Chapter 11
"Danny! Didi!" Millie screamed hysterically, tears falling unheeded down her cheeks. EVE had managed to get the tall, solidly built woman out of the burning café, and was currently occupied keeping her from charging back in after her kids. She was fighting a losing battle as the panicked mother slowly but surely towards the fire and certain death, clawing at the air in front of her as if it would get her closer to her children. EVE looked up watched anxiously as the flames seemed to climb higher and higher on the building, seeming to multiply. Millie finally collapsed a few meters away from the door, dissolving into sobs as she realized that the odds were heavily against her children coming out of this alive.
While EVE was staring at the fire, she thought she saw something twinkling flying from the second-floor window. Her processors had just registered it to be broken glass when she saw something else come out of there; a large black blob sailed through the flames and smoke and landed in a heap right in front of EVE and the grieving mother.
"MOMMY!" The blob yelled, as it split into three, two soot-covered parts leaping up and latching on to Millie. She looked at them in stunned amazement and then hugged them so hard EVE was sure their necks would snap from the strain. "Danny! Didi! You're all right! I was so worried- I thought I had list you… I- I…" She stammered, tears of joy flowing freely from her eyes.
EVE turned away from this happy little scene to examine the remaining third lump, which was lying on the ground and seemed to be attempting to clear the smoke from her lungs by trying to bring one up. The blue dress she had been so ecstatic about only a little while earlier was now beyond help- ripped, torn and covered in soot.
"Urrgh." Rosette said from the ground. EVE helped her into a sitting position. "I hate kids," Rosette whispered to her with a smile, "but I'm glad they're okay."
As EVE noticed that a good chunk of the hemming was missing from the once blue dress, she heard Millie say, "What are these?" EVE turned to see Millie remove two rough pieces of sapphire cloth that had been tied around their faces to filter out the carbon from the smoke and the tiny slivers of glass when they went through the window.
"Sister Rosette put them on us! Aren't they neat?" Danny cried. He snatched his back and put it around his face again. "Lookit me, I'm a bandit!" he cried, running around in a circle.
"Daniel Nicholas Brian Albus Thompson-Wolfwood!" Millie yelled, hands on her hips. "You stop that yelling right now! What if the Red Rogues hear you?"
"Who?" Rosette asked.
Somewhere along the line the Sheriff and volunteer fire department had arrived on the scene, and they were escorted across the road so the fire fighters could get to work, though they had arrived too late- the fire had already nearly burnt itself out. Millie watched them shovel sand onto the flames still guttering in the charred and blackened corpse of what used to be her home before answering.
"The Red Rogues are thugs and outlaws," Millie said in a tired voice, "and probably the ones who set the café on fire. I hope Meryl got out alive…"
At the mention of Millie's friend, something clicked in both EVE's and Rosette's heads as they whipped around to stare at each other. "Edward!" They exclaimed in unison.
"Eh? What's that?" A fire fighter that was standing nearby asked. "Sorry ma'ams, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation- are you saying that your friend was trapped inside when the building caught fire?" At Rosette's and EVE's nods, he shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry, but there's no way he could've gotten through that. That was the worst fire I've ever seen- and I've been doing this plum near twenty years. If your friend was inside the building, he's only ash now."
A section near the back of the café flared up again. While the fire fighters rushed to put out this new blaze the machinery in Rosette's mind ground to a halt. If Edward was dead, that meant that the red water, her ticket home, was gone- that she was stuck here, in this hell, for the rest of her life.
Rosette dimly heard muted shouting, as though it were a long way off. A shot rang out and they all ducked, Rosette instinctively reaching for her gun, which she remembered was no longer on her hip. As the shouting got closer, Rosette decided to sort out whether she was going to live here forever later and focus on merely staying alive at the moment. She did not stick around to find out if the shouters were the shooters, but grabbed Millie's hand and ran for her life, EVE scooping up the children and following suit.
Meanwhile the two people who were supposed to be dead had found themselves back in town, having doubled back through a roundabout route through the sand dunes until they could be reasonably sure that the heat had died down, no pun intended. Meryl had by this time woken up and had accepted the fact that there was no going back. They had managed to scrounge some old brown cloaks with hoods that covered up his blood-red coat and her white one. Her sea-green-with-white-polka-dots apron had been fashioned into a sort of scarf to cover her black hair, and Edward had untied his braid to let the hair fall loose around his shoulders. As of now they looked like a poor harried housewife and her ugly daughter, as long as you didn't get to close.
"I have some friends that will put us up for the night," Meryl whispered to him. She fell silent as a group of people passed in front of them. When they were gone, she continued, "we can use their place as a base of operations-" She stopped and looked up at him. "Al, are you listening to me?"
He was not. Rather, he was staring at a young girl- she couldn't have been older than eighteen, and that was stretching it- who was standing over on the next street corner smoking a cigarette. Scantily clad in short-shorts and a shirt that just barely covered her breasts, her tired eyes and heavy makeup told Edward she was a bona-fide practitioner of the oldest profession in the world- prostitution. He broke into an all-out, nothing-to-lose insane run towards her, Meryl hot on his heels, wondering why in hell he was choosing now of all times to decide he had to get his rocks off.
By some cruel quirk of fate, the girl chose at that moment to glance in their direction. Her eyes widened and she dashed away, incredibly quickly for someone so tiny.
"Hey! Wait!" Edward yelled after her. She darted down a darkened alley, and Edward had just reached the mouth of it to see her climb up and over a wooden fence that stood about halfway down it. He didn't even stop- one swing of his right arm blew the rotted old wood away in a hole big enough for him to leap through.
He came out in the center of town, standing in the middle of a main road amidst what appeared to be dozens of nooks, crannies and alleys that could conceal a mal-nourished young girl. Venting his frustration, he kicked the wall beside him… with his human foot. Jumping up and down on the other one and clutching his injured foot, he heard a distinct giggle coming from his right. He turned and there she was, standing at the mouth of an alley on the other side of the road just ahead of him.
Seeing she'd been made, she turned tail and dashed down the passage. Edward decided not to give chase. He turned around to see a very angry Meryl glowering at him. Despite the height difference, he was acutely aware of how much damage she could do to him.
"Now can we go to my friend's place?" She asked.
"Jack!" Rosette called as she opened the door to the auto body shop. EVE and the others followed, though more demurely. "Jack! Where are you? We need your help!"
"Eh!" a voice yelled, followed by a crash. Behind the counter in front of them a door leading to a side room, presumably his sleeping quarters opened and Jack stuck his head out.
"Whozat? Whozere?" He asked groggily. His tired eyes focused on Rosette. "Why, miss Rosette! What a pleasant surprise. Back from your shopping trip already?" He stepped out from the doorway into the reception room where they were standing, clutching a bottle of Wild Turkey in his robot hand. Rosette thought he had bathed in the stuff, the smell was so strong. He eyed her burnt and ripped gown. "If I were you, I'd ask for an exchange!" He guffawed at his own joke.
Rosette, however, did not have time to laugh. "Jack, this woman-" she indicated Millie and her family- "has just lost her home, and there's people after us. We need the Angela to-." She was stopped by the shaking of his head.
"No can do, ma'am." The old mechanic said apologetically. "The Angela is Eric's, not mine, and I can't give permission to let you drive her-"
"What!" Rosette shrieked. "These people's lives are in danger, and you won't even let use that old beater? Why you heartless, arrogant old-"
"Now, now," Jack said calmly, "you didn't let me finish. I said I couldn't give you the Angela because it's not mine. But there are plenty of cars I do own, and you're welcome to use any one of them," he said with a grin.
"-Kind, thoughtful, wonderful man, you," Rosette finished. After telling EVE to find take Millie and hide in the auto body shop while she went out to locate 'Eric' (who was the only one who could navigate in the desert and thus be able to get them to Eden safely until the Red Rogues stopped looking for them) she followed him to the back room where he, like Vash, kept a multitude of vehicles in various states of repair. He made a beeline straight for one that was under a tarpaulin, preventing Rosette from making out what kind of shape it was in. With a flourish, Jack whipped back the cover to show a beautifully restored motorcycle. Rosette could feel her eyes bugging out almost to the point where they popped out of her skull. Jack walked around it, strutting like a peacock and she followed, trailing a hand along its smooth casing. She was in awe of such a mechanical masterwork. Black body with silver wings painted all the length of the body, where the wings would connect to the body painted on the sides of the front wheel to the where the very tips of the wings met just behind the back seat where the motorcycle's passenger would sit.
"A vintage 1999 Orange County Chopper -one the first ones they ever produced-, painted jet-black with enough horsepower to pull this deadbeat planet into a new orbit." Jack explained proudly. "I touched up the engine and the paintjob and was so in love with her I nearly sold the business to be able to afford her. Long story short I got her, plus a second mortgage and a hernia because of the amount of money I had to fork over. But I'm not complaining. She's my pride and joy. I call her the Athena."
With difficulty, Rosette tore her eyes away from the beautiful machine and thought she saw an amused smile on the cagey old mechanic's face. She couldn't be sure, however, as he turned away and said, "Here we go, the Sleipnir." He walked over to a regular town car parked beside the bike. While in top notch condition and a thousand times better than the Angela, it was no Athena. Rosette couldn't help shooting a look of longing towards the goddess-like motorcycle before clamping her mind down on the task at hand and climbing into the Sleipnir's driver seat. As she was preparing to back out, she looked at Jack. "Why is it you and Vash- er, Eric, name your cars?"
Jack looked at her. "It's good luck, is all," he said. "Besides, don't you name the things you love?"
Rosette drove off without another word, pondering the meaning behind the words. She didn't notice a man on the rooftop of a nearby salon watching her, nor did she see him pull out a walkie-talkie and call for backup.
"I still can't believe you did that." Meryl muttered. "After all that talk about having to go on the move, keeping a low profile, you run off and-"
"Is this the place?" Edward asked as they stopped in front of a single-story bungalow. It seemed to be a hotel of some sort- there was a sign that proclaimed it to be the Atlantis Motel- the Lost City of Comfort. It would have been prudent to say the place had seen better days, but Edward was quite sure in his gut that it hadn't. Meryl nodded, almost as if reading his mind.
"It's not the Ritz, but the owner owes me a favour." She said. She banged on the door. Loudly.
"Lina! Get the door already! We got customers!" They heard a man's voice inside shout.
"All right! I'm getting it old man, so shut up about it!" a girl's voice replied, and a moment later the door opened, and Edward was standing face-to-face with the girl he'd chased earlier.
