The block was ours and what women remained were ours to do with as we pleased while their husbands and fathers smiled on approvingly. We said goodbye ...to Alice, handed over her commission, and I shook her hand and Mary kissed her lips. Mary disappeared upstairs to get ready. She was going clubbing with a friend of hers, Diane, and I wanted to make sure the sluts were all ready for my guest to arrive. For years I had been playing D&D with the same group of guys. Usually we played at my house,. We could hide somewhere they’d never find us. We could just disappear. They’d stop hunting for us.” In an increasing, jumbled frenzy she spit out plans, destinations, options, all driven by the need to escape danger - a reaction to what she’d just seen.I waited her out. When she fell silent, I said calmly, “I wasn’t killed. There’s nowhere to run. You can’t spend the rest of your life in hiding. There’s only one way to make all this stop and that’s to figure out what’s going on.”“But...” Tears. ”He flinched a little, not wanting to be reminded. He blamed the whole thing later on his friend and what he called ‘white liquor’. I asked Amanda about it and she laughed. “It’s moonshine, honey. Home made ‘corn likker’. It’s pretty potent stuff, especially if you’ve never encountered it before.” The conversation made forgiving Mark a little easier.“You need to stay away from him.”The vehement way he said it shocked me. “Mark, I only met him once and we only talked for a few minutes.” Well,. " He took a long pause recalling something long forgotten "I wanted to be like them, off on these great escapades and doing these big deeds, or at least something different with my life." Its why I took this job, I thought that maybe the bread maker's son could finally go off and just do something.." he looked deep in the ceiling "-but I still can't escape it, I'll never be the one riding off to the sunset, or defending these great forts, or even crafting weapons. I'm just some gratified.