NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 5370165" data-attributes="member: 3285">Music of the Spheres: Part 8 – Crazy BeatIt took hours before Randy and Bob reconnected.  They all felt the earthquake, but Hayden's fire department, ambulance, and law enforcement were already spread thin.  With cell phones out, communication was severely curtailed. When Donny didn't report back from the station, they went looking for him. Judy promised to have the ambulance stop by the house to check on the girls before returning to her shift. It was a sad testament to Hayden's state of affairs that there was nobody alive to rush to the hospital.  Randy and Judy hadn't been able to reconnect with the phones down.Donny was battered and bruised, but he was alive and Randy couldn't afford a man down.  They took the Durango back to town together.Main Street looked normal enough.  People were walking about minding their own business, chatting away on their cell phones.  "Hayden doesn't look too worse for the wear," said Randy.  A businesswoman with a poodle on a leash stood in front of a snack truck, the phone screwed into her ear as she attempted to talk and buy a bagel at the same time.  Nearby, two young girls with pixie haircuts, one blonde, one brunette, were listening to a single cell phone and giggling.Donny looked down at his cell.  "Uh, Randy?""Yeah?" "I don't got a signal on my cell phone."Bob held his phone up.  "Me neither."Randy checked his phone at his belt.  "Me neither."Donny looked back out the window.  "So who are they all talking to?"“Hello?” said the businesswoman, staring at her phone.  “Hello?”  She put it back to her ear, listened for a moment, and then dropped it back into her purse. Randy pulled the Durango to a stop near the curb.  Something was very, very wrong."Well that ain't normal."  Randy slid one hand towards his holstered pistol.Everything got very quiet. The businesswoman just stood there, as if she forgot what she was doing. When the bagel man handed her a bagel, she stared at it blankly. The sheriff and his deputies got out of the SUV. The businesswoman’s features suddenly peeled back in a look of indescribable, feral rage. Her polite expression was replaced by a convulsive snarl that shrank her eyes to slits and exposed both sets of teeth. The businesswoman’s poodle ran into the street, trailing its red leash with the hand-loop in the end. A black car roared through Main Street, catching the poodle beneath the wheel and tossing its bloody carcass through the air. The blonde-haired girl seized the businesswoman. Her companion backed away. The young girl latched onto the businesswoman's neck and bit down, causing an enormous jet of blood.  She shook her back and forth like a doll. Then she cocked her own blood-smeared face up to the bright blue sky and howled in what sounded like triumph.BLAM! The blast went wide, just missing the blonde girl.  Donny fumbled to reload the smoking shotgun.  Randy whirled on him, snapping out of his shock. "Donny, what in the hell!"From behind them came the unmistakable hollow bang-and-jingle of a car crash, followed by screams. The screams were followed by another explosion, this one louder, concussive, hammering the day. Behind the bagel truck, another car swerved across three lanes of and onto the sidewalk, mowing down a couple of pedestrians and then plowing into the back of the previous car, which finished with its nose crumpled into the side of a building window. The blonde girl cleared the distance between them at a fantastic rate.  Donny was still in the middle of reloading when she launched herself at him, plunging her tiny feet into his torso.  He managed to get one arm up, but that just gave her something to bite.  She gnawed on his arm."AHHH!" shouted Donny. The blonde girl's bobbed backwards, spitting a jet of blood from her skull.  She slid off of Donny. Bob whirled his pistol on the other girl. "WHO AM I?" The dark-haired girl suddenly screamed. She smacked herself in the forehead, spun three times, and then runs straight into a lamppost, again and again. Her nose was broken, gushing blood down her lower face. A vertical contusion was puffing up on her brow, rising like a thunderhead on a summer day. One of her eyes had gone crooked in its socket. She opened her mouth, exposing a ruin of what had probably been expensive orthodontic work, and laughed.  Then she ran away down the sidewalk, screaming."Back to the Durango!" shouted Randy, who had his own pistol out.From the top floor of a building across the way, a window shatters in a bright spray of glass. A body hurtled out. It fell to the sidewalk, where it exploded. More screams from the street. Randy hopped into the driver's seat as Donny and Bob followed suit. He threw it into gear and slammed on the gas pedal. A man came running out of a nearby building, roaring wordless sounds at the top of his lungs, his shirt flapping behind him. He ran into the street.  Randy swerved around the man, barely missing him. He ran onto the other side, still roaring and waving his hands at the sky. He disappeared into the shadows beneath the canopy of the hotel forecourt and was lost to view."Where we going?" asked Bob, out of breath."Judy," was all Randy said.</blockquote>

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