Pitch, Rust, and Broke Glass
She left home with nothing but her nice dress and her good knife. She walked in the dark for hours, straying farther from Dry Wells than she'd ever been before. After awhile, she stopped at the edge of the river, and looked at her reflection in the moonlight. She was still wearing the makeup she'd put on to attend the feast, although it was smeared by her tears. When she saw herself with her makeup and her dreadlocks she was filled with revulsion. She let herself fall into the river, let the cold black water envelope her, felt the makeup wash off. She swam out into the middle and floated there on her back, the fine fabric of her best dress clung to her small body. She stared up into the night sky.
For the next few days she kept close to the Colorado out of necessity, following it north on the eastern shore and avoiding lurks and whatever else fresh water attracted. She ate whatever she could scavenge, mostly pinto beans and banana yucca. She didn't bother to hunt as she didn't feel safe building a fire. She had some survival skills, but she was the farthest she'd ever been from home and all alone. She felt more vulnerable than she'd ever felt in her life, but she also felt more free. The struggle to survive day-to-day liberated her.
After a week of walking she came across the cracked remains of a parking lot for a boat pier. She was scared of tetanus, but she was newly emboldened by her independence and curious to examine the rusted shells of cars and boats. She tore the hem and waist off of her dress wrapped them around her feet, then gingerly set out across the blistered pavement, making an effort to be as stealthy as possible in case the ruins held any surprises. She approached a four-door Chryslus Corvega with a boat hitched to it first. As she got closer she couldn't believe how huge it was. It looked like a slain beast, its corpse left to rot in the post-nuclear sun.
She found a rotted briefcase in the trunk, but it was full of men's clothes. A full suit and tie, some relax wear including a sweater vest, and fishing clothes including waders that couldn't possibly fit her small frame no matter how much she coveted the thick soles. She did put on the over-sized fisherman's hat, figuring any relief from the sun couldn't hurt, but removed the lures and hooks from the band. She left all the other clothes in the remains of the briefcase. In the boat behind the car there was nothing of value.
There were seven more rusted husks in the parking lot, seven more bleaching bones of once-great beasts. She gingerly searched them all one by one, but found much the same in each. There were no useful supplies, no medical kits or non-perishable foodstuffs, no weapons of any kind, not even a tire iron. Although in a small trailer attached to one car she found a sizable collection of pre-war women's clothing, all of the dresses were several sizes too large. She didn't bother putting on the lady's sun hat she found, preferring the more modest fishing hat.
She finished searching the last car (which contained nothing but the skeleton of its former owner) and scrambled cautiously out of the parking lot and onto some nearby rocks. She squatted on a rock and pouted, looking over the remains of a once-great civilization and privately thinking so what. These people had so much in their time, but in the end it amounted to so little. Most of them died in their behemoth cars, surrounded by their useless knickknacks and leisure sport equipment. Their lives had been meaningless, and they couldn't even be helpful in death. Pre-war people were selfish, she reasoned. She was about to get up and continue on her way when she noticed past the parking lot closer to the river were a few squat blue boxes. Cabins.
She had much more luck in the fishing cabins. The first was full of the smell of stale death and skeletons, but the second had a full medkit with bandages, gauze, disinfectant, and the rarest treasure, two stimpacks still in their sterile wrapping. The third was the real jackpot. She didn't know what the small cabin was used for before the bombs fell, but she guessed it was either the house of a maniac or a hideaway for criminals. The floor was covered in hundreds of leather boots. All different sizes, all different styles, almost none of them paired up. She felt richer than she'd ever felt in her life. She sat in the cabin for hours, trying to find the perfect pair of boots. Four hours went by before she found a boot that fit her right foot perfectly, but for her left she had to settle for a boot that was a little too big. It fit fine when she wrapped her foot in the bandages she'd just found. In the closet was a similarly question-inspiring amount of leather coats, including one meant for a woman of her slender build. She was about to explore the next cabin when she discovered she wasn't the only person around.
Three people, two men and a woman returned from a hunt just as she opened the fourth cabin's door. As soon as she heard them approach she ducked in and shut the door quietly. She scanned the dark room and realized she made a terrible mistake. Scattered throughout were obvious signs of habitation, including recently-used needles. Growing up she'd been taught that drug use went hand-in-hand with violent, dangerous and unpredictable behavior. Right at that moment she hoped those warnings were exaggerated. One of the men was talking loud enough to his companions that she could hear him through the door.
"I was sure she was there," she could just barely make out. Someone else said something to the man but she couldn't hear it properly.
"Well then next time you talk to him!" the man protested loud enough to be perfectly audible to her, "Anyway, we can try again tomorrow. She can't have gone far."
The voices grew louder and she realized they were fast approaching her cabin. In the dim light she searched for a place to hide, and settled for the closet. She hoped they wouldn't notice the closet was closed even though it was open when they left. Just as she slid the thin wooden door shut the front door burst open, and the smell of shit and leather announced the presence of the cabin's occupant. From the footsteps she guessed it was the woman. She walked into the cabin, sighed irritably, then returned to the door and screamed, "And next time bring the lift!"
"Gotta let it charge!" one of the men yelled back, and the woman made an irritated noise then slammed the door shut. She swore under her breath then dropped to the mattress on the floor and (judging by the sounds she could hear through the closet door) took off her boots and threw them at the wall. They hit the wall with a thud each and the woman swore under her breath again. Her stench was terrible. She smelled like shit and leather, and her feet liberated from her shoes smelled atrocious, like rancid meat. In the closet it was all she could do to keep from retching from the smell. She heard the woman on the bed take off her jacket, and she could smell her air out her armpits, which somehow smelled even worse than her feet. The woman shot up, the pressurized hiss of the psycho plunger the only sound in the cabin for a moment before she gurgled and belched contentedly. She swore again, this time much louder. She took off her belt and, judging by the wet smacking sounds and her jagged, labored breathing, began to masturbate furiously. In the closet, the girl with no name stifled laughter. She was truly, deeply afraid, and the horror of her situation seemed so incredibly, bizarrely funny.
The woman loudly finished, then lay on the bed for an interminable amount of time before buckling her pants back up, putting her boots back on, and leaving the cabin. She waited until she felt that it was absolutely safe to leave the closet, then with trepidation slowly opened the door and examined her surroundings. Day turned to night while she'd hid in the closet. The woman left the cabin door open, and past it she could see they'd started a large fire and were gathered around it. She was in an unusual position, at risk to be discovered and possibly murdered (possibly worse than murdered), but she had the upper hand. They'd let their guard down around her, and she couldn't help but take advantage of the opportunity.
First she examined the woman's cabin more thoroughly. She found a stash of ammunition of all different types, mostly nine millimeter bullets, which she could recognize as they were quite common among the warriors of her former tribe and in the southwest wasteland in general. Most were from Gun Runners making long shipments, or from Gun Runner shipments ambushed by raiders fleeing east. Or so she'd heard. In any case, she doubted these bullets were bought. She put them in her jacket pockets. In the broken refrigerator she found the woman's stash of drugs, mostly psycho but also some steroids and liquor. In a cabinet she found some dried meat, which was the only thing she ate all day. She didn't find any weapons, so she quietly slipped out of the cabin into the darkness.
She skulked on the edge of their fire, just past the light. She finally got a good look at them, two men and one woman. One man was tall, at least as tall as Raven, but thin and sickly looking. He had a long chin strip goatee and shaggy hair, and glinting in the firelight she could see the revolver on his hip, as long and thin as him. The other man was short, but wider. She couldn't see his face, but he clenched a machete tight in his fist. He was the loud one, speaking again but away from her so she couldn't quite make out what he was saying. With each word he swung the machete in front of him and with his other hand gestured broadly. The woman was shorter still and stocky. Not fat, but built in a masculine way. Her short hair accentuated her manliness. Something about the way all three of them held themselves led her to assume they were all related, perhaps siblings. She slipped past them unobserved to the next cabin, which she entered silently and carefully.
In the corner a dim electric light shined. A small counter that was covered in old junk food boxes in the woman's house instead had an intricate and beautiful statue made of welded scrap metal. It had a rudimentary human shape composed of helices. It was almost charming but for the fact that she couldn't believe it was created by one of the people just outside. The whole cabin was filled with similar artworks, some dangling from the ceiling by fishing wire, all of them bathed in the pale light. She crept around the room, carefully avoiding disturbing any of them. There wasn't much else in the cabin. In a metal case she unlocked with a bobby pin there was a collection of even more scrap metal, good pieces that had very little rust and wear. In the bottom of the cabin's refrigerator was the torch used to make the art, and the rest of the refrigerator was filled with bottles of water, soda, and beer. The closet was full of more artwork. She left without taking anything.
They were still gathered around the fire, carousing and drinking, waiting for a whole bighorner to cook over the fire. She wondered if any one of them was the artist. None of them looked particularly inspired by a muse. They all looked lean and cruel, like starving dogs. They had calmed down, the short man was still clutching his machete but he was no longer gesturing with it. They were all sitting down on old plastic lawnchairs. She didn't even bother to skulk around. They didn't pay attention to anything but the fire. She wondered how they'd survived for so long.
The next cabin was the second-to-last cabin in the entire campground. Unlike the others, it was locked, but she had the same bobby pin from before and cracked it open without much effort. Although, even she, standing at barely five feet tall and weighing less than one-hundred and ten pounds, could simply kick the door in, it was so old and of such poor quality.
The inside of the cabin was dark, but her eyes adjusted quickly. She grew up with a preternatural ability to see in the dark, something she'd never really appreciated until she found herself in life-or-death circumstances. In the dark of the cabin she saw mostly garbage, trash made up of old food containers, rags, and pieces of paper. The whole place smelled like an animal gave birth in it, a smell so thick it was practically solid. When she slipped in and quietly shut the door behind her she gagged, and her eyes adjusted to the dark before she adjusted to the smell. The floor was covered in a layer of dirty clothes, as was a military cot. As she explored she discovered the likely source of the smell- unlike in the other cabins, whichever of the men who was living in this one used the no-longer working toilet, to the extent that it overflowed with human waste. A small dam of old jeans and sweaters had been erected on the floor so as to prevent the feces from flooding the entire surface.
She was loathe to search the room, but compelled by the thrill. At any moment she might be discovered by the cabin's occupant, and kept one eye on the door accordingly. She was grateful for her new leather boots, as her first step into the festering squalor was onto a glass syringe that burst under her heel in spite of her delicate tread. She said a silent prayer to her footwear and made her way over to the cot. Underneath it she found a rusting metal footlocker that was unlocked, but she couldn't slide it out past the layer of dirty clothes. Whatever was in the footlocker was too heavy for her to lift up and pull out without more traction. Removing the footlocker was too risky so she continued to the refrigerator, and found it more rewarding anyway. Inside it she found an M3 submachine gun, the kind of weapon her grandfather called a grease gun. It seemed to be in decent shape, and next to it on the fridge's wire rack were three clips, although two were half-empty. Also in the fridge were three fragmentation grenades and parts of what she assumed was a six-chambered revolver. A few small energy cells were scattered throughout the shelves, but she'd never seen energy weapons in her life and didn't know what they were. She loaded the full clip into the gun and stashed the others and the frag grenades in her jacket. She slung the grease gun's leather strap over her shoulder and carefully made her way back to the door, which opened just as she reached it.
Standing in front of her was the tall man, who didn't notice her fast enough to react before she buried her knife up under his ribcage and directly into his heart. She leaped up and kissed him on the mouth as she did so to prevent him from screaming a warning to his companions and pulled him into the cabin. He hardly struggled at all, and she could feel the life drain from his lips. She closed the door behind him as his corpse slumped onto her, then she let it fall to the floor, the clothing muffling the thud. She smirked triumphantly at the body, relishing her flawless execution as she wiped her knife clean on his jean jacket, the only part of his outfit that wasn't as filthy as the rest of the apparel that littered his floor. She noted with derision that even though she'd spent a week wandering with nothing by herself she still found time to keep her clothes reasonably clean. She searched his body and narrowly missed pricking herself on a syringe full of psycho in his breast pocket, pulling her hand away from the side of the needle like it was red-hot. She patted down the outside of the rest of his pockets, and found some ammunition for the gun at his hip and the key to the cabin. She removed the gun belt from around his waist and wrapped it around her own without examining it, then quietly opened the door and peered through.
The surviving man and the woman didn't seem to notice what happened. They were still sitting around the fire, the girl drinking a beer and the short man eating a piece of meat with his hands, machete on the ground by his chair. She slipped through the door and silently approached the fire, stopping close enough to hear them but far enough that she was just two points of light in the darkness, the reflection of the fire in her eyes.
"We should probably move along, soon," the woman said after two beats of silence. She leaned in close to the short man and looked him in the eye as she said it, searching. It sounded like something she could only suggest without the tall man around. The short man thoughtfully chewed his meat for a minute, then drank a mouthful of his own warm, stale beer.
"Pitch wants this girl. Says it'll be a big score," he said.
"I get that. But afterwards..." the woman pleaded. The short man stared into the fire.
"She's a good lookin' girl. All alone. Young. We bag her, sell her to the bulls, we'll be in enough gold to go wherever," he drank from his bottle again, "head to Reno. Kill ourselves with drugs and booze and whores..." he trailed off.
The woman glanced back at Pitch's cabin. She moved her chair closer to the short man. She spoke quieter, so that in the darkness their unseen guest struggled to hear her, "She's one of those Twisted Hair niggers. We ain't been here long, but long enough to know not to mess with one of them."
She realized they were talking about her. The short man looked at the woman stone-faced.
"That's why she's worth more. We get her, they pay us, we get out. Pitch'll understand that," he finished just as she fired the grease gun.
A wild spray of bullets struck the short man from the side, through sheer chance hitting him in the temple. The woman jumped out of her seat and spun around with a small revolver in her hand but she turned the submachine gun on her too fast, the wild spray of bullets mostly missing but a few struck her in the chest, knocking her back into the fire. The woman discovered that the fire that cooked a bighorner easily cooked her and she screamed.
The submachine gun ran out of bullets, but she held the trigger down so that the staccato click-click-click accompanied the pained screams of the woman being cooked alive. She had never fired a gun before, and was overwhelmed at how easy it was. She didn't realize her gun wasn't firing anything until the small pistol the woman dropped in the fire began to discharge because of the heat. The loud pop each bullet made as it exploded in its chamber caused her to drop the grease gun and take cover. Six bangs and then no noise but the crackle of the fire.
The woman dragged herself painfully out of the fire, her leather clothes burned into her blistering skin. She crawled on her hands and knees, only to look up and see Pitch's silver pistol pointed right at her, and just beyond it two shinning eyes and a wide smile illuminated in the dark. One final bang splintered the night air.
She picked up the submachine gun and slung it over her shoulder again. She patted down the short man and found nothing but a switchblade, a pair of leather gloves, and some banana yucca fruit. Blood poured in a thick stream from the hole she'd made in his head, and his eyes were open and glazed. She examined the gloves, noted the scorch marks on each tip of the left glove's fingers. She put the gloves on her own hands and closed the short man's eyes.
She returned to Pitch's cabin and lifted the cot noisily off the metal trunk. She flipped open the lid. Inside was mostly garbage, old junk food and drugs, but on top was a brown leather bag she opened to find aureus and denarius, a decent amount of Legion coin. She tucked the bag under her arm and headed away from the cabins at a rapid pace. After an hour of walking she sat down next to the Colorado and used her knife to hack off her dreadlocks one by one.