Lost

I roughly kicked the hot, orange sand beneath my feet, using every last bit of strength I had to stop myself from screaming. I wondered long and hard how we had come to this. I knew why we were here, I would never forget, but sometimes I wondered if it was really worth it. Gangs of passionate and colorful individuals just like us were based all over this desert, all for the same purpose.

We were known as Killjoys. We were loud, outspoken, and above all, we were strong. Well, most of us were. We were a family, in a sense. We fought for freedom and artistic expression, we fought for emotion. We hadn’t always been this... army, though. Beneath the torn shirts and scuffed up boots, there were normal people; human beings.

Our rivals were a corporation known as Better Living Industries, an army of what we knew as draculoids. They were stripped of all color, everything about them was black and white – literally. Not a single splash of color resided on them, inside or outside. Now don’t get me wrong, Better Living Industries weren’t necessarily “the bad guys”, not really. They were an army, just like us, but they fought for exactly the opposite of what we did.

Their leader, Korse, was the only one of them who could really be considered “evil”. I guess you could say he was the Hitler of this world. He fought for a “perfect world”. A world void of all emotion, color or expression. A world of bliss. His aim was to brainwash everyone he possibly could into feeling nothing but unnatural happiness. I suppose he wanted to “sterilize” the world. This wasn’t the world any of us wanted to live in. We were born to feel emotion, we were born to be expressive; that’s what we believed.

So we had congregated, devised an army to fight the good fight. There were gangs of Killjoys stationed all over the world, but the majority of us resided in California.

My own gang was known as The Crisis Crashers, and we were probably the most wanted Killjoys in all of California; perhaps even the whole of the country. In Korse’s mind, we were the strongest. If he took us down, creating his perfect world would be no trouble. We didn’t have a particular base like most of the gangs, as we were constantly on the run. Right now though, we maintained a temporary residence on the Western edge of the desert, an area known as Zone 6. We’d found a broken down shack that had probably been a small shop or diner before all this damage had fallen upon us. Over a couple of weeks we’d managed to turn it into a fairly comfortable home, although it was tight. There were seven of us after all.

I had come here several years ago with my brother Kobra Kid and my boyfriend Fun Ghoul. The second we heard of the war that was about to take place, we didn’t even have to think twice about joining the forces. We’d always been artistically passionate. Throughout the battles that raged through the desert, we had run into four other Killjoys who had welcomed us with open arms. Their names were Jet Star, Art Breaker, Venom Noise, and her sister – the youngest of the pack – Lucid Darkness.

We were a family. We needed each other just like we needed oxygen. There was no way we’d ever survive without each other. Never in our wildest dreams though, did we ever imagine it would come to this. We were barely surviving anymore. We had virtually nothing left, and we were losing hope. The real war hadn’t begun yet, but we all knew it was approaching fast, and I had a feeling we would be fighting a losing battle.