Assault Party

Her feet waddled quickly across the lightly creaking dark wooden planks. A harsh breath rattled out of her throat, echoing eerily in the silent halls. A light appeared at the corner of her vision, pulsating lightly, as laughter had once in the corridor, but no one laughed anymore. Joy was taboo.

A sigh coalesced out of nowhere, but it turned out to be from her throat. Soon, the silence returned, broken only by the pitter-patter of rain leaking through the disheveled roof. Howls of pain ripped forth from an unknown source. She darted forward, bolting to the door where the sounds had originated. She recognized the voice somehow and it tore at her throbbing heart, making her breathing difficult. The door remained locked and the cries only increased in both rate and intensity.

She threw her shoulder at the barricade, finally breaking through the petty obstacle. He laid there, perspiration clinging to his skin and drying on his forehead, chest heaving with the effort to breathe.

“Why weren’t you there? Didn’t you care?” He grasped the words with an iron grip, despite his heart swinging over the fire, as a pendulum for the glee of some tormentor.

“I… I couldn’t have…” She let the excuses bubble out of her mouth, knowing them to be useless. Words weren’t needed to describe that she hadn’t any to fuel her pleas.

“You could have. You should have. I shouldn’t have died.” She trembled at the cold purity of his words, knowing them, in her despair, to be true.

“You may as well have killed me…” He trailed off, a severe glare leeching out of his eyes towards her. Unwillingly, she stepped forward, nearer and nearer to him, menace in her steps. He didn’t break eye contact. She resisted the pull of her hand to his tiny little throat, without much headway. Finally, her steps ceased and her sweaty palms clenched desperately about the circumference of his throat. Tears built aggressively in her eyes, and she tried with all of her willpower to release, to let go of the bane. In the end, she didn’t have any willpower to fight with; her spirit retreated and cowered in a corner. He writhed in her hands, choking, laughing silently as she cried out for it all to end.

“You should have died… You should die…” She began to bleed profusely from her pores as his pitiful, scintillating body took its last whine of oxygen. Letting go, she let the hemoglobin flood interminably from her hands and body, draining her of the life she never deserved.

___

Bright sunlight in her eyes roused her from a frightful land of nightmare. Vaguely, she felt liquid trickling down her cheek. Thinking it was simple pain falling from the crevices in her sleeping eyes, she wiped it away. Her hands returned to the sight and she found them glistening with the gem caress of ruby fluid. In shock, Dixie flipped the mirror so she could better view her condition.

Dixie felt almost electrocuted at the sight of herself. “Bedraggled” hairs flew in each direction about her—now-sunburnt—face. Burgundy blood fell down her face like her lips had become the rocky bed of Niagara and her nose had become the mouth of the great waterfall. She must have hit her nose on the steering wheel in her jolting sleep. Upon further examination, she found that conclusion to be correct. She tried wiping off the dried funk with her sleeve, but to no avail.

Dixie stepped out of the hooded car and found her eyes thrust into a blindingly bright and blisteringly hot setting. The desert surrounded her in its full expansive glory. Habit kicked in and, knowing she had nothing to do for a little while, her thoughts trotted away, back to her dream.

It’s my fault. Oh, Jed. She thought dimly, remembering her murderous dream as if it had been factual. Though months had passed since his death, she still impractically left messages on the machine, until the telephone lines went down in the earthquake that had shaken the dead citizens of major California cities.

After slipping off her shoes and sitting down, away from the sun-heated car, she dug her feet into the dark sand. Once the first layer of heat was broken through, cool bliss made its way into her body through her feet—and now—her calves.

She entertained idle thoughts, which she tried her best to keep positive, as she rested her body on the millions of grains of sand that now supported her form.

With hot enough temperatures each bit of crystalline structured sand would become glass. When her thoughts ran towards the farcical idea of her lying on a flat pane of cool glass, she found comfort; as if it were ice.

In the flash of a shutter she found the glass fused with blood; her blood, Jed’s blood, the blood of the millions of glass figures that had shattered. She saw them all now. Every one of them; the secretary, the lawyer, the doctor: turned to glass and splintered helplessly on the ground. Now she stepped on their memories and minds, cutting her soft feet on the razor sharp edges of once-humans. It was clear that it was her bleeding now, bleeding on families and friends, on the army, and the navy and the air force… the sick, the homeless, the elderly, and the fetal. Tears ran tracks through the blood clotted on her face, pushing through the dissimilarly colored particles and bringing them downwards with gravity’s harmful force. She wouldn’t have had to step on them if they floated without the meddlesome hand of gravity! They might not have died!

She pulled her feet out of the sand, seeing the cuts fill with pus and grime. Taking the thinnest piece of glass and thread made of heartstring, she stitched it back up, mending the broken gashes. Dixie licked her lips, letting the dry saliva fall down her throat, and finally she realized what was happening to her, as she had experienced a few in her recent tenure at the desert.

Just a mirage…

She quickly got up, finding herself off-balance and sand filling her ear. Jewel seemed to turn into a giant yellow lady bug. She reached in between the vibrating wings to grasp something… her water bottle! Taking a giant swig she ambiguously felt some true sight return to her. The glass plains fell away, leaving dandelion desert. Dixie’s car returned to normal, in everything except color, but she still bled… Sitting down in the now GT again car, she turned on the ignition to use the air conditioner for a few minutes. She knew better than to use it copiously, for soon it would be on the fritz due to the car battery or coolant and what-not, but this was a special situation.

Finally she closed her eyes, only to open them and find herself in the dull and boring desert. The thought comforted her that she was all alone, until the rampant thought returned to the war-battered crevices of dreamland, and she found that the poor, pale boy that she had murdered was Jed. Of course, this was her guilty subconscious telling her this, but it didn’t mean that she hadn’t killed him.

Dixie grabbed the radio from the back seat, turning the dial in dull anticipation; she knew very well not to hope.

“Peace has not yet ensued between North Korea and America, but the nuclear holocaust is off until further notice, as the White House has been, well, blown up. Inconveniently, this was one time where every official convened in Washington D.C. The government is gone. People are barely surviving; I am currently living off of my estranged aunt’s herb garden and broadcasting from home.” A sob wrenched the chest of the woman, who had been so calm and collective only moments ago.

“Someone needs to save us; we can’t go on much longer like this.”

Much longer? It hadn’t even been two months! If someone could save the world in a matter of months, more power to them, but the chance was unlikely at best. Realizing she hadn’t powered down the radio, she listened further, after changing the station to a more sensible attempt at radio broadcasting.

“The tales heard of a mad man with a cure for all of our sufferings has been, after months of controversy, confirmed by me personally. He even cured my best friend with an aerosolized version of his cure. The few companies that are still standing have decided that they should take to mass producing this. Anyone with a crop duster or other method of releasing the cure through the air, go to the following companies in three days: Raytheon, Blue Swan…” Her heart jumped in her chest at the hope, but she knew very well that she would still suffer, despite this cure for ‘all’ suffering. They were still dead.

Dixie shut off the idiotic radio full of thoughts and hopes. She had no way to help anyone; Dixie would continue to self-sustain until the life-saving phase blew over. Last month it had been blood transfusions as the hit cure; the previous was the dung of a rare animal. Most of the ‘cures’ were just hearsay. If the radio stations all confirmed the mass-saving of the planet, she would return to civilization in due time. For now, though, she was on her own; this hope did not extend to her already-hardened soul.