The Boss's Daughter

01

Things have been good for us since shit hit the fan. It took us a little while to build up our group and our system, but ever since we finalized it, it's been great. We never have to worry about food or water or where to sleep. And we especially don't have to worry about people fucking with us.

     My dad is feared. Which is why I fear nothing. People cower away from him. Sometimes literally. Which can be a bad move for them, depending on the type of mood he's in.

     I get my best traits from him. My confidence. My sassiness. My sarcasm. And for all these reasons, I'm feared too. Just like him. Maybe sometimes a little more so. I like to think that it's because of my deceiving innocence. A girl with a French braid in her long sandy blonde hair looks pretty harmless until she bashes someone's head in with a mace.

     Daddy sometimes calls me his little Gogo. He's a sucker for Tarantino movies. Says he likes the gore in them. Or he did. When we were able to watch them. I took a great likeness to them too, despite my age.

     I was always a pretty mature kid when it came to stuff like that. I never had to ask about the circle of life or the birds and the bees. I just sort of knew. I think Daddy was always grateful for that. He never had to go through the depressing conversation about what happens when you die or the awkward conversation of how sex works.

     Although, I could be wrong about his being grateful. He's quite blunt. I get that trait from him too. He has no problem telling someone that he's about to kill their best friend or their wife or their brother. Or all of them right then and there in no particular order.

Like I said, we are feared. Our presence is not taken lightly. Everyone knows we mean business. We do not bluff. And those who try to test it? Let's just say they never get to tell the tale. But the blood on Daddy's bat does a pretty good job of taking care of that for them.

Ole Lucille has been good to us. She's probably Daddy's best friend. The one he can always rely on other than me. He's had her since the beginning. He'd never admit to this, but I'm the one who thought of the barbed wire.

     Daddy already had the bat. It was my mom's when she played baseball with her friends as a kid. She was a bit of a tomboy growing up.

     Anyway, I was 12 when this all started. One day, when we started running low on food, we went outside. He took my mom's bat for protection. It was all we had at the time. He'd hit a few corpses with the bat and gotten a great amount of satisfaction out of it. We searched through a few houses and got enough food to last for a while.

     At one house, I was in the backyard on the swings while my dad was inside. There was a shack outside across from the swing set. The door was cracked, and something shiny inside caught my eye. When I went to see what it was, I was met by a corpse. It fell, luckily, giving me the advantage. I was able to take it out with a loose board resting against the shed.

     The shiny thing was a roll of barbed wire. As soon as I saw it, I got a crazy idea. The racket of my taking the corpse out alarmed my dad. He came running out just as I picked up the wire with a rag. I turned around and met his eyes.

     "For Momma's bat," I said, holding the wire out to him.

     He looked at the wire and smirked at me. "Oh, I like the way you think, little darlin'."

     When we got back, he fixed up the bat and declared its name Lucille. After my mom.