The boys were bound and determined to avoid the mistakes they made last time. They were too relaxed, too cocky. That didn’t fly with the Not Deer, and it sure as Hell wouldn’t fly with a Whirling Whimpus — a sasquatch-like creature with enormous arms that hung down past its tiny legs and the power to whip up whirlwinds strong enough to send a man to Oz when it felt like it. This one wasn’t particularly big, according to the Mother Cat, but if they didn’t take every precaution, they’d all go the way of Slugfoot Sal sooner than they hoped.

  They needed to gear up.

  When the boys needed guns, there was only one person they turned to: Big Dale Bristol. Compared to Big Dale, the boys were downright youthful. Their skin had started to go leathery over the years, but his was rough as rawhide. They still had some brown left in their hair, but he didn’t have any hair at all. The years had taken a toll on Big Dale and left him half-blind, three-quarters deaf, and totally unable to walk. Still, he ran his little gun shop with his son, Little Dale, and they were willing and able to get their hands on just about anything, legal or not.

  From the outside, the shop looked more like a hoarder’s garage than a reputable business. Scrap metal littered the grass in front of the entrance; some of it had been there long enough to get half-buried in the dirt. A garbage can right up next to the door overflowed with crushed beer cans and empty tins of nicotine pouches. A little further away, Little Dale sat in a rocking chair under the shade of a tree. When he saw the boys approach, he greeted them with a shake of the half-empty can in his hand.

  “It’s been awhile,” he said. “Thought y’all might’ve retired.” He stood up and squeezed the bill of his camouflage baseball cap so that the bill formed a dramatic arch that didn’t quite reach the sides of his head. Little Dale was far from little, standing about a head taller than any of the boys. He claimed that he was only six-foot-three, but his tape measure must’ve been busted. Him being damn nothing but skin and bones made seem taller even still; he was like a man on stilts.

  “Nope. Just takin’ a break while my bones healed,” Woodrow said. Little Dale turned to look at him for the first time and jumped back in surprise.

  “What in the mother fuck happened to you?!” he asked.

  “Oh, you mean this?” Woodrow pointed to his own face. “Was tryin’ to pop my ears — you know how they get clogged — and I went too hard, and this happened.” He opened his eyes wide and Little Dale flinched.

  “Seriously though, what the fuck?” he pressed. Bill Jones told him all about the eyes of the Wampus Cat, though he mixed in a story about how Woodrow’s old eyes were going bad and that being why they decided to get him new ones.

  “Well… alright…” Little Dale dropped it. With his beak-like nose and crooked teeth, he wasn’t one to usually put someone down over their physical appearance. “So, y’all lookin’ to restock your ammo?”

  “We were planning on spendin’ a little more today, actually,” Chuck said. “We’re goin’ after something big, and Woodrow’s little six shooter ain’t gonna cut it.”

  “Whatcha huntin’?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Little Dale huffed and looked like he wanted to say something else, but stopped himself and invited them inside.

  The inside of the gun shop was heaps nicer than the outside. Everything was clean and orderly. A polished hardwood floor housed a series of freshly-wiped glass cases that displayed various handguns, and rows of bigger sorts of weapons hung in neat rows along the walls.

  “Well, what can I getcha?” Little Dale sighed.

  “We were gonna ask your pa about that, actually,” Bill Jones said. “Is Big Dale around?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the back room, but he ain’t been in the mood for talkin’ much lately. His lungs are startin’ to go. But he still keeps smokin’ that damn pipe, even when I try to offer him up some Xing pouches. They’re much healthier, ya know.”

  “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I reckon,” said Woodrow. “We’re gonna go see if we can rile up some words out of him, if that’s alright with you.”

  Little Dale told them to go right on ahead, and so they slid through the door behind the front counter and into a little room with an old desk and a dusty computer. Big Dale leaned back in his office chair and watched an old game of baseball on the computer monitor with the volume blaring. When the boys entered the room, Big Dale coughed nasty, sharp coughs for what felt like several minutes, but then the words came flowing happily out of his papery face.

  “Ya know, I was a pitcher back in the day,” Big Dale said loudly without any other introduction. “Set records at my old high school. Had offers from ten different colleges. Then all Hell broke loose…”

  He’d recounted this tale to the boys at least a hundred times, but they always shook their heads and muttered obscenities earnestly in the honor of the life he lost like they were hearing about it for the first time. It was just the respectable thing to do with elderly folk.

  “That’s a damn shame…” said Woodrow mournfully when there was a second of silence. Big Dale was just about to get to the part of the story where he was holed up in the Atlanta Braves’ stadium, of all places, while he was in the army, and they’d held off the soon-to-be emperors of both the east and the west from killing the people they’d wrangled inside. It was a very long story, and the boys planned to be in bed before midnight, so Woodrow had to cut him off.

  “…but we were wondering if we could buy some weapons?”

  “What!?” Big Dale looked at him with cloudy white eyes and blinked rapidly. His mouth hung open and accentuated his drooping jowls. Woodrow started to repeat himself, louder and more slowly this time, but Big Dale quickly cut him off.

  “Why’d you have to come back here and bother me about that? They’re in the front. Little Dale will take care of ya, unless that boy’s asleep again. Damned kids. (Little Dale had just turned thirty-four the previous week.)

  “No sir, he’s awake. We need a little more firepower than what you got in the front room. We need the good stuff,” Chuck said.

  “Something from your personal collection,” Bill Jones clarified.

  Big Dale turned a light shade of pink.

  “And just what in the hell do you think you need somethin’ like that for?”

  Bill Jones told Big Dale everything; he didn’t make up any stories this time. Little Dale didn’t believe in anything he hadn’t seen with his own eyes, but Big Dale knew better. A Whirling Whimpus was not big news to him. He also hated the emperor more than anyone else they knew, so he would undoubtedly be sympathetic to their plan.

  “That’s just about the dumbest shit I ever heard,” he said after Bill Jones finished talking. “Y’all are gonna get yourselves killed — or worse. You can’t kill Augustus. It ain’t possible. Believe me, we tried.” Woodrow could feel another war story going on, so he spoke quickly.

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  “We’ll sure stand a better chance if we have your help, don’t you think? That collection of yours is a sight to behold. Maybe it’s about time it’s put to good use.”

  Big Dale digested these words for a moment. Sometimes his processor was a little slow. He opened his mouth, got distracted by something that happened on the computer monitor, stared at the screen for a minute, and then responded with something between a snort and a groan. Little Dale might not have been little, but Big Dale wasn’t only called that because of his seniority; he was massive. He was roughly the same height as Little Dale, but with an extra couple hundred pounds stacked onto his frame. After one more snort-groan, he placed his palms firmly on his desk, hoisted himself up with great effort, and waddled his way towards the door. The boys followed behind, out of the store and into the shabby house that stood behind it.

  Just like the store, Big Dale’s house looked ready to be condemned on the outside, but was neat and orderly on the inside. If it were up to either of the Dales, everything would be a chaotic mess. Thankfully, Barbra Bristol was there to keep them in line — as much as they could be kept in line.

  Barbra Bristol was the embodiment of sweet old southern lady. She was never seen without a hand-sewn dress on her plump body, and always wore her white hair in a tight bun on top of her head; she always seemed to be in the process of whipping up a pie or some other delicious, heart-palpitating treat; and she wasn’t afraid to hand someone their ass if they stepped out of line in her house. The boys made sure to be on their best behavior around her.

  “Boys!” she exclaimed when they entered the house and gave each of them a warm hug. “Haven’t seen y’all in so long! How’ve you been holdin’ up? I haven’t stopped beatin’ myself up for missing Sal’s funeral, but Dale ain’t been in the best of health, and Junior won’t go within a mile of a police officer.”

  “No sense in bein’ hard on yourself. We know you would’ve came if you could,” said Woodrow. “I reckon you liked Sal better ‘n we did.” He smiled, but Barbra didn’t take it as a joke.

  “Nonsense! You boys never left each other’s sight. It must be hard — I’m sorry. It ain’t no consolation, but I got some corn muffins about to come out the oven if y’all are hungry.”

  Chuck already had one foot in the kitchen before Bill Jones put his hand his chest to stop him.

  “Sorry ma’am, but we’re here on business,” he said. Barbra frowned.

  “Well… alright. Maybe you can take some on your way out,” she said dejectedly.

  “We’d be more than happy to,” Woodrow replied. Big Dale waddled past his wife into the hallway and opened a door to reveal a set of stairs.

  “Gonna have to help me down,” he said. Woodrow and Chuck each grabbed one of Big Dale’s arms and gently lowered him down each step. He huffed and groaned the whole way down, but they eventually got him into the basement unscathed.

  The basement was more like a museum, a tribute to the Emperor’s War and all that humanity threw at Augustus before it inevitably had to give up. During the brief three years that the war raged on, a lot of developments were made in weaponry in a desperate attempt to find something that would stop Augustus and Mickey from usurping the United States government. They all failed, of course, and access to these weapons were suppressed once the war was over, but they were still quite powerful, and some people were still able to get their hands on some of the scraps left over from the War.

  Big Dale had amassed quite the collection of these weapons. A few were weapons he himself used during the war. Others he gathered from old war buddies when they felt like getting rid of them — or when they died. After decades of collecting, Big Dale had enough firepower to level half the country, he was naturally very protective of it.

  “Don’t touch a damn thing unless I tell you to!” he grumbled hoarsely at the boys. They were too awestruck to respond. The guns were dusty old relics, yet they were more advanced than anything they’d ever seen in person. A long, tarnished silver blade was mounted on the wall. It was narrow and came to a point, almost like an oversized needle, and the hilt had a series of switches in a row along the top, right where someone’s thumb might go.

  “That was for his sludge-soldiers,” Big Dale explained when he saw Woodrow gawking at the sword. “Worked pretty darn well, actually. Flip the first switch and it emits an extremely low vibration that keeps the little fuckers from condensing into something that could hit you too hard. Flip the second and it freezes down so cold that anything it touched turned solid. The act of explaining something seemed to wear Big Dale out immensely and he found a wooden crate to sit on and leaned his back up against the wall. He drew raspy breaths that made his belly move up and down.

  “Wow,” said Woodrow.

  “Won’t help us, though,” said Bill Jones.

  “What about this?” Chuck lifted up a gun longer than his body, matte black, with a bulky square body with buttons all over and a narrow barrel that was responsible for about three-quarters of the gun’s length.

  “Put that down! Didn’t I tell y’all not to touch nothin’ unless I tell you to!” Big Dale roared with all of his strength. Chuck jumped and placed the gun down like it was a live bomb or a newborn baby.

  “Haven’t y’all ever heard of a Waver? Then you should have enough sense to treat it with respect!” He took in a clicking breath that didn’t sound too different than a death rattle. “That thing can shoot five kinds of radiation at you, and you won’t like any of ‘em, I’ll tell you that much! Though the microwave setting was pretty alright for heatin’ up a combat ration if you shot it from a few hundred yards away.”

  Bill Jones inspected the weapon — making damn sure not to touch it — before concluding that it would be too risky. Even if they managed to use it without hurting themselves, the chance of damaging the Whimpus’s cells were too great.

  Then, Woodrow opened a small box filled with what looked like smooth, white marbles.

  “Ah, those are just Trench Diggers,” Big Dale wheezed. “Throw one down and it’ll dig out a hole big enough for a man to crouch in — two men, if they’re real friendly with each other.”

  “Sounds like they could come in handy,” Woodrow said and looked to Bill Jones, who agreed.

  “Alright, take ‘em,” Big Dale said. Woodrow set them near the stairs so he could continue to look around. The boys looked at several more objects and Big Dale explained what they were: some pills that soldiers could take and not be hungry for three days (though they didn’t have any nutritional value), a suit that convinced the sludge-soldiers that you were one of them (though it was produced too late into the war to make a difference), and all sorts of objects that would cause someone to die a horrible, painful death if they were unlucky enough to be on the wrong end of them. Most of them, Big Dale wouldn’t part with most of them, and the boys didn’t want them anyway. They were about as liable to blow themselves up with them as they were to take down the Whimpus. So far, their trip to Big Dale’s wasn’t as prosperous as they’d hoped. They had some hole-digging marbles and that was about it.

  They were just about to walk back up the stairs, maybe get some corn muffins, when Big Dale got of the crate his rump had been planted on and said “Wait — y’all might like this one. Would cost you a pretty penny though.” For the first time since the boys got there, the old man smiled.

  They opened up the crate, and the two biggest six-shooters Woodrow had ever seen sat one on top of the other. Two crates of bullets, each about twice the size of Woodrow’s thumb, sat underneath them.

  “Now, I don’t know if y’all could use them.” Big Dale started, “They were meant to be used in conjunction with a mech suit, which I haven’t been able to find in all my years of searchin’. But I reckon that one hit from that and there ain’t a Whimpus in the world that would be upright.”

  “Yeah, there’s no way we could use those,” Bill Jones said. “The recoil alone would—”

  “I’ll take ‘em,” Woodrow interrupted. Big Dale let out a crunchy laugh.

  “Yeah, thought so.”

  That was that. Woodrow handed him some cash for the guns and the marbles, and the four of them went back up the stairs and into the kitchen where Barbra Bristol was waiting for them.

  “Oh, dear. Y’all aren’t gonna use those, are you?” she asked with a frown when she saw Woodrow holding the two enormous revolvers.

  “I think I just might,” replied Woodrow, smiling, which caused Bill Jones to frown alongside her. “But it’s nothin’ to worry about, ma’am. I do say those corn muffins are smellin’ pretty good though.”

  Woodrow reached for a sweet, yellow muffin, and she yanked the plate away. Her friendly smile vanished.

  “Dale might be near-blind, but I can see what y’all are doin’.” She looked deep into Woodrow’s yellow eyes. “Now, I don’t know why y’all are doing this, or what y’all got planned next, but I’d advise you to tread lightly. Animals are more than just parts. When you take a part, you’re takin’ part of their soul with it. God might not be too keen on that when you come knockin’ on his door.”

  The boys had never seen this side of Barbra Bristol before — they’d never provoked it out of her. Woodrow thought about the way he can speak with the Mother Cat, how the conversation seemed to flow more easily once he added the second eye to his head. He didn’t have any idea how or why she seemed to know so much about what was going on with him, but he couldn’t help but feel like she was on to something. How much of these animals, these monsters, get inside of his head as he went through this? And how much of him would be left by the end?

  “Mrs. Barbra, there ain’t nothin’ to worry about, I promise you,” Woodrow said, not sure if he was lying or not. Big Dale fell asleep on the couch, and the boys all left in a hurry with their bellies empty and their hands full.