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http://www.mychemicalromance.com/blog/zone-specter/danger-days-title-pos...
Fun Ghoul—Frank
Eventually me and Skipping Sally made it to the car. I looked back to see Gee giving Ray a serious look—then Ray step around him and start heading towards the rest of us.
“You put her symbol on the nuke?”
I turn around and see Mikey holding up the weighted end of the nuke so that Jen can get a better look at what he drew.
“Yep, took me awhile though to strip off the old paint,” he says setting the nuke in the backseat.
“Knew you were gonna paint that on there,” I laugh as I take the front seat.
“Shut up Frank,” Mikey mutters.
I keep laughing though when Ray walks up to my window, a little irritated, “You’re telling him.”
“Why me?!” I hiss.
“Because he thinks I’m gonna tell him something that has to do with that rumor—hence he keeps shutting me out,” he grumbles before ending the conversation by climbing into the back after Jen.
I groan and hit let my head hit the dashboard pretty hard—hopefully this’ll knock in something I can use to tell him. Both of them were gonna be pissed that was for sure, there would be no escaping the wrath of the Way Brothers. For one, they’d be mad at me for not telling them sooner, and secondly, that BLI were probably using Elena’s corpse right now to do god-knows-what kinda experiments and shit.
“Frankie, are you alright?”
I lift my head up to see Jen leaning her head over the seat to give me concerned puppy-dog eyes.
I smile, “You know my sister was the only one that ever called me ‘Frankie’?”
“You’re avoiding the question,” she says.
“I’m fine, and how’d you know I was avoiding the question?” I say curiously.
“Elena always did, so I kinda picked it up from her,” she says simply.
Of course she picked it up from her—most of what this kid knew came from her sister.
“Alright, we all ready to go?” Gee says, stopping the conversation.
“Yep!” Jen pipes up.
“Good, cause it’s still five hours to Joe’s,” Gee says revving up the car to go.
“It’s what?!” Jen squeaks.
At that I start laughing while everyone else gives me the usual head shakes.
Well Jen took the five hours better than we all thought. She just basically took the mic and talked to Cherri, who then handed it off to Neon, and then she talked to D for a little bit before hanging up and deciding to go looting through the trunk through the old opening in the back seat. She ended up finding Elena/Lynzie’s helmet, which Gee ended up telling her to put back. Then she pulled out her bag and in it she discovered a Polaroid she’d stuck in there a while back. She took one picture when she was sitting in the middle seat in the back of what was in front of her. It was basically just the back of me and Gee’s heads and a little bit of the road ahead. She probably would’ve taken more but Gee announces then that we’re only a few miles away from Joe’s.
Ray kicks the back of my seat after that, warning me that I need to spit it out now or face terrible consequences. And for holding it off I’m gonna have to tell him in front of Jen—who so doesn’t need to be hearing this. Guess that’s kinda my fault, man I hate it when I gotta act serious.
“Hey Gee, there’s something I need to tell you,” I say quietly.
“What is it?” he says, raising his eyebrows questioningly and not taking his eyes off the road.
“It’s about Joe’s, and kinda about…Elena I guess too,” I say starting to get nervous, but I can’t back out now.
“Frank, I swear to everything, if you’re gonna tell me about that stupid rumor—” he’s all of a sudden gone into anger mood, but being ever conscientious of Jen’s presence, he’s doing his best to keep most of it in.
“It’s not about that—I can’t say everything ‘cause of Jen—” I try to stay calm and get Gee to as well so he won’t lose it on me and ignore everything I say.
But now it’s Jen’s turn to cut in, “I can hear what you have to say! I’m not a baby and she’s MY sister!” she goes on in an irritated sassy tone that reminds me a little of Elena’s.
“No one is going to hear this!” Gee shouts.
“You need to hear it Gee, it’s important,” Ray says calmly—trying his best to keep everyone sane and sensible.
“What are you talking about? If it’s about Elena then I think we should hear it,” Mikey says, sounding a little offended at not being given a chance to give his two cents in the conversation.
“Joe’s was burned to the ground! There, I said it!”
I couldn’t take it anymore—no one would let me finish the damn sentence and I need to get it out before I lose my chance.
Suddenly everyone goes lurching back in their seats as Gee stomps his foot on the accelerator. Great, I knew this would probably happen.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?!” he gripes.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to ruin the progress you and Mikey were making with what I saw that night—I knew if I told you you’d do something stupid like you are now!” I throw back—still feeling hurt and angry, even though I knew it’d be coming, that he thinks I was holding back on him for selfish reasons.
“What did you see?!” Mikey yells.
I’m about to shout back that I can’t tell him with Jen right here. But then I go flying forward as Gee hits the brakes, right up alongside what once was Joe’s.
It’s nothing more than a charred heap of ash and wood, nothing more. Gee jumps right outta the car and starts running for the burn site, pure disbelief and pain all over his face.
“Gerard!” I hear Mikey yell for his brother as he climbs out too and goes to see what he’ll do.
I quickly get out too joining Mikey while Ray tells Jen to stay in the car. I run over and see Gee digging through the remains, trying to find what he knows isn’t there.
“Where is she?! If they burnt the whole place she’d be in here somewhere?!” he snaps.
“They could’ve done it in a separate fire to be more thorough,” Mikey says weakly.
“You won’t find her because she’s not here,” Ray says as he comes to stand beside me.
Gee stops his frantic search, and approaches us with a desperate rage in his eyes. He takes a hold of my shirt then and I can hardly recognize him as my old friend.
“You said you saw something that night. What was it?” he spits.
“Gee let me go!” I say as I claw at his fist clenching my shirt.
“What did you see?!” Gee shouts in my face, shaking me now.
“Gerard let him go!” Ray yells, him and Mikey pulling on Gee to get him to back off me.
“I’ll tell you but you need to let me go first!” I shout as I try to push him off.
“Tell me for god’s sakes!” Gee yells.
“Let him go!”
Gee shifts his wild eyes to someone beyond me—and his face suddenly melts from rage to something more like shame. He turns back to me with apologetic eyes and quickly lets me go and shrugs away from Ray and Mikey.
“Sorry,” he mumbles numbly.
“‘S alright,” I say back, patting him on the shoulder and giving him a small smile.
“What’s wrong with you people?”
I turn around and see a ticked off Jen standing behind us, looking at us as if we’re crazy.
“Is anybody gonna answer me?” she says putting her hands on her hips in an attempt to mimic her sister’s pose.
I laugh a bit as I answer, “We all just got issues, kinda a thing for us.”
“Ugh, I’m gonna wait in the car, I don’t feel right walking around this place like this,” she shudders.
“Alright, we’ll be quick,” Gee says calmly.
She nods then dashes back to the car. I look back over to Gee then, and shrug my shoulders.
“I guess I own you an explanation,” I say a little sheepishly. Then I tone down my voice a bit, and use my rare serious voice, “But you’re not gonna like what I have to say.”
“I can take it,” Gee says tightly, taking a quick glimpse around us.
“I saw the Dracs carry out a body bag when we were driving away from Joe’s, just before they set it on fire,” I mumble.
“They took her body,” he says hoarsely.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve got an idea, but I’m not gonna say it,” I tell him.
“I wanna know,” he mutters.
“I’m not saying it could be true, but maybe they’re using her for something, either they’re still trying to draw you in with her or they wanna torture Lynzie—” I try to say it all as quickly as possible, but stop as Gee practically falls on his ass, hyperventilating from the horror of the sick possibilities that BLI could be doing to his daughter’s body.
“Oh my god, Gerard!” Mikey’s on his knees next to Gee in a moment—worried as hell for his brother.
“I’m sorry! Oh god Gee I didn’t want to tell you! I’m so sorry!” I start pulling at my hair and pacing in my worry for Gee’s sake.
“No,” he says in a trembling voice, “You were right to tell me this—they can’t get away with this, I won’t let ‘em!”
“To hell if we’re gonna let them!” Mikey hisses.
“We need to leave now,” Gee mutters, “We need to get Jen back to D and start planning how we’re gonna get Lynzie back—then we all go back and take down BLI and put an end to all the pain they’ve inflicted on everyone.”
“We better get a move on then,” I sigh, knowing humor isn’t gonna do any good right now.
“I need to do something first,” Gee says getting up and moving past us towards the car.
We all watch as he goes to open the trunk and pull out that piece of wood he brought from the paint shack. When Jen pokes her head out of the window, most likely to ask him what he was doing, he just smiles sadly and tells her we’ll be leaving soon. He comes back with the board in hand and then he goes to the center of the site—right where the counter used to be. He raises the board high above his head and then brings it down into the ground.
He turns to us then, “Can someone help me get this to stay?”
I walk through the ash and I hear Ray and Mikey follow behind me as we go to help him place the marker. After we get it to stay securely in the ground, Gee turns to Mikey.
“You still got that paint?” he says.
Mikey nods then pulls the little bottle of purple paint he brought from the shack outta his pocket along with a little paintbrush and places them in his brother’s hands. Gee gives him a quick nod before crouching down so that he was eye-level with the top of the board. He opens up the paint and dips the tip of the brush into it, then looks back to the board. He makes careful even strokes along the wood, forming the familiar shapeless figure of Elena’s ghost in her logo. Gee dips the brush into the paint again and starts to make the long drooping eyes and mouth to the ghost next, then two quick strokes across each eye leave their X’s. Another dab in the paint before he makes the tiniest brushes along the wood to make the “Z-6” under the ghost, then a swiftly drawn circle around it all.
“Almost done,” Gee whispers.
He dips the brush into the paint one last time before he starts to paint Elena’s Killjoy name under her logo. Then he caps the paint again and hands it back up the Mikey. He takes the paint in one hand and then helps Gee up with the other.
“Now everyone will know this is where she died,” Gee murmurs, “This is the first place I’m going to take Lynzie after we rescue her, she’ll need the closure,” he sniffs.
“C’mon bro, we need to get Jen back soon if we wanna get Lynzie back fast,” Mikey says patting his brother on the back.
“Right, let’s go,” he says turning away from Elena’s marker.
Everyone starts heading back to the car, but I stay behind for a bit. I take one last look at it—a bright light amongst the dark ashes. Then I hear the guys calling me over.
“See ya Elena,” I murmur, “Take it easy kid.”
I’m jumpy and nervous. After we left that marker on Elena’s grave we kept going straight on back to Zone 5, only stopping for gas and food. And the occasional prank me and Jen would pull off on the others.
A lot of them were old classics of my time, but fairly new to the kid—seeing as she’d grown up in BLI society most of her life. But we basically did the whole bucket-full-of-water-over-the-door on Mikey, he ended up chasing us around ‘til he finally caught Jen up and started spinning her around in his arms while she giggled her little butt off. Then there was the fake snake and spider in Ray’s med bag—that wasn’t really all that fun since all he did was throw them back at us. Gee was a little more fun: we managed to sneak up on him while he was carving a picture into the wall at a station and when he chased after us we hid in the car. Then when he was standing right in front of the car I honked the horn—I swear the dude literally jumped ten feet in the air!
We’d also been messing around with her camera some too. Most of the pictures we took were of the desert and one of the old Killjoy mailboxes that are spread out around the Zones. There’s also a decent handful of photos she’d taken of us looking pretty stupid—me purposely, the others not so much. The kid also managed to convince us to have a little photo shoot. One of Ray sitting on the counter holding his gun loosely in his hands, then one of Mikey leaning up against a magazine stand reading “Look Alive Sunshine” and wearing his shades, and then she got one of Gee sitting on the hood of the car looking like his usual serious self, and then mine where I’m just crouching down leaning back on my heels and looking off into the middle-distance.
But now we were only an hour away from Dr. D’s…and my sister.
We hadn’t seen each other since I left the day after Gee took off after Lynzie. And I hadn’t even given her a proper goodbye—me, Ray and Mikey just got up and left in the middle of the night, trying to leave without anyone’s notice. But she had, she heard us leaving and came out of her room just as I was walking out the door. That last look on her face still pains me, the hurt I’d caused her after she’d dealt with so much of it already—and the nod she gave me. She knew I would turn back on her say, that I’d step down and be the brother I hadn’t always been—but she just nodding, letting me know she accepted my choice. And then I left.
“Frank quit fidgeting, you’re making me nervous,” Mikey says, cutting me away from serious mind and back to my good side.
“Why should you be nervous?” I laugh, “Unless you have some secret crush on Cherri or my sister—which I’ll probably kick your—”
“Frank,” Gee suddenly cuts me off in a warning tone just as I was about to say it.
“Butt, I was gonna say butt,” I say defensively.
“Sure you were,” Gee says in a sarcastic tone.
“Anyway, I’m about to see my sister for the first time in years, would you be all calm and easy-peasy?” I say with a grin at Mikey.
He chuckles a bit and rolls his eyes at me but stops when he sees Jen. I look and see she’s a combo of nerves and sadness—nervous because she’s about to see her grandpa again after so much hard times, and the sadness because I’m an idiot for talking about how happy I am to be seeing my sister when hers isn’t gonna be there waiting for her like mine is.
I feel really bad for bringing it up, so I lean over and whisper in her ear, “She’s still looking out for you—she’s Zone Specter remember?”
That gets a small smile outta her, “Thanks Frank.”
“Almost there, I can see it from here,” Ray says from the front seat.
“Where?!” Jen suddenly jumps up from her seat between me and Mikey and leans her head over the front seat to get a better look.
“You can see the sign from her just on the horizon,” Ray says pointing up ahead.
“I can’t see—no wait, I do! I see it! I see it!” Jen squeals—and it’s all we can do to keep her from bouncing around in the car.
But thanks to Jen’s bubbly attitude during the rest of the car ride—that kinda took my mind off of things until Gee started pulling in.
“We’re here!” Jen yells out.
Next thing I know she’s jumping over me and out the window and starts running for the “boarded” up door.
Suddenly the door goes flying open and Cherri Cola comes rushing out to meet Jen.
“Cherri!” Jen squeals as she jumps right into Cherri’s arms and gets swung around in a bear hug.
“Oh my god I’ve been so worried about you Dune!” Cherri says, a few tears actually slipping down her face.
“I missed you so much Cherri!” Jen giggles.
“I missed you too Dune!” Cherri says as she sets her down.
“Where’s grandpa?” Jen asks once she’s back on her feet.
The whole time those two had their little reunion, the rest of us had gotten outta the car.
“He’s inside with Neon Venom—” Cherri says before someone else comes bursting out the door.
“Frankie!” Micheylah shouts out my name before running right into me for a hug nearly knocking me over.
I smile and hug her back, “Whoa, knock me over why don’t’cha kid.”
“Oh you know you missed me,” she teases hugging me tighter.
“Okay I may have missed you a little,” biggest understatement of my life.
“Told you so,” she laughs as she pulls away, biggest smile on her face.
“Yeah, yeah the kid sis is right again,” I joke.
“Four years does NOT make me the kid and you the adult Frank,” Micheylah says sternly, but loses it and gives me a hug again, “God I missed you so much bro!”
“Hey Neon, nice to see you again too,” Mikey says sarcastically.
“Hey guys, oh god it’s been too freakin’ long!” Neon laughs as she goes to hug Ray, then Mikey.
“Gee!” Neon says, holding out her arms for a hug, using a fake Italian accent like I probably would’ve.
“Hey Neon,” he smiles and gives her a quick hug.
“I’m really sorry about what’s happen Gee,” Neon whispers so that Jen doesn’t hear.
“Thanks Neon,” he mumbles.
“Grandpa!” we all turn around to see D at the front door and Jen running over to him.
“Dune!” he smiles and opens up his arms for Jen to jump into his lap—I don’t think either of them is gonna let go.
“I’m so glad you’re alright Dune,” D says happily as he holds tight to Jen.
“Call me Jen grandpa, that’s my name,” Jen says looking at him with her big cute smile that’s all her own.
“Jen it is then,” D laughs, “C’mon, lets get inside, you’ve all had a long trip.”
“Our drives not over yet D, we gotta get going for Zone 6 soon,” Gee says following behind D as Jen pushes him back inside.
“Where are you guys going?” Jen says looking back at Gee kinda sadly.
“We gonna be heading back to our old hideout, start planning how we’re gonna get your mom back,” Gee says.
“You’re gonna get her back?” Jen says quietly.
“One way or another kid,” Gee smiles, walking past her to push D through the doors.
“She looks sad,” Micheylah whispers.
“What are you talking about?” I say turning to face her.
“What I mean is, I think that kid’s gonna miss you guys, especially Gee,” Micheylah says with a knowing look on her face, “I think she’s taken to seeing him as her dad.”
“Well it’d be a lie if he said he didn’t see her as his daughter now too,” I say, remembering how close those two had gotten, and how protective Gee was getting over the kid.
“But knowing that boy he ain’t gonna admit it,” Neon laughs as she puts her arm around my shoulder, “Now let’s get inside, I’m starving.”
“First family diner in what? 5 years?” I say putting my arm around her shoulders too.
“Try 15 Frankie,” Neon laughs.
“Alright Iero jokesters, lets get inside before the Dracs come out,” Ray laughs as he walks past us.
“And we’re proud of it!” me and Neon say together as we follow the others inside.
Part 82: http://www.mychemicalromance.com/blog/zone-specter/danger-days-part-82
