enchantedsleeper
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- Posted: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:15:26 +0000
Chapter 2
Alyssa Gladius stared down the barrel of her ancient and dented Colt .45 pistol. She knew exactly what it could do to the man standing in front of her. It would blow a bloody hole a finger’s width wide in his chest – or his face, or his throat, or whatever part she chose to aim it at. She smiled a little in anticipation and cocked the pistol.
The man’s face contorted into a snarl and he lashed out with something heavy on the end of a long rope – some sort of makeshift weapon. He was tall and heavyset, strong but lacking in the brains department: a typical Neo. Alyssa ducked easily underneath the slow-moving weapon and fired upwards, hitting him a little below the chin. The man collapsed onto his back, his weapon thudding beside him and blood rapidly pooling around his throat. If he wasn’t already dead, he soon would be. Alyssa shook her head; she wasn’t sure how a guy that stupid had managed to survive for so long. But no matter.
She took advantage of the brief respite in order to take stock of the battle. Danny’s lot were losing, and badly. The Neos had never been intelligent, but it was as if they were getting stupider every fight. Who used a metal ball and rope against a gun? Not only that, but they were missing several members, men Alyssa knew she’d seen recently. There was something weird about that… maybe Danny was engineering some sort of other operation elsewhere? But he himself was here, fighting…
Alyssa sought out Danny Guapo amidst the rubble- and body-littered surroundings. After a couple of seconds, she saw him roll out from behind a rusted and bullet-riddled carousel and fire two shots at some unseen assailant. Alyssa smirked. Now this was interesting: he wasn’t wearing his precious hat, something she hadn’t seen him without in all the years she’d known him.
“Hey, where ya hat, Danny?” she called. Danny turned to look at her and made a rude sign, then leapt backwards and ran for cover inside some kind of old café that had the remains of a large plastic pretzel still hanging above the doorway. A few gunshots followed him, all of them hitting the pretzel and causing another portion to break off and fall to the ground.
Alyssa heard rapid footsteps behind her and turned in time to see a Neo with some kind of spiked knuckledusters aiming a punch at her back. She dropped to the ground and the blow caught her on the way down, grazing her cheek and leaving two or three bloody slash marks behind it. Above her, her assailant seemed to have frozen; she quickly rolled out from beneath him just as he collapsed, the blade of a World War 1 rifle/bayonet sticking out of his back. The owner of the weapon, a tall and lanky teen with black hair strode forward and yanked the bayonet unceremoniously out of the body. Alyssa nodded at him in acknowledgement; she wasn’t fond of the guy or his ego, but he was a competent fighter and could be trusted not to defect to another gang as long as the going was good. That was all the honour a person needed these days.
The battle, now, was as good as over; the remaining Neos were getting the message and scarpering. They’d be back in due course, when supplies got low again, or else Alyssa’s gang would go and raid their turf for valuables, depending on who ran out first. The war between the two gangs was never-ending, and to be honest Alyssa quite liked it that way. It meant there was always a place to raid when food was low, a fight to pick when things were slow. She knew Jaq didn’t like her to think of it that way, but it was true; the Neos were more a challenge to her than anything.
Alyssa kicked a path through the rubble of a destroyed shop front, glancing into the café as she passed even though she knew there was no chance Danny would still be in there. If there wasn’t already a way out the back, the coward would have created one. She side-swiped a large piece of plaster with her foot and watched absently as it spun a few feet before shattering against the side of a burned-out gumball machine.
Upon closer inspection, it appeared that there were less dead Neos lying around than Alyssa had thought, given how many she’d seen go down. Mayb’ some o’ them dragged ‘emselves back up, th’ ********]. Just then, a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye drew Alyssa’s attention and she swung around, yet saw only empty shops in front of her, and no one to her left or right as far as she could see. Still, there could be someone hiding nearby…
Alyssa discarded the notion of wasting her time investigating and instead walked round the side of the carousel. She came upon Jaq, her best friend, kneeling beside a boy whose right leg had clearly seen better days. It was bent at an awkward angle and there was blood gathering steadily around the calf. The boy’s face was ashen and contorted with pain; Alyssa gave him five minutes before he succumbed to the agony and passed out.
Alyssa crouched down beside Jaq and spoke swiftly, pitching her voice low so the boy couldn’t hear her. “Who’s he?”
“Newbie,” Jaq muttered tersely, intent on levering a bullet out of the boy’s calf with a blunt but clean knife. “’m no miracle worker.”
“You’ll do,” Alyssa assured her. “’member Chaz?”
The ghost of a smile flitted across Jaq’s face. “That was bad.” The bullet popped out and fell to the ground with a ‘c***k’.
“T’was. How many down?”
A slight frown creased Jaq’s normally expressionless face. “Two. Newbies both.” She pulled a slightly greying cloth and a roll of makeshift bandages out of the worn, translucent plastic satchel over her shoulder. After first wiping away the blood immediately surrounding the wound, she began to bind the boy’s leg up tightly.
“Who?”
“Zip ‘n’ Jake.” Jaq yanked the bandages forcefully, intent on rendering the limb immobile so that it could heal, and the boy’s eyes rolled upwards as he fainted. “Kit liked Zip.”
Alyssa grunted, wiping away some blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. It wasn’t a good idea to like someone too much, because it would only hurt once they were gone. Of course, that made both her and Jaq hypocrites, since they were sisters in every sense but genetically, but Alyssa was confident neither of them were going to die any time soon.
She left Jaq to construct a splint out of the bits of debris lying around, and began the arduous process of hauling the bodies of both ally and foe outside. Maybe later, they’d make some sort of funeral pyre out of the lot, to avoid attracting too many buzzards, but for now dawn was breaking, and it would quickly become too hot to be outside. She bent down and wrapped her arms around the torso of the last Neo she had felled. As she hauled him off the ground as best she could, his head lolled against her chest, blood from his neck wound quickly soaking her skimpy black top. Rolling her eyes, Alyssa began to drag the body backwards towards the entrance. She continued dragging it even after she was outside the abandoned mall which was her gang’s hideout, only dumping the body once she was about fifty yards away.
After a few similar trips, Alyssa straightened up and realised that Kit was helping her. She recognised the girl even at a distance by the artificially white streaks that were dispersed throughout her brown hair. Bleach was the only way to change the colour of your hair, and that girl sure liked to mess around with hers. Jaq had once sworn that she’d end up looking like an oldie someday.
Kit drew nearer, and Alyssa realised that the body she was carrying was Zip’s. The guy had been tiny, dashing around everywhere with boundless energy – hence the nickname. Alyssa wasn’t surprised he’d got himself shot, and it didn’t bother her unduly. But Kit, with her relentless optimism, had liked the guy.
Kit reached the spot where Alyssa had begun making a pile out of the bodies of three or four Neos, and laid Zip’s body down next to them. She inclined her head at Alyssa, looking uncharacteristically serious, before turning on her heel and making her way back to the mall to retrieve more bodies. Alyssa followed, knowing that later she’d be twice as exuberant, to make up for it almost, and they’d all be sick to death of her.
The sun was a good way into the sky by the time they’d finished, and Alyssa, Kit and Chaz, who had later joined them, were sweating profusely. The three retreated a good way into the mall, accompanied by Jaq, Jet (who walked along cleaning his bayonet, an action which annoyed Alyssa for no conceivable reason) and Sim, a girl with a sharp tongue and dark hair cut as straight as a knife could manage. Predictably, Kit talked a blue streak, waving her bloodstained hands in the air to accentuate a point. Chaz was as taciturn as ever, and was the first to peel away from the group and head into a random shop where he would sleep away the hottest hours. Alyssa noticed he still walked with a slight limp. Sim reserved her breath for the occasional cutting comment, which Kit would only laugh off before carrying on talking. Jaq rolled her eyes every now and again at Kit’s incessant chatter, making comments to Alyssa about how the battle had gone. She’d noticed the lack of opponents, too, but could explain it no better than Alyssa.
“Mayb’ a bunch got killed on a job,” she suggested, raising a hand briefly as Jet walked away from the group.
Yeah, that’d work, Alyssa thought, nodding. But what job?
After a while, Kit finally ran out of things to tell the air around them and departed; Sim followed soon after, and left Jaq and Alyssa walking together. They came to a stop at the same place as always and turned in to neighbouring shops. Alyssa’s was a vast store which bore the letters B C M RK I A S above the entrance. God only knew what it had once sold.
In a storeroom at the back of the shop were a few boxes and a bed, the only proper bed in the entire place. Alyssa sat down on it with a creak of decades-old bedsprings and idly contemplated finding some food that evening, after sunset. Maybe in a bar if she had the clink for it.
They’d finally gone. Good. He’d thought for a minute that girl with the rapier might have seen him, but if she did, he’d managed to hide well enough that she dismissed the notion. The down-side to hiding, of course, was that it could be distinctly uncomfortable at times.
A youth of around seventeen with thick, black hair and Asian features edged gingerly out from between the shop wall and what he thought might’ve once been the door of the shop. Whatever it was, it had been very heavy and fairly painful.
Still, he’d got to witness all of the battle, which had confirmed his ideas about the politics of this place. Lawless was way different to Sedona, and you couldn’t even compare it to Flagstaff or any of those other places, but he was beginning to figure it out.
He strode quickly towards the entrance of the mall and then broke into a run. It was well and truly morning now, but he didn’t intend to sleep; he knew someone who’d be interested in what he’d seen.
