“
Why are we down here?”
“To stock up on weapons.” Uncle Mort crossed to the far wall. “We need lots of ’em. Driggs, pick that up, it’s not going to kill you—” Driggs gave him a look. “Okay, it won’t further kill you. Take a couple of these, too.” He handed Lex and Driggs a few thin vials of Amnesia each.
“What are these for?”
“Weapons. Aren’t you paying attention?” He walked to yet another wall and began to load up on items that were, at long last, recognizable as instruments of death.
“Guns?” she asked, surprised for some reason. “Not, like, Amnesia blow darts?”
“Oh, which reminds me.” He took something else off the shelf.
“What’s that?”
“Amnesia blow darts.”
Lex shook her head. “But why guns, if we have all of this other cool stuff?”
“Because despite our best efforts to use Amnesia as much as we can instead of lethal force, we’ll probably need to kill some people, and guns kill people.” He moved on to the next wall and began rifling through more gadgets. “Or people kill people. I forget how the hippies say it. Now, this one’s for you, Lex. I’m going to need you to guard this with every meager iota of attention span you have left. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. Don’t lose it.”
Lex got all her hopes up—even though she’d gotten to know Uncle Mort pretty well by now and should have known better than to get even a small percentage of her hopes up. And sure enough, the item he gave her caused the smile to evaporate right off her face.
“Don’t lose it,” he repeated.
Her eye twitched. “What is it?”
“What does it look like?”
“An oversize hole punch.”
“Exactly.”
“What?” she boomed as he went back to his papers. “You get guns, and Driggs gets the deadly Heisman, and all I get is an office supply?”
“Yes. Don’t lose it.”
It took every ounce of Lex’s strength to not kick the bubonic football into his face. Noticing this, Driggs swooped in and wrapped her in a calming, solid embrace. “Relax, spaz,” he said.
“But he—”
“—wouldn’t give you a bazooka. Oh, the unbearable trials and tribulations of the living.”
Lex deflated. Nothing put things in perspective like remembering that your boyfriend had been killed not a few hours earlier and was now stuck in some hellish existence halfway between life and death.
“Sorry,” she said, giving his arms a squeeze, happy that she could even do that.
“That’s okay. Human problems are hard. Hangnails and tricky toothpaste tubes and getting shat on by birds and the like.”
“Mondays suck too,” she mumbled into his chest.
“Oh, Mondays are the worst
”
”