Chapter 4 - Your Favorite Poison
Christian dragged himself back to headquarters one night on his hands and knees, barely able to stand up. His face was punched in, both his eyes blackened, and he felt like at least one of his ribs was broken.
Gloria helped him into the station, gingerly easing him into a chair and draping a blanket over him. "What the Hell happened to you?"
"Got the crap beat out of me by a policeman," he said through chattering teeth, shivering under his blanket and threadbare clothes. Gloria tilted her head and scrutinized him, taking note of the glazed, empty look in his too-wide eyes.
"That's it," she decided, "you're getting off the drugs."
"What? Why?" asked Christian, looking up at her with those big, creepy puppy-dog eyes.
"Because we're in the middle of a war, and if you keep rushing into battle all messed up like this, you're going to get killed!" said Gloria. She rummaged in her bag and tossed something into his lap: a bottle of caffeine pills. "This is your new fix. And I don't want you over the legal alcohol limit, either." As he gaped up at her in disbelief, she reached into his trouser pocket.
"Whoa! What are you—?"
"Just as I thought," she nodded as she found a needle of heroin on him. Then, much to his surprise, she asked, "Mind if I borrow this?"
"…Wait…didn't you just lecture me about the dangers of drugs?"
"Yeah. I'm not going to use it, though. Just watch."
He waited up with her until everyone else was fast asleep. He was coming back to his senses now, the pain from his beating intensifying. As the clock struck two, she walked over to one of her sleeping comrades, bent down next to him, and injected a lethal dose of heroin into his arm.
"What are you doing?" Christian gasped.
"He's a traitor," said Gloria.
"Alright, now you're just being paranoid!"
"No. I'm not." She turned him over and went through his coat pockets, turning out a number of recording devices and an anonymous letter bearing the government seal. "See? He's a con," she confirmed, pressing the needle into his hand to make it look like he'd drugged himself to death.
"Then why," asked Christian, "didn't you just kill him in front of everyone? Shouldn't you have used him as a warning for any other traitors?"
"He probably didn't want to do it," Gloria lamented, glancing down at the spasm-wracked boy. "The law has all sorts of ways to make people comply. I wouldn't trust him enough to believe him if I confronted him about it and he claimed to switch back to our side, but he deserves to die as a saint to the others."
Gloria spent several hours poring over the papers and recordings she'd found in the traitor's pockets, working into the next afternoon, studying charts and maps and newspapers, hoping to find out who he had been reporting to and eliminate that person before information about her leaked too high up the political command chain. By that night, she had a lead, and she left the station just as night fell to pursue her target. "I'll be right back," she told her ragtag band of revolutionaries.
She found her target within a few hours, and when she didn't return to the base in a reasonable time frame, Christian went out after her and found her pinned to an alley wall by the hands of her lecherous target, her jacket buttons undone, his actions totally contradicting the badge of authority pinned to his lapel. No one seemed to care, though, if the perverse enforcer attempted to violate the honorable vigilante. "Get off me!" she shrieked as she pummeled him with sharp kicks that he seemed not to notice.
"Oi! Let her go!" Christian shouted, pulling a half-loaded gun out from his belt and firing two warning shots into the man's leg. Screams ensued, the officer reached into his coat and pressed a button on a small, streamlined communicator. In seconds, the wail of sirens pervaded the air.
"Shit!" Gloria hissed. "Christian, we've got to get out of here!"
He was hardly listening, standing in place and emptying the rest of his bullets into Gloria's assailant's head. After he ran out, shots continued to blast in the vicinity: the few revolutionaries Christian had brought with him on his search-and-rescue mission were engaged in various fights with the swarm of government agents pouring copiously into the square. Screams deafened, sparks flew, bodies fell. The streets had erupted into chaos.
The riot was still in progress when a shaken Gloria and numb Christian made it back to HQ, leaving a trail of graffiti and litter and chanting protestors behind them. "Well, that didn't turn out half bad, eh?" she said, her cheeks flushed. She was rather satisfied with the outcome of the night—what had begun as a mission to protect her veil of secrecy ended with the brutality of the law enforcers for all to see and cry out against.
Christian seemed to disagree. His hands were shaking, his expression blank. "I c-can't believe I just k-killed someone," he choked through a lump in his throat.
"Oh, come on. I kill people all the time," Gloria pointed out.
"Yeah, well you're lucky you don't have a conscience then."
"Come on, Christian, don't be like this," she groaned. "What you did back there just might have saved my life!"
There was no answer. A door slammed shut towards the far interior of the station: Christian had locked himself and his tearful breakdown in the bathroom.
Gloria collapsed in a heap in a folding chair. "Well, this is just great," she muttered to herself. She'd managed to alienate the one person she actually cared about, and he was the one who'd shot a man dead.
And tomorrow, despite the demonstration of collective anguish that had just commenced, society would go right back to silencing The Revolution and fearing The Man.
"What am I even doing here?"
A/N: All songs/characters (c) Green Day. This one takes us through Last Of The American Girls and Murder City.