2. Earthborn Shepard
To say that Natalie was hungry was something of an understatement right up there with aliens are weird. A gurgling growl that sounded like a caged beast sounded from the young girl's stomach. Natalie hadn't eaten for almost two days...if you could call a packet of expired cinnamon donuts she'd pulled from the dumpster behind a supermarket eating. When she'd emerged from the depths of the dumpster, prize in hand, she'd been covered in filth. Even now, after attempting to bathe in the freezing water from a busted fire hydrant down the block, she could smell herself.
Her hair, black, oily and matted hung limply to her shoulders and was horribly knotted and tangled. Her eyes, a deep blue were sunk low in her gaunt and drawn face. She was sixteen but life on the streets had wrung her out and she more closely resembled the thirty something hooker who plied her trade on various street corners. Chronic lack of proper food had left Natalie with an all-too-prominent ribcage and the bones in neck stood out like knobs. The good news, if you could call it that, was that her borderline malnutrition had left her almost completely devoid of breasts and she hadn't yet caught the attention of the types of people who grabbed girls off the streets and...did things to them.
In addition to the hunger pangs now clawing at her insides, Natalie had picked up a cold and her nose ran constantly. Sniffling, she wiped her nose with one mucus-encrusted sleeve of her tattered sweater. All her clothes, bought from thrift stores when she had actual money to spend, seemed to be tattered. Her jeans were gone at the knees in exactly the same way people paid hundreds of credits in stores in order to achieve the 'distressed' look. I'll give those stupid pricks distressed! she mentally cursed as she walked along the gutter. Her destination, in the distance was a poky little restaurant. Natalie was hungry and was desperate enough to steal food in order to avoid a slow death by starvation.
She wasn't proud of what she'd been forced to do in order to survive. She was white trash. She knew that, didn't mean she couldn't aspire to something more though.
"Aspire to what, Shepard?" Finch had taunted her one day two years ago. Finch was trash too, only he revelled in it. He took every opportunity to knock over well-dressed people and steal their money.
"It's dog eat dog, Shepard," he'd told her.
"Don't you want to get away from all this?" Natalie had asked, waving a thin bony arm in the direction of the neighbourhood. From somewhere in the near distance, she heard a woman screaming then a dull thump and a man roaring "Shut up, bitch!"
"And what'll you do instead, huh?" Finch answered and leaned in towards her, quiet fury in his eyes.
"You got no papers, so you can't get a proper job, you can't get fake papers, even shit ones 'cause you got no money and you can't even turn tricks like them whores in the gutter cuz frankly, Shepard, no man would be desperate enough to actually pay for sex with you!"
"You're a shit of a human being and I hope you die, Finch!" Natalie had yelled back at him, "I hope you fucking die!" She stormed out of the crumbling apartment blocked the Tenth Street Reds had claimed as their own and disappeared into the cold and uncaring night.
Now she stood beneath the shadows cast by a stately elm tree on the opposite side of the road from the restaurant. A flickering neon sign proclaimed the place to be Gino's.
"OK, what now?" she asked herself. "Cuz I am so not going rooting around in the dumpster just so I can get a pack of month-old donuts!"
Natalie wasn't a strong girl, she couldn't just knock a person over and steal their takeout like Finch would. She didn't even know what she was doingin the Reds. She had no real skills to speak of beyond using an old omni-tool to override cryptolocks on occasion.
As Natalie stood in the shadow cast by the old elm, the roots cracking the surrounding pavement, her nose leaking, a plan began to form: wait for a single person to leave with a bag of takeout, follow them and when there was nobody else around, threaten them at knife-point until they gave up the food. Then run like hell.
Good plan, except she had no blade. Casting around the cracked pavement, Natalie found a rare treasure: a glass bottle that hadn't yet been smashed. Gingerly holding the bottle by the neck, she swung it against the pavement, hoping to smash it. Instead the bottle rapped against the concrete, jumped from her fingers and rolled away. Natalie sighed, feeling tears coming on then tried again. For a wonder, she managed to smash the bottle without cutting herself to ribbons in the process.
Holding her makeshift weapon, Natalie settled in to wait.
A short time later, a middle aged woman in a blue suit entered Gino's. As the door swung open a warm glow from within spilled out onto the street outside and Natalie heard the dull murmur of the customers as they talked amongst themselves. Then the door shut, cutting off the glow and the voices. That door shutting summed up Natalie's entire existence: on the outside looking in. Opportunities constantly denied her. No safe place to rest her weary head. No place to call 'home.'
The same woman exited about ten minutes later clutching the holy grail - a container of takeout food. Natalie's stomach rumbled and her mouth flooded with spit. Quickly and quietly, the young girl slipped across the road and fell in behind the woman in the suit.
You better hope she doesn't have a car close by or you're screwed the little voice in her mind supplied. Head darting around like a chicken's, Natalie made sure nobody else was around before she jogged to catch up with her intended victim. She took a deep breath, clutching the bottle with suddenly damp hands and yelled, "Give me the food or I'll cut ya!"
Well that was what she'd meant to yell out. What came out instead was a strangled squawk. The woman turned to face her, raised an eyebrow and said calmly, "Get lost before I call the cops, girl."
Natalie inhaled sharply, wiped her nose and tried again, "I ain't foolin' with you! Give me the bag!"
The woman clutched the container close to her chest and began backpedalling. Throwing caution to the wind, Natalie dropped the bottle, lunged forward and closed both hands on the bag. A short tussle ensued as they fought for possession of the food. Natalie cringed as the woman clipped her around the ear then, feeling a sudden burst of rage, Natalie shoved the woman backwards just as hard as she could. The woman emitted a surprised cry then her head hit the pavement with a sickening thud. The woman's body jerked once then she lay still.
Natalie stood over the woman, trembling uncontrollably. What had she done? All she'd wanted was some food. And now she'd killed a person. Falling to her knees, Natalie laid her head on the woman's chest, hoping to hear her breathing. Maybe she wasn't dead, maybe she was just really really hurt? So the voice of hope yammered in the frightened young girl's mind.
Natalie sat like that for a long time, head lying on the woman's still chest, food lying forgotten in the gutter. The young girl's shoulders heaved with silent sobs. She cried not only for the woman whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but she also cried for herself.
At some point, the sobbing ceased and she fell asleep right there on the street, with the dead woman as a pillow. In one of those perverse moments intended to make people stop to wonder what was wrong with the world, not one person paused in their comings and goings to check on the woman and the girl. Not one.
---
The next morning Natalie stood up, grabbed the food that still lay untouched and ran back to the relative safety of the apartment. Shaking with fear and spent adrenaline, Natalie wolfed down the now-stale food, feeling her guilt build even as her hunger faded. She was a horrible person, she told herself. She must be. Why else would her own parents have abandoned her to this?
For the first time in her sixteen years, Natalie's thoughts turned to suicide. Why not end it all? Who'd miss her, after all? Finch? Yeah right. Finch loved three things in this world: himself, money and sex. In that order. He wouldn't even notice she was gone. And there was no family to mourn her passing. Oh sure, there were probably cousins somewhere maybe even a brother or sister who'd not had the bad luck to be abandoned as she had been but they didn't know she existed so why would they give a crap? One less homeless kid, right? Who gave a rat's?
Screaming at the top of her lungs, Natalie shouted at the sky, "Who gives a fuck?" Chest heaving, she slammed a fist into the wall of the bedroom she called hers. Her hand gave a sickening crack as it punched through the crumbling plaster. Cradling her hand, Natalie sank to the mattress on the dirty floor and cried.
"The fuck you whining about now?" Finch spoke from the doorway.
Without looking up, Natalie mumbled, "I killed a woman."
Finch laughed, "No shit? And here's me thinking you weren't good for nothing!"
Furious at him, Natalie shouted, "It isn't funny! She's dead! Because of me!"
"Yeah, and? People die all the time. If you died, you think anybody'd care?" Finch said calmly. He left before she could answer. Natalie had no answer anyway. She cried herself to sleep for the second night in a row.
Sometime during that long night, something that had long percolated in her subconscious took flight. There was a way for her to get out of this life. She'd need to save up enough credits for fake papers, good ones and even then they may not be enough but she had to at least try. Hell, wasn't the Alliance always on the lookout for more meat to throw into the grinder? And what was she, if not meat?
As dawn's first light filtered through the grime of the bedroom window, countless motes of dust dancing within, Natalie emerged from her tearful slumber renewed. Two more years. All she had to do was survive the next two years and then, with hope, she'd be able to enlist.
For the first time in a long time, Natalie Shepard greeted the new day with hope in her heart.
