I Believe We're The Enemy

Ginny’s P.O.V.

Waking up in Ray’s arms has become a normalcy to me, but my heart still leaps when I blink open my eyes to find his face only inches from mine. I snuggle closer to his body, only for him to wake with a start, accidently pushing me away. “Ray, you idiot,” I grumble, moving towards him again.

He grins. “Sorry, Ginny,” he whispers, pulling me towards his chest. I relax as my face nuzzles into his neck, my lips brushing over his dust-streaked skin.

“Ginny, Ray, stop being all cutesie-pie with each other and get up. There’s something on the horizon and we don’t know what it is, but it’s probably dracs,” Frank says loudly, peaking around the doorframe at us. Moaning sleepily, I disentangle myself from Ray’s arms, catching the jacket that Frank tosses at me as I sit up. “You’ll need this if you don’t want to get sunburned out there,” he explains. The jacket is denim, like Ray’s, but rather than plain dark blue it’s entirely dyed a deep forest green. I slip it on carefully, feeling the surprisingly soft fabric swish against my slender arms, and I thank Frankie gratefully.

“No problem. You’re in charge of waking up Ray. Get out front as quickly as you can,” he finishes, trotting out of the bedroom. Sighing nervously, I grab Ray’s arm and pull him off the cot, giggling as he huffs in irritation.

“Get up, honey,” I trill quietly. He gives me an angry glare and stands up, dusting off his jeans irritably.

“Why do dracs always show up while I’m sleeping?” he groans. I wrap my arms around his neck, running my fingers through his poofy curls, and give him a taunting peck on the cheek.

“I don’t know... Maybe it’s because you’re so cute when you’re sleeping?” I suggest sweetly. He gives me a warm hug, and I feel the tense worry of battle overcome him as Gerard shouts for us to hurry up. Ray leads me through the front room and onto the shifting sand outside where Frank, Mikey, Gerard, Sun Beam, and Dr. D wait. On the edge of our vision, a number of pale-colored dots are spread across the road and the surrounding dust, obviously coming toward us at a steady pace. Frank hands me a dark teal-green ray gun, the word LETTERBOMB stamped across the side.

“This is yours. Your name, your color. Take good care of it, and don’t use it unless you have to,” he says quietly. All traces of his normal humorous self have disappeared from his face, but he still flashes me a small smile before he turns to face the rapidly approaching specks on the horizon.

Several minutes later, ten dracs on motorcycles pull up near the diner. The minute their feet touch the ground rays of light start to shoot through the sky at incredibly high velocity. We’re outnumbered, but Mikey takes down the first two dracs easily, leaving us almost even with our opponents. For a while we’re doing well, our enemies going down steadily, one by one, and I feel excited adrenaline coursing through my veins as we begin to taste victory. Then, out of nowhere, another ten dracs pull up, and we’re at a distinct disadvantage. Gerard, his left hand disabled by an unexpected laser blast, pushes Ray and I toward the door, obviously realizing that this is a fight we can’t win.

“Go!” he screams over the sound of Sun Beam’s latest erratic shooting fit. He turns to Ray, his eyes pleading. “Protect her!”

Ray nods shakily and drags me through the diner to the porch. However, as soon as he opens the door I realize that we’ve been ambushed. Five white-clothed dracs are standing in an immaculate semicircle around the door, and in the center of them, a tall man in strangely old-fashioned gray clothing grins eerily at us. The sunlight shining through the many windows glints off of his entirely bald head, and his teeth have a strangely carnivorous look to them. Behind us we hear a crash, and I realize that the fighting must’ve moved to the front of the diner.

“Hello, Jet-Star,” the man says in a cold, cruel-sounding voice. Ray stiffens and pushes me somewhat behind him, protecting me from the malevolent glares of the dracs.

“Korse,” he snarls, his nose crinkling in rage. The man just grins wider.

“Who’s that you’ve got with you? Another little friend?” He nods to one of the dracs and it scampers forward to grab me, but Ray steps in the way.

“Don’t touch her,” he hisses, and I reach forward to grab his hand.

Korse’s eyes widen. “Jet-Star’s found love,” he says in mocking amazement. His feet cross the floor way to quickly and before I can react, the barrel of his pure white gun is jammed under Ray’s chin, his finger hovering over the trigger. “What would your little lovebird think if I killed you, right here, right now, in front of her?” My throat dries up with dread and I feel my body almost melting. Just shut down. Don’t think about it-

My fingers fly to my gun, ready to defend Ray, but the nearest drac shoots it out of my hand, filling the room with its garbled laughter. Korse sneers. “Brave girl aren’t you? I’d hate to see you destroyed,” he hisses, pushing the gun further into Ray’s chin. For the first time a hint of fear crosses Ray’s face and my hand moves on its own, reaching around Ray and grabbing his royal blue gun out of its holster.The dracs can’t reach me without shooting their leader now, and I raise the gun as quickly as I can, pointing it at Korse’s heart. I mean to shoot true, to kill him while I can, but a horrendous shriek from the front room causes me to jump, and when my finger pulls the trigger it hits Korse’s stomach instead.

Suddenly, the room is filled with screams of rage, and as Ray ducks to grab my gun from the ground all hell breaks loose. Two dracs drag Korse through the double screen doors, loading him into a glinting black car and driving away, while the other three stay back to fight us. They fall quickly, and we sprint through the door, running for several minutes before we dare to stop. When we finally turn back, the diner is only a distant blaze of flame.

“Holy shit,” Ray whispers. I turn to him and wipe the smudges of gun smoke away from his face, feeling him relax as our skin collides.

“Look!” he yelps suddenly, pointing toward the burning diner. Emerging from the door is a tall figure carrying something else in its arms, and judging by the overabundance of color it’s a Killjoy. We identify it as Mikey, and as he draws closer I realize that his burden is a limp, unconscious Frank.

“Mikey!” I yell, drawing his attention to us. He grins when he realizes that we’re alive, but as all of our thoughts return to Sun Beam and Gerard his face falls. After a couple minutes of jogging he reaches us, and I rush forward to examine Frankie, my heart thudding with anxiety. Luckily, he’s breathing, and his only injury is a somewhat minor gash on his left thigh. I look up at Mikey, and when our eyes meet our normal fear of each other is drowned out by a greater purpose.

Mikey, Ray, and I all turn to face the diner again, waiting in tense silence for the two missing members of our party. As the minutes tick by silent tears start to stream down Mikey’s face, dripping onto the sand below. Ray takes my hand and squeezes it once, his shaky fear traveling from his hand to my heart.

Finally a lonely streak of red and blue emerges from the diner, and Mikey screams in delight, his tears now flowing freely from his bright hazel eyes. Gerard isn’t even limping, so it doesn’t take him long to draw closer to us, his hair flailing wildly in the wind. A rush of unquenchable emotion takes over me and I break away from Ray, running toward Gee, toward my big brother. When I get to him he pulls me into his embrace as soon as I’m within reach, wrapping his slender arms around me so tightly that I wonder if he’ll ever let go.

“Ray took care of you,” he murmurs, his face smothered by his hair. “You’re okay.”

“I love you, Gee,” I whisper under my breath, trying not to let him hear. My effort is in vain.

“I love you too, Ginny.”

“Let go of my big brother!” Mikey roars, and before I can manage to get away I’m squished between the two Ways, the younger one still holding Frank. Ray worms his way into the middle of the group hug, and as his arms wrap around my waist I lean back into his chest, relaxing in the warmth of my family.

“What happened to Sun Beam?” I ask quietly. Gerard just shakes his head, looking away from me sadly. My stomach aches with fearful pain, but I let myself turn and bury my face in Ray’s chest, using him to block out the world all around me.

Frank wakes up several minutes later, and once his leg has been fixed to the best of Gerard’s ability he seems just as energetic and chipper as normal. After about an hour of tense silence we start walking beck toward the burned-out diner sick with fear abotu what we’ll find. The dracs abandoned the battlefield long ago, leaving only a lump of fire and a chance that we survived. The porch is nothing but a heap of ash, marked by the few bodies of the draculoids that Ray and I shot down. Beyond that is the empty, roofless bedroom and the front room, where most of the fighting took place. Streaks of smoke and blast marks cover the smoldering wallpaper, but the refrigerator where our food is kept is still intact. Finally, we move on to the music room, which was untouched by the fire. On the long table where Dr. D did his work, we find four well-painted BL/ind brand disks and, scrawled on a battered piece of paper, a note:

Well, rock-n-rollers, I’m gonna have to run for it now, but I’ll leave you with these. The first three are you old albums, but the last one is the two newest songs and our work on the other one. You know which one I’m talking about. Your guitars and stuff are in the storage closet. Oh, and I’m sorry about Sun Beam. She went down valiantly, took a good number of dracs with her too.
Keep running,
Dr. Death Defying.

Mikey curses under his breath as we turn to the other side of the room. There, sprawled out on the floor, her body jerked into an awkward stance by the laser blasts pockmarking her skin, is Sun Beam. Her sunglasses have been knocked from her face, and her ghost-blue eyes are glazed over by a silent lack of life. Staring death in the face for the first time in four years, I’m suddenly overcome by an all-consuming horror. I thought that by running away I could escape this, I could get away from the pain and hopelessness now gnawing at my heart, but it’s even more present now than when Mum died, because the victim before me isn’t the only person out there that I love.

Ray sees how hard I’m shaking and pulls me toward him, needing my presence just as much as I yearn for his. However, instead of just hugging me like he normally does, he kisses me this time, leaning over so that our lips meet even though he’s much taller than me. For several moments I’m frozen with terror. What if that was Ray’s body lying on the ground? What if his shining brown eyes never met mine again? What if--

“Ray! Cut it out! Can’t you see you’re scaring the living shit out of her?” Gerard yells, glaring at Ray as I jerk away from him.

“No, Gerard, I can’t,” he growls through gritted teeth. “Because when you really love someone, you’re supposed to close your eyes when you kiss them.”

He loves me. He said so. My heart races way faster than any heart ever should, and I feel my head reeling. I love him too, I realize. I love him so much...

Next thing I know I’m running, through the diner and out the back door and away, into the desert. I hear Ray calling my name but I don’t turn back. I can’t be in love, never. I swore I’d never love anyone again, especially not like this. Cursing furiously, I run away, desperate to escape from the confines of this new emotion that’s gained control over my life. I don’t stop until my legs give out, leaving me to collapse in the relative safety behind the dead skeleton of an enormous cactus. There I cry myself to sleep, feeling as alone as humanly possible in the unnatural silence of the California desert.