“This is going to be even harder than I thought it would,” Junko tells them. “Our competitors have been doing this kind of thing since the day they learned how to walk.”
Scavy looks back at Popcorn. She is sitting against a wall on the other side of the roof, quivering. Her skin is white. She doesn’t look good at all. At first, he thinks she could just be going through Waste withdrawal. But he can tell that’s not it. Junko was right, Popcorn is infected.
Scavy had known Popcorn since they were kids. Both of them were living on the streets, abandoned by their parents, running with the same gang. If you’re abandoned by your parents in the Copper Quadrant you have two options: whore yourself or sell Waste. They chose the latter.
Popcorn was the weirdest chick Scavy knew. She was unpredictable, destructive, and always on high energy. They were never really romantically involved at first, even though they did hook up from time to time. She dated a lot of his friends but he wasn’t really interested in her in that way. He thought the pink mohawk she had back then was pretty cute, but he mostly just thought she was cool to hang out with.
He clearly remembers the first day they met. He was walking along the beach in his bare feet, squishing the sand between his toes, watching the waves hitting the shore. The one thing he liked about Copper was that he had the beach. The people in the upper quadrants couldn’t walk in the sand if they wanted to. They were walled up in the center of the island. A lot of those people haven’t even seen the ocean through their tall barriers.
Sure the beach was littered with broken glass, medical waste, and all the other trash the rich people dumped into the ocean, but he still felt privileged to visit the beach whenever he wanted.
As he walked past the vagrant shacks that lined the beach, he saw a teenaged pink-mohawked girl about his age. She was trying to break down the door of one of the shacks, kicking it in with her pink combat boot.
“What are you doing?” Scavy asked.
She didn’t stop kicking the door.
“Robbing the shack?” Scavy said. “You know they don’t have shit in there, right?”
She shrugged at him and then kicked the door open. But once the door was open, she didn’t enter. She just went to the next shack and started kicking that door in.
“Why are you kicking in doors?” Scavy asked her.
She shrugged. “Just for fun.”
Scavy liked that answer.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
They went from shack to shack, kicking doors down. A couple of hobos stumbled out of their shacks and slurred drunken obscenities at them. The punks just laughed and continued kicking.
One door Popcorn kicked splintered on impact and Popcorn’s boot went through the middle. She burst into laughter when some hobo on the other side grabbed her leg.
“Damn punks!” cried the hobo on the other side of the door. “I’ll fuck you, fucking punks!”
Then the homeless guy twisted Popcorn’s leg, as if he was trying to twist it off. Popcorn just giggled at him and grabbed Scavy by the shoulder.
“Help!” she cried, then laughed.
Scavy grabbed her under the arms and pulled, then pushed off against the door with his foot. The door opened and hit the hobo and the face, causing him to let go. They both ran off, laughing, then hid under the dock and did some lines of Waste.
Once they were high, Scavy asked, “What’s your name?”
“Poppy,” she said. “But some people call me Popcorn.”
They became good friends after that. They used to go out and wreak havoc on the neighborhoods. Scavy would steal a crate of fish from the docks and then they would throw them at strippers in the redlight district. Poppy would sleep with the local tattooist to get them both free tattoos. Then they would shit in crates of produce that was to get shipped to the upper quadrants. She was Scavy’s kind of person.
One of Popcorn’s favorite things to do was spray paint pictures on the wall separating Copper and Silver, usually of muscular women with pink mohawks sneering and flipping the middle finger. They would have dialog bubbles that were supposed to be insulting, but never quite hit their mark. Stuff like: “Silver Sucks!” or “Fuck off, filthy scum!” or “think fast, fuckers!” which is one that really made no sense to anyone else except for Scavy and Poppy.
Popcorn was a huge fan of the “think fast” game. Whenever Scavy wasn’t looking, she would say “think fast!” and then throw an apple or a rock at him. Sometimes he would catch the object, sometimes he wouldn’t. Scavy knew that when Poppy said “think fast” trouble was coming.
One day, while they were doing lines of Waste, Poppy said, “Think fast!” and then stabbed a knife through Scavy’s hand, nailing it to the table.
Scavy just looked at the knife in his hand and back up at Popcorn who had a goofy “I totally got you” look on her face.
“What the fuck!” Scavy yelled, his blood mixing with the lines of Waste on the table.
“You’re too slow,” she said, then snorted one of the lines with his blood in it.
Scavy tried to pull the knife out of his hand, but it was jammed into the table pretty good. He just sighed and shook his head at Poppy, his blood on her nostril. When you’re friends with a crazy unpredictable bitch, you’ve got to take the good with the bad.
They started dating, for a while, but both of them knew that wasn’t going to stick. Popcorn wasn’t the type to get serious with anyone for very long. She just gets bored too easily. But Scavy relates to that. He’s the exact same way.
A couple of days ago, Scavy told her, “So I think we should break up and shit.”
And all she did was shrug, and said, “Yeah, sure. You wanna do a line?”
“Yeah.”
And that was it
As Scavy watches Popcorn shiver and spit, he taps the bottom of his spear against the concrete roof. Junko notices that he’s finally come to terms with his friend’s condition. She goes to him.
“We have to take care of her,” Junko says, holding up the 9mm. “Before she changes.”
Scavy nods a few too many times. “Yeah, okay.”
“I’ll do it if you want,” Junko says.
“No, I’ll do it,” Scavy says, reaching for the gun.
“Make sure she doesn’t see it coming,” Junko says, blocking the sight of the handoff from his girlfriend. “It’ll be easier for her that way.”
“Yeah. Easier.”
“Shoot her before she even knows what’s going on.”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
“Okay,” Junko says, and pats him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry…”
Then he turns to Popcorn. He takes a deep breath and points the gun at her. A smile appears on his face as he gets a funny idea for how to handle this.
“Hey, Poppy,” he says.
She looks up at him.
“Think fast.”
Then he shoots her in the face.
“What the fuck, Scavy?” Popcorn says to him, as blood drips from the bullet hole in her forehead.
The other three just stare at her.
“Umm…” Scavy leans over to Junko. “She didn’t die.”
Popcorn wipes her forehead and then looks at the blood on her fingers. “You think that’s funny, asshole?”
“She’s already turned,” Junko says, taking the handgun from the punk and pointing it at the punk chick.
Poppy looks behind her at the blood on the wall, then she stands up and goes to them. “You’re such a dick.”