Bad Choices (Hypernaturals 8)

Be-Warehouse

There was moaning from those merely critically injured rather than out and out stone dead. Moaning did not equal movement of any significant sort. This is the dead and the soon to be dead even if we left now and did nothing else.

Not counting Pierre.

Morgan and I went up to the stage, where Pierre lay after Skye pounded him. We smacked him a few times to wake him up.

He sat up, bleary-eyed, and we hauled him roughly to his feet.

"So. Bad news I am afraid Pierre. My husband and I have decided you cannot have our daughters after all. Sorry. We never so no takebacks." Morgan is still a bit giddy it seems. I get it. "You see, Pierre: We do not have two daughters. We have four. One of them is named Nakoma, and she used to be your granddaughter."

Skye stepped over and said very, VERY angrily: "Used to be. Now she is MY granddaughter. You slimy piece of shit."

Pierre looked at Skye with apprehension. He is more afraid of her than Morgan or I. Makes sense. Skye dropped a guy near him from the roof and clobbered him brutally. Pierre was not awake for the song and dance routines.

"How many did you get?" I asked Morgan.

Morgan raised her eyebrows and looked back at the room, considering. "I shot those ten guys over there. Got a few more with my hands. Call it fourteen?"

"That gun really gave you an unfair advantage. Even with the little guy swinging around, who is no longer cute by the way, I don't think I got more than seven or eight. Also, I take credit for the chair that was shot."

"I got that many from the front row after I pounded this jerk." Skye said, getting into the competition element of it. "Oh, and that guy up on the catwalk." She pointed up.

Rachel said "Yes, well, I only got a few, but most of them were runners like Rudolph there."

"Rachel!" Helen said, then to us "I will find more bullets, somewhere in one of these piles. I just did not have a chance to look yet."

"You were too busy making Pervert salad with your hands to look. for bullets" Jessica told her. "I don't think you bit a single one of them, this time."

"Drug dealers, I'll bite. Especially ones that want to make ME into a spinner." I got a dark look from Helen at that reference. That is exactly where I mined that from: Helen and my first adventure together. "This level of animal? No way I would spoil my mouth. Yuch." Helen told her

I turned back to Pierre "So, Pierre. That's where it all stands now. A few of your fellow creeps are alive somewhere in that pile as you can hear, but not for long. You are not going to survive either, just so you know. We wanted you to know before we kill you what happened. Nakoma is not only alive but she is safe. Your son is alive but long, long gone. Your friends are dead or at least dead soon. We need to decide how we are going to kill you."

"Let us think about it while we work." Morgan suggested.

Pierre was looking about the meeting area and trying to be very non-obvious about it. It is all bodies and tipped over chairs at the moment. An odor of gunpowder hung in the air from the twenty-eight shots fired.

"You know he is going to try to make a break for it." Rachel said, watching him.

"Why did we stand him up again?" I asked rhetorically.

"So he could see better." Morgan said to me even as she directed Pierre's attention to the former audience. "See what he has brought upon himself. Never mess with Nakoma. That is what happens."

"A lesson you only get to learn one time, at the end of your life." Skye said. She really does not like Pierre.

Helen gave Pierre a direct, into the center of the face, piston-style punch. Pierre toppled. He lay on the ground holding his face and groaning.