Dark Blue Monstropolis

Her hazel eyes slowly began to flutter with life. The images deposited themselves on her mind with a rapidity that she was not quite ready for.

“What the hell?” she asked the empty room. Then the events from the previous day (night?) began to play back for her.

Very slowly, she got to her feet. Her head felt like it was inside a fish bowl with a large bowling ball balanced very delicately on top. Every time she turned her head to look at something new, the world seemed to take its time getting into her field of vision. This would have to be remedied and fast.

She found the bowl of grimy water she had put out for the cat during the brief time that she had one and splashed it in her face. Both the coldness and the stench of the water did the trick of bring the world back up to speed. She wiped the excess grime off with the bottom of her night gown and realized that there was dried blood.

My knees. She looked down and remembered that final conscious thought. She picked the pieces of broken glass and cinderblock out of her skin.

She didn’t have a mirror in the room because they were contraband, but she took stock of the rest of her body as best she could without one. She was actually quite young, but her young body had been through a lot, hadn’t it? Still, given her habits and habitat, she thought she had held up quite nicely. Any guy who gave her half a glance would sometimes nearly break his neck trying to get the other half. She was both petite and fit.

Her recent hobbies (occupation?) had kept her running from the authorities most of the time and she had to be in top shape to outrun some of them on their personal airlifts.
She grabbed a black t-shirt and faded blue jeans from the floor and traded them for the bloody nightgown. As she did, she took stock of her upper body for any damage that might have been incurred from the previous night’s festivities. There was hardly a scratch on her toned upper body. She continued her business. She emptied the debris from her boots, put them on, and laced them up tightly around her ankles. More than likely she would be running today. With her long sandy-blonde hair tied in a pony-tail and her favorite baseball cap on her head, she was ready for what ever life threw her way.

Or so she thought.

Once again, she keyed the digital code into her case and grabbed the shiv. Knives, guns, and swords had long been outlawed, but everyone seemed to have at least one of them anyway. She smiled at this and cut a large gash down the side of her mattress with the shiv.

Since she had turned the mattress on its side during the night, she had to insert her arm into the mattress up to the armpit before her hands fell on what she was looking for. From inside her mattress, she pulled a black 9mm pistol wrapped in an oil cloth. Her arms went into the mattress again and pulled out a belt with a low-slung holster attached. Her arm went into the mattress for a final time and pulled out a small black cylinder. She gripped it in her hand and slung it toward the ground. Several pieces of black steel flew out of the end of the cylinder and became a hard metal baton. She tapped it against the floor and collapsed it. She stuck this in her hip pocket.

She unwrapped the pistol, placed it in the holster, and wrapped the belt around the holster. She started to put the pistol inside her box and realized that there was neither room for it or a place for it to belong.

She began to dig around her room for her small backpack. After a brief search she found it under what was left of the bed. She looked at it briefly. It bore a single word written on the outside cover-flap: Ginger. It wasn’t the name she was born with, but when she had found the backpack nearly a dozen years ago, she decided that it was as good a name as any and made it her own.

She undid the buckles of the cover-flap, opened her backpack, and stuffed the holster and the pistol inside. Her case began to make the hissing noise again and she waved her hand under the slowly closing lid. It reversed its direction in an almost apologetic way. There were times when she wasn’t sure that this case wasn’t her only true friend in the world.

She grabbed her beat-up visor and put it on. Just as she did so, an image flickered onto the screen. The audio that came with it was deafening. The image was of a tall, slender woman with a hand cannon of some sort laying waste to a group of people. She seemed to be onstage somewhere, which made sense, because the audio that nearly left her bleeding from the ears was filled with music that she had heard somewhere before. She filed that into the back of her head to parse through later. Right now, she had to scat and scat fast.

She placed her hand gently on the top of her case and it began to close again, but this time with more purpose, as though it new it were doing its job right this time. Ginger slung her backpack over her right shoulder and grabbed her case with her left hand and danced her way through the rubble of her room to the door.

Before she even put her hand near the palm plate, she turned around and gave her room one final glance. She would not be seeing this room ever again and she wanted to make sure that there was nothing around that might tie her to this mess. She was almost convinced that there was nothing when her eyes stopped on a tiny scrap of paper near the waste dump in the corner. She danced her way back across the room, picked up the slip of paper and read what was on it. Scrawled in her own handwriting were these words:

Wickeds X. Food. Lock door. Mix away.

She held it to her nose and sniffed. She couldn’t smell anything, but she felt the almost microscopic grains of powder enter her nostrils. The drug she had gotten had not been in pill or liquid form. It was a powder that had to be mixed with some form of liquid. She had mixed it…where? She couldn’t remember and hoped against hope that the lack of that memory wouldn’t come back to haunt her. She started to stick the piece of paper into her pocket, and stopped. What if they are doing a search downstairs to see if anyone had contact with him? With Jake?

She dropped the paper into the waste dump. She put her backpack and case on the floor, unfastened her pants, pulled them down around her knees, turned and squatted over the waste dump. She relieved herself on the paper sitting in the bottom of the dump. After she was done, she placed her hand on the palm panel and the waste dump lowered itself into the floor. She could hear the familiar noise of the aging pneumatic system carrying the dump to where ever it was supposed to go. She thought that in a different life, her case lid and this waste dump might have had quite a nice friendship.

In a different life.

That’s what she needed.

She made her way back to the door, placed her hand on the palm plate and yet another aging pneumatic motor opened the door. Better say goodbye to your friends, she told her case and stuck her head out into the hallway. She scanned both ways, saw that the hallway was empty and stepped out of her room forever. The sad, leaky pneumatics seemed to be thankful that it wouldn’t have to perform this task again for awhile. She turned left and headed to the staircase that would take her down the eighteen flights of stairs to the ground level of her building.

She didn’t have the heart to make the pneumatic elevator work that hard just for little old Ginger.