So It Was Told by the Whore of Babylon...
The life of this whore had ended before it had began. Dead in the water by the time she had taken her first breath. From then on she had become cold blooded, so much so that the Follower's doctor who delivered her had thought her dead before he saw her empty black eyes looking into his, giving off such a pervasive terror of the soul. The same way that some men were destined to be murderers or rapists or charlatans or utter failures, she had been to become a whore, her vocation having been chosen for her by some cruel, celestial rolling of a dice before her cold, dead heart had ever taken a single beat.
Her mother had died birthing her, only just seeing the face of what killed her and cursing it for its selfishness. Her father had been so distraught that he had walked out into the wastes drunk, only to be found one week later with two cazador stingers broken in his gut and his pistol in his hand, having blown his own brains out. Any family had disowned her before she could open her eyes and to try and save a future of suffering. A do-gooder dashed her head against the floor, leaving her skull permanently malformed and her brain to grow incorrectly. Even then she had survived, just as her small, cold corpse was about to be thrown into a drain. Despite all this, as a child, for a short time, she had found happiness. Before self-consciousness had become a realisation (as she could never look pretty) she had found someone to look after her and feed her. To treat her as a child should be and to give her the love that would result in a fully formed human being. They lived in a small shack in an unknown corner of Freeside, and for that small epoch, life had been perfect. But it was not to last. Gone in a manner that was so cruel and corrupting that the whore to be was left wandering for a long time before she had even completed half a decade in the wasteland.
After that, at the most innocent age of six, she was very forcefully, shown how the world had changed after the war. Where the law of man had receded and had been replaced so rapidly by the law of the crazies. Under such laws no one would bat an eye at the fact that a girl of six had been taken down an alley by a known rapist. Under such laws nobody would investigate any screams. Nobody would listen to cries of help or the youthfulness of the voice. To the youthfulness of a voice that belonged to a girl, who could have possibly, despite everything that had happened to her, made some sort of good life. Yet she was now set onto her destiny that had been chosen long ago. And like that, in the space of ten minutes, she had been deflowered. Like that, the last bits of her innocence had been stolen by a man who was entirely the good, the bad, the worst, and the rest of Vegas rolled up into one. But all she remembered of it was how soft his hand had felt leading her down that alleyway.
After that, any lingering feelings or vestiges of human compassion were gone, sucked out in a manner most ruthless and efficient at the age of six. Then on was when she became truly empty, truly cold and truly insensate. Numb would be incorrect, numb would suggest that there had once been some feelings that the numbness had replaced, or even that when the numbness was touched there would be some registering of sensation. But to her there was nothing, just existence. And to exist she did be a whore.
So that brings us to the situation that she is currently in. In a dingy rented room in Gomorrah, with a sweaty stranger pumping up and down on top of her while she stared at the wall with empty eyes, body limp and lifeless and causing the stranger to check if she was still alive half way through. As if her death would have stopped him. When he was done, he tossed her a handful of caps and was gone before she could sit up. She mechanically swung her legs over the bed, walked into the bathroom, washed herself, put her uniform back on, and headed out.
None of these men loved her. None of them cared if she was alive or dead. They only cared for that the gap between her her legs where it was lubricated and warm. They cared only that the price didn't go up, and that what they caught from her didn't last for too long and wasn't too nasty.
As she walked out of Gomorrah she knew eyes were on her, slowly moving in circles around her crotch and chest. So she danced and took men back to her room and quite literally rinsed and repeated. Come the time of her break she did not feel different, did not feel colder or warmer or more filthy or more degraded. No matter how much filth was on her skin and how much her leather smelled.
She walked into an alleyway, pulled out a cigarette and smoked. It didn't make her feel anything, or want to feel anything. It just filled up time in her existence. She was told that it would make the place look bad if she was seen to be staring at a wall during her breaks. Then she was on the floor. From the blood she saw she supposed she had been hit. Them something was pushing her down into the ground. A body. And its voice said,
"I don't think I'll pay for this."
And so she existed.
AN: This chapter was written by Machiavellian Skulduggery, author of The Janus Faced Man, The Touch of A Lover, and Memoirs of A Desert Ranger. Check him out. The next chapter will be written by myself, Surprisingly Odd, author of Two to the Head: A Courier Six Novel. Check me out too, if you want. This is a collaboration account between the both of us, and this flash fiction came from the idea to write about the survivors of the nuclear Fallout, and the hardship and desperation that comes from pure survival.
Thanks for reading - Surprisingly Odd.
