A Rogue's Monomyth (Coda)
August 23, 2012 - First Ward, Praetorian Earth
There was a storm coming.
This observation could be considered true of a figurative storm, perhaps, but that was far away and not of consequence to the woman waiting to run. She was more worried about the very real, literal, meteorological storm bearing down on her home. It was no simple storm either: this was hurricane season and the petulant weather had all the earmarks of it being a right hard bitch. Hard enough to knock the town flat, given the lack of any preventative measures available to the scrambling, destitute citizens. The swampy town had long ago been left to rot by corrupt figures who knew how to cut their losses. The girl knew how to do that too, which is why she had made Praetoria's First Ward her home.
The streets of were empty save for a few scavenging ghouls and the grousing DUST soldiers assigned to give the streets one last patrol before returning to Headquarters. They would batten down what hatches there were and wait out the storm behind sandbags and reinforced walls. The rest of the ward could drown and they would merely float out onto the rain-swollen streets with little care for the other denizens of this scavenger, survivor town. The ghouls, on the other hand, would feast on anything that moved, living or otherwise. They would endure just fine in the tempest.
Colt watched one such patrol of soldiers pass down the cracked concrete and tarmac streets, keeping herself behind a thin shield of rusted corrugated metal. The metal had once been used, long ago, as a barricade against some prior incursion of soldiers or even marauding paramilitary resistance forces. The metal was folded inward, pock-marked with bullet holes, a testament to its utter uselessness against a greater force of arms. Colt watched through one of the larger bullet holes as the barely-attentive soldiers walk down the thoroughfare. She hoped that her ceaseless shivering wouldn't call attention to the one amber eye which must have been visible if they had looked any more carefully. She didn't dare move back further, the motion would have surely drawn their attention and, more importantly, their fire. Within the First Ward, if you did not wear the armor and rank of Praetoria's Direct Urban Strike Team, then you were fair game and lawful enemy combatants. Even if you were a thin, hungry twenty-and-keep-the-change girl shivering under a worn, plastic poncho in the oncoming twilight.
Colt had bought the poncho for a box of dry matches, hoping to keep off the rain until she had made it back to her den. Now that the clouds had firmly covered over the sky, taking the light from the city, what had been late afternoon was quickly becoming rushing darkness. Worse still, the rain-sodden air brought a surprising chill that cut straight through her loose yellow-cotton top and the patched-and-re-patched black pants which she had worn straight through to gossamer thinness. She regretted not bringing her thicker leather pants or her old, battered biker jacket, but the travel she had planned to that other world of chaos and plenty, demanded that she dress for warmer weather. With the storm on its way, the weather had plummeted from blistering and steaming down to chilly and blustery. Colt waited and watched the raindrops start to populate the stone and mossy brick around her.
Colt waited until the DUST patrol moved beyond her field of vision, and then another two minutes beyond that before abandoning her hiding place. She tightened the knapsack strapped to her back, took her water bucket and guitar case in hand, and bolted for the alley on the far side of the street. It was forty feet of open terrain, a little too far for her liking, but she had already trod all of the safe, hidden paths she had at her disposal. This was a last risk, a final gamble before she was home.
Colt's dash across the street was punctuated by the harsh slapping noise of her boots on the ground, each one sounding like gunshots in her mind. Her wide runner's stride carried her over the street in a dozen steps, but she was followed by the sudden staccato rattle of automatic fire slashing behind her. She felt something heat the air behind the small of her back and singe the back of her left forearm. Colt ran anyway, ignoring the pain and even tightening her grip on the bucket. She couldn't afford to lose it. She kept her head as low as her stride could manage and crossed into the cover of the alley just before a blast of automatic fire sent masonry scattering behind her. She didn't look back, she didn't stop. She knew she wouldn't hear the soldiers coming, wouldn't know they caught her until the shot hit her. There was no use in looking back.
The girl capered through the alleyways, cursing that she'd been caught when she was so burdened. She refused to lighten her load though, and grimly decided she couldn't afford to circumnavigate the alleys or abandoned buildings. She would have to plow through directly, even if it meant that she would lead them back to her safehouse. Colt gritted her teeth and bounced off of a pile of rain-greyed crates as she tumbled through the alley debris. She had planned for this. She had made arrangements. Colt merely regretted that she would have to actually put them into use.
Colt leapt down into a sunken pathway, ankle deep with brackish water from the last rain. She pivoted and charged down the pathway, imagining the DUST marksmen taking careful, firing-range-tested aim, and placing a bullet between her shoulder blades. No such report came and her splashing steps echoed in between the sides of the tall, abandoned apartment tenements. She threw herself to the left, pushed off the wall with her lead foot and sprung back toward the right and down another pathway. She could see the entrance of the eight story walkup, its door long taken off the hinges and salvaged for barricades, living spaces, or who knows what else. She charged up the steps and with a heave she prayed that she still had in her aching legs, leapt low over the threshold.
She landed with a heavy thud on both feet, and glanced backward for the first time. No shadows yet, she had bought a few seconds of time. She ran up the first flight of steps, hopping over a low tripwire she had set months before. Colt wished she had time to set the one at the building's entrance, but after she had blown up a deer that had done nothing but skip into the tenement foyer to escape some flooding, she tended to leave it alone. Colt made it to the first landing and slid her guitar and the bucket across to the far side. Her arms ached and burned from carrying the awkward weights for so long under such a punishing pace.
Colt gulped for air and despite the protests of her muscles picked up the old FN-FAL rifle strapped to the broken, splintered bannister. It had cost her quite a bit more than a box of matches, but even still, Colt did not consider her chances much improved by it. It was almost fifty years old at this time, and to call it obsolete would have been a compliment. She knew the old conventional ammunition wouldn't penetrate the DUST combat armor, but she could get lucky and nail one of them in the face, or maybe the throat. It was all she had at hand.
The desperate, exhausted girl kneeled down behind the pile of sandbags she had laboriously stolen from various rally points around the Ward, set the rifle to her shoulder and waited. She narrowed her eyes down the iron sights and waited for the first idiot to come into her line of fire. As Colt kneeled there, her body still and arms aching, her attention locked on the doorway, she felt an old, familiar burning in her veins. A well-worn, familiar anger streaming through her. She wanted them to follow her. She wanted the armored bastards to charge in, grenades and assault weapons at the ready. They needed to pay for scaring her, for holding the whole Ward at gunpoint while the innocent, abandoned citizens were just trying to survive. She felt her vision go red and her breath shorten to brief, husky gasps.
There was a long wait. The raindrops thickened into nails and bullets on the ground. Colt kneeled until she felt her family's trademark anger subside into cold sweat and shudders of exhaustion. She slumped back behind the sandbags and tried not to acknowledge she was crying.
They hadn't followed. She was safe.
Colt strapped the antique rifle back on its post and picked up her guitar and the bucket. A bit of milky white fluid had leaked out from around the bucket's lid, but it hadn't taken a hit from a bullet. The guitar case wasn't quite as lucky. After opening the lid, she saw that the bullet only managed to nick an ugly little groove into the ribs. It wasn't lethal by any means, but she'd take some care in smoothing it out later. She closed up the case and walked up to her living space on the fourth floor.
Like everything else in this area, the living space had been reinforced and each of the windows boarded up long ago. Just as well, given the oncoming storm, but it also allowed her to live unseen from the patrols below. The original door to the apartment had been scavenged long ago, but Colt had found a replacement which had fit the frame more or less. She left it open this time, allowing the coolness coming in from the stairwell's breezeway to rustle the dead air within. The guitar, knapsack, and poncho went down on her hand-restuffed mattress sitting bare on the floor, the bucket went with her into the recess that had once been a bathroom. The plumbing was long forgotten, and now only served as a reinforced safe room.
Colt sat the bucket down on the floor and lifted off the lid from the dry toilet basin. She reached in, pulled out a sealed ammunition box from within it, and carried both this and the bucket back into the main room. After setting it down, the girl took a deep breath, closed her eyes and calmed herself. She felt that same burning in her veins, but this time focused it, folding it along imaginary lines of blood and nerves. She whispered some small phrase and flicked the fingers of both hands out. Candles, scavenged and recycled wicks and wax, came to life in the room. Not too many, not enough to risk a blaze fanned by the wind entering the room, but enough to see better.
The girl witch sighed, satisfied, and strode into the kitchen. After a little searching, she found the pail she was looking for, and brought it join the other receptacles she had gathered. Colt took up the ammo box, unlatched the lid, and poured out the thick, smelly goop that had accumulated into the pail. The whitish curdled liquid was a little less than she would have liked, but she silently admitted hadn't been watching it as closely as she should have been. She stirred the goop lightly with a wooden spoon she had dumped in the pail, and then turned back to the box which now glowed energetically from within.
Colt reached in and pulled the concealed object from the box, turning it over in her hand to check for any obvious signs of degeneration. Colt leaned backward, reaching with her free hand to grasp a fallen bundle of pre-rolled cigarettes. She plugged one into between her lips and leaned forward again, raising the box’s ever-burning severed hand up to light the smoke.
"And the books say these things are only good for unlocking doors," Colt sighed out a small cloud of smoke and dropped it back into the empty box. It wouldn't consume much in the time she left it free to the air, and she wanted a little extra light as the storm strengthened outside. She stood back up and retrieved her knapsack from the mattress. After stowing the supplies she had acquired on her sojourn to Primal Earth, she selected a small tin of beans to heat up. Any electrical power had been long destroyed or diverted in this area of town, so Colt had only some bartered charcoals and her pyromancy to cook with. She made do, and had done worse in the past.
"Let's for-get a-bout the past," she sang quietly as she stirred the beans. "'cause it can't be un-done..." She glanced over to the burning hand and the candles, frowning slightly. She hadn't meant to spook so hard when the boy had come out of the catacombs beneath Sharkhead Island. It had just been so sudden, unexpected. In all the graveyards, in all the world, he had to have emerged right where she had been practicing.
"Figures," she breathed as she extinguished the flame smoldering under the tin. She pushed over a small, traveler turntable over to the pail, bucket and box, and sat down among them all. The turntable had cost her even more than the rifle: three weeks patrolling tunnels beneath Eltentown. It was the hardest, craziest patrol there was, but she had earned her prize. For others, it might have been useless given the lack of electricity, but in her hands....
Colt glanced at the 45 on the player and hummed in approval before taking the power cord in hand. She concentrated once again, murmuring a tiny rhythm of power into the machine. The turntable spun up and soon the scratches and hiss of a mono recording broke from the single speaker. Colt reached into the canister and brought the burning, severed left hand and set it on the floor in front of her. She opened up the bucket and dipped the box into the thick goat's milk within. She left enough room for the hand to go back in it when she was done. For now, there was a heaviness in her chest and the hand was all the company she had. Colt folded her feet underneath her, basked in the scratchy recording of a blues man killed in the last great hurricane to ravage the Ward, and began to eat her precious canned food.
"Only the best for you, Dad," Colt Moineau said to the ever-burning, immortal hand laid out in front of her. "Ain't we got it all?"
Just like its former owner might have done, the hand ignored any attempts at conversation. Instead, the flame-wrapped index finger began to tap in time with the music, as the storm grew louder and stronger and threatened to blow the lights out of the ruined city.
There was a storm coming.
This observation could be considered true of a figurative storm, perhaps, but that was far away and not of consequence to the woman waiting to run. She was more worried about the very real, literal, meteorological storm bearing down on her home. It was no simple storm either: this was hurricane season and the petulant weather had all the earmarks of it being a right hard bitch. Hard enough to knock the town flat, given the lack of any preventative measures available to the scrambling, destitute citizens. The swampy town had long ago been left to rot by corrupt figures who knew how to cut their losses. The girl knew how to do that too, which is why she had made Praetoria's First Ward her home.
The streets of were empty save for a few scavenging ghouls and the grousing DUST soldiers assigned to give the streets one last patrol before returning to Headquarters. They would batten down what hatches there were and wait out the storm behind sandbags and reinforced walls. The rest of the ward could drown and they would merely float out onto the rain-swollen streets with little care for the other denizens of this scavenger, survivor town. The ghouls, on the other hand, would feast on anything that moved, living or otherwise. They would endure just fine in the tempest.
Colt watched one such patrol of soldiers pass down the cracked concrete and tarmac streets, keeping herself behind a thin shield of rusted corrugated metal. The metal had once been used, long ago, as a barricade against some prior incursion of soldiers or even marauding paramilitary resistance forces. The metal was folded inward, pock-marked with bullet holes, a testament to its utter uselessness against a greater force of arms. Colt watched through one of the larger bullet holes as the barely-attentive soldiers walk down the thoroughfare. She hoped that her ceaseless shivering wouldn't call attention to the one amber eye which must have been visible if they had looked any more carefully. She didn't dare move back further, the motion would have surely drawn their attention and, more importantly, their fire. Within the First Ward, if you did not wear the armor and rank of Praetoria's Direct Urban Strike Team, then you were fair game and lawful enemy combatants. Even if you were a thin, hungry twenty-and-keep-the-change girl shivering under a worn, plastic poncho in the oncoming twilight.
Colt had bought the poncho for a box of dry matches, hoping to keep off the rain until she had made it back to her den. Now that the clouds had firmly covered over the sky, taking the light from the city, what had been late afternoon was quickly becoming rushing darkness. Worse still, the rain-sodden air brought a surprising chill that cut straight through her loose yellow-cotton top and the patched-and-re-patched black pants which she had worn straight through to gossamer thinness. She regretted not bringing her thicker leather pants or her old, battered biker jacket, but the travel she had planned to that other world of chaos and plenty, demanded that she dress for warmer weather. With the storm on its way, the weather had plummeted from blistering and steaming down to chilly and blustery. Colt waited and watched the raindrops start to populate the stone and mossy brick around her.
Colt waited until the DUST patrol moved beyond her field of vision, and then another two minutes beyond that before abandoning her hiding place. She tightened the knapsack strapped to her back, took her water bucket and guitar case in hand, and bolted for the alley on the far side of the street. It was forty feet of open terrain, a little too far for her liking, but she had already trod all of the safe, hidden paths she had at her disposal. This was a last risk, a final gamble before she was home.
Colt's dash across the street was punctuated by the harsh slapping noise of her boots on the ground, each one sounding like gunshots in her mind. Her wide runner's stride carried her over the street in a dozen steps, but she was followed by the sudden staccato rattle of automatic fire slashing behind her. She felt something heat the air behind the small of her back and singe the back of her left forearm. Colt ran anyway, ignoring the pain and even tightening her grip on the bucket. She couldn't afford to lose it. She kept her head as low as her stride could manage and crossed into the cover of the alley just before a blast of automatic fire sent masonry scattering behind her. She didn't look back, she didn't stop. She knew she wouldn't hear the soldiers coming, wouldn't know they caught her until the shot hit her. There was no use in looking back.
The girl capered through the alleyways, cursing that she'd been caught when she was so burdened. She refused to lighten her load though, and grimly decided she couldn't afford to circumnavigate the alleys or abandoned buildings. She would have to plow through directly, even if it meant that she would lead them back to her safehouse. Colt gritted her teeth and bounced off of a pile of rain-greyed crates as she tumbled through the alley debris. She had planned for this. She had made arrangements. Colt merely regretted that she would have to actually put them into use.
Colt leapt down into a sunken pathway, ankle deep with brackish water from the last rain. She pivoted and charged down the pathway, imagining the DUST marksmen taking careful, firing-range-tested aim, and placing a bullet between her shoulder blades. No such report came and her splashing steps echoed in between the sides of the tall, abandoned apartment tenements. She threw herself to the left, pushed off the wall with her lead foot and sprung back toward the right and down another pathway. She could see the entrance of the eight story walkup, its door long taken off the hinges and salvaged for barricades, living spaces, or who knows what else. She charged up the steps and with a heave she prayed that she still had in her aching legs, leapt low over the threshold.
She landed with a heavy thud on both feet, and glanced backward for the first time. No shadows yet, she had bought a few seconds of time. She ran up the first flight of steps, hopping over a low tripwire she had set months before. Colt wished she had time to set the one at the building's entrance, but after she had blown up a deer that had done nothing but skip into the tenement foyer to escape some flooding, she tended to leave it alone. Colt made it to the first landing and slid her guitar and the bucket across to the far side. Her arms ached and burned from carrying the awkward weights for so long under such a punishing pace.
Colt gulped for air and despite the protests of her muscles picked up the old FN-FAL rifle strapped to the broken, splintered bannister. It had cost her quite a bit more than a box of matches, but even still, Colt did not consider her chances much improved by it. It was almost fifty years old at this time, and to call it obsolete would have been a compliment. She knew the old conventional ammunition wouldn't penetrate the DUST combat armor, but she could get lucky and nail one of them in the face, or maybe the throat. It was all she had at hand.
The desperate, exhausted girl kneeled down behind the pile of sandbags she had laboriously stolen from various rally points around the Ward, set the rifle to her shoulder and waited. She narrowed her eyes down the iron sights and waited for the first idiot to come into her line of fire. As Colt kneeled there, her body still and arms aching, her attention locked on the doorway, she felt an old, familiar burning in her veins. A well-worn, familiar anger streaming through her. She wanted them to follow her. She wanted the armored bastards to charge in, grenades and assault weapons at the ready. They needed to pay for scaring her, for holding the whole Ward at gunpoint while the innocent, abandoned citizens were just trying to survive. She felt her vision go red and her breath shorten to brief, husky gasps.
There was a long wait. The raindrops thickened into nails and bullets on the ground. Colt kneeled until she felt her family's trademark anger subside into cold sweat and shudders of exhaustion. She slumped back behind the sandbags and tried not to acknowledge she was crying.
They hadn't followed. She was safe.
Colt strapped the antique rifle back on its post and picked up her guitar and the bucket. A bit of milky white fluid had leaked out from around the bucket's lid, but it hadn't taken a hit from a bullet. The guitar case wasn't quite as lucky. After opening the lid, she saw that the bullet only managed to nick an ugly little groove into the ribs. It wasn't lethal by any means, but she'd take some care in smoothing it out later. She closed up the case and walked up to her living space on the fourth floor.
Like everything else in this area, the living space had been reinforced and each of the windows boarded up long ago. Just as well, given the oncoming storm, but it also allowed her to live unseen from the patrols below. The original door to the apartment had been scavenged long ago, but Colt had found a replacement which had fit the frame more or less. She left it open this time, allowing the coolness coming in from the stairwell's breezeway to rustle the dead air within. The guitar, knapsack, and poncho went down on her hand-restuffed mattress sitting bare on the floor, the bucket went with her into the recess that had once been a bathroom. The plumbing was long forgotten, and now only served as a reinforced safe room.
Colt sat the bucket down on the floor and lifted off the lid from the dry toilet basin. She reached in, pulled out a sealed ammunition box from within it, and carried both this and the bucket back into the main room. After setting it down, the girl took a deep breath, closed her eyes and calmed herself. She felt that same burning in her veins, but this time focused it, folding it along imaginary lines of blood and nerves. She whispered some small phrase and flicked the fingers of both hands out. Candles, scavenged and recycled wicks and wax, came to life in the room. Not too many, not enough to risk a blaze fanned by the wind entering the room, but enough to see better.
The girl witch sighed, satisfied, and strode into the kitchen. After a little searching, she found the pail she was looking for, and brought it join the other receptacles she had gathered. Colt took up the ammo box, unlatched the lid, and poured out the thick, smelly goop that had accumulated into the pail. The whitish curdled liquid was a little less than she would have liked, but she silently admitted hadn't been watching it as closely as she should have been. She stirred the goop lightly with a wooden spoon she had dumped in the pail, and then turned back to the box which now glowed energetically from within.
Colt reached in and pulled the concealed object from the box, turning it over in her hand to check for any obvious signs of degeneration. Colt leaned backward, reaching with her free hand to grasp a fallen bundle of pre-rolled cigarettes. She plugged one into between her lips and leaned forward again, raising the box’s ever-burning severed hand up to light the smoke.
"And the books say these things are only good for unlocking doors," Colt sighed out a small cloud of smoke and dropped it back into the empty box. It wouldn't consume much in the time she left it free to the air, and she wanted a little extra light as the storm strengthened outside. She stood back up and retrieved her knapsack from the mattress. After stowing the supplies she had acquired on her sojourn to Primal Earth, she selected a small tin of beans to heat up. Any electrical power had been long destroyed or diverted in this area of town, so Colt had only some bartered charcoals and her pyromancy to cook with. She made do, and had done worse in the past.
"Let's for-get a-bout the past," she sang quietly as she stirred the beans. "'cause it can't be un-done..." She glanced over to the burning hand and the candles, frowning slightly. She hadn't meant to spook so hard when the boy had come out of the catacombs beneath Sharkhead Island. It had just been so sudden, unexpected. In all the graveyards, in all the world, he had to have emerged right where she had been practicing.
"Figures," she breathed as she extinguished the flame smoldering under the tin. She pushed over a small, traveler turntable over to the pail, bucket and box, and sat down among them all. The turntable had cost her even more than the rifle: three weeks patrolling tunnels beneath Eltentown. It was the hardest, craziest patrol there was, but she had earned her prize. For others, it might have been useless given the lack of electricity, but in her hands....
Colt glanced at the 45 on the player and hummed in approval before taking the power cord in hand. She concentrated once again, murmuring a tiny rhythm of power into the machine. The turntable spun up and soon the scratches and hiss of a mono recording broke from the single speaker. Colt reached into the canister and brought the burning, severed left hand and set it on the floor in front of her. She opened up the bucket and dipped the box into the thick goat's milk within. She left enough room for the hand to go back in it when she was done. For now, there was a heaviness in her chest and the hand was all the company she had. Colt folded her feet underneath her, basked in the scratchy recording of a blues man killed in the last great hurricane to ravage the Ward, and began to eat her precious canned food.
"Only the best for you, Dad," Colt Moineau said to the ever-burning, immortal hand laid out in front of her. "Ain't we got it all?"
Just like its former owner might have done, the hand ignored any attempts at conversation. Instead, the flame-wrapped index finger began to tap in time with the music, as the storm grew louder and stronger and threatened to blow the lights out of the ruined city.