“I finally caught up to you,” I said, while Tammy-Lee and her friends looked around the dead-end they’d ended up trapped in during our little chase.

  “Please, don’t kill us!” yelled the mousy woman.

  The guy with the fedora had soiled himself and was crying. The obese green-haired person, who was holding the unconscious suit guy, had a grim look on their face.

  Tammy was standing in front of them, guarding them all with the crowbar in her hands.

  I took a step towards them, and they all tensed up.

  “Kill you?” I asked. “I just want to know where Bee went. The girl who was looking for Milton.”

  “If I tell you, you will let us go?” asked Tammy.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “She went towards the Stop & Shop six blocks away. It still has power and water, as well as food. But there is a big gang who claimed it. They are dangerous. I told her, but she would not listen.”

  “Do you know who this Milton guy is?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I wonder why Bee wants to find him,” Panda muttered. “Maybe it’s her friend, or a family member.”

  I turned to Panda. “She stole a machete, right? Probably isn’t a friend, I reckon.”

  The group watched me closely, clearly freaked out.

  “Oh right!” I said, startling the mousy woman and fedora guy. “Stay away from anywhere that has lights on. And also, don’t go into public transport. Tomorrow is probably going to get pretty crazy, so try to find some more weapons.”

  They shared a few brief glances between them.

  “They probably think you’re crazy,” Panda muttered. “Understandably so.”

  I shrugged. “Alright, catch you guys later!” I told them and made to leave.

  None of them moved an inch.

  I stopped mid-step and spun around, startling them a second time.

  “I almost forgot! Don’t tell anyone about what you saw in the kindergarten, okay?” I asked, putting a balloon-gloved finger up in front of my lips.

  The mousy woman started crying.

  I left the dead-end alleyway and headed towards my new destination.

  “They really thought you were going to kill them,” Panda said.

  I shook my head. “Even though I saved them.”

  “It was probably the way you saved them, not to mention hunting them down in the streets.”

  “Sometimes you have to ruffle some feathers to make an omelet.”

  “That’s not how the saying goes,” he said with a sigh.

  I ran the six blocks to the Stop & Shop, which was a store I’d been inside a few times in the past, since my old apartment wasn’t too far from it.

  “I should go see if my stuff is still in the apartment.”

  “There’s no chance,” Panda replied.

  “Maybe Kevin is there,” I said hopefully. “Maybe he returned home and has been waiting for me all this time.”

  Panda sighed.

  I went around a residential block and the large store came into view. Most of the letters had been torn down from the large purple sign, such that it now just read ‘P & P’. The weird logo with the four half-moon slices was still intact though.

  The dull light-grey wooden fa?ade was stained with obscene and frankly quite childish graffiti.

  “PP Gang?” Panda read out loud, seeing one of the tags on the wall.

  I shook my head. “Amateurs.”

  About two feet of red bricks ringed around the bottom of the large building, forming the foundation. A few probably-not-load-bearing white pillars held up the off-white metal strip that ran along the middle of the wall. The letters that would normally say stuff like ‘Fresh Picked Produce’ and ‘Citizens Bank’ had been torn down. In their place, on the awning that covered the entrance, were letters fastened with duct tape that read ‘Milton rulez’.

  About six young-looking guys were gathered outside the entrance, doing pushups to impress a girl sitting on the charred husk of a car. Her hair was gelled into spikes and looked to have been spray-painted pink and black. She wore a leather jacket and was covered in piercings.

  “Looks like a bad Mad Max cosplay,” Panda criticized.

  I walked up to them and the guys all got to their feet, before brandishing knives, pipes, and bare fists.

  “What do you want!?” yelled one of them right into my face, showering me with spit. “This is PP Gang’s territory!”

  “Tell them you want to talk to Milton,” Panda advised.

  “Milton,” I said and kicked him in the nuts. He produced a string of sounds like a dog toy being violently played with.

  The others backed off, yelling in alarm. The woman jumped down from the roof of the car and ran towards the store’s entrance.

  Surprisingly, the guy hadn’t been split in two or anything like that. It was as though my Strength boost had failed to activate.

  “Goddamn it, Gambit!” Panda exclaimed. “Why did you do that?”

  I turned to look at him. “I don’t have time for this shit, and I got his spit all over my face.”

  Clang!

  A pipe had struck me right in the head, bending around my skull.

  “Ow,” I muttered and looked at the guy who’d hit me.

  He’d frozen in fear, so I grabbed the pipe from his hands and bent it around his neck, before tying a knot on it.

  The guy collapsed onto his ass while frantically trying to undo the knot as he slowly suffocated.

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  I strode towards the four other guys, but they immediately scrambled for the safety of the store.

  “Milton!” I yelled as I followed them in.

  The interior of the large store was a total mess and barely recognizable. The shelves between aisles had been knocked over and there was stuff everywhere. Someone had even hung a teddy bear from the ceiling with the cord of a lamp.

  As Tammy had said, the lights all worked inside, which meant this place would become a dungeon as soon as the Great Game began.

  No sooner had I climbed atop a fallen shelf than improvised projectiles flew my way from further in where shelves and freezer counters had been arranged almost like a fort. There were also people on the floor and other fallen shelves between me and the fort, and they were armed with stuff like toy bows, weaponized cans and bottles, as well as slingshots.

  None of the stuff hurt when it hit me, and I managed to catch a bottle out of the air, before throwing it back with enough force to cave in a guy’s ribcage.

  “Holy fuck!” Panda exclaimed. “You don’t have to use lethal force on them!”

  “Who cares, they’ll all die tomorrow anyway if they stay here.”

  “I’m realizing now that giving you an excuse like that was quite a reckless decision on my part.”

  I ignored him and continued marching through the store, while returning fire against all the ranged attackers. I broke off a bit of a metal shelve and flung it like a boomerang, managing to decapitate a guy with a stapler in his hands.

  Panda kept reacting loudly to my actions, but I didn’t care. They’d been the ones to start it after all.

  “That’s not true,” he complained.

  When I made it to the walls of the ‘fort’, with ten people dead or injured in my wake, eight people leaped over the edge with weapons in their hands. One of them had an honest-to-God katana, the rest had machetes and knives.

  Realizing that taking hits from bladed weapons was probably not a good idea, I backed off and let them come at me.

  I dodged a slash from the katana and punched the guy hard enough to fling him across the room, then I grabbed his sword and sliced it through the two right behind him.

  Nothing happened for a couple seconds, but then they fell into two pieces.

  Seeing the easy way I dealt with their friends, the rest immediately tried to flee, but I didn’t let them.

  Half a minute later the rest were on the ground, cut to pieces or shattered by my punches.

  I climbed over the wall of the fort and found three women, one of them the pink spiky-haired girl from earlier, cowering behind a display freezer that stank of fish.

  “Don’t kill us!” one of them yelled. This girl also had gelled-up hair, but it was spray-painted red.

  I scanned their faces, but none of them were Bee.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” I told them. “She’s got short black hair and is probably wearing a hoodie with a neon-yellow smiley on it.”

  They looked at each other. “She was here just moments ago,” said the pink-haired girl.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know!”

  I sighed. “What about Milton? Where’s he at?”

  “In the bathroom!” said a third, who looked like a normal soccer mom. She was at least ten years older than the rest of them.

  “What the hell is she doing with this crowd?” Panda muttered, echoing my thoughts.

  I left the three behind and walked towards the bathrooms set into the back wall at the far end of their fort.

  Before I could make it there, footsteps on the floor came from behind me and I turned just in time to see the pink-haired girl stab a screwdriver into my stomach.

  Unlike last time someone had tried to gore me with that tool, the tip simply just bent instead of piercing through my unicorn suit.

  She looked down at the weapon in her hand, disbelief on her face.

  “M-monster!”

  I grabbed her by the throat with my left hand and lifted her off the ground, pulling my right arm back to prepare to punch her across the store.

  “Why is it always screwdrivers?” I wondered.

  “Karmic symbolism?” Panda suggested.

  The woman looked at Brock with fear in her eyes, while squirming weakly against my grip.

  “Spare me!” I heard a high-pitched man’s voice yelling from the bathrooms behind me.

  The voice wasn’t directed at me, and someone else yelled back in response.

  “You don’t get to plead for mercy!”

  It was Bee’s voice.

  I immediately let go of the woman and marched into the men’s bathroom, leaving her gasping on the floor behind me.

  Inside it stank of shit. Despite having access to running water and power, it seemed no one had taken up the duty of cleaning.

  “Why are you humans always so foul?” Panda commented.

  There was a stall down at the far end, from which came the pained sounds of someone fighting for their life in more ways than one.

  Standing in the open doorway of the stall was a girl I’d be able to recognize anywhere in the world.

  “Liar,” Panda muttered. “You’d totally forgotten what she looked like earlier!”

  Her hair was black and cropped just above her shoulders. She wore a large white t-shirt and baggy black trousers with a chain hanging from her back pocket to her belt. On her feet were black sneakers.

  “Bee!” I exclaimed excitedly.

  The girl took a step back from the stall and looked at me. She had half a scissor in her hand, the other half torn off to create an improvised shiv. Her face was round with big apple cheeks. Her expression was grim, as her dark eyes ran up-and-down my attire.

  “Are you the one who they were all yelling about?” she asked.

  “Is someone else out there!?” came a high-pitched man’s voice from inside the stall. “Please, you’ve gotta help me, this girl’s crazy!”

  “Shut the fuck up, Milton!” Bee shouted back at the guy inside.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  Her grip on the scissor shiv tightened and she clenched her teeth. “He killed my parents!”

  My heart skipped a beat. Back when we’d been in the taxi game together and had been asked where our parents were, she’d said they were still alive and back at their home. I hadn’t questioned it at all, but in hindsight it had clearly been a lie.

  “Move,” I said, feeling anger take a hold of me. “I’ll deal with this guy.”

  “No!” she protested. “He’s mine to deal with!”

  “Maybe this is the reason why she had such a high insanity gauge when you first met her,” Panda guessed.

  I took a deep breath. “Listen, Bee. You don’t have to get his blood on your hands. I’ll do it, don’t worry.”

  She dropped the scissor shiv to the floor and started crying.

  “You just wait outside,” I told her.

  Panda hopped from my shoulder and onto hers as she hurried past me, leaving the bathroom.

  After she was gone, I walked to the open stall.

  “Hey Milton,” I said, looking at the guy who was sitting on the toilet, his pants down around his ankles.

  “You saved me,” he said, gratefully.

  “Trust me,” I told him, “in a few moments you’ll really wish I hadn’t.”

  After I’d dealt with Milton, I came out of the men’s bathroom to find Bee sitting on the floor, hugging her legs. Panda was standing in front of her, one of his squishy arms pressed against her head to try and console her, though she of course didn’t know he was there.

  He looked up at me. “I had no idea a person could make sounds like that.”

  “Me neither,” I replied.

  “Is he dead?” Bee asked, her voice muffled by her knees.

  “They’ll need a sponge to clean up what’s left of him,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I reached my hand down. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  The three women had all vanished, but the corpses of all the other PP Gang members were strewn about the place. There was a trail of blood from one guy who’d managed to crawl outside.

  Bee looked up at me with red-ringed eyes. I’d never seen her in such a state before and the sight physically hurt me. She was like the little sister I’d never had and seeing her hurt like this made me want to hunt down every last person responsible for her sadness.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Only my friends call me Bee. They’re all gone now though. I don’t know where they went…”

  “They must’ve been taken by the Child Protective Services,” Panda guessed. “Still have no clue why she was left behind though…”

  “I’m Gambit,” I told her. “I’m from the future.”

  She smiled. “You look like it. Although I thought you were doing a bad One Piece cosplay at first.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that?” I muttered, annoyed.

  “It’s probably the swan-feather cape,” Panda said.

  “Are we friends in the future?” Bee asked.

  “Oh, you bet! We’re like the bestest friends,” I insisted. “And in the future you’ll be able to do magic and solve puzzles and all this amazing stuff!”

  She laughed again. “I do like puzzles.”

  Then she took my hand and got up from the floor, wiping her face.

  “That sounds like fun,” she said, a glint of madness in her eyes.

  “That was way too easy…” Panda muttered. “Should we be concerned?”

  I ignored him. “Alright, here’s the plan,” I told her, leaning in conspiratorially. “First we’ve gotta find this grumpy business lady who, once the Great Game starts, becomes like the protagonist or some shit.”

  “The Great Game?” she asked. “What’s that?”

  “It’s how you’ll get magic powers,” I told her. “It’s like a messed-up show that turns our entire world into a game.”

  “Okay.”

  “After that we have to find Chris. Oh, but we should probably go to my apartment first, Kevin might be there.”

  “Kevin?”

  “My pet bull frog.”

  She nodded.

  “Then we have to find the Mayor and deal with him. And we should probably also hit up Serenity Mall and see if the Chief of Police is hiding there. Both those guys have got to go, obviously.”

  “That’s all?” she asked, laughing.

  “Not even close! We also have to find my friend Tina, she’s bald and pretty crazy. And lastly we’ve gotta save Otto the Otter Mascot!”

  “At what point do I get magic?”

  “Sometime tomorrow, I’m pretty sure.”

  She let go of my hand and went over to where the bloodied katana was left behind on the floor. After wiping it off she swung it through the air a few times. Then she looked back at me.

  “Lead the way, ‘Gambit’.”

  I grinned and strode towards the entrance. Bee followed closely behind me.

  “This timeline is already doomed,” Panda muttered exasperatedly.