it started out, we were lying on our backs, just lounging not going to sleep, looking up at the middle of the perpetual night sky, and the moon there--the pale orange glowing banjo in the sky that, looking back, i guess must have been the other one of whatever exactly we were living on.... our bedroom didnt have a roof.... it was just another cranny of the treehouse-esque collaboration of boards and struts and buttresses that made our little fortress more or less stable and secure.... then somebody wanted to wander; me and my dad/the old man and the other guys/my brother(s) rambled on through the slapped-together rooms toward the kitchen/main common area and got our shit together. I grabbed one of the keys, the old man grabbed another. Ill be this key man, you be that one, I said. I was used to more or less taking charge on these little outings. Far from being a tough guy, I was nevertheless world-wise enough out there to mostly keep us from getting totally fucked with. You always had to be ready for an emergency; at some level my whole life had been a secret, silent preparation for that. we trucked down the raptraddley stairs and on into the open spaces--a valley? a field? i dont know exactly. But there was some sort of grass, and some boulders here and there, and people milling about everywhere. Tonight, like most nights, there was a definite current. People pretty much wandering, in small groups or clusters, men and women in thrift-store-looking clothes, all in the same direction, mindlessly, toward some unspecified destination. I hate this mob mentality, I muttered. But we were going the same way. Stopped to hang around or look at something or just to regroup under some broad old trees, with a few picnic tables scattered around on the bare dirt. I was talking to one of the other guys about something, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a tall, dark guy approaching the old man with a ------- (looks like a tarp or cloth about two feet by one foot, dirty yellow with some folds or creases) held in both hands. Look out! I yelled, just a hair too late, as simultaneously I leapt toward them and the dark guy swooped his ------- over the old mans head. I just made contact with the dark guys throat, but I had started too late and from too far away. I regained my balance easily, rather anticlimactically, and stood there frustrated, starting to think about how to negotiate this development. Some omniscient, detached narrator voice said (in my head I guess) Whatever the nature of the ------- and the ------- people who wield them, it was clear to whom [the old man] now belonged. I knew the old man would be a zombie-like virtual slave to that ------- motherfucker until we could figure out a way to break him loose. Now I remember what I had been doing over on the other side of the clearing: talking with this shirtless, longhaired dude who looked a little worse off than my little group. He might have been hinting or directly asking for some kind of help. I was probably hedging. Im not sure about that part. All I know is, his comment was: Yeah, but you have a bullet. I got a murder.... What he meant by bullet was key--meaning, I had a place to stay, or more precisely, a place I could keep scavengers and marauders out of, and an extended group to look out for each other. What he meant by murder was that he had been charged with murder, back in a hazy past the meaning or location or present relevance of which was unclear--except that, according to him anyway, it made his basic survival here, in this insular, anarchic, mysteriously dilapidated world at least a little bit more difficult.