Saturday, December 12th, 12:00 p.m.

It had been a hard sell, but Michelle had been able to spin it. A tunnel collapse at the last showing of the Nueva Vista Drive-In. There were holes galore in the story. Swiss cheese would've looked more solid. Why didn't anyone else know about the movie? How did Michelle know about the movie? Why were there so many dead people in town on the same night?

To all of these legitimate questions, Michelle professed ignorance. Christopher, Michelle, Ron, and even Blujh all somehow managed to keep the story straight while the catatonic Diana hadn't been able to add or subtract from her account.

Michelle knew the Burley Police Department and society as a whole had a hard time swallowing her story, and Officer Young still wanted to arrest her. Yet, even he knew he didn't have enough evidence to do anything about it.

When Michelle finally touched base with Marty, he was practically salivating at the whopping mackerel of a potential story. He received her resignation instead. He begged and pleaded like every man that's just realized they've lost all their power, revealing themselves to be the straw men they indeed are. Ron put in his two weeks a couple of seconds later and had taken to sleeping on the couch in Michelle's apartment, so had Blujh, but she didn't mind. He had a lost look on his eyes that she recognized from her own face in the mirror,

The two of them stayed up until the wee hours watching movies, never speaking of what had happened. On the nights where Michelle could actually get some sleep, the spirits still haunted her, but a member had joined their ranks.

Officer Perry Durant played a recurring role in her dreams, but not as the man she remembered. His piercing, blue eyes still managed to cut through her defenses even with the glaze of a dead man. Where his heart had been, a ragged hole with sharp protrusions of bones had taken its place. A leering, burnt face hovered over the menagerie of spirits laughing hysterically, and Michelle would wake with her fists clenched. If it was in anger or fear, she could never tell.

Michelle didn't know what came next for her in the "big picture," but she knew that she wouldn't be able to rest while that monster roamed free. She had no idea where he could have gone. The man was paralyzed and weak with exhaustion but had still managed to give her the slip. She understood why he had done it, primarily if the fat toad had known what she had planned for him. A court of law was too good for that piece of shit. The fact it would be considered murder didn't even enter into the equation.

What's one more body to the pile?

Since the incident, Michelle couldn't muster up the energy to do much of anything and hadn't felt the familiar flood of violet protein swirling in her bloodstream. Good riddance. That was a piece of her life that had best remain locked away.

Reporters weren't known for their hefty wages, and Michelle did not have a lot of money saved up for an extended period of unemployment. Ron had posted ads on Craigslist to capitalize on his photography skills, but Michelle did not feel like she had a comparable talent to offer. Besides, interaction with other people was apotheosis to her current mindset. Over that month, Michelle's once robust drive had been reduced to a withered, atrophied gland to the point where she couldn't even find the energy to care about losing something that had been integral to her character. However, she did find out what all the fuss was about in Grey's Anatomy.

One uneventful evening in a string of uneventful evenings, on her nightly Walmart ice cream run, she noticed something happening in an alleyway to knock her out of complacency. A man had taken it upon himself to accost an older woman. The straps of the woman's purse were entangled in her fingers, so the thug was not able to wrestle it loose, so her entire body was yanked towards him when he tried to pull it from her. In his left hand, he held a knife and brandished it at the woman. To Michelle, it appeared like the weapon was just for show, a prop to scare the woman into complacency. She had seen weapons held with the intent to kill,

Michelle almost kept walking. Experience had shown she was no hero. The man was armed, and then Michelle would be putting her own life in danger. She didn't think the man wanted to use the knife to hurt anyone, but accidents happen. She wasn't doing anything with her life, but that didn't mean she was ready to give it up quite yet. Besides, it's not like the woman was in any real danger, or the man would have finished it already.

Despite Michelle's reservations, her feet started to move of their own accord like they were following a set of preprogrammed commands that superseded conscious thought. Instead of carrying her to what passed for home, they slapped against the pavement. Michelle Kim entered the alleyway. A tub of Cherry Garcia ice cream clattered to the ground, forgotten.

For the past month, Michelle's life had been devoid of physical activity, but her body still retained memories of when it was once a weapon. She moved the length of the alleyway with a sprinter's speed and agility. The familiar flood of violet endorphins did not accompany her, but Michelle barreled towards the man regardless.

The man was so focused on getting the purse and escaping; he didn't notice the lithe Asian woman bearing down on him. If he had seen her face at that moment, he would've run in the opposite direction. The woman shrieked, "Please, don't do this. My social security checks already aren't enough. Please, just please let me go."

"We all got problems, lady. Just give me the bag, and you won't have a hospital bill to add to the list," he said, eyes darting from side to side as if to look around to see if anyone had heard her shriek.

In his scan, the man noticed Michelle, and his eyes bugged out. He let go of the woman's purse so suddenly that she fell to the ground from the force of her own attempts to escape. The breath expelled from the woman in a white mist punctuated by a soft oomph as her butt hit the pavement. The man turned on Michelle with the knife clutched in his hand. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, reflecting the streetlight behind her. The blade shook like a leaf, the tip jittering as if in anticipation.

Before Michelle collided with the man, she realized it was not a man she was sprinting towards. It was a boy that couldn't have been older than fifteen years old. Long swatches of greasy blonde hair parted in the middle framing his face. Big red whiteheads, along with crater-like acne scars, painted the canvas of his. His gaunt cheeks suggested that it had been a long time since he'd had an actual meal.

Michelle spared a brief moment of pity for the kid as she ducked to the left, narrowly avoiding a clumsy knife lunge. She stepped inwards, dancing past the amateur strike, and lowered her shoulder. Shoulder collided with sternum. Despite her own slender physique, Michelle knocked the boy backward as if he were made of papier-mache.

They both fell to the ground, but the knife was still clutched in the boy's hand. She had hoped to dislodge it. She looked the boy in the eye and realized she didn't know what to do next. She didn't have the weight to hold him there, and the boy had already started trying to wriggle free. Now that she didn't have the element of surprise, Michelle had given up her only advantage. Although he looked frail, the kid's thrashing told a different story.

Michelle held the boy down long enough for the older woman to clear out of the alley and let out an audible sigh of relief. The kid had lost his last reason to keep up his assault. His target got away, and Michelle would give him $20 to slake his need for power. She didn't want to reward the boy's behavior, but she really didn't have a whole lot of other options. If the kid came away from this broke, he would repeat the attempt on a woman that wouldn't have Michelle to help, and she couldn't have held him down any longer for the authorities to arrive.

She let the pressure off the boy's chest and stood up to dust herself off. Michelle was wearing sweats and a T-shirt, but old habits die hard. While the boy struggled to get himself into a standing position, Michelle fished in the pockets of her sweats for her twenty-dollar bill. It was nowhere to be found.

Michelle's gaze fell back on the boy just in time to see him lunge towards her, knife outstretched.

"No," was all the boy said.

The knife felt like it had been dipped in fire as it slid into the right side of Michelle's abdomen. The blade felt like it ignited the contents of Michelle's stomach before being unceremoniously yanked back out. Blood welled from the wound, more blood than she was comfortable with.

The boy looked at the blood-soaked knife, looked at Michelle, and then looked back at the knife again. The knife clattered to the ground with a delicate, metallic tinkling that was at odds with the savagery it had just exacted on Michelle.

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," the boy repeated over and over like a prayer, "I'm real sorry lady, really sorry."

He stepped backward as he spoke, eyes locked on Michelle's. His eyes seemed to beg for forgiveness, but when he had gotten a sufficient distance away, he disappeared into the darkness of the alley, leaving Michelle to bleed out on the pavement. Oddly enough, she did want to forgive the boy.

Michelle felt a pleasant warmth seep into her socks. Blood had dripped down Michelle's clothes saturating her sweats and socks. A pool of blood started to spread out around her white sneakers.

The violet healing factor in her blood did not jump to her rescue as she slumped to her knees. She recalled a vague memory of a CPR lesson to keep pressure on wounds like this while waiting for emergency services.

But that's assuming they're on the way.

She pressed one hand over the wound while she used the other to pat herself down, looking for her phone, like the nonexistent twenty dollar bill, it was nowhere to be found.

Light-headedness threatened to pull her down, and she was tempted to let it. The world spun around her like one of those obnoxious rides at the fair that substituted substance for revolving around real fast, and Michelle knew that lying down on the ground and closing her eyes would stop the ride for good.

No.

She needed to call the authorities. Then she could rest.

She forced the world to stop spinning long enough to scan the alleyway to see where her phone had gone. It lay cracked on the pavement about fifteen feet from where she stood. Her lunge must have dislodged the contents of her pockets.

I survive a near-apocalyptic event in Lancet Falls, Idaho, but I die to a random mugging. Real smooth, Michelle. Real smooth.

Michelle lowered herself to the ground and started to scoot herself back down the alleyway without taking her hand from the wound. The result was an awkward, three-limbed effort that involved a lot of knee and palm scrapes. The thickness of her sweats shielded her from the worst of it, but she could still feel the pain through the cloth.

The hand holding the wound felt sticky and warm, and Michelle would not have been surprised if clotted blood wouldn't try to keep her hand there if she wanted to remove it. The sensation was somewhat akin to soda drying on your hand, an unpleasant stickiness that Michelle couldn't stand.

Soda? Why soda? I haven't had soda in years. If this is what your life flashing before your eyes are like, I must have led a pretty dull life.

After that, all coherent thoughts faded to the background. The journey to the phone became a mechanical process. The pain felt like it was happening to someone else, and a part of Michelle watched that Asian woman drag herself towards a cracked phone. From Michelle's birds-eye view, it didn't look like the woman was going to make it.

What a shame. She seems so nice.

When Michelle was a meager three feet from her phone, she stopped any forward progress. Her arm still moved back and forth, but it no longer had the strength to keep moving her. Before too long, the hand stopped moving also, and Michelle stared at a brick in a wall. A pattern in the brick looked like the state of Texas. To a blood-deprived mind, a state-shaped brick was possibly the most fascinating thing in the world.

The brick started to float into the air, and Michelle had a hard time tracking it. It wasn't until her head hit the pavement that she realized the brick hadn't been floating; she'd been falling. The impact didn't hurt so bad. Her hair cushioned the worst of it.

A part of Michelle's mind knew that closing her eyes would be a bad idea, but her eyelids felt so heavy. Michelle blocked out all the pain and all the thoughts of trying to get help. She needed to focus on one thing, keeping her eyes open. Michelle had always been good at staring contests, but this one was for life and death.

There was no telling how much time had passed before her vision started to blur, and her eyes began to droop. It could have been seconds, or it could have been hours, but the result was the same. Red light flooded her field of vision—the sound of rapid footfalls approaching her lulled her to sleep.

An aggressive beeping woke Michelle from her slumber. She jolted upwards.

I need to find my phone.

When she had reached a sitting position, her body refused to let her stay upright. She fell back on a soft mattress and a thin pillow. The room she found herself in was a mix of creamy whites and yellows, probably market-tested to have a calming effect, but the steady beeping of a heart monitor undercut the soothing ambiance.

Wires were hooked up to her chest, and a little clamp was attached to her finger. Michelle contemplated ripping off the apparatus to announce she was awake and was ready to know what the fuck was going on.

The ghost of searing pain in her stomach reminded her. Michelle's hands rushed to her stomach, expecting blood to be still oozing from the wound, but all they touched was a white cloth bandage.

"Don't worry, dear, you're going to be right as rain," a raspy, feminine voice sounded to Michelle's right.

Michelle turned her head to see a frail woman lying on a bed. Her body seemed shriveled and hunched with age, and the fingernails of the hands clutching the top of the sheets looked nicotine-stained. As if on cue with Michelle's observation, the woman emitted a dry cough that sounded like her lungs were lined with sandpaper.

"No offense, but the word of someone who inhales a pack of cigarettes a day doesn't hold much weight for me," Michelle said, now looking for the button that would call in a doctor or a nurse.

"Fine then, don't listen to me. I just heard the doctors talking, is all. Thought you might wanna know, but ya'll already know everything," the woman rasped.

Michelle stopped her search for the remote and turned to the woman, switching gears. "I'm sorry for snapping at you. It's hard not to wake up a little testy when you wake up in a hospital bed."

The woman started hacking again, but the wrinkles around her eye suggested she was laughing instead of choking.

"True enough, dear, true enough. I hate this G-D place, but my grandson insisted I come in. Apparently, my lungs are about as useful as used Kleenex. They got me on the transplant list, and I haven't seen em' since, but I ain't too worried about it between you and me. They got Ellen in this joint," she said, motioning to the television mounted on the wall.

Michelle wanted to tell the woman to shut her trap and tell Michelle everything she needed to know, but that wouldn't get Michelle the information she needed.

Michelle Trick #8 - If you pretend useful information isn't valuable, it'll probably be thrown out along with everything else.

"Ellen?" Michelle asked, "I love Ellen!"

I hate Ellen.

The woman almost hacked out her lung before responding, "What's your name, love? You ain't a bad cellmate after all."

"Michelle Kim, volunteer mugging victim. You?"

"June Cheever. Pleasure," the woman said, "Pretty stupid, though."

Michelle gritted her teeth, "What do you mean?"

"I understand bein' a hero and all, but isn't that a little risky when you've got a little one on the way?"

Michelle's mouth fell, her chin almost hitting her chest, "little one?"

"Yeah, that's what the doctor was saying. That it was a real close thing there for a minute, and if the baby had been a little bigger, the knife probably woulda gutted it. He said you both were fortunate, and you should sign up for the lotto."

"My baby?" Michelle asked again, not fully comprehending.

"Yeah, your baby. Are you even listening?"

Oh, of course, my baby.