Things Fall Apart

Party Poison was woken up by the sun's first rays shyly darting over the pale blue dunes still cold from the night. He looked down at Kobra Kid, sound asleep, snuggled against him. All that Poison could see of him were a few blonde locks of hair out of a Better Living Industries sleeping bag, which was originally meant to carry around the corpses from the city left to rot in the desert, under the placid eyes of the Trash Lords: As the city's damps and cemeteries were full, and the BL/i had a hatred for mess and dirt, the wasteland was used as Battery City's garbage can. The Rebels living here got most of their stuff from this trash which was, for most of it, still pretty useful, including the corpses bags. What they had previously contained didn't seem to bother anyone. Here, being asleep was synonymous of being dead.
Poison zipped down his sleeping corpse bag, and, after throwing a quick glance at his comrades in arms, still asleep in their own bags, at the remains of their campfire which had left a black circle of ashes on the white sand, he got up on his feet and walked further away from the circle of sleepers. He took a moment to admire the horizon. It would just be a matter of minutes before the sun rose entirely over the dunes, and burning red, orange and pink shades already spread in the pale blue sky slowly fading to darker blue in the places were the night hadn't quite left yet. To his far left he suddenly noticed Fun Ghoul, who was taking his round of guard, sitting on a rock, staring at the morning sky as well. Poison walked the distance separating them in a few step and sat down next to him silently.
"Hello uncle" Fun Ghoul greeted him, without even moving his glance away from the sky. "The sun was waiting for thee to rise."
Poison nodded. He was used to his strangeness. They had noticed, ever since the day Cola had found him, that that boy wasn't quite right in the brain. Maybe it was because he had spent too much time wandering in the wasteland, the deadly sun heavily beating on his head, cooking his brain inside his skull, maybe it was something the BL/i did to him. None knew and he never told. Another good shooter was more than welcome here, so they had taken him in anyways. No questions were ever asked here.
The past was dead, and the future bulletproof.
For some reason, Fun Ghoul called Party Poison his uncle, even though he had been told many times it wasn't the case. Party Poison didn't mind, so he let him do so.
He actually enjoyed Fun Ghoul's presence. He was less serious, less aware, more careless than the others, and his Shakespearian ways of talking sometimes amused him.
"Today will be as bright as the sun, nuncle!" the latter exclaimed, while the rising sun drew pink shades on the morning sand hills, and coloured the whole sky.
In the camp, Kobra Kid woke up, feeling his brother's presence missing next to him.
"How would you know? You can never know what happen." Poison replied darkly.
"I know what happens, uncle. I know it all. I know the Witch like my own mother. She's thy sister uncle, but she ain't Kobra's. Nah nah nah nah!
She smells the blood of a Battery man.
By the end of the day masks will fall.
The Witch will have dinner tonight, she already sets the table for four."
Poison replied with a rare thin smile to Fun Ghoul's incoherent babbling, slightly amused.
"Jesus! You do have teeth!" Fun Ghoul exclaimed, noticing it.
At that moment Kobra arrived from behind them, as silent as a wildcat, and as mute as ever. He sat down in the sand in front of them, staring at the rising sun, entirely ignoring both his brother and his comrade.
"Methinks here's a murderer uncle..." Fun Ghoul whispered, looking genuinely worried about the boy's presence.
"Shut the fuck up for a second will you?" Poison snapped, eventually fed up with Fun Ghoul's nonsense.
"Eh, what do you want? You're a wise man and I'm a fool, expect no better from me." Fun Ghoul replied, and he then remained silent.
Poison sometimes wondered if he truly was nuts or if he was just acting that way.
He stood up, calling Kobra, who turned around and joined him like a dog whose master just called over, and they walked back to the campfire together, where now everyone was awake.
"Greetings!" Doctor Death Defying exclaimed, seeing them arriving. "Ready for your big day, boys?"
Poison nodded taciturnly, sitting down next to Jet Star, Kobra still on his side. Today was the last one of their hundred-day formation to become true rebel fighters.
In a hundred days the four boys had learned how to survive in the desert, how to shoot efficiently, had grown muscles and learnt how to fight.
And today was the last day, the day they would come back to the Radio House, no more as refugees, but as Warriors.
Suddenly, Doctor D's walkie-talkie produced a scratching sound. The rebels had to use this old device, as it wasn't traceable by the BL/I, being too ancient technology for their advanced techniques. The walkie-talkie scratched again and Tommy Chow Mein's excited voice was heard on the other side of the line.
"Tommy to Doctor D., there are Dracos in the wasteland. I repeat, Dracos in the wasteland! They're about ten in the Trash Lords area, looking for something in the garbage. I'm with Cola, DJ Hot Chimp and three other volunteers. Waiting for your authorisation to attack. Over."
Doctor D. took a look around the four young boys sitting in circle in front of him, seeming deep in his thoughts. After a while, he eventually sighed and approached the walkie-talkie to his mouth, still staring at them.
"Negative. I'm taking the trainees there, to see what they're worth. Over."
"Okay, call us if you need help. Over." Tommy's voice replied, not even trying to hide his disappointment.
Party Poison covered his excitement under a stoic mask he always wore on his face. It was a beautiful mask, very realistic, which represented Poison's face to the tiniest details, so that even himself couldn't make the difference sometimes. It never showed any other emotion than disdain, and its expression was Dead.
But Party Poison wasn't dead, he only looked that way.
He wore his mask so often he had almost forgotten how to take it off now. Nobody ever noticed he never was bare faced.
Only Fun Ghoul shared his over excitement around, at the idea of killing. He jumped on his feet aiming his laser gun at everything, shouting excitingly senseless sentences about gore subjects which words were too slurred to be understood, smiling like the happiest goof on the planet.
Kobra Kid didn't react, as usual. But the four of them all knew he would kill without any hesitation if he was asked to.
Jet Star was the one Doctor D. was the less sure about. That boy was kind-hearted, nice and sensible. He would hate killing. He wouldn't want to. And if he did, it wouldn't be long before he felt absolute remorses. Doctor D. secretly thought he wouldn't live long. But that, he didn't tell.
"You heard me boys." He said, setting his hands on his wheelchair's sides, ready to go, "We've got a bunch of Dracos to exterminate."
They only were twenty minutes away from the Trash Lords area.
Strangers would wonder how could they know where they were going, considering the wasteland was a huge sea of sand, everywhere looking the same, with the dunes moving away with time and wind.
But they knew the desert like the back of their hands.
It had became part of them, so they would know where they were, like a man knows where his knee is, and how, from here, he can go to his neck.
And so that's how five tiny human figures found themselves walking on the skin of the wasteland, towards its hip, where the Trash Lords lived, imposing fence between the Wasteland World where the real humans and the last colours remained, and Battery City where only the wealthiest could buy colours at Tommy Chow Mein's Black Market, where aftermaths were secondary and lives flat and planned ahead.
And so five real humans, who hadn't lost their colours and were totally oblivious of their future, lurked behind the sand dunes around the Trash Lords, encircling the Dracos they now could see. They crawled in the Trash Lords shadows, slowly getting closer, until the decisive moment when Doctor D. gestured them to go.
They put their masks on.
A rush of adrenaline filled the four boys, their hearts suddenly racing, while they drew their laser guns out and jumped out of the protecting shadows into the black and white sight of the black and white creatures wearing frightening black and white masks and black and white uniforms from their black and white office in their black and white city.
Those ones used to be human.
Now, what they don't tell you about fights, is that they're surprisingly very quiet and fast. The four boys shot without thinking, before the Dracos could even react, and three of them fell in the garbage, dead. Fun Ghoul jumped on one of them with all his strength, stumbling it backwards, slitting its throat with a small knife he always had hanging from his belt.
Black blood stained the white sand and his naked hands.
The Trash Lords observed passively.
The six remaining Dracos had had time to draw out their guns now, and they had spread menacingly in front of the four unharmed boys. They had to move fast and move now, if they wanted to stay alive.
Poison made the first move. He jumped forward, aiming at the head of one and touching him right in the middle of the brow, supplely avoiding its final shot, while Kobra automatically aimed and shot quickly, like a robot would, walking forward decisively, killing two Dracos in two perfectly aimed shots, only being spared by some heavenly action.
His eyes were dead.
Jet Star threw himself in the sand to avoid some blasts aimed at him, but he had to shoot twice before killing his opponent. Fun Ghoul quickly threw his knife right in the eye of a Draco who fell over, and was immediately shot dead by Party Poison, who was really close. Meanwhile Fun Ghoul already was occupied with the last remaining enemy, kicking it in the stomach, throwing it backward before it could shoot, so that its blast went up and got lost in the sky. He then ran towards it, and, putting his gun right between its two eyes, shot it right in the brain.
The only sounds that had been heard were the quiet "zap"s of the ray guns and the soft crashing of bodies in the sand.
The Trash Lords watched in silence, spreading their shadows equally over the dead and the living, the Good and the Evil.
"Everyone's good?" Doctor D.'s husky voice was heard, while his wheelchair appeared over the nearest sand dune. Poison immediately checked on his brother, but everything seemed to be fine with him. Apart maybe from the fact that he was as dead as usual.
"You guys did okay." Doctor D. continued.
"It was a piece of cake!" Fun Ghoul screamed in an overly-excited high-pitched voice, licking the blood off from his fingers.
"Look at the mess you've done!" Doctor D. tutted him, "We use laser guns to avoid blood, boy."
"But I like blood better!" Fun Ghoul screamed.
"Never mind." Doctor D. sighed. "Take their masks off now."
"Excuse me?!" Party Poison exclaimed, ripping his own yellow mask away and stuffing it in his coat pocket.
"Take their masks away, we have to give them to the Witch." Doctor D. repeated calmly.
"Who cares? They were BL/I's barking dogs! They should be left to rot here."
"Before being Dracos, they were human, kid. The Witch doesn't care about Good or Evil. She only cares about the Dead : we have to give her the masks in order for her to catch their spirit, and for their tortured souls to find peace."
Jet Star difficulty ripped a mask off the face of a Draco without discussing. It was stuck very strongly, as though it had been worn for so long that had became its actual face, its proper identity.
Poison shivered.
"To be honest," Doctor D. continued "I'm not sure whether giving Dracos' masks away is useful, because I know they take control over their body once applied to their faces. Some even got theirs after their deaths. This is what awaits you if the BL/I catch you, dead or alive. If the mask is applied when still alive, it steals the soul. Maybe they indeed are soulless creatures, empty shells that the Witch cannot save, but it is worth a try."
Nine black and white masks and one darker with blood where piled up next to Doctor D.'s wheelchair.
They all couldn't help but notice how Dracos' blood was almost unnaturally black, as though all the colours had been slowly drained away from them, and all form of humanity eradicated.
It wasn't news that the BL/i had banned colours.
"Let's take them to the Witch now."
And so they walked away from the Trash Lords, to the heart of the Wasteland. The heart of the Wasteland was Hope.
Hope was a tiny former postbox, the only remaining one.
Nobody knew why it was here, and nobody cared.
All around it and even on its top were all kinds of flowers, some that had been withered for a while, some that had been put recently, and many, many candles, still lit for most of them. The postbox had been beautifully arranged by all the passers-by with colourful graffitis and messages for the departed ones. On the front of Hope was a green eye, the Witch's eye, looking far away into the distance. Could it see as far as battery city? Above it the words "I FORGIVE U" were engraved.
Instead of envelopes, deceased's masks were slipped in Hope, through the slot reading "Farewell" above the word "LOVE".
That was where the Witch collected all the masks and took care of their owners' soul. From Battery City to the wildest part of the Wasteland, everyone knew about Hope, whether they believed in the Witch or not.
Doctor D. slipped the six masks unceremoniously into Hope.
"May the Witch save their souls." He whispered, before continuing out loud. "That's one thing done! Now let's get back to the Radio House and celebrate properly, kids!"

Notes

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