//------------------------------// // 16: Viva // Story: Crystal Apocalypse // by leeroy_gIBZ //------------------------------// ----------------------Dear Diary We encountered a gang of raiders today; fourteen of them in total. They were attacking a survivor tower. It was a massacre. We scored a whole quiver of arrows off of their leader, as well as enough food for us for another week. Excellent. Finishing the last sentence, the girl shut her journal and slipped it back into a pocket in her satchel. She had started the entry shortly after waking up. She planned to make it a habit of it. She then scouted out the perimeter of her camp before she packed up. Her patrol through the dawn’s early light revealed little more than the thick dust, rotting corpses and fortified ruins typical to Las Pegasus of the ruined casino. She pulled the hood of her cloak further down around her face to keep the early morning sun out of her eyes. She then adjusted the strap on her quivers, picked up her bow and set out of the hotel’s foyer. The sun had risen higher by that point, shining weakly behind the omnipresent clouds of ash, casting the destroyed city in a perpetual gloom.  Other people, those lucky enough to have survived the initial cataclysm with mind or body questionably intact, had fled up the stairs of the hundreds of towering concrete blocks that comprised the Las Pegasus Strip. There they hunkered down with a few decades’ worth of tinned food, slowly but surely rebuilding society from their own ideals, expanding and connecting their little fiefdoms and citadels with an intricate system of rickety rope bridges and death-defying leaps. Only their bravest dared to traverse the down below, on the shadowy streets where all manner of horrors lay in starved wait. The girl nocked an arrow in her compound bow. A second later, the arrow whistled into a man’s skull, pinning him to a filthy brick wall., Dark blood, thick as tar splattered against the wall, dripping disgustingly. The lone zombie spluttered and gurgled as the magical unlife faded from its eyes yet again. She could’ve sworn that she’d shot him last month. No matter. He might have picked something useful up since then. She walked over to it, ripping the arrow out of the corpse. It slid to the ground, leaving a brownish trail of filth down the wall, obscuring some graffiti. She cursed as she rifled through the creature’s rags, finding nothing except for long-dried gore. The archer had hoped to find a wallet, or perhaps a ring of keys. The former held cash; that made for good fuel; and the latter was always good as improvised brass knuckles. She’d lost her last set persuading a pair of foolhardy scavengers back up to the rooftops, where they belonged. This was her domain, and sometimes she even enjoyed ruling it. She pulled a nub of chalk out of her pocket, the girl drew a white arrow on the building, in the opposite direction of course, to throw off any raiders. Didn’t need more of those, killing them only brought others back stronger, and angrier. Once finished, she continued to sneak through the dark streets, on the lookout for any supplies the Roofers may have neglected to find, or any supplies their scavenging parties might have surrendered to the raiders down below. She didn’t think of herself as a raider. Those killed for fun, not in self-defence. That was the difference. Whether or not it mattered anymore was up for debate. A year ago, she’d stumbled on a coven of witches or, at least, they’d claimed to be witches. They smelled more like out of work florists, clustering around an old funeral parlour, ripping peoples’ hearts out in exchange for some kind of supernatural power. Whatever their Tirek was, he was powerless against a good tomahawk to the skull of his high priest. Something glinted in a store window. She rushed over to it, hurrying across the street, half-crouching in case anyone patrolling the bridge above was in a grappling mood. Her axe cracked the window open, and she slipped her cloak off and laid it across the protruding shards of glass before clambering inside. Her heart sank as she realized what the darkened storefront held: clocks. No wonder in hadn’t been burgled yet. You couldn’t eat those, and they didn’t make for good weapons either. Still though, one or two might be of use. The girl shoved a few of the more intricate, not to mention smaller, clocks and watches into her knapsack. They might not be any good for something practical, and silver casings wouldn’t burn, but a companion of hers’ liked to pick them apart. When the girl had found her, unconscious and dehydrated in an overturned truck on the city limits, she’d had one of them with her. Or at least, she had the remains of one; the timepiece had cracked open, showering her with tiny brass widgets, screws and gears and springs. Still recovering from the crash, she spent most of her waking hours trying to reassembled the bizarre little box. As she poked through the abandoned store, she spotted a cash register, lying untouched on a counter. That she wrenched open, stuffing the wads of cash into the pockets of her windbreaker. The coins she left,. those were too light to slingshot at anything, unless she wanted to merely annoy them; in her experience, that never helped. After that, she sneaked through the backroom of the store, hoping that whoever had owned this place had the prudence to at least leave something of use. A shotgun, maybe, or something of that ilk to fend off the inevitable horde of rioters or looters that sprung up every election season. No such luck. All the storeroom of Grandfather Clock’s had was, well, clocks. The girl groaned in frustration, smacking her axe against the face of one the larger offenders, shattering it. As she tugged the weapon out of its inner workings, she noticed something. The case of the machine she was resting her foot against while trying to extricate her axe from it was made of wood. That, she remembered with a madcap grin, was flammable. And she liked fire. It scared off the undead like nothing else, and the fact that you could cook your food off it didn’t hurt either. The pair of men didn’t see her, not immediately; her muddy brown cloak camouflaged her fairly well in the dark and dusty storeroom, but they might have heard her tomahawk come loose They definitely heard her crash into a pile of cuckoo clocks after she lost her footing yanking her tomahawk free. “Shit! What was that?” One said, raising his rifle and scanning the room. He didn’t spot the girl, hiding behind an overturned grandfather clock – the timepiece, not the salesman – trying to unholster her bow without knocking anything else over. “I don’t know, brother of mine, but I highly suggest we proceed with extreme caution.” His mustachioed counterpart said, drawing a sword. “And extreme prejudice.” His brother said, flashing a grin. Flim and Flam each flicked on a torch, illuminating the dusty room in a hungry yellow glow. Like red-haired panthers, the two of them prowled through the store, searching for the source of the disturbance. Once they’d exited the immediate area, the girl flicked up her hood, just high enough to see. In their infinite brilliance, they’d left the way up to their skyscraper open; the reinforced car door lay ajar, with a pinprick of light at the very top, promising enough food not to starve. She knew that it was a bad idea. The lower quarters of any Roofer territory were invariably crawling with angry residents, armed and always begging for fresh meat. The girl noticed as she tiptoed closer, that the stairs were made of wood, and considering that an earthquake had long knocked out any smoke detectors, the lighter with the shield engraved on it felt almost like another finger. A finger she flicked precisely once, against the threadbare carpeting of the blockaded emergency exit. Time to go! An arrow shattered the clock, just inches away from Flam’s neck. The second sliced half of his moustache clean off. Only then did he scream, scrambling for his sharpened fencing sabre. “Who goes there?” He squealed, alerting his brother, “Come out where I can see you!” He panicked, waving his sword around. The third arrow thudded squarely into his chest, slowly drowning the blue and white stripes of his waistcoat in red. Flim yelled furiously, more of an animalistic cry than a real threat, and showered the room with bullets. The fire made it hard to see. Under the cover of both smoke and darkness, a shred of cloth tied around her nose and mouth, the girl crawled right past the shooter’s downed brother, and right up to him. Axe in hand, she whacked it into his neck. He went down without a sound. Before the flames reached his body, the girl had torn off his bandoleer, and slung his AR over her own shoulder, right next to the compound box and the pair of quivers. Then she ran like hell. Her legs ached, her heart pounded and her lungs burned with more than just exhaustion by the time she arrived back at her campsite: A hole-in-the-wall sort of bar, almost invisible to the naked eye. The tough steel door, as well as the surrounding brickwork, was entirely coated with old election posters, proudly claiming Big Daddy McColt’s superiority over all other competitors. She tapped her knuckles against a panel of paper-coated steel, the resulting rhythm eventually rousing her roommate from her slumber. “Stop knocking or else somebody will hear the secret code, Sour Sweet. Unless you’re being chased, in which case you shouldn’t be knocking at all because you’ve just led them to our hideout.” Sugarcoat shouted, from inside. “We’re not being chased, We were trying to wake your lazy ass up because you spend all day lying in bed while We go out risking our life to keep the both of us alive!” Sour shouted back. She heard the first of the door’s many locks clunk open, and she breathed a sigh of relief. If nothing else, finding Sugarcoat was simply a godsend due to how convenient she made it to be able to properly hide. This place was far more secure than her last camp, nothing more than a locked room half-buried under the exploded rubble of a power station. Eventually, the clicks ceased, and a slot in the door creaked open, revealing a pair of cracked orange glasses and tired purple eyes, half intensely scrutinising Sour and half wishing to be back in bed. Sour crossed her arms and scowled, “And a good morning to you to, sleepyhead, now let Us in before We burn this place to the ground!” “Password accepted. Welcome home.”