SONDER (IV): tmr thomas

022: I should call

Dawn 22

I found a gun hiding in the cockpit. It is a small, old-looking handgun, probably from the 21st century, or something. So tiny that it only carries five bullets. I have no idea how Jorge got his hands on it, but it's pretty cool. More dangerous than a Launcher and easier to carry.

I take the gun with me, along with a box of ammo (Jorge has hundreds of boxes stored away in here) and move into the main room. After a few minutes, I figure out how to load it. Michelle was always the one who is good with tech, so I'm kind of surprised I manage to get it this far.

After lifting the storage panels for like, an hour, I find a foam target, with indents from bullets. I shake my head in disbelief. This is so cool. So shucking cool.

I have only been alone for like, twelve hours now, but I am already bored out of my mind. I made pasta for breakfast, and now I am making pasta for lunch. The gun waits on the floor for me to finish eating. This meal, I eat the noodles plain. It is somehow worse than Fry-pan's cooking. Shuck, I miss it, like, intensely.

I make my way back to the cockpit. The dishes are beginning to pile up, but I literally can't clean them. Maybe I should've gone with Newt, if just to not be alone. There are a couple of books here, but I don't really feel like trying to grill my brain with information.

On the floor are drawings I've made with the few sheets of paper I could find. I drew the ocean, and all of our friends (they are all little stick-figures), and I even drew me climbing the walls. Now, I am definitely not an artist. Like, not even a little bit. However, they have a kind of charm to them. I wonder if WICKED let us doodle, although I doubt it. When Michelle and Leo come back, I can ask them what they remember about the past.

In the cockpit, I scan the top of it. I want to press, like every single glowing red button on here, and flip ever shucking switch, but that is probably a bad idea. On the ground behind them, I see a small screen with a play button. I press it, and some folk music rings out, buzzing through the Berg.

It's a song I don't know, but so is every song. I make my way back to the cockpit, spinning and leaping as I go. If the Flare wasn't a thing, and WICKED wasn't either, I could become a ballerina. I'm pretty tall and lean after all, and no, that isn't just from starving at the hands of WICKED (although that is part of it).

I sway my hips, picking the gun off the ground. With the target set up, I'm good to go. I try to hum along to the melody, but the song keeps changing dramatically. I tap my foot to the beat, raising the gun. When we reach the song's climax, I fire the gun at the target.

The loud bang cuts through the music. My shoulders recoil from the force of the bullet launching itself through the air. As I stumble backwards, my foot lands on a pen and I fall to the ground. My back aches from landing on the metal, although I'm thankful that the gun didn't go off again.

That could've gone worse than I had expected, right?

The next hour feels like a montage. I'm doodling again, filling the page with drawings of flowers and of decapitated pigs. The same song repeats over and over. Eventually, I learn a few of the words (I've come to realize that half of the song is in Spanish and the other half in English, and while Ella might know a couple of languages, I know only the one that I am currently speaking to you in), so I sing until my voice grows dry and it feels like I am screaming. I continue to dance, until my feet begin to stomp on the ground over and over again.

I pick up the gun and fire it. Even though I don't miss the target, I'm not good. I figure out that I need to bend my knees slightly, and that I shouldn't close my eyes. Instead, I line up the red dot on the end of the barrel between these two things that are closer to me, and after that my aim really improves. The bullet rips into the target, and then another does. Once I am through the first round, I reload it. My hand keeps lifting at the last minute, and I'm worried that I am going to shoot the ceiling.