Fire and ice

11:10 a.m

Shelly held Matt’s ax with both hands and stared out at the road leading to Nitko’s gate. Before she had left the parking lot, she’d broken a window on Hal’s pickup truck and had taken the sawed-off shotgun he kept behind the seat. It was a twelve-gauge pump, a very nice gun, and Hal, being dead and all, certainly wasn’t going to need it anymore. After taking the gun and the box of shells in the glove compartment, she’d left Nitko’s property and had backed her car into a patch of woods, out of sight, thinking she would ambush Matt when he tried to come after her.

She’d shoot his ass and then cut his head off with his own ax.

Because she had a feeling he was the one guy who might be able to stop her from what she had to do.

And she couldn’t have that, could she?

Thinking about it made her giggle.

K-Rad had the right idea. He was the Man Who Stood Up. The Man Who Would Not Take It Anymore. Shelly had let the pricks steal her life away, day by day, dollar by dollar. She was going to take it back. Screw dying fast versus dying slowly. If she had to go, she was going to take a bunch of those fuckers with her.

She watched the smoke rising from the production building and wondered if Matt was even still alive. She would give him a few more minutes, and then she would go have some fun elsewhere.

But where? A fragment of song from her childhood popped into her mind, something about starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Good idea, she thought. Get them young before they can turn into the kind of miserable fucks who’d stolen her life away.

In her mind she mapped out the route to the daycare center down the road.