Meanwhile, Hal attempts to reason with Maggie, who does not even want him to call her Maggie. He wants her to join the resistance, and she wants him to shut up. Hal tries to pull a fast one by ripping the bag off his head, whipping around, and taking a swing at Maggie. She ducks effectively and lays him out on the ground, putting a knife to his throat. She has a really big gun as well and tells Hal to wise up. Maggie kicks ass, no joke.

Meanwhile, back at Riverbottom Nightmare Band HQ, Tom tells Pope that they call the aliens Skitters. You'd think that Pope is someone who would surely be cognizant of the diarrheic associations, but he merely praises the moniker and notes that they call them Cooties, like the kids game. Pope says that before the Skitters/Cooties, he was always going up against cops and other degenerates in a world where killing people was not generally accepted. With the Cooties/Skitters, however, it's open season. He asks if Tom has killed any and how. Tom's preferred method, of course, is to get really close and go right for the head. Pope screams with glee that he's been going about it all wrong. If you take out a couple of legs, apparently, it slows the Skitters down and weakens them, and then you take the head shot. Say what you will, but Pope is the bearer of some useful information. Pope went one-on-one with the very Skitter who is presented as a trophy on the high school stage and made it out alive.

Pope asks if Tom has ever taken down a Skitter ship and notes that while the Skitters and Mechs respond to sound, the ships respond to heat. He then regales Tom with the tale of how one night when he and his band of misfits raided the armory, they got wasted and set an old Volkswagen engine on fire, then shot at the ensuing Skitter ship (and patrolling "Cootie-Bird") with a bazooka. The ship must have sensed something though, and so it dodged out of the way. He adds a very sad and dumb-assed, "That would have been sweet." Tom, who has remained silent for most of Pope's monologue, requests a beer. Pope has some sense of prisoners' rights, and so agrees.