After Alabama had stormed off on one of the motor bikes, Arizona sulked around trying to think of what to do. He was worried beyond belief, though his always emotionless face didn’t show it. He walked by the kitchen and stopped at the voices coming from inside.
“Okay, she probably headed this this way.” Zebra pointed to a map spread over a table in the kitchen. “She doesn’t know the area well, and the gas in that tank might get her to about here.” He pointed to a former small city on the map.
“If I know Alabama like I think I do, she went to G.I.’s grave.” Disco nodded, the humor from his usually merry face gone. “They were really close, she always went to him. We’ll take that area.”
Arizona stepped in. “Mighty said she headed East.” He said interrupting them ignoring the bitter and disgusted looks he received from everyone.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” Rage headed towards him before being held back by his twin brother and Plasma.
“She wasn’t supposed to see that-” He said quickly.
“So you were just planning on getting your kicks behind her back, huh?” Rage cut him off, raging, just like his name implied.
“It wasn’t like that, I made a mistake. Everyone does.” He said his fists clenching at his sides.
“So now she’s a mistake, huh?” Rage’s eyes could’ve burned holes in Arizona’s jacket. “She was the best thing that ever happened to you, you sorry piece of shit!”
“I never said she was a mistake, don’t twist my words, you Beaner.” He growled stepping forward a step, the muscle in his jaw had begun to jump as he gritted his teeth in fury.
The room had dulled to a tense silence. “What did you call me?”
“I called you a Beaner.” He said with a sneer. Rage’s eyes shone with pure fury as he broke away from his captors and slugged Arizona with his famous right hook, smashing his nose sideways and sending blood over the linoleum floor. Ari just lunged at him, recovering quickly from the shot, his fists colliding with Rage’s chest. Arizona went in for another strike as Rage’s fist slammed into his neck before the rest of the room intervened and pulled the two apart.
“Will you just get the fuck out of here before you do any more damage?” Disco turned angrily as he helped Plasma and Lightning hold Rage back. Arizona started to lunge forward again but Zebra, his closest friend, put his hand on his chest, stopping him.
“Just leave for a while, okay? Before anyone else gets hurt.” Zebra looked disgusted. He didn’t say any names, but he was obviously talking about not just him hurting Alabama, but Solar as well. Arizona simmered for a moment before he wrenched himself from the grips of his captors and stalked off.
Arizona left out the back where they kept the motor bikes and tools for maintenance and wheeled out the only other motor bike there was. If they wouldn’t let him help he was going to find her and fix this himself.
He revved the engine and tore out of there, leaning forward for more speed. Then sped on going East for a while following the tracks, but after about 15 minutes it started pouring rain. Arizona growled and pulled over. Soon he was drenched and cold but he didn’t care. He had to find Alabama. Next, took his jacket off and shoved it inside the saddlebag and closed it again. He remounted the bike and took off again at a much slower pace.
Arizona drove on for another hour, seeing nothing, he stopped and turned off his motorbike, put the kick stand out and stood next to it. It was still pouring rain, and by now Arizona’s skin was beginning to sting from the slight acid content in the water. He was immensely grateful for his goggles, which let nothing inside, but he needed shelter. Ari looked around but saw nothing. Then he grumbled and shook his head, droplets of water slipped into his ears and he twitched, hating the feeling.
“I need to get out of this damn rain.” Arizona said and started up his bike again. He drove on a bit more until a dark silhouette of something on the ground appeared. His bike sputtered out as the gas was used up. Ari growled and let it fall on it’s side then jogged over to the mass. As he got closer and was able to see through the torrent of rain he found it to be a slowly rotting wooden boat. What was a rowboat doing in the middle of the desert? He pulled his raygun and walked all around the dinghy then slowly lifted it up and peered underneath. It came up empty so he quickly ducked under and let it fall back down. It was mostly dry, just damp.
By now his sight was diminished to nothing. He lay for a while trying to get comfortable but found that futile as there was a lump under him digging into the small of his back. He rolled to his side and started to feel around. His hand soon found the lump and a moment later it turned out to be a handle. He gave it a few tugs when it popped up and something metallic hit his nose, and hard, he cringed then shook it off, already feeling the warm blood flowing.
“Damnit...” He grumbled but slipped down into the hole after some finagling. He fell about 5 feet and sat groaning. It certainly wasn’t his day. He wiped his nose on his wrist and stood up. Arizona looked around then smiled, remembering the device he and Neon had attached to his goggles. He turned one of the spikes and a light green light flicked on then settled allowing him to see.
Immediately he regretted this and was thankful for the blood flowing from his nose blocking the smell of death and decay. Before him was a scene of mass gore. This place had once been a fallout shelter, but it was now a mass grave of mutilated and half decayed bodies. He gagged despite his lack of smell and closed his eyes for a second, but all Arizona could see in his mind was the face of the girl that had first greeted him. She had a look of terror plastered to her once pretty profile. Her body was bloated and leaking maggots from all orifices. He opened his eyes again and took in her bloated body. His eyes traveled from her horrified face to her neck, which actually frightened him. Her neck was sliced right to the center, and crawling with maggots. Someone had obviously tried beheading the poor girl. He forced himself to look away and found another scene of carnage. A boy about his age, though it was hard to tell from the look of his bulging body, was sat in a chair. His abdomen had been sliced open, his insides spilt over his lap and onto the ground before him.
“You poor souls..” He choked out attempting to swallow. There were two more bodies, one, an older fellow who was missing chunks of skin was laid out on a table, his eyes gone, the sockets alive with bugs. Then he looked over to the body in the corner. He was untouched and looking forward with a very scary smile on his face. The man was severely malnourished and very skinny, not yet bloated.
“I have to take a guess and say you’re the sadistic fuck who killed them?” He said with the shake of his head. He wanted to leave, but needed a place to stay, and this was the only place for miles. He cringed as he stood by the ladder leading up then decided to make sure the man was really dead. He walked over to him and nudged him with his foot. As he did, the arms fell from their fold on his knees and his legs fell apart to reveal a gaping hole in his gut where there was a lone rat gnawing away at the innards. He jumped back and fired his raygun twice, one hit the chest of the man and the other seared through the rat, eliciting a high pitched squeal.
He gave a shudder and backed up shaking his head. He had to swallow several times to keep the bile from entering his mouth. He had seen some pretty bad things, but nothing even close to the scene that he had encountered. He backed up back to the ladder and slid down next to it hugging his knees to his chest and hid his face in his knees. He closed his eyes but the image of the girl’s face hit him, so he threw them open again. The green light streamed into his sight and he could make out the stitching in his pants so he turned a spike and turned off the night vision letting things go black again. In the silence he could hear his own breathing, his heartbeat as it increased in pace.
You fucked up. You have done some serious stuff. But nothing like this. He thought miserably to himself hugging his knees closer. Ok, just breath. Calm down, you’ve been around dead bodies before. He sighed. Fool, you fucked everything up. You loved Solar, fell for Alabama, and you went and let Solar trick you, the moment some cocky fool comes along she would have left me again. You are nothing more than a person to her.
He sat up still hugging his knees. “And in all honesty, what is she to me? Eye candy, and not even that.” He rolled his eyes under his goggles and shook his head.
“I made a big mistake, if I had really wanted to be with Solar I would have made an effort, but I didn’t.... I made the effort with Alabama though, does that mean something?”
Shut up fool, you already messed things up beyond repair. He thought before lapsing into a silence that was just a large void, empty of thoughts and images.
Several hours later he shifted and groaned, the sound resonating around him. At first he couldn’t remember where he was, then it flooded back over him, along with the stench. He gagged for a minute, then sagged to one side and dry heaved. He was slightly thankful that he hadn’t eaten anything for some time. After a while he stopped heaving and sat up, wiping the spittle from his lip and chin.
Arizona climbed up the ladder and opened the hatch to find that it was still raining. He wasn’t even sure if it was day. He climbed back down but left the hatch open and walked over to the body of the malnourished man. Ari knocked him over to the side and grabbed one of the stiff legs then dragged the body over to the ladder. He dropped the bent leg and studied it then decided there was no way he was going to get the body up the ladder from holding it. So he looked around quickly but saw no rope. That’s when he decided it was time to venture further into the shelter. He closed his eyes for a moment then stepped slowly into the round shelter. It was large and very circular but had many shelves and cabinets to give it corners.
There was an eye wash station along with several cages that contained a dead monkey, a dead cat, a dog which was also dead and another cage that was tipped over and empty. It must have held the rat. “Scientists...” He mumbled, shaking his head. He skirted around the bloated corpses and began opening drawers filled with vials, syringes, and an array of items he couldn’t place. After a while he grew angry and threw open a cabinet close to the bloodstained floor, finding what he was looking for. Rope. Gratefully, he pulled it out and gave it a few tugs determining it was strong enough. He walked back over to the murderer and tied one end around the dead man’s leg and the other around his waist, then began climbing the short ladder.
Arizona climbed out to see just how bad it was raining. It was just as hard as the day before, if not harder. He moved the boat away and scanned the immediate area then pulled out the body. Next he untied the rope and drug the body from the hole about 20 feet. He turned and went back down the ladder to the other man who was missing chucks of his body. On the left side of the chest was a tattoo written in fancy letters. Alice Talowits. Underneath the name was a list of numbers. 7-19-2008 to 12-23-2015. He stopped for a few seconds doing the mental math. Six years, most likely his daughter. He once again shook his head and found the discarded clothes next to his feet on the ground and started to redress the man.
After he had dressed him he slipped his arms under the stiff body and picked it up. Arizona lugged the body over the hole where water was starting to fall in. He set the man down and maneuvered the body so that it was sitting against the wall. Inside one of the coat pockets a card made an appearance, sticking out slightly. He pulled it out to see just who this man that had been made a meal was.
“Dr. Thomas Talowits.” Arizona read aloud, “CDC science specialist.” The man in the picture slightly resembled the dead man before him. He had short hair and a slight 5 o'clock shadow, but was well dressed and trimmed with a stunning smile, possibly middle aged. The man before him looked grim and dead. His hair had grown to an extent that it was more like a mop of grease and bugs. He slipped the card inside the pocket inside his jacket then slipped the rope around and under the mans arms. He tied it tight then stood to repeat his climb up the ladder.
He climbed out then pulled the man out but carried him 20 feet in the opposite direction of the other man. He laid Dr. Talowits down neatly giving his body the utmost care before he returned for the last two bodies. Inside he went straight for the other bloated man. He searched the body before he found the identification card. He too was a CDC man, though much younger, possibly an assistant. He looked down at the name before reading it aloud.
“Richard Freeman” He looked down at the picture of the man, he was young probably in his very early twenties. He put the card in his inside pocket with the other one. He groaned and picked up the man’s entrails from the ground and his lap and stuffed them back into his stomach. He cringed at the squishiness of the entrails as he shoved them in as far they would go to keep them from sloshing back out.
“Sorry Richard.” He mumbled as he dragged the chair over to the ladder. He sat the chair back down on all fours but it still sat catawampus. He kneeled down to try and slip the rope around the man but as he touched the body it came tumbling off the chair colliding with Arizona knocking him to the ground as the pressure that had built up elsewhere in the body came gushing out of the gash in the abdomen. Arizona squirmed under the leaking mass flailing in disgust and fear.
“Get off me you fat lard” He shouted then became absolutely still. After a moment he pushed the mass off of him and sat up shaking his head trying not to vomit. “Get a hold of yourself, Ari boy. He is dead, they are all dead.” He stopped talking his mouth gaping like a fish before all emotion left not only his face but his body as he shut down everything he could possibly feel. Usually his last defense, but now he was going to be like this forever, it made sense to him since caring got him stuck in places where poor murdered people leaked on him.
After a while he went back to the deflated body of the man Richard and set to tying the rope around him and climbed the ladder swiftly, before dragging him over and laying him next to the Doc. He then stood there, next to his two new dead friends and let the acidic rain wash away the gore and slime that had not slipped off his shirt in his scramble to get away. He watched as a kidney fell from where it had been hanging on to his belt loop and fell with a squelch at his boots. His Anarchy shirt, normally a light red color was stained maroon from the blood that had already soaked in and stained. He grumbled to himself as he picked maggots off jacket and pants, even a few from his drenched hair.
After most of the gore had washed away Arizona climbed back down the ladder and managed to get the young girl out and next to her CDC counter parts with out any more problems. He stared down at the bodies with out so much as a sympathetic feeling before he searched the girl’s body for her card. He didn’t bother reading the name, he no longer cared, so instead he pocketed the card and fired off 21 shots from his raygun before slipping back in the hole, shutting the lid after himself.
Arizona sat around in the reeking fallout shelter, alone aside from the dead creatures and shifted between limbo and alertness. Many days later he climbed back up the ladder and opened the hatch and climbed out. He turned on his night vision goggles to see that the rain had let up slightly. Every so often the moon would peak through the clouds and make a brief appearance before slipping back in.
“Good, maybe now I can get home.” He grumbled in a monotone voice. He made one last trip down the hatch and pulled out the gas he had found and fed it into his discarded bike before he returned to the bodies of the three victims. They had been sitting in the nonstop rain for so long that most of the rotted skin had already begun to burn away. Sighing he grabbed the shovel he had found and began digging a massive hole. It went easy due to the constant pound of liquid and before long his own skin was stinging as pulled the bodies in and threw the mud back over them.
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