I reached out my right arm towards my beautiful offspring. I wanted to go with them and leave the world behind. 

That was what I wanted. I saw it now, a truth clearer than the cleanest crystal. Since the day my wife and children had passed on, leaving me alone...maybe something had spoiled inside of me, I thought. I had retreated from the prospect of living life again since then, preferring a hermit-like existence instead. Gareth, just him perhaps, had saved me from a slow death; I certainly would have drunk myself to death had he not been watching with those knowing eyes of his.

But now he too was gone, my last good friend, the only one in the world I had ever really known. And now I-

The children, my children, I cried inside, were nearly to me, claws outstretched. I watched them, feeling the weight of the night's events. Who cared if they were mine, someone elses. I sighed, closed my eyes as they approached. Just stand there, resign from it all, let the grief and tiredness simply flow away-

-or not, as Treize bashed me across my shoulder, sprawling me on my ****. As I pulled myself up, sudden pain lined across my left palm; there was broken glass everywhere. But, for a moment, the weight was gone; I felt like myself again.

"Wake the **** up boy!" Treize shouted as he and the Butcher fired from my left and right. The strange, monstrous things who had been my children caught the two sprays fully; hot shrapnel tore their leering, fang filled faces to bows and ribbons. I focused on the blood for some reason: it ran rivers, lines of crimson diverted by stray glass shards across the ground. Like the Amazon, I thought distractedly.

This wasn't a thing I could express in words however. The Butcher pulled me to my feet again. He shook his head slowly. "Bad move. You would have died right there."

"Damn right" snarled Treize. He wouldn't look at me. I turned my eyes down. Once again, I had failed to take action.

I itched at my wound. Christ what an itch! "Treize, I-"

"General!" cried a dozen voices simultaneously.

The men gathered in the death throes of my incomplete apology. They had heard the shots, and now stood at attention around the two corpses.

Treize pointed north, west, south, east in a circular motion. "Men, they are beginning to close around us tight. We've killed a whole **** bunch of them, and they are PISSED OFF!!! Pissed I say! We need to make them angrier, lure them out, then blow them aw-"

Blow.them.away.

I gasped in sudden realization. Yes, that was it! Risky to go back, but perhaps Gareth might have had this pre-planned. Why else would have...

The bar was as it was every night; dead, lively as the grave, everything obscured by a dozen smokes.

"You have..wait, what?" I coughed, nearly swallowing an ice cube.

Gareth grinned, teeth hidden craftily. His balding head shone dull in the hazy light."Yeah, molotov cocktails man. Fifty liters of the stuff, bottled and stocked in the celler."

I stopped, stared. "But that's-"

The grin grew wider. "Illegal? Not quite man, not quite." He chuckled without mirth. "You could say its...inheritence. A hand-me-down."

Ice cold sour burned itself to ash down my throat. "F...for what purpose?"

He turned away. At that point, I was drunk enough to pass out.

"To bury this place alive someday. Someday..."

"...and make ourselves a little base-of-operations. We'll need to stock up, gather more weapons. Before Halloween, we-" Treize bellowed, his face bloody in the moonlight.

"Teacher!" I said loudly, rising over his voice.

He turned a burning eye to me; still angry, perhaps, about my near giving-in earlier. "What Peter? Do you have some GREAT plan in mind? Please share it with the rest of the class!" he motioned, spreading his arms. The other men, some gaunt-eyed, others full of fire, regarded me with silence.

I cleared my throat. "We have to go back to Gerrymander Black sir. There's something Gareth left for us."

He raised an eyebrow, a look I remembered well from my classroom days. "...And what would that be?"

The wind and shadows and the moon seemed to grow in volume, as if anticipating my answer.

I thought of Gareth, what he might say.

"Heat, my friend. Enough to set the world on fire." I grinned.

Treize's eyes widened for a second, as if scared of something he had seen in me...

...then broke out into a grin himself.

"THEN LETS GO BACK!" he laughed. He turned to the men. "New objective boys! Back to the bar!"

We marched quickly, laughing. I joined in, feeling...better than I had before.

But when we got there....