Things Fall Apart

There was no way anyone would have recognised the kids the three of them used to be now.
It was like the desert had slowly slunk inside of them. It crackled on their skin and glowed into their eyes.
Just like it, they smelled like fire and danger.
Just like it, they were swift, dry and reckless.
The desert was both their home and their mother. They wandered on it and knew all of its ways better than their own skin.
They knew it breathed.
It had a spirit.
It was The Witch.

Jet-Star had long curly hair and wore a leather patch on his blind eye. Just like anyone else here, he wore a leather jacket and leather gloves, as well as a blue laser gun. He was a good fighter, very loyal and friendly, always in a good mood. His nice character had melted everyone's reluctance towards the newcomers away very quickly. Even the cold Tommy Chow-Mein hadn't resisted, and the two of them were often found friendly chatting. But he had remained closer with the two lost brothers he had arrived along with.
Party Poison had dyed his hair bright red and hid his face between a yellow mask with dark triangles cutting its blind eyes and a purple round like a third eye in the middle of his brow. He walked around in skinny Dead-Pegasus leather clothes, carrying a pink laser gun. He had grown thin and muscular, and always talked loudly in a defying tone, accompanied with impertinent gestures.
He was loud, rude, mean, violent, dominant and impertinent.
He didn’t love anything or anyone apart from his brother, even though he never publicly showed any form of kindness or affection towards him nor towards anyone else, and always seemed angry against the whole wide world.
But Party Poison only lived too bright and too loud to overwhelm that oppressive feeling of numbness that had lurked inside of him, like a poison. Hence his name. He was a Poison to himself.
Part of him had burned away with the now forgotten memory of a chubby raven-haired kid he used to be that he had buried deep inside of him.
Everyone lived in a sort of oblivion of their previous lives, as though it had been nothing but a dream. As though they had always been in the desert and the desert had always been inside of them.
Only Kobra Kid remembered. But he had no voice to bring these memories back to life.
He wore the same skinny Dead-Pegasus clothes as his brother, a yellow laser gun and a motorcycle helmet Poison had personalised for him that read "GOOD LUCK".
When he did not fight, he walked around wearing a pair of entirely black sunglasses that were too big and hid half of his delicate-featured pointy face. His actual glasses had been buried in the sand a while ago, and he didn't really mind.
Cherri Cola, who was only a year older than the three newcomers, had made a point in cutting Kobra's hair short on the side, brushing his longer locks back, away from his face, and dying it blonde, just like his own hairdo was, so that they sort of looked alike now. Actually more than Kobra and Poison did. What Kobra had of Poison though were his impertinent smirk and manners, and his silence, only echoing the other's emptiness.
Everyone thought the latter to have become an asshole, and maybe they were right.
Only Kobra saw that his brother was Dead. It hurt him, to see him that way. But there was nothing he could do.
And perhaps that was why Kobra never reacted to anything. Hardly ever communicated. The only times he did were through gestures only Poison understood. Maybe because he was the only one that actually listened and cared.
Nobody ever asked Kobra if he really wanted to fight along. They just assumed he did, because one more good shooter was more than welcome. When Kobra Kid was out to kill, he never missed.
That was where his name came from.
But the more he killed, the duller his eyes looked, as though he was slowly dying from inside. And then again, only Poison had noticed. But there was nothing he could do about it either.

Only, things were about to change that day, when the sun rose again over the wasteland in red shades, over the dirty and messy Radio House, its inhabitants still asleep, over the piles of trash guarded by Trash Lords, over the grey sandy hills where an exhausted nameless stranger wandered hopelessly, still unaware of the fact that he was about to burst into their lives a few hours later.
It was over a year Party Poison, Jet Star and Kobra Kid lived in the Radio House in the middle of the desert, and the three of them were perfectly trusted and integrated now.
That morning, Cola had gone for a walk on the dunes. He did that, sometimes, when the world became too overwhelming. By an unsaid mutual agreement, nobody ever talked about the past, back at the Radio House, but, every once in a while, realisation stroke the more weak-hearted of them. Cola hated days like this, when he questioned everything. He would rather have had some action. But sometimes he wondered if what he had became was really a saviour, a good guy, or just a murderer, a bad guy, and if escaping life under the Better Living Industries commandments, which maybe wasn't that awful, was worth all of the trouble they daily went through. During days like this, he usually walked for a few hours by early morning, before the sun got too hot, to clear out his mind. He was on his way back to the radio house when he heard a distant groaning. Unsure of its provenance, he took a look around. His heartbeats accelerated. He drew his laser gun in front of him and continued to walk forward carefully. The groaning was heard again, closer this time. Cola realized that it actually sounded more like an inarticulate scream. Whoever produced it must have been in pain. He started running towards it, the screams getting closer and closer, until he noticed a lonely -dark human shape on the bright sand of a dune.
“Hi!” He suspiciously threw at the figure on the dune; still aiming at it with his gun as it could have been a BL/I agent after all.
The stranger grunted again and suddenly fell down. The body rolled down the dune and eventually remained at its feet, motionless.
“Hello?” Cola repeated, approaching the stranger cautiously. Seeing the body produced no signs of life whatsoever, he eventually dared to turn it around.
If there had been a danger, it sure was gone now, as the stranger, a short young man with long shaggy dark hair who mustn’t have been more than twenty years old judging by the timid beard appearing on his cheeks witnessing the long time he had spent in the desert, was in quite a pitiful state: his clothes, which cola recognized as Battery City’s lower class citizens’ uniform, were dirty and ragged, his face as dirty and sunken.
Failing to wake him up as he had obviously passed out from the lack of food and water under the burning hot sun, Cola eventually decided to carry the poor boy back to the Radio House, where he would be taken care of before anyone decided what they should do of him and whether he could be trusted.
And this was how Fun Ghoul, still unnamed at the time, entered their lives. Quietly, miserably.
There was no clue back then of what a precious friend and ally he would become.
Maybe the time he had spent bare-headed under the sun had burned his neurons; maybe it was what the BL/I had done to him back in Battery City, maybe he was just born that way. He never told. As a rule, nobody ever talked about their past, there only was the present, and this bright future they all dreamed about and intended to get a bite of. Those who were left behind weren’t cried for long, in that time of trouble, there was no time to mourn for the dead: only life mattered.
The future was bulletproof, the aftermath secondary.
Fun Ghoul was, as it might have been put cracked. But they all were a little fucked up anyways, all in their own ways, through Poison’s cruelty or Kobra’s silence, Tommy Chow Mein’s roughness or Cola’s sadness.
Fun Ghoul was, in fact, insane. The overly nervous, dark, violent, maniac and unstable kind of insane. But he could shoot.
They dressed him up, and he chose to wear a Frankenstein’s monster mask and a green laser gun.

Party Poison, Jet Star, Kobra Kid and Fun Ghoul. The four of them were about the same age and reached the Radio House, oasis in the middle of the desert, at the same period. They were inevitably drawn closer to each other than the rest of the rebels, all different but similar, always together. Party Poison soon stood out as their leader, as he was the only one to be able to communicate and order Kobra Kid, seemed to be overly fond of Fun Ghoul’s instable mind, fondness Fun Ghoul gave him back wholly, and respected and listened carefully to everything Jet Star had to say, aware of his cleverness.
They became one particular division of the rebels, with impressive rates of death in the Draco’s, and even S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W’s ranks. They were feared by both sides, the rebels and the enemies.
The Psycho, the Brain, the Dead and the Madman.
Party Poison, Jet Star, Kobra Kid and Fun Ghoul.
They were called and called themselves the Fabulous Killjoys.
It was on that very day, that the Danger Days had begun.

Notes

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