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Hah! I actually wrote something! Okay, it was totally supposed to be adult fic, and it's not, but whatever! I rule! Happy fucking new year!
Title: Written in Sand on the Sea Shore
Author: Froodle
Warning: contains absolutely NO ADULT CONTENT whatsoever, I am a horrible person.
Author’s notes: in which Lex learns to read and write. Set in non-existent s6 on the Island of Mysterious Mystery
Pairing: None, really. Mentions of Lex/Taisan, Lex/Zandra and Lex/Siva
Rating: A smelly PG13
Disclaimer: I own nothing! Not even the clothes on my back!
Feedback: is fine, but not as good as cake.
In the immediate aftermath, before the streets were filled with burning cars and blaring sirens and the shrieks of warring tribes, it was the inconsequential things he missed most. Take-out food. Television. The internet. Computer games. Better to focus on these, the trivial distractions of the old world, than think on the innumerable dead. His mother, his father. Everyone’s mother and father. He lamented not being able to get pizza delivered, pushing aside the thought that winter had frozen the ground in their communal garden solid and he could dig her only the shallowest of graves before decomposition set in. In the time before, television might have filled the ear-splitting silence their sudden absence left behind, and he mourned the loss of his favourite music channel and a certain bad-but-strangely-addictive teen soap rather than mourn the loss of an entire generation. When the machines stopped working, he had thought he might go mad. He’d spent his whole life in this city and never seen it so quiet. It was the greatest silence he’d ever heard, the horrifying peace that came after so much death. When the riots started, he threw himself, filled with gratitude, into the thick of things. The noise, the action, the fights, anything to crowd out the quiet that made him feel like his head would explode.
There’s no rioting on the Island. Jack calls it the Unknown Shore, some nerd joke accessible only to him and Amber and Ellie with their public school educations, but as far as Lex is concerned, it’s just the Island. No rival street gangs hurling abuse at each other in the early hours, no raucous laughter and blaring music from parties fueled by home-made grog and juiced-up car batteries. Jack and Ellie have the occasional shouting contest, which lifts the boredom temporarily but provides no outlet for the rest of them.
He’s teaching himself to read, now, in the absence of anything (or anyone) better to do, and providing that bitch Ebony isn’t around to make snotty comments about long-dead playwrights whose work was incomprehensible even in the low-budget film version he’d watched in school. It’s painstakingly slow work, drawn with a stick in the wet sand, and he wishes that Taisan was here, sure that she would be able to offer assistance even as he knows he would have refused it. Even Ryan, God help him, though he would have rather bitten out his tongue than call him “Sir” like those half-feral kids Salene had pulled in off the streets to learn their numbers and letters, in what seems like a lifetime ago.
He’s using an alphabet primer, one of several with brightly coloured pictures and a separate page for each letter. Amber had brought them with her in that last desperate flight from the city, taking up valuable space on the ship that would carry them to their Brave New World – one of Ellie’s, this time. In the weeks at sea, he had thought that Amber could stand to grab a little more food and a little less reading material, that books were just another useless relic from a world dead and gone and not coming back, relegated her obsession with the written word, in his own mind, to Jack with that radio set, convinced there was some hidden wisdom from the adult world still out there, if only they had the right equipment to locate it. He’s strangely grateful to her now, if only because it provides a distraction from Trudy’s histrionics, everything a drama with her, Ebony’s incessant scheming, greedy for power even on a deserted island with only a tattered handful of Mallrats left to rule over, Jack babbling about whatever it is Jack babbles about, he’s learnt to tune the noise out by now but the flailing wears on his nerves in such close proximity.
He opens the grimy, water-stained book at the first page, smoothes out a patch of sand with his foot and begins again.
A (a) is for Apple, the book tells him, something he hasn’t eaten in an age, not since the good days when the Mallrats controlled the Antidote and the city with it. Antidote is another A word, as is Alice, who had apple trees on her farm and used them to make good strong cider, which is a type of Alcohol, and also Amber, who is currently missing and therefore can’t hassle him about stealing her son’s educational tools for his own benefit. He copies the letters, upper and lower case, and sketches a crude apple next to it, along with two stick figures, one with a frowny face and pineapple hair, the other with overly exaggerated breasts and holding what is supposed to be an earthenware jug filled with homemade booze, but doesn’t resemble much except perhaps a deformed jellyfish.
B (b) is for Ball, according to the good and presumably long dead folks at Read With Me publishing. It also stands for Brat, which ties in nicely with Brady and Baby Bray and explains why he spends so much time dwelling on Alcohol, because while Amber is missing, the same, alas, cannot be said for her offspring. He sketches two blobs with wide-open wailing mouths and a particularly smug and annoying-looking stick man who represents the namesake of one and father of the other.
C (c) is for Cat, and for Chloe, wherever she is, and that leads him to Calf, which is the name for a baby Cow, and that sets him daydreaming about steak and hamburgers and prime rib. He tries drawing a Big Mac, but wet sand is not the right medium for such artistry, and in the end he settles for a four-legged creature that might have been Bluebell, if you know what to look for.
D (d) is for Dog, and for Dal, whose name should by rights conjure up an image of open farmland and manure tracked into the Mall, but all he remembers now is the smell of concrete in the rain, the way his body lay twisted on the ground, the blood coming from his ears and mouth and Amber screaming, screaming, as the rest of them run for their lives. He doesn’t want to draw that, so instead he draws Danni, big boobs and bigger hair. He can’t draw her annoying voice, so he draws jagged sound waves emerging from a wide-open mouth, and stabs her image with a stick a couple of times, slag, to show her what he thought of her, still thinks of her, though she must be long dead by now.
E (e) is for Egg, but mostly for Ebony, with the black stripe of the Locos across her eyes like the masked bandits in old movies on rainy Sunday afternoons, the police siren howling and the roar of rollerblades on tarmac. No coincidence, in his mind, that E also stands for Evil.
F (f) is for Foot, and also for Food, of which there is almost never enough, and he draws a pepperoni pizza hot from the oven, though it must be six years or more since he last tasted one.
G (g) is an easy one; he doesn’t need the bright green Grass in the picture to help him here. G is the Guardian, who destroyed his marriage, who he should have killed when he had the chance, would have killed that day on the roof if Bray hadn’t grabbed his arm at the last minute, spoiling his aim. A figure in a long dress with long hair, and the moment it is done he tramples it in rage for the way things turned out, the city in ruins and people scattered and wide-open for the next invasion, the threat he envisioned, told it to him not as a warning but to taunt him, you bastard, burn in-
H (h) – in Hell, which is where the Guardian and all his fruitcake followers belong, but also the place where all of them live, have done since the Virus, although now it seems the world was always this way, and the memories before are some half-remembered, improbable dream. He draws flames around the mangled figure beneath the capital G, a certain satisfaction in watching his sand-man burn, though no substitute for the real thing.
I (i) is for Indian, though the figure in war paint and feathered headdress looks like the average kid on the city streets, assuming any of them are left after Mega’s virus. He thinks for a while, can’t come up with anything better, more relevant, draws a stick man with feathers in his hair and carrying a sort of tiny axe thing.
J (j) is for Jay and also Jack, so alike in their belief that science and technology would deliver them from this world, so different in the places their belief took them, Jack with his wind turbine and water filter, Jay with technology that turned users first into addicts and then into slaves in the mines on the outskirts of the city. He draws them both, the Techno brand on one, spiky hair and flailing arms on the other, draws a line between them, underscoring in his mind the line between good and bad science, though he knows Jack would have some long lecture about the basic neutrality of pure knowledge, as if what you did with it wasn’t the only thing that mattered in the end.
K (k) is for Kite, and the sight of that red and blue triangle, the tail decorated in little yellow bows and the two figures, one large, one small, standing atop a hill and holding the string, makes him think of the son that should have been his and all the things they might have done together (though he has never flown a kite, probably wouldn’t have the first idea how to get it in the air) and for a moment he feels sick and dizzy with the grief that filled him on Eagle Mountain, and he grips the stick in white-knuckled hands and shuts his eyes against the memory. He breathes deep, draws KC instead, spiky hair and war paint under the eyes and wide mock-innocent grin. Even this makes his head swim, the kid brother, the devotee, the adherent to The World According To Lex, and where is he now? Some miserable Techno slave camp, if he’s even still alive, and robbing the other prisoners blind with some scam or other, he has no doubt.
L (l) is another easy one, Lex, and if this drawing is more carefully done than the others, who can say anything? These are his lessons, after all. He can do what he wants, even skip out altogether if he feels like it, except there’s nowhere to go and nobody to go with.
M (m) is for Mall, and he finds he can’t remember what it looked like outside, vague impressions of trash-filled streets and the entrance through the sewers, but mostly what comes back to him is that feeling of being safe and warm, of having a real bed and a place that was truly his. M is for the Mosquitoes, too, and his deputy, what was her name? It’s gone, all he can remember was the velvet cat suit and pink hair, and the fact that she ran off with their medic and never said a word to anyone. Never mind, the Mall will do, a square building with a triangular roof and he scratches the word MALL across the front of it.
N (n) is Ned, and whatever half-baked plan he had with kidnapping Trudy and Amber, and Alice out of her mind with the loss, and then the madness that came after. Useless idiot Ned, that whole sorry mess was his fault, what was he thinking? He shakes the hair out of his eyes, shaking the memory away along with the errant strands, copies the drawing of a human Nose out of the book instead.
O (o) brings up the Outcasts, chief among them that treacherous bitch May, stealing his boots and setting them up with that staged kidnapping and Dal broken and dying after a fall from that old parking structure. He’d said it was only a joke with the molasses, but he would have used real tar if he could have found any, and been glad of it too. The drawing looks more comical than anything else, but he makes the mouth wide in a scream of agony and considers it serves well enough for his purpose.
P (p) is for Patsy, poor kid, for all that she was fooled by Trudy into spying for the Chosen, trying to make things right and executed for playing the double-agent. Young as they all were – are – one of the youngest, and too young to die at the hands of blue-robed maniacs in thrall to a live zealot and a dead sociopath. Her brother Paul, too, safe to count him among the dead, how long would a deaf kid have lasted in that world they’d left behind? He can barely remember their faces now, mostly recalls yelling at them for one reason or another, but he draws them holding hands and smiling and maybe that brings them some peace, wherever they are, to be remembered and thought well of.
Q (q) is for Queen, and the book shows a stately figure in splendid robes and bejeweled crown, but to him it says Ebony, at the head of a vast swarm of Locos, red leather and black eye-paint, holding Zoot’s necklace as proof of her ascension to power. She was like some olden-times King returning with the heart of a slain dragon clutched in his bloodstained fist, see what I have done, see what I can do to you if you do not accept my rule. The old tyranny of the Chosen laid to rest and her own in its place, eliminating the competition through bribery or banishment, only to have her prize snatched away from her by a wheelchair-bound computer geek gone bad, reduced to a prize herself. There’s some satisfaction in that, at least. He depicts a furious-looking Ebony, reaching upwards for her crown, held just out of reach by a leering stick figure with the T brand on his forehead.
R (r) is for Riots, and lots of them. The screams of pain and anger and, yes, exhilaration at being alive and able to fight, he wasn’t the only one, old grudges, new disputes, battles for food and territory, the thick pall of smoke that hung over the city streets in the days that came after the Loneliness. Impossible, of course, to recall the old days without also mentioning Ryan, his best mate, not that there was a lot of competition for the position. Bray had word of him from some horse dealer years ago and Salene had gone to look for him, taking with her the horse with the vaguely minty-sounding name, but returned alone. Hope he was still alive, hope he was out of the city when Mega released the virus. Hope he was happy, his stick figure alter ego smiling blithely out of the sand on some forgotten island.
S (s) is for Siva, of course, tall and lissome and a fine street fighter, though with none of her baby sister’s predatory grace. So useless in the domestic sphere and okay, yes, a part of it was about getting one over on the Technos, and it was all tied up with Ebony and all the things he’d wanted to do with her, to her, but he’d cared for her nonetheless, and mourned her loss even as some dark part of him was glad to see Ebony suffer so.
T (t) is for Taisan, his second wife, his real wife, with her moony ways and earthy charms, the smell of incense that clung to her even outdoors in the bright sunlight and the all-natural hangover cures that were worse than the taste in his mouth the morning after. There had been other women, would be other women again, but he would always love her, always hold her up as the standard to which other women would aspire and ultimately fall short of.
U (u) is for Umbrella, according to the book, but out here they have to make do with Jack’s leaky lean-tos, constructed of leaves and twigs and liable to collapse at inopportune moments. However, he can’t think of anything else, so he draws it anyway, cursing the old world with it’s easy, portable shelter while he must shiver and sneeze at the fall of civilization.
V (v) is Virus, a no-brainer here, destroyer of his old life, a plague visited on the adults for their vanity and avarice, so that they destroyed themselves even as they reached for immortality. No doubt Jack, had he been here, could have drawn the molecules and DNA double-helixes and whatever else comprised their self-inflicted Apocalypse, but that’s beyond him, so he copies the Violin out of the book and scowls in irritation when it comes out looking like a Coke-a-Cola bottle.
W (w) is for World, the book suggests, all bright blues and verdant greens. Maybe that’s what it looks like from space, what that satellite with its crew of dead scientists sees as it orbits the planet, gazing down at an Earth no longer choked with the pollution of an industry based in fossil fuels, freed from the smog created by the old world, though he still thinks of it as the modern world. Lex prefers Whiskey, even if you can’t get it anymore, would prefer even the blindness-inducing swill that makes do for hard liquor these days, and even if the bottle he draws is more supermarket own-brand than Johnny Walker.
X (x) is for Xylophone, and he copies the name down with painstaking care until he remembers an old show from before, about a warrior queen with a leather bustier and a titillating relationship with her attractive blonde sidekick. He does his best to render the main character, an Amazon in a mini-skirt holding the requisite phallic sword, writes the word Xena above it, so much easier to spell and much more fun to draw than some instrument he hasn’t seen since school music lessons when he was about five.
Y (y) is for Yo-Yo, and he remembers how his grandmother (his mother’s mother, his father’s people being even more accomplished at being worthless drunks than the old man was himself) would put one in his stocking every Christmas when he was young. Young also begins with a Y and he supposes he still is young, at least by the standards that applied previously. Even so, he’s one of the older generation, now the whole world is so shockingly, appallingly young.
Z (z) has a picture of a Zebra next to it and the stripes make him think of Zoot, demented King of the Locos, dark God of the Chosen, but there’s someone far more important, and he draws a young girl whose hair would be pink and blue if he had access to colours, and holding in her arms a tiny bundle that might, in another life, have been his son. He writes her name beneath it, pressing hard on the stick so it sinks deep into the sand, some futile attempt to make the impression permanent, even though at the far end of the beach, where he first began, the sea is already eroding Alice and Amber with their Apple and Alcohol. He picks up the stick and the book and heads back to their camp, and the thought occurs to him, pleasing in its symmetry, that although Zandra was the first one to be lost to him, hers will be the last name the waves wipe from the beach.
In other news, why is all X-Files slash either rubbish, angsty, or riddled with unnecessary Australians? This makes me very sad. In contrast, Numb3rs slash is usually very awesome, which is weird because if I had to pick whether shows about fightin' crime with math and shows about massive government conspiracies were sexier, math would lose like France in any battle ever.
Title: Written in Sand on the Sea Shore
Author: Froodle
Warning: contains absolutely NO ADULT CONTENT whatsoever, I am a horrible person.
Author’s notes: in which Lex learns to read and write. Set in non-existent s6 on the Island of Mysterious Mystery
Pairing: None, really. Mentions of Lex/Taisan, Lex/Zandra and Lex/Siva
Rating: A smelly PG13
Disclaimer: I own nothing! Not even the clothes on my back!
Feedback: is fine, but not as good as cake.
In the immediate aftermath, before the streets were filled with burning cars and blaring sirens and the shrieks of warring tribes, it was the inconsequential things he missed most. Take-out food. Television. The internet. Computer games. Better to focus on these, the trivial distractions of the old world, than think on the innumerable dead. His mother, his father. Everyone’s mother and father. He lamented not being able to get pizza delivered, pushing aside the thought that winter had frozen the ground in their communal garden solid and he could dig her only the shallowest of graves before decomposition set in. In the time before, television might have filled the ear-splitting silence their sudden absence left behind, and he mourned the loss of his favourite music channel and a certain bad-but-strangely-addictive teen soap rather than mourn the loss of an entire generation. When the machines stopped working, he had thought he might go mad. He’d spent his whole life in this city and never seen it so quiet. It was the greatest silence he’d ever heard, the horrifying peace that came after so much death. When the riots started, he threw himself, filled with gratitude, into the thick of things. The noise, the action, the fights, anything to crowd out the quiet that made him feel like his head would explode.
There’s no rioting on the Island. Jack calls it the Unknown Shore, some nerd joke accessible only to him and Amber and Ellie with their public school educations, but as far as Lex is concerned, it’s just the Island. No rival street gangs hurling abuse at each other in the early hours, no raucous laughter and blaring music from parties fueled by home-made grog and juiced-up car batteries. Jack and Ellie have the occasional shouting contest, which lifts the boredom temporarily but provides no outlet for the rest of them.
He’s teaching himself to read, now, in the absence of anything (or anyone) better to do, and providing that bitch Ebony isn’t around to make snotty comments about long-dead playwrights whose work was incomprehensible even in the low-budget film version he’d watched in school. It’s painstakingly slow work, drawn with a stick in the wet sand, and he wishes that Taisan was here, sure that she would be able to offer assistance even as he knows he would have refused it. Even Ryan, God help him, though he would have rather bitten out his tongue than call him “Sir” like those half-feral kids Salene had pulled in off the streets to learn their numbers and letters, in what seems like a lifetime ago.
He’s using an alphabet primer, one of several with brightly coloured pictures and a separate page for each letter. Amber had brought them with her in that last desperate flight from the city, taking up valuable space on the ship that would carry them to their Brave New World – one of Ellie’s, this time. In the weeks at sea, he had thought that Amber could stand to grab a little more food and a little less reading material, that books were just another useless relic from a world dead and gone and not coming back, relegated her obsession with the written word, in his own mind, to Jack with that radio set, convinced there was some hidden wisdom from the adult world still out there, if only they had the right equipment to locate it. He’s strangely grateful to her now, if only because it provides a distraction from Trudy’s histrionics, everything a drama with her, Ebony’s incessant scheming, greedy for power even on a deserted island with only a tattered handful of Mallrats left to rule over, Jack babbling about whatever it is Jack babbles about, he’s learnt to tune the noise out by now but the flailing wears on his nerves in such close proximity.
He opens the grimy, water-stained book at the first page, smoothes out a patch of sand with his foot and begins again.
A (a) is for Apple, the book tells him, something he hasn’t eaten in an age, not since the good days when the Mallrats controlled the Antidote and the city with it. Antidote is another A word, as is Alice, who had apple trees on her farm and used them to make good strong cider, which is a type of Alcohol, and also Amber, who is currently missing and therefore can’t hassle him about stealing her son’s educational tools for his own benefit. He copies the letters, upper and lower case, and sketches a crude apple next to it, along with two stick figures, one with a frowny face and pineapple hair, the other with overly exaggerated breasts and holding what is supposed to be an earthenware jug filled with homemade booze, but doesn’t resemble much except perhaps a deformed jellyfish.
B (b) is for Ball, according to the good and presumably long dead folks at Read With Me publishing. It also stands for Brat, which ties in nicely with Brady and Baby Bray and explains why he spends so much time dwelling on Alcohol, because while Amber is missing, the same, alas, cannot be said for her offspring. He sketches two blobs with wide-open wailing mouths and a particularly smug and annoying-looking stick man who represents the namesake of one and father of the other.
C (c) is for Cat, and for Chloe, wherever she is, and that leads him to Calf, which is the name for a baby Cow, and that sets him daydreaming about steak and hamburgers and prime rib. He tries drawing a Big Mac, but wet sand is not the right medium for such artistry, and in the end he settles for a four-legged creature that might have been Bluebell, if you know what to look for.
D (d) is for Dog, and for Dal, whose name should by rights conjure up an image of open farmland and manure tracked into the Mall, but all he remembers now is the smell of concrete in the rain, the way his body lay twisted on the ground, the blood coming from his ears and mouth and Amber screaming, screaming, as the rest of them run for their lives. He doesn’t want to draw that, so instead he draws Danni, big boobs and bigger hair. He can’t draw her annoying voice, so he draws jagged sound waves emerging from a wide-open mouth, and stabs her image with a stick a couple of times, slag, to show her what he thought of her, still thinks of her, though she must be long dead by now.
E (e) is for Egg, but mostly for Ebony, with the black stripe of the Locos across her eyes like the masked bandits in old movies on rainy Sunday afternoons, the police siren howling and the roar of rollerblades on tarmac. No coincidence, in his mind, that E also stands for Evil.
F (f) is for Foot, and also for Food, of which there is almost never enough, and he draws a pepperoni pizza hot from the oven, though it must be six years or more since he last tasted one.
G (g) is an easy one; he doesn’t need the bright green Grass in the picture to help him here. G is the Guardian, who destroyed his marriage, who he should have killed when he had the chance, would have killed that day on the roof if Bray hadn’t grabbed his arm at the last minute, spoiling his aim. A figure in a long dress with long hair, and the moment it is done he tramples it in rage for the way things turned out, the city in ruins and people scattered and wide-open for the next invasion, the threat he envisioned, told it to him not as a warning but to taunt him, you bastard, burn in-
H (h) – in Hell, which is where the Guardian and all his fruitcake followers belong, but also the place where all of them live, have done since the Virus, although now it seems the world was always this way, and the memories before are some half-remembered, improbable dream. He draws flames around the mangled figure beneath the capital G, a certain satisfaction in watching his sand-man burn, though no substitute for the real thing.
I (i) is for Indian, though the figure in war paint and feathered headdress looks like the average kid on the city streets, assuming any of them are left after Mega’s virus. He thinks for a while, can’t come up with anything better, more relevant, draws a stick man with feathers in his hair and carrying a sort of tiny axe thing.
J (j) is for Jay and also Jack, so alike in their belief that science and technology would deliver them from this world, so different in the places their belief took them, Jack with his wind turbine and water filter, Jay with technology that turned users first into addicts and then into slaves in the mines on the outskirts of the city. He draws them both, the Techno brand on one, spiky hair and flailing arms on the other, draws a line between them, underscoring in his mind the line between good and bad science, though he knows Jack would have some long lecture about the basic neutrality of pure knowledge, as if what you did with it wasn’t the only thing that mattered in the end.
K (k) is for Kite, and the sight of that red and blue triangle, the tail decorated in little yellow bows and the two figures, one large, one small, standing atop a hill and holding the string, makes him think of the son that should have been his and all the things they might have done together (though he has never flown a kite, probably wouldn’t have the first idea how to get it in the air) and for a moment he feels sick and dizzy with the grief that filled him on Eagle Mountain, and he grips the stick in white-knuckled hands and shuts his eyes against the memory. He breathes deep, draws KC instead, spiky hair and war paint under the eyes and wide mock-innocent grin. Even this makes his head swim, the kid brother, the devotee, the adherent to The World According To Lex, and where is he now? Some miserable Techno slave camp, if he’s even still alive, and robbing the other prisoners blind with some scam or other, he has no doubt.
L (l) is another easy one, Lex, and if this drawing is more carefully done than the others, who can say anything? These are his lessons, after all. He can do what he wants, even skip out altogether if he feels like it, except there’s nowhere to go and nobody to go with.
M (m) is for Mall, and he finds he can’t remember what it looked like outside, vague impressions of trash-filled streets and the entrance through the sewers, but mostly what comes back to him is that feeling of being safe and warm, of having a real bed and a place that was truly his. M is for the Mosquitoes, too, and his deputy, what was her name? It’s gone, all he can remember was the velvet cat suit and pink hair, and the fact that she ran off with their medic and never said a word to anyone. Never mind, the Mall will do, a square building with a triangular roof and he scratches the word MALL across the front of it.
N (n) is Ned, and whatever half-baked plan he had with kidnapping Trudy and Amber, and Alice out of her mind with the loss, and then the madness that came after. Useless idiot Ned, that whole sorry mess was his fault, what was he thinking? He shakes the hair out of his eyes, shaking the memory away along with the errant strands, copies the drawing of a human Nose out of the book instead.
O (o) brings up the Outcasts, chief among them that treacherous bitch May, stealing his boots and setting them up with that staged kidnapping and Dal broken and dying after a fall from that old parking structure. He’d said it was only a joke with the molasses, but he would have used real tar if he could have found any, and been glad of it too. The drawing looks more comical than anything else, but he makes the mouth wide in a scream of agony and considers it serves well enough for his purpose.
P (p) is for Patsy, poor kid, for all that she was fooled by Trudy into spying for the Chosen, trying to make things right and executed for playing the double-agent. Young as they all were – are – one of the youngest, and too young to die at the hands of blue-robed maniacs in thrall to a live zealot and a dead sociopath. Her brother Paul, too, safe to count him among the dead, how long would a deaf kid have lasted in that world they’d left behind? He can barely remember their faces now, mostly recalls yelling at them for one reason or another, but he draws them holding hands and smiling and maybe that brings them some peace, wherever they are, to be remembered and thought well of.
Q (q) is for Queen, and the book shows a stately figure in splendid robes and bejeweled crown, but to him it says Ebony, at the head of a vast swarm of Locos, red leather and black eye-paint, holding Zoot’s necklace as proof of her ascension to power. She was like some olden-times King returning with the heart of a slain dragon clutched in his bloodstained fist, see what I have done, see what I can do to you if you do not accept my rule. The old tyranny of the Chosen laid to rest and her own in its place, eliminating the competition through bribery or banishment, only to have her prize snatched away from her by a wheelchair-bound computer geek gone bad, reduced to a prize herself. There’s some satisfaction in that, at least. He depicts a furious-looking Ebony, reaching upwards for her crown, held just out of reach by a leering stick figure with the T brand on his forehead.
R (r) is for Riots, and lots of them. The screams of pain and anger and, yes, exhilaration at being alive and able to fight, he wasn’t the only one, old grudges, new disputes, battles for food and territory, the thick pall of smoke that hung over the city streets in the days that came after the Loneliness. Impossible, of course, to recall the old days without also mentioning Ryan, his best mate, not that there was a lot of competition for the position. Bray had word of him from some horse dealer years ago and Salene had gone to look for him, taking with her the horse with the vaguely minty-sounding name, but returned alone. Hope he was still alive, hope he was out of the city when Mega released the virus. Hope he was happy, his stick figure alter ego smiling blithely out of the sand on some forgotten island.
S (s) is for Siva, of course, tall and lissome and a fine street fighter, though with none of her baby sister’s predatory grace. So useless in the domestic sphere and okay, yes, a part of it was about getting one over on the Technos, and it was all tied up with Ebony and all the things he’d wanted to do with her, to her, but he’d cared for her nonetheless, and mourned her loss even as some dark part of him was glad to see Ebony suffer so.
T (t) is for Taisan, his second wife, his real wife, with her moony ways and earthy charms, the smell of incense that clung to her even outdoors in the bright sunlight and the all-natural hangover cures that were worse than the taste in his mouth the morning after. There had been other women, would be other women again, but he would always love her, always hold her up as the standard to which other women would aspire and ultimately fall short of.
U (u) is for Umbrella, according to the book, but out here they have to make do with Jack’s leaky lean-tos, constructed of leaves and twigs and liable to collapse at inopportune moments. However, he can’t think of anything else, so he draws it anyway, cursing the old world with it’s easy, portable shelter while he must shiver and sneeze at the fall of civilization.
V (v) is Virus, a no-brainer here, destroyer of his old life, a plague visited on the adults for their vanity and avarice, so that they destroyed themselves even as they reached for immortality. No doubt Jack, had he been here, could have drawn the molecules and DNA double-helixes and whatever else comprised their self-inflicted Apocalypse, but that’s beyond him, so he copies the Violin out of the book and scowls in irritation when it comes out looking like a Coke-a-Cola bottle.
W (w) is for World, the book suggests, all bright blues and verdant greens. Maybe that’s what it looks like from space, what that satellite with its crew of dead scientists sees as it orbits the planet, gazing down at an Earth no longer choked with the pollution of an industry based in fossil fuels, freed from the smog created by the old world, though he still thinks of it as the modern world. Lex prefers Whiskey, even if you can’t get it anymore, would prefer even the blindness-inducing swill that makes do for hard liquor these days, and even if the bottle he draws is more supermarket own-brand than Johnny Walker.
X (x) is for Xylophone, and he copies the name down with painstaking care until he remembers an old show from before, about a warrior queen with a leather bustier and a titillating relationship with her attractive blonde sidekick. He does his best to render the main character, an Amazon in a mini-skirt holding the requisite phallic sword, writes the word Xena above it, so much easier to spell and much more fun to draw than some instrument he hasn’t seen since school music lessons when he was about five.
Y (y) is for Yo-Yo, and he remembers how his grandmother (his mother’s mother, his father’s people being even more accomplished at being worthless drunks than the old man was himself) would put one in his stocking every Christmas when he was young. Young also begins with a Y and he supposes he still is young, at least by the standards that applied previously. Even so, he’s one of the older generation, now the whole world is so shockingly, appallingly young.
Z (z) has a picture of a Zebra next to it and the stripes make him think of Zoot, demented King of the Locos, dark God of the Chosen, but there’s someone far more important, and he draws a young girl whose hair would be pink and blue if he had access to colours, and holding in her arms a tiny bundle that might, in another life, have been his son. He writes her name beneath it, pressing hard on the stick so it sinks deep into the sand, some futile attempt to make the impression permanent, even though at the far end of the beach, where he first began, the sea is already eroding Alice and Amber with their Apple and Alcohol. He picks up the stick and the book and heads back to their camp, and the thought occurs to him, pleasing in its symmetry, that although Zandra was the first one to be lost to him, hers will be the last name the waves wipe from the beach.
In other news, why is all X-Files slash either rubbish, angsty, or riddled with unnecessary Australians? This makes me very sad. In contrast, Numb3rs slash is usually very awesome, which is weird because if I had to pick whether shows about fightin' crime with math and shows about massive government conspiracies were sexier, math would lose like France in any battle ever.