Zombie plot
What he will realize later is that he'd let his guard down. After everything that happened, he had let his guard down. He' d dared to think that everything would be handed to him without working. A common trap. Someone gets lucky and ends up thinking that their luck won't ever change.
One moment Mason is sitting at their table smiling and poking his sister with a plastic oscars fork and the next he's sprawled across the pizza, sauce thick and salty. Strange chunks of meat mixed themselves with pepperoni as his son (His son! His son!) lay sprawled facedown in the sauce.
I should have known.. He'll think later. I shouldn't have gotten comfortable.. When had life ever been easy for him? From one thing to another, he'd continued to put everyone he'd ever cared about into one colossal clusterfuck after another.
He'd been born under a bad sign.
And people are screaming. Some are dying. The thick sweet iron smell of gore hangs in the air, mingling with garlic. For a moment he thinks of pizza and becomes disgusted with the sudden feeling of hunger within him. People sticks. Oscar's answer to the inhuman and monsterous and their specially required diets.
Later he'll make plans too. They'll never come to fruition. The thing about vengeance is that it takes it's own course regardless of the best laid plans of mice and men in most cases. Besides. His luck is shit. He was never the best planner.
When did he get outside? His son's limp body is hanging in his arms like a pile of clothes. He was never this light. His son. Even as an infant he was always the heavier of the twins. His children. Someone has their hand on his shoulder, blond hair falling across his face as Crystal presses herself against him sobbing. Ame is pulling on her brother's arm like a toddler asking him in a strange sing-song voice to wake up.
His son still smells like pizza. Pizza isn't alive, it's to be eaten and enjoyed and this body in his arms, this still cold corpse...
"...I was a fool."
It was all my fault.
"....I shouldn't have gotten careless."
He's dead because of me..
This is what he tells the police, even though it doesn't make any sense.
When the EMT's try to take his son's corpse from his arms he practically snarls at them. If only. If only he could change as Spoon could. If only he could summon up all of his baser animal instincts in truth and make them all pay for what they had done. He longed to let go of the human voice telling him that Crystal and Ame needed him.
He wanted revenge. He wanted to taste his enemy's blood even as he wiped a calloused thumb across his son's ruined cheek before dragging the back of his hand over his eyes clumsily, as a child would. The gunman killed eight, but he'd shot his son first.
He firmly believed it was planned. The first death to shock the populace. The fact that they'd been willing to sacrifice innocent people to get at him was unthinkable. He had believed them capable of anything to achieve their means.
He just hadn't expected seeing the movie-theater manager lying in a pool of his own blood. He hadn't forseen the hispanic mother and her baby boy pulling at her hand with a tear-stained look on his face. He could not have concieved of the employees who'd gone in on a pizza watching their comrades be carted off to the ICU while they themselves were placed in bodybags as they drew their last breath.
They had died because he had dared to believe that he could have an iota of normal in his existence. Because he had forgotten that there was no such thing as normal.
He failed them.
He had failed all of them.
Crystal wipes Salad dressing out of her hair as she clings to her younger sister. Ame's lost her twin. And she seems half a human being cuddled in her sister's arms staring at the chaos with wide eyes.
Crystal slides her hair behind her ears and looks for her father. He was speaking to the officers. He was lying to them. Giving an Alias. He said it was important. He had to do it. Then-
"Dad?" her brow furrowed. How the hell had he slipped away?
Christopher Muldoon, Lieutenant First Class United States Army, Wiped the Remains of his family's dinner and his son's blood off his face, adrenaline pumping through his veins.
The fountain's water may as well run red with blood or dirt. It tastes like the desert's water. How could he have been so blind? He'd never left it, even here in this desert of neon and steel and glass. He had brought his men home prematurely.
Satisfied that he's not going to be licking dead child off his fingers or trying to hurt anyone (yet. Not yet) He makes for Crystal's car.
"...Sorry baby."
The world roared to life, "Daddy's got a little unfinished business to attend to."
Loud and proud. That's what his gun is now. Loud and proud and shock and awe. He can get used to the noise and the smell goddamnit. He'll use it to bring the wrath that it represents down upon the enemy and god help them if they stand in his way.
Shock and Awe. The final solution. He pulls the hammer back and slides it into his holster, opening the door to-
Somewhere else.