Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #2! In the previous installment, a paper girl named Erin meets up with three other paper girls in the early morning following Halloween: Mac, KJ, and Tiffany.

Once Tiffany’s expensive walkie-talkie gets stolen by, presumably, hooligans, the four of them discover some weird shit in the efforts to get it back. A strange piece of spacecraft in the basement of new house construction. A barely audible hum that can be heard throughout the neighborhood. Unearthly men speaking an odd language. An object with an Apple logo on it.

And now you’re caught up.

Paper Girls, Issue #2 [November, 2015]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

Welp, Mac’s holding a gun on the cover. Shit’s gonna get real. Hasn’t she been watching the news these days?

There’s a splash page with a phrase written in the mysterious alien language. It’s just like Futurama where they pepper in those signs written in Alienese and you can decode if you’re a 13-year-old nerd who has time for that. I’m a 34-year-old nerd; I don’t have time for that.

The sky is cloudy and purple. A lightning storm is visible in the distance. A creepy hooded figure runs past a house with a “GEORGE BUSH FOR PRESIDENT ‘88” sign on the lawn. He’s cradling a small sack in his arm. Maybe there’s a kitten in it!

He has those strange triangle pupils. Clearly, this is one of those guys. You know the ones. The ones with triangle pupils who steal little girls’ walkie-talkies. He hops a fence into a yard and stops short once he hears the strange hum. The hum goes “VUR VUR VUR VUR VUR VURRRRRR” and it’s coming from the dang purple sky. And it looks like some kind of tear in the space-time continuum is all sorts of happening.

Scientific progress goes “VURRRRRRRRR“

Now, this triangle-pupiled bastard already looks terrified as it is. He kind of has this permanent “AHHHHH!” look, but this rip in the sky really scares the shit out of him. And with good reason, since an enormous dinosaur-like leg steps down onto the ground. The scared alien dude says an unknown five-letter word (possibly “fuuck”), drops the sack, and tries to get the heck out of dodge…

,,,but it doesn’t work. This guy gets nabbed by whatever space beast this is, gets killed, blood everywhere. It is revealed that the sack was full of various electronic devices, some anachronistic, including, but not limited to, a cordless phone, a couple of flip phones, an iPad, and Tiff’s walkie-talkie. The beast grabs the walkie-talkie!

It’s morning now. Well, it was morning before, but now it’s sunrise morning. The girls return with Erin to her empty house, which Erin finds unusual considering her sister Missy usually waits for her to go to school. “After all the insane crap going on? Your family probably got the hell out of Stony Stream,” says Mac. Don’t forget, Mac’s the tough guy.

KJ gets distracted by a candy bowl replete with full-size Hershey bars, amazed that Erin has one of the good Halloween houses, but Mac tells these girls to fuckin’ focus! The town is overrun by crazy triangle eyeball weirdos who get weirded out by the weird humming. Erin thinks these are just normal dudes with Elephant Man syndrome, or that Rocky Dennis kid.

You know, Eric Stoltz? He got fired from Back to the Future because he sucked?

The sound of laughter, or maybe heavy breathing, comes through Tiff’s non-stolen walkie-talkie. Someone on the other end is jerkin’ it! Gross! Mac picks up the phone to call the police, but there’s no dial tone. Just an emergency broadcast signal. “I’m telling you, everybody must have gotten the order to evacuate,” insists Mac, who wants nothing more than to get on her bike and pedal 100 goddamn miles away from this shithole suburb.

An unnerved Erin still doesn’t believe that her family would just up and leave without her, but Mac’s already thinking ahead here! Keep up, sister. “We should get to my house. My dad has a gun.” Good thinking, Mac! Start shooting bullets into things ASAP.

Here’s where Erin starts getting high and mighty about their roles with respect to the news. Their jobs are just to deliver the news. They don’t report the news. They don’t get involved with the news. They don’t even listen to Huey Lewis and the News! “If we see bad stuff happen, we’re supposed to stay back and let the adults handle it.”

Well uh I suppose I can’t argue if you put it that way, I guess.

Mac doesn’t like the idea of staying back and letting the adults handle it. Time to get a gun, bitches! Who’s with me? KJ and Tiff raise their hands, and Erin continues her sad-sacky apprehensive disposition. Peer pressure is a really killer though. Next thing she knows, she’s biking alongside them again.

Erin hangs back with KJ and asks her opinion on whether or not these alien dudes are monsters. “Maybe they’re, like, some kind of nuclear mutants the Russians sent here from Chernobyl,” KJ postulates. That’s a pretty sound hypothesis. Maybe we can get Jared Harris to look into that.

Perhaps they’re not from The Land of Zelenskyy. Perhaps they’re from somewhere even farther away. Erin pulls out the little device with the Apple logo on it, the one that looks like one of those square, screenless iPod Shuffles. It’s the same logo that’s on her school’s ugly green-screen Macintosh computer. “I’ve been thinking, what if this is some kind of…micro version of it?”

KJ thinks that’s wack! How can you fit a whole computer on a little square like that? Dumbshit. Well, guess what honey, back in the ‘50s a computer used to fill an entire room and it only had a 2kB harddrive. Now look at how technologically advanced they are! In another 30 years, computers will just be nanobots burrowing into your skulls like terrifying brain worms. Don’t tell me a future computer can’t fit on a square. Did you see the Apple logo??

Now who’s talking crazy talk! KJ points out that time-traveling nerds seem a little more unlikely than monsters. At least monsters are real. And furthermore–

Mac tells KJ and Erin to cork it. She can’t hear herself think. They’re supposed to be looking for…you know. Something.

Tiff is the first to find something, all right. There’s a crazed werewolf standing motionless in the middle of the street, catatonic with crazed animal fury. It’s wearing a cargo jacket over a Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction t-shirt, fashionably ripped jeans, and some hella Air Jordan III’s.

Why, it’s just Wallace Bund from 8th grade. He wore that mask to school yesterday.

“Why’s he just standing there like a creep?” asks Mac.
“He’s kind of a creep,” says Tiff, and she gingerly approaches the creep against the wishes of her compadres. She can tell it’s really him, he reeks of Drakkar Noir.

Thattaboy…nice doggie…

Erin is losing her shit. Gritting her teeth, she begs the rest to just forget about Werewolf Boy and keep on moving. Tiff gets her hand close enough to get it bitten off, but then the strange humming starts up yet again. This time they dart their heads around, trying to locate the source of the sound. Erin looks up and sees a massive, violent storm above them. Just an electrified torrent of violet-pink light, swarming with weird pterodactyl-type dinosaur creatures.

“What. What the fuck?” Mac breathes. It’s time to get their asses inside, but Tiff needs to see what’s up with Wallace Bundhole…

…but he’s gone.

Mac starts booking it to her house and urges the three of them to follow her or she’ll rape their faces! Probably.

The storm continues as they all lay low in the foyer of Mac’s disheveled homestead. “You think any of those flying things saw us?” asks Erin, nervously, trying to get what little reassurance she can get.

If they did, they’re not coming for them. Yet.

Mac rummages through a closet looking for supplies. She’s a Girl Scout you know. Don’t laugh or she’ll punch you in the face so hard you’ll be chewing food through the teeth now lodged in your butt.

Hey, here’s a refreshing sight for sore eyes! A drunk lady lumbers into the room, clutching a bottle of Rumple Minz peppermint schnapps! She obviously doesn’t like Mac.

Ahh, the good ol’ suburban ‘80s.

“I don’t know, which part of not drinking don’t you understand?” spits back Mac to her hazy, shitfaced stepmother. “What difference does it make now? Don’t know if you and your friends have noticed, but the G.D. world is ending,” Alice slurs, eyes half-open.

Erin tries to be polite, lets Alice know that they and Mac are trying to hide in the house until the coast seems clear. Alice tells Erin not to call her ma’am, starts mumbling sadly about demons from Hell and the like.

“Alice, where’s my dad?” asks Mac, the vulnerable fear creeping in.
“He’s gone. Forever.”

Well that’s ominous.

“I was dozing next to him in bed when this, this awful sound woke us both up, and then…then I watched my husband just, just vanish. Disappeared into thin air.”

Just like Wallace Bunderpants.

This is just like The Leftovers with Justin Theroux! Apocalypse! The Rapture! He was a good man, Mac, your daddy, he went to heaven with all the other goodins’! Not us, though, we’re all wicked and evil. We’re stuck to suffer through the end of this dumb world.

“See, ‘cause of Dukakis and…and all those people, we’re finally living through that Bible thing that predicted this was gonna happen,” Alice continues to somberly mutter. Mac’s starting to get annoyed. Then Alice pulls out a fucking gun and starts pointing at twelve-year-olds. “There’s only one thing the Lord wants us to do here, you understand that, right?”

And to think, Mac’s dad married this one because she was more fun.

Gettin’ serious now! With the gun aimed at Mac, Erin tries to talk some level-headed sense into this drunkard evangelist. She tries to explain that what’s going on outside has nothing to do with God. She should know, she goes to Catholic school. “Yeah, I thought I knew everything when I was your age, too,” Alice says, gun still trained on her stepdaughter.

She starts waxing nostalgic ‘bout 1965, remembering her own preteen years and how badly she wanted to grow up when everything would be better. But that’s the big shitty joke about life, kids. It actually is better when you’re younger and carefree. Being an adult sucks!

Good thing you girls will never know! Well, bye!

“DON’T!” Mac screams and knocks her hand away. No bullets go off. Not yet, anyway. “You can’t do this!”

“I have to, sweetheart,” Alice sniffs.

“But, I love you,” Mac starts crying, “Mom, I lo–”

BANG!

The other three girls stare ahead in shocked horror.

And we don’t know what happened yet. That’s the end.

Final Thoughts

Uplifting! Sounds like it’s just going to keep getting worse! Buckle up!