Reunion

I wake up to cold water on my face and I see Dingo looking at me with a nervous grin. “Shit Shade, you need to watch that. Your face looks like its been to the butcher shop,” he hands me a cigarette while I check myself. I still have my gun and that bulge in my hip pocket feels like my cell phone. The idiots are so used to being immune to bullets that they still don’t search people for weapons. “Yeah, can’t take them like I used to,” I mutter before taking a drag. My cheek burns from the cuts my teeth made when I got punched, “How long have I been out?”, I ask. “About thirty minutes,” he says flatly. I reach out my hand for some help getting up and he just looks at it. “So…I’ll ask again, what are you doing with a bunch of Nod freaks? I don’t remember you ever being any fonder of them than I was,” I ask. He shrugs and sits down next to me. “It’s complicated. When Sunshine and me saw those guys carry you back to that hospital, we got into a big fight about who to go to. Like you said, those guys are something else. Guns that can hurt a vampire was big info and we couldn’t decide who to go to. I mean, I was all for the Enlightenment but…when we pulled the bullet out of Sunshine, we checked it over. All those fucking science classes they made us take back when we were with the Movement, right? It was lead. No chemical residue. Nothing weird,” he explains. When you’re a member of the Enlightenment you’re required to become a bit of a maverick education-wise. Science, philosophy, art, personal development. “Sunshine said we had to go anyways but I was against it. Like you used to say about their fucking motto over there, ‘Question everything except us’. I wouldn’t be shocked if they decided the reason Sunshine was missing his arm was because he fell asleep with just one part of his arm in the sunlight,” Dingo says. I nod and try to collect the marbles in my head because right now a red light is going off. I’m amazed Dingo was able to get this kind of time with me so easily. “So you went to the guys who were crazy enough to believe you’d been shot by a magic bullet and told them,” I say.