The next morning, I put on my last nice dress. I remembered the day my best friend and I took the train into Metropolis to shop. We had convinced ourselves that the shopping in Gotham left a lot to be desired. We sat on the train in our walking shoes, feeling so grown up as we huddled together in our seat.
We scoured the mall, going into what must have been every store, and some at least twice. At the last store, I'd found The Dress. It was sitting on a mannequin, underneath a light in the middle of the store.
"Oh, you need that," my friend had noticed me staring. She got an associate to take it off the dummy for us. In the dressing room, staring in the mirror, my hair up in a messy pony tail, wearing plastic Hello Kitty jewelry, I'd felt gorgeous.
And now I was walking through the rubble of my home town, picking my way carefully over the cracks in the sidewalk, wobbling slightly in my heels. I shivered, feeling the wind cutting through the thin silk of the dress. Black, with a flared skirt, cap sleeves, and the lowest neckline I had ever dared to wear.
The walk seemed endless. The smell of spray paint was heavy in the air. Was I in LoBoys or Demonz territory? Did it matter anymore? Was there anyone who could save us? They said they were going to protect us. From what? From each other? From ourselves? I knew now that there was no one to protect us from ourselves. The ending of Gotham had been the beginning of the true nature of humanity. I saw the hand of a corpse sticking out from behind a pile of bricks, I wanted to both laugh and cry. Instead, I just muffled my scream.
I sighed and stepped over a pile of trash, telling myself that it was all just papers and random garbage. There was no possible way there was a body underneath there. There were no more bodies. They had all been picked up. I knew it wasn't true, but it was something I had to tell myself in order to be able to get there.
I pulled my coat, a large wool one of Lanie's that I had managed to brush most of the lint off tighter around me. Winter would never end, would it? I'd been unable to find tights without holes in them, and of course I couldn't just go down to the store to buy some. Instead I was wearing the thinnest panty hose on the face of the Earth. My aunt had sighed as she took them out of their package.
"Try not to freeze to death."
There were no gloves to speak of, nor was there a hat. At least it wasn't windy to blow my curls around. And at least my hair had come out in something like Shirley Temple curls. I knew the way I looked in that dress with that hair.
Hopefully, the Penguin would think I looked the same.
Finally, after what felt like hours, but what I knew wasn't, I arrived at the old warehouse. I stood outside of it for a few minutes before knocking on the cracked wooden employee entrance. The door pulled open, and a burly man with a unibrow poked his head out.
"Yeah?"
"I need to speak to Mr. Cobblepot?" I squeaked. The door shut and I stood outside for a moment, uncertain of what I should do. Just as I was getting ready to turn and walk home, defeated, the door opened again.
"Penguin said he'd see you." I stepped into the warehouse, my eyes almost bulging out of their sockets. There were pallets of food, blankets, water, toilet paper (toilet paper... we missed that), just about anything I could think of.
I was tempted to reach out and fill my pockets then make a run for it. But not only could I not find the medicine, I thought that it might ruin my chances at getting anything I needed from him. And I couldn't run in heels, not with the streets being trashed, not with the fact that there wasn't even any traffic for me to try and dart through.
The running part might have been what really stopped me.
I followed the thug up a creaky flight of wooden steps, careful to keep my dress from getting snagged. Glancing down, I could see the rest of the thugs milling around, talking and lifting and moving. I swallowed as I stepped into the office.
