[hr][center][i][b]Somewhere Terrible, Outside Pointe Bordeaux | Grace Kennison[/b][/i][/center]
[i][center]Some Awful Day, Some Awful Month, Some Awful Year - 0 Time For Messages[/center][/i][hr]

Grace only heard the ringing in her ears as she opened her eyes, blinking the dancing stars out of her vision. Her head hurt as if her older brother Peter had just drilled her with a baseball again. For a moment, she felt herself transported through time back to that moment of her childhood. The ringing was still there, but she could also hear shouts from her brothers mixed with the wild hoots of laughter from her sisters. The sun was shining and she could feel the grass on the back of her legs and arms. It was hard to breath. She could feel the warmth of her own blood on her face from where the ball had smashed her nose. She could hear Peter’s voice, the gravitas in his angry words marred by the cracking of his voice as he yelled at someone to check if she was still breathing. 

“No way is that bitch still alive after that headshot,” said someone. A man. Joseph, maybe. How? He was younger than Peter, it made little sense for his voice to be deeper. Had her hearing been ruined too by that fastball?

“Trust me, it’s best to hit these freaks twice,” said Peter. Except, no, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t been the nicest of brothers, but he was never downright malicious. Peter had moved away.

She blinked again. The sunny sky disappeared, blackened out almost instantly by the storm clouds above. The grass turned into mud; Grace could feel it seeping in through the cracks in her helmet and clinging to her hair. The blood on her face was gone, replaced by the cold drops of rain from the sky above. The visor on her mask had completely shattered. Her head still hurt, but her nose no longer felt smashed. She was overwhelmed by the smell of smoke, swamp, and something putrid that she couldn’t place but would later learn to be burnt flesh. She closed her eye in concentration as she pulled herself out of the past. There was no time for unhappy walk down memory lane. The convoy. The attack. She had to do something. 

[i]Step one: Get up. Get safe.[/i]

“Holy shit, I went to school with this girl. Should’ve guessed that stuck up bitch was Thu—” 

Grace heard three sounds at once as she sat up. The first sound was of someone yelling out in surprise. It seemed like it was supposed to be a warning, but the words that came out were a mixture of unhelpful rage-fuelled gibberish. The second was the mousy squeak of her own voice as she saw the man looming over her whip his revolver towards her face, his reaction time slowed by the surprise of seeing a corpse (or what he had assumed to be a corpse) come back to life. The third was the discordant and percussive noise of a bone snapping in two accompanied by the shrill symphony of vocal cords being shredded by bloodcurdling screams.

An instant wave of regret hit Grace as she realized that she had reacted too fast and had not controlled her strength. She scrambled as she pulled her body out of the mud, lost her balance, and dropped forward onto all fours. A noise like a cannon firing went off nearby, but it was not enough to cut the gut wrenching cries of anguish from the crippled man. She crawled next to him and carefully smacked him in the face. The blow was strong enough to knock him unconscious. It had been an attempt to be merciful both to her attacker and to her own ears. Grace did not have time to become sick as her eyes danced over his twisted leg. [i]Move on, move on.[/i] 

She stumbled to her feet as the other man yelled something at her and fired his gun at her chest. Grace had expected a bullet to smack the wind out of her, possibly even putting her on her ass again and send her drifting back to wonderland. The man had expected the girl to drop to the ground and to start shaking like a pair of back alley dice. There was a brief tingling sensation as the barbs bounced off of her body that cause Grace to jump and tense up ever so slightly, but in the end the wires harmlessly fell to the ground along with the bloom of plastic confetti. The two exchanged a short, confused glance before they quickly realized what had actually occurred.

“Seriously? Why would you think that would work?” said Grace as she walked towards the man. She wasn’t taunting the man; she was offended. [i]Do I really have that little of a reputation?[/i] she thought. Using a taser on her was like trying to kill someone with a nerf gun—unless you were going to disregard the choking hazard warning and shove the damn thing down their throat then you’d be better off just pissing into the wind. She tapped him in the gut as he tried firing on her again, knocking the wind out of him as he doubled over in pain. He’d be incapacitated for a good while. Grabbing the taser, she chucked it effortlessly into the swamp.

[i]Step two: assess the situation.[/i]

Grace had to figure out what was going on—getting shot in the face had a way of confusing your timeline. The welt on her forehead was already throbbing in dull pain.The last thing she remembered was rushing around warning people about the attack, and then there was a loud noise, and then she was on her back. She looked around and tried to grasp what was happening besides the obvious fact that her warning had been too little, too late.

Cars were continuing to swarm into the plantation. She couldn’t tell where the vehicles belonging to the convoy ended and the ones brought by the rioters began. It was noisy, way too noisy. Guns rang out in the air. Electricity crackled through the sky. Rallying cries and screams pierced through her helmet. The damn crunched up thing was blinding her peripherals, but for some dumb reason she couldn’t bring herself to break it off even though it no longer masked her face. A stupid comfort in all of this chaos. It wasn’t enough. Months of childish games of make believe where she ran around a city in some shitty get up and confronted drug addicts, petty thieves, and wannabe wiseguys did nothing to prepare her for something like this. 

She was moving. Why was she moving? [i]My phone, my phone. I stashed my bag in a van. I need to call Joseph. He can help,[/i] she thought, her better judgment clouded with panic. She could hear someone praying between heavy, sobbing breaths. It took her a minute to realize it was her own voice. The soft voice faded as her eyes fell upon throngs of bodies. She couldn’t stop looking. Surely they were okay. Surely they were just napping; tasers were always nonlethal, right? Surely it was normal for that man to only have half of a face left, the rest of it blown away by a weapon. Surely she wasn’t the only—hrk! Her mind cleared just in time for her to move to ditch the helmet. Ripping the mask off of her face, Grace doubled over as she lost her breakfast. [i]How lame,[/i] she thought, wiping her mouth off with a muddy sleeve. [i]Really, you’re worried about that?[/i] Dizzied but strangely sobered by the sickness escaping from her body, Grace pulled her thoughts together.

“Step three,” she muttered under her breath, echoing the words Joseph had said to her ages ago. “You gotta be a hero.” The logic, in her mind, was sound. She knew she could take a beating; she wasn’t so sure about the others. She had to protect her people, whatever that fucking meant. Until this afternoon she had considered the citizenry of Pointe Bordeaux to be “her people”. Now, she had her doubts about it. Whatever. She’d worry about that cerebral shit later. She had to stop this madness from spinning further out of hand. [i]Okay. You got this, Grace.[/i]As she stood up, there was just enough time for her to cover her face with her arms as a truck crashed into her.

She didn’t see what happened, but she felt the force of the truck smashing into her chest as pain shot through her entire body. The air pushed itself out of her lungs, but she did not budge. She couldn’t budge. Typically, a person would have been thrown like a ragdoll over the hood or smashed under a tire like a opossum. For Grace, the vehicle just wrapped itself around her body and encaged her in steel. Trying her best to ignore the pain (and the crumpled over body that was sprawling over the windshield) she pried herself free from the tangled mess of metal and made her way around to the side of the truck. She checked for fire and saw none. Good. There would be no need to move anyone then—she didn’t want to be that idiot who paralyzed someone by pulling them from a wreck that wasn’t going to go up in flames. Despite the fact that the driver had tried to mow her down, she ripped the door off the side of the truck to make sure that nobody needed immediate attention. 

The scene in the front of the truck was vicious; there was no convincing herself that the driver or the man sprawled across the windshield were alive. She felt the churn of sickness in her stomach once again and averted her gaze, her fingers clasping around her necklace. It was rough, way too rough. [i]Move on. Focus. They crashed into you. It’s not your fault. Not your fault. Move on. Focus.[/i] Tearing the collapsed back door off of its hinges, Grace felt a shadow fall over her. There was nobody to save. She felt her head spin as she backed away from the wreck. [i]Move on. Move on. There are others. Move on. Not your fault. Move on. Move on.[/i] It didn’t work. She collapsed behind a car in despair, her hands clutching her face in shock. 

She didn’t have much time to wallow in her own miseries. Say what you will about Catholics, but they knew how to use guilt to motivate themselves. Grace forced her to keep moving. She had said she would help. Taking her dirty hands from her face, Grace looked to her left and spotted the man who had searched her earlier. [i]Lucas, right?[/i] He clearly was not okay. The man was crouching down in the mire, his hands pressed to his ears as he sat on his haunches with his hands on his ears like a scared child. It was like how she wanted to be, come to think of it. [i]I can atleast help him, right? God, please don’t let me screw this up too.[/i] She crouch-walked her way over to the man, cautiously reaching out to grab his shoulder. 

“H-h-hey,” she said, brushing a finger against him. “Come with me, okay? I, I, I...you’re going to be okay, okay? You are okay, right? No injuries or anything? I think the convoy’s retreating. I’m going to help you, alright?” Whatever confidence that seemed to be in her voice (which was little if even any) faded, replaced instead by a frantic desperation. “Jesus, let me help you, please? I, I, I can’t live with myself if I don’t even...listen, grab my hand. I’ll protect you, okay?”She held her hand out to Lucas, knowing that she could just throw him over a shoulder if he was unwilling or unable to cooperate. 

“Please?” she said, trying to force a trusting smile on her face. It failed, a pained frown taking its place. The only thing she could think about was what Joseph had said to her on the phone about him fearing that she was doing something stupid. She exhaled deeply. [i]The real step three: do something stupid. My fucking creed.[/i]