Cobras Never Die
Bandslash (Killjoy!verse MCR/Cobra Starship), NC-17, ~10,350 words. Mikey/Gabe, Frank/Ricky Rebel (Show Pony). Title is a bastardization of the Cobra Starship song "Cobras Never Say Die" and the phrase "Killjoys never die." Warning: violence on par with the Na Na Na music video.
Extras:
-a picture I made of Gabe all dolled up as a Killjoy
-a zip file of all the songs mentioned in this fic (YouSendIt download--let me know if it's expired and I'll reupload)
-Frank/Ricky PWP coda here: Move My Feet Out Of Control
***
When Mikey wakes up on the last day of his first life, his bed is on fire, and Gabe won't stop singing.
Mikey wastes time trying to put out the sheets until he's conscious enough to realize that the rest of the apartment is also on fire, at which point his top priority shifts from saving his furniture to saving his ass. He drags Gabe out through the smoke-choked hallway and down the grimy concrete stairs, ignoring his breathless chant of "the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire," which it is.
They stumble out onto the sidewalk and stare out at the street. It's not just their apartment, or even just their apartment building. Everything is on fire, every building in sight. There's a brick building that's on fire, which Mikey is almost positive should be impossible.
"It's all over and I'm standing pretty, in this dust that was a city," sings Gabe, watching a man with a baby lurch out of the flaming brick building. The man doesn't spare him a glare, just takes off down the road. There's probably no point in looking for refuge, but Mikey silently wishes him luck.
He's still wearing the T-shirt and basketball shorts he was sleeping in, along with a pair of slip-on Vans he managed to stuff his feet into on the way out the door. Gabe doesn't have anything on except boxer briefs and a sombrero. Mikey doesn't want to know where he came up with the sombrero. He's not sure he wants to know about the singing, either, but he asks anyway.
"The Cobra, dude," Gabe pauses long enough to explain. "Remember I told you about that vision I had? It's my destiny to keep the party rocking during the apocalypse. Shitting balls, I need some instrumentals. Think anyone in there had a flame-retardant amp I could salvage?"
Nothing is flame-retardant. The cement sidewalk is actually catching fire now, for fuck's sake, and Mikey is rethinking the futility of escape. He scrambles to think of a place that might be less miserable than here, but there haven't been any truly safe havens in this city in a long time, not since before the internet went down for the last time and people started dying from the strange tastes in the air.
Gabe starts humming the opening riffs of "Smoke on the Water." Mikey almost snaps at him to shut up, but, "Fuck, that's actually a good idea," he mutters and heads toward the reservoir, skirting around a pile of stinking, flaming garbage. Gabe pauses to root through it, coming up with a flip-flop and a half, the heel snapped off the right one. He puts them on and half-walks, half-skips along behind Mikey, wailing about making a place to sweat.
Mikey isn't the only one to think of this. The crowd is thick near the edge of the water, and it's pure luck that they run into Gerard. He's actually dressed, with boots and everything, so he probably hadn't gone to bed yet. It's not unusual for him to stay awake until mid-morning and sleep during the afternoon. Mikey feels a little guilty for not having run to his rescue, but only a little. Gerard didn't run to save him either. Family and friends don't exist anymore, just allies, and everyone has to put themselves first.
"Why's Gabe singing?" Gerard asks.
Mikey rolls his eyes. "He decided to be the violinist on the Titanic or some shit. Something to do with his herpetological revelation last summer."
"Hey," Gabe says, "that was just a zit, okay." He wanders off into the crowd. Mikey doesn't try to stop him.
"Have you seen Frank?" Mikey asks Gerard.
"He got kidnapped in the middle of the night," Gerard says. "I dunno if he's still alive, he kept puking and his hair was coming out all over the place even before he was dragged off to get fried by nuclear desert rays or whatever. He's probably fucked. But at least he's not burned alive in a puddle of his own vomit like he would have been if he'd stayed."
Someone on the other side of the reservoir interrupts their conversation by going up in flames and toppling into the water, which also goes up in flames. Everyone around them immediately starts panicking.
"You have got to be fucking shitting me," Mikey breathes. Up until this moment, he thought he would make it through this somehow. Now, when even the water is on fire, he's not so sure.
The Sex Pistols start blasting from somewhere in the middle of the throng of screaming people. Mikey makes his way toward the sombrero he can see bobbing around above everyone's heads. Gabe has gotten his hands on a battery-powered boombox, and he's shimmying his boxer-briefed ass around to Johnny Rotten's shrieking.
Mikey thinks what the hell and grinds up to Gabe, because everything is on fire and there's nothing else he can do. Someone crashes into Gerard from behind, probably accidentally, but Gerard interprets it as the instigation of a mosh pit and breaks out his concert elbows. A brunette girl starts laughing hysterically and hurls herself into the fray, and what the fuck do you know, Gabe really is throwing the party of the apocalypse. Mikey's sweating from the fire and the sun and Gabe's body heat pressed against his back, and more and more people are joining in, and they're all going to die dancing.
Suddenly, a white truck appears out of nowhere and parks on the blackened grass. It's too clean to have come from anywhere in the blazing, filthy city, even if there were any gasoline left here to fuel it. Gabe's hands are wrapped around Mikey's waist, keeping his hips swaying to the music as they watch masked figures pile out of the truck. They're swathed in white fabric, shockingly bright in the dust and ash surrounding them.
One of them grabs the boombox before Gabe can move fast enough to defend it and hurls it into the reservoir, right in the middle of "Anarchy in the U.K." It disappears in the burning water, cutting off the music. Gabe picks up singing where it left off without missing a beat. He, Mikey, Gerard, and the brunette girl are the only people still dancing. Everyone else is staring, not at the people in white, but at the truck. It has a tank of gas and it works, and it can save some of them. Not all of them, though, and they all seem to realize that at once. There's a sudden stampede for the back doors.
The white figures don't try to fight them off. They're opening the doors for them, actually, and Mikey wants to escape the inferno too, but he isn't stupid enough not to question the motives of a Good Samaritan wearing a mask. He's not getting in the truck until he knows where it came from and, more importantly, where it's going.
One of the people in white is coming toward them holding a riot baton, and Mikey extricates himself from Gabe's grip because he doesn't like the look of that at all. Gabe deflects the first blow and delivers a solid right hook to his attacker's gut, still bellowing, "I wanna be anarchy!" The girl is bellowing right along with him, and as the other people in white start to notice the disturbance, she plants her back to Gabe's and faces them down.
"Mikey! Gerard!"
Mikey spins around to see Frank hanging precariously by his knees out the passenger-side window of a battered brown Trans Am, waving furiously. "Get in!" he yells.
Relief washes over Mikey at the sight of him. "Gabe, come on!" he says.
"You motherfucker," Gabe says. Mikey blinks.
"You're the broken glass in the morning light," Gabe sings quietly, just to him. "Be a burning star if it takes all night. Just save yourself, I'll hold them back tonight."
Mikey's never heard this song.
Gerard is already crawling over Frank into the backseat. "Get in the car, Gabe, shut up and get in the car," Mikey pleads.
Gabe shakes his ridiculous sombrero-capped head. "You know Muse?" he asks the girl.
"Fuck yeah," she says, and belts out, "Declare this an emergency!" Gabe joins in with, "Come on and spread a sense of urgency," and then they disappear in a pile of flailing white limbs.
Mikey doesn't have family anymore, and he doesn't have friends. He has allies. Everyone has to put themselves first.
He gets in the car.
A kid runs up as he's about to close the door. "Can I come too, please?" he begs desperately.
"No freeloaders," says the driver, a guy with long hair and a beard.
Frank looks at the kid. "Fuck, Steve, he's like twelve."
Steve sighs. "You gonna feed him? Walk him? Make sure he doesn't piss on my vinyl?"
The white-clad gang are turning toward them, and one of them raises something that looks unpleasantly like a gun. Frank grabs the kid's arm and yanks him into his lap. "Drive," he snaps at Steve.
Mikey thinks he can hear, "It's time for something biblical" faintly emanating from the cluster of people around Gabe and the girl. Then Steve revs the engine and he can't hear anything at all.
***
Frank introduces them all to his new friend, who turns out to be an old friend. Frank used to know Steve through the music scene when there was a music scene, and apparently did him a few serious solids back then. He came to rescue Frank when the fires started, and Frank made him come back to get the rest of them.
He drives them way out into the desert, to a tiny shack made of sheet metal that looks like it's about to fall down. It's full of cardboard boxes. Mikey thought Steve was joking--no one has actual vinyl anymore--but most of the boxes really do contain old records. The kid, whose name is Ricky, does not piss on them. He actually brightens up when he sees an original Ziggy Stardust and asks if Steve has Diamond Dogs, which abruptly reverses Steve's attitude toward him.
Ricky is fifteen, not twelve, and he ends up being a lot more useful than Frank, who's still practically shedding fingernails from the radiation. Frank announces that Ricky is his proxy for physical labor and cheerfully orders him around from the pile of burlap he's using as a bed. Ricky jumps at the chance to do anything Frank wants, hints that he wants, or could potentially want. Mikey would think it was cute if he weren't preoccupied with all his debilitating guilt.
Gabe had some kind of combination hero complex and death wish, Mikey gets that. Mikey couldn't have done anything to convince him to come with them, he gets that too. He could have handled it if he thought all that shit about cobras and partying through the apocalypse really was hallucination-induced insanity, but he's pretty sure it wasn't. Gabe is--was--weird, but not actually crazy. And the way he sang those lines directly to Mikey about holding them back makes him suspect Gabe did it for him. He can't deal with that.
Fortunately, they're still pretty fucked, so Mikey can distract himself by trying to stay alive. Water is the most immediate problem, followed closely by food. There's a small stockpile of protein bars and bottled water, but it's not going to last the five of them long. Steve has been living out here for a while, but he's been surviving by stealing from the city that is currently a giant fireball. They have to find out where the white truck came from, because the people in it were well-fed, clean, and organized like no one Mikey's seen in years. Wherever they came from will have all the supplies they need.
Also, guns. Those would be handy.
Steve's supply of gas for the Trans Am is limited, so they explore the desert on foot at first. There's a lot of it. Mikey and Gerard usually go out as a team, trying a new direction each day, looking for anything at all besides dust. Steve has a couple of bare-bones radio transmitters, almost walkie-talkies but without even the plastic casing, to help them keep in touch while they're out. When Ricky finds out Steve put together the transmitters himself, he pesters him with incessant questions about radio waves and electrical conduction, then sits down with the transmitters and messes with them until they work about twice as well.
"I told you it was a good idea to bring him along," Frank says smugly. Ricky beams.
Steve snorts. "You had no fuckin' clue what the kid had going on in his head, Frank. You wanted to bring him because of those big pretty eyes."
"Jeez, you make me sound like some kind of pedophile," Frank says. Ricky's grin disappears.
"I wonder if we could hook up the record player to play music over the radio," says Gerard. "That would make my day more pleasant."
"Maybe if we had any power for the record player," says Steve.
"What about manual power?" suggests Ricky. "We could rig up a bicycle pedaling system or something. Or, hey, Steve, do you know anything about solar panels? We're not gonna run out of sun anytime soon."
Frank flops off the edge of his burlap and drags Ricky down into an upside-down hug. "I fucking love this kid," he mumbles to Ricky's belly button and blows a raspberry on his stomach. Ricky looks like he's trying not to smile again, but failing spectacularly.
"Look," says Steve, picking up a pencil stub. "To harness solar power, we'd need either a lens and a steam turbine or a photovoltaic material like silicon..."
"C'mon, Gerard, we should get going if we want to make it back before dark," says Mikey.
Gerard looks over to the other side of the shack, where Steve is scratching diagrams in the dust and Ricky is trying to peel Frank off of himself so he can see. "I kind of want to learn about solar panels too," he says.
Mikey shrugs. "I can go by myself. I'll have the radio, and it's not like there's much chance of anything interesting happening."
So of course it's that day, when he has no backup, that he finds the highway.
He almost doesn't. He walks faster without Gerard with him, so he's further than usual when he gets to his point of half-exhaustion. They learned that lesson the first time they did this--you don't walk until you fall over, you walk exactly half that far, otherwise you can't make it back. Mikey is about ready to turn around when he sees a smudge on the horizon. It takes another hour to get close enough to see that it's a billboard with a faded Starbucks ad on it.
This probably used to be Highway 10. There aren't any cars on it now, obviously, and Mikey's not sure how an abandoned highway could be useful, but he's definitely past his point of half-exhaustion, so he sits down in the shadow of the billboard to rest.
That's where he is when the truck comes.
It might be the same truck as the one at the reservoir. Mikey doesn't remember that creepy smiley face on the side, but he doesn't trust his memories of that day very much. There's no cover, nowhere to hide. He can't do anything but flatten himself to the ground and hope he's grimy enough to blend in.
He isn't. The truck stops, and someone in white hops out. Mikey has a split second to decide between running and fighting, and the guy could just squash him with the truck if he ran, so he stands his ground.
The guy doesn't try to talk, just takes a swing. Mikey ducks, darts forward, and stomps his knee in. "Fuck!" says the mask, and Mikey freezes for just a second at the unexpected reminder that there's a real person under the costume. Then the guy kicks Mikey's foot and bends a toe backwards. Mikey loses the pity and wrenches the guy's head to one side. He goes limp.
"Jesus Christ," Mikey says out loud. He might have just killed someone. He drops to his knees and checks the man's pulse. He's still alive, just unconscious. Mikey debates finishing the job for about a quarter of a second, but he can't do it. He's pretty sure he'll get there given enough of the desperation that's gradually boiling up in him from life in the desert, but not yet.
He looks in the back of the truck first. There's no cargo. He climbs into the cab and shuffles through the glove compartment. There's an unmarked white plastic package, which he tears open to find something that looks edible. He's suspicious of it, but not suspicious enough not to eat it. He's fucking hungry, and whatever it is, it's dense enough to fill his stomach.
"Come in, 5628," crackles a voice from the dashboard. "5628, are you there? Have you investigated the unidentified body?"
Mikey thinks fast. He holds down a button next to the speaker, hoping it's the right one for a response. "Yeah, it was dead."
"Probably one of the morons who tried to get away," says the dashboard. "Leave it. How long is it going to take you to get back to Battery City?"
"Uh," says Mikey. He has no idea what or where Battery City is. "I might be a little late."
The voice seems to accept this. "I'll have the dracs at the gate stay out until you get here."
"Thanks," Mikey says and lets his finger drop from the button. He's not sure what he's getting himself into, but at least the truck has air conditioning. He hasn't felt this cool since the weather started getting unbearable in early spring.
He strips the truck driver of his white outfit and puts it on over the T-shirt and basketball shorts he's still wearing. There's an ID card attached to a pocket. With any luck, that will be enough to get him past their security without any passwords or anything. He leaves his ripped-up Vans next to the guy, switching them out for the tidy white boots. They're a little big, but they'll work. He contemplates the radio transmitter for a minute, weighing the risks of someone finding it on him against the risks of leaving it for the guy to find when he wakes up. Eventually, he climbs up the billboard and hides it in the scaffolding.
The last thing he puts on is the mask. It's disturbingly comfortable.
He figures Battery City is probably somewhere along the highway in the direction the guy was going. He keeps his eyes peeled as he drives for side roads or tire tracks, but in the end it turns out that the highway (which is indeed Highway 10, according to the signs no one's bothered to take down) leads him directly where he wants to go. There's a blockade at the edge of the city, but they wave him through without even stopping the truck. The security guards are wearing even weirder masks with wide rubber mouths and wild fake hair. They must be what the voice on the radio meant by "dracs."
There's a fork in the road after the blockade, but the left side of it is helpfully labeled "TRUCKS," so Mikey doesn't have to make any wild guesses about his route. It leads him past a series of buildings labeled "Better Living Industries" and straight to a loading dock, where he turns the truck around and backs it up to the concrete ledge by the roll-up door. He's glad no one is watching, because it takes him four tries to line it up right.
He pulls the keys from the ignition, locks the truck, gets out and looks around. There's a side door to the building that looks locked. He approaches it tentatively and discovers a card slot, into which his new ID card fits perfectly. The door clicks open.
"There you are," someone says the second he walks through the door. It's another person in white. "Where's your transfer paperwork?"
"Um," says Mikey.
She laughs. "Did you leave it in the truck again? I don't know why the hell we keep you around sometimes. Go on, go on, don't forget to lock the truck behind you this time."
Mikey heads back out, grateful for the apparent incompetence of the man he's impersonating. He finds a clipboard stuffed down next to the driver's seat. There's a sheet of paper on it with a list of names and a signature at the bottom that could conceivably be transfer paperwork. He takes it back into the building, careful to lock the truck again.
"There we go. Hey, you even remembered to get it signed at the factory. Great." She takes custody of the clipboard and starts heading down the hall, then turns around. "Hurry up, we're gonna be late for the mandatory viewing tonight if you don't get a move on. If I get fined for missing it, you're paying."
Mikey trots after her down the long white hall. The place is like a cross between an office building and a hospital. They end up in a room that looks like a lecture hall with a screen at the front. The chairs are filled with masked people in white.
"Just in time," says yet another masked man at the door. The woman flashes her ID, and Mikey quickly follows suit. The man makes two checkmarks on a list and gestures for them to sit down.
An image of a neatly dressed Asian woman appears on the screen. "Rescue efforts and removal procedures are progressing as planned," she says calmly. "Our factories are functional now that the conflagration operation has been terminated and the workforce is present and organized. Objections have been minimal, and the zones are clear. The new population of Battery City is safe and provided for."
A graph appears on the screen of "desirables" and "undesirables" present in Battery City and in the factories. The woman's voice explains the figures and how they relate to what Mikey can only assume is their master plan to take over the world or something. This shit is creeping him out. He really doesn't like the term "conflagration operation," either. It implies that the fires that just ruined his life were intentional.
"Remember, you are the faces of BL/ind," says the woman. "Our city looks to you for standards of acceptable behavior. Represent the company at all times, and always take your medication."
After the video is over, the woman sitting next to him turns and says, "Wow, did you see those numbers? That truckload of worker bees you took over today was practically the last one."
Mikey wants very badly to leave. Fortunately, everyone else is standing up, and it's easy to slip away from the woman in the sea of masks. He goes back to the loading docks, approaching the roll-up door from the inside this time, and finds a fleet of motorcycles in the garage behind it. He roots through the shelves and drawers nearby, looking for the keys. While he's searching, he stumbles across a plastic bag containing stacks of the white-packaged food he ate in the truck earlier. He slings the bag over his shoulder.
Finally, he finds a cabinet with rows of numbered keyrings. He grabs the key labeled "03" and sticks it into the ignition of the motorcycle in the third parking spot, putting on the white helmet hanging on its handlebar. A quick swipe of his ID card, and the door rumbles up to let him out. He closes it behind him, because even though it's inevitable that they'll realize the motorcycle is gone, he'd rather give himself as much time as possible to get away before that happens.
It's after dark by now, and the blockades are unmanned. Mikey files away this information for future reference as he rides past them. A few miles out of the city, he passes a forlorn figure plodding along the highway in his discarded Vans. Mikey remembers what the woman said about the truck containing people being shipped off to work in factories, and tightens his grip on the handlebars to stop himself mowing the bastard down.
He stops at the Starbucks billboard to retrieve his radio transmitter and turns it on. "Hey, anyone listening?" he says into it.
"Jesus, Mikey, where the fuck are you?" Gerard grumps immediately from the tiny speaker.
Mikey grins. "Highway 10. I'm on a motorcycle, I'll be back soon."
"You're where on a what now?"
"I'll tell you about it when I get back," Mikey says, straddling the bike. "I've got food," he adds.
"Ooh, drop the fucking transmitter and get your ass back here, then."
***
The first time Mikey realizes there are other people living in the desert is when one of them tries to siphon the fuel from his stolen motorcycle.
Steve, Gerard, and Ricky are all off trying to drag home an abandoned trailer Gerard said he found a few miles away. Mikey is sitting in the shack, munching on his nails and trying to figure out how to investigate the factories in the old city without getting himself killed. He still has the white outfit, and it's even mostly clean (except for the boots, which he's been wearing), but there's a lot of risk inherent in impersonating an employee of BL/ind. Of course, there's also a lot of risk inherent in going in without cover.
The incongruous sound of running water distracts him from his planning. It sounds like it's coming from outside. He gets up to check it out and discovers that the noise is not water but gasoline, hitting the bottom of a bucket held by a frizzy-haired guy he's never seen before.
"Hey!" Mikey says, lunging for the tubing sticking out of his gas tank. The guy jumps and tries to run with the bucket, but Mikey snags him by the collar and hangs on tight. "No way, dude. Put it down."
The guy reluctantly sets down the bucket. Mikey tugs him into the shack. "Whoa," says Frank from his pile of burlap. "Who's this?"
"I dunno, who are you?" Mikey asks the guy. He looks between them suspiciously. Mikey sits down and pats the floor next to him. "C'mon, we're not gonna bite. Do you know anything about Battery City or the factories?"
"Yeah," says the guy. "I'm squatting near the factories. Name's Ray." He sits down. "Um, sorry about the gas thing. I thought you were a drac."
"Reasonable assumption," says Mikey. "What do you know about them?"
Ray shrugs. "They try to kill me. I try to kill them. So far I'm winning."
They pepper him with questions. He doesn't know much about Battery City, but he's been living in an abandoned car dealership near the edge of the city since the fires stopped, so he knows all about BL/ind's factory setup. He says most of the product they're turning out consists of pills and canned food, but there are also assembly lines for clothing, weapons, and other things Mikey would really like to have.
"Show me," he says to Ray. "It's close enough that we can walk, right? I'd rather conserve fuel." Ray nods, standing up.
"Mikey," says Frank. He's looking up with a wrinkled forehead. "Shouldn't you wait until the others get back? It'll be dangerous, and Steve knows more about sneaking around and stealing stuff than you do."
Mikey shakes his head. "He can go steal stuff himself if he wants it."
"We're all in this together, though," says Frank.
"Yeah, well, I don't see anyone else producing vehicles and food, not to mention playing Bond to figure out what the hell is going on here," Mikey snaps. "I'm sharing my shit with you guys because you saved my ass from combustion, but that doesn't mean you get to tell me what to do."
Frank looks stunned. "None of us could do this by ourselves, Mikey. If we start keeping track of favors, we're gonna need a flowchart."
"Then make one."
"Mikey, quit pretending you don't give a shit about us, okay?" Frank says. "I know you do. You're just being a dick. You gotta stop trying to excuse your dickitude by pretending to be heartless."
Mikey grabs the BL/ind ID off the uniform shirt and leads Ray out the door without another word.
It's a long walk to the old city. On the way, Ray points out the car dealership where he's staying. "In case you ever need a favor," he says, quirking an eyebrow. Mikey feels a little embarrassed for getting into shit with Frank in front of a stranger, but he doesn't say anything.
The BL/ind factories are in a part of town that was abandoned years ago, long before the fires. It's full of soot-covered warehouses, but some of them are less sooty than others, and when Mikey looks closely he can see wood under all the grey and black dust.
"The warehouses they're using didn't burn," Ray says. "I guess they must have treated them somehow before they set the fires."
"Which one has clothes?" Mikey asks. He knows he should stock up on food and water, but he's really fucking sick of these basketball shorts.
Ray points to one of the warehouses. "Good luck, man," he says and skedaddles. Mikey doesn't blame him.
He tries the ID badge on the card slider by the door. It doesn't work. They probably disabled it as soon as they knew he had it. He finds the building's loading dock instead and camps out around the corner. It's about an hour before one of the white trucks shows up. The driver backs it up to the door, opens it, and disappears inside for long enough for Mikey to slip into the warehouse.
He ends up on a balcony overlooking the main room. It's full of tired-looking people producing various textiles. Mikey stays there for a minute, watching them. It's not until he realizes he's searching for Gabe's face that it occurs to him that Gabe might still be alive.
He'd assumed that everyone at the reservoir died. This is, in retrospect, a pretty baseless assumption. If BL/ind had wanted them all dead, they would have left them to burn instead of piling them in the back of a truck. Gabe was making a lot of trouble, so it's not likely that he made it, but it's possible.
He's not here, anyway. Mikey wanders around the factory until he finds a few boxes of finished clothing (all black and white--what is it with these people and their grayscale lives?) and roots through them, coming up with a pair of black jeans, a white shirt, and a white faux-leather jacket. He puts them on, ditching his tattered pajamas in a trash receptacle, and snags a few extra pairs of socks. He thinks about getting clothes for the rest of them, but they were all more appropriately dressed for the desert in the first place than he was, and he'd have to carry anything he took out of here all the way back to the shack.
Then he drops the socks, because someone is shooting at him. Someone is shooting a ray gun at him.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he mutters, dropping flat behind the cardboard boxes of clothes. He crawls away from the direction the lasers (lasers, what the hell) are coming from. Just as he rounds the corner, a beam cuts one of the boxes in half.
Mikey is so screwed.
He gets out of the building by sheer luck and legpower, running faster than he ever has in his life. Once he's out the door, he takes off down the street, frantically looking for somewhere to hide because he cannot outrun a fucking laser.
Whoever's behind him, probably a drac, is still firing. Mikey tries to run in zigzags to avoid the beams without losing ground, which doesn't work so well. He doesn't register the noise of the motorcycle until it pulls up next to him and he's dragged bodily across the back of it. His first thought is shit, they've got me, but obviously the drac is trying to shoot him, not capture him. He raises his head to look at the person driving the bike. It's Gerard.
It's too loud to speak, so Mikey is silent until Gerard parks the bike outside the shack. The trailer they were off fetching is out front next to the Trans Am. "I--" Mikey starts.
"Don't even fuckin' wanna hear it," says Gerard and stalks inside.
Mikey follows him sheepishly. Frank is sitting against the wall, refusing to look at him. Mikey stuffs his hands in his new pockets and discovers that he managed to stick a pair of socks in there before the shooting started. He takes them out and holds them out to Frank.
"Am I gonna owe you one for this?" snipes Frank. "Should I draw up a chart so we can keep score?"
Mikey lets his hand fall back to his side, waits a moment, and then holds out the socks again. Frank sighs and takes them, because he's less of a jerk than Mikey is. Mikey knew that already.
"Were those actual lasers they were shooting at you?" Gerard asks.
Mikey lights up. "Yeah, fuck, we've got to get our hands on some of those guns. I bet Ray knows where they're making them."
Frank groans. "You should have left him to get toasted and saved yourself some time, Gerard," he says, and Mikey knows they're okay.
***
Ray hasn't seen the guns, but he knows which factory produces weapons and electronics, and the ray guns have got to fall under one of those categories. They formulate another plan to get supplies from the factory--an actual plan this time, rather than Mikey's blind dash, which he admits in retrospect was a poor decision.
("Poor decision, my ass," says Frank. "You're a fucking moron, Mikey. Own it.")
Ricky takes one of the radio transmitters and stakes out the factory Ray points out. When a loaded truck leaves that building, he radios Steve, who hides with Gerard and Mikey on the far side of a billboard a few miles up the highway. The motorcycle Mikey stole is parked at the base of the billboard. Their theory is that if the truck drivers will stop to investigate a body lying on the ground, they'll probably stop to check out an abandoned company motorcycle.
The guy who was driving the last truck didn't have a gun, but that truck was empty, so they can't be sure what to expect. "If he's got a long-range weapon, for fuck's sake stay put," Steve says. He's looking at Mikey.
"I don't actually want to die," Mikey says. Steve gives him a dubious look. Mikey really wishes they would drop it already.
Their target comes into view. "Ssh," says Gerard, like the driver can hear them through half a mile and a truck.
It works beautifully. When he gets close, the driver stops as predicted and gets out to approach the bike. He's not carrying a gun. They left some of Steve's old junk in the saddlebag closer to the billboard, to keep him busy with his back to them. They shimmy down the billboard pole and jump him from behind. Gerard and Mikey hold him down while Steve roots through the back of the truck with a duffel bag. He finds electrical tape and tosses it to them. "Keep him still," he says. He puts another few rolls of the tape in his duffel bag, along with batteries and a few other potentially useful things in the truck, before yelling, "Score!" and brandishing something vaguely gun-shaped.
"Does it work?" Mikey asks.
Steve aims it at the rear right tire of the truck and pulls the trigger. A beam of light flashes, and the tire explodes with a loud bang.
"Yup," Steve announces unnecessarily. He squats down to look at the tire. Mikey can see a smoking hole in the side.
"How many are there?" asks Gerard, wrapping the electrical tape around the truck driver's ankles.
"There was just one in the box, but there might be more boxes," says Steve. He clambers back into the truck and starts tossing boxes out the back. "Looks like nine total."
Mikey checks that the tape will hold, then hops into the truck and helps Steve take the guns out of the boxes and put them in the duffel. "Anything else interesting in here?"
"Mostly batteries."
Mikey snorts. "Truth in advertising, I guess." He fills the rest of the space in the duffel with batteries while Steve opens up the rest of the boxes.
"Whoa, hey!" Steve says, pulling a sheet of something out of a box. "Take this, too. We can use it for solar power. Okay, the rest of this is no good to us. Let's fill up the bike's tank and book."
Mikey takes the duffel back to the shack on the motorcycle. Gerard and Steve follow on foot, leaving the truck driver taped up in the cab.
Ricky is thrilled to bits about the photovoltaic whatever, and he and Steve spend the next few days huddled together in a corner, messing with things Mikey doesn't begin to understand. While they're busy with that, Mikey and Gerard get all Highlander on BL/ind's asses. Now that they have their own ray guns, they can just flatten the trucks' tires from a distance instead of tricking the drivers into stopping, which was risky and wouldn't have worked much longer anyway.
The drivers start carrying guns too, but Gerard is an unexpectedly good shot and usually manages to drop them before they can do any damage. Mikey's aim isn't quite as good, but he learns quickly. The first time he kills one freaks him out more than it should, given that he was expecting it to happen sooner or later, but after a while it gets easier. It helps that they depersonalize themselves in advance by all looking exactly alike.
Battery City, Mikey discovers, gets its water from a pipeline to the ocean. They try tapping the pipe, but the purification system is evidently on the city side of the pipe, and saltwater isn't helpful. Eventually, they figure out that clean water is carried to the old city in tanks for the factory workers, and Gerard and Mikey start hijacking water trucks.
The food selection, or lack thereof, is puzzling. "I don't get it," Mikey says as they lug boxes of canned goop to the shack. "They've clearly got plenty of resources, but all they're making to eat is energy bars and dog food."
Gerard shrugs, holding the door open with his shoulder. Mikey ducks inside. Frank is doing something that looks like sewing. "Whatcha up to, Frank?" Mikey says, depositing his load on the floor.
"Masks!" Frank waves around a piece of white fabric with holes cut in it. "'Cause you guys are, like, burglars now."
"I don't know if I really want to jump on the white uniform bandwagon," Mikey says.
Frank waves this aside. "We'll figure out a way to dye them or something."
"Holy shit," says Ricky from the corner, where he's been bent over the record player for the past week. It's now quietly but definitely playing the Beatles. "Holy shit, holy shit, we did it!"
"Holy shit!" Frank drops his masks and dives onto Ricky's back, wrapping his arms around his neck. Ricky turns his head and kisses Frank full on the mouth.
"You don't know how lucky you are, boy," sings Paul McCartney into the dead silence.
Frank freezes for a long moment, then jerks back. "Don't," he whispers.
"Fuck, I'm sorry," says Ricky, eyes wide.
"It's okay, I'm not... just don't."
"Fuck," Ricky says again and rushes outside.
Frank drops his head into one hand and groans softly. "I was hoping this wouldn't be a problem for a while," he says into his palm.
"He was sorta getting some mixed signals," Mikey points out. "You probably shouldn't molest him like that if you're not willing to follow through."
"I know." Franks looks up at him miserably. "It's my fault. I thought maybe in a few years, you know? But he's a baby. I can't." He sighs. "Could you go make sure he's okay?"
"You broke it, you fix it," says Mikey.
"Please?"
"Okay, okay."
Ricky's sitting on the trunk of the Trans Am, staring out into the desert sunset. Mikey hops up next to him and stays there for a few minutes, not saying anything.
"This really sucks," says Ricky finally.
Mikey nods. "Being fifteen sucked for me too, and I didn't even have to deal with all this desert survival shit on top of not getting laid."
"It isn't just about not getting laid," says Ricky.
"Yeah, it is," says Mikey. "You know how I know? Because everything else, you already have. Frank's nuts about you. He loves you, and he tells you so. He takes care of you and he lets you take care of him. He's always crawling all over you. The only thing that's missing is orgasms."
Ricky's quiet for a moment, then mumbles, "Fine, okay, it's about not getting laid."
"Yeah," says Mikey. "It sucks."
***
Steve and Ricky start broadcasting with the record player. They don't know if anyone is listening, but it makes them all feel better, knowing that there's music in the air. Ricky babbles to Ray about their "radio station," and the next time Ray comes by, he brings a tape player, a microphone, and a stack of cassettes.
"Where the hell did you get those?" Steve demands.
"My friend Vicky-T," says Ray. "She used to work in the factories, but she escaped. She's been listening to your radio station since I told her about it yesterday. She told me to give these to you."
Ricky's face lights up. "We have a listener!" He digs out some batteries and opens up the back of the tape player.
Mikey's more interested in this new character. "Where did she get this stuff?" He hasn't seen any kind of entertainment products coming out of BL/ind's factories at all.
"It's hers," says Ray. "Shit was going down for days before the fires started. She figured it was gearing up to something and hid her stuff out of town." He points to the tapes. "One of those is her band. The one marked MGMK."
"She was in a band?" says Mikey.
Ray grins. "Is. She is in a band. Mad Gear and the Missile Kid. They're escaped factory workers. They have a recording studio made up of the shit she saved. It's in one of the burned-up buildings that didn't collapse all the way."
"Dang," says Ricky. "Here I thought we were being all radical by broadcasting music out in the dystopian desert, and they're actually recording?" He gets the tape player hooked up to the speakers and puts on the cassette.
Drugs gimme drugs gimme drugs I don't need it but I'll sell whatcha got take the cash and I'll keep it...
Mikey listens, spellbound, until the track ends. When it does, Steve grabs the tape player and the radio transmitter. "This one goes out to our literal number one listener," he says into the transmitter. "Thanks for the tunes, Victory Trick." He starts the song over on the air.
"Victory Trick?" asks Ray.
Steve shrugs. "Better not use real names. We don't know who might be listening."
"Ooh, ooh, code names!" says Frank. "I wanna be Fun Ghoul." Frank has probably been saving that up for years, on the off chance that he might someday be in need of a ridiculous pseudonym.
"I gotta think about mine," says Ricky.
"I don't," says Mikey, thinking of Gabe kicking ass and smiling, and of this music that makes him want to kick ass and smile too.
***
Gerard has been acting weird for a while before anyone except Mikey notices. Mikey doesn't say anything because he's not sure exactly what it is that's off about him. But when Gerard suggests they turn off the music, even Frank can't miss that something's going on.
"What the hell, Gerard?" he says, bewildered.
"It just seems unnecessary," Gerard says in a quiet voice that doesn't sound right on him. "What's the point? What's the point of any of this? We could be living in Battery City with clean clothes and clean water and food we don't have to kill anyone for."
Mikey exchanges a glance with Steve. "Gerard, what's going on?"
"I'm sick of dust," says Gerard. "I'm sick of color. I want things to be simple."
"Are you on drugs?" says Ricky.
Mikey didn't think that was it, but a flash of guilt crosses Gerard's face and suddenly he knows what's going on. "The medication," he says. "The pills they're feeding people in the city. He's got some. He must have taken them from one of the trucks."
Gerard crumples to the floor, clutching his trench coat closely around him. "I just want life to be simple," he whispers. "I'm tired. I want to be happy."
"Shit," says Mikey.
They take the pills away, leaving Gerard miserable and useless. Mikey hates seeing it, but he doesn't know what else to do. He understands now why BL/ind isn't producing any food except energy bars and canned muck--the pills make Gerard hate all sensation.
He tries to stay with Gerard as much as he can, and that's the only reason he's in the shack when Ricky plays the song.
You're the broken glass in the morning light, be a burning star if it takes all night, so just save yourself and I'll hold them back tonight...
Mikey's head snaps up. "What song is this?"
"Hm?" says Ray, who's sitting with Ricky by the broadcasting equipment. "New MGMK. Vicky-T gave it to me this morning."
"Can you take me to Vicky-T?" says Mikey. "I really need to talk to her. And her band."
***
Mikey wouldn't have expected that the first thing he would do upon seeing Gabe alive and well would be to punch him in the face, but then, he wouldn't have expected that the first thing Gabe would do would be to ambush him and stick his tongue down his throat. It kind of takes him off guard.
Gabe hits the deck with a loud thunk. He's wearing all-white clothes, obviously stolen from the factories like Mikey's. "I knew that would happen if I ever did that," he says from the floor, rubbing his jaw. "Ow. Totally worth it. Ow. It's good to see you, man."
"You asshole, you're not dead," says Mikey. "Why didn't you tell me? I didn't know until I heard that song."
"How was I supposed to find you? I didn't know where the hell you ran off to. I recorded 'Save Yourself' for the radio station 'cause I thought you'd probably be listening. I didn't think it would get you here this fast."
"The radio station is us, dude," says Mikey, and he's surprised to find that it's true. Steve and Ricky have done all the work getting the music on the air, but Mikey still feels like he's a part of it.
"Shiny!" Gabe springs to his feet. "Check this place out, you're gonna wet yourself." Gabe leads him down a surprisingly soot-free hall to a large room full of recording equipment.
"We split a cable from one of the factory generators for power," says Gabe, fingering an amp. "Vicky-T has all kinds of electronic crap. Like a voice scrambler thing. You couldn't tell the vocals were me, could you?"
Mikey could not.
He sits down on the floor, leaning against the wall, and lets Gabe tell him all about his enslavement, escape, and subsequent recording contract. "It's all about the Cobra," Gabe says earnestly, "it's about keeping the party spirit alive even though we're all totally fucked. And you guys are helping, you're getting our message out there. There aren't many of us now, but there will be. People aren't going to put up with this Better Living bullshit, being drugged off their asses all the time. They'll keep squirming out to the zones, and when they do, we'll be here with a beat they can dance to. The beat matters, Mikey."
And maybe Mikey is going insane too, but after living in the bleak desert without music for a few weeks and then getting it back, he's starting to understand. He gets why Ricky couldn't help kissing Frank when the White Album started playing on the craptastic ancient record player. The beat does matter.
"Hey dickface, I finished that other song I said you should wait for me to finish before you sent Ray off to the station this morning," says a familiar girl, walking in. She blinks at Mikey. "Oh hey, he finally found you, huh? Glad you didn't get incinerated."
Of course Vicky-T is the one who went down fighting with Gabe at the reservoir. It all makes sense. "Glad you didn't get pounded to a pulp by riot batons," Mikey responds.
Formalities over with, she turns to Gabe. "Great, now you can shut the hell up about him. Here, listen to this." She clamps a pair of what look like fairly high-quality headphones over his ears.
Mikey waits quietly until Gabe is distracted by the music, then says, "He talked about me?"
"He's in love with you," says Vicky-T. "Or he's an incredibly creepy pervert stalker. Actually, to be honest, my money is on embracing the power of 'and'."
***
Gabe rides to the shack on the back of Mikey's motorcycle and excitedly pops the new song into the tape player.
Everyone looks at him, even Gerard, who hasn't lifted his head in two days. "Gabe?" he says.
"Sh, listen to this, this shit is awesome," says Gabe.
It's bouncy happy music about how fucked the world is, just like the rest of MGMK's songs, but for some reason this one makes Gerard sit up and pay attention. At the line we'd be killing ourselves by sleeping in he looks at Mikey, eyes shining, and Mikey is an instant convert to the cult of the cobra.
"What does the Japanese mean?" Gerard asks after the song is over.
Gabe shrugs. "Um, I think the part at the beginning is something like 'life is short and the road is dangerous, so let's dance.' But I don't remember all of it."
"Play it again," says Gerard.
They're halfway through listening to the song for the third time when a drac sticks its head in the door.
"Fucking," says Mikey, diving for a gun. Frank beats him to it, blowing a hole through the drac's head. Mikey grabs a gun in each hand, yanks his BL/ind mask over his head in the hopes that it'll keep them from shooting at him right away, and charges outside. There are at least ten of them, six on motorcycles and the rest pouring out of a white company sedan. He guns down three before they have time to react, and dives behind the trailer.
He gets two more as they come around the trailer, then Gabe is standing in front of him and Gerard is picking them off from the doorway. Mikey tries to help, but Gabe is in his way. "Move, motherfucker," he snarls, but Gerard is already done.
"We gotta go," Steve is saying. "They know where we are, we gotta find someplace else." He's lugging the record player and the solar power setup to the Trans Am. "Come on, help me get this shit in the car."
"Where are we gonna go?" asks Ricky.
"I know a place," says Gabe. "There's a diner northwest of here, further from the highway. No one was squatting there a couple weeks ago when I found it."
Steve is stacking records in the trunk. "Sounds good, come on, let's go."
The diner is much bigger than their little shack, and a lot more solid. It's still hot, but if they open the windows at night and close them at dawn, it might keep cool for a while. Steve and Ricky immediately take over a back room for the radio station and start in on getting the solar power working again.
Gabe pokes around in some closets and comes back with a bunch of paint cans. "Check it out," he says. "Colors. Haven't seen a whole lot of those in a while."
Gerard grabs them and starts painting absolutely everything, singing under his breath about getting off the dance floor. When he's done, Mikey's helmet has been turned into a freaky yellow and red happy face, the guns are all bright primary colors, the Trans Am has a giant spider on its hood, and the tape player Vicky-T gave them is decorated with a cartoony explosion and the word BOOM. Gerard even paints the masks Frank made, a badass robber clown kind of aesthetic, and Mikey has to admit they look sort of cool.
"Wahahahahoooooo!" hollers Ricky as he zooms through the kitchen on roller skates, making Mikey jump. Frank collapses in giggles. Ricky does a few laps and then skids to a halt in front of them. "I found them in a supply closet," he says, grinning widely. "There was some hair dye, too, look." He offers forward a couple of small unopened boxes.
Mikey bleaches his hair and Gerard's, then dyes Gerard's pink. The color looks good on him.
***
Mikey is sitting in one of the red vinyl booths, carefully painting the words GOOD LUCK on his motorcycle helmet's visor in white, when Gabe finds him. Gerard hasn't been using the white paint much, because they're all pretty fucking sick of white, but Mikey feels that it sends a clear message.
Gabe sits down across from him. "They've got the radio broadcasting again," he says. "Steve's calling himself DJ Dr. Death Defying."
"Mhm," says Mikey, concentrating on keeping his lines straight. He's almost done with the K.
"He says you all picked code names for the station. I think I'm gonna be Fang Tango."
"Mm."
Gabe picks at his cuticles, not looking at Mikey. "He says you named yourself Kobra Kid."
Mikey finishes the letter and sets the helmet aside on the sticky table to dry. "Why didn't you let me fight?" he says. "Why did you get in my way like that? You think you can defend me better than I can defend myself?"
"No," says Gabe. "I'm not thinking rationally when you're in danger. It's an instinct. I can't let you get hurt."
Mikey takes a deep breath. "I guess we should talk about the kissing, huh."
"Yeah. Um, sorry about that."
"Are you?"
Gabe looks up, meeting his eyes. "Not a fucking chance."
"Vicky-T thinks you're in love with me," says Mikey. "Either that or you're a perverted stalker."
"Love," Gabe informs him firmly. "Definitely love. Trust me, I know from perverted stalking."
Mikey leans his head against the vinyl-coated bench seat back, closing his eyes to get away from the look on Gabe's face. "Either one of us could die out here. Any of us could die any second. Getting too close to each other makes us more vulnerable."
"That is a falsehood and an inaccuracy and a pile of steaming horse manure," Gabe announces. "Safety in numbers, dude. Getting too close to each other makes us fucking invincible."
It's not true, Mikey's sure it's not. Throwing himself in front of Mikey every time anything starts going down is not conducive to Gabe's health, and it's blind luck that he's still alive right now after all the shit he's pulled. But fuck, he wants to touch Gabe, and he can hear music coming from the broadcast room--I don't want to hold back, I don't want to slip down, I don't want to think back to the one thing that I know I should have done. He'll take the sign.
"Come here," he whispers. Gabe disappears under the table and pops up on Mikey's side of the booth next to him in about a quarter of a second, but he waits patiently until Mikey leans over and kisses him.
Once it's clear Mikey isn't going to change his mind, the patience vanishes. Gabe manhandles Mikey out of the booth and onto the floor, never breaking contact with his mouth. The linoleum is dirty and gross, but Mikey barely notices, focused on Gabe's lips and hands and the hard-on he can feel pressed against his hip. He pushes Gabe's shirt up and lets him grab his ass under his jeans. He digs his teeth into Gabe's bottom lip, tugging sharply before letting his mouth fall open and his head fall back. Gabe sucks at his neck, rutting up against him through his clothes.
Mikey's head bumps into one of the paint cans. He reaches up to shove it away, but Gabe grabs his wrist. "Hang on, let me," he says, dipping his fingers into the paint. They come out bright red. Gabe grins widely. "Color, Mikey," he says, and grabs Mikey's ass again, smearing the red paint across his skin.
Mikey gapes at him. "You fucker," he says, and grabs a handful of paint to wipe across Gabe's chest in retaliation. Somewhere in there, though, it stops being retaliation, probably around the moment he notices that Gabe's nipples are rock-hard. He rubs one of them with the paint, twisting the slick bud in his fingers. Gabe moans and kisses Mikey hard, thrusting his tongue into his mouth.
Mikey wriggles out of his shirt and straddles Gabe, grabbing for another can. He pops off the lid and pours blue paint across Gabe's stomach, then presses down and writhes, the slippery skin against his torso a stark contrast to the rough friction in his pants. Gabe is thinking the same thing, rolling on top and pushing his hand under Mikey's waistband, still coated in red paint.
"Our clothes are going to be ruined," Mikey murmurs.
"Our clothes," says Gabe, "are going to be awesome. You don't want to wear white anyway." He strokes Mikey slowly, streaking his cock with red. Mikey lifts his hips, trying to get more, trying to feel everything he can while he can. Gabe laughs breathlessly and cracks open a can of yellow paint, covering his other hand with it and stroking it over Mikey's jaw. "God, you're beautiful," he says and kisses Mikey again.
There's a drop of paint on Mikey's eyelash, tinging everything with a haze of blue. Gabe's cheek is splattered with blue and yellow and green, which inspires Mikey to mix more of the yellow and blue to get more green. Gabe loosens his hold on Mikey's cock and slips his own alongside it, squeezing them both, rubbing until Mikey can't bite back his moans.
Mikey comes first, and Gabe kneels up over him, jacking off and swirling Mikey's come into the red paint on his belly, turning it pink until he dilutes it with his own semen. "That's disgusting," pants Mikey, although it's not. Gabe grins like he picked up on the unspoken thought and flops down with his head on Mikey's shoulder.
Mikey turns to kiss him again. "Go find something we can wipe up with," he says.
Gabe grumbles but heaves himself to his feet and wanders off to dig through the cupboards, shedding his paint-spattered clothes along the way. Mikey shakes his head, pulling up his pants. He's barely gotten them zipped up when Ricky rolls in on his skates and topples into the booth. "So, John McCrea extracted your head from your ass, huh?" he chirps, rolling one skate back and forth on the floor.
"You played that on purpose?" Mikey asks, trying to sound indignant but only managing vaguely amused.
"Mood music," says Ricky. "I figure someone should be getting some around here, even if it can't be me. You and Gabe have no reason not to be fucking. None at all."
Right now, Mikey has a hard time arguing with that.
***
"I'm gonna be seriously pissed if you get yourself killed for real this time," says Mikey. "Now that I know what kind of orgasms I'll be missing out on without you around."
Gabe nibbles on his ear.
"So what, you're gonna play MGMK songs to the residents of Battery City?"
"Nope," says Gabe. "We're starting a new project. The zones need one kind of music, but these people need something different." He perches on a barstool at the counter and sings, "In the city twilight everything was all right, they'll drag you home if you don't hold your ground, so don't back down. We were out but we're taking it back."
Mikey folds his arms. "Did the Cobra tell you to do this, too?"
"The Cobra is a metaphor, dude," Gabe says. "It's the right thing to do. Music is what we've got, so music is how we'll win. Art is the weapon."
"They didn't guard the gates after dark when I went in, but they might have amped up security since we started gunning down their trucks." Mikey rests his hands on Gabe's hips. "Good luck, man."
"Your helmet already wished me luck on your behalf," Gabe tells him solemnly. Mikey laughs and walks him outside. He and Gerard stand there in front of the diner, watching as Gabe and Vicky-T disappear on Mikey's motorcycle.
"They're probably gonna die," says Mikey.
"You're such a killjoy, Mikey," says Gerard.
Mikey nods. "Yup. We're all fucking killjoys. We're gonna kill all their shiny white medicated fucking joy, and we're gonna replace it with color and music and the real world. Let's go steal another water truck, we're running low."
Gerard slings an arm over Mikey's shoulder. "Fabulous."
Extras:
-a picture I made of Gabe all dolled up as a Killjoy
-a zip file of all the songs mentioned in this fic (YouSendIt download--let me know if it's expired and I'll reupload)
-Frank/Ricky PWP coda here: Move My Feet Out Of Control
***
When Mikey wakes up on the last day of his first life, his bed is on fire, and Gabe won't stop singing.
Mikey wastes time trying to put out the sheets until he's conscious enough to realize that the rest of the apartment is also on fire, at which point his top priority shifts from saving his furniture to saving his ass. He drags Gabe out through the smoke-choked hallway and down the grimy concrete stairs, ignoring his breathless chant of "the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire," which it is.
They stumble out onto the sidewalk and stare out at the street. It's not just their apartment, or even just their apartment building. Everything is on fire, every building in sight. There's a brick building that's on fire, which Mikey is almost positive should be impossible.
"It's all over and I'm standing pretty, in this dust that was a city," sings Gabe, watching a man with a baby lurch out of the flaming brick building. The man doesn't spare him a glare, just takes off down the road. There's probably no point in looking for refuge, but Mikey silently wishes him luck.
He's still wearing the T-shirt and basketball shorts he was sleeping in, along with a pair of slip-on Vans he managed to stuff his feet into on the way out the door. Gabe doesn't have anything on except boxer briefs and a sombrero. Mikey doesn't want to know where he came up with the sombrero. He's not sure he wants to know about the singing, either, but he asks anyway.
"The Cobra, dude," Gabe pauses long enough to explain. "Remember I told you about that vision I had? It's my destiny to keep the party rocking during the apocalypse. Shitting balls, I need some instrumentals. Think anyone in there had a flame-retardant amp I could salvage?"
Nothing is flame-retardant. The cement sidewalk is actually catching fire now, for fuck's sake, and Mikey is rethinking the futility of escape. He scrambles to think of a place that might be less miserable than here, but there haven't been any truly safe havens in this city in a long time, not since before the internet went down for the last time and people started dying from the strange tastes in the air.
Gabe starts humming the opening riffs of "Smoke on the Water." Mikey almost snaps at him to shut up, but, "Fuck, that's actually a good idea," he mutters and heads toward the reservoir, skirting around a pile of stinking, flaming garbage. Gabe pauses to root through it, coming up with a flip-flop and a half, the heel snapped off the right one. He puts them on and half-walks, half-skips along behind Mikey, wailing about making a place to sweat.
Mikey isn't the only one to think of this. The crowd is thick near the edge of the water, and it's pure luck that they run into Gerard. He's actually dressed, with boots and everything, so he probably hadn't gone to bed yet. It's not unusual for him to stay awake until mid-morning and sleep during the afternoon. Mikey feels a little guilty for not having run to his rescue, but only a little. Gerard didn't run to save him either. Family and friends don't exist anymore, just allies, and everyone has to put themselves first.
"Why's Gabe singing?" Gerard asks.
Mikey rolls his eyes. "He decided to be the violinist on the Titanic or some shit. Something to do with his herpetological revelation last summer."
"Hey," Gabe says, "that was just a zit, okay." He wanders off into the crowd. Mikey doesn't try to stop him.
"Have you seen Frank?" Mikey asks Gerard.
"He got kidnapped in the middle of the night," Gerard says. "I dunno if he's still alive, he kept puking and his hair was coming out all over the place even before he was dragged off to get fried by nuclear desert rays or whatever. He's probably fucked. But at least he's not burned alive in a puddle of his own vomit like he would have been if he'd stayed."
Someone on the other side of the reservoir interrupts their conversation by going up in flames and toppling into the water, which also goes up in flames. Everyone around them immediately starts panicking.
"You have got to be fucking shitting me," Mikey breathes. Up until this moment, he thought he would make it through this somehow. Now, when even the water is on fire, he's not so sure.
The Sex Pistols start blasting from somewhere in the middle of the throng of screaming people. Mikey makes his way toward the sombrero he can see bobbing around above everyone's heads. Gabe has gotten his hands on a battery-powered boombox, and he's shimmying his boxer-briefed ass around to Johnny Rotten's shrieking.
Mikey thinks what the hell and grinds up to Gabe, because everything is on fire and there's nothing else he can do. Someone crashes into Gerard from behind, probably accidentally, but Gerard interprets it as the instigation of a mosh pit and breaks out his concert elbows. A brunette girl starts laughing hysterically and hurls herself into the fray, and what the fuck do you know, Gabe really is throwing the party of the apocalypse. Mikey's sweating from the fire and the sun and Gabe's body heat pressed against his back, and more and more people are joining in, and they're all going to die dancing.
Suddenly, a white truck appears out of nowhere and parks on the blackened grass. It's too clean to have come from anywhere in the blazing, filthy city, even if there were any gasoline left here to fuel it. Gabe's hands are wrapped around Mikey's waist, keeping his hips swaying to the music as they watch masked figures pile out of the truck. They're swathed in white fabric, shockingly bright in the dust and ash surrounding them.
One of them grabs the boombox before Gabe can move fast enough to defend it and hurls it into the reservoir, right in the middle of "Anarchy in the U.K." It disappears in the burning water, cutting off the music. Gabe picks up singing where it left off without missing a beat. He, Mikey, Gerard, and the brunette girl are the only people still dancing. Everyone else is staring, not at the people in white, but at the truck. It has a tank of gas and it works, and it can save some of them. Not all of them, though, and they all seem to realize that at once. There's a sudden stampede for the back doors.
The white figures don't try to fight them off. They're opening the doors for them, actually, and Mikey wants to escape the inferno too, but he isn't stupid enough not to question the motives of a Good Samaritan wearing a mask. He's not getting in the truck until he knows where it came from and, more importantly, where it's going.
One of the people in white is coming toward them holding a riot baton, and Mikey extricates himself from Gabe's grip because he doesn't like the look of that at all. Gabe deflects the first blow and delivers a solid right hook to his attacker's gut, still bellowing, "I wanna be anarchy!" The girl is bellowing right along with him, and as the other people in white start to notice the disturbance, she plants her back to Gabe's and faces them down.
"Mikey! Gerard!"
Mikey spins around to see Frank hanging precariously by his knees out the passenger-side window of a battered brown Trans Am, waving furiously. "Get in!" he yells.
Relief washes over Mikey at the sight of him. "Gabe, come on!" he says.
"You motherfucker," Gabe says. Mikey blinks.
"You're the broken glass in the morning light," Gabe sings quietly, just to him. "Be a burning star if it takes all night. Just save yourself, I'll hold them back tonight."
Mikey's never heard this song.
Gerard is already crawling over Frank into the backseat. "Get in the car, Gabe, shut up and get in the car," Mikey pleads.
Gabe shakes his ridiculous sombrero-capped head. "You know Muse?" he asks the girl.
"Fuck yeah," she says, and belts out, "Declare this an emergency!" Gabe joins in with, "Come on and spread a sense of urgency," and then they disappear in a pile of flailing white limbs.
Mikey doesn't have family anymore, and he doesn't have friends. He has allies. Everyone has to put themselves first.
He gets in the car.
A kid runs up as he's about to close the door. "Can I come too, please?" he begs desperately.
"No freeloaders," says the driver, a guy with long hair and a beard.
Frank looks at the kid. "Fuck, Steve, he's like twelve."
Steve sighs. "You gonna feed him? Walk him? Make sure he doesn't piss on my vinyl?"
The white-clad gang are turning toward them, and one of them raises something that looks unpleasantly like a gun. Frank grabs the kid's arm and yanks him into his lap. "Drive," he snaps at Steve.
Mikey thinks he can hear, "It's time for something biblical" faintly emanating from the cluster of people around Gabe and the girl. Then Steve revs the engine and he can't hear anything at all.
***
Frank introduces them all to his new friend, who turns out to be an old friend. Frank used to know Steve through the music scene when there was a music scene, and apparently did him a few serious solids back then. He came to rescue Frank when the fires started, and Frank made him come back to get the rest of them.
He drives them way out into the desert, to a tiny shack made of sheet metal that looks like it's about to fall down. It's full of cardboard boxes. Mikey thought Steve was joking--no one has actual vinyl anymore--but most of the boxes really do contain old records. The kid, whose name is Ricky, does not piss on them. He actually brightens up when he sees an original Ziggy Stardust and asks if Steve has Diamond Dogs, which abruptly reverses Steve's attitude toward him.
Ricky is fifteen, not twelve, and he ends up being a lot more useful than Frank, who's still practically shedding fingernails from the radiation. Frank announces that Ricky is his proxy for physical labor and cheerfully orders him around from the pile of burlap he's using as a bed. Ricky jumps at the chance to do anything Frank wants, hints that he wants, or could potentially want. Mikey would think it was cute if he weren't preoccupied with all his debilitating guilt.
Gabe had some kind of combination hero complex and death wish, Mikey gets that. Mikey couldn't have done anything to convince him to come with them, he gets that too. He could have handled it if he thought all that shit about cobras and partying through the apocalypse really was hallucination-induced insanity, but he's pretty sure it wasn't. Gabe is--was--weird, but not actually crazy. And the way he sang those lines directly to Mikey about holding them back makes him suspect Gabe did it for him. He can't deal with that.
Fortunately, they're still pretty fucked, so Mikey can distract himself by trying to stay alive. Water is the most immediate problem, followed closely by food. There's a small stockpile of protein bars and bottled water, but it's not going to last the five of them long. Steve has been living out here for a while, but he's been surviving by stealing from the city that is currently a giant fireball. They have to find out where the white truck came from, because the people in it were well-fed, clean, and organized like no one Mikey's seen in years. Wherever they came from will have all the supplies they need.
Also, guns. Those would be handy.
Steve's supply of gas for the Trans Am is limited, so they explore the desert on foot at first. There's a lot of it. Mikey and Gerard usually go out as a team, trying a new direction each day, looking for anything at all besides dust. Steve has a couple of bare-bones radio transmitters, almost walkie-talkies but without even the plastic casing, to help them keep in touch while they're out. When Ricky finds out Steve put together the transmitters himself, he pesters him with incessant questions about radio waves and electrical conduction, then sits down with the transmitters and messes with them until they work about twice as well.
"I told you it was a good idea to bring him along," Frank says smugly. Ricky beams.
Steve snorts. "You had no fuckin' clue what the kid had going on in his head, Frank. You wanted to bring him because of those big pretty eyes."
"Jeez, you make me sound like some kind of pedophile," Frank says. Ricky's grin disappears.
"I wonder if we could hook up the record player to play music over the radio," says Gerard. "That would make my day more pleasant."
"Maybe if we had any power for the record player," says Steve.
"What about manual power?" suggests Ricky. "We could rig up a bicycle pedaling system or something. Or, hey, Steve, do you know anything about solar panels? We're not gonna run out of sun anytime soon."
Frank flops off the edge of his burlap and drags Ricky down into an upside-down hug. "I fucking love this kid," he mumbles to Ricky's belly button and blows a raspberry on his stomach. Ricky looks like he's trying not to smile again, but failing spectacularly.
"Look," says Steve, picking up a pencil stub. "To harness solar power, we'd need either a lens and a steam turbine or a photovoltaic material like silicon..."
"C'mon, Gerard, we should get going if we want to make it back before dark," says Mikey.
Gerard looks over to the other side of the shack, where Steve is scratching diagrams in the dust and Ricky is trying to peel Frank off of himself so he can see. "I kind of want to learn about solar panels too," he says.
Mikey shrugs. "I can go by myself. I'll have the radio, and it's not like there's much chance of anything interesting happening."
So of course it's that day, when he has no backup, that he finds the highway.
He almost doesn't. He walks faster without Gerard with him, so he's further than usual when he gets to his point of half-exhaustion. They learned that lesson the first time they did this--you don't walk until you fall over, you walk exactly half that far, otherwise you can't make it back. Mikey is about ready to turn around when he sees a smudge on the horizon. It takes another hour to get close enough to see that it's a billboard with a faded Starbucks ad on it.
This probably used to be Highway 10. There aren't any cars on it now, obviously, and Mikey's not sure how an abandoned highway could be useful, but he's definitely past his point of half-exhaustion, so he sits down in the shadow of the billboard to rest.
That's where he is when the truck comes.
It might be the same truck as the one at the reservoir. Mikey doesn't remember that creepy smiley face on the side, but he doesn't trust his memories of that day very much. There's no cover, nowhere to hide. He can't do anything but flatten himself to the ground and hope he's grimy enough to blend in.
He isn't. The truck stops, and someone in white hops out. Mikey has a split second to decide between running and fighting, and the guy could just squash him with the truck if he ran, so he stands his ground.
The guy doesn't try to talk, just takes a swing. Mikey ducks, darts forward, and stomps his knee in. "Fuck!" says the mask, and Mikey freezes for just a second at the unexpected reminder that there's a real person under the costume. Then the guy kicks Mikey's foot and bends a toe backwards. Mikey loses the pity and wrenches the guy's head to one side. He goes limp.
"Jesus Christ," Mikey says out loud. He might have just killed someone. He drops to his knees and checks the man's pulse. He's still alive, just unconscious. Mikey debates finishing the job for about a quarter of a second, but he can't do it. He's pretty sure he'll get there given enough of the desperation that's gradually boiling up in him from life in the desert, but not yet.
He looks in the back of the truck first. There's no cargo. He climbs into the cab and shuffles through the glove compartment. There's an unmarked white plastic package, which he tears open to find something that looks edible. He's suspicious of it, but not suspicious enough not to eat it. He's fucking hungry, and whatever it is, it's dense enough to fill his stomach.
"Come in, 5628," crackles a voice from the dashboard. "5628, are you there? Have you investigated the unidentified body?"
Mikey thinks fast. He holds down a button next to the speaker, hoping it's the right one for a response. "Yeah, it was dead."
"Probably one of the morons who tried to get away," says the dashboard. "Leave it. How long is it going to take you to get back to Battery City?"
"Uh," says Mikey. He has no idea what or where Battery City is. "I might be a little late."
The voice seems to accept this. "I'll have the dracs at the gate stay out until you get here."
"Thanks," Mikey says and lets his finger drop from the button. He's not sure what he's getting himself into, but at least the truck has air conditioning. He hasn't felt this cool since the weather started getting unbearable in early spring.
He strips the truck driver of his white outfit and puts it on over the T-shirt and basketball shorts he's still wearing. There's an ID card attached to a pocket. With any luck, that will be enough to get him past their security without any passwords or anything. He leaves his ripped-up Vans next to the guy, switching them out for the tidy white boots. They're a little big, but they'll work. He contemplates the radio transmitter for a minute, weighing the risks of someone finding it on him against the risks of leaving it for the guy to find when he wakes up. Eventually, he climbs up the billboard and hides it in the scaffolding.
The last thing he puts on is the mask. It's disturbingly comfortable.
He figures Battery City is probably somewhere along the highway in the direction the guy was going. He keeps his eyes peeled as he drives for side roads or tire tracks, but in the end it turns out that the highway (which is indeed Highway 10, according to the signs no one's bothered to take down) leads him directly where he wants to go. There's a blockade at the edge of the city, but they wave him through without even stopping the truck. The security guards are wearing even weirder masks with wide rubber mouths and wild fake hair. They must be what the voice on the radio meant by "dracs."
There's a fork in the road after the blockade, but the left side of it is helpfully labeled "TRUCKS," so Mikey doesn't have to make any wild guesses about his route. It leads him past a series of buildings labeled "Better Living Industries" and straight to a loading dock, where he turns the truck around and backs it up to the concrete ledge by the roll-up door. He's glad no one is watching, because it takes him four tries to line it up right.
He pulls the keys from the ignition, locks the truck, gets out and looks around. There's a side door to the building that looks locked. He approaches it tentatively and discovers a card slot, into which his new ID card fits perfectly. The door clicks open.
"There you are," someone says the second he walks through the door. It's another person in white. "Where's your transfer paperwork?"
"Um," says Mikey.
She laughs. "Did you leave it in the truck again? I don't know why the hell we keep you around sometimes. Go on, go on, don't forget to lock the truck behind you this time."
Mikey heads back out, grateful for the apparent incompetence of the man he's impersonating. He finds a clipboard stuffed down next to the driver's seat. There's a sheet of paper on it with a list of names and a signature at the bottom that could conceivably be transfer paperwork. He takes it back into the building, careful to lock the truck again.
"There we go. Hey, you even remembered to get it signed at the factory. Great." She takes custody of the clipboard and starts heading down the hall, then turns around. "Hurry up, we're gonna be late for the mandatory viewing tonight if you don't get a move on. If I get fined for missing it, you're paying."
Mikey trots after her down the long white hall. The place is like a cross between an office building and a hospital. They end up in a room that looks like a lecture hall with a screen at the front. The chairs are filled with masked people in white.
"Just in time," says yet another masked man at the door. The woman flashes her ID, and Mikey quickly follows suit. The man makes two checkmarks on a list and gestures for them to sit down.
An image of a neatly dressed Asian woman appears on the screen. "Rescue efforts and removal procedures are progressing as planned," she says calmly. "Our factories are functional now that the conflagration operation has been terminated and the workforce is present and organized. Objections have been minimal, and the zones are clear. The new population of Battery City is safe and provided for."
A graph appears on the screen of "desirables" and "undesirables" present in Battery City and in the factories. The woman's voice explains the figures and how they relate to what Mikey can only assume is their master plan to take over the world or something. This shit is creeping him out. He really doesn't like the term "conflagration operation," either. It implies that the fires that just ruined his life were intentional.
"Remember, you are the faces of BL/ind," says the woman. "Our city looks to you for standards of acceptable behavior. Represent the company at all times, and always take your medication."
After the video is over, the woman sitting next to him turns and says, "Wow, did you see those numbers? That truckload of worker bees you took over today was practically the last one."
Mikey wants very badly to leave. Fortunately, everyone else is standing up, and it's easy to slip away from the woman in the sea of masks. He goes back to the loading docks, approaching the roll-up door from the inside this time, and finds a fleet of motorcycles in the garage behind it. He roots through the shelves and drawers nearby, looking for the keys. While he's searching, he stumbles across a plastic bag containing stacks of the white-packaged food he ate in the truck earlier. He slings the bag over his shoulder.
Finally, he finds a cabinet with rows of numbered keyrings. He grabs the key labeled "03" and sticks it into the ignition of the motorcycle in the third parking spot, putting on the white helmet hanging on its handlebar. A quick swipe of his ID card, and the door rumbles up to let him out. He closes it behind him, because even though it's inevitable that they'll realize the motorcycle is gone, he'd rather give himself as much time as possible to get away before that happens.
It's after dark by now, and the blockades are unmanned. Mikey files away this information for future reference as he rides past them. A few miles out of the city, he passes a forlorn figure plodding along the highway in his discarded Vans. Mikey remembers what the woman said about the truck containing people being shipped off to work in factories, and tightens his grip on the handlebars to stop himself mowing the bastard down.
He stops at the Starbucks billboard to retrieve his radio transmitter and turns it on. "Hey, anyone listening?" he says into it.
"Jesus, Mikey, where the fuck are you?" Gerard grumps immediately from the tiny speaker.
Mikey grins. "Highway 10. I'm on a motorcycle, I'll be back soon."
"You're where on a what now?"
"I'll tell you about it when I get back," Mikey says, straddling the bike. "I've got food," he adds.
"Ooh, drop the fucking transmitter and get your ass back here, then."
***
The first time Mikey realizes there are other people living in the desert is when one of them tries to siphon the fuel from his stolen motorcycle.
Steve, Gerard, and Ricky are all off trying to drag home an abandoned trailer Gerard said he found a few miles away. Mikey is sitting in the shack, munching on his nails and trying to figure out how to investigate the factories in the old city without getting himself killed. He still has the white outfit, and it's even mostly clean (except for the boots, which he's been wearing), but there's a lot of risk inherent in impersonating an employee of BL/ind. Of course, there's also a lot of risk inherent in going in without cover.
The incongruous sound of running water distracts him from his planning. It sounds like it's coming from outside. He gets up to check it out and discovers that the noise is not water but gasoline, hitting the bottom of a bucket held by a frizzy-haired guy he's never seen before.
"Hey!" Mikey says, lunging for the tubing sticking out of his gas tank. The guy jumps and tries to run with the bucket, but Mikey snags him by the collar and hangs on tight. "No way, dude. Put it down."
The guy reluctantly sets down the bucket. Mikey tugs him into the shack. "Whoa," says Frank from his pile of burlap. "Who's this?"
"I dunno, who are you?" Mikey asks the guy. He looks between them suspiciously. Mikey sits down and pats the floor next to him. "C'mon, we're not gonna bite. Do you know anything about Battery City or the factories?"
"Yeah," says the guy. "I'm squatting near the factories. Name's Ray." He sits down. "Um, sorry about the gas thing. I thought you were a drac."
"Reasonable assumption," says Mikey. "What do you know about them?"
Ray shrugs. "They try to kill me. I try to kill them. So far I'm winning."
They pepper him with questions. He doesn't know much about Battery City, but he's been living in an abandoned car dealership near the edge of the city since the fires stopped, so he knows all about BL/ind's factory setup. He says most of the product they're turning out consists of pills and canned food, but there are also assembly lines for clothing, weapons, and other things Mikey would really like to have.
"Show me," he says to Ray. "It's close enough that we can walk, right? I'd rather conserve fuel." Ray nods, standing up.
"Mikey," says Frank. He's looking up with a wrinkled forehead. "Shouldn't you wait until the others get back? It'll be dangerous, and Steve knows more about sneaking around and stealing stuff than you do."
Mikey shakes his head. "He can go steal stuff himself if he wants it."
"We're all in this together, though," says Frank.
"Yeah, well, I don't see anyone else producing vehicles and food, not to mention playing Bond to figure out what the hell is going on here," Mikey snaps. "I'm sharing my shit with you guys because you saved my ass from combustion, but that doesn't mean you get to tell me what to do."
Frank looks stunned. "None of us could do this by ourselves, Mikey. If we start keeping track of favors, we're gonna need a flowchart."
"Then make one."
"Mikey, quit pretending you don't give a shit about us, okay?" Frank says. "I know you do. You're just being a dick. You gotta stop trying to excuse your dickitude by pretending to be heartless."
Mikey grabs the BL/ind ID off the uniform shirt and leads Ray out the door without another word.
It's a long walk to the old city. On the way, Ray points out the car dealership where he's staying. "In case you ever need a favor," he says, quirking an eyebrow. Mikey feels a little embarrassed for getting into shit with Frank in front of a stranger, but he doesn't say anything.
The BL/ind factories are in a part of town that was abandoned years ago, long before the fires. It's full of soot-covered warehouses, but some of them are less sooty than others, and when Mikey looks closely he can see wood under all the grey and black dust.
"The warehouses they're using didn't burn," Ray says. "I guess they must have treated them somehow before they set the fires."
"Which one has clothes?" Mikey asks. He knows he should stock up on food and water, but he's really fucking sick of these basketball shorts.
Ray points to one of the warehouses. "Good luck, man," he says and skedaddles. Mikey doesn't blame him.
He tries the ID badge on the card slider by the door. It doesn't work. They probably disabled it as soon as they knew he had it. He finds the building's loading dock instead and camps out around the corner. It's about an hour before one of the white trucks shows up. The driver backs it up to the door, opens it, and disappears inside for long enough for Mikey to slip into the warehouse.
He ends up on a balcony overlooking the main room. It's full of tired-looking people producing various textiles. Mikey stays there for a minute, watching them. It's not until he realizes he's searching for Gabe's face that it occurs to him that Gabe might still be alive.
He'd assumed that everyone at the reservoir died. This is, in retrospect, a pretty baseless assumption. If BL/ind had wanted them all dead, they would have left them to burn instead of piling them in the back of a truck. Gabe was making a lot of trouble, so it's not likely that he made it, but it's possible.
He's not here, anyway. Mikey wanders around the factory until he finds a few boxes of finished clothing (all black and white--what is it with these people and their grayscale lives?) and roots through them, coming up with a pair of black jeans, a white shirt, and a white faux-leather jacket. He puts them on, ditching his tattered pajamas in a trash receptacle, and snags a few extra pairs of socks. He thinks about getting clothes for the rest of them, but they were all more appropriately dressed for the desert in the first place than he was, and he'd have to carry anything he took out of here all the way back to the shack.
Then he drops the socks, because someone is shooting at him. Someone is shooting a ray gun at him.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he mutters, dropping flat behind the cardboard boxes of clothes. He crawls away from the direction the lasers (lasers, what the hell) are coming from. Just as he rounds the corner, a beam cuts one of the boxes in half.
Mikey is so screwed.
He gets out of the building by sheer luck and legpower, running faster than he ever has in his life. Once he's out the door, he takes off down the street, frantically looking for somewhere to hide because he cannot outrun a fucking laser.
Whoever's behind him, probably a drac, is still firing. Mikey tries to run in zigzags to avoid the beams without losing ground, which doesn't work so well. He doesn't register the noise of the motorcycle until it pulls up next to him and he's dragged bodily across the back of it. His first thought is shit, they've got me, but obviously the drac is trying to shoot him, not capture him. He raises his head to look at the person driving the bike. It's Gerard.
It's too loud to speak, so Mikey is silent until Gerard parks the bike outside the shack. The trailer they were off fetching is out front next to the Trans Am. "I--" Mikey starts.
"Don't even fuckin' wanna hear it," says Gerard and stalks inside.
Mikey follows him sheepishly. Frank is sitting against the wall, refusing to look at him. Mikey stuffs his hands in his new pockets and discovers that he managed to stick a pair of socks in there before the shooting started. He takes them out and holds them out to Frank.
"Am I gonna owe you one for this?" snipes Frank. "Should I draw up a chart so we can keep score?"
Mikey lets his hand fall back to his side, waits a moment, and then holds out the socks again. Frank sighs and takes them, because he's less of a jerk than Mikey is. Mikey knew that already.
"Were those actual lasers they were shooting at you?" Gerard asks.
Mikey lights up. "Yeah, fuck, we've got to get our hands on some of those guns. I bet Ray knows where they're making them."
Frank groans. "You should have left him to get toasted and saved yourself some time, Gerard," he says, and Mikey knows they're okay.
***
Ray hasn't seen the guns, but he knows which factory produces weapons and electronics, and the ray guns have got to fall under one of those categories. They formulate another plan to get supplies from the factory--an actual plan this time, rather than Mikey's blind dash, which he admits in retrospect was a poor decision.
("Poor decision, my ass," says Frank. "You're a fucking moron, Mikey. Own it.")
Ricky takes one of the radio transmitters and stakes out the factory Ray points out. When a loaded truck leaves that building, he radios Steve, who hides with Gerard and Mikey on the far side of a billboard a few miles up the highway. The motorcycle Mikey stole is parked at the base of the billboard. Their theory is that if the truck drivers will stop to investigate a body lying on the ground, they'll probably stop to check out an abandoned company motorcycle.
The guy who was driving the last truck didn't have a gun, but that truck was empty, so they can't be sure what to expect. "If he's got a long-range weapon, for fuck's sake stay put," Steve says. He's looking at Mikey.
"I don't actually want to die," Mikey says. Steve gives him a dubious look. Mikey really wishes they would drop it already.
Their target comes into view. "Ssh," says Gerard, like the driver can hear them through half a mile and a truck.
It works beautifully. When he gets close, the driver stops as predicted and gets out to approach the bike. He's not carrying a gun. They left some of Steve's old junk in the saddlebag closer to the billboard, to keep him busy with his back to them. They shimmy down the billboard pole and jump him from behind. Gerard and Mikey hold him down while Steve roots through the back of the truck with a duffel bag. He finds electrical tape and tosses it to them. "Keep him still," he says. He puts another few rolls of the tape in his duffel bag, along with batteries and a few other potentially useful things in the truck, before yelling, "Score!" and brandishing something vaguely gun-shaped.
"Does it work?" Mikey asks.
Steve aims it at the rear right tire of the truck and pulls the trigger. A beam of light flashes, and the tire explodes with a loud bang.
"Yup," Steve announces unnecessarily. He squats down to look at the tire. Mikey can see a smoking hole in the side.
"How many are there?" asks Gerard, wrapping the electrical tape around the truck driver's ankles.
"There was just one in the box, but there might be more boxes," says Steve. He clambers back into the truck and starts tossing boxes out the back. "Looks like nine total."
Mikey checks that the tape will hold, then hops into the truck and helps Steve take the guns out of the boxes and put them in the duffel. "Anything else interesting in here?"
"Mostly batteries."
Mikey snorts. "Truth in advertising, I guess." He fills the rest of the space in the duffel with batteries while Steve opens up the rest of the boxes.
"Whoa, hey!" Steve says, pulling a sheet of something out of a box. "Take this, too. We can use it for solar power. Okay, the rest of this is no good to us. Let's fill up the bike's tank and book."
Mikey takes the duffel back to the shack on the motorcycle. Gerard and Steve follow on foot, leaving the truck driver taped up in the cab.
Ricky is thrilled to bits about the photovoltaic whatever, and he and Steve spend the next few days huddled together in a corner, messing with things Mikey doesn't begin to understand. While they're busy with that, Mikey and Gerard get all Highlander on BL/ind's asses. Now that they have their own ray guns, they can just flatten the trucks' tires from a distance instead of tricking the drivers into stopping, which was risky and wouldn't have worked much longer anyway.
The drivers start carrying guns too, but Gerard is an unexpectedly good shot and usually manages to drop them before they can do any damage. Mikey's aim isn't quite as good, but he learns quickly. The first time he kills one freaks him out more than it should, given that he was expecting it to happen sooner or later, but after a while it gets easier. It helps that they depersonalize themselves in advance by all looking exactly alike.
Battery City, Mikey discovers, gets its water from a pipeline to the ocean. They try tapping the pipe, but the purification system is evidently on the city side of the pipe, and saltwater isn't helpful. Eventually, they figure out that clean water is carried to the old city in tanks for the factory workers, and Gerard and Mikey start hijacking water trucks.
The food selection, or lack thereof, is puzzling. "I don't get it," Mikey says as they lug boxes of canned goop to the shack. "They've clearly got plenty of resources, but all they're making to eat is energy bars and dog food."
Gerard shrugs, holding the door open with his shoulder. Mikey ducks inside. Frank is doing something that looks like sewing. "Whatcha up to, Frank?" Mikey says, depositing his load on the floor.
"Masks!" Frank waves around a piece of white fabric with holes cut in it. "'Cause you guys are, like, burglars now."
"I don't know if I really want to jump on the white uniform bandwagon," Mikey says.
Frank waves this aside. "We'll figure out a way to dye them or something."
"Holy shit," says Ricky from the corner, where he's been bent over the record player for the past week. It's now quietly but definitely playing the Beatles. "Holy shit, holy shit, we did it!"
"Holy shit!" Frank drops his masks and dives onto Ricky's back, wrapping his arms around his neck. Ricky turns his head and kisses Frank full on the mouth.
"You don't know how lucky you are, boy," sings Paul McCartney into the dead silence.
Frank freezes for a long moment, then jerks back. "Don't," he whispers.
"Fuck, I'm sorry," says Ricky, eyes wide.
"It's okay, I'm not... just don't."
"Fuck," Ricky says again and rushes outside.
Frank drops his head into one hand and groans softly. "I was hoping this wouldn't be a problem for a while," he says into his palm.
"He was sorta getting some mixed signals," Mikey points out. "You probably shouldn't molest him like that if you're not willing to follow through."
"I know." Franks looks up at him miserably. "It's my fault. I thought maybe in a few years, you know? But he's a baby. I can't." He sighs. "Could you go make sure he's okay?"
"You broke it, you fix it," says Mikey.
"Please?"
"Okay, okay."
Ricky's sitting on the trunk of the Trans Am, staring out into the desert sunset. Mikey hops up next to him and stays there for a few minutes, not saying anything.
"This really sucks," says Ricky finally.
Mikey nods. "Being fifteen sucked for me too, and I didn't even have to deal with all this desert survival shit on top of not getting laid."
"It isn't just about not getting laid," says Ricky.
"Yeah, it is," says Mikey. "You know how I know? Because everything else, you already have. Frank's nuts about you. He loves you, and he tells you so. He takes care of you and he lets you take care of him. He's always crawling all over you. The only thing that's missing is orgasms."
Ricky's quiet for a moment, then mumbles, "Fine, okay, it's about not getting laid."
"Yeah," says Mikey. "It sucks."
***
Steve and Ricky start broadcasting with the record player. They don't know if anyone is listening, but it makes them all feel better, knowing that there's music in the air. Ricky babbles to Ray about their "radio station," and the next time Ray comes by, he brings a tape player, a microphone, and a stack of cassettes.
"Where the hell did you get those?" Steve demands.
"My friend Vicky-T," says Ray. "She used to work in the factories, but she escaped. She's been listening to your radio station since I told her about it yesterday. She told me to give these to you."
Ricky's face lights up. "We have a listener!" He digs out some batteries and opens up the back of the tape player.
Mikey's more interested in this new character. "Where did she get this stuff?" He hasn't seen any kind of entertainment products coming out of BL/ind's factories at all.
"It's hers," says Ray. "Shit was going down for days before the fires started. She figured it was gearing up to something and hid her stuff out of town." He points to the tapes. "One of those is her band. The one marked MGMK."
"She was in a band?" says Mikey.
Ray grins. "Is. She is in a band. Mad Gear and the Missile Kid. They're escaped factory workers. They have a recording studio made up of the shit she saved. It's in one of the burned-up buildings that didn't collapse all the way."
"Dang," says Ricky. "Here I thought we were being all radical by broadcasting music out in the dystopian desert, and they're actually recording?" He gets the tape player hooked up to the speakers and puts on the cassette.
Drugs gimme drugs gimme drugs I don't need it but I'll sell whatcha got take the cash and I'll keep it...
Mikey listens, spellbound, until the track ends. When it does, Steve grabs the tape player and the radio transmitter. "This one goes out to our literal number one listener," he says into the transmitter. "Thanks for the tunes, Victory Trick." He starts the song over on the air.
"Victory Trick?" asks Ray.
Steve shrugs. "Better not use real names. We don't know who might be listening."
"Ooh, ooh, code names!" says Frank. "I wanna be Fun Ghoul." Frank has probably been saving that up for years, on the off chance that he might someday be in need of a ridiculous pseudonym.
"I gotta think about mine," says Ricky.
"I don't," says Mikey, thinking of Gabe kicking ass and smiling, and of this music that makes him want to kick ass and smile too.
***
Gerard has been acting weird for a while before anyone except Mikey notices. Mikey doesn't say anything because he's not sure exactly what it is that's off about him. But when Gerard suggests they turn off the music, even Frank can't miss that something's going on.
"What the hell, Gerard?" he says, bewildered.
"It just seems unnecessary," Gerard says in a quiet voice that doesn't sound right on him. "What's the point? What's the point of any of this? We could be living in Battery City with clean clothes and clean water and food we don't have to kill anyone for."
Mikey exchanges a glance with Steve. "Gerard, what's going on?"
"I'm sick of dust," says Gerard. "I'm sick of color. I want things to be simple."
"Are you on drugs?" says Ricky.
Mikey didn't think that was it, but a flash of guilt crosses Gerard's face and suddenly he knows what's going on. "The medication," he says. "The pills they're feeding people in the city. He's got some. He must have taken them from one of the trucks."
Gerard crumples to the floor, clutching his trench coat closely around him. "I just want life to be simple," he whispers. "I'm tired. I want to be happy."
"Shit," says Mikey.
They take the pills away, leaving Gerard miserable and useless. Mikey hates seeing it, but he doesn't know what else to do. He understands now why BL/ind isn't producing any food except energy bars and canned muck--the pills make Gerard hate all sensation.
He tries to stay with Gerard as much as he can, and that's the only reason he's in the shack when Ricky plays the song.
You're the broken glass in the morning light, be a burning star if it takes all night, so just save yourself and I'll hold them back tonight...
Mikey's head snaps up. "What song is this?"
"Hm?" says Ray, who's sitting with Ricky by the broadcasting equipment. "New MGMK. Vicky-T gave it to me this morning."
"Can you take me to Vicky-T?" says Mikey. "I really need to talk to her. And her band."
***
Mikey wouldn't have expected that the first thing he would do upon seeing Gabe alive and well would be to punch him in the face, but then, he wouldn't have expected that the first thing Gabe would do would be to ambush him and stick his tongue down his throat. It kind of takes him off guard.
Gabe hits the deck with a loud thunk. He's wearing all-white clothes, obviously stolen from the factories like Mikey's. "I knew that would happen if I ever did that," he says from the floor, rubbing his jaw. "Ow. Totally worth it. Ow. It's good to see you, man."
"You asshole, you're not dead," says Mikey. "Why didn't you tell me? I didn't know until I heard that song."
"How was I supposed to find you? I didn't know where the hell you ran off to. I recorded 'Save Yourself' for the radio station 'cause I thought you'd probably be listening. I didn't think it would get you here this fast."
"The radio station is us, dude," says Mikey, and he's surprised to find that it's true. Steve and Ricky have done all the work getting the music on the air, but Mikey still feels like he's a part of it.
"Shiny!" Gabe springs to his feet. "Check this place out, you're gonna wet yourself." Gabe leads him down a surprisingly soot-free hall to a large room full of recording equipment.
"We split a cable from one of the factory generators for power," says Gabe, fingering an amp. "Vicky-T has all kinds of electronic crap. Like a voice scrambler thing. You couldn't tell the vocals were me, could you?"
Mikey could not.
He sits down on the floor, leaning against the wall, and lets Gabe tell him all about his enslavement, escape, and subsequent recording contract. "It's all about the Cobra," Gabe says earnestly, "it's about keeping the party spirit alive even though we're all totally fucked. And you guys are helping, you're getting our message out there. There aren't many of us now, but there will be. People aren't going to put up with this Better Living bullshit, being drugged off their asses all the time. They'll keep squirming out to the zones, and when they do, we'll be here with a beat they can dance to. The beat matters, Mikey."
And maybe Mikey is going insane too, but after living in the bleak desert without music for a few weeks and then getting it back, he's starting to understand. He gets why Ricky couldn't help kissing Frank when the White Album started playing on the craptastic ancient record player. The beat does matter.
"Hey dickface, I finished that other song I said you should wait for me to finish before you sent Ray off to the station this morning," says a familiar girl, walking in. She blinks at Mikey. "Oh hey, he finally found you, huh? Glad you didn't get incinerated."
Of course Vicky-T is the one who went down fighting with Gabe at the reservoir. It all makes sense. "Glad you didn't get pounded to a pulp by riot batons," Mikey responds.
Formalities over with, she turns to Gabe. "Great, now you can shut the hell up about him. Here, listen to this." She clamps a pair of what look like fairly high-quality headphones over his ears.
Mikey waits quietly until Gabe is distracted by the music, then says, "He talked about me?"
"He's in love with you," says Vicky-T. "Or he's an incredibly creepy pervert stalker. Actually, to be honest, my money is on embracing the power of 'and'."
***
Gabe rides to the shack on the back of Mikey's motorcycle and excitedly pops the new song into the tape player.
Everyone looks at him, even Gerard, who hasn't lifted his head in two days. "Gabe?" he says.
"Sh, listen to this, this shit is awesome," says Gabe.
It's bouncy happy music about how fucked the world is, just like the rest of MGMK's songs, but for some reason this one makes Gerard sit up and pay attention. At the line we'd be killing ourselves by sleeping in he looks at Mikey, eyes shining, and Mikey is an instant convert to the cult of the cobra.
"What does the Japanese mean?" Gerard asks after the song is over.
Gabe shrugs. "Um, I think the part at the beginning is something like 'life is short and the road is dangerous, so let's dance.' But I don't remember all of it."
"Play it again," says Gerard.
They're halfway through listening to the song for the third time when a drac sticks its head in the door.
"Fucking," says Mikey, diving for a gun. Frank beats him to it, blowing a hole through the drac's head. Mikey grabs a gun in each hand, yanks his BL/ind mask over his head in the hopes that it'll keep them from shooting at him right away, and charges outside. There are at least ten of them, six on motorcycles and the rest pouring out of a white company sedan. He guns down three before they have time to react, and dives behind the trailer.
He gets two more as they come around the trailer, then Gabe is standing in front of him and Gerard is picking them off from the doorway. Mikey tries to help, but Gabe is in his way. "Move, motherfucker," he snarls, but Gerard is already done.
"We gotta go," Steve is saying. "They know where we are, we gotta find someplace else." He's lugging the record player and the solar power setup to the Trans Am. "Come on, help me get this shit in the car."
"Where are we gonna go?" asks Ricky.
"I know a place," says Gabe. "There's a diner northwest of here, further from the highway. No one was squatting there a couple weeks ago when I found it."
Steve is stacking records in the trunk. "Sounds good, come on, let's go."
The diner is much bigger than their little shack, and a lot more solid. It's still hot, but if they open the windows at night and close them at dawn, it might keep cool for a while. Steve and Ricky immediately take over a back room for the radio station and start in on getting the solar power working again.
Gabe pokes around in some closets and comes back with a bunch of paint cans. "Check it out," he says. "Colors. Haven't seen a whole lot of those in a while."
Gerard grabs them and starts painting absolutely everything, singing under his breath about getting off the dance floor. When he's done, Mikey's helmet has been turned into a freaky yellow and red happy face, the guns are all bright primary colors, the Trans Am has a giant spider on its hood, and the tape player Vicky-T gave them is decorated with a cartoony explosion and the word BOOM. Gerard even paints the masks Frank made, a badass robber clown kind of aesthetic, and Mikey has to admit they look sort of cool.
"Wahahahahoooooo!" hollers Ricky as he zooms through the kitchen on roller skates, making Mikey jump. Frank collapses in giggles. Ricky does a few laps and then skids to a halt in front of them. "I found them in a supply closet," he says, grinning widely. "There was some hair dye, too, look." He offers forward a couple of small unopened boxes.
Mikey bleaches his hair and Gerard's, then dyes Gerard's pink. The color looks good on him.
***
Mikey is sitting in one of the red vinyl booths, carefully painting the words GOOD LUCK on his motorcycle helmet's visor in white, when Gabe finds him. Gerard hasn't been using the white paint much, because they're all pretty fucking sick of white, but Mikey feels that it sends a clear message.
Gabe sits down across from him. "They've got the radio broadcasting again," he says. "Steve's calling himself DJ Dr. Death Defying."
"Mhm," says Mikey, concentrating on keeping his lines straight. He's almost done with the K.
"He says you all picked code names for the station. I think I'm gonna be Fang Tango."
"Mm."
Gabe picks at his cuticles, not looking at Mikey. "He says you named yourself Kobra Kid."
Mikey finishes the letter and sets the helmet aside on the sticky table to dry. "Why didn't you let me fight?" he says. "Why did you get in my way like that? You think you can defend me better than I can defend myself?"
"No," says Gabe. "I'm not thinking rationally when you're in danger. It's an instinct. I can't let you get hurt."
Mikey takes a deep breath. "I guess we should talk about the kissing, huh."
"Yeah. Um, sorry about that."
"Are you?"
Gabe looks up, meeting his eyes. "Not a fucking chance."
"Vicky-T thinks you're in love with me," says Mikey. "Either that or you're a perverted stalker."
"Love," Gabe informs him firmly. "Definitely love. Trust me, I know from perverted stalking."
Mikey leans his head against the vinyl-coated bench seat back, closing his eyes to get away from the look on Gabe's face. "Either one of us could die out here. Any of us could die any second. Getting too close to each other makes us more vulnerable."
"That is a falsehood and an inaccuracy and a pile of steaming horse manure," Gabe announces. "Safety in numbers, dude. Getting too close to each other makes us fucking invincible."
It's not true, Mikey's sure it's not. Throwing himself in front of Mikey every time anything starts going down is not conducive to Gabe's health, and it's blind luck that he's still alive right now after all the shit he's pulled. But fuck, he wants to touch Gabe, and he can hear music coming from the broadcast room--I don't want to hold back, I don't want to slip down, I don't want to think back to the one thing that I know I should have done. He'll take the sign.
"Come here," he whispers. Gabe disappears under the table and pops up on Mikey's side of the booth next to him in about a quarter of a second, but he waits patiently until Mikey leans over and kisses him.
Once it's clear Mikey isn't going to change his mind, the patience vanishes. Gabe manhandles Mikey out of the booth and onto the floor, never breaking contact with his mouth. The linoleum is dirty and gross, but Mikey barely notices, focused on Gabe's lips and hands and the hard-on he can feel pressed against his hip. He pushes Gabe's shirt up and lets him grab his ass under his jeans. He digs his teeth into Gabe's bottom lip, tugging sharply before letting his mouth fall open and his head fall back. Gabe sucks at his neck, rutting up against him through his clothes.
Mikey's head bumps into one of the paint cans. He reaches up to shove it away, but Gabe grabs his wrist. "Hang on, let me," he says, dipping his fingers into the paint. They come out bright red. Gabe grins widely. "Color, Mikey," he says, and grabs Mikey's ass again, smearing the red paint across his skin.
Mikey gapes at him. "You fucker," he says, and grabs a handful of paint to wipe across Gabe's chest in retaliation. Somewhere in there, though, it stops being retaliation, probably around the moment he notices that Gabe's nipples are rock-hard. He rubs one of them with the paint, twisting the slick bud in his fingers. Gabe moans and kisses Mikey hard, thrusting his tongue into his mouth.
Mikey wriggles out of his shirt and straddles Gabe, grabbing for another can. He pops off the lid and pours blue paint across Gabe's stomach, then presses down and writhes, the slippery skin against his torso a stark contrast to the rough friction in his pants. Gabe is thinking the same thing, rolling on top and pushing his hand under Mikey's waistband, still coated in red paint.
"Our clothes are going to be ruined," Mikey murmurs.
"Our clothes," says Gabe, "are going to be awesome. You don't want to wear white anyway." He strokes Mikey slowly, streaking his cock with red. Mikey lifts his hips, trying to get more, trying to feel everything he can while he can. Gabe laughs breathlessly and cracks open a can of yellow paint, covering his other hand with it and stroking it over Mikey's jaw. "God, you're beautiful," he says and kisses Mikey again.
There's a drop of paint on Mikey's eyelash, tinging everything with a haze of blue. Gabe's cheek is splattered with blue and yellow and green, which inspires Mikey to mix more of the yellow and blue to get more green. Gabe loosens his hold on Mikey's cock and slips his own alongside it, squeezing them both, rubbing until Mikey can't bite back his moans.
Mikey comes first, and Gabe kneels up over him, jacking off and swirling Mikey's come into the red paint on his belly, turning it pink until he dilutes it with his own semen. "That's disgusting," pants Mikey, although it's not. Gabe grins like he picked up on the unspoken thought and flops down with his head on Mikey's shoulder.
Mikey turns to kiss him again. "Go find something we can wipe up with," he says.
Gabe grumbles but heaves himself to his feet and wanders off to dig through the cupboards, shedding his paint-spattered clothes along the way. Mikey shakes his head, pulling up his pants. He's barely gotten them zipped up when Ricky rolls in on his skates and topples into the booth. "So, John McCrea extracted your head from your ass, huh?" he chirps, rolling one skate back and forth on the floor.
"You played that on purpose?" Mikey asks, trying to sound indignant but only managing vaguely amused.
"Mood music," says Ricky. "I figure someone should be getting some around here, even if it can't be me. You and Gabe have no reason not to be fucking. None at all."
Right now, Mikey has a hard time arguing with that.
***
"I'm gonna be seriously pissed if you get yourself killed for real this time," says Mikey. "Now that I know what kind of orgasms I'll be missing out on without you around."
Gabe nibbles on his ear.
"So what, you're gonna play MGMK songs to the residents of Battery City?"
"Nope," says Gabe. "We're starting a new project. The zones need one kind of music, but these people need something different." He perches on a barstool at the counter and sings, "In the city twilight everything was all right, they'll drag you home if you don't hold your ground, so don't back down. We were out but we're taking it back."
Mikey folds his arms. "Did the Cobra tell you to do this, too?"
"The Cobra is a metaphor, dude," Gabe says. "It's the right thing to do. Music is what we've got, so music is how we'll win. Art is the weapon."
"They didn't guard the gates after dark when I went in, but they might have amped up security since we started gunning down their trucks." Mikey rests his hands on Gabe's hips. "Good luck, man."
"Your helmet already wished me luck on your behalf," Gabe tells him solemnly. Mikey laughs and walks him outside. He and Gerard stand there in front of the diner, watching as Gabe and Vicky-T disappear on Mikey's motorcycle.
"They're probably gonna die," says Mikey.
"You're such a killjoy, Mikey," says Gerard.
Mikey nods. "Yup. We're all fucking killjoys. We're gonna kill all their shiny white medicated fucking joy, and we're gonna replace it with color and music and the real world. Let's go steal another water truck, we're running low."
Gerard slings an arm over Mikey's shoulder. "Fabulous."