Pazuzu Trilogy Blog

Gaunt Rainbow, the Forth Revision (as in order or degree) is complete!

Sure, you can read the preview on Smashwords, but I thought I'd save you a few clicks and post the rewritten first chapter on the Pazuzu Trilogy. After all, she is the epic's progeny. Now warning, it is graphic but this is a horror story. Enjoy -

GAUNT RAINBOW
Matthew Sawyer

1 Journey from Mourning

“Crimson,” he says again.

The motorcycle looks neon purple, but Pamela ignores the salesman when he says crimson. The skinny, sweating man presents the color of the bike as either the biggest or the only selling point.

“C’mon, crimson is the color of hellfire,” he exaggerates, wide-eyed. “The same color as those things that ripped up Capital when you were a kid, remember them?”

Yeah, she remembers demons – the sheer variety of names for colors and an absence of brochures in the junk yard, and the lack of even a single Owner’s Manual, lets this guy to use any inspired word he wants to describe hues. In her hunt for a bike, here and other sales lots, Pamela hears a lot of exotic, made-up names like “eggshell” and “oxblood.”

The color really doesn't matter. She plans to go into the desert alone. Too many people grow old and die while she watches – she just stands and watches. Pamela knows she is an angel of death, and not the romantic, metaphorical kind. She is a literal incarnation.

“I’ll even wash it for ya’,” the seller tempts Pamela. “But that will cost extra.”

Pamela squints at the thin, dark-skinned man. She hopes he recognizes the spiteful stare. The morning sun shines bright, so Pamela speaks to him in the shade of ramshackle shacks. They see each other in perfect detail. Wrinkles around his mouth deepen. His eyes slowly sink into his prominent skull and Pamela recognizes the signs. Her hunger ages this fellow.

Her body feeds from his life force and he’ll feel famished and exhausted very soon. She's like a parasite. Pangs never prick her stomach while she's around other people, and none bother her now.

The motorcycle looks good for traveling the Shur desert. A rigid chassis and aluminum frame means it will handle light and agile. Its high ground clearance will allow Pamela to stay away from roads. The machine promises an enduring, long, purposeful life and the color remains incidental.

Winter will also be kind to both Pamela and the machine. The temperature in the Shur never drops below freezing. Her exclusively black leather wardrobe looks good, protective and will be comfortable for months. The season also supply plenty of rabbits and coyotes for food. Pamela doesn’t worry about hunting and cooking them. They’d taste wild anyway, like copper.

Instead, she plans she will automatically consume the animals as she crosses their paths, just as she does with this man now. Merciful, instead of hurting him any further, Pamela decides she'll purchase the bike and find some genuine food.

“Seven thousand,” she offers low, under half the worth of the vehicle. She expects argument and barter will follow, but the negotiation won’t last long. Her body leeches the man’s energy. She hates herself when her mouth salivates. The reaction is probably some sick, unconscious acknowledgment that she knows her unconventional meal stands near and is absorbed into her aura.

“What?” the man yells. Sudden weariness sabotages his indignant outrage. He yawns. “I asked for twenty grand!”

That price was courageously high. The circumstances as to why an unused bike sits in a junkyard demands a clearer perspective on its worth to the local population. Pamela knows the price of the vehicle, especially here. Her childhood spent salvaging the dead city of the Chosen provides an education. Pamela uses the facts to her advantage.

“You won’t get anywhere close to that price in the encampment. And it cost you nothing to drag it out of the cursed city.”

“I had to risk my neck against ghosts and demons,” the man protests. He totters a bit, signaling the end of negotiations.

People living in the encampment make valid disclaimers like these the man lists. Many of them have watched Capital burn. Ghosts did not haunt the blackened limestone beyond the wall the city lies behind, but stories about demons are true, at least on that day when everyone in Capital had been judged wonting of sin.

As a little girl, Pamela lived in Capital with her mother. She, alone, walks from the wreckage of the city, the legendary sole survivor. Pamela walks through fire, naked except for a thick coat of soot. People in the encampment rush toward the cry of the little girl. Everyone believes she is a miracle, preserved though divine intervention. The absence of even a scratch on the girl is testament of the messiah who, that day, is said to have come to the Promised Land. Millions of Chosen perish and yet the Living God preserves this little girl, a little UnChosen girl.

Capital had been smote almost twenty years ago. Ever since, people dwelling in the encampment have scavenged the lost and abandoned remains of the city. Existence demands the brave forays into the haunted city of monsters. Pamela scavenged, too, until she accepts that she drinks the souls of the people who only sought to give her shelter. Her curse fills her with remorse and she thinks for a solution, long and hard.

Her own answers inevitably always seems to involve exiling herself to the Shur desert. Dying alone in the sands makes everyone safe, Pamela hopes. She's died once before, in an explosion preceding the flames that engulfed Capital, and returned to life in that very maelstrom of fiery bombs and monsters. Ever since that day, she’s never been sick or feels hungry. Any injury she suffers heals quickly – while the people around her suddenly age and grow thin.

“There are no ghosts or demons,” Pamela insists. She balls her hands into fists and pushes them into either side of her waist. The bartering requires a dose of reality. “You got this bike for free, poking around in ruins. Anything you get for it is all profit. I bet a lot of people here in the encampment have bikes like this, and will trade them for a loaf of stale bread and fresh water. I got both and all day to look for that deal.”

“Are we gonna haggle the price all morning?” the man asks. He looks fatigued. Stubborn irritability keeps him from taking Pamela’s offer then and there. Her comment about food most likely starts the audible growling in his stomach. The man might have had a full breakfast already, but he needs to eat for two this morning. Pamela knows to always remind people to find food once they wane. She never tells them anything more.

“Nobody in the encampment has that kind of money. That bike will sit here until it’s stolen or the military returns, and confiscates every looted thing they find.”

“The military ain’t coming back,” the old man grumbles. The tendons on the backs of his hands push against contracting skin. Stubbornness will be the death of him. Pamela takes a step backwards, ready to walk away. She refuses responsibility for any more death. When the dealer shrinks further, she takes a second step back.

“Okay,” the old man relents. He doesn't realize Pamela saves his life. Only the preserving a sale interests him “But you’re right. Nobody’s buying. How 'bout ten?”

“I said seven,” Pamela states. She has already won. The man’s ridiculous counter offer sounds like a last gasp for air. He is fortunate to literally have one. In Pamela’s dark past, people fatter and younger than him have dropped dead. She holds out a stack of bills in an assortment of large denominations.

“Fine,” the man answers with a gruff woof. He tosses the keys of the motorcycle to Pamela and takes the money from her gloved hand. The man collapses against a stripped car. He does not count the money.

“Hey,” the seller calls as Pamela straddles her new bike and kick-starts the engine. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

“You just need to eat,” Pamela advises before she drives away. She has another stop to make before leaving town. Her supplies are stashed in a shack at the center of the sprawled and overcrowded encampment. There, Pamela will have a chance to grab real food for herself.

Navigating the streets might be difficult; they always change direction and sometimes end abrupt and unexpectedly. Before Capital burned, temporary hovels often cropped up spontaneously and streets redirected around the hodgepodge of obstacles without notice. The new buildings sometimes last only a few hours. Surviving shacks often became permanent. Tenants are always performing shoddy patches to the damage inflicted by weather and age.

Pilgrims no longer come to Capital. Consequently, nobody comes to the encampment, but the people who remain still chaotically reshape their neighborhoods. The unorganized reconstruction originally continued out of habit but has become an obsessive-compulsive tradition.

The dynamic growth of the encampment once accommodated waves of people coming to and rejected from Capital. That city’s foundation lies upon the biblical Promised Land. Capital's brilliant white wall warns thieves and terrorists with ghosts. The wall still stands, but its gates are all open. The Chosen's military abandoned the city upon its destruction and the temporary return of the messiah.

Pamela decides she will seek that messiah in the desert, assuming he went into the Shur. She's heard stories that claim he came out of the Shur on the shoulder of a priest. She's met the messiah, when he was a boy years ago in Capital. He cured her blindness. That boy may have even brought her back to life after an explosion killed her. Nobody had greeted Pamela to her resurrection. The boy-messiah had vanished and everyone was dead, their smoking bones covered in ash.

If Pamela finds him, she will ask the messiah to heal her again. Once he lifts her parasitic vampirism, she will then ask him what happened in Capital. How and why did she die? Why is she cursed? There are so many questions. Pamela especially wants to know why she alone had been spared.

Everyone else had been killed when the warehouse ignited. Why did the messiah allow the bomb to explode in the first place? Crucial questions include – Why he did he leave the Promised Land and if will he return? Pamela can offer the messiah her service. She believes in him. Pamela is the living proof of his greatness, and disciples are a tough commodity to keep. The priest she remembered that boy traveled with, a man named Benedict, has also disappeared.

Before then, Pamela’s mother had learned of the messiah from an old woman at the indigo factories along the coast. Long ago, that old woman, the boy’s mother, announced the arrival of the messiah. The lady was miraculously made young again, before her mother's eyes – before the eyes of doubting witnesses. The old woman announced the ascension of her son, but she never returns.

The neglected ordination may have driven the Living God away. Pamela resolves herself to fulfill the praise for the returned messiah, if she ever finds him. The boy have been a little older than Pamela when they first met and he must now be a grown man. She always dreams of meeting him again.

When she was a little girl, she imagined he would find her in the encampment, they became friends and even more – the boy was the messiah after all. As an orphaned child, Pamela needs someone with strength and wisdom. The messiah incarnated those for her. Her mother died in the same explosion that killed Pamela the first time.

Pamela never knew her father. Her mother never speaks of him. His memory made her cry. Still, Pamela's heard rumors that the man had problems with military patrols after curfew in Capital, at a time when soldiers confined people to their homes at night. Pamela imagines soldiers took her father away.

Her memories of those childhood days in Capital consist only of sound, touch and smell. Those sensations became irrelevant when her sight was restored. Pamela was fine with that trade. Although, just the sight of poverty and crime in the encampment overwhelms her. If her other senses had remained as fine-tuned, as when she was a child, any additional sensitivity to the dismal stimuli would cripple her. The truly sad part of the city’s destruction was life in the encampment didn't change after Capital burned. People have always lived as they do today. Immediately after the destruction, many people used drugs peddled from heathen sympathizers, but even that escape eventually dried-up.

Pamela did not bother to use streets to reach her stash. She grew-up a native of the encampment. She knows shortcuts not subject to the changing nature of the place. Some people would describe her route to be a series of adjacent backyards, but calling any patch of ground in the encampment a backyard is generous and optimistic. Pamela exploits passages between opposite-facing shacks, each with openings large enough to accommodate the jutting handle bars of her motorcycle. The growling short, fat pipes rattle awake any night owl.

This shortcut comes to a dead end. A new dog house blocks Pamela’s path. She wriggles the bike back to the street – her destination still twenty minutes away. Luckily, a cart selling burritos looms ahead. Pamela recognizes the business. A family has pushed it around the encampment for at least a generation. Stainless steel panels preserve the restaurant from rust. Rotted, hard rubber wheels verge on crippling the mobility of the whole operation.

An old couple had sold hand-rolled burritos off this cart since before Pamela comes to the encampment. They become the encampment’s first victims of the little girl’s hunger. Both fall over dead while Pamela watches the woman heap tangy smelling shreds of meat into a flour tortilla. Pamela’s mouth had watered as her meal was prepared, but her hunger was sated when the old couple died. The memory helps her recognize the involuntary reaction to the nature her curse.

The grandchildren of the poor deceased couple took over the family business and now run the cart. Pamela appreciates young people and children. They're resilient against her automatic, leech-like consumption. Young people can eat a lot of food, too, which is the key and how to survive an encounter with a hungry Pamela.

“Rainbow,” calls a teenage girl from the cart. Kids in the encampment have given Pamela the nickname. They tease, in happy and friendly intent, her preference for black. Pamela thinks about trying other colors but she never feels any hue feels suitable. Black works perfectly, given her preference for a monochrome wardrobe.

Three sibling teenagers now operate the family cart business. The brother and both sisters attend the operation this morning and stock food for the next few days. Usually, a pair staff the operation alone at any given time. The girl who welcomes Pamela is the youngest sister. The girl’s brother, nearly eighteen, is the oldest, but they all are small children.

“Give me five egg burritos,” Pamela orders once she stops her bike before the food cart. The engine cuts off sharp and she removes the key.

“Nice bike,” the boy compliments. “We got soda.”

“Thanks,” Pamela answers. “The soda from Capital?”

“Yeah,” the youngest girl interjects. “I’m making runs now, too.”

Pamela addresses the young girl directly. “I’ll take whatever you find, Patty. There’s not much left of anything in there. Did you find it yourself?”

“Nah, Sally did. We carried out. Paul had to stay with the cart.”

“Good job, Sally,” Pamela says to the second girl. Sally matured quickly. The girl already possesses the shapely hips and breasts Pamela will never grow. Sally’s figure makes her jealous, in a nostalgic sort of way.

“Thanks,” answers Sally.

The food this morning looks like it has been pre-prepared. The teenagers either innovated or got lazy. The quality of food from vendors in the encampment is never the highest, anyway. Still, cooked food from a cart is the finest dining experience that can be found in the encampment.

As they're presented to her, Pamela stacks the five burritos on her left arm, braced against her ribs. Paul, the oldest of the three kids, hands Pamela an open bottle of warm cola.

Pamela gorges herself with the burritos while they young man holds the soda at the end his extended arm. She doesn't feel hungry, but with so many people around her and near, she never does. Nevertheless, food in her stomach will be a good idea once she rides alone in the desert. She can then ride all day, Pamela guesses. For her, legitimate hunger was still an unknown experience.

Paul and Sally stand the same height. Patty has already grown as tall as Pamela, and the girl will grow about two more inches. Knowing that the girl still has some growing yet makes Pamela feel a little dejected, as well as short and skinny.

Away from the encampment, her petite physique makes Pamela a target. She knows too well her appearance is actually a lure. Because her uncontrollable curse, she isn't afraid people will try and hurt her. If they do, the unwitting and horrible fall into a terrible trap. Long ago when she salvaged the ruins of Capital, she once used this curse in self-defense.

Pamela became rich that day a gang of raiders cornered the salvage team she had joined as a little girl. In her youth, the only living people who visited Capital either hid or killed each other as they plucked the carcass of the dead city. For the sake of safety and to haul goods from the grave, scavengers went into the cursed place in teams. The kids on Pamela’s team were once the only friends, sisters and brother she had ever known. She'll always feel guilty that her adolescent stupidity had revealed their hiding places to murderous raiders.

****

The leader of Pamela’s fated, self-organized team had been a young man named Jon. He could not have been more than seventeen, and he wore a downy black mustache. The boy looked like a full grown man to Pamela, primarily because she was only about ten or eleven years old. Her short life in the encampment quickly blurred memories about herself – important life data such as her age and even her birthday. She suspects she was older than she bothers to remember and she grows impossibly slow. The secession of her adopted parents all looked old, but Pamela may have been eating them.

Jon had a girlfriend named Freddy. They scoured the ruins of Capital together with another girl named Juno. Juno looks much closer to idealized Pamela’s age, but the girl never shares details concerning herself. Like everyone in the Shur, Juno was suspicious of familiar strangers – but she had collected her personal share legitimate reasons. Everybody tells lies and acts selfish. They have even before the destruction of the Promised Land.

Juno trusts only Freddy, so much that she emulates her androgynous role model in speech and dress. For a long time, Pamela assumes all scavengers push and yell at each other, and bully weaker team members. Scavengers act assertive and butch, just like the Chosen people Pamela remembers seeing when she was a younger girl, before heathens decimated the caste. For years after, she crawls over their bones.

When Freddy first invites Pamela to join the team, Pamela wonders why Freddy and her boyfriend are even interested in her. Despite the tragedy in her life, Pamela remains true to her station in the UnChosen caste – meek and unassertive.

“You’re lucky,” Jon proclaims.

“You got out of the siege on Capital all alone,” he tells Pamela. “If there aren’t any Chosen alive today to tell the Mortal God what to do, luck is the only grace left.”

While growing up, luck seems the only asset Pamela possesses. Her stunted growth leaves her short and skinny, not much larger than the girl who came to the encampment. Pamela just never grows the girth pushing people around requires. Her size did not stop Jon and Freddy from picking up their lucky charm, their mascot. Luck is all they care about that day the team goes into Capital and dies, the day Pamela eats them alive.

“Let’s go, Pam,” Freddy encourages her.

Freddy, Jon and Juno always come to the shack where Pamela then stayed with a friendly middle-aged couple. The couple are typical UnChosen people – poor, mild and tame, like her own mother. Pamela could not say she loved them, but they are kind people that deserved some trust and compassion.

As with everyday, her adopted parents were working that day, trucking garbage into the desert – a common chore in the encampment. The dead often go to the same locations and the family’s flat bed truck functions as a mass-transit hearse.

Throughout much of her life, Pamela thinks everyone calls the Shur desert a waste because that's where trash goes. She more recently learns the encampment and all the Chosen’s cities weren’t considered parts of the Shur. These hand-dug oases distinguished civilizations from “waste.”

The team – Freddy, Jon, Juno and the newest member, Pamela – breach Capital through one of a dozen open gates through the shining Wall – one on the far southwest side and in the morning, if she recalls. A neat grid of parallel and perpendicular streets crammed with scorched and abandoned automobiles outline block-after-block of burned-out, concrete-block buildings.

Everyone splits up as the team combs through empty apartments and cars. No one wanders any further than the sound of their voices. The skeletal corpses of the dead tenants of the city aren't disturbed. They lie where they had suffocated to death, undisturbed until years later when someone comes along and turns-out their pockets.

Pamela shirks tasks that involve handling dead people. Looking at the gross bodies make her feel sick, but touching them always causes Pamela throw up. Juno impresses Freddy and has no qualms about robbing the dead. At noon, the brave girl stops looting, seeks her teammates and finds Pamela.

“Pam, where’s Freddy and Jon?” Juno demands in a hushed tone. She carries blackened purses and a backpack. The boyish girl looks more nervous than usual. “I heard something.”

“I don’t know,” Pamela answers. “Yell for them.”

“No,” Juno threatens. “I heard people coming our way, they might be raiders – can be heathens.”

“Oh,” Pamela answers naive before Juno tugs her from the doorway of the empty ground-floor apartment the timid girl was searching.

The two girls steal into bright sunlight and crouch behind wrecked automobiles. Outside, Pamela hears the echo of squeaking wheels on a shopping cart. Someone pushes it, rumbling over cluttered and greasy streets. She knows neither Jon or Freddy have carts. Pamela spots her older friends across the street. They come out of a building together. The unnerving sound of the cart echos from the opposite direction a block away.

Juno see the pair of team members before Pamela alerts her mates. The girls looks at each other, make an unspoken agreement and sprint between dusty and rusted vehicles. The team gathers on the curb before the apartment building Jon and Freddy have slipped out. The two older kids are disheveled, with messed hair and unbuttoned shirts.

“Fred, someone’s coming,” Juno tells her role-model.

“I know, I hear them,” Freddy says. “I doubt it’s a demon, I don’t think monsters go shopping.”

“Heathens,” Juno insists.

“Rival teams of UnChosen can be just as bad,” Jon reminds the team. “Quick, hide whatever you got.”

“Where?” Pamela asks, feeling helpless.

The team splits up before she gets an answer. Jon and Freddy go back into the apartment building and Juno hops across the street again. Pamela trails after the boyish girl empty-handed.

“Where are we going to hide?” Pamela braves and calls to Juno. The other girl throws her haul behind the flattened wheel of an old flatbed, fumigator’s truck. Once they have secreted their unknown prizes and a moment later, Jon and Freddy slip out of the apartment building.

“Too late,” Juno says loud enough for her team mates to hear while she drops onto her knees. “They’re here!”

Pamela crouches and loses the locations Juno, Jon and Freddy have gone. Assaulted by the sound of the cart, reverberating and muffled like thunder in the ash-filled valley, Pamela gets scared and pokes up her head. She fears being alone and wants to see if the street is clear, so that she might discover the hiding places of her teammates and join them.

Five men dressed in tattered brown camouflage and carrying assault rifles appear over the hood of a gutted sedan. These men push the noisy shopping cart, and another. Both carts are overfilled with stuffed canvas duffel bags. The men dress like Chosen soldiers, except the disrepair of their clothes. The state of their appearance brands them as heathens, but UnChosen scavengers also often wear whatever they find.

“Stop where you are,” one of the suspected heathens shout at Pamela. Once spot, Pamela races across the street, into the apartment building in which she originally saw Freddy and Jon disappear.

“Dammit, not in there,” Juno shouts at Pamela, giving away her own location.

“Grab 'em both,” one of the ragged uniformed men orders.

Only one man goes after Juno. The others follow Pamela into the shaded apartment building. Pamela enters the apartment. She is just about to search for her friends in the second room when the armed men catch her.

“Pamela, what are doing?” Freddy scolds the little girl, with very unfortunate timing. The luck Pamela was supposed to bring to the team dries up completely and reveals Freddy, too.

“UnChosen kids,” a man in uniform mumbles when he and his cohorts enter the apartment. They bring Juno with them. The man points his rifle toward the direction from which comes Freddy’s voice. “Come out, or we’ll kill these two, find ya’ and cut out your tongue. You’ll die choking on your own blood.”

Jon steps from the second room instead of Freddy; the macho girl stays hidden. After sliding into plain view, Jon promptly raises his hands and surrenders

“We don’t want trouble,” Jon promises the armed men. “We’re just exploring.”

“That’s a load of shit,” decides the man who first shouted at Pamela. “Where’s the other girl, the one that just spoke?”

A couple armed men shoulder their rifles and grab both Pamela and Juno. The man who holds Pamela giggles and pulls her across his stiffening crotch. Tears well in her eyes while she bears the harassment without complaint.

“It’s just us,” Jon claims.

“Hurt the tomboy,” an armed man commands another.

The man who holds Juno promptly snatches the girl’s right hand and bends a thin finger until it snaps with “pop.” Juno immediately wails and all the armed men laugh.

“Please,” Jon yells, then falls when a rifle muzzle slaps across his forehead.

“Don’t,” Freddy begs and appears from a closet in the same room in which everyone stands. “Please, let her go!”

“Well, three girls,” chuckles the man giving orders. “There’s plenty to share. Put the boy out of commission.”

The man who knocked Jon to the floor drops his rifle’s barrel and immediately fires a bullet into the boy’s groin. The armed men then join Jon’s scream and squeals with cheers and laughter.

Freddy screams and jumps toward her boyfriend, only to be belted on her jaw by the man who shot him. She falls over, just out of reach of Jon. After her daze lifts, she whimpers and begs, but broken teeth and blood in her mouth make her pleas incomprehensible.

“And now the rest are all ours,” brags the commander. “Go find hotel rooms, boys. I’ve got the big girl for myself.”

“But the other two are kids,” complains the shooter. “Besides, Ralph has crabs, and he’s already rubbed up against that one.”

“I’m marking my territory,” the man molesting Pamela claims. “But you can visit. Besides, we all got crabs. They’re just not biting you sour assholes, 'cuz you taste bad.”

“Shut up, Ralph,” the commander says and turns back to the shooter. “Alright, you can have mine when I’m done.”

Two of the men have already pulled Juno from the apartment before Ralph twirls Pamela around to face the entrance. He's shouldered his rifle and now holds a large serrated knife. Pamela hears the commander say one more thing before Ralph pushes her outside.

“Sorry, honey,” the commander tells Freddy. “This means I’m not keeping you.”

Freddy's screams join Jon’s howls the moment Pamela stumbles into the bright daylight. The two men who have taken Juno are bent into open doors on either side of an immolated car just outside the apartment. They chuckle and no sound comes from the girl, but Pamela is certain Juno squirms in defiant silence inside the automobile.

Outside the apartment, Ralph pushes Pamela to the concrete sidewalk and drops upon her. He presses one strong hand on her throat, pinning the little girl to the ground and strangling her. Ralph uses the knife in his other hand and cuts her pants into ribbons. The wiry and stinking fiend tightens his grip as he strips the small girl. All the while, Pamela gags and watches stars wink in and out between her and her attacker.

The scraggly man pushes himself into her, like a fist through a drywall panel. Pamela feels paralyzed within a field of white light – a light so bright it dims the overhead sun. The bludgeon of brilliance then suddenly extinguishes, dropping the hurt and terrorized little girl into darkness. Pamela wakes a moment later, staring into the blazing noonday sun. Everyone dies that same instant.

Waking brings back the memory of the devastated warehouse the day Capital burned. New and horrible memories are now added to the vision. Pamela wants to scream, but the small miracle girl has already honed her instinct for self-preservation. She bites her tongue, hard. A dried-up mummy lies on top Pamela, between her bare spread legs. Only leathery skin, bones and clothes remain of the man who had raped and awakened an angel of death.

The small girl rolls the corpse off of her. Ralph tumbles completely away when Pamela sits up. Her crotch is painted with sticky, mostly dry, blood. Pamela debates pulling on her shredded pants or pouring out the rest of her canteen and washing the gore off her body. She unconsciously scrapes blood from her inner thighs with her fingernails and pants.

Pamela sobs as she scratches dry swathes of blood off her skin. Her cries rot away the early hours of the afternoon, until all the blood has dried and Pamela has rubbed the clots into dust. She brushes the red film from her body without conscious effort.

After exhausting herself, she stands up shaking, looks around and listens. No sound comes from inside the apartment. The shriveled bodies of the men who assaulted Juno lie halfway inside the car at either side. Juno makes no noise. Pamela intends to look for the girl, but first wants to see what became of Jon and Freddy.

Pamela creeps to the door of the dark apartment. When she see no movement, she steps inside. Everybody is dead, her friends and the perverted raiders. They are all just dried-up bodies, just like those she woke to find, years ago here in Capital. Apparently, the man who had awaited his turn with Freddy had discovered the food the woman and her boyfriend had hidden. Four open bags of dehydrated beans and pasta now sit near the entrance.

Pamela thinks the messiah – his name is David - the Living God has returned for her. Not a single cut or bruise remains on her body, whereas everyone else has withered into mummified husks. Pamela stands alone. She gathers the bags of food her team had recovered and goes back outside. Juno fares no better. The tough little girl is now nothing more than dry, papery skin and bones.

Pamela grits her teeth and unceremoniously claims the pants her dead teammate wears. Once her nausea passes and she stops shaking, Pamela inspects the luggage of the attackers. They carry money, gold, ammunition, and anything and everything else of value that remains in Capital. She spends the rest of the day alone and numb, hiding her inherited treasure.

A little after sunset, Pamela quietly returns to the encampment without her team. She never tells anyone the truth of what happened that day in Capital. Instead, she spins a partial yarn. She reports an unknown gang chased her team and only Pamela got away. The fate of everyone else remains unknown.

Years pass and she uses the excuse and often says she looks for old teammates whenever she forays into Capital. She lies again and again. In retrospect, nobody believed the excuse after a week. But people in the encampment either allowed her a protracted period of mourning or minded their own despair. Survival consumed everyone.

Her horded resource keep Pamela’s currently adopted family – really, fond strangers – and friends well supplied for years. Pamela already had the reputation as the girl who came out of the destruction of Capital, alive. She then becomes an anonymous benefactor.

Long after Capital had been scoured dry, no one asks how she manages to find money. People spread rumors she ventures into parts of the city where demons have disappeared and make lairs. The whispers don't bother her. Rumors scare people from following her into the basement in which she keeps her trove.

****

“Are you gonna drink this or what?” Paul asks Pamela. “My arm’s getting tired.”

The boy’s bent arm droops. Pamela can’t apologize because her mouth is stuffed with eggs. Instead, she smiles, shrugs and takes the bottle of soda from Paul.

Paul gestures at the motorcycle. “So, that’s the bike you’re taking into the desert. It looks pretty good.”

“You’re still going into the Shur, alone?” Sally asks scowling at the idea. The only criticism Pamela receives is the girl’s pessimistic scrutiny of the plan. Pamela nods her head. She's told the three business-kids too much already. Real food makes her chatty.

Pamela splits the last of her resources and sends everyone she knows, as in whomever she owed a debt or for whom she feels grateful, to the closest city – a place called Gomorrah. She keeps a good chunk of the share for herself and pays for the motorcycle. Her friends and pseudo-family believe they'll see her again in Gomorrah. They might still. That depends if she finds the person she goes looking for. If blessed and luck has returned, she may bring back the lost messiah from the desert.

“It looks like fire,” Patty, the youngest girl, says. She comments on the motorcycle’s paint and strokes the bulbous fuel tank. The motion reminds Pamela to fill the tank before she straps the spare container on the back seat.

“That’s something like the guy who sold it to me said,” Pamela answers with her cheeks stuffed with chewed burrito.

“Is that the color of your helmet, too? Did you finally pick one, Rainbow?” teases Paul. His sly sisters grin at him. Pamela gladly disappoints their mischievous yearnings.

“Nope, my helmet’s black too. You can wave goodbye to me once I get it, and my gear.”

Pamela swallows her last burrito nearly whole. The remaining soda washes down the dry chunks. She jumps back unto her new motorcycle and kicks it to life. Pamela revs the engine once and smiles.

“I’ll see you kids,” she says and races twenty meters before slowing and swerves around dawdling trucks on the unpaved road.

“Ride, Rainbow,” cries little Patty. Sally and Paul wave at Pamela’s back. The three will miss the frequent visits of a good customer and an interesting woman and friend.

“She came out the cursed city all by herself when she was a little girl, younger than me,” Patty whispers to her older sister.

“And she always came back with lots of useful stuff and money...” Paul repeats.

“I hope she didn’t get it all,” Patty wishes aloud.

“Pagans, heathens and demons haunt the Shur,” she whispers to Mark, careful Sally does not hear. Talking about terrible things still gives their little sister nightmares.

“Rainbow always got away in the past,” Mark replies. “She’ll be fine and she’ll find the messiah. She’s lucky that way.”

“I hope so,” Patty says. The girl has grown sharp overhearing secret discussions between her older siblings.

****

Now that she has physical food in her stomach, Pamela does not rush to collect the rest of her stash. Weaving in and out of traffic on a motorcycle today isn't difficult. She often saw people do the same. Today marks the first time she rides a bike in town. She learned to ride in the desert. Her lessons involved traveling a straight line as fast as she can. Pamela intends to do just that after leaving the encampment. The destination is south of Gomorrah. The most recent stories she's heard say a man wanders out there in the desert, performing miracles.

Pamela stops once she reaches a two story structure pieced together with wooden shipping palettes and covered with a huge, originally clear, plastic sheet. Age, weather and fungus has permanently discolored the sheet a streaked gray. A single, angry man can knock down the rickety building, so the kids living inside made certain everyone likes them. Being nice to neighbors and strangers not only preserved their home but also kept them fed. The palette structure, built by a gang of children is the encampment’s default, do-it-yourself version of an orphanage. In the absence of the Chosen's Church, the house was built the heathen way.

“All right,” Pamela calls to nobody. “Get my stuff. You know the deal. I’ll give you half, but I first pick-out what I want to keep.”

The structure creaks and rocks with the scamper of a dozen small feet. The excited noise and scene makes Pamela giggle, amused by the happy elves in their magical house. She wonders if a place like this would have been available when she was a girl.

A place like this would have been a blessing if the people in the encampment had not been so kind to her – certainly not this slapdash mansion. The crates come from the shipyards in Capital. When Pamela was a girl, people hadn't gotten so far salvaging the city, not until almost five years ago.

“Rainbow,” a little boy shouts. All the kids use Pamela’s nickname. It caught on fast. Pamela likes the name when they laugh when the kids says it. The name might be the first sweet taste of irony for many of them. Life was already bitter and unjust for these children. So many people suffer, and that is why Pamela must leave. She'll make it up to them once she finds the messiah.

“You got it,” the little boy says and passes Pamela a black motorcycle helmet. Its visor is tinted opaque. The snug seams make the helmet appear molded as a single oblong plastic ball.

“You saw me coming.” Pamela smiles at the boy. She twists her long black hair into an unknotted braid as she waits for the delivery of the rest of her things.

“I watched you between the slats,” brags the boy. He might have followed Pamela’s approach even if he have not looked for her specifically. The building was nothing but slats. Wind and dust blows straight through the place.

“Top or bottom?” Pamela asks. That’s how the kids distinguish the floors – the structure lacks a staircase. A ladder and a couple ropes replace the missing stairs.

“Top,” the boy declares as if announcing a strategic discovery. Proud of his lookout, he shares the location of his position with Pamela. He fits right in with the other kids.

“Now, you’re Ben, right?”

“Yep!”

“Good job, Ben,” compliments Pamela. “Thank you for bringing my helmet.”

The little boy grins and sways. More children arrive, carrying a couple backpacks, saddle bags and a red plastic container. The child carrying the container arrives last. The full ten liters of gasoline makes the load heavy for a boy his age and thin stature.

“Sorry, honey,” Pamela apologizes to the boy lugging the container. “I need both, I’m going to fill the tank before I go.”

The boy mocks insult. “Honey? My name is Tee!”

“All right, Tee,” Pamela corrects. “Can you get it, please?”

“You don’t even know our names,” accuses an empty-handed girl.

“Sure I do,” Pamela counters, bluffing through her difficulty recalling everyone’s name. She had been lucky to quickly remember Ben’s. “You all call me Rainbow, so I’m going to make up names for you.”

A couple children groan, but the game Pamela introduces excites most. Tee will miss playing. Touting a container with nearly twenty liters of fuel is tough work for any kid his age. The errand takes him some time. Pamela removes her gloves and points at each present child.

“You’re Cometa, you’re Bailarin, and Feliz, Timido,” Pamela pushes out her bottom lip when she nicknames the bashful boy. A frown darkens her expression when she reaches the next child.

“Grunon and Sonoliento. Ben, you can be Narcotizado”

“I liked my other name,” states one of the girls who had groaned about getting a new nickname. Pamela now calls her Bailarin.

“Well, now you’ve got a new one,” Pamela says. “But I’m the only one who gets to call you that.”

“But all the names are too long, except Grunon and Feliz,” complains one of the boys who initially supported her game.

“That’s what I’ve got for you. Hey, where are the other kids? I know I hear more coming.”

“Soose and Dee went to hide. They’re afraid of you because you wear black all the time,” explains the girl now Rainbow now calls Cometa.

The statement makes Pamela laugh. Most of the children living in the palette house now join their grown friend. The overwhelming noise in the neighborhood becomes the sound of these joyful children.

“Here,” Pamela prompts the kids, “Help me tie this stuff on my bike.”

While Pamela ties on the saddlebags, Tee lumbers up with the twenty-liter container swinging side-to-side. His face and shirt are wet with sweat.

“Thanks Tee,” Pamela says. “I need the water too.”

“Ah, c’mon! Somebody else get that. I’m tired,” Tee shouts. His outrage makes Pamela laugh. She expects she has exhausted little Tee. The boy now called Grunon sprints up and into the children’s mansion.

Pamela tops the motorcycle’s tank with gasoline from the smaller fuel container. The larger can goes onto the back of the seat. Her two canteens of water arrive on a military issued utility belt. An empty ammo pouch still hangs on the middle. All gear the military once issued to soldiers is camouflaged brown, so the belt doesn't clash with her outfit. Like everyone else in the world, she didn't have a color choice when Pamela scavenged the accessory,

She inspects both the saddlebags and backpacks containing a light set of camping and automotive tools, clothes, blankets and – most importance – food. Pamela had packed the bags herself and everything seems intact. She already knows what she'll leave the kids. A backpack with clothes and junk food goes to Ben, a pity Pamela already forgot the nickname she gave him. She had thought to give the boy the most descriptive one she might imagine.

“Do you remember the nickname I gave you, sweetie?” Pamela asks him with a sly smile.

“Narcotizado,” Ben answers and pulls a candy bar from his inherited backpack. The boy knew the candy had hid inside.

“See, you forgot the nicknames already” shouts the girl Pamela calls Bailarin.

“I’ll especially remember yours, Bailarin,” Pamela answers waving her finger at the girl.

The kids stole the backpack from Ben. Everyone wants a share of the junk food, but the stash wasn’t be enough for all the kids – so many kids. The game of survival awarded those you claim a share first, or stole winnings from another player.

“That’s it, kids,” Pamela says, hoisting the brown backpack and sliding in front of the plastic fuel can tied on the seat. The kids cheer and wish her luck on her trip. They don't know she isn’t going to join her friends in Gomorrah. Most don't realize she won't return tomorrow.

Pamela pulls her helmet from the handlebars. She tightens the loose braid in her hair before wrapping it on top of her head. Then she puts on the helmet. Cheers and well wishing are instantly muffled. The artificial handicap reminds Pamela of being blind as a little girl. The sudden lack of a sharp field of vision tempts her to leave the helmet behind.

She convinces herself the helmet protects her hearing against the drone of the bike. When wind blows sand in her face and the sun burns hot, she'll also need and thank the tinted visor. After a few seconds of thought, Pamela decides she'll leave the helmet on. The bike growls when it starts and purs the few seconds it sits idle. Pamela leaves the encampment without another word and tears into the desert while the sun is still low in the eastern sky.