The cuties continued to perform. They kept right on singing even as Gore threw them across the room and into a pile of discarded sewing needles. Steve imagined that the cuties were still smiling as Gore knocked two of them together hard enough their little pony ears twisted into a knot.

  Even Evy kept singing and smiling, though she did pause when Gore used a man dressed as a gorilla as a jump rope.

  “Bow before the tyrannous of brutality, ye putrid souls, and witness my utter decimation of all once cherished in this world! All shall be destroyed and despair!” Gore declared as he stood upon the remains of a fox costume.

  “You done?” Steve asked.

  “I feel much better, yes.”

  “Good. Here’s your horns. That should have distracted Dawn a little. Let’s go find her. Thanks for not killing anyone, by the way.”

  “That is your one and only favor of the day,” Gore said, popping the ram’s horns back into their slots in his helmet.

  “Fair enough.”

  “Steve, what are you doing?” Evy asked, only then breaking out of her song.

  “I’m going to get a friend. Then find a sandwich that will end the world. You should come.”

  Burney screamed.

  “Well that’s just your opinion, Burney,” Steve said, and ran out the door into the hallway, Gore and Burney in tow.

  When they made it to the hallway, they discovered a parade of cuties. The parade was less an actual parade, and more cuties marching and singing to hide that they were fleeing in terror from Dawn and the frying pans she’d found in the hotel kitchen.

  “Dawn, Dawn!” Steve shouted, seeking out the woman who was making her way their direction, leaving frying pan-wounded cuties in her wake.

  “Too much good! Too much happy! Bong!” Dawn shouted. She added the word bong as a sound effect to emphasize her hitting a unicorn-costumed cutie in the head with a frying pan. It actually lessoned the good-neutralizing effects of this act, so she hit the cutie again. “Too much!”

   “Dawn! Over here!”

   Dawn didn’t stop, though. She kept right on chasing the massive group of cuties.

   “They’re heading to the main convention hall!” Evy exclaimed, following Steve and pretending her squeak was of delight and not concern.

   “After her!” Steve shouted. He chased the woman chasing the cuties straight across the daisy-strewn, and now blood-strewn, lobby. They passed singing groups of cuties who had no choice but to be swept up in the flow of demon and cutie and Judge.

   “Give the world your smile. Give the world your — gah!” the cuties sang as they were wrangled into the main hall.

   “Dawn!” Steve shouted as they reached the main hall, the doors bottlenecking the remaining cuties till Dawn pummeled them to the main stage. The room looked like it could fill five hundred cuties. Perhaps a fourth of that number were gathered in chairs, singing on the main hall stage, or dancing on the wide space between. “Burney, tackle that one!”

   Burney screamed.

   “Do it for Dawn!” Steve insisted.

   Burney offered one more scream before he made a running tackle into a hamster-costumed cutie. The costume immediately caught fire and the cutie inside struggled for his life as Burney was completely the opposite of helpful in getting the costume off.

   “What, what…” Dawn slowed a moment in her pursuit of the overt goodness of the costumed peoples. The entire main hall was silent, all eyes on Dawn and Steve. Dawn looked toward Steve and Gore, sniffing like a blood hound with a scent. “Is that evil I smell?”

   “Yes it is, Dawn,” Steve answered.

   “It smells like bacon,” Dawn said, and backhanded a cutie who dared to try and regain consciousness.

   “I was not aware evil had that smell.”

   “Nor was I,” Gore conceded. “This is a problem.” To test whether evil smelled like bacon, Gore grabbed one of the fleeing cuties and head-butted him in the creature’s puppy dog masked face. “Hmm. Smells like blood and the tears of the innocent. But not bacon.”

   Drawn to either the smell of bacon or blood and the tears of the innocent, or whatever evil may or may not smell like, Dawn approached Steve and Gore. “Steve,” she said, regaining some measure of control. The silver scales she held in one hand had tilted slightly closer to balanced, but were still heavily favoring the side of good. “You left. You were a coward.”

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   “I was kind of an idiot. But I’m not giving up,” Steve admitted.

   “You wouldn’t abandon Gore.”

   “And I won’t abandon you.”

   Burney screamed.

   “Cliches are appropriate at certain moments, Burney,” said Steve.

   Dawn’s eyes widened. She checked her scales. Steve had not adjusted the balance of the scales in any way. If anything, the scales were holding at the position they’d been when Steve started talking. Dawn looked back at Steve with a bit more of her usual self showing through the sweat and pieces of fur clinging to her face.

   “What are you going to do?” Dawn asked.

   “I’m going to snap you out of this, get to New Orleans, and find the best sandwich in the world,” Steve answered.

   Burney screamed.

   “And get Burney a taco,” Steve added.

   “Then take this,” Dawn said. In one hand, Dawn held the silver scales of her office. In the other, she held a bunny, and extended the furry creature to Steve. “And kill it.”

   “Okay.” Steve took the bunny and tossed it at Burney.

   Dawn paused, her eyes showing no emotion as the bunny squealed in its burning death-throes. Dawn watched her scales tilt a little more toward the side of evil, more toward a balance, as the bunny burnt to ash. “I didn’t expect you to do that so quickly.”

   “It’s just a bunny.”

   “What do you mean just a bunny?” Evy asked, stepping through the crowd.

   “Just a bunny. I’ll burn another one if it’ll make you feel better, Dawn.”

   Dawn did just that. And just like before, Steve held it by the ears and tossed it at Burney.

   Burney was visibly uncomfortable with his role in this exchange. However, he’s visibly uncomfortable at all times so no one headed his screams of protest.

   “Stevey! That’s not happy-happy at all! Why would you hurt a defenseless bunny?” Evy cried.

   “Because I asked nicely,” Dawn replied, a skeletal grin forming on her face. “Do it once more, Steve.”

   “Wait! Let’s sing a song! We must stop this!” Evy said. “Steve, you don’t want to be evil, do you? You want to be with us and be happy, right?”

   Steve took the fresh bunny Dawn summoned for him to mercilessly kill.

   “Stevey, what about being happy?” Evy asked, smiling up at the half demon.

   “This doesn’t make me happy,” Steve said, and tossed the last bunny onto Burney’s head. “But it makes my friend happy. And it gets me where I need to go.”

   “That’s not a good moral to learn!”

   “Who said anything about learning a good moral? I’m just trying to get a good sandwich.”

   With the incineration of that adorable animal, the scales in Dawn’s hand tilted just a pinch off overwhelmingly good. It wasn’t much, but the change was enough for Dawn to snap out of her sing-along-induced happy trance.

  The change came to Dawn like she was awakening from a nightmare. A rainbow and frosting-coated nightmare. She stared wide-eyed and grinning the skeleton’s grin of the family of the Grim Reaper.

  “Dawn, what are you doing?” Steve asked.

  Dawn threw a hand into the air and drew into existence a swarm of red-eyed bunny rabbits. The bunnies fell into reality a foot above the cuties. Thousands of them, twitching and kicking and flailing, as they landed in a tidal wave upon the costumed singers.

   “Evil bunnies, attack!” Dawn shouted, and the bunnies swarmed.

   The cuties tried to sing. They tried to resist. A few tried to hug the bunnies. But they couldn’t stand against the flood of adorably biting mammals that enveloped every cutie in the convention.

   Dawn paused, an island of peace in the midst of white-furred carnage drowning each and every cutie in rage. She examined her scales. They were dead set on equally balanced. “Oh, I found your hat. Okay, now we can go,” Dawn said, handed Steve his fedora, and put the scales away.

   Steve gazed upon the bunnies swarming and biting and clawing the entire population of cuties. He saw them run, saw them panic. He saw Evy look pleadingly at the group of bunnies surrounding her before she too disappeared beneath puffy white fury.

   “They’re not going to be killed, are they?” Steve asked.

   “Kill them all!” Gore declared.

   “No, no killing.”

   “Not killed, just maimed,” Dawn offered.

   “No maiming either.”

   “Partial wounds, marginal maiming.”

   “I can accept that,” Steve said. He put on his hat, and walked out the door. “Let’s go.”

   They had to wade through the bunnies and screaming cuties to make it to the lobby. There, the daisies both on and around the panzer were quickly being devoured by bloodied bunnies munching on flowers in between munching on human flesh. Steve saw a cutie flailing in the lobby to fend off the bunnies. He was wearing a bunny costume, but this didn’t seem to deter the manic creatures that turned his costume into tattered rags.

   Before they made it to the door, Steve bent down to help the formerly bunny-costumed cutie, pulling him free of the swarm and allowing him to leap to the safety of the tank. Without thanks, the cutie leapt inside and slammed the hatch shut, cutting off the angry bunnies who tried to claw their way through the steel.

   “What’d you do that for?” Dawn asked. “You tilted the balance of good and evil back to good again.”

   “Then fix it,” Steve said, and shrugged.

   “Fine.” Dawn reached into the air and plucked another bunny into existence. This one was bright-eyed and almost looked to be smiling. She tossed it onto the tank, where the angry bunnies immediately attacked their fellow creature like a swarm of piranhas.

   “Better?”

   “Better.”

   The scales of the balance of good and evil properly evened, the four creatures of hell departed the hotel, eager to be rid of the experience and continue on their quest to search for the sandwich that would break the antichrist out of his gaming trance. Unfortunately, upon walking through the shattered hotel doors, they discovered this would not be so easy.

   Steve had moral issues with stealing a car. That was no longer an option, though. Steve had issues with the idea of hitch-hiking, since Burney would no-doubt damage someone’s vehicle. That was no longer an option, either. Even renting a car and using a stolen credit card to pay for it, reprehensible to Steve, was no longer an option, because a dozen police cars and twice that amount of fire trucks, ambulances, pizza delivery cars, and other emergency vehicles, now occupied the parking lot and surrounding roads.

   The police and emergency crews didn’t look like they were doing anything in particular. But upon seeing cuties screaming in evacuation from the hotel, they began escorting the injured to ambulances and fending off the pursuing bunnies. While it was humorous to watch police officers brain angry rabbits with Billy clubs, it was easy to see that this would be a massive deterrent to finding a way out of Arkansas.

  Amidst the sounds of sirens and frightened cuties begging for mercy from horribly confused police officers, Jack the angle stepped out of one of the ambulances. He walked toward Steve and his friends. He carried a large monkey wrench, and casually swung it over his shoulder as he approached the demons.