragons (https://keith-baker.com/dm-gem-dragons/), in 'Githeberron' Khyber might not have destroyed Siberys' body, but instead his mind, giving an explanation for the source of psionics as opposed to arcane magic. This was called the 'Dream of Siberys', as opposed to the Blood of Siberys, and the Gem dragons are the children of eberron infused with the Dream of Siberys. In the comments, Keith even suggest that in Githeberron or another alternate reality, Khyber was broken apart by Eberron and encased a wounded Siberys to stabilize him, creating a Ring of Khyber and a underworld of siberys instead. In the same comment, he states that the maze of reality can only affect the material plane and the outer planes remain unchanged, supporting the concept that they were constructed as the building blocks of material reality.
With these points in mind, I have been wondering about the impacts and consequences of the following hypothetical a canon events. I would like to hear your opinions on these.
Age of Demons: During the Age of Demons, which supposedly lasted since almost the beginning of time and for eons, the godlike overlords reigned over the mortal children of eberron and the celestial children of siberys uncontested. There was nothing but suffering, misery, agony, fear, it was literal hell on eberron for most of the world's history. - During that time, how would this have affected the planes? As far as I know, this was never adressed before in any capacity. - Did the perpetual suffering of mortals lead to a permanent nightmare dream of the age on Dal Quor? - Did this constant of mortal suffering lead to the layers of Thelanis being mainly defined by sorrowful and dark stories, for misery is all mortal-kind knew during this age? - Did Feyspires manifest on eberron during that time, and if so, what relationship could the fiends have had with the fey?
Reality-Rewrite by the Daelky: As mentioned in the overview, the daelkyr have, at least once, fully rewritten the entire history of the material world. While I already pointed out that most planes are self-contained and either don't care or mostly don't care about the material, there are some things that are bugging me about the premise of this entire concept. - If the planes are unaffected by the meddling of the daelkyr with the material, does that mean that, for example, the infinite archive of daanvi contains the knowledge of not just the entire history of our prime material plane, but every other prime material plane that has ever existed? And if not, does that mean its archives are being rewritten everytime the prime material changes, thus meaning it is affected indirectly? - The same goes for the vault of memories of dolurrh. Are the stored memories of mortals erased and replaced by those of the dead of the new reality, or does the vault contain the memories of the dead of previous incarnations of the material plane? - Similairly to the parts about thelanis and Dal Quor during the Age of Demons, are the Dream of the Age and the stories of Thelanis rewritten to fit the themes of the newly imposed material reality, or do they stay the same? - On that note, do you think the Daelkyr have to conquer a world first to be able to reshape it with the maze of reality, or can they just do it at any time? If the former is necessary, how is it possible that a single dragon, Vvaraak, had the knowledge of how to (potentially) permanently halt the advancement of the daelkyr and prevent them from rewritting reality as we know it? It seems absurd that no one in the past incarnations of reality had that idea before, especially as Githeberron was described as a far more harmonous and united world (See Sardior https://keith-baker.com/dm-gem-dragons/), with just as powerful and knowledgable dragons. (Note: This point can probably be easily resolved by keeping the incomprehensible and enigmatic plans of the daelkyr in mind, for they may be even want to be bound and knew this would happen.) - Finally for Xoriat, if the planes are unaffected, does that mean that they may have remains of mortals or mortal meddling of past incarnations of the material in some of their layers? For example, the frost giants are living on risia, essentially preserved forever, due to the plane's properties. If that is the case, would the astral plane not be the only plane with remains of past incarnations of eberron, as described in Chronicles of Eberron (Page 114). And if the remains vanish once the material is rewritten, these planes are also indirectly affected by the meddling of the daelkyr
Destruction of Cyra and the moons in general: The destruction of the moon cyra, by the Cul'sir dominion, is a monstrous fact in itself, with immense implications. - If the moons are the anchors of the outer planes to the material, and are an essential part of the material plane itself, what would happen if they are all destroyed? Would the material plane even be able to continue to properly function, or would it only affect manifest zones and have no other effect whatsoever (as it seems to be the case with Dal Quor, and to some extent Xoriat with the Gatekeeper seals). If the later is true, why do the moons exist in the first place? What is their purpose in the fabric of the material plane (Except for being a really cool gameplay and narrative tool for interplanar shenanigans)? - Regarding the former part, do the dragons simply have the power to destroy the moons and cut of all the planes from the material forever? They teached the giants arcane magic, and while the giants likely developed the means to destroy the moon themsevles, the dragons could surely do it as well without many problems. - Another curious fact is mentioned in the Dal Quor section of Exploring Eberron (Page 159), which states that not even planeshift or astral travel can get you to Dal Quor or vice versa. The later is further elaborated on in the astral plane section of chronicles of eberron (Page 115), which states that the color pools (which allow interplanar travel between the planes and the astral plane) of Dal Quor are impossibly black and inaccessable. With these two things in mind, are the moons not evidently much more important to the multiverse as a whole than just for the material plane? Without the moons, interplanar travel by any means is impossible, for any plane. To further emathize on my former point with this, do the dragons simply have the power to destroy the fabric of the entire multiverse by blowing up the moons? That would be incredibly wild and almost absurd, and I cannot imagine that the inhabitants of the outer planes would simply not care, if their only means of interplanar travel is destroyed by the seemingly irrelevant mortals. - Finally, this also brings up a wild question regarding my penultimate part about the previous section for the daelkyr: Could one theoretically blow up Lharvion and prevent the daelkyr from ever meddling with the material plane again, and thus preventing them from altering reality? Also, if the effects of the destruction of cyra are present in the timeless astral plane, which contains countless remains of stuff from the previous incarnations of eberron, and even prevent the other planes from reaching Dal Quor, does that mean Cyra has been wiped out from all possible incarnations and alternate timelines of eberron? This hypothesis is probably the wildest one in this whole post!
Finally, I want to ask you all: What theories do you have about the planes and their interconnections? How do they interact in your eberron, if at all? What things transpired between them in your eberron and what wild events occured in your planar systems?
With all that said, I think I finally reached the end of my essay. Thanks to anyone who takes their time to read this post and I am very curious about your opinions and theories. Cheers! ^^

As the title says, this past Friday night (technically Sat morning, 05/11/2024, at like 12:30am), I got too blasted drunk and lost all of my modern everyday needs in a Lyft.
Story below if you want, but my basic question is: How would I go about getting Lyft to contact me (or rather, my partner, since I don't have my phone)? I have already contacted the person who called the ride, and let them know what I lost and asked if they can help me (they did not respond). I then filled out the lost item form on Lyft, and responded to their confirmation email with additional details. I don't know what else to do. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We were a group of four: Myself, two of my besties, and their friend/upstairs neighbor who I had just met that night (Let's call them 'Olive'). We are hanging out at Olive's place, and they call a Lyft for us to all go over to their other friend's place (We'll call them "Grimby"). I barely remember anything about the Lyft ride, I was already so toasted by this point. I don't drink much at all, and when I was asked out for the night, I thought we would all be chilling at Olive's for the whole evening, so I let loose with the pace of the group for once. Anyway, I realize shortly after arriving at Grimby's that I do not have my phone, but I vaguely remember setting on the counter at Olive's, so I figure I can just retrieve it the next day if anything. Safe friends, all good, I forget about it. The night goes on.
The next morning, I go over to the besties' house and ask if they can tell Olive I'm here, and ask if I could grab my phone. Olive's roommate let's me in, I look around a bit, but my phone is nowhere to be seen. Olive asks Grimby if it's at their place, and they say they haven't seen it. I ask the besties if they can message my partner, and get him to send a screenshot of my location. My phone is definitely dead at this point, but the screenshot showed my phone's location to be waaaaay far away from anywhere the four of us had been last night, so we discern that I must have left it in the Lyft, along with my ID and cards, which are in a pocket on the back of my phone.
As I said, I've contacted Olive and Lyft both, letting them know exactly what I lost and a visual description of everything. It has been four weekdays with no response from either party, and I'm so disheartened by everything. I check my bank acct regularly, and no one has tried to use my cards for anything. Today, I ordered a new phone and drivers license, and will cancel my cards as soon as I confirm I don't need them for anything I've forgotten thus yet.
​
If anyone has been in a similar situation and had to jump through hoops to get their items back, I will literally do so much to achieve that outcome; I hate the idea of my stuff floating around out there, even if I have replaced it all. I also have heavy emotional attachment to physical objects and tend to anthropomorphize, and I just feel really sad specifically about my little phone being tossed aside and replaced when she was a perfectly good device with lots of life left; I've literally been crying about this (autistic, and also currently PMSing).