Tad had long since vanished from their home, though not before giving Mom 
a broken nose. He'd been replaced by Shemp, who had been replaced by Todd, who 
had given way to Tony. One day the Shanghai Police had come to arrest Tony, and 
he had plugged one of them right in the living room with his skull gun, blowing 
a hole in the guy's stomach so that intestines fell out and trailed down 
between his legs. The other policemen nailed Tony with a Seven Minute Special 
and then dragged their wounded comrade out into the hallway, while Tony, 
bellowing like a cornered, rabid animal, ran into the
kitchen and grabbed a knife and began hacking at his chest where he thought the 
Seven Minute Special had gone into his body. By the time the seven minutes had 
gone by and the policemen burst back into the apartment, he had dug a hole in 
his pectoral muscle all the way down to his ribs. He menaced the cops with his 
bloody knife, and the cop in charge punched in some numbers on a little black 
box in his hand, and Tony buckled and screamed as a single cookie-cutter 
detonated inside his thigh. He dropped the knife. The cops rushed in and 
shrink-wrapped him, then stood around his body, mummified in glistening 
plastic, and kicked him and stomped him for a minute or two, then finally cut a 
hole in the plastic so Tony could breathe. They bonded four handles onto the 
shrink-wrap and then carried him out between them, leaving Nell to clean up the 
blood in the kitchen and the living room. She wasn't very good at cleaning 
things up yet and ended up smearing it around. When Mom got home, she screamed 
and cried for a while and then spanked Nell for making a mess. This made Nell 
sad, and so she went to her room and picked up the Primer and made up a story 
of her own, about how the wicked stepmother had made Princess Nell clean up the 
house and had spanked her for doing it wrong. The Primer made up pictures as 
she went along. By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real 
things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.