Circumstances

"Um, hi Sheriff," whimpered Casey, obviously filled with fear and embarrassment at the situation.

"What the hell is going on here," said the man in blue.

"I am so sorry, I wasn't thinking, I don't know what happened. One thing led to another, it was completely innocent at first I promise."

"Promise my ass," said the Sheriff, "Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you guys are in?"

"Well, actually..."

"Shut up, Joe," said Casey.

"Listen to the girl, young man. No amount of talking can get you out of this situation. Since you are, in fact, on somebody else's turf we will have to take it to them to see what is to be done about this. But, if it were up to me, I'd be taking you kids in for indecent exposure. You got that?"

"Yes, sir," said Joe, cowering in shame while struggling to find his clothes.

The two dressed and were lead by the sheriff to the administrative offices of the building to find an older gentleman, conservative in attire and grooming, hovering over a desk reading what looked to be official documents of some sort.

"I have two for you," the sheriff said, "caught 'em up in the attic stark naked doing god knows what. Their aroma is pungent, sir, of sin and negligence to the holy word."

"Alright, alright, I get the picture," said the older gent, "Just leave'em to me. I'll take care of it. You go off doing whatever it is you do."

The sheriff left the room, obviously frustrated that the owner did not ask to have the two removed from the premises right away and taken downtown. His footsteps carried on for about two more minutes before vanishing altogether.

I was young once as well, you know. When I was your age I got myself into all sorts of trouble. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll, you know? That was me. That was also then, and this is now. I grew up, got old, lost touch with the fun and fancy free that I used to have. When the two of you walked in, I knew what was going on. I saw the two of you trail off to the attic. I did it when I was young. If it were not for those experiences that I had when I was younger and vital, then I would not be the person that I am today. Certainly I'm not as wild as I used to be, I can't be. I had to grow up, get a job, become a respectable part of society. But I can never lose touch with the importance of those years. I may have lost touch with my youth, being at my age... it's understood to do so. But I will never forget my youth, and how much I loved it. I want people your age to love it just as much as I did, hence why I said nothing when you young lovebirds went up and into that attic. I simply don't care. I knew that if I left you in the hands of that bastard cop he would have taken you downtown and created a whole mess of problems for you. Not at all necessary. Stay young, my friends... but next time, keep it out of the attic.

"Wow, sir, I can't even begin to thank you," said Joe.

"No thanks necessary, son, just take care of yourself."

The two left the office and the building altogether to go outside and have a cigarette. Joe began regaining color to his face while Casey hastily inhaled the sweet smoke emerging from her cigarette.

"So uh, that was close," she said.

"Next time will you listen to me?" asked Joe, through muted laughter.

"Nope," it was worth it, that motherfucker was awesome!"

"You are one who will never learn, my love. So what was it you were going to tell me in there? We got kind of interrupted."

Casey's face faded quickly from smiles to fear. She stomped out her cigarette and took Joe's hands. The feeling in Joe's stomach dropped. It, too, went fast from an adrenaline rush to impatient, fearful anticipation.

"I'm pregnant."

Sing Sing Love Song.

You'll Go To Hell for What Your Dirty Mind is Thinking.

Mali, fuming and sorely wishing she could exhale pure flame, snapped the plastic cover of her PDA closed. She rose to her feet. Gordon and Parker, who flanked her on either side, exchanged a look, shrugged, and offered her their forearms, which she accepted. She lead them toward the front of the gymnasium where the ticket counter - a small red contraption, shaped like a conk shell, that distributed numbers to those who wished to address the audience - was being manned by a gangly, ruby-faced teenager. She refused to let her stare fall away from the boy as she approached.

Joe and Casey, left behind in the wake of Mali's indignation, exchanged sighs and carefully drew into one another. Casey wrapped her arm around Joe's waist (it felt so much thinner now, perhaps she should get him to eat more?) and Joe tickled the soft flesh of her right palm with all of his fingers.

"What do you think?" Joe inquired. He noticed her gaze was fixed on a door at the far end of the gymnasium. Casey turned her head and pecked him on the lips before leaping to her feet and sauntering toward the exit. Joe followed, tethered by a leash he could not see, only sense.

They reached the door and Casey studied the crowd nearby. No one was paying them any mind as the angry Asian man continued his tirade up on the stage. She looked to Joe for approval; he shook his head "No" and frowned. A cheer came up from the crowd and Casey, after offering Joe a grin, ducked into the doorway and disappeared up a long flight of dark stairs. Joe sighed, struck his head against the frame once, shoved his hands in his pockets, and followed.

He lost her midway up the stairs, as the flights turned and twisted, occasionally plateauing into a landing before again resuming the ascent of steps. "Casey?" he called. No answer.

Once he reached the top, the tired muscles in his calves ached and burned, defaming his insistence on climbing with hot acid to lap at his joints. He huffed and bent over, bracing his hands on his knees. Three coughing fits and a couple minutes later, air finally settled in his lungs and he again called her name.

"Casey? Where are you? I don't think we're supposed to be up here," he shouted, studying his surroundings. He found himself in what he supposed was the attic, a long expanse of sloping ceilings and moth-eaten storage bins. Several strings of Christmas lights stretched above and in front of him, his only source of light in the shadows.

"Joe? Come to me," Casey's voice called from the far end of the attic.

Joe found her sitting behind a barricade of crates (labelled "Annual Kidney Disease Bake Sale") on a salmon-colored blanket that appeared immune to the ravages of time, dust, and moth alike. She had curled her legs under her and draped the excess of the cloth across her lap so that only the mounds and shadows of the suggestion of her lower half were detectable. She smiled up at him and offered him her hand. When he accepted, she gently pulled him down to sit in front of her.

"I really don't think we're supposed to be here, you know."

Her hands moved beneath the blanket for a time, then appeared. She held the die.

"Tell me a story," she asked, smiling.

"Casey -"

She shook her head and allowed the die to fall from her fingertips. It fell into the blanket, rolled only twice, and settled on four.

"Casey, please, I really think we should go find the others. Mali's probably speaking by now."

"You have a story to tell," Casey insisted softly.

Joe sighed and rested his back against the crates behind him, then began.

Be thankful for small miracles, he told himself. There were no leaks in the ceiling above or around their bed, so they kept dry on nights like this when God was up to his old antics of trying to drown all of creation. Everywhere else in their home? Now that's a different story.

He held her as she softly purred her song of sleep, her back cradled against his stomach and their legs drawn into each other's, mercilessly entangled. His feet had gone to sleep the same time as she and now teased him with pinpricks. His right hand was her pillow, slid just between the back of her neck and the soft flesh just below her ear; her golden hair tickled the insides of his fingers every time she breathed. His left hand, he was not ashamed to admit, cupped the pearl-white skin of her breast, and he felt every heartbeat. He'd stay awake all night if it meant this.

How did I find you? he asked her in his head. But of course, he remembered.

He had noticed her while subjecting himself to one of the more rigorous competitions his fraternity had invented: a test to see who could consume the most Starbucks double shot espressos in ten minutes. With a snap of his elder brother's fingers, he and another pledge lifted the chilled cans to their lips and drank deep.

At first, it didn't seem so bad. He liked espresso.

Then came the second. And the third. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth. He was starting to not like espresso by the twelfth. At sixteen, he swore he'd never give Starbucks another time of his money. By twenty-two, he was conspiring to burn down every local franchise he could find.

To get his mind off the sluice of silky fluid pouring down his throat, he let his eyes wander. Campus was alit with the first day of a new semester. Students strode in massive, snaking lines between buildings, each as unique as the last and all sporting the same expression of dulled excitement.

Suckers, he thought. He'd skipped his morning classes that day and felt all the wiser in doing so.

Then, he saw her.

She strode with timidity, her footsteps carefully placed one after another. The confident strides belonged to the German shepherd who strode ahead of her, its tail wagging back and forth like a metronome, its pink tongue lazily spilling from the left side of its black gums. A red harness, fixed around the dog's waist, led to a handle that she gripped in her right hand. They approached a bench, which she discovered by tapping one of its legs with the toe of her right shoe. She said something to the dog and it heeled. Gingerly, she felt her way to her seat and cooed to her companion, who responded with a warm bark and more wagging of its tail.

"Time!" his elder called. It didn't matter. His challenger had been met with defeat but a moment before as the deluge of coffee came pouring back out of his throat. His elder clapped a hand on both of their shoulders and announced the victor. He'd make a fine addition to their fraternity, the elder told him.

It still didn't matter.

With the contest concluded and his manhood appeased, he quickly jogged over to her. She stared straight ahead from behind large black shades, gently stroking the soft fur between her dog's ears. The dog watched him intently as he approached, cocking its head as if to say "Hello, friend. Don't be a fuck up or I'll rend your limbs."

She was beautiful. Her hair was the color of sun-stained wheat and fell across her shoulders like rain. Her skin was pale and spotted with the faintest of freckles across her cheeks and forearms, but her legs, exposed for less than a foot between the hem of her skirt and the tops of her high-boots, were immaculate and featureless. Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing, constrained and (he imagined) gasping for air within the confines of her ribbed fleece turtleneck. She was smiling softly, a feature that seemed more permanent than perfunctory.

"Handsome dog you have there," he said.

"I wouldn't know," she replied. It seemed neither shallow nor self-deprecating, but warm instead. She extended her free hand in an open gesture. "My name's Alice."

He remembered all of it, even now, even the taste of twenty-some-odd espressos chilling his insides. He wanted only to hold her, to keep her warm and dry in the face of the tempest raging beyond their window. She sighed in her sleep and he drew her closer. 

At their feet, her guide lay patiently, his black eyes fixed on them. Over the years, his expression had gradually molted, though perceptible of course only to him; from a look of distrust to a look of betrayal, the kind of stare a man might receive from the husband of the housewife he's known.

"Sorry, boy," he said. The dog only sighed and curled his snout to tail and drifted off to sleep.

Joe finished and realized Casey had drawn him into her lap, his head nestled in the valley of blanket between her knees. He shivered slightly, the cold drafts of the attic creeping under his clothes and raising gooseflesh across his shoulders, but he felt the heat of her and it warmed his bones. He rose to kiss her, their mouths parting and a sigh escaping her. His hand slid beneath the blanket and felt the warm flesh of her thigh beneath his fingertips.

He broke the kiss by only an inch. "You- -?"

Casey closed her eyes and smiled, guiding his hand under the blankets to the greatest warmth she possessed. He explored her with his fingers and felt hers tugging at his belt.

"This can't be a good idea."

Her small, nimble fingers crept inside his jeans and found evidence to the contrary. She wrapped him, too, in her blanket and he pushed, sliding inside her. His eyes met hers.

"Joe, I--"

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?!" came a man's voice. They both looked and shook with a start.

Neither had the foresight to keep the blanket wrapped around them; it fell away, exposing them in full to the tall, middle-aged man in blue whose badge read "Sheriff".

Trolling

"Personally, I like the idea of heroism, of what makes a hero. I totally get you Joe because it's true. Moralistically, for a character to be a villain, they've got to have a reason, a definition to their form. Heroes? It's easy because it's the right thing to do. Villains you have to legitimize, give depth to their struggle, otherwise they're shallow, facile at best.

But

Heroes for me aren't necessarily about the characters themselves, it's about what it means to be a hero. They struggle against adversity, always attempting to do the right thing, even when the world is against them. Villains take the easy way out. They say fuck it and take another road rather than sticking with the right thing. That takes balls my friend."

That was the most Mali spoke outside storytelling. The only ones to realize this were Joe and Casey. Parker was musing out the window at the wide open sky, carrying in his eyes hope that his personal deity would encourage current situations and negate the past, lest it haunt his future. Gordon found himself comfortably resting, a hat hood hiding his unconscious face. None of them felt an overwhelming desire to wake him, though his food was getting cold. The particular diner they found themselves in was peculiar. Everybody knew everyone's name. It was obvious the establishment wanted to integrate them as well, given the entirety of the wait staff, 3 waitresses with an age rank Gordon declared quietly as "fresh" to "microwaved", greeted them with an introductions and pleasantries. It was off putting to the strangers present.

They decided to consume their food quickly, turning away the slices of Americana in favor of a swift withdraw, one that was delayed by a bizarre recount of a dream Gordon had awoke to. As they exited the overly zealous restaurant, a flyer found itself under the heel of Joe's shoe. It contained a rather derogatory image of the President Elect with fun words like "socialism," "communism" and "Marxist" below it.

After a quick perusal of the sheet, Joe found what he was looking for. Stretched across the bottom in communist red was a paragraph detailing a story session for those who wanted to vent their frustrations at the impending administration that, in print declared "would be the downfall of western society."

Joe lifted the form, drawing attention to the storytelling portion of the event.

"Who doesn't want to hear crazies talk. It'll be amusing at the very least. We just need to remember to keep ourselves under control." Casey glared at Gordon specifically, who was still making large attempts at gaining full consciousness.

"What love, I'll keep me knickers about me"

"Damn well better. I don't want to spend the night running from a very angry Mormon mob."

The building was a local youth center, located in the heart of the city, a city which still didn't have a name as far as they were concerned. They opened the doors just as the speaker, an Asian American fellow in his mid 20's began to speak.

"Hello, Tasty Max's Pizza, what can I get for you today."

"My name is George........"

"Sikorski, we know. You've ordered pizza 37 times in the last three years. We've run a simulator on everything you've ever ordered from any outside food sources and believe you are going to order a one topping, probably pepperoni and garlic bread with 91% accuracy. Is that what you would like?

"......Yeah, could I get a two liter with that?"

"Absolutely. Your total comes to $62.98."

"What? Go over everything on the bill for me."

"Well sir, the meal is $12.95, then you have a service tax, income tax, state tax, federal tax, pizza tax delivery tax and a monetary tax: that puts your order at $40.58. National Health Insurance has advised us to charge anyone who orders red meat that also has a high cholesterol level or that has a history of heart problems. Since it's Friday, the Catholic Church has also issued a charge to any declared Catholics who eat meat on Friday during Lent, a portion of which goes to the federal government. That brings your total to $62.98.

We could offer you a healthy organic alternative. It doesn't have a particular taste and it cost the same, but it will save you some money in the next three years."

Mali didn't even want to hear the end. She was livid.

49 Tales Later

Gordon awoke, finding himself completely alone in the small town in Utah. He sat up on the bench that he nodded off on, and looked around, seeing absolutely no one.

"The fuck..." he said to himself, and stood up and started to wander around, looking for any sign of life. As he searched for someone, he heard a the shuffling of footsteps, and then a loud crash, as if someone had knocked over pots and pans.

"This ain't fuckin' funny mate! Is that you Joe? parker?" Gordon asked, peering arouns the corner of the small greasy spoon that the group had stopped at. He slowly crept in, making sure not to make any sudden movements. as he slowly moved forward, he heard a slight growling.

"Ok, come the fuck out, I'm done fuckin' around!" Gordon said, as he slowly inched towards the kitchen. As he moved forward, he saw what looked like a pool of blood on the floor. He finally entered the kitchen, and looked on in horror at what he saw next.

One of the waitresses was eating the cook.

"WHAT THE FUCK??!!" Gordon screamed, as he took of running out of the diner. The waitress quickly sprung up from the cook and bolted after him with tremendous speed. Gordon ran fatster than he had in his entire life, trying to escape the possesed waitress. He turned around as he ran, and saw that there were now four other "people" chasing him along with the waitress. He pumped his legs as fast as he could, and dove into an abandoned car, and franticly searched for a set of keys. He jerked down the sun visor, and a set of keys dropped ito his lap. He quicky popped the ky into the ignitoon, and tried to start the car, but to no avail. "C'mon you piece of shit!" Start!" he screamed. he looked into the rear view mirror, and watched as one of the people lunegd onto the top of the car and started clawing at the roof. The other surrounded the car, as Gordon tried desperatly to start the car. When it finally started, he sped off, throwing the man who was on top of the car in front of him. As it stood up, he slammed into it, causing the person to explode into a combiniation of blood and entrails. "Jesus!" Gordon yelled, as he kept driving. He looked around at his surrondnings, and saw that everywhere he looked, people where being attacked by hoardes of seemingly enraged people, who would then start to devour their victim.

After about a half hour of searching for a safe haven, the car sputtered to a stop. Gordon had ran out of gas. He scoured the car for any kind of supplied he could find. The only useful item he came across was a gun under the passanger seat. He grabbed the large revolver and left the car behind, quickly moving towards a small house to his left, trying to avoid detection from any of the enraged people. He kicked the door in, and pointed the gun in front of him, ready to shoot the first moving object. As he searched the house, he heard crying from the upstairs. He slowly moved up the stairs, and entered a bedroom on his right, where he found Mali curled into a ball on the side of the bed, whimpering to herself.

"Oh Jesus Mali, what the fuck is going on?!" he asked.

"I don't know! First we were all just sitting in the diner, and then you were knocked out from behind, and all of these people started attacking us! They were fucking eating Parker! I watched them! They fucking ate him!" she cried hysterically.

"Ok, just calm down. We'll get out of this. We just need a phone, or a car, or something." he said, as he searched the room for a phone.

"We need to get the fuck out of this town Gordon!" Mali cired.

"You don't think I realize that! Those fuckin' things are everywhere love! We can't exactly make a great escape without a vehicle. Just cause I'm a Brit don't mean I'm James fuckin' Bond!" Gordon yelled. As he finished his sentence, a hand reaches from under the bed and grabs Mali's ankle. She screams as she is pulled under the bed.

"MALI!" Gordon screams, as a huge spalsh of blood hits the wall. Gordon backs up into a wall, and an arm crashes through it, clutching Gordon and pulling him into the next room. He breaks free and turns around, and sees that the person who has attacked him is Joe, who looks at him with blood red eyes, and has blood spilling from his mouth. He slowly inches towards Gordon, growling at him.

"Ok mate, just calm the fuck down. I know we ain't always seen eye to eye, but that ain't no reason to go and start eating people." Gordon says, trying to reason the person who used to be Joe. Joe lunges at him, and Gordon fires off a shot aimed at his head, forcing him to crash into a wall. Joe slides down the wall, dead.

"Well that was fuckin' close old boy." Gordon says to himself. As he turns around, he is quickyl attacked by Mali, who tackles him to the floor. The two struggle for a minute, before Mali takes a large chunk out of Gordons neck.

'JESUS FUCKIN' CHRIST!" Gordon screams, as he quickly sits up, and realizes that everyone in the diner is staring at him.

"Dude, chill out. It's just a chili dog." Casey says to him.

"You'll never believe the fuckin' dream I just had." Gordon says, as he starts to decribe the horrors that just went through his head.