All Dogs Go To Heaven/Epilogue

## Epilogue

Featured characters:

Lunchmeat couldn’t sleep.

It’d been like this all week. 3am and every time he closed his eyes all could see was the scarred man. The archivist. His head suddenly cocking back and opening. The contents of his skull. On Duncan. On the display screens where his Battleground looped.

Julie had been dealing with it too. He’d hear her up at night. Sometimes messing around in the kitchen. Other times she’d throw on her boots and pace around Eddie Denim’s ranch. It was quite the sight; Julie walking through the desert in nothing but combat boots and one of Eddie’s oversized heavy metal t-shirts. Oh, and a shotgun; she usually brought her shotgun.

Eddie Denim had said it was post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD. He’d said it didn’t have shit to do with how tough you were – he’d seen men tougher than nails who’d come back from overseas and just couldn’t "normalize". Just sometimes an image gets stuck in your brain.

Maybe that was it. But Lunchmeat thought it was something else.

Ramon Riggs had taken care of them when they’d returned to the mainland – they likely could have asked for anything, he was so happy to hear that the Boogeyman was dead. But all they really needed was medical equipment.

Stitches to be specific. Forty-seven in his side. Another twenty-two in his chin. There wasn’t much they could do for Duncan’s eye – he’d need to see a specialist. But they gave him a patch and some painkillers and that seemed to help.

Julie did most of the driving. There was a scary two days in South Dakota when Lunchmeat spiked a 105.2 fever and they had to fill up a tub with buckets of ice from the ice maker to keep him from cooking. But that cleared and they got back on the road. Hours on hours punctuated by pitstops and country music. And then the real shocker was waiting for them back at Eddie Denim’s ranch.

Malholtra.

Lunchmeat literally screamed when he saw her sitting on Eddie’s porch. He wasn’t gonna apologize for calling her a stupid bitch – no need to open old wounds – but he rushed out of the car and picked her up in a bear hug and just held her for a good long moment.

"You look like hell, Lunch," she said.

"You should see the other guy," he said. He tried to sound cool but his voice cracked and he nearly started tearing up.

That night they shared war stories over barbeque and homemade moonshine. Malholtra’s story was every bit as crazy as theirs and then some. She went on about mountain climbing and a secret lab. He drank too much, too quick, and might have dozed off a moment because he couldn’t really follow what she was talking about with the flowers and the monkey. It didn’t matter. She was back. They were back together.

Except they had nothing.

Malholtra showed them the laptop she stole. She had hoped it would be stock full of secrets. Emails from Johnny Conspiracy that laid out all the info. What they were doing. And why.

But it was entirely mundane. And then entirely impenetrable. According to Malholtra, within hours the computer had been locked out of anything important. She couldn’t even get Office to open.

The thumb drive turned out to be even more useless. It took hours of arguing before Duncan convinced Eddie to even allow him to plug the drive into a computer; Eddie was justifiably convinced that they’d plug the drive in and six Pillar helicopters would drop in out of the sky. The results were far less dramatic.

The thumb drive was empty.

That sent Lunchmeat over the edge. They had bled for days for this drive. They’d crawled into a special kind of American hell – Duncan had maybe lost an eye and Lunchmeat hadn’t enjoyed solid food for over a week. And for what?

An empty hard drive and a name? *Sergei Whatthefucknick*?

What had the archivist called him? The Pawn? Something about a first text?

Yeah, maybe Eddie was right about PTSD. That violence was like a virus and if it gets in your brain, it can replicate. Over and over till you need to drink to go to sleep and even then, you dream about the archivist. His head cocking back over and over, and everything inside just pouring out.

But Lunchmeat thought the real reason he couldn’t sleep was because with everything they’d done, they still had nothing.

He went down to the kitchen to find more liquor. He thought he’d had plenty to drink, but apparently not enough.

There had been half a bottle when he called it a night. Now the bottle was empty.

His eyes fell on the laptop, left out on the counter. Half-drunk and not thinking, he jammed his thumb on the power button. Watched it load up to a password screen. Locked. Just like Malholtra said.

Without thinking, he took the thumb drive from his pocket. They tried it on two different computers, but they hadn’t put it in the Tythonic laptop. Why would the results be any different?

Except the moment he slid in the drive he knew he’d found something. He knew by the sudden chirp of the CPU. By the fan kicking on inside the laptop and the sudden cascade of information on the screen.

Moments later, he heard the door close behind him and Julie shuffled in from outside, shotgun in hand. She was wearing her standard ‘desert wanderer’ outfit. Combat boots and one of Eddie’s t-shirts – this one had Mickey Mouse wearing a Freddy Krueger glove. She stunk of alcohol. Lunchmeat figured she was the one who finished off the moonshine.

"You got the computer working?" she asked, noting the display. "What are all those names?"

Lunchmeat instinctively ran his tongue over the scar in his mouth. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to suddenly be sober or if he needed to finish the job and get full-on drunk.

"I think they’re the winners."

She leaned in close and reviewed the screen. It all felt oddly formal. Mundane. Like a list of business expenses the Archivist had quickly jotted down in a spreadsheet. Only instead of business lunches, it was *the who* and *the how*. Years of brutal Battlegrounds reduced to a list of names.

Names. And GPS coordinates.

Lunchmeat didn’t know where to find this Russian. This Sergei Kalimnick.

But this list seemed a good place to start...

## Other Parts

* Prologue
* Part 1
* Part 2
* Part 3
* Part 4
* **Epilogue**