“Where the fuck are you? Help me!”

There was no soothing voice. There was no song.

But Daddy was there, just like he always was.

Mama is gone. She’s in my tummy. Aaalll gone.

Lola scooped up the gun from the passenger seat and peered through the windshield toward the roiling bodies. She blinked her eyes, shook her head, slammed the metal of the gun against her scalp. But when she looked, she still saw Daddy. Every face, every mouth, every stomach. They were him.

And she wanted to shoot every fucking one of them. She wanted to see blood and fat pour from the bullet holes, mixing together into an orange sludge as it rushed out of them. Craved to see them collapse motionless to the ground, just like the man at the station.

I’ll kill them all.

She stepped out of the car, eased the door shut. The glass front of the restaurant warped and bended inward, and cracks spread across the surface. It wouldn’t be long before it exploded from the weight. Any second.

Even as they feasted on each other, it was the food from the buffet they wanted; she knew that now. She remembered how they looked when she was apprehending the fat man. How they ignored everything, even their own pain, as they stuffed their faces.

It was the Chinaman. Even Jennings mentioned how terrible the food used to be there. But the little Asian man changed the recipe. He did something to it, added something to create this mutant craving.

He was the reason for the gang of Daddies submerging Lola into this nightmare, drowning her in lard. And she would get him too.

She stalked across the vast stretch of concrete, leaving her vehicle running behind her. Her gun held tightly in her grasp, the other hand gripping the pulsing pain.

Will my fellow officers be showing up on scene any time soon? She hoped not. Wanted these fuckers all to herself. And she wasn’t in the mood to follow procedure…or to arrest anyone. She wanted to stop hearts. She wanted to turn them into Swiss cheese.

She wanted Daddy’s voice to go away.

Her eyes burned with vengeance as she neared the horde of corpulence. She could smell them. Like greasy bed sores seeping poisonous juice. Their sound sent quivers over her skin and caused her eye to twitch.

Then, like being hit by a charging rhinoceros, Daddy smashed into her from her blind spot. He straddled her and grinned like the Devil.

SLOP IN THE TROUGH

Mr. Chan looked past Juan and into the cooler. Juan expected him to lose it, to shout about how they were stealing, how he would call the police. But his face went slack and the hard, take-no-shit look blurred into a droop of worry. He pointed the gun at Manuel and moved Juan aside with his bandaged hand.

“They all the same. Like monsters.” The gun shook as he aimed it. Juan saw tears strolling down his bony cheeks.