Assault Party

A drum didn’t sound in the distance and no dramatic music appeared in their ears on an invisible loud speaker. It was anti-climactic as he holstered his weapon, hand still at the ready to rewind, and have his laser gun right back out and equally lethal. Dixie’s breath rattled out of her chest like a water snake gorging itself out of her throat, falling out with a succinct hiss. She didn’t even notice that she was holding her breath.

“Are you going or staying?” The man sat on the hood of the car, arms crossed over chest leisurely, but still poised for action and reaction, back straight, knees springy. She made her decision quickly, opting for a solitary existence in the desert. She didn’t deserve the company of humans.

“Going, I’ll survive on my own.” He nodded curtly at Dixie’s response, which was parched of finality. She thought she saw a brief proud smile flicker across his face, but it must have been the light. He handed her a city-issue ray gun from his second holster, a secondary scabbard for the infernal machines. She accepted, a question on the tip of her tongue, before it was answered, as if she was mind-read.

“Learn how to use it. Exterminator Korse is always on the lookout for us Rogues. The only thing he likes better than killing is torturing traitors to what he considers the crown. It’s not enough to survive, sometimes you have to fight.” Well, that was very informative, Mr. Stranger. Dixie gulped in harsh anticipation of her reality, knowing that it was not going to be filled with rainbows and fresh ramen.

“Thank you.” The last sociable politeness she would utter, the only remnant of her squandered city-self, was that thanks. She was thankful not only for the advice and weaponry, but the assurance that she wasn’t actually alone, even if that was the path she had chosen, even if no one was by her side. Dixie heard the guttural thralls of an approaching vehicle, the man turned his head quickly to make sure it was his ride, by the expression he gave the object, it was. He winked, saluting her with gusto, as Dixie was sure he seldom did, and he was off, walking briskly to a vehicle filled with impatient perpetrators of breaking and entering.

“By the way, nice underwear,” cried someone from the graffiti mess of a car. She looked down in shame, but eventually was able to wave them off, watching them to make sure they didn’t hit her car.

Dixie dusted off her pride and placed it, somewhat gracefully, back onto the top shelf, putting her hands on her hips and walking to the Jewel’s ajar door.

The impression of her buttocks was still depressed in the seat, as if the car were still hers. She fit perfectly, her small hands grasped the painted ones from her steering wheel, making amends with the young Dixie that was the little drummer girl, the good older sister.

She released all of the anger and fury into the silent pair, hoping she could gain back some small semblance of what she once was. Nothing really happened, despite her desperate hope for an epiphany, as disappointing as the anti-climax was, it was not surprising.

Sitting in here, reliving old memories and mourning for the long dead and gone, it wasn’t kosher. An unavoidable sorrow left her eyes at the words carved in the dashboard, outlined feebly by red desert dust: “If you don’t keep down, Better Living, I’m turning this car around and heading straight for you.”

It wasn’t even funny, just vindictive and perfect, like the imagery of painting in, or red paint, either way, tea-stained, cabbage, old blood; it was like revenge on a platter. A war torn Trans Am rattled down the nearby road, picking up a swifter pace, regurgitating sprockets and bolts, when it saw her car. If she didn’t find a new car and soon, people would think she was part of the BLind-os or the waaa-ambulance.

She wasn’t going to have that, now was she?

As a professor in cahoots with the police and even some angry Exterminators, though she hadn’t known their purpose before this juncture, she knew the ways of the new desert. She could find a repair shop in conjuncture with a junk yard every fifty mile marker. Dixie certainly had enough fuel to get her that far, maybe even farther, should she not find a vehicle pleasing to her. The deserts were the scrap heaps of the city.

Like the bodies of innocents that were dumped there, now decomposed and thoroughly decimated. Dixie still remembered every single corpse she saw, she knew none of them by name, only in death. In death where they lay sleeping, unable to touch or move, feel or react. Unable to smile at the living, for they died gasping, choking on the farce of blood and vomit.

These were the new bodies, cars and houses and things deemed unnecessary, now that age was the only thing that killed, and that just barely. Youth remained in the medicated society like it was a brand new country, wetting its whistle with the infantile population of others, immigrants to their own home.

Right, getting out of Jewel, she had to do that. This was supposed to be some sort of closure and it just opened new doors, new questions that she could peruse and wonder about during her lonesome nights. It was a wonder she made it months in the desert, she thought a lot. Dixie found herself sanctimonious; she had never been that way until she wasn’t allowed to sanction those emotions.

She was still working on getting her ass out of the seat and moving on, physically and emotionally. Jewel had weathered her through sandstorms and poison, now she was a catalyst for the rogues? Now Dixie was a rogue?

They really needed a better name, something snappy, something accurate and ironic. Irony was generally something she found necessary in titles. She also found fun a necessity for marketing, like unicorn meat, magic in every morsel! She of course read that in a back water back order issue of Wired that she found on the ground one day… It was so colorful, whirling around in the wind as litter, cobalt blue shocking the midnight skies and blank facades of the nearby buildings. She made a colorful paper airplane out of it. She had done that when the pills hadn’t taken so much affect, her first day of happiness, followed by many of stoic lack of insurrection.

That was when tears came shining through the darkness that slowly began to fall over the finality of the desert landscape. She had come full circle, Dixie realized as she got out of the car, stretching her weary hands above. It wasn’t really dramatic, nor was it boring; it was just life circling the ever-present drain.

The fair moon wiped its presence from her mind as she stared back at her old home, at the distant visage of Battery City, once so star stuck, and now filled with color-devoid smog to block the heavens.

It was time to survive, she thought dismally as she wound her way to the vehicle that now bore her chase. It’s time to live…. It’s time to live alone, finally content in her uncontained self-expression.

Dixie was now fully grown, no longer the cowardly adolescent sprout she once was, a woman that Jed would be proud to call big sis. If only he could see her now, her finally noting the error of her ways and seeking to better herself. Why? Because she knew it wasn’t her fault, and that surviving the cause of death was just luck, now she could survive here, survive so that Jed’s memory would not fade or desist over the years.

Finding a forlorn bottle of spray paint with a little left, she approached the solidary structure of the mailbox, now knowing why it was so vigorously tattooed with the sayings of rogues… because they had something to say.

I forgive you.

Dixie forgave herself and wearily rode into the sunset, appreciating the fall of one day, awaiting the rise of another with a bittersweet eagerness.