Florian Red and Camren Tarrayo have been eliminated.
|------------|
It's harder to control than Girlie was, the piece of junk. It veers to the left and some defect in the axle causes it to hop to the right. It drives perfectly straight. Every bound the jackalope takes one way or the other Dell has to react and it brings forth a new bud of respect for the other. She blurs at the pantomime freckles they painted on her face with the shoulder of her vest. At least for their driving. She blinks.
Been a while since she's driven anything other than cattle or stakes into the ground. A Dell ten years younger than this one grapples for the wheel. These aren't the streets of California either. This isn't Mom's car and it certainly isn't Girlie. She drives.
She drives through the wilds of town, past the mesquites and the scrub. Past the chained-off pool and the motel adjunct to it which should be chained-off as well. Through the soccer fields of Idle High, and the cow fields as she adds another swoop into their great designs. She passes the lonesome catholic church, the old jail, the bingo hall, the house that is always on fire, and the hospital that does a poor job treating the resultant burns. She turns onto Main Street, just about avoiding a yellow Ford Fiesta going the other way, and visits the shops selling books and crafts and flowers and beers, and the corner shops which sell everything there is to be had.
The jackalope leads her through the same town it first led her away from. A fragile place filled with people and things that are anything but. A can of some coke product laying on the ground after being chucked against a wall. And Dell isn't quite the lid the residents trust her to be. A rabbit, of all things, is about to crack her open. The charlatan steps on the aluminum pedal and takes advantage of the dirt road that is less dirty than the rest to gain on the creature. She gains and gains, but a glance down to the dash shows a speedometer stuck at sixty. She isn't gaining- it's stopping.
Both of them slow down. As a haggard Dell weakly kicks open the van door and slinks from her mile-high seat just to avoid collapsing on the street, people drinking at the saloon and purchasing trinkets from, well, anywhere, they start to divert their attention. They stand up and swim through the brisk, hot, air as if they were caught in a tractor beam. They start to file outside.
The jackalope is similarly entranced. It ignores Dell as her bloodied and broken body battles just to be. Alien to it's past tendencies, it seems unaware of all the clumsy movements Dell makes towards it. She stops and squints, less at the rabit than at the surrounding. The props, the congregation, and the electronics not quite only she knows lay beneath.
"Please," she pleas. The creature only stands there and lets fresh blood drip from it's maw. Like it knows things it can't possibly, such as the past and the future. That Dell hasn't shot seventeen men in it's spot thousands of times and they would lay thereabouts and wouldn't die.
She doesn't know what the jackalope could do to temper her, but it doesn't do it anyway. With a heavy breath, Dell holds up her hand in the shape of a gun, points it at the rabbit, and takes away her thumb.
In a shack to her left, which looks ancient and rotting, but is abuzz with electricity inside, a man who has spent decades making it less obvious that Dell never killed those men watches closely through a peep hole. He presses a button wired to a muzzle of pyrotechnics.
The jackalope is scattered to elsewheres.
The gathering crowd erupts into cheers that pull them all together into something more monsterous and fearsome than any of them alone. It sounds like gunshot. Like heavy metal music, like the howl of some terrible wolf, like absolutely nothing at all.
|-FINALS-|
Do whatever it takes.
|-WORD LIMIT-|
None.
|-STAKES-|
Only the difference between everything and nothing. I have a vote just like anyone else does in this round. And although there is no official weight perscribed to either, I will, and will encourage the voters to, take a holistic view of both the residents preformance in the final task, and in this competition as a whole, when they vote.
|-DEADLINE-|
Thursday, August 5th, 10:00 PM EST