No Heart in the Wasteland

So if the title to this file is to be believed, I wrote it two months ago while working an overnight at my security guard position. I don’t remember writing it, and I don’t know where the story was going or what was meant to happen. However, reading it now, I have that rare feeling of actually liking something I wrote. So I thought I’d share this thing I don’t remember writing!

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In the thick darkness of city alleys, they lurked and lingered with the pervasive wickedness born within them. King amongst these beasts was the lizard, a red lizard man, with great amber eyes and teeth like shards of milky glass. His body lumbered somewhere in between truly human and truly reptile, moving upright yet slinking and flicking about. They called him Rabo, those who called him anything at all. Most tried not to think of him. They feared even treading on his shadow.

Of course, only those who lived in the derelict urban aisles knew for sure who to fear. The higher into the shining spires you went, the power of ground level reputation played out until it wasn’t even ephemeral; it was entirely unknown. At one of those highest rooms, a real reputation to fear resided for those upper echelons. The copper haired witch, a pioneer in her own right and daughter of many generations of pioneers before her. The mechanics and digitials that unwound from her mind and came to live in the world were a delight and a terror. They inspired and frightened in equal turn. Many men and women had stories to tell of Evelyn, as they called her, sending a clicker clacker to do something uncertain but certainly bad. And to be sure, as many of the stories were true.

Two figures, dwelling in their extremes of power, utterly separate, but so deeply unified by the silence they found themselves forced into. Through their exceptional achievements they stood alone, superior to any mind within their accessible spheres. Without knowing it, the copper haired woman and the red lizard man craved each other with a fierce hunger. Ideas of each other were forming in frames on the walls of their minds, without any tangible details to build from. Just a thirst and craving that drove it’s work on, consciousness or no.

It was inevitable. Evelyn would descend one day, or Rabo would climb. But somehow, the two would dance some step or other.

It was winter, as it happened.

Seated at her six legged desk, many lenses before her eyes, Evelyn laid her present work to rest. She raised her head from the magnifiers and let it fall back against her chair. Curls like shining wires framed her face as she stared upward, imagining something at the edge of her thoughts for the upteenth time that week.

At times an idea would enter the waiting rooms of her mind and linger there for an agonizing time. Sometimes she could be patient with these lurkers, but more often her patience dried up long before the visitor emerged fully. She’d already chewed her inside lip raw waiting for the latest to make its way into view. What did she want to do?

What? What could it even be, she had a challenge in front of her that was engaging enough. A client wanted a little bug, just a very little one, to deliver a punishing sort of substance into the boudoir of a former lover. The lover happened to be a former security executive and quite keen to spot the little threats in the woodwork. It was a complicated, contained sort of a test of skill. She wanted to have this kind of work in front of her all the time, surely! Mercy, please, mercy she thought. Mercy from this agony of what if! With this thought she rose up and knocked the lenses over, striding around the room with an inflated sense of rage and ego. She did not deserve such desperation. Not her, of all people.

Her clothes were rumpled and her shoes had holes in the soles, but she charged from her apartments without altering one thing. And no one would say a thing about that stain on the linen shirt sleeve, or that hole in the hem of the trousers. Who would dare?

The descending boulevard of Rupert Spire curved about the massive stalk, still many hundreds of feet wide at this, it’s highest and narrowest point. She strode down the shining stone with the click of anger in her footsteps. Shop fronts and little gardens for resting held no interest. Down she curved with the street, until after some time she came to a pause.

She was out of breath, and angry still.

Then she looked to her right, and her guest at last stepped through the door.

It settled in the chair across from her desk, took a deep breath, and began to speak slowly and carefully of its intentions.

It spoke of the elevator door before her now, guarded by metallic sorts of men. It spoke of descent.