#she had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor and given six months to live. that was four years ago. so it wasn’t a shock.

[snckt]

one of my best friend’s mom passed and today was her funeral. and. i say it like that’s all she was but she was so much more than a friend’s mom, she was my friend too. she was always there, sitting in her kitchen ready to join in on whatever fun that we girls had thought up. (but let’s be real, she was the one who thought it all up for us. that magic of being a teen was because of her. so much was because of her.) i’m profoundly sad.

[tvintedspvrkmoved]

ʟᴀʏʟᴀ ʀᴏᴜʀᴋᴇ . layla faith rourke was born and raised in ford city , nebraska by her mother , eloise rourke. raised in the christian faith , layla was incredibly religious growing up as influenced by her mother. so it was no surprise when , after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor , the mother daughter duo turned to god.

ʀᴏʏ ʟᴇ ɢʀᴀɴɢᴇ . when layla was in her early twenties , she fell incredibly ill. she rapidly began to show several concerning symptoms , leading to a diagnosis of a gliosarcoma of the brain. she was given six months to live at most , prompting eloise to spring into action. a preacher named roy le grange was beginning to offer faith healing sessions , which appealed to the incredibly religous , god fearing older woman ; thus layla and her mother attended these sessions until they ended , just after sam and dean winchester rolled into town.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴡɪɴᴄʜᴇꜱᴛᴇʀ ʙʀᴏᴛʜᴇʀꜱ . when layla met dean winchester , she thought he was funny and charming. more than that , she felt it was deserved when he was chosen by roy to be healed from a failing heart. so it was incredibly shocking and disappointing when , after she was finally chosen , he began to try and deter her from accepting the healing. he never explained why ( though a few years later , she has a pretty good general idea ) he did this ; all she knew was that the first time the preacher attempted to heal her , dean caused a disruption - and the second time , nothing happened. to make matters worse , the preacher's wife was found deceased , a stroke having taken her while everyone was gathered for the second healing attempt. layla saw the body ; it was the first time her faith had ever wavered.

ᴇʟᴏɪꜱᴇ'ꜱ ᴅᴇᴀʟ . realizing there was not going to be a divine miracle sent for her daughter , eloise turned to methods more occult than religious. she scoured libraries and the internet , desperately searching for any way to keep her daughter alive - and eventually she found one. eloise had ventured far into a dark corner of the internet , where she learned how to summon and make a deal with a crossroad demon. given her lifelong faith in god's existence , it was not difficult for eloise to believe in the method - only to grapple with what it would mean for her faith , and for her afterlife once those ten years were up. still , with layla's life on the line , she followed through and made the deal ; her daughter's tumor was gone by the time she got home.

when layla found out what her mother had done , she was furious. she demanded to know everything , to see the forum in which eloise had been given these instructions. she learned all about the deal , and about what would happen to her mother when her time ran out. the more layla discovered , the more determined she became to find a way to get her mom out of the deal.

ɴᴏᴡ . four years later , layla is twenty six and still searching for a way to get eloise out of her crossroad deal. given the clear existence of demons , she is still a believer that god exists as well. given her anger , however , religion has taken a back seat to helping her mother. she frequently communicates and works with the winchesters ( heavily affiliated with jareds @stanfordprepped and @shook-me-all-night-long ) and has begun to work cases. new to hunting , she's only worked a handful of cases so far , but she's been learning and researching lore for different supernatural beings ever since she first found out about the deal.

ʜᴇɪɢʜᴛ . 5 ' 6 ᴡᴇɪɢʜᴛ . 128

[truthbeetoldmedia]

iZombie 5x01 "Thug Death" Review

We are back in New Seattle, and relations between humans and zombies are as tense as ever. The first episode of iZombie’s final season is mostly about setting the table, putting into motion some strong narrative threads that will take us to the finale.

The episode starts with a six-month time jump, establishing that there is now an accepted workflow in the city. Blaine’s brain business is booming, paying off border agents to help him smuggle brains into Seattle in order to keep the zombie population fed. Major is settled into his role as commander of Fillmore Graves, and assesses case of people who want to go beyond the city wall (medical emergencies and special cases only), while Liv, still acting as Renegade, assesses cases of people who want to be brought in, hoping that a zombie scratch can save their lives. Dale and Clive are stronger than ever, taking advantage of the cure, and are expecting a baby. But when a woman is murdered by zombies and it’s caught on camera, it threatens to blow open some carefully curated processes.

Liv and Clive get on the case, without the brain of the murdered woman. They have to do some old-fashioned police work, cold calling and using security cam footage to get leads. They run across Bix Cahill, the boyfriend of a potential victim. In a rare turn for iZombie, this case isn’t solved by the end of the episode, giving us a cliffhanger that might carry into next week, or maybe even longer. Rather than just a open and shut homicide, this one is going to have ripple effects on all our major players.

Peyton is still the acting mayor, and she’s attempting to hold everything down. She agrees to go on local TV and unfortunately finds herself caught in a debate with a concerned human woman, Dolly Durkins (Jennifer Irwin). The conversation escalates to Dolly advocating for bringing the guillotines back. Later, we find out that she’s more than just talk — she’s running some kind of violent human rebel ring out of a fish food truck. A customer places a seemingly innocent order that results in an explosion at a Fillmore Graves checkpoint, devastating Major and his squad.

After watching the brutal assault video, Blaine’s border patrol agents back out on their deal, threatening the state of brain food in Seattle. He brings them in and roughs them up a bit, but one doesn’t back down, telling Blaine that he doesn’t work for zombies anymore. Will the other agents follow his lead, or will Blaine make good on his promise to turn them into zombies for disobeying him?

Liv’s Renegade operation has become a little more sophisticated over the last few months, fake wardrobe walls and all. While reviewing applications to be smuggled into New Seattle, she is particularly moved by a teenaged boy with a brain tumor and abusive foster home. When her coyote shows up, the boy has brought two of his young foster sisters with him, and they convince the coyote to take all three of them. At the risk of sounding cold-blooded, this is a terrible idea. The coyote only brought one ID, and a slip up like this could ruin the whole Renegade operation. Sure enough, they don’t make it past a checkpoint, and a border agent finds the young girls hiding on the bus. I hope that Liv has a trick up her sleeve to save this one.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted by the show’s addition of Dr. Collier (Quinta Brunson). Viewers might know Quinta from her internet content, particularly from Buzzfeed. Personally, I’m a huge fan of her, so I hope that iZombie can take advantage of her comedic chops. Here, she plays Ravi’s new brilliant liaison at the CDC, who she fights to get face time with — this proves to be a struggle while he’s on a ridiculous Jason Statham-ish brain. She gets him to focus enough to tell him her theory about a cure using the post-mortem brains of the victims of “Freylich Syndrome.” Freylich Syndrome was the rare disease that Isobel (RIP, sweet baby girl) was plagued with, and her brain did in fact produce a cure. Ravi tells her she’s correct, but cautions that it would put a target on teenage kids who are already diagnosed with a terminal disease. Ravi seems to believe that a lead on a zombie cure is too valuable to be ethically pursued at this time. Dr. Collier listens, and tanks her own idea during a conference call with her supervisors. There’s something that feels uncomfortable about this — I didn’t love watching a black woman discredit herself in order for the plot to work, but I’m hoping that we see more Dr. Collier in the future, and hope she’ll play a big role in finding the cure by the end of the series. I’m looking forward to her teaming up with Ravi.

The past few seasons of iZombie have had some fantastic case-of-the-week brains, while having some overly ambitious, fuzzy overall season arcs. With showrunner Rob Thomas insisting that the show will be wrapping everything up with no ambiguous endings, perhaps this season will have a more focused and determined arc. I hope the show doesn’t bite off more than it can chew, narratively speaking.

Stray Thoughts

A huge motif last season was the impact of viral images and what is (and what isn’t) caught on camera, something that continued here with the season opener. The showrunner has been open about how New Seattle often mirrors modern day America, with varying degrees of subtleness.

Seems like iZombie and co might be saving their budget for other things, the explosion at the checkpoint happens so off screen that it’s almost confusing.

One of my favorite small moments of the episode was when Dale sends Clive out for chocolate, but he has to rifle through a picked-over convenience store to no avail. I love that the showed how resources are low through the lens of Dale’s pregnancy cravings, as if women with child don’t have it hard enough.

Peyton’s new haircut looks SO good that I didn’t even notice that it was a new cut until Ravi said something! On the other hand, it’s been five seasons and Liv’s wig is as terrible as ever.

Blaine eats a brain that has a  PhD in Information Science, and starts rattling off very specific, memorized facts about all his hostages. As a person who is a few weeks away from earning their Master in Library and Information Science I have to say…this is...not exactly how that works.

They couldn’t have given Quinta a scene partner with a reasonable height for her introduction scene? She’s practically craning her neck to look up at him, and the composition of the shot is so strange. I get that the point of the scene is that her character is underestimated, and perhaps the height differences were meant to show that, but it was distracting.

iZombie airs Thursdays at 9/8c on the CW.

Haley’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝

[newstfionline]

‘Every single day is a gift’

By Lindsey Bever, Washington Post, July 25, 2018

There was a time--several months after J.J. Hanson was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, but several years before he died from it--when, he once said, he might have considered ending it all.

The husband and father said in 2015 that the previous year, he learned that he had a Grade 4 brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme and was given four months to live.

He had been fighting the cancer, but now, sick in bed and worried about becoming a burden to his family, he was lost in his thoughts.

“I was done,” he said. “Done.”

“Would this be easier if I just gave up--if I just said, ‘This is too much of a burden on my family, the pain is difficult, I don’t want to deal with this?’ What if I just said I’ve had enough and ended it,” J.J., president of the Patients’ Rights Action Fund, said in two videos recently released by the organization, which opposes the legalization of physician-assisted death.

“I would be okay the next day because I would be gone. I wouldn’t feel the pain. I wouldn’t feel the emotion. They do--my wife would feel it for the rest of her life. My son would not have one more day to spend with me.”

In December, J.J., 36, died of the disease, but his family said he spent his last days opposing assisted death and, instead, advocating for better end-of-life care. His wife said he told her that if he had had the lethal dose of medication on his bedside during his darkest of days, he might have used it and then missed out on three more years with his family. He said he didn’t want that to happen to others.

“Every single day is a gift,” J.J. said in the 2015 video, “and you can’t let that go.”

J.J.’s wife, Kristen, said she wants to continue to spread his “message of hope.”

“Always hold on to hope. Even when you feel you’re at the end, there’s hope to have precious time with your family without pain or suffering,” Kristen, of Sullivan County, N.Y., told The Washington Post last week.

J.J. was diagnosed in May 2014 after he had a seizure.

Kristen said her husband later told her that he felt as if he was having a severe panic attack during a meeting at work--then he got tunnel vision, lost his ability to speak and fell to the floor.

Kristen was at home playing with their then-1-year-old son when she got a call from her husband’s phone number; it was a paramedic saying that he had collapsed and had a grand mal seizure.

Kristen rushed to the hospital.

She said an MRI exam showed two lesions on her husband’s left temporal lobe; a biopsy confirmed it was cancer. She said a neurosurgeon told them the tumors were inoperable. She said they were told to “go home and try to enjoy the time you have left together.”

Kristen said that although she and her husband were overcome by “overwhelming grief,” they got a second opinion--and then a third. The couple found another neurosurgeon, and J.J. ended up having brain surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Kristen said.

“We were so grateful,” she said. “We had hope that with treatment we could get time together.”

J.J. was accepted into a clinical trial and started chemotherapy and radiation. He seemed to be responding to treatment, his wife said, but in September 2014, he caught a common cold and his body could not beat it. That’s when he became depressed and told Kristen that he thought about ending his life, she said.

“Those were dark days,” Kristen said. “He questioned everything--whether it was worth fighting, whether he was too much of a burden to his family and whether it would be better for everyone if he gave up.”

But J.J. chose another route.

By 2015, he had finished treatment and was tumor-free, but he knew that there was a good chance that the cancer would return.

He said he didn’t want to give up.

“You can’t unmake that choice,” J.J. said about physician-assisted death. “Once you do it, it’s done.”

Physician-assisted death has gained ground in the United States--with six states and the District of Columbia legalizing the practice--although it remains a divisive issue among patients, families and health-care providers.

On one side, some doctors argue that physician-assisted death should be a choice for patients who are already dying and want to end their suffering on their own terms. Those on the opposing side contend that such assistance violates one of the core principles of their profession--do no harm--and could become a slippery slope to euthanasia. There’s even disagreement about how to characterize the practice. Opponents say terms such as “aid in dying” are euphemisms that obscure the harsh reality, while proponents see “doctor-assisted suicide” as stigmatizing patients who choose it.

In the 1990s, it was legalized in Oregon, followed by Washington in 2008 and then Vermont, California, Colorado, the District and Hawaii. A court case made it legal in Montana.

The practice drew intense national attention in 2014, not long after J.J. was given a terminal diagnosis. At the time, a terminally ill woman named Brittany Maynard moved from her home in California to Oregon so she could use the state’s Death With Dignity Act. The 29-year-old had been diagnosed with a Stage 4 brain tumor--glioblastoma, the same tumor as J.J.’s--and was told it would kill her within six months. She instead set her own timeline, taking a fatal dose of barbiturates.

In his last days, J.J., who openly opposed the practice, moved closer to family and spent time with his son, James. Then Kristen gave birth to their second son, Lucas.

“Life was good,” Kristen told The Post. “It was a gift to have all that time that we never expected.”

In October 2016, the cancer had returned, and by August the next year, the treatments were taking a toll on him.

“We stopped all treatments for two months to give his body time to recover, and that was when we found out that the tumors had started growing again,” Kristen said. “At that point, we had a discussion about possible treatment options. There was a low probability it would cure him or even slow the cancer down, so he made decision to stop treatment and focus on living one day at a time.”

Kristen said she hopes that her husband’s story will prompt lawmakers to ban physician-assisted suicide and instead work to improve hospice and palliative care for patients. She said she also wants to encourage terminally ill patients to have hope and families to enjoy every moment they have together.

“It was time I would never give back for anything,” she said.

[dimenovelsfromoblivion]

The Collective

As inhospitable as the desert can be the parched, arid lands are ideal for preserving the ancient cities built in the early days of civilization. These mostly abandoned settlements were scattered across the landscape quietly being buried in the sand.

Still, there were some cities, archaic remnants of ancient kingdoms that had long since vanished, but life went on even as the old dynasties crumbled back into the enteral sand and the people settled around the ancient walls for hundreds of generations went about existence much the same as their vanquished ancestors. These places although mostly forgotten these forerunners of civilization existed alongside the electrified concrete and steel megalopolis that had come into existence in the final terminal stages of human-settled life.

Just as in previous epochs this seemingly worthless place was where empires fought life and death struggles.  Just like the innumerable men of arms who were sent here to pacify these lands over they millenniums Corporal Keller of the US Marines couldn’t comprehend exactly what it was that kept drawing the armies of the world back to this same desolate place.

Keller and his unit had spent the last few days watching drones and bombers, the latest and greatest in hi-tech siege weaponry blast the prehistoric city to rubble. Now it was time for the grunts to go in and blow away anyone that survived the barrage.

The helicopters hovering overhead stirred up the sand into a storm. The air was saturated with the grainy particles that stung at the eyes and skin, but it was at least a mild morning. The desert dew still gleamed in the morning sun and a place white moon lingered in the bright morning sky. The Marines moved cautiously but kept up the pace. Today it was Corporal Kellers turn to be the point man, which meant first one inside, first one to take any fire.

The young soldier and his company had surrounded a courtyard. He was hugging the corner wall at the entrance when the signal was given. Flash grenades were tossed into the open space, and the soldiers quickly moved in. They only ran into each other though. The courtyard was empty.

“Clear,” Keller radioed in.

Keller felt something tap on his shoulder. There was a spot of blood soaking into his uniform.

“What the fuck?”

He looked up corpses were hanging from hastily constructed rafters above their heads in various stages of decay and dismemberment. The helicopters had scared away the scavaging birds, but it was easy to see on the soft decomposing flesh where they opportunistic animals had been feeding.

Keller felt queazy he called it in. “We got bodies hanging here.”

There was the sound of something stirring behind the walls and the jolted Marines raised their weapons. Keller looked at the west and could see two deep red circles. He moved closer and brushed away the sand. It was a drawing of a woman with a plump body and what looked like iron wings. She wore some kind of ceremonial headdress, and her bird-like feet had large sharp talons.

“What the fuck is this?” Keller muttered.

“RPG!” Startled Keller looked up and saw a rocket flying down from the top of the wall, then an abrupted impenetrable blackness.

James jolted awake in his chair. A layer of sweat covered his waxy skin, and he had to catch his breath. “Holy shit,” he cracked as he reached for a nearby glass of water.

The foundation of a collective unconscious is the transcription of memory into the biomolecular structure of the human being. Evolution is by and large a process of trial and error the psyche is where the experiences of our predecessors echo across the gulf of time adding to the notional sum of existence. One of the ways it manifests is through instinct, an innate reaction a sentient being has to a situation it may have never encountered. The enigmatic process is one that straddles the line between the rational and the mystic. It was a painstaking process limited by the crawling pace of evolution.

Legions of faceless specialists directed by an institutionalized disdain for the natural order were activated to construct a more valuable and efficient model for the collective unconvinced. Their nanotech monster was decentralized and of course, data-driven. The microscopic machine was a synthetic virus that transformed sentient human beings into data banks of human memories. The natural incubator for this emergent intelligence was the military, where of course psychological programming is a paramount concern. Unwitting soldiers were merged into a micro-collective conscience. Their experiences of war could now be shared through a real-time data stream. Minature machines bound their minds together and turned their most horrific memories of war into shared experiences.

Retired Major James Fullerton had no inkling of this grand design or his place in its growing web of consciousness. Neither did the doctor who pointed to the small innocuous shadow on the translucent gray and white image of his brain.

“We don’t know if it’s a tumor, but it’s not operatable. I’m sorry, but all we can do is wait and see.” The doctor informed him in his professional but compassionate manner.

Daniel Princip, a friend from his unit, was given a similar prognosis barely six months ago and now he was dead. Granted it was a bullet from his service pistol that released him from his mortal coil and not any sort of cancer or degenerative neural disease, but James knew, and Daniel must have been somewhat aware that the mysterious blemish on his neural tissue was an omen of doom.

James and Daniel were both combat veterans who became friends while witnessing some of the darkest and most blood-soaked excesses of modern war. When they heard the sanitized euphemism for a massacre, their minds conjured up scenes of crushed and mangled bodies. They had both seen mothers carrying the dismembered remains of their children after a “surgical strike” or families wallowing over bloated fly-covered corpses of fathers and sons killed in “counter-insurgency” raids. Despite this, they managed to integrate back into society and keep isolated the contagion of violence that infected their souls.

James was divorced, but amicably so. He had two daughters in college and had enjoyed years of success as a financial consultant. Daniel hadn’t fared so poorly either. He was a lawyer and confirmed lifetime bachelor. The experience of war instilled in him a sense of just how indifferent the universe is and the inevitability of tragedy and undercut any desire or incentive for him to have a family.

Whatever was consuming Daniel from within worked quickly. His body withered away from his bones, and his colorless eyes sank into his gaunt face. He endured every test and consulted every specialist, but there was no conclusive answer. When he told them about the dreams, they suspected his ailment was purely psychological. He was just another soldier being ravaged by the malignant trauma that had been planted in his brain like a ticking time bomb from his service days.

“I keep having these like flashbacks only it doesn't feel like their mine. It feels like I'm in someone else's body watching what they’re watching,” James said with a faraway look in his eyes.

James was intimately familiar with the terror the twin specters of regret and shame could unleash upon their victims gave a sympathetic and understanding nod.

“It’s like watching a movie, and I know something terrible is about to happen but no matter what I can’t stop it. It’s like being a voice screaming inside that kid’s head, but he couldn’t hear me.”

“Boy?” James repeated.

Daniel nodded. “Yeah, his name was Lance Corporal Thomas Johnson that’s who I am a lot of times,” Daniel said before taking a sip of coffee. “At least that’s what the other guys call me. Poor kid, he’s on his second deployment, and his mom’s just been diagnosed with cancer,” Daniel said matter of factly.

When Daniel gave those strangely specific details, Jame’s felt his stomach tie into knots and swell up into his throat. “Huh, that’s kinda weird,” he replied casually.

These visions always a rare occurrence were now steadily commandeering his subconscious. His sleep was now drowning out from the incursions of these living nightmares just like what happened to Daniel. He wasn’t sure how but James knew it was this smudge on the MRI that was the source of these aberrations of war.

The sleep-deprived James was retracted back in his recliner dulling his senses in the ultraviolet lite of the tv mounted on the wall. He absently cycled through the televisions line up, which at this time of night was mostly infomercials. He finally gave up the futile search for entertainment and settled on one of the many twenty four hour news networks.

The screen was bifurcated between an attractive blond news anchor and repeating B-roll footage of a middle eastern battlezone, by now a familiar television backdrop.

The blonde was listening attentively, indicated by the occasional nod to the static voice of field reporter who was summing up all the action that had apparently just happened a few hours ago.

“Around 8:15 this morning the Marines declared the city liberated,” the faceless voice explained while footage of marines putting in a battering ram through and a tank firing a round into a building played in the background.

“The city has been liberated,” the anchor confirmed “but we’re being told combat operations are still ongoing. Why is that?”

There was a short delay between the question and answer while a new loop of battlefield footage started to play.

“Yes, that’s true. Marine units are still engaged in mop-op operations in and around the city. While the military is in control of all municipal and administrative buildings, there are still some terrorist strongholds scattered around, but the military spokesman we talked to says they’ll be clear before the day is out.”

The talking heads on the screen started to sound further and further away until their banter became obscure mumbling. James passively watched the medley of battle and sank deeper into his chair. Whether he wanted it or not he was slowly slipping back into sleep. His eyes fluttered, and his jaw slacked. His head gradually fell back, and the room started to fade away. He was on the edge of sleep when a scene on TV jolted him awake.

It was the courtyard from his dream. The dangling bodies had been taken down and the gangrenous limbs removed but James still recognized the scenery even after it had been thoroughly satisfied. On the west wall was the same etching of the plumb winged woman with crimson eyes.

The ringing doorbell startled James.

“Who the hell could that be?” he muttered. Deciding to ignore the door James picked back up the remote and started flipping around again but whoever had come calling was persistent. The doorbell rang another three times in quick succession.

“Jesus fuckin christ alright,” James snarled.

The ringing continued as he made his way to the door. “Alright alright!” James Hollard.

He looked through the peephole and saw a man probably in his mid to late twenties in rain-soaked clothes with shaggy hair and a beard. James kept the chain lock on the door.

“Can I help you?” He asked visibly irritated.

“Are you Major James Fullerton?” The man asked.

“Yeah, that’s me who are you?” James replied.

The stranger on his stoop pulled out a gun at hip level and pointed it through the space between the door and the frame.

“I really need to talk to you,” he said calmly.

“Oh shit,” James mumbled.

The armed intruder followed behind James with his gun pointed at his back.

“Where’s a place we can sit down and talk?” he asked with a raspy voice.

“Look, man, I won’t give you any trouble. Just take what you want and get going,” James said.

“It’s nothing like that. My name’s Luetenant Phillip Speers second airborne.”

“I retired from the military eight years ago if you have any gripes with them I really can’t help you,” explained James.

Phillip didn’t reply. When they got to the den, he directed James back to his recliner while he sat down on the couch. James paused for a second when he saw Phillip’s left arm was a robotic prosthetic.

“I’m sorry I have to do this, but I considered all the options, and this was the only way,” Phillip explained.

“What’s this all about?” James asked calmly.

Phillip leaned forward. “I got out of the service three years ago, and about a year and a half ago I started having all these fucked up dreams. Now I know what you’re thinking,” Phillip sighed “PTSD right? Well, that would have made sense but these dreams I was having weren’t mine. In fact, I don’t even think they were dreams. It was like seeing through someone else's eyes. Night after night I was back in the desert doing recon missions in a place I’ve never even been before, and for some reason, the guys on the mission all called me James, James Fullerton. I lived through your time in the Subsaharan,” said Phillip. “I know about Daniel, and I know about that boy in the Michael Jordan jersey.”

James was speechless. He’d never told anyone about that kid, but James had spent years and years begging his ghost for forgiveness, or at least what his mind thought his spirit might be like. It was James’s unit that called in the drone strike that incinerated him. Even though he left behind no mortal remains his face was forever seared into James’s memory. He never could forgive himself for sacrificing the child to the cold mechanical hunter

Phillip saw that he had touched a nerve and decided to press his questioning further. “Have you ever met or heard of a marine captain Peter Harding?” he asked.

James shook his head.

“He came to be about a year and a half ago and told me about the same thing I’m telling you now. He knew every dirty detail of my deployment. He knew about friends I lost people I wasted I mean everything. He even knew how I got this,” Phillip said holding up his robotic arm.

“Have you heard of Corporal Keller?” James asked.

“Have you seen the picture on the wall too?” Phillip asked with wide eyes.

James nodded “yeah the woman with the wings and the ruby eyes.”

“Christ,” muttered Phillip “Yeah that one really fucked with me.”

“So what do we do about it?” James asked.

Phillip set the gun down and vigorously rubbed his eyes. “Look, man, I have no idea what they did to us. The VA never told me anything. It wasn’t until I went to a private doctor I found out about the thing in my head.”

“Yeah, the shadow. I have it too.” Said, James.

Phillip sat back. “Well they’re not going to help us with this thing that much is clear, and the doctors tell me they can’t cut it out. So really there’s only one thing to do only one way we can disconnect ourselves.”

“Yeah?” James shrugged.

Without a word, Phillip picked up the pistol, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. A cloud of red mist saturated with pink particles blasted into the air and sprayed the wall behind him.