Adrenaline Sisters// fall out boy & my chemical romance

Chapter 42: I Know I'm Bad News

||First Person||Revolution||

I run my fingers along the tops of the records sitting compactly within the giant, plastic bin by Agent Cherri Cola's station. He's busy, working away On the Air, taking some calls from the killjoys that are lucky enough to get a hold of a phone in the first place. This kid named Jimmy something called a minute or so ago to bug Agent about a Mad Gear and Missile Kid shirt that he won but still hasn't received (for rather obvious reasons— we don't exactly have a mailing system). Cherri hated having to remind people that since Doctor D's death, he's had so much to keep up with in order to have the station continue broadcasting. Agent already made an announcement weeks ago about the deceased Doctor Death Defying, an ironic and sadly gruesome fate to the man we all looked to for direction. Agent's hair, which is the same colour as Kobra's fading bleached strands, should be greying by now with all of the stress he's dealing with. Sure, he has Show Pony and the rest of us to help him out, but the people look to him as their guide now since Doctor Death Defying's untimely murder. Of course the Defenders and Fabulous Four are there to inspire them, but Agent handles the more technical aspects, like traffic and news reports. We're like celebrities in a way. We're the face of the movement and he handles the tricky stuff behind it all. While Gerard took my sister and Patrick to the store (that's at least what Andy told me when I found out they had left), Cherri asked me to pick out whatever record interests me and then organize the rather messy bin. Kobra, who sits off in the corner of the room, finished his own pile and began to read a stack of comics that he had in his room.

"Enjoying that?" I muse when he glances up at me from his Spider-Man comic book. He smiles at me and nods, reaching up to scratch under his eye with his thumb. "What's it about?" I ask, trying to make small talk. I still felt a strange fear when I looked over at him, my sister's words plaguing me like the little girl herself. He killed with the intention to when he had the choice not to. Patrick, on the other hand, went into a state of temporary insanity. He never wanted to kill Joe. I know that it's the truth, but I can't accept it just yet, not when his kind, the Infecteds, were the reason my sister and I had to run away. But because of her words, I can't help but see the young and seemingly innocent boy curled up with a comic book almost unnerving. I remember the girl that I shot in the hand to save Ray's life and how Mikey had shot her in the head without a second thought. I'm sure he blinked, I'm sure he shook when her lifeless body collided with the ground, but I can't help but wonder how many he's killed before her— before I even met him— to stay alive.

"It's about this totally average guy named Peter Parker," Kobra begins with a grin, his voice cute and excited all the same. That in itself is almost enough to make me forget about my worries. "He gets bitten by a radioactive spider and has, like, the ability to move like a spider. Spinning webs, scaling walls, that kind of thing. He becomes a superhero and does some really rad shit while keeping his personal life separate from Spider-man and battling bad guys. It's really great." Mikey answers me, smiling bashfully before looking back down at the pages. I turn away to the task at hand of alphabetizing the records in the bin, a good majority spread out across the hardwood flooring. I pick up an album with a young guy and girl on a dark green background, the words Selfish Machines and Pierce the Veil on it.

"It sounds nice," I throw over my shoulder to Mikey Way as I trace the words on the album cover. The title, Selfish Machines, sounds so incredibly accurate when describing a good majority of people in what's left of this world. When I look back at Mikey, I make a mental note that he isn't like us, the selfish machines. He's better than that.

"Oh, is that Pierce the Veil?" Mikey inquires when he sees the vinyl in my hands. He sets the comic down on the stack by the wall, moving over to me so he could take the album out of my hands. He grins when he turns it over, studying the track listings. "You gotta hear Besitos." He smirks at me.