Prologue - Desert Crown

Alphard had been sitting on the hood of the beaten-up truck she and Siam had stolen from the town a few kilometers back. She kicked her legs up and down, bouncing them against the truck while the sun beat down on her from above. The droplets of perspiration ran down her legs, her arms, her neck. The feeling of warm, streaming liquid flowing down and throughout her skin was one she had become accustomed with but never quite had gotten used to.

The heat was augmented by the rising sheets of infrared rebounding from the blazing desert ground and distorting her outward gaze. She felt like removing her rugged combat boots, her light-fitting T-shirt, her dusty, blasé pants and be rid of them so she could at least do away with some of the heat pounding her body. Instead, she opted to fanning herself by tugging the collar of her shirt repeatedly, somewhat venting herself in the absurdity that was the desert. She stared at a cactus, trying to establish a connection with it in a hint of heat-influenced insanity and pitiful conscience since it and she were the only living things around in her vast, empty vicinity. She had to cover her eyes with a cuff of her hand to see the rolling, ragged mountains sitting on the horizon. They were the only good elements of the uninviting terrain, their hauteur grazing the deep-blue, too-bright-to-look-at sky which just had to be cooler than sitting at ground level and helplessly melting away. The flat and cracking ground she sat above was better than the hellfire passage that had been the curving, towering dunes they'd recently passed through after having completed their objective in the previous town. Minimal, but an improvement nonetheless. The heat was overbearing, conclusively intolerable. She wondered how any human being, or any living creature for that matter, could live in such inhabitable conditions without cursing their existence.

The cactus ejected intimidating needles from its rugged surface a few paces away from her. She chugged the canteen, draining what remained of her ration. After jerking her neck back for what was inside of it, she placed the canteen in front of her and dipped it up and down to confirm that it was really empty though she already knew. The heat distorted her rationale, just like it did the ground as her vision was warped in shifting waves of visually incomprehensible shears. She threw the canteen at the cactus in frustration. It hit a needle, fell to the ground, and settled. There was a reservoir in the back of the truck but Siam meticulously kept track of how much was remaining in it; should she even remove a milliliter of treasured H20 from its large container, he would make her run arbitrary laps through the desert. She wasn't too fond of that idea. The cactus seemed to mock her – she imagined it tempting her, taunting her, teasing her. "Can't take the heat? Get out the desert." Fuck you, Cactus.

Siam had simply told her to wait by the truck. When he told her to do something, it might as well had been a military directive or a truce issued by a sovereign king. She had to listen. Continuing to suffer in the heat, she imagined that if she had been a bit stronger than him, which she was far from, what she might do to him as payback for making her wait in the inferno with tantalizing water sitting in the truckbed just behind her.

She noticed that from underneath the hood of the truck, traces of smoke had been slipping through and fuming in the air near and around her. She got up, popped the hood from the driver's side, and lifted the cover only to be blasted by more heat in the form of smoke flooding her and further raising her temperature to her infuriation. She stepped away and fanned the smoke from her face and watched as the engine exhausted clouds of smoke into the searing air. She was apathetic as to the vehicle's condition, though it obviously was doing no better than her, and walked around the truck, climbed atop the truckbed, and sat on the top, facing the cactus anew. She kept the hood lifted and let it sift like she had been for the past hour.

Cactus, capital C since they were now acquainted to some degree, stood strong and tall against the gravity of the ridiculous heat. She stared at it with her distant, azure-blackened eyes and detested it for even being able to adapt to such a harsh environment. Inspired by her unjust and misplaced resentment, she conversed with Cactus as if it were a real person to pass time and to possibly forget about the inferno beating down upon her;

"Hey" she started.

….

"How do you deal with this? The damn heat, that is."

….

"Don't you get tired sometimes? Like, you know, bored of being stuck in a permanent sauna and all?"

….

"Come on," she encouraged, "you can't actually like being in Hell. Even if it is a less hot version."

….

"Do you know what rain is? Does it ever, like, form thick clouds in the sky and start pouring water? Does that even happen here?"

….

"Maybe you don't know any better" she concluded, curving the back of her knees into the cabin of the truck through the open driver's seat window. A thought crossed her mind after having gone through the most casual conversation possible with a cactus. Don't they have water in them? They're plants. As aesthetically unpleasing and unsettling they are, they're still a weird form of plant life. She thought she heard somewhere that cacti had water in them. Potential salvation. An epiphany might lead to her water-thirsty quench being satisfied.

She kept an army knife in her back pocket just below the FN Five-Seven snugly hidden inside her pants near her lower back, a more convenient location than the more sharp and lengthy one she kept underneath the cuff of her tight-fitting denim near her foot or the more experienced, somewhat dull box-cutter like knife she kept inside the strap attached to her right leg or the more lethal, tip-piercing one she kept opposite the handgun on the other side of her waist.

She had choices.

Undermining the rough texture of Cactus, she opted for her everyday, comfortable blade, switching the knife out with her fingers, and leaping from atop the truck. She approached Cactus and was about to test whether or not her hypothesis was a cruel myth or a brilliant discovery for nomadic, desert-wanderers like herself. Unable to see a mischievous needle sticking out where she had thought there was none, she lunged at the surface only to be stabbed, shedding blood going down the inside of her middle finger.

"Damnit!" she complained as scarlet dripped down the inside of her hand and quickly made its way down her wrist. Not only was she losing water at a decent rate, she now had the luxury of losing blood with no way to properly bandage the wound except for some first-aid provisions Siam always kept with him. Fantastic.

There was always the ancient and completely sanitary option of stopping the bleeding by putting the appendage in her mouth and sucking on it like a baby, but she was just too angry to think about doing so and let the wound drip, drip, drip, bloodletting. Somewhat ashamed of her actions, she realized that the heat had driven her to semi-psychotic behavior which had resulted in an affliction she should not have sustained. She knew better. She was trained better. Her composure always had to remain sound, regardless the condition she found herself in. And yet, Cactus, with its limb-like arms sticking out and taunting her still, along with the ever-raging furnace that was the desert, had irked her enough to drop her rationale and act foolishly. She was annoyed by the pain but wasn't mad at Cactus. It was the heat. It had to be the heat. Drops of her blood coagulated along her hand, collected at her wrist, and fell unto the desert floor, drying and evaporating on contact.

"You got me, Cactus" she joked, a smile creeping consciously over her face. "You really got me."

…

"Do you have to be so mean?" she continued, kicking dirt into the air which blew away in the breeze. The wind had been commandeered by the sun's rays and turned into the desert's elemental bandit, streaming flashes of dusty particles and still hotter gusts into her face and clouding her vision.

…

"I mean, you're all alone out here and you got needles all over you for little reason. Its not like anyone's going to attack a cactus out here."

…

Damnit. Fuck you, Cactus.

She had to stop her mania before it turned into schizophrenia. She thought Siam would be back by now. There was nothing there. Just a town, or what was left of a town, sitting in an oddly placed area somewhere between nowhere and a shortcut leading to nothing.

The buildings in the distance had been buried and abandoned after what looked like a disaster had ravaged it. The concrete slabs which had constructed the buildings sat awkwardly above the unforgiving ground in a state of decay characteristic of devastation. The windows had been punctured, leaving not-so-circular vacancies in the exteriors, many of the roofs had been compromised, leaving gaping voids and disrupting structural integrity, and random pieces of debris had been floating around, drifting far away from the buildings they had once constituted. The desert had more life in its merciless embrace than that desolate ghost town.

Before she returned to loathe by the truck, she heard a slither emerge from behind Cactus. She turned to see a considerably large, coiling snake twirl from the base of her prickly friend and make its way toward her in slow, winding swivels. Mesmerized by the curling motion, she returned her blade to her pocket and kneeled to its level where she could observe it more carefully. It was a welcome distraction to take her mind off the heat and the pain from having hurt herself trying to fulfill her need for water.

Its tongue incrementally slipped from its rounded head, whipsawed while making a clicking sound, and returned only to slither again shortly after. Admiring its cold and distant demeanor, with an urging sense of resolution and a determination that resounded in the back of her mind, she decided that she wanted to be like the snake. Not that she wanted to crawl on the desert floor and live among cacti while hunting rodents. She thought that its traits - patience, elegance in its squalor, efficiency during the hunt, purposefulness, and prowess - were admirable qualities to emulate whenever she went out on missions with Siam. Scarlet mixed with golden dust just centimeters away from the serpent, now just an arm's length from her knees.

"Hey, Snakie" she nicknamed while pivoting her head to analyze its crawl from a tilted angle. "What are you doing here?"

Slither.

"Am I your prey? Do you want to hurt me?"

Crawl.

"You're not much different from me. We're both attracted by bloodshed and, look, I even have a tattoo of you on my arm."

She rolled up her sleeve to show Snakie the tattoo which slithered from her wrist up her arm in the most intricate way possible. A black, carbon decal spun up her forearm, twisting and turning like the snake's motion on the ground. It winded and wheeled along its path, shortening the distance between them steadily. Its fangs jetted upward sharply from the bottom of its mouth.

"Aren't you tired of crawling on the ground? Or is that where you thrive? Is this where you belong?"

Slither.

Alphard covered her sleeve and stood to her feet. The blood from her hand slid down onto her tattoo, staining it red. By now, the sun had begun to set. Along with its departure went the vexing heat and she could finally relax without having to worry about her head throbbing from the sun's beatdown. She took her gun from her waist, aimed it at the snake, and fired three shots into the snake's head, body, and at its tail. The snake tried to flee, but its life was slipping away. Blood seeped from the bullet holes and boiled on top the still hot ground. Its body was writhing, rotting, still. Smoke lifted from the gun's muzzle and evaporated in the wind while she stared at its bloody carcass with a heartless comport.

"Bye-bye, Snakie" she whispered while turning away from the dead serpent.

Leaving the snake and cactus behind, she returned to the truck and assumed her status of waiting again. The sky had turned orange, intertwined with trails of pink luster scattered across and above the western horizon.

After another half hour of waiting, she finally heard footsteps approaching from the barren town.

"Siam!"

He marched through the desert with his commanding presence, a backpack hanging behind his back, his hands in his jacket pockets which exposed his dirtied and wrinkled tank-top underneath. He ignored her excitement to see him, observed whether the truck's status and her condition were the same, and continued walking forward with a neutral, apathetic look on his face. She was happy to see him though he wasn't one to reciprocate emotions very well, if at all. She, however, was put on alert when she heard the sound of more than one set of footsteps coming from his direction. She equipped her Five-Seven and aimed in Siam's direction, to which he reacted fearlessly.

"What are you doing?" he asked in an underwhelmed yet aggressive tone.

"Someone's following you."

"Did I ever teach you to point your weapon at comrades?"

"N-no…" she said in a sheepish tone, her stance now filled with doubt and uncertainty.

"Put your weapon away."

She obeyed with her head down in shame while placing her handgun at her waist in its original place. "But who's following you, then?"

Siam slowed his stride to a stop before reaching the driver's side door. He only did so to wait for the person behind him to catch up to his steed and do the same. He stared at Alphard for a long moment, scolding her silently with a brutal and unforgiving gaze.

She hated that look.

He noticed that there was blood running down her wrist from her hand and wondered how she had attained that wound.

"Where'd you get that cut from?" he inquired with demanding resonance.

She had to think of an excuse quickly knowing that there was no way he'd take her half-maniacal, semi-fantastical cactus and snake phase as a good reason for why she was bleeding so profusely. It was totally unbelievable and half-assed at best.

"I, um…. I accidentally cut myself sharpening one of my knives."

He didn't believe it. But since there was no threat anywhere around for kilometers on end, he didn't feel the need to pry. She was relieved when she saw that he had no desire to press any further.

"I want to introduce you to our new comrade."

What?

He stepped aside to show her a small, frail looking girl that looked like she just escaped from a refugee camp and found asylum in Siam's company. A pink, somewhat oversized tank-top, scuffled red shorts, and the most unorthodox shade of silver hair a person could have but which she sported quite well. She gazed at Alphard with a look of worried concern, not knowing what to expect from the taller, black-haired, red-handed bandit sitting on top of the truck. Alphard didn't know what to think of the fragile girl Siam had brought with him; she stared at the girl indifferently, looking down upon her from her perch atop the beige, raggedy old truck.

"Go ahead," Siam told the little girl, "introduce yourself."

She looked at Siam, looked at Alphard, looked back at Siam for support, looked at Alphard in fear, and succumbed to the order bestowed upon her by the tall and rugged man.

"C-Can…" she muttered.

"Speak louder" Siam asserted to her with an encouraging tone in his voice.

"Ca-Canaan" she announced.

This must have been some kind of a joke. Alphard wasn't laughing. Fuck me.