Assault Party

Back. Back in the desert, her vehicle this time: a sturdy, strictly monotone automobile. She let sweat bead profusely and roll lingeringly down her sunburnt back, stinging slightly, but eventually alleviating the blistering heat. It wasn’t ironic that Dixie was back in this seemingly unchanged place, wild, not quite human, but not yet beast. It was not a coincidence either. It was luck. It was blind fate, busting into her life like a cannon splintering through wooden planks and giving Dixie a reason to live. A reason to believe that living was better than the alternative.

Pills weren’t her reason to live anymore.

The utter lack of them, the emotion that was once bereft from her professorial brain cells, but now back inside of her, that was what she lived for. Being happy was not a part of this plan. She was not going to allow herself to be happy, not after what she had done. Not an ounce of that serotonin serendipitous cheer would she allow to drip into her metaphoric hypodermic IV. The one consolation prize she had earned from her penance was freedom. The release from a self-absolved prison, a spiral cage formed by her very limbs and by tearing apart her torso into strips. Melted pill bottles acted as the glue that held her skeletal enclosure together, the nuts and bolts.

A final resolution sounded in her mind like the omniscient chime of an over-head bell or gong. She was free from the torment that she hadn’t known she was experiencing; she didn’t realize that Dixie was dying inside and being replaced by an ephemeral hollow husk, fading away by the second. It was almost like she had woken up from a dream, of course everyone says that. It was, in point of fact, a dreamless slumber, deserted by the creative fantasy of dreams, akin to having a dream after release from that fugue state.

Driving in her car, she headed upwards, towards Sacramento with that thought etched cunningly into her mind. It was almost terrible to think that she had been on this same road only two years backwards, and was now a lonely spinster on the road to nowhere.

3 Hours Backwards

She wasn’t sneaking out. Hell no. Dixie had the perfect way to get out, her clearance. All she had to do was come up with a legitimate excuse to leave the city. Of course, she didn’t really need to because she had trained most of the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W. They knew her as loyal and dependent, they knew her as lovely strong-willed Professor Knight; who was the only woman counted as a man in the last city in the U.S. One time she had heard a joke, and just now did she see its truth: “Do you want to hear a joke? Women’s Rights.” Very funny, correct? Almost TBS worthy.

As she approached the exit point of Battery City, she didn’t feel the wave of nausea that she had expected, just a cool complacency that led her to believe she was leaving for somewhere better. Of course, in her docile pilled-up state, she had never known the outside world; sure she trained people from all over what was left of the continent, but what state was the rest of the world in?

Were they really everywhere?

Was the man going to hound her back to society using its jiggling haunches and fiercely bared teeth?

Or execute her, because there was some sort of reason that the anti-pills were murdered?

Now Dixie was scared, but free will would, sort of, prevail over her need for safety. She was a survivor, she could make it. She did it before all the pain was seeped from her and replaced with blindness, she could do it again.

“Business? Oh, hey! The teacher that aced me out of Scary School, what’s up?”

“Just a little business, setting some new rules, need to get out of public ear shot, you know how it is.” What an easy lie? Because it was truth, that’s why it was so easy.

New rule: no lying, even if it costs me my life. I don’t want to waste my time lying, that’s just like being on the pills again.

Right, now she had rules to being a fugitive, what a laugh.

“Alright, ma’am, see you when you’re done with your business.” The empty smiling man waved her out and now she realized what part she had held in this world. Dixie had trained people to take away the only ounce of happiness some had left. She had given them a cake class to allow them to kill people that disobeyed them. She was as bloodied as they.

Fast Forward: Wind Down.

There came a point in the road where she began to recognize foliage, a cactus grown headily since last she saw it, with her initials still carved greedily in its husk. Dixie wasn’t a stranger to loss, but now that she was lucid, she found that this cactus was what she missed the most, due to its close proximity to her beloved Jewel. She went off-road, despite the danger to her tires, hoping blindly that her rugged old friend Jewel was still there.

Shock wasn’t the reaction Dixie experienced, nor was it surprise. It was an utter sudden nausea and heartthrob, the one she had expected to experience on her retreat from Battery City. Vandalism had overtaken the oceanic colored beauty that was no more. Flowers grew from the back seat that she had slept on many a night. It was as if people had cultivated it. Nearby was a mail box, equally vandalized in the same care-worn manner.

“That’s our only link home, if any of us have one left, that is.” A fire headed man approached from behind, picking up a busted ray gun within calloused hands, fiddling, flicking it back and forth as if it were a deck of cards or a sheaf of papers. She turned back to look at the box o’ home. It wasn’t much; people had a decorated with flowers and graffiti, a spot of the city standing in the wild, still strong and tall. It was rusting in a fashion similar to Jewel’s hide, as if it had experienced a few tender moments on the harsh surface of Venus, scorned by the acid of the goddess of love. If only Greek philosophe’s had known just how dangerous Venus was, it might have changed their perspective of love. Okay, it was ironic, no matter how over and misused the term was.

“Do you have a home?” The asinine question flowed from the inquirer’s lips. All she noticed was how chapped they were, reminiscing of the unutterable pain the Sun’s heat-full radioactive beams could cause.

“This was my home.” She heard him start a little in the sand, clearly surprised, “This was my car.” He scoffed, clearly a girl wasn’t allowed that cool of a car in his mind, “The spot where that mailbox is now was my garden. This was my home, now it’s yours.” She turned to face him, tête-à-tête with his freedom, “I’m jealous. I get drugged for two years and you grow flowers in the back of my car like some kind of hippie.” The scorn in her voice was inevitable; the part of Dixie that might have once sneered and told herself to be less rude was lost. Now all that was left was a tough elastic core, ready for anything. It was akin to being boiled alive, shell ripped off, but not yet eaten: a hard-boiled egg waiting for consumption at the company salad bar.

“Nice to know you’ve got a sense of humor.” He leaned back on the peeled, oxidized hood of the car, good thing this was a cold day… or not.

“I’ll make you a deal. You and your little save-the-trees friends can keep this spot; you can keep my home… if you get me a new set of wheels. I can’t stand sitting in this thing anymore.” She pointed at the vehicle she had driven into the desert, the companion for second foray into wilderness. A brief frown crossed the stranger’s face at the logo on her license.

“No. I’ll make you a deal. If you give us Better Living secrets, you can stick with us and keep your home, with some light sharing-is-caring.” Now cartoon boy was one for clever puns, eh? Well, she’d show him.

“I might not be on the pills anymore, but you were in my office humpty-dumpty, and I can give them a list of every single thing you stole, from Jumanji to Hotel Rwanda.” He laughed, inexplicably, Dixie didn’t understand why her chuckled so coldly in the heat of the desert until he pulled out his gun.

It was humbling to know that she could die in a moment, humbling to know that she was all alone, in a one-sided gun fight with an anti. His face became serious.

“We’re not hippies. We don’t want your secrets to bother Better Living either, we just want to be able to pull something out of our hat when the Exterminators come to call, black mail. We’re survivors, this is where we survive. You clearly don’t understand that, despite your lovely little lie. I don’t believe that you’re not on the pills. You wouldn’t be fine if you just got off them. Shaky, maybe, pissed off, yes. Doesn’t everything hurt your little battery heart?” his grip tightened on the weapon. Dixie wasn’t in mortal peril, so she scoffed at his unrealistic view. Clearly he had never been on the pills. That or she really wasn’t fine. Maybe if she cried about her problems he wouldn’t shoot her? She heard once that telling people your life story made them see you as human and not want to kill you… or was that an episode of Grey’s Anatomy? Eh, it wouldn’t have worked anyways, her brother was dead and she had nothing to live for.

“It does hurt. I almost wish I were on the pills and back living my supposed dream life, yes, just so I don’t have to feel what I did.” Oh boy, this was going to get all personal, wasn’t it?

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