Donny likes to talk. He spends most of his town down by a bar on Eli Court in a part of downtown the daytimers have started referring to Hermitville. I suppose when you only leave the bar long enough to slink back into your 10′ by 10′ apartment to make sure the usual money makes it into the usual account people are liable to start putting a label on you. Most of the go-zers, that’s people like Donny, don’t remember much and really don’t have much to talk about. They’ve been stooped in a liquor bottle for so long it might as well be an extension of their dick, one hand clasped around the base of a bottle, the other fingering the sides of the precious little silver card that makes it all possible.

It probably seems like I’m being a little vague. That’s strictly unintentional. See, I or anyone else for that matter, know fuck all ’bout the go-zers. They just sorta showed up on day. Not like a trudging mass of ’em walking through the streets, no they just popped up. Any and every bar within three miles of the southern tip of the city suddenly had half a dozen new customers dropping over three hundred a fuckin’ week on liquor not including the bouts of ‘entertainment’ the more brazen girls convinced them to partake in.

No one asked them where they came from, not sure they would have given an answer if we had. Four to six quiet guys appear in a bar, spend a bunch of money, it ain’t news. People lose a bunch of money at CARDS every week, no one really thought too much of it. Spend a few nights drinking, disappear on the next Velvet Bus to where ever they came from. Only these guys didn’t leave, they barely moved. Suddenly the barmen started talkin’ to one another and they all shared the same fairytale. 32 bars with almost exactly 150 new stool-ornaments decorating their business. Local guildsmen went through the motions to have them ousted, until they realized they all had the magical money machines in their pockets. The fuck was I going? Right, Donny.

Donny has a rather large portion of his left leg removed and has found itself embedded in a newly opened hole somewhere next to base of his skull. If you hadn’t guessed, Donny’s not in the greatest of sorts. If the grey mess sticking to his ears and concrete is any indication, he should probably be dead. Or at the very least not talking me ear off.

“You ever see the movie Headmen Trail? Stupidest damn thing I’ve ever seen. It was playing in the boozer last week, watched it over the game. Over two and a half hours of a man walking. It’s amazing what those stupid bastards’ll pay for.”

He smiles through the gore across his face, sending a biological projectile onto his chest.

We’re in the unfinished basement of an old candy shoppe. Blue tarps are covering most of the walls and a not unnoticeable amount of blood is painted across the wall, I say painted, because there’s a paint sticking out of the tongue of his shoe, you know, the one attached to his head.

“What’s wrong, Blake?”

I don’t know what to say. The smell of black licorice and powdered sugar have settled into the foundation of the basement, which when combined with the smell of clotting blood makes me a little sick. I can feel something in the back of my brain trying to pull its way out of my head, something like being dangled upside down over a ridge and yanked up and down by one foot.

“Well, it could have something to do with that sneakered antler sticking out of your head.”

Donny takes a second and looks up and his forehead and follows something all the way to the limb violently bored into his head. His face never changes.

“Yeah, I suppose that should probably be of some concern. The, uh-”

He pauses for a moment.

“Grey! The grey stuff. Is that the uh-”

He pauses again. I finish his thought for him.

“Brains. Yes, it is.”

“Well, that’s no good. You figure you can help me get it all back together?”

“I’m not really sure that’s an option, Donny, I don’t think you should really be, well, talking first off.”

“Oh, please. Half the idiots in this world don’t use their damn brain and still manage to wander out into traffic everyday. No reason I can’t still use what’s left of mine.”

Eventually, after staring at something that so goes against your idea of what things should and ought to be, you just sort of shut off. Well, I suppose you could fight it and try to figure out what the finer details of the situation, but I’ve never been known as a smart man, and faking it just seemed like it was going to make things worth. I’ve never been a violent man, but I really want to pull the limb from his head and finish the job, at least until some things starts to make sense.

Mark comes down before I get too comfortable with the idea.

“Yo, I found a box of ajax in with the corn syrup.”

He peers under the stare case, a large plastic cereal container filled with white powder in his left hand. Mark was the one that found Donny lying here. He was the one that brought me here. Why I don’t know, ‘parently I look like I know ’bout corpses.

“Ajax? What kind of candy are you boys making?”