Miasma of the Dawn

[D/N]

(Kaitlyn Greene continued from The Greatest Sideshow on Earth)

The gun bucked in her hands as she fired wildly into the ocean.

"This gun..."

A few more. Her fingers felt like someone had taken a meat hammer to them.

"This gun fucking sucks!"

Seriously, what the hell? It was an Uzi! Wasn't that supposed to be synonymous with gun awesomeness. But this... she couldn't control this thing. She couldn't shoot it without the gun shaking all over the place no matter how hard she tried to grip it. And she was fucking Katy Buried here. How dumb were these terrorists to give a shit gun like this to the rest of her classmates when not even she could make it work properly?

Kaitlyn sighed. Then she grumbled about how cliche that seemed. She looked out of the cove and the sun was starting to ascend higher, and then she shrugged, tossed the gun underhand on the rocks next to her bag, and squatted down.

This was her second time here. It was at least familiar territory, and she guessed that made it as good a place as any to wait out the next few hours and see what happened. While she'd scurried across the bridge in the rising sun after leaving the pub, wondering where the hell she was headed, it had popped into her head and stayed caught there. The cove. Nice and inviting. And probably a place where no one would spend the night, so it'd also be empty at this ungodly hour.

And it didn't escape her that she'd gone back to her first failure following her second.

Kaitlyn grabbed Peter Pan and sat down on a rock, leafing idly through the pages as she gazed out cross the old horizon. Yeah, the cove and the tide. How often did tides come in and out, anyway? Once a day, right? Yeah. Yeah, there'd be more tides.

Maybe that meant more chances. To not blink. Huh. File that one away, Kaitlyn.

That made her feel a bit better. More chances. Better fuckin choices. And hell, consider what she'd done right. She had books and bars and bombs, didn't she? And believers. If the voices would play along more, more believers still. She could spin that forever.

Of course, it didn't take more than an hour of flipping through the pages of what was inexplicably titled Peter and Wendy instead of Peter Pan before her mood was souring and those anxieties in her stomach grew again because it had to be close to nine. And why the hell had she remembered this fucking book as fondly as she had? It was written a billion years ago and sure as hell read like it with this weird British prose and there was all this rambling stuff about the goddamn redskins dancing around the fire and going ooowahahahaheyeyeyho or whatever pieceshit they liked to fucking sing about rather than the boss pirate-killing action she'd kind of remembered it having.

Although it was pretty funny when Tinkerbell fooled the Lost Boys into thinking that Wendy was a bird and they shot her with an arrow while she was flying. Tink was actually pretty badass.

But whatever. She hadn't cracked open her other book yet because she was saving that. It had been her favorite book ever when she was 12, it had been her dad's fave when he was a kid in the 70s and it came out and she'd be really fucking pissed if had turned out as crap as this one had.

And then the announcements came on.

She pitched Peter Fucking Pan into the ocean and forgot about him forever.

(Kaitlyn Greene continued in Greene's Gulch)