Mickey Torke was planning a trip to a place he wasn’t welcome. He wasn’t welcome in many — most — places, but that usually didn’t stop him from showing up anyway, if he felt like it. But this was different. He was going to the only place where someone might be able to stop him — America.

  Not to visit Gus. Gus was just about the last motherfucker he wanted to see. But the sleep, and the dreams, were coming more and more often, and he couldn’t get his mind off of that damn baby. It was bordering on obsession. He put a freeze on all operations with every one of his allies to plan his trip to the east.

  He sat at a table in a penthouse atop a casino in Las Vegas — the capital of Micktopia. Lights flashed, music blared, and an assortment of half naked men and women moved around him and did unspeakable things to themselves and to each other. Usually Mickey would be doing more unspeakable things than the rest of them combined. Instead, he stared at crumpled papers and folded maps that littered the table and looked like they had been scrawled on by a Neanderthal. He rubbed his temples and closed his eyes.

  “Maybe the baby isn’t a baby anymore. You’ve had these dreams for decades,” Mickey muttered to himself. “Or maybe he’s been a baby for the last fifty years. Or maybe he’s just really fucking short.”

  He snatched one of the papers off the table and held it close to his face. It was a recounting of one of his more recent dreams, where the baby had sucked the oxygen from his lungs and watched him slowly die of suffocation. He concluded that it definitely looked like a baby and not like a very short man. He threw the paper down, and it swayed back and forth before falling underneath the table.

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  “Maybe I should just ask the sludge boy himself.” He was referring to Emperor Augustus. “You think he would want to sit down for a chat? Yeah, probably not. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”

  He pressed his face against paper after paper, going through every dream he could remember, hoping that something would tell him who this baby was so he could pull his little body apart. A semi-nude woman came up behind him and rubbed his shoulders. She was beautiful, olive skinned with long, black hair that hung over her shoulders and covered up parts of her that Mickey would normally want to see — normally, but not today. He grabbed her wrist and she collapsed in a heap of limp limbs.

  She’s lucky I didn’t make her pop like a fucking water balloon, he thought. A couple of people loped over to the limp body and pulled her away by her legs.

  “No raping!” Mickey shouted over his shoulder.

  I’m a bum, but I’m not a monster, he thought. Alright, I’m a bum and a monster, but I’m not a fuckin’ rapist.

  He went back to studying the paper that he had in his hands before the beautiful naked woman rudely interrupted him. He concluded that, aside from the baby and from him being killed, the only other consistent part of the dreams was that they took place in locations he knew well. Almost every single dream took place in Leesville, North Carolina — the one place he stayed the longest, the place he met Gus.

  “Another Gus connection,” he grumbled. “Or…”

  It was also the town where he stole a mysterious bottle from a mysterious church, where he and Gus drank the mysterious substance, and where they were imbued with their great, terrible powers.

  Mickey sprang up from his seat and smashed his fist down on the table, turning it to sawdust and sending his papers flying in multiple directions. The crowd of people all went silent and looked at their president.

  “See y’all motherfuckers later,” he shouted. “I’m going to church!”