Where the Heart of Anti-Shurtugal Rises Again.

This chapter felt longer. Also, it had a lot of hidden stupidity I didn't catch the first time around. I think I got most of it, though.
And confession, here's the emotional fallout I forgot about. :P I'm going to blame my bad memory, the forced romance being distracting, and the part where technically, the chapter could be deleted and it would have no bearing on the rest of the book, especially since it's not that memorable in the first place.



Chapter 20

 

“Kevin picked up on the first ring.”
Nope, still not exciting. Fifty tells him what's up.
“'Ah.' He clicked his tongue a few times. 'Danny?' he asked, and she could hear the tension he was trying to hide.” Their close, endearing bond warms my heart. X(
Daniel whines about having to have stayed in the car while Fifty played CQB and tortured a guy.
“[Cranky] sucked a breath in. 'Agents?'”
“'No, actually. Get this --- they put a hit out with the Mob.'”
“'What?'”
Um. Those guys were losers and absolute shit at killing people. Why is that so dreadful? And why does that get a bigger fuss than the dead dogs? But no, Cranky is impressed that Fifty took out six stooges. Fifty said the dogs did most of the work. The dogs ripped apart one dude, trapped two dudes inside, and trapped one dude on the roof. Having guns inside the house would have been a better option.
“[Fifty] would never think of herself as the most prepared again. [Cranky] was the king of prepared.”
Cranky's preparations:
Make business plans with a dude who owns an old truck.
Buy property that has a river on it.
Build a really long driveway.
Build a house. Use granite countertops. Do not use guns, air conditioning, or secure doors.
Own a barn five miles away from the house.
Build a puppy mill barn near the house.
Raise up an army of big dogs. Do not buy dog size bullet proof vests.
Put kerosene in closet.
Use gravel as a lawn near the house.
Use killer, sharp, pointy, death grass on the rest of the property.
Buy Kevlar fur coats.
Buy a wooden rowboat.
Eat frozen tv dinners.
Train one dog to run the escape plan. (See chapter 17 for details.)
Put grenades, cash, rocket launchers, night vision goggles, a Humvee, guns, and bullet-proof vests in the barn five miles away from the house.
Have plan to pawn off surviving dogs on competing breeder/trainer.

 

I don't know about you, but I'm not impressed. Where's the perimeter security? The dogs clearly failed at that. A freaking tunnel to the river would have been better. Where's the night vision goggles inside the house?
Cranky and Fifty talk some more on the phone. Cranky is briefly sad about NPC #42, but clears his throat and forgets what sad is.
Also, here's the plot on Cranky's end, summed up in dialogue: “When word gets back to my guy about what happened tonight . . . well, we might not need the e-mail. He's going to have to talk to your guy about this. I'm ready --- I'll see them do it. Then we can decide if we need more.”
'My guy' = 'My CIA boss and the mastermind behind the attempts on my life.'
'Your guy' = 'Fifty's old boss from the government department so secret it doesn't have a name but who is presumably conspiring with 'my guy' to have us all murdered, even though the only evidence we found is that they tampered Dopey's files.'
But they might send emails. What if they meet in a crowded public place and Cranky has to stand too far away to hear them? I mean, the guy's idea of problem solving involves fur coat camoflage and rocket launchers. Plural. Multiple rocket launchers. He doesn't exactly strike me as sophisticated.
“'...it appears the people in charge pegged you for the win. I won't pretend I'm not insulted.'” Fifty is mad that the bad guys decided Cranky would win in a fight against her. A big, tall agent with a trained attack dog vs. a short desk jockey with some drugs and a screen saver. I'd put my money on the agent, too.
Fifty didn't tell Cranky that Dopey almost got everyone killed instead of just NPC #42, an elderly couple, and some dogs. Cranky knew she was leaving that part out so Dopey wouldn't have to overhear that yes, it's his fault that three innocent humans, two hitmen, and some dogs are dead. (Fifty offed the others.) Isn't he supposed to be an adult who can A) put two and two together and already know it's his fault and B) be told about his mistakes so he can take responsibility and learn from them? Then again, if Fifty or Cranky ever do own up to their part which is not telling him about how not to get noticed by government murder agents, I never find out.
Cranky thanks Fifty for saving Dopey and not ditching them first opportunity she got.
“'Don't beat yourself up, Danny,' she heard [Cranky] tell him. She wondered if Daniel had been able to hear just as clearly.” Duh, yes. We have been given absolutely no reason to suspect Dopey's hearing is in any way impaired, so YES, he could hear Cranky clearly. Because that's how cell phones work. They are loud, little bastards. But if Fifty had known, instead of merely having idle curiousity about such possibility, Meyer might have had to give her character an emotional reaction. Both sentences were copouts. Dopey can avoid emotional fallout that comes with accidentally getting people murdered. Fifty doesn't have to feel feelings and can safely stay in robot world.
Dopey is like, aw, man, I got people killed. Cranky is like, whatever, Fifty and I are used to having a higher body count.
“[Cranky's] voice dropped into a lower register,” Now. I took music in highschool. I've also been in a choir. Low or high register is not related to volume, it's related to pitch, as in soprano vs. bass. Mrs. 'I'm going to state I have a degree in English words in my biography as the first sentence” should know that. Or at least, after reading her tripe, I'm not in a mood to let mistakes like that go.
Cranky has a dog breeder he's going to call, so the animals left behind will have a home puppy mill to go to. Though to be fair, I don't know if that other guy keeps his dogs in cages for most of the day.
Fifty wonders if the cops will get suspicious. Cranky says, “He'll say Arnie called when he heard shots or something.”
Um. Won't that make the cops more suspicious? A dog breeder just happens to call another dog breeder right before he gets merced, so the surviving dog breeder gets all the expensive dogs. Right.
“'Now be good and do whatever the Oleander says, okay?'” says one adult to another adult. And we're expected to believe that Dopey really is an adult capable of making grown up decisions. But first, Dopey suggests they stay at a cottage belonging to “Mr. McKinley”. The more this sad sap talks, the less I think of him like an adult. I'd put his age at maybe a very sheltered 15, if I didn't know he was supposed to be almost twice that.
Dopey says that they can't steal the McKinley's car. Fifty says she felt like she shared an eye roll with Cranky. She has been in the same vicinity with the dude for 48 hours. She spent 72 hours wishing he'd call. That is not enough time to get to know him. Even Dopey is still practically a stranger. Meyer has spent a lot of time with her characters and she's projecting that onto her characters. Which means she's not in their heads, she's still in hers. Bad authorship.
“[the cuts from the killer death grass] already stopped bleeding on their own.” I should hope so. Fun fact: there's actually grass out there that's sharp enough to draw blood. It's like walking through a field of paper cuts. Paper cuts. Also, hay fields can draw blood if they've been cut recently and the weather is dry. Those cuts can be a bit deeper. Cranky doesn't strike me as the type to bale hay. Dopey is not said to have a bleeding disorder. So where the heck would cuts worth mentioning come from?
Dopey tells her that he was able to kill because he thought they were going to kill Fifty and Cranky told him to visualize someone he cares about in danger as motivation to shoot people. Um. What about Cranky, his brother? You know, the blood relative he grew up with? Instead of the crazy robot who tortured him a week ago? How about his brother as a person to visualize in danger?
“Her voice was somber when...” We are supposed to be in her head. The narrative style is the one where we're third person, but inside someone's head. This sentence is bad in two ways. It breaks the narrative style just to give us a passive verb.
“'We only defended ourselves.'” says Dopey. Fifty just chopped a dude's finger off to torture him for intel. To be fair, Dopey doesn't know that. But Fifty didn't correct him about the strict self-defence aspect. Also, they ran into the SUV without knowing who was in it. Twice. It could have been a cop car for all they knew. They were, afterall, driving without the lights on at the time. Also, setting the house on fire is not self-defence. Let's say you're home alone. A random dude with a gun comes in. Under what circumstance is setting the house on fire the best option?
Dopey thinks that mosquitoes will be a huge issue. See? They should have brought those rocket launchers.
“She couldn't believe he was the one trying to cheer her up.” Neither can I. Putting a lampshade on it isn't the same as an excuse.
They go to a gas station. The mundane task should have taken a paragraph, but because MELODRAMA, it takes five page sides.
“she said in the lowest register that wouldn't sound put on.” Oh, so Meyer does know what that means. So what was the excuse for using it wrong two pages ago?!? Also, in all the years I've been driving, I've had to tell the cashier what pump I used less than five times and all those times were during a rush hour, not the middle of the night. It's a cheap, lazy excuse to make Fifty have to talk like a boy to remind the reader of her weird disguise. Wouldn't the bad guys be looking for a short, skinny person and look twice at all short, skinny people anyways?
“The woman had bleached-blond hair with an inch of dark roots, nicotine-stained teeth, and a name tag that said BEVERLY.” Because 'the cashier with the nicotine-stained teeth [action verb] [relevant object] to [character],' might sound too competent to be in this airport trash thriller. If we didn't get the story interrupted with a sentence dedicated to pure description of a character who is going to disappear in a few pages, we might actually start to become enthralled with the story. That would simply ruin this spork.
Some drunk, high teenagers walk into the gas station/convenience store. One is white, one is Hispanic, and the third is black. I get the feeling this is not the diversity people are looking for.... Of course, one grabs her and pulls off her hoodie because he was granted a spidey sense that the author wanted cheap drama. Because teenagers frequently assault strangers in convenience stores on camera, assuming there is one, all the while the cashier is yelling at them that she has 911 ready to dial. Because she didn't do that already when she noticed all three were intoxicated as shit and driving......
All three have Fifty cornered while the cashier is still yelling about calling 911. Dopey walks in with a gun stuffed down the front of his pants. There's a Darwin Award for that. A dude literally shot himself in the junk doing that. Sadly, no Darwin Awards are to be handed out today.
“[Dopey] did something different with the way he held his jaw. [Fifty] couldn't quite put her finger on it, but suddenly his face was the opposite of friendly.” It used to be that I would have been terribly confused as to what he did with his jaw that made him appear the opposite of friendly. Thankfully, The Epistler has already found that answer a few chapters ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StG2u5qfFRg

Another lazy copout to be sure.But confronted with cheap plot devices in their natural habitat, Dopey suddenly puts absolute authority in his tone. This casts the magic spell known as gtfo.

Fifty scolds Dopey because she was about to poison the kids with projectile vomiting.
“I'll tell you when I need backup.”
“'And I'll be there,' he snapped.”
How romantic. My heart melts.
They stop in a national park. All four occupants is rewarded with a descriptive sentence about how they relieved themselves. Thank you, Meyer. It has been a while since I've been reminded that these walking plot devices are actually flesh and blood.
Only now does Fifty check the front of the vehicle where they smashed the SUV. No evidence of even a minor fender bender. I call bullshit.
We get an advertisement campaign for Aspirin and Motrin. If someone asks for an Aspirin, giving them a Motrin instead does just as well, even when one had been concerned about bleeding grass cuts 8 - 12 hours ago.

“It felt normal in an abnormal way to have [Dopey] lie down beside her, instinctive and comfortable for him to warp one arm around her waist and bury his face in the hollow of her neck.” Which is hopefully not the side where her ear almost got cut off. Lazy copout. Again. And no, using abnormal and normal to describe the same thing was not clever. All it does is leave me to believe that the medieval thesaurus is down and out with the measles.

Dopey starts shaking and his face is paler, though for whatever reason, him being in the shade makes it harder to tell. “Probably not authentic shock; more likely just a traditional panic attack.” That sentence is so condescending. Since I don't have a baseball with me, I'm just going to move on before I think about it too much and get really mad about it.
It's supposed to make Fifty look like a medical genius, having to keep an eye on Dopey in case he goes into shock. But it makes him look really, really stupid when he can't figure out that he's shaking and that's a problem. Or it's not that much of problem and Fifty is just over-reacting, which makes her look stupid. She was shaking earlier, too, but didn't think anything of it.
“He pulled her down onto his chest, cradling the damaged side of her face carefully in his long fingers, and whispered into her hair, 'I could have lost you, just like that. Everything that means anything to me is gone --- I've lost my home, my job, my life... I've lost myself. I'm hanging on by my fingernails, [Fifty,] and it's you I'm hanging on to. If something happens to you... I don't know what that means for me. I don't know how I keep going. I'm dealing with the rest, [Fifty,] but I can't lose you, too, I can't.'”
This was supposed to be the sweetest thing ever. Instead:
1) Dopey lost any status as an adult that the gas station scene might have given him. He is, once again, a helpless victim. Him taking charge of the gas station dumbassery was just a fluke, it seems. (Him killing that dude on the roof happened off-screen.) He has been doing everything Fifty tells him to. Fifty told him to run into the SUV a second time and he didn't hesitate. The only decision I remember him making is the decision to go buy groceries, which got people and dogs killed.
2) Screw Cranky. Yes, Cranky clearly hasn't been around much, sadly. (He is the only one who talks sense once in a while. Namely, insulting the crazy robot.) But if Dopey is that indifferent to someone he grew up with, I need one heck of an explanation. If I were to get one of my loved ones back tomorrow, I'd be a complete basketcase for who knows how long. I'd be in hysterics every time I thought about it. Dopey has been, like, “That's cool that my brother's not dead after all. Hey, look, my torturer has a face and boobs.”
3) Fifty is a robot with no nerve endings. He's touching a sizable cut, near her mostly severed earlobe that Dopey slapped some stitches on. Um, heck, no. If she were human, the cuts would be hurting. That's why mentioning over-the-counter pain medication rang like a cheap, mini MELODRAMA moment. She hasn't given two shits about her injury, except whining about how she's easier to remember now.
4) Stockholm syndrome. He's lost everything, including regard for his own brother, so he's clinging to her like a good, little puppy.

5) He knows he's being unhealthily dependant on somebody who barks orders at him to kill. (Come to think of it, he killed the driver in the SUV.) He's doing it anyways with no hesitation or doubt. He knows he's vulnerable right now and won't be thinking clearly, yet he's doing stupid things on purpose anyways.

 

Fifty thinks of her childhood and how her mother never gave comfort to her daughter as she was dying. Thanks, Meyer. I had stopped being mad at you for the cheap use of cancer. It's used to establish that Fifty is emotionally scarred... and mimics what she saw on tv to comfort Dopey. That is disturbing, given the rest of the book.
“He was no longer just pale. His soft eyes were haunted, tormented, his jaw tight against the panic he was trying to control. A raised line pulsed in his forehead. He stared at her like he was pleading for a release from pain.”
So.... you know how I say the narrative was close third person, as in that third person that heavily draws on skills of first person because it's still being inside somebody's head? So then events are supposed to be filtered through the lens of the character's perspective?
When Fifty looks at unhappy people, she thinks they want her to give them “release from pain.” We humans call those types of serial killers, 'Angels of mercy,' because in their deluded, little brains, they think they have the right to give 'mercy' to other humans.
I'll never sleep soundly again.
Also, I call those veins instead of raised lines.
It reminds Fifty of that one time she tortured him, you know, maybe a week ago? So she holds his head close so she doesn't have to feel guilty when she looks at his face. She starts to panic. They look at each other. Then “Rather than [the looking at of each other bringing] comfort, the depth or his dear multiplied hers. She could lose him, and she didn't know how to live with that.”
Honey, you lived a whole bunch of years without him. You're fine.
Reading those last two pages, I got scared. Not because they said they were scared, but because Fifty is a total psycho who needs to be locked up before she completes her killing spree. Also, if Dopey dies, we'll know who did it. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.
But take away the disturbing implications, and you're left with three page sides of people saying they're scared and assuming the other person is scared, which feels flat and forced, and being really codependent with each other, which doesn't exactly illicit warm, fuzzy feelings.

I think the only good news I have is that I didn't see the word, 'obviously.'