Stranger

“So, Stranger, what happened to you?”

The words crest against the misshapen lumps of what might have once been ears atop her head. She raised bleary, half scarred over eyes to look across the oily, foul-smelling fire pit, at the vagrant who shared her camp. Taking her time to reply, the woman slowly raised herself up, before speaking in a voice reminiscent of screeching metal and twisted flesh.

“An accident. Or something.”

The man raises his eyebrows, half his face obscured by a spiderlike web of scars, probably a burn, not that the woman particularly cared. Everyone had scars, it didn't matter whether they were caused by a mother’s insults or a soldier’s bullet. Someone with a perfect face and a memory not full of holes was a myth, and anyone who said otherwise was lying, clinging desperately to some semblance of hope in this decaying, rotten world.

“It’s not mah place to pry, but dearie, you look like someone decided to mold acid to ya face until it stuck, what happened to ya?”

Another vagrant, tramp, hobo… something, this one a woman whose mouth split at the top and bottom, peeling away from her face in a stark, alienlike expression of injury… perhaps a lover’s scorching remarks had done that, the stranger kept her gaze only for a scant moment before she turned away. Looking back into the ugly purple flames and breathing through a ragged, near-busted regulator. For a time, the only sounds were the fleshy crackling and popping of the flames, and the whirring, machine-like action of the regulators all three wore. Before Stranger finally spoke again.

“I wish I knew, supposed to be in this locket here… but I can’t open it.”

Clublike, grime and scum-covered hands gently lifted a glimmering, silver chain from within the bulky environmental suit. At the end of the chain was a simple locket, made from a burnished silvery metal and glinting in the illumination from the firelight. The small heart-like shape seemed to almost deform in the crackling light from the fire, twisting and shaping until it resembled the woman holding it, misshapen, broken down. Hopeless…

The quiet was resoundingly broken with harsh, barking laughter from the other 2, one phlegmy and rueful, the other cracked and despairing. Their voices cut in, briefly overwhelming Stranger with the sheer noise, before lapsing away into silence as the woman coughed and spat something into the fire, the flames hissing and burning a bright, neon green for a moment. As the illumination kicked up, the flames illuminated faded, patched over armor, and the large weapon sitting across Stranger’s knees, prompting the man to hiss and attempt to scramble backward. His covering falling away, but Stranger raised her hand before he could run, and magically… he stopped moving entirely… as she said once more, in her halting, breath-heavy speech.

“I mean you no harm… these are not mine originally, I don’t come from the arcologies…”

The woman’s one good eye rolls in its socket as she grunts to the man, whose scarred and barren face blurs as shifting metal on the left side moves across it.

“If she wanted ta kill ye, she woulda don it already.”

Stranger’s hands fumbled and the locket crashes to the radioactive dust beneath her feet, faint, glowing particles ignite in the silvery powder, and she scrabbles frantically around for a moment. Scrambling to retrieve it as the man watches her and the woman lets loose that phlegmy cackle once more.

“I don’t believe ya story, girlie. Those injuries ain’t from anythin natural… yeh sure ye out here on ya own?”

Stranger nods, her regulator shifting and crackling as she sucks in a breath, holding the locket into the air, before starting to place it back on her chest.

“I’ll bet her lover told her she was as terrible in bed as her face was ugly.”

The man muttered, but Stranger heard him and felt the ice-cold crackling as the left side of her face blazed into luminous, painful scratches. New scars… new words… The woman doesn’t react any longer, and the man spits on the ground next to him. Before he bluntly asks Stranger.

“I don’t think you’ll find anything here that you’re looking for. There’s naught here but old bones, dust, and blasted buildings.”

Stranger nods her head glumly, she’s spent over a month in this place, the burned-out wreck of some greater race’s civilization, this legendary city of Angels… according to its stories… but there’s nothing here except grey shells, blasted buildings, and a thick coat of sometimes glowing ash. The craters in the city’s remnants are poisoned beyond even her suit's capability to resist, the arcology deep underneath turned her away at the slightest sight of who she is. A doomsday soldier, condemned to fight a war forever. Armor patchworked over a dozen times, nanomachine batteries running drier than the ocean she walked across to get here. A canon capable of disseminating radioactive death at ranges exceeding a mile… Stranger grimly chuckles to herself in the depths of her suit. The sound of screaming metal gracing the dusk of her surroundings.

“I have to find her, even if it’s just her bones… I feel like I’m here for a reason… but I don’t know what it is. I have to find the place this locket goes… and return it home.”

The man blinks at Stranger through bleary, pained eyes, as if he’s seeing her for the first time. Before he harshly replies once more.

“Not every journey is worth the pain at the end. I don’t think you’ll thank yourself for taking this journey once you arrive at the end of it. Mark my words.”

The man’s voice rings hollow in Stranger’s head as she slowly gets up, her armor creaking and shifting as the regulator hisses. Before Stranger retrieves her weapon, straightens up, and turns back to the man, his stumplike, metal legs crudely grafted onto long since scarred stumps.

“I… I think I may agree with you… but then again… I’m not a vagrant suffering in the radioactive wastes of this decaying world.”

Stranger’s slow, plodding pace fades into the distance as the man twitches, lines of injury carving themselves onto his face as the insult carves its way into his mind.

Stranger’s pace is quick, her journey nearing its end. Regardless of what she wants, her suit’s protection has failed her, and this area, heavily irradiated, is killing her slowly and painfully. Already, the suit has exhausted its supply of painkillers keeping her on her feet, and her rifle sees more usage as a crutch than as a functional weapon… but she must keep going… she has too… her memories are relying on that. The memories of her awful scars and the worst encounter of her life rely on opening this locket… well… that’s what her orders say… the fragmented memories of the piece of paper seem so long… so long ago…

The shell of a bombed-out residence catches her by total surprise, Stranger’s pace quickening for a scant 30 paces until… with a banshee’s screech, the leg joints of her armor give out with a tearing noise, and Stranger falls, hard… hard enough that she crashes into the dust, breathing heavily as her hands tear at her biohazard suit. Scratching and scrambling to tear it off her body until she kicks the lower half free with a grinding crash. Breathing heavily, her regulator screaming at her to get out of there, Stranger rushes towards the house, running as fast as she can… until… The sun is out… actually out… the woman’s faltering steps slow and cease, and she tears the mask free of her face, bright sunlight graces skin so pale it might as well be transparent, and a pair of brown eyes stare at the quiet, residential street Stranger has stepped into. People and passersby staring at the giant of a woman, clad in the remnants of a suit of armor covered in pockmarks, bullet holes, and burns. Her gigantic rifle, a crude steel construction clatters to the pavement, and Stranger looks at what should be a bombed-out house, at the faceless, masked people that stare at her in placid, docile confusion. Here are the people that sent her to war, here is the house that sent her away, here are the people who condemned her to her fate.

“Samantha?”

The voice is sweet, innocent, so kind it makes Stranger… no… Samantha’s heart hurt, at the little girl standing on the porch that is so like her, that face, those cheekbones… sister… memory faint, scratching at this prison, Samantha’s hands tear at her suit, but the armor blunts her fingernails, and scratches up her hands.

“Sister?”

Her voice hurts… aches… dry and painful is her throat… all of this is too bright! Too much! Emotions… memories… an argument, pain… the stinging red mark on her cheek when her mother gave her physical verdict.

“Samantha!!”

The little girl darts forward… but… a hand crushes down on her shoulder and stops her, a manicured, painfully perfect hand, and the faceless mask of Samantha Prime stares back at her daughter.

“You. Shouldn’t be here. Step away now, and I won’t be forced to do something drastic.”

Stranger’s harsh, barking laugh is one of feral, predatory savagery as she steps forwards, her rifle rising up and up and up… until she sees the prime clap her hands over sister’s ears and eyes… Stranger never hears the cracking of rifles, nor does she feel the bullets strike her suit and tear through it like so much paper. The giant slumps to the ground, her suit crunching into the pavement and crashing into the dust.

The little girl pries her mother’s fingers open and stares at the hulking mass of metal as peace officers swarm the woman, gently taking her back up and placing her into the door of the black van. Sister’s body language is still, even as Samantha prime lowers arms too long, and legs too wide, bending down and whispering into Sister’s ears.

“Bad girls end up in the arms of the peace corps… remember… a useful girl is a good girl.”

Sister nods. A bad girl is sent to the peace corps, a good girl is a useful girl. Her gaze looks to the heavens, at the quiet, digitized blue sky… with a sun that never quite moves as it should...