The Wastelands: Chapter 3

   The relentless chill of the desert night was frigid and biting, a contrast to Arizona’s scalding hot days. The girl sat hugging her knees before a fire, her hood pulled up over a head of sloppy brown hair which desperately needed to be washed. She shivered and reached up with quaking hands, pressing them closer to the sad little flame which illuminated her position in the darkness.

   Meanwhile, Jack sat at least ten feet away, shunned to the cold blackness of night, save for the brief dusting of silver stars which gleamed above them, no light pollution to hinder their sight.

   Jack was tired, hungry, cold, and beginning to seriously consider feeding the gloomy girl his last bullet. But he couldn’t, not really. And it wasn’t even because he as a person couldn’t do it, it was because he as himself knew that he would never find his way back to anything, otherwise. The girl seemed to know where she was going, unlike Jack, and considering he was as directionally challenged as a busted boomerang- he’d rather take his chances with her.

   Jack lifted his gaze from the ground as he heard the girl which he’d dubbed R, for her necklace, fiddling around with her backpack. From it, her trembling hands pulled a thin piece of tarp which she draped around her shoulders. The tarp crinkled as she rocked gently, pulling the tarp as tightly around herself as she could, cool, white, breath seeping from between her quivering lips.

   In the blackness between them, Jack could feel R’s blue doe eyes fall onto him. A faint whisper which he almost mistook for the wind drifted over to his ears, and a second too late he had realized that it had originated from R.

   A second later and she called out again, her voice quaking like her chilled limbs, “…it’s cold, I get it…” her voice was soft, delicate, afraid. Nothing like her earlier outburst, which had been the last he’d herd of her, actually.

   R didn’t repeat herself again.

   Jack chose to treat her statement as an invitation and stood, pulling up his bag and padding over to the barely there fire before sitting down, rubbing his hands together before holding them out to the flames, “…food…you got any?” Jack asked after a moment, his gruff voice sounding hoarse from the semi-dry air which stuck in his throat like needles of ice.

    R shook her head lightly and tugged at her tarp, “….none that I can spare….”

    Jack let out a puff of breath in wry amusement, “Must not be much then… haven’t seen you eat anything at all yet…”

   R was silent for a moment before her eyes flickered over to Jack and her soft voice permeated the air once again, “….I said I don’t have any to spare…. Not even for myself….” R cast her eyes back to the flames and edged closer to the warmth.

   “What, you got people somewhere you’re trying to get back to or something?” Jack asked, raising a brow.

   There was the sound of a small, sharp, barely audible intake of breath, as if to muffle something painful, “….No….”

   “Then who’s the food for?” Jack inquired.

   “Whoever can afford it.” Came R’s cold, practiced, almost mechanized, response as her glossy eyes gazed into the flickering flames.

    Jack snorted distastefully, “Oh, so you’re one of those.” He commented offhandedly with a roll of his eyes.

    R shifted awkwardly, pressing her palms into the dirt, “…Yeah…” she sighed, drawing a circle in the sand with her fingertip.

    The conversation ended almost exactly as it had started, with R’s quavering voice which hung like a delicate leaf off of a wilted plant.

    With a sigh, Jack tugged at the sleeves of his black tee which cut off above his elbows, wishing that they were somehow longer.

   There was the rough sound of crinkling before a ball of thin plastic connected with Jack’s face. Though it didn’t have any particular weight to it, the surprise of the light impact was enough to topple him over backwards. Grabbing at his apparent assailant, Jack sat up to find his fist closed around another small section of tarp identical to the wad which R had wrapped around herself. Looking over, Jack found that R had laid down, and curled into a ball with her back to the fire as she used her pack as a pillow.

   “…Thanks.” Jack called out lightly after a moment.

   He could hear R exhale lightly over the popping and crackling of the smoldering fire, “…you can keep it, I don’t need it anymore…”

   Jack furrowed his brows as he draped the section of tarp over himself, “…Thanks?” he almost questioned before he himself shifted and lay against the ground, pulling up his own pack to lay his head onto. He was still freezing, but it was slightly more tolerable now.



    Sunrise came too quickly, and R found that she herself got hardly any sleep. All that she saw every time that she closed her eyes was blood, while the sound of that one fatal shot rang out in her skull with each hard palpitation of her heart. If only she hadn’t screamed, she thought, then they would both be alive now, and she wouldn’t be stuck with a stranger in the middle of nowhere.

   Sitting up and working out the kinks in her joints, R relished the return of the stuffy Arizona heat. She would never get used to the climate change, no matter how long she was here. In the beginning it wasn’t so bad, she and her brother had sleeping bags and had bundles of firewood strapped onto their horses.

    However, upon crossing the border, R and Paxton were robbed by highwaymen of a specific breed that people these days referred to as Blackslab. They were thieves, murderers, and rapists who traveled in large mobs and picked on those in small groups, like R and her brother, who could easily be overpowered, or at the very least overwhelmed by their numbers. R and Paxton were lucky that the Blackslab that they’d run into were weak and insolent, lucky that they only got off with being robbed, lucky that the goons had just left them in the dust.

    And so, nights were spent curled in her stubborn brother’s arms as they shared the meager heat of tiny fires constructed of twigs and anything else they could find out in the middle of nowhere.

    R and her brother were a different sort of people, a breed which had crawled through the cracks and wormed their way across the map ever since the so-called end. Vagabonds, as they had taken to be called, were people who traveled all over exchanging goods and items which, ever since the EMP, had come in short supply.

    From valuable things, like medicine, to convenient things like hygienic products or seed packets, to some of the rarer, more luxurious wares such as make-up, snack foods, coffee beans, and factory produced ammunition that wouldn’t misfire or need to be packed before use. R and her brother supplied it all.

    With the world the way it was now, people couldn’t survive without vagabonds, especially those that had been shunned to desolate areas where water was scarce, food was in short supply, and the weather conditions were less than forgiving. Not to mention places where it was almost impossible to grow crops.

    The trip they had been on had been routine, a visit to Lawless Zone 6, LZ-6 as the locals called it. LZ-6 was home to Sahara, the rumored queen of the desert. One of the perks of the job was the connections. Trading with people in positions of power all over what was left of the world, left one with quite a vast network of allies.

    Something, however, had come up somewhere in between leaving LZ-6, and returning to one of their established station houses hidden in Nevada where they kept part of their stash. R didn’t know what it was, but something had spooked her brother, had caused him stop their strictly scheduled rout in order to drag the both of them to a ghost town to lay low- which, for the record, they’d never been particularly good at.

    The siblings happened to be wanted by three different militia groups, eight different registered safe zones, and had been banished from LZ-3 up in Tennessee by one angry ex-boyfriend and his equally angry regiment of underlings. Paxton was right, Benito did have a way of blowing things out of proportion.

    But none of that mattered now. R was on her way to LZ-6 to have a bit of a chat with Sahara regarding the people who killed the last thing she had to lose in this world.

    R rolled her tarp up, removed her sweatpants and her hoodie, and crammed them into her pack best she could.

    The man was still sleeping, but like she told him earlier, they weren’t together. Casting the strange man a fleeting look over her shoulder, R started down the crumbling road. She was close now, LZ-6 was only a few hours away.

    Her throat was dry and each intake of breath was more painful than the last. She’d run out of water about this time yesterday, and the effects of her dehydration were starting to take their toll. R pitied the man, Jack she thought he had called himself, she really did. He was clearly worse off than her, and she felt bad about refusing him food. But she wasn’t running a charity, and she would need what scraps she had in LZ-6, she had a responsibility there that ran deeper than just revenge.



    “Hey!” Jack called as he jogged after the fleeting figure of his makeshift compass. If R had heard him she didn’t react, and continued on.

    Walking with an apparent limp, her right foot dragged slightly on the broken up concrete and Jack thought back, wondering why he didn’t notice it sooner. She must have rolled an ankle in their earlier scuffle. When he had woken up, R was long gone. She had left without any trace other than light drag marks in the sand cluing him in on her direction. Drag marks which he only now realized were probably caused by said limp.

    Something about the way which she walked held determination. Because though she walked with a limp, her head was held tall, her posture straight.

    Much closer to her now, Jack called out once more, “Hey!” He was only ten feet away, the gap closing with each second that passed. There was no way that she couldn’t hear him, “Hey, R!”

    R finally responded, turning on her heels and narrowing her eyes she leered at him as he came to a halt before her, “What did you just call me?” Her tone, yet again, was different, it sounded as it did yesterday when they first had met. She was fierce and lively, nothing like her small, wispy, far away voice from the previous night.

   “I called you R.” Jack then snorted, “You haven’t exactly told me your name, sister, so I don’t really know what else you expect me to call you.” Jack pointedly glanced down towards the silver necklace around R’s neck.

    The girl’s own eyes flickered down in realization before she snorted, “My name is irrelevant, Jack.” She hissed, “Because, like I said, we are not together- where the hell are you even going anyways?” R asked quizzically as she gestured to the vast expanse of desert which surrounded the pair.

   Jack drew back and squinted as he looked up towards the horizon, “…uhh… well…” Jack reached into his pocket and drew out his pack of cigarettes. Flipping the carton open, withdrawing a cancer stick, and placing it between his lips Jack let out a small cough, “…I was, ah… kinda hoping that you knew…”

   R’s jaw dropped open and her lips parted slightly as she stared at him dubiously before rolling her eyes and turning away from him, “You have got to be kidding me,” she huffed, “you are seriously doing this aren’t you- That’s why you’ve been stuck to me this whole time! You’re fucking lost aren’t you!” when there wasn’t a response, R swung back around and snatched Jack’s cigarette out of his mouth, “Aren’t you!”

    Jack raised his eyebrows and shrugged meagerly.

    R’s lips twitched up into a wry smile and she laughed dryly, “…Just my bloody fucking luck…”

    “So…ah, where are we going?” Jack asked as he reached up and pushed his beanie down on his head.

    R sent him a disgusted sidelong glance as she pulled a matchbook out of her back pocket, “I don’t know about you,” R said as she stuck Jack’s cigarette between her lips, “but I’m going to LZ-6.” R struck a match and lit the cigarette before tossing the match to the ground and stomping over it with her shoe. With that R turned away and yet again began to walk.

    From that point on, any and all conversation that Jack attempted to make was met with nothing but stifling silence.