~:~:~:~
Hit-Girl.
~:~:~:~

If Daddy were here, he'd know what to do.

The glass separates me from Kick-Ass. He looks up above the office, and I can just hear Red Mist's gloating voice. The door is just as secure, but the crack underneath lets me hear.

He's going to die. Then I'm going to die.

The bad guys win sometimes too.

"...can watch what they do to her..."

Kick-Ass looks around. The three from before are circling him now. One of them is wearing my brass knuckles.

"Real slow." Red Mist says, and then they start.

~:~:~:~
Kick-Ass.
~:~:~:~

They move in, and I have time for one shot.

Behind me, the limping one raises a hand. I turn and shoot him between the eyes, snuffing him out quickly. To my left, brass knuckles swing hard, hitting me behind the left ear.

I drop the gun, swinging my baton and striking his leg. Another grabs me around the middle and throws me back to the ground hard. I stand, striking him in the side with my weapon before I swing it again to drive him back. I trip over the one I shot, falling on my face.

A booted foot stomps down against my back, throwing me down hard. I roll over and stand, facing them both now. Being thrown has moved my mask, blocking my vision. I take it off and drop it.

The one on the right starts to circle around me. He throws a left jab and then steps around and punches me with the right, throwing me back against one of the metal counters.

They each grab one of my arms and throw me back down hard. An arm grabs mine and turns me over. Punches begin to strike every inch of my face. A lifetime ago, they would have hurt.

When they wear themselves out, I get back on my feet, swinging wildly to clear a path. They pant and bend over, taking deep breaths. On the platform above us, Red Mist looks disappointed.

Hit-Girl is on her knees now, slamming the window again. She is crying, tears dripping down her face from below her mask. She screams every foul name in the book, barely able to be heard. Red Mist laughs.

"Good effort, but I want to see more." He says.

Something clicks in a hand, and a shiny switchblade is thrust at me. I turn to the side and it slices through the shoulder of my suit, missing precious flesh and bone.

I kick the knife bearer in the chest and slam the baton into the other mug's face, sending them both to the ground.

The gun is close. I run for it and snatch it up, turning around. The one with the knife lunges at me again. Before I can shoot, he slashes through the meat of my arm. I drop the gun again and blood marks my suit again, fresh blood to stain with the rest of the past few days' accumulation. Some mine. Some others'.

I kick him in the stomach, doubling him over, then slam my stick on the back of his head. It chips and cracks down the center from the force of the impact. My trademark weapons have finally bit the dust.

Another strike from behind. I don't go down this time. I spin around and slam my head into the attacker's skull. He falls down, out. I don't feel a thing.

Hit-Girl stops banging on the glass. She lays in front of the window, blood and snot dripping down her face.

Red Mist comes down the stairs now, standing on the sidelines.

"You fucking apes, you suck." He grumbles, tapping the machine pistol at his side against his leg with an impatient look.

With one dead and two out of the game, it's us now.

But there will be no final fight. No real confrontation. The coward is cornered.

I bend down to pick up the gun I dropped. He unlocks the office door and approaches Mindy.

She tries to stand, and he shoots her in the leg without a moment of hesitation.

Armor-piercing rounds. The funny red rounds in a gun held by the Red Mist.

He grabs her by the back of her suit and pulls her up. Her leg cannot support her. One hand is hard around her neck, forcing her to stand on her right. He presses the gun against her cheek hard enough to leave a small burn from the searing hot bore of the barrel.

He drags her out of the office, making his message clear. I point the gun at him over Mindy's shoulder.

I don't know for sure what will happen now, but he smirks when I hesitate. He grips the gun a bit tighter. She doesn't have the strength left to fight.

I toss the gun. He shoves her away and shoots her, then turns and shoots me. Lead tears through my shoulder and my gut, throwing me to the floor.

I try to stand. I manage to sit. There's a gaping hole in my belly. I can see things I shouldn't in there.

He levels the gun at my head and it clicks. Outside, there are sirens in the distance. He looks at the steel door, then back at the other exit.

With a laugh and a single, momentary look back, he runs.

I get up very slowly. This hurts more than being stabbed. More than anything in my life.

Hit-Girl lays very still on her back. Blood pools underneath her body, dripping through the blackened grout of the tile and swirling around the dirty drain next to her. She coughs, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.

The handgun. Near me. I clamp a hand down hard on my stomach wound and pick it up. I walk back to her and drop to my knees. She opens her eyes and looks up at me.

"Finnnnnnnnnnnnn..." She speaks without a voice, lips forming a circle as her bruised and swollen eye sockets quivering with fresh, hot tears in pain that must truly outdo my own.

"Don't talk."

She takes a metal vial from her belt and grabs for my hand, pressing it into my palm.

"Finnniissshh the job..." She whispers.

Condition Red.

I turn the vial over, press my thumb to the release and hold the vial up to my nose, inhaling through the hole in the chamber.

This stuff is terrible. It burns and makes my entire head throb. The taste of pills chewed down without water is in my mouth and dripping down the back of my throat like a nasty, lumpy glue. The pain in my stomach is there, but it ceases to keep me on my knees.

Finish the job. Finish the job.

~:~:~:~

I catch up with Chris as I turn past the remains of a shot-up card table. Room after room destroyed, a sign of her passing. He fires over his shoulder at me, spending a few bullets from a fresh clip.

At the end of a corridor ahead of me, he pulls the door open and turns around. He fires another burst of ammunition at me, stitching a line in the cinderblock wall and raining dust down into the hallway. The industrial lights mounted on the walls fizzle and dim. I draw the gun from my belt and fire as he does. A round strikes his armor and he slams the door shut behind him, laughing.

The hole in my body continues to bleed. I keep one hand over it, tucking the gun under my arm to open the door. A hand gloved in red shoots out from around the corner and fires again. One round hits the door, leaving a mushroom-shaped bore on it's exit.

He takes a right at the next turn. I shoot after him, but my aim is not steady. Rounds bounce around his fleeing form. He slams open another door and I hear him ascending the stairs to the roof.

I aim up and level the gun with the back of his head. The next shot hits him in the shoulder as he turns, clipping meat and the material of his suit at once. The door slams in my path. I throw my weight against it and the knob on the other side cracks against the exterior wall.

Red Mist stops at the edge of the roof and looks back. We shoot again, almost at the same time. He takes another in the torso and stumbles forward onto his knees, squeezing the trigger. When he lands, the gun flies from his hand and clatters at my feet. I lunge forward and snatch it up, emptying the clip in his direction. It bucks higher in my hand with every spent round. A dotted line begins in front of him and crosses over his body, two of the cop-killers tearing into him.

He yells out in pain, and I drop his gun, throwing myself onto him.

"A FUCKING LITTLE GIRL!" I turn him over and drive my fist into his face. His hands grapple at mine, a desperate defense. I pull my hand back and punch him again, red dripping between the knuckles of my tan gloves.

His head hits the stone hard. His eyes roll back into his skull. One of his hands grabs my arm as I draw back for another swing. I put the pistol against his hand and pull the trigger. He screams again, his hand is now a bloody, shattered piece of meat. I turn the gun over and slam the handle into his face. He makes a low groan, almost like a dying animal.

"MY FUCKING DAD!" I scream, swinging the gun into his face.

I don't know how many times I strike his face with the gun. My body screams in pain, but I can't stop. It's a long time before I grab him by the hair and push the barrel against his head.

"FUCK YOU!" I pull the trigger. The contents of his skull splatter my face.

I shove the gun into his open mouth and pull the trigger again. "FUCK YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"

.

.

.

Your funeral will have red flowers. You wouldn't have it any other way, Chris.

Get up.

One more thing.

There's a very big hole in my stomach now.

Somebody lights a match under my insides. My intestines hang in a bundle around my waist, hanging through the hole in my stomach now. I close my eyes, biting down on the neck of my suit as I try to shove them back in.

My poor guts. They haven't asked for any of this. Any of this at all.

They won't all go back in.

A loop of small intestine escapes my fingers when I get back to the stairs. I lean against the railing, becoming aware of my own end now. I cough, and the world goes black for just a second. Blood from my mouth drips on the wall. At the bottom of the stairs, I feel vomit rising in my throat and I cough up bile and other sour things mixed with blood.

One more. One more thing.

The corridor is Everest. More of my innards escape my hands. Two hands, but I can't let go of the gun. My hand is frozen around it's grip.

Everything smells like blood. Everything is covered in blood.

So much pain. So much death.

I love you, dad.

Red and blue lights bounce through every dirty window in the building. A deep, bright light is swept across the ground floor. I stumble at the doorway of the meat room.

Lay here.

One more thing.

There's a noise near me. One of the two men that I knocked unconscious is waking up. Leaning up on my elbows, I shoot him between the eyes.

Up and back across the room. I almost stumble again over the last of the incapacitated hired help. I shoot him with my head turned away. As I step over him, something pulls, and then I step back and watch my boot come down on the small intestine that's become wrapped around the dead man's neck.

The pain cannot be described.

There's a voice with a megaphone, and I even hear a helicopter.

Hit-Girl lays where she is, eyes open and body very still except for the tremors of pain that force her into convulsions every few moments, fresh blood dripping from the holes that have ruined her last good suit.

I fall down next to her again. It takes a while to sit up.

She raises her head. All she can do. I use my hands to push myself closer to her, sitting up and resting her head in the crook of my arm.

"I wanna go home..." She says, finding the strength to talk again.

Not die at this age.

She won't die.

That's what's so tragic.

In a moment, they'll get the doors open. They'll come inside and take us away.

Some adrenaline, maybe some of that great morphine. Unmasked for the whole world.

Dave Lizewski, high school nobody.

"Tell me we're going home soon." She says.

"We'll go home soon." I tell her, holding her. She begins to shake again. I hurt, but I know she's suffering more, because at least I'm sort of going numb at this point.

I put my arm around her shoulders and hold her tight until it stops.

"We'll go home soon, and your daddy will come too." I keep saying to her.

She closes her eyes.

One more thing.

"Tell me more." She says.

"Your daddy will come and get you..." I say. "...and he'll be there again. Things will get better, because he'll be there."

"Go on. Tell me more." She says slowly.

The steel door at the end of the meat packing bay rattles on it's ancient hinges.

The gun is still in my hand.

"You won't have to go back to school... because he'll be there... and he'll make things fun..." I whisper to her.

"Yes..." She sighs.

"..and you'll do really good. He'll teach you a lot of nice things, and he'll be proud. He'll be proud of you."

Taken away to live and unmasked.

Mindy Macready. Eleven years old. Raised in blood. Orphaned by violence.

They'll fix us right up, and I'll go to jail.

She'll go away somewhere.

Somewhere with a locked door. Somewhere they can keep her away, because she is so tragic.

Some people are born sick.

Some people are made sick, and they can never get better.

Sometimes, they're really young, and the world is too big for them.

Sometimes, they try to fix it.

They try to be normal and it always falls apart, because they will never be anything but what they are.

"He said he was proud of me sometimes." She says.

The door's rusty chain lock gives without much of a fight.

The doctors call it Exsanguination. Common people call it bleeding out. Sometimes, you've lost too much blood.

Sometimes you lose enough blood to stop living, but not enough to die.

Until finally, it stops. The suffering stops. You like to think it will.

But you watch that happen to someone.

You think that a person's body has this limit. This threshold and line that it will cross at some point... where it will just numb. Just give in, and the suffering will end, but it doesn't.

Until you realize that your prayers and your hopes and your dreams are never going to change a thing. You know what you have to do.

Not because it's heroic. Not because it will make the world a stronger, loving place. Because no one else can.

God won't help, if he's even up there listening.

We don't show all of our pain all of the time.

"I'm a fanboy, Dave. Just like you. Mindy died having no idea, but I'm just another asshole."

One. More. Thing.

"He is proud of you, Mindy." I tell her.

In all of this, I have learned about the things people do. Why we are what we are.

I understand, and I still believe that we're worth saving, through everything. Can you believe that?

There are people who have died, and then we've brought them back.

I press the gun against her head.

"Tell me." She repeats

"He's proud of you." I tell her.

Sometimes people die and come back.

"Tell me." She repeats again.

"He's proud of you. He's proud."

"Promise?"

"I promise, Mindy. He's so proud."

They tell us not to be afraid.

The door opens. Lights wash over us.

I draw the trigger back.

Life leaves Mindy and Hit-Girl forever.

The mask is laying close. Just where I left it.

I put down the gun, and I reach for it, putting it back on.

It is part of who I am.

This is who I am, and what I have created.

The lights come closer.

I don't let go of Mindy until strong arms pick me up and lift me away from her.

Her head falls to the floor.

At the end of the tunnel, there is a light that never goes out.

~:~:~:~
Red Mist.
~:~:~:~

When that moment comes, some of us take a step back, and re-examine our direction in life.

Some of us don't. They don't understand what it means to honestly want something.

To fight for it.

To die for it.

When he pulled the trigger, I died.

Liar.

At the head of the table, Uncle Carl lights a cigarette. He takes a drag and rests it against the side of the ashtray. A wispy curl of smoke rises through the light above the table and evaporates before it touches the lamps.

The rest of the room is dark. I stood there for the longest time, watching them. Understanding what had to be done.

What has to be done, is that we have to take a step back.

I remember the needles. They were sharp and wide and fastened to the machine that bore itself into the remains of my face. A stimulant was injected into my IV, keeping my brain alive while they dug out the slug. One shot had exited completely. The other had bore directly through my limbic system and ricocheted into the parietal lobe.

On either side of the table, the Elders are evenly divided. Four on either side, all staring at this stranger in the mask who stands, clutching not a gun or a bomb but a red folder stamped with a familiar symbol.

This is how we're going to do things now. We can't be the 'evil' ones in secret anymore. Not when they are out they in their masks, swearing to find people like us.

We're going to reveal ourselves. We're going to create something new, and they'll begin to realize the price of their career choices.

After my skull was clean of lead, the needles withdrew. The skin grafts would begin after the reconstruction of the left side of my face, and the back of my skull, where the worst damage had been done.

There were more needles over time. Machines working day and night, tubes feeding my body fluids and vitamins and precious oxygen.

You can fall off a building. You can be shot in the head or you can have a heart attack. Any way that it happens, we all die of the same thing. Hypoxemia. Low oxygen in the bloodstream. Essentially, your brain and heart choke without air to breathe.

If it happens for a few seconds, you can survive. If it lasts for longer than a minute, you can have irreparable brain damage.

They said I was legally dead for six and a half minutes. I remember nothing but darkness. When I opened my eyes, I could see more than what my eyes showed me.

"You all were invited here for a few reasons. Most important, business." I say to them. They hang on every word, but my voice, altered from the deterioration of my vocal cords in my coma, can still be recognized by the perceptive.

"Chris." Second on the left says.

"Red Mist." I correct. Somebody taps their drink down. "Alive, I'm sure you are all disappointed to know."

Third on the right stands up and looks at me. Uncle Carl leans back in his chair and smiles.

The body would have been a John Doe. Nothing left to identify by except for the remains of a tattered costume. It would have been biting details to slap next to the survival of a certain Dave Lizewski. Also known as Kick-Ass, vigilante and child murderer.

Within an hour, Dave Lizewski was identified, protective custody with a policeman posted outside of his hospital room door around the clock. Looking back at all of the blogs I missed, many different stories have made it to the web.

The general consensus - Kick-Ass wasn't what we thought, was he?

Kick-Ass' unmasking devoured the media. His grandparents refused to give a statement, but they got enough statements from people that stepped forward who knew him from school. They even got a friend named Martin and a girl named Katie Deauxma.

Nobody would have cared about the body in red unless it was identified.

But it never made the press. Money was given to expire interest. Nobody complained, and what was left of me was airlifted to a private hospital the next night.

I had help. I won't forget the ones that stayed loyal to my father. To me. None of the men in this room, of course.

What really got people going was what happened to Kick-Ass after that.

He disappeared from that hospital. Nobody has seen him since.

Except for a few rumors on the internet.

"I'm alive, and now I'm here to take back what's mine." I tell them.

I open the folder and turn it around. They lean up in their chairs, staring down at the contents.

From now on, we're going to do something none of the other families have ever thought of. We're going to become real villains.

They couldn't save my hand. A prosthetic was attached, painted and sculpted to be as lifelike as possible under my left glove. It has it's own quirks, but it does it's job.

Under the mask I wear, the left side of my face has been completely rebuilt. That pummeling with the gun did the bulk of the damage, the bullets rattling inside of my head did the rest. My left eye is now blue and lifeless, the ocular nerve scraped out with the rest of the dead skin and shattered muscle. Soon, they'll give me a contact so the pupils match, but I'll never see through the thing.

The cheekbone replaced with a synthetic material sculpted from organic coral. All of this modern science, and society has been stepping backwards all of this time. The cleft of my chin is gone, seventy percent of my jawbone reconstructed from scratch. Long, puffy scars in my scalp where epoxy has been bonded to the fractures in my skull, making it whole once more.

The eyepieces in my new mask enhance my depthless vision. The suit I wear is my own design, down to the red symbol in the center of the chestpiece. I put a hand against the bottom of the mask and slide it up. My face remains in shadow cast by the the lights above.

"Not all of you will be moving on with me. Some of you have to answer for your deception."

I realize now that I've been a giver for too long, letting them take what isn't theirs, and bending over for their own ideals.

Something my father would never consider. Something bigger than he could ever leave behind.

They're out there. On the internet. In back alleys. In parking lots and on street corners. People in masks, trying to do the right thing.

Some of them are like me. Some of them see the bigger picture.

They'll join us when the time comes, and being a superhero will become the most dangerous occupation in the world for the ones that don't.

"Now, Chris-" Somebody begins to protest.

"There's no discussion tonight. No other night now, either. You're obsolete."

I tell them what we're going to do from now on, and what it's going to mean for us.

Uncle Carl finishes his cigarette, and he stands up, heading for the door. I let him go. There will be another time.

They get up to leave. One by one by one, until only one stands at the table.

I put a hand on my left cheek and think about all of those surgeries and procedures that saved my mind. Dead for so long, I should be a vegetable. I am sane. I am aware. Every time I look in the mirror now, I see two sides of the world staring back.

This is who I am, and what I have created.

Outside, there is a world that can be taken piece by piece.

An army that can be formed. A war that can be fought.

"Chris, you should be dead." He says.

"I am dead." I answer him, a light smile.

"What do you mean?" He asks.

I turn my head to the light. He stares in a mixture of fear and disgust at what's become of my face.

"Well, half." I say.

"The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming."
~Harvey Dent~

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END OF BOOK TWO.
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