Cedar Springs, Washington

Dawn smiled, quietly enjoying the girl to her left's discomfort. Dawn disliked Nikki -- she was one of the worst of the simpering idiots that trailed around after Logan like a disease, and there was hardly a moment when she didn't want to slap the cow. However, there were social precedents in place, and on the odd occasion Dawn felt that she should meet them -- the very odd occasion. And after all, Nikki hadn't done anything to provoke it at this particular moment.

Yet.

Listening to Logan start to go on about 'Zombopocalypse', Dawn couldn't help but smile at the boy's childish enthusiasm. "Honestly, Logan. You know that I can't stand silly movies like that, it's such a... boy thing. I mean, Zombopocalypse? That name is just ridiculous!" she said, rolling her eyes. "I don't mind the more serious horror ones, but when it's just an excuse to throw a bunch of zombies onto a screen... it's not really my thing."

There were very few girls who would ever tell Logan Kikkert that he was being silly, for fear of upsetting or in anyway putting him off talking to them. Dawn, however, didn't do sugar coating. If she didn't like something, she pointed it out. If that outfit did make you look fat, she would tell you.

"And what's Kyle done now? Honestly, I need to give that guy a slap. Can't go five minutes without doing something stupid." she muttered.

There then came a tense moment, when Logan slid her smoothie over. A long silence, as Dawn internally worked over the possible responses to the nickname. You could have cut the tension with a knife -- even though in reality, when there is a lot of tension in the air, the last thing you want to do is to get a knife out. After a long moment, Dawn finally raised an eyebrow and looked up at Logan. It was the moment before the Judge, having deemed the defendant guilty, stated their sentence.

Dawn smiled. It was a faint, wryly amused smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. "Thanks, and by the way - you still have that smoothie on your collar." she said, reaching over the counter to flick it off with her finger, flashing him a look that spoke of narrowly avoided wrath.

As Logan proceeded to go on about his new plan for the Apple smoothie, Dawn went between varying degrees of curiosity, and utter disbelief. "You... I can't believe you just said that." she stated, facepalming most pointedly. "Honestly Logan, don't make me knock that head of yours on the counter. Don't want to dislodge what little sense you have left in there." she muttered, rolling her eyes. She flashed Nikki a glare, containing within it tales of simpering bitches being mutilated in various interesting manners, conveniently transcribed into a moment looking into those bright blue orbs.

"Fruit based one liners? Good grief..." Dawn muttered as Logan went back off into his raving about the film, paying very little attention. When Logan began miming with the price check gun, she lifted a hand up to gently lower it, shaking her head. "Just... no."

Dawn was in the midst of exchanging an amused look with Logan, hand still firmly pressing the price check gun down onto the counter, when things started to go to hell. The redhead swore, dropping the gun and her smoothie to bring her arms up over her head to hide her eyes from the flashes, blinking to try and restore her vision as lights danced across the backs of her eyelids. She stepped backwards hazily, shaking her head before uncovering her eyes to behold the madness that filled the shopping centre.

"What the..?" the redhead began, gaping at the oddly dressed men in the distance, before Logan commanded her attention from his position behind the counter. Her head snapped around to look at him, her blue eyes wide in a mixture of panic and confusion. She was in mild shock, and Logan's quick words snapped her from her daze, returning the stoic girl to command. The girl hurried over to the counter again, sliding over it relatively gracefully (at least managing not to fall over) to land into a crouch on the other side, wincing as the loud shouts began to echo through the air.

In the cramped space, Dawn could get a clear view of what Sheri was showing Logan, and it sent shivers down her spine. "They're in.. everything." she whispered, not bothering to root around for her mobile, instead lifting the headphone to her iPod from her front pocket -- she'd not bothered turning it off, intending only to pause briefly at the smoothie store -- and surely enough, the same words echoed from it into her ear as she lifted it.

"Fuck..." she muttered, nodding to Logan, the normally fierce air about her replaced with a harrowed and afraid look to her eyes as she crawled after the two. High school drama was one thing...

End of the world drama was just a few steps up the scale...

Dawn Keating was afraid.

This was a novel feeling for the young woman, so used to inspiring such in others, (a low-level, playground based fear, but fear nonetheless) and so seldom experiencing the other end of the pointed stick of intimidation. Her fear didn't freeze her, though, nor truly impede her progress - no, by and the large, her fear annoyed her. She was annoyed that she was being intimidated and forced to crawl about like a rat in a trap, annoyed that these people had forced her to abandon her expensive phone and iPod, and annoyed that she was being put through an emotion that was so alien and stupid; sure, in primeval days fear might have been necessary to let cavemen know when to run, but surely by this point people were intelligent enough to figure this out through logic rather than have a quickened pulse and butterflies in the stomach have to tell them.

Sadly, despite her theoretical protestations against the very concept of fear, the fear refused to bugger off.

Score one to primeval instincts, nil to Dawn Keating's logical reasoning.

The jingling of Sheri's keys distracted Dawn from her pondering of deep psychological concepts and returned her to the reality of 'running away'. The girl practically held her breath while Sheri fumbled with the keys, and was at the point of snapping rather unfairly at the woman when Logan intervened. Thank god for Logan -- who would've thought the dopey, oblivious idol of many would prove to actually be capable in a stressful situation? Dawn certainly wouldn't have accepted any sort of supposition he'd do better than her, and yet the proof was in the pudding. Or rather, in the swift unlocking of the door.

However, circumstance promptly failed their new figurehead leader, as it was discovered that his grand escape didn't really stretch much further than this door. Dawn was about to suggest making a break for it on foot, when to her total, utter, pure horror, the day was saved by none other than Nikki.

This was just demeaning.

"My car's out front, don't worry!" The girl spoke in an annoyingly calm and optimistic voice. It was rather odd as well, Dawn noted, that the fragile and easily cowed pretty girl would suddenly display such a blase attitude towards being fried. Very odd. But rather than dwell on this, Dawn filed it away for later brooding, as brooding at present was ill advisable and bordering on suicidal, speed and efficiency necessary to survive in the wilds of the shopping mall service corridor.

As their second unexpected leader began to slap down the corridor, Dawn developed a strong desire to slap her, but again this was suppressed and filed away alongside all the previous irritations to simmer away into a ball of anger in the back of her mind - but most importantly to not impede her progress.

The disturbing crack echoing through the building only held Dawn's attention for a moment, for right now she was focused. The redhead had the singular goal of 'live', and wizards or no wizards, nobody stopped Dawn Keating from achieving a goal she set out to do with this level of determination. Bulldozers had tried and failed, as had concrete walls. Metaphorically. Too bad these weren't metaphorical wizards.

Throughout the walk, Dawn's minor irritations seemed to enlarge themselves to disproportionate sizes. Everything became a source of irritation, but most prominently, that thrice damned slapping. Flip, flop, slap, slap, flip, flop, slap. Dawn wanted to punch something. This was not helped as yet another obstacle was reached. As Logan spoke Dawn muttered something about how 'alarming a fire escape is pointless, it's a flaming door like any other flaming door, and sticking a big 'ALARM' sign on it is only going to mean that intruders break your nice shiny front doors instead, and why the hell do they care if we use the fire door anyway, surely every door becomes a fire door in the event of a fire.'

"We're not going anywhere."

The abrupt flash of blue caught Dawn's attention, drawing it away from her irate mutterings in time to witness 'Nikki's' transformation. Rather than gape in shock, a single string of thought passed through Dawn's mind.

'I knew she was too much of a bitch to be anything but bad work. There's bitch, but then there's Nikki bitch. Like the difference between a bomb and an H-bomb. She's going to go for me first, isn't she? Just because I trod on her toes at the smoothie counter earlier...'

"I'm terribly sorry, Logan."

Then the girl turned to Dawn, and for a moment it seemed that the tables had turned, and the gazelle was about to gore the lioness with its horns. But as we are all aware, in nature this does not happen -- and if Dawn had anything to say about it, it wasn't about to happen in Cedar Springs either.

The Wizard curled her fist, gave a high shriek and loosed the burst straight at Dawn's head.

And then Dawn's fist impacted her squarely in the nose, breaking it well and truly, with a sickening crack. 'Nikki' would have barely a moment to register this, horror in her widening eyes as she clutched at the wreck of her 'darling' nose, blood beginning to flood down her face, before yet again Dawn's fist impacted her, this time directly on the temple with a satisfying thunk, and the Wizard dropped like a sack of potatoes.

"I always knew there was something off about that girl..." Dawn murmured, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.

Quite how Dawn had avoided the fireball was something of a mystery. Perhaps her mounting anger at the girl had led her to want an excuse to lay into her, and her mind had been running over the possible scenarios and laying out appropriate physical responses. Perhaps she just had good reactions. What was certain, though, was that she was very much not on fire.

"...I think now would be a good time to start running. Don't you?" the redhead went on. "They'll probably know that one of them just got knocked out. I don't think the alarm is a concern any more. Do you reckon we could all squeeze onto a motorcycle? Because I have mine out front... it seemed pointless to note that when miss flaming fingers had her car in the picture. But maybe we could all try and squeeze on? Might not be comfy, someone might have to sit in someone else's lap, but I rather think we have more pressing concerns than passenger comfort to deal with right now."

With that, Dawn promptly barged the door open, gestured to Sheri and Logan to follow, and started to run, rummaging through her bag for the keys to the bike as she went. "Fucking things are never where I want them to be..." she muttered. Then she was at the bike, and Logan and Sheri were approaching behind her, and all of them were panting because it had been a long way to run that fast - but none of them cared because; shit, that was a cyan hat, and shit, they had to get the fuck out of there.

Slinging her leg over the bike seat, Dawn barked "Get on!" at the pair, shoving the keys into the ignition and praying that the engine started first time. Apparently there was a god, or Dawn's bike could tell that something was up, because it did.

"Hold on!" the redhead yelled over the roar of the engine, not really noticing whose hands it was that clenched around her waist like a vice grip, too focused on the collection of cyan hats swiftly approaching their position to care. Then she twisted the handle, and the bike moved.

It was a relatively sporty vehicle, a birthday present a couple of years back from her parents jointly. And hell, when she told it to go, it went. Someone behind her squeaked. A fireball passed about a metre to their rear, and then they were picking up speed. The wind tossed Dawn's hair out behind her - the helmet still happily clattering away within the 'trunk' beneath the seat - threatened to toss them back with its ferocity, but somehow it didn't, and somehow they were careening through the carpark at breakneck speeds, and cars were exploding all around them as fireballs showered where they were supposed to be but weren't.

"Holy. FUCK!"

Dawn felt that this summed up the situation quite well.

All of a sudden, there was the arm -- the barrier to getting into the car park, black and yellow striped in its hazardous and suddenly life threatening manner. There was a brief moment where Dawn honestly believed they were about to die, to go sprawling over the barrier and land in a mess of blood and gore and bones and teeth on the concrete beyond. And then she went momentarily insane.

See, to the right of the barrier, there was a truck. This truck had no obvious purpose, but obviously people had been in the middle -- or towards the end -- of unloading it, because the back was down and it was nearly empty. There's an odd thing about driving at high speeds on a motorbike whilst escaping from a nasty horde of fireball flinging wizards, where you see things such as this with big neon signs beside them, screaming 'RAMP' at you.

"Shit. We're going to die." the redhead noted, even as she wrestled the bike to the right, and pointed it at the truck. "We're going to die, because this doesn't work in life, and we aren't James Bond, an- fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"

The last part of Dawn's sentence was swallowed by nonsensical cursing as they took off. And they did take off. They didn't go crashing into the cabin of the truck, or flip over backwards, they took off, and flew over the barrier. Time seemed to slow down to allow viewers at home the chance to observe the sheer insanity of what was occurring.

And then they landed, and they were still moving, and they hadn't fallen over.

This went against the laws of physics somewhat, Dawn noted, but perhaps the Wizards had fucked that up too.

Whatever. She wasn't going to complain.

"Okay... we're a live. I think. We are, right?" she breathed after a few minutes, having slowed the bike down to a more reasonable pace as they progressed through quiet, empty streets, avoiding main thoroughfares.

"...where do we go now?"

"Hello, Renar residence." Jordan clamped the phone between his ear and his shoulder. He needed both hands to fumble with the fire extinguisher. "This is Jordan speaking."

Logan would have heard a whoosh as Jordan sent a blast of foam onto a merry blaze feeding off most of their living room table. The thing had cracked and collapsed like kindling.

The Renar's pleasant three-story home was in shambles. What wasn't smoking had been toppled over and smashed. The china cabinet had its innards sprawled out, dangerous and glinting shards. Jordan took care to avoid that part of the room. Having taken care of the larger fire, he scrambled over the up-ended sofa where he thought he saw something else burning.

While Logan breathlessly explained what had happened to him in the others, Jordan ambled through the ravaged home in a sort of stupor, dousing smaller fires here and there. Though the dining room and living rooms had taken the most damage, the kitchen was in fair disarray as well. There was a faucet running, and all the plates had found their way out of the cupboards -- onto the marble floor in bits and bits. That wasn't even mentionining the cutlery. There had been quite a scuffle.

Sylvia was in the kitchen, now, screeching. She was sitting on the chest of a thin man, pounding at him with her little fists. A periwinkle hat lay alone and crumpled under what had once been their ceiling fan. Sylvia shrieked and shrieked, and the man cried and cried. Jordan plugged his pinky into his spare ear.

"What? Yeah, Logan. I can hear you. No, this isn't a bad time. My sister is only about to commit murder."

"Who the hell do you think you are? Coming in here, throwing your fucking FIREBALLS at us?"

"Should I stop her? It's really good for her, I think."

"If you and the rest of your CULT BUDDIES think we're going to have ANYTHING to do with you .. HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU, WALTER KRONKITE .. "

"Definitely clearing out some bottled up aggression. Might just let her go on for a while."

"I should rip your THROAT out, and stuff your EYEBALLS up your -- "

"Yeah. Yeah, good point. Let me get her a second."

"Sylvie?" Jordan stepped back into the kitchen, waving smoke from his eyes. "Hey. Hi. Busy? No? Okay. It's Logan."

Sylvia turned, looked around. Some of her curls had fallen in front of her face. She smiled at him lovingly. "Jordan, sweetie, may I borrow the extinguisher?"

Jordan covered the reciever of the phone. He looked down at the petrified Wizard, who was frantically mouthing -- 'NONONONON -- '

"Are you going to bludgeon him?" Jordan asked fairly.

"Of course not."

"Do you know what 'bludgeon' means?"

"Give it!"

Jordan brought the phone back up to his ear just as Logan asked for an account of what had happened up in Cedar Heights. Jordan was only too happy to oblige.

Literal seconds after the call to Nikki had gone to voicemail, a fireball had slammed through the Renar's kitchen window. This didn't speak particularly to any sort of marskmanship skill, considering how large the thing was. Still, Sylvia had shrieked and fallen to the ground. Jordan went the route of a more manly-type shout, and wasn't too far behind joining his sister.

They had crouched there, breathing heavily while their house alarm and smoke detectors wailed. Sylvia rolled to the keypad on the wall, while Jordan went for the round white thing above the sink. Soon, there was silence. They stared at each other.

While their ears rang and their hearts pounded .. there came four polite raps on the front door.

Things had picked up speed from there. There was a lot of shouting about 'Where Mrs. Renar was!' and how the kids 'Didn't know and wouldn't tell anyways.' Of course, there were a lot more adjectives thrown in, and a lot more fireballs. Eventually -- after most of the house had been trashed -- the Wizard learned not to piss off a hundred pound female. Sylvia went for the cutting board and cracked the man in the head, knocking his hat off as she did so. He wasn't shouting so confidently, now. In fact, he was doing much more whimpering these days.

Their phones had quickly been jammed down the trash disposal once the block letters started scrolling. Just to be safe, Jordan had turned the water on, too -- filling the entire sink to short the circuits. He crossed the kitchen, now, and shut the faucet off. The sink gurgled wickedly.

By now, the siblings had reasoned that their mother's work at the Conklin Center downtown had everything to do with all this madness. Jordan pointedly avoided mentioning this to Logan as he finished the story.

" .. so, yeah. Sylvia got mad fast. Things are under control, more or less." Another whoosh; Jordan had missed the sink towels smouldering. "Where are you guys again? Wedgewood? You need a ride? Well, how did you get there?" Jordan frowned. "Wait. How in the heck did you fit three people on .. "

"They need a ride?" Sylvia looked back around. She observed Jordan with a curious expression. "Well, Jordan. Go get your keys, and we'll get them!"

"We are not going to pick them up." Jordan covered the receiver again.

"It's what mom would want us to do!"

"Dad wouldn't want us leaving the house."

"Mom wouldn't want them out there by themselves."

"Dad would tell us to not be idiots."

"Mom would say it's too late for that."

Sister and brother stared each other down. Jordan pretty much knew he had already lost. After glaring the glare to end all glares at Sylvia, Jordan uncovered the phone and returned to the conversation.

"Logan? Yeah, bro. Stay put. I'll come and get you in the truck. Tell Dawn to chill out. I don't wan you cramming three people on that bike again."

Jordan ended the call, stepped to the side, and carefully set the cordless phone back in its cradle.

"So." He cleared his throat, shifted his hold on the fire extinguisher, and looked down rather awkwardly at the wizard. "What're we gonna do with Mr. Chuckles here?"

"I don't know, Jordan." Sylvia raised the cutting board, and the wizard started to whimper again. "What do you think he was gonna do with us?"

"We'll take him along." Jordan decided. He set the extinguisher down, and reached for his CSHS lanyard that had his keys. "He shouldn't be too much trouble after the thrashing you gave him."

Sylvia absently hummed a Taylor Swift song as she seized a handful of the Wizards hair, and hauled him up and towards the door. She hefted the cutting board in her hand as a sort of cattleprod. While the two left the house, Jordan took the time to look around, let it all sink in.

This was his life. This was his life, smashed to bits and burning. No more rich lake-front houses for him anymore. Everything had changed. The world had changed.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Jordan grabbed a Klondike bar from the freezer before joining his sister and her hostage in his truck.

"Seatbelts." Was all he said as he climbed into the drivers's seat.

"Are you fucking kidding me." Sylvia poked her head out from the back. The Wizard was cowed neatly as far against the window as he could physically go. "What, you think we're gonna get a ticket for -- "

"I think if we're gonna be doing any evasive driving, I want you buckled up." Jordan jangled the keys, turned the engine on. He never thought he'd be so glad to hear his baby's V8 in his entire life. "Do it, Sylvie."

She scowled at him. "The end of the world trumps your five-star crash test rating." and she sprawled out, one foot on the Wizard's chest just to let him know, again, who was in charge.

"Your funeral." Jordan said, shrugging, as he backed them out of the driveway.

"You know .. " Sylvia poked her head out one more time. "Given the circumstances, that was a really poor choice of words."

Wedgewood Park had seemed like a good place to stop the bike. It was totally empty when they'd rolled by -- everyone probably run home to their families or been taken by the wizards already...

...wizards. They actually were, weren't they? They even had the freaking pointy hats. Dawn was almost embarrassed to be associated with an apocalyptic event that revolved around people in pointy hats. It was like some nerd kid's...

"That .. was awesome!"

...like one of Logan's wet dream fantasies. Not literal-- ew, bad thoughts. Moving away from that...

"Awesome? Logan... we just almost died, like a dozen times in a row! If things had panned out even a modicum differently, we'd be.. just.. splatters!" Dawn protested, turning to face the boy with a scowl. "You're an idiot!" she snapped, prodding him in the chest with an accusatory finger, "Now stop being an idiot, because if you being an idiot means you end up dead, I'll kill you!" Because that made sense. Dawn's mild Scottish accent was more pronounced when she was angry, and ranting, and it came through rather prominently here.

Dawn let out a growl of frustration as Logan was distracted by a payphone, obviously not taking anything of her raging in mind. "Are you even listening to me..?" The redhead sighed, shaking her head and rubbing her eyes with her palms. Calm, Dawn. Calm.

Whilst Logan and Sheri went about trying to figure out the phone -- or more, Sheri tried to convince Logan that a payphone couldn't read his mind, or something equally stupid - Dawn paced back over to her bike, to assess it for damage. Landing from an insane, impossible ramp jump with three people on it couldn't have done the suspension any good, or the wheels or... any part of it. The redhead ran a hand over the metal, crouching down to get a better view. That was scratched. Yup, that was broken... she wasn't even sure what that was, but it was safe to assume that it really shouldn't lodged in there.

"Good grief..." she muttered, shaking her head. This was beyond her capabilities to repair: the bike would run, as it had demonstrated, but it wouldn't be breaking any landspeed records, and there was a distinct possibility of a sudden unexpected breakdown -- something you didn't want when you were on the run from... wizards. Damn, it was still embarrassing just to think that.

The sound of talking from over at the payphone indicated that Jordan had picked up, and so Dawn straightened out of her crouch and wheeled the bike over with a sigh, muttering irritably about the state that her baby was in. Not literally - she didn't call it that, but the concept was the same. When Logan asked for an account about what had happened at Jordan's end, the redhead was sat to the side, leaning on her bike and staring up at the sky. She could gather a little of what was being said from here, by Logan's responses and reactions; it sounded pretty much as expected. Wizards, fire, rampant destruction. The important part was there weren't any gasps of shock. Nobody had died.

When the call ended, Dawn lowered her eyes to meet Logan's. "So. I guess we just... wait now, eh?"

The redhead frowned. "And I meant what I said. No. Being. Stupid. Kapeesh? Sheri, help me make sure that Logan stops being stupid, and realises that this isn't like his stupid zombie films, where he always thinks he could do oh-so-much-better than the characters in it. It isn't... much, and people always die on those anyway. This is serious, and I don't want your... enthusiasm getting you, or us, or anyone else, in trouble." she instructed, righting herself to prod once again at Logan's chest, glaring at him menacingly in the drastically close proximity. "Get it?"

"You need to settle down." Sheri frowned, catching the bare end of Dawn's tirade. She took two steps closer to the girl, and while she barely made it up to Dawn's nose, Sheri planted her head on her hips -- unwavering. "That's what we're going to get straight, first of all. You can call him stupid all you like, but the way things look -- we're all we have, for the moment."

Sheri pointed over at Logan, who was still finishing up his conversation with Jordan on the phone.

"That boy could end up saving our lives." There was no fear in Sheri's eyes. Her jaw was set, and it was clear she was talking down to the fiery redhead, no matter the consequences. "The sooner you quit with namecalling -- if that's really your mechanism with coping then I think the better of we'll be." The older woman brushed past Dawn without another word. "Let's move the bike, hide it."

Sheri shifted the kick stand and began to walk the wounded cycle down the curved path to where the ditch opened up, near the forest line. As she did so, there were a few dull thuds as Logan tried once, twice, to unsuccessfully end the call -- jabbing the receiver at the phone booth itself.

"Sheri! Shereeeeeeee! I think I broke the latch thing."

Sheri ignored him. There was a slight bump as the front tire hit the curb. The woman walked it over the woodchips getting closer and closer to the drainage ditch, a black hole for frisbees and kickballs and other things of childhood. This was not a safe place to wade or go fishing, many health notices had been sent out about drinking from the crick, and the CSHS Honors Bio class had even found a strain of E. Coli ..

And closer, closer came the bike.

"It's marshy. It'll sink." Sheri stood with the bike at the edge of a precipice. One good push, and it would rattle down the bluff and into the water. The woman stood, staring levelly at Dawn. "This is your test, dear. Are you going to risk the cycle being found and our trail being followed? It's all cute games when you're slashing necks in high school, but things are getting really real, really fast."

Sirens wailed overhead -- they were just below the underpass. The two ducked instinctively as a few emergency vehicles whizzed past, the doppler effect creating an eerie backdrop as the noise faded ..

.. it was just the gurgling of the crick that could be heard, now.

Sheri tapped her finger on the handle.

"Guys!" Logan came bounding back over -- having swerved low to avoid detection -- "I've got news. Jordan says some dude came to his house, but they've taken care of it. They're attacking all over, their cell phones aren't working either. He's coming to get us, I told him where we are." His story started to jump ahead of itself. "I didn't tell -- I didn't tell him about Nikki. I mean Charmena. I hope that's, you know. I mean -- sounds like something we should say in person .. "

Logan glanced from Dawn, to Sheri, and saw the bike in between.

"What's going on?" The good-natured youth did not wear 'worry' well. It just didn't suit him. He reached up, scratched the back of his head. There was still a wrinkle in his shirt where Dawn had so savagely, frantically stabbed at him not moments before. "Jordan should be about ten minutes way .. were you saying something?"