Anya stumbled over the broken landscape, shards of rock grated against her bare feet, she left a crimson streak behind her when she forgot to lift her leg high enough. Her arms drifted in front of her, attempting to keep her upright, she couldn't stop. Somewhere in her mind she knew if she fell she wouldn't be able to get up again, there was also the knowledge that if she fell they would beat her until she passed out. These thoughts were in the far recesses of her mind though, what really concerned her was water. She couldn't describe how she could sense where it was, she just felt the pull somewhere deep in her gut. It was why they hadn't sold her off to slavers yet, it was also why they hadn't outright killed her yet, sometimes she wasn't sure if she should be grateful or not, other times she let the high of Jet and booze do her thinking for her.
They had been just short of Paradise Falls when they had discovered her gift. They were crossing miles of desert, nothing but a crusty dirt caked surface and the sun beating down overhead. The men had rationed the fresh water amongst themselves, they dispensed the radiated crap that they pulled out of the ground to the captives. She had fallen to her knees and retched what little was in her stomach out onto the burning rock. She had felt the insistent tug then and been too weak to resist it, she crawled and stumbled away from the path the raiders were taking, they were too miserable themselves to take immediate notice of the straying pack.
The boys marched like zombies behind her, shock and malnutrition had rendered them both oblivious to their situation. She had crested one small arching dune before they had caught her, Mal had come up behind her shoving his boot into her back cruelly. She dropped to the scorching sand but still tried to squirm forward, the drive behind more powerful than she could control.
"Time to put you down, bitch." He had set the barrel of his shot gun at the base of her neck. Pete had come up behind them then, his voice quiet with awe.
"Mal. Look at what she fucking found." In the distance he had finally seen it, the flicker of water. What made it special was the greenery surrounding it. Not much, a few weeds and some crab grass, but it was alive. The water was fresh. "She's a Dowser." Pete had slapped Mal on the back and laughed, the only time she had seen him smile that wasn't malicious. "We're going to be rich."
She had heard the shot then, the shockwave powerful and deep. For a moment she thought she had gone deaf, she thought too that the shot had been into her skull and she was mercifully free of these monsters.
Pete's body flopped down to the ground next to her, his face awash in shock for a moment until his eyes slowly glazed over. She smelled gunpowder then, tears sprung to her eyes and she began to shake. Mal hoisted her back up to her feet before the blood that oozed from Pete's gut could reach her. "No Pete, I'm going to be rich."
What she had remembered clearly from the incident was how cold Mal had been, how frightened she had been when she looked in his eyes and saw nothing human in them. How frightened she would still be if she could stay sober in their midst.
After the boys had been sold off she had refused to help them, she led them across miles and miles of land aimlessly, intentionally walking away from where she thought water might be. Despite her own desperate need for water she thought maybe the world would be a better place if these men were to die along with her. She had earned several beatings for it, sometimes so bad that they had to lash her to a Brahmin until she could walk again. They murdered and pillaged in the mean time to make a living.
They had discovered the power of Jet when a few of the men had thought to grapple with her after a particularly uneventful search, she screamed and scratched at them, bit whatever she could, she didn't have much strength but she poured all of it into fighting them off. They came at her with the Jet then. It was an almost immediate effect, she became more compliant, compliant like a twitching corpse. This pleased the men greatly. When they finally crawled off her to have some sleep she had stumbled to her feet unthinking and wandered out into the darkness. They had found her the next morning crumpled next to an old concrete well, her fingers cracked and bleeding from trying to pry up the lid.
They had figured out how to make their new toy work.
The memories jumbled together in her mind, the smell of the house burning, what tears and soot mixed together tasted like, the image of Pete's eyes fading into death. It was all just information that bubbled up to the top, only to spill over the edges of her drug induced stupor.
Somewhat back in the present she crested the rubble pile she had been marching toward. She had to dig in with her hands to triumph over the steep embankment, more pains that registered only faintly. She saw the sparkle of sunlight off water down at the bottom of the hill, she paused only a moment before she started to walk down the hill. Her knees buckled as she picked up speed and she slid most of the way down on her side.
She lay still panting when Mel finally caught up, he nudged her with a boot. They were nicer boots now, real Brahmin leather, his clothes also looked like they had been washed more than once. She had made him a very rich man. He smiled his sick grin and clapped his hands together.
"Boys, I think I've hit retirement." His gaze molested the greenery before him, he hadn't quite seen anything like it, he couldn't even remember seeing anything like this from pictures before the war. There were living trees here, real live trees, they were the small and stunted but they were alive. It was at least an acre, mountains rose up on either side, hiding the discovery to those in the distance.
The drugs shuddered through her system violently as she listened to him gloat on in an echoey voice near the back of her mind. The men swarmed in around and gave great whooping cheers as they finished the march to the waterhole. One of the men stooped to hoist her over his shoulder and her head spun as blood rushed up to her face. Seven years, she thought to herself in a moment of unhappy clarity, seven years should be enough time. When do I get to die?
Two days had passed before Gabriel could gather the strength to move at all, his flesh was raw from the sun, he could feel the heat radiating from his skin, he could feel how it wanted to crack into great bleeding chasms. It took him several hours to lift himself to a sitting position without collapsing back to the ground. He slid himself slowly to the shade of what was left of the home the raiders had burned. He slid weakly against the wall and tried to stay awake, but the effort to move this far had burned most of his reserves. He tried to muster up the energy to be grateful that a mole rat hadn't found him and made an easy meal of him yet, but it was hard to see the silver lining when his whole body throbbed in violent pain with his heartbeat and he didn't have the strength to stand. He passed out again to the thought of never waking.
When the world came into focus again it was to voices, shuffling of metal, and a low croon of a Brahmin.
Traders had come to investigate, the smoke had probably been visible for miles. They weren't the usual folk who came through town, those folks were probably wary enough to know that it was over for the settlement of Cale. Safer to move on than to investigate and fall victim to raiders themselves. But these men were professionals, probably raiders when the mood struck them, but traders for all purposes when they showed their faces in the larger, more governed settlements.
"Water…" He had croaked out, his fingers scrabbling at the dirt when one of them had found him. The man eyed him with a sneer and disappeared back behind the building, he came back with the rest of the crew. He heard them talk about the positives and the negatives of nursing him to health, there was no empathy with these men, only which decision would pay off the best. They had decided to let him live, the bullet had passed clean through him, aside from the severe blood loss he didn't seem to suffer any serious damage. The men hadn't babied him either, he had been put to work immediately, one armed or no.
He was little more than a slave to them, he did what they said and he received enough rations to live off of. It hadn't been to bad to start with, he had been an errand boy, cleaning, fixing, slinking into locations they thought weren't safe enough to traipse into themselves. It had gotten progressively worse though, they had given him a weapon and expected him to participate when they bullied honest people into coughing up more caps than they thought was fair. When they thought people weren't worth bargaining with they would just eliminate them and dig through the wreckage. Gabriel had been a part of that too. Unwillingly at first, the threat of being left in the deserted wasteland with nothing was a serious cause for concern. But soon even that wasn't enough to convince him it was the right thing to do. Some of the people they picked off just because they were weak enough to be easy targets. The things he told himself to be able to sleep at night were just lies, eventually he stopped trying to convince himself. These men were monsters, they had turned him into one of them; but the worst part was that he had let them.
He stayed up late one night after a particularly successful scaving party, booze was the primary boon. The men had enjoyed the fruits of their labor heavily that night, Gabriel had laughed along with them, nursing his bottle of whiskey while the rest of the men polished off several. Bryson, the man who was as much of a leader as any of them would willingly allow had stayed up sharing drunken stories with Gabriel late after everyone had passed out. Stories of conquests that made Gabriel sick to his stomach, the whiskey sloshed in his veins warming his skin, he found himself smiling and laughing along with the stories.
"Gabe." Bryson looked to the young man, the drunk man smiled crookedly; it didn't look cheery, just sinister. "Y'aint half bad." His words slurred as he slumped to the ground and grinned up at the sky. Gabriel rose then, the cool metal of a hunting knife tucked against his arm, he could feel himself shaking, he didn't know if it was nerves or rage. He knelt next to the man and plunged the knife into his throat, he didn't have time to cry out, he only made a small gurgling noise as he choked to death on his own blood.
It was easy after that, slitting each and every one of their throats cleanly and professionally, half of them didn't even stir from their stupor. He felt like a great weight came off of his shoulders, he let a half chuckle slip from his lips. The camp smelled like death and was now eerily silent from the low drunken snores that had filled the night only minutes before.
He stripped them of everything they were worth and piled the bodies to rot in the sun, it was the only dignity he thought they deserved. He took the product in to the next settlement he came across and sold everything he could. He kept the best set of armor and a good set of rations to keep him for a while, he also kept the knife he had killed them with, it suddenly felt sentimental to him. He scavenged parts from some of their crummier weaponry and purchased some better quality pieces. He would do his own bullying now, not because some useless thug told him to.
He wasn't afraid of what he had become any more, he had survived, and that was all that really mattered in the wastes.