“But then only one of us will survive,” Haroon says.
“You don’t understand,” Junko says. “We’ll be lucky if even one of us survives. Last season not a single person lasted beyond the first day.”
“Then why bother?” Adriana says. “We might as well kill ourselves now.”
Junko shrugs. She doesn’t really have a good answer for her. But Laurence steps forward and answers for her. “Because if we’re gonna die, we’re not gonna die like chumps.”
Then he punches his large fist into his palm.
The punks cheer him.
Junko goes to Charlie.
“So, are you going to join me,” she asks, “and leave the bitch behind?”
“Yeah,” he says, without making eye contact. “I’m with you.”
Junko smiles at him. “Good. Forget all about her and you might actually last awhile.”
Charlie wipes his tears away, tries to toughen up.
“So who else should we team up with?” he asks.
Junko looks around the room. She points at the black man with the mohawk and the guy he is talking to, an ex-soldier turned vagrant named Lee. “Them.”
“They can be trusted?”
She nods. “I’m a good judge of character.”
“Who else?”
“I think I can trust that Haroon guy,” Junko says. “But he’s an idiot if he thinks he can actually get out of the wasteland by anything other than helicopter.”
“He seems okay. That all?”
Junko looks around the room, then nods.
“Yeah, the rest are either worthless or scumbags or both.”
Charlie says, “Then let’s talk to the three that are worthwhile.”
As Junko introduces herself to Laurence and Lee, Charlie grinds his fist at the thought of Rainbow betraying him like that. He knew she was on the selfish side, he knew she hated the idea of living in the Copper Quadrant, and he knew money was important to her. But what he didn’t know was how little of importance he was to her.
Rainbow was a hippy from the Gold Quadrant. She lived in relative luxury since as long as she could remember. As a rich spoiled girl whose parents paid for everything, she was able to spend her time reading, smoking pot, protesting, painting, promoting peace and happiness, smoking pot, dancing, sun-bathing, and smoking pot. There were a lot of hippies in the Gold Quadrant. There were very few in the Silver and Copper Quadrants, because people were too busy working their asses off for just the bare essentials of survival.
When Charlie and Rainbow first met, it was at the university.
“What are you reading?” Charlie asked her.
Rainbow looked up from her picnic blanket to see the strange man staring down on her, blocking the sunlight.
“Charles Hudson,” she said, folding her legs, her wet grassy toes resting on top of a cucumber sandwich.
“What are you reading that crap for?” he said. “There were much better books written before Z-Day.”
“But I like his books,” she said. “I relate to them. He’s the only good writer since the apocalypse.”
Charlie smiled and stretched his back at her. “I don’t know, I think he’s kind of a douchebag. Just look at his author photo. Total douche.”
Then he walked away.
“Asshole,” Rainbow said.
She hated when people said crap about her favorite author. Just because he was a popular contemporary writer, that didn’t make him terrible. Most of the classics were originally bestsellers, written by the popular contemporary writers of their time. Just because Charles Hudson wasn’t dead yet and had yet to withstand the test of time, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.
She muttered to herself, “You look more like a douchebag than Charles Hudson.”
Then she turned to the bio page and looked at his author photo. Then she looked back at Charlie, who was walking casually through the park with his hands in his pockets. Charlie was wearing the same green antique army coat as the author in the photo.
She chased Charlie down and walked beside him, looking at his face and holding his book up as reference. Although he was younger in the photo, had less meat on his bones, and was clean shaven, she could see they were the same person.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she asked. “Charles Hudson.”
Charlie smiled. “I was wondering if you’d notice.”
“Why didn’t you tell me!” she said. “You’re my favorite author!”
“If I’m your favorite author,” he said, “you’re not reading the right books.”
“I’ve read a lot,” Rainbow said, then licked her upper lip. “You’re the only author that really speaks to me.”
“But there’s a whole library full of books by masters of the craft,” he said, pointing at the university library on the other side of the park. “Those are the all-time greatest works of literature, written by geniuses. I’m no a master. I’m no genius. I’m not even smart, really. I’ve just been writing stories my whole life, since I was a kid, as a way to escape our shitty reality.”
“But I can relate to that,” she said, swinging her dreads over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t blocking her cleavage. “I can’t relate to some masterful genius from a completely different era telling stories about a world I never knew. You write about our lives now, in Neo New York.”
“But those other books are brilliant works of art.”
“I don’t care if they are brilliant. I care about emotion. You make me smile, laugh, cry, fear, fall in love. That’s what is important.”
Charlie smiled at her. She smiled at him. He noticed she was sucking in her stomach, arching her back, pushing out her breasts so that they wouldn’t look so small.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Cathy,” she said. Then she leaned in, pressed her cheek against
his, and said in a gentle voice, “But you can call me Rainbow Cat.” Her lips so close they tickled his earlobe when she spoke.
He was used to the flirtatious advances of his female readers. His past six girlfriends were all young pretty fans. They were the only girls he was interested in, because even though he liked to make light of his writing talents all he really wanted was to have his ego stroked as much as possible. Compliments meant so much more when they were coming out of the lips of a beautiful woman.
By the next morning, they had already had sex three times. Rainbow was aggressive with her sexuality, gluttonous with it. She knew what she wanted, and she wanted it all right then and there. Charlie liked that about her. The more she wanted him, the better he felt about himself as a writer. She didn’t know him, personally. She only knew his work. So for him to see her crave him sexually so bad meant that it was his art that she wanted to fuck. She wanted to lick his art, press her body against his art, feel his art inside of her. As an artist, it was like an ego blowjob, and he loved every second of it.
But she didn’t just want to make love to him, she wanted to possess him. It wasn’t long before she dropped out of college and moved in with him. It wasn’t long before she convinced him to marry her.
They were happy together. Rainbow was happy that her favorite author now belonged to her, both physically and mentally, and he was happy to be with this pretty young girl who loved his work so much that she was willing to dedicate her life to him because of it. For each of them, it was a perfect arrangement. But it didn’t last.
When the last fiction publishing company in Neo New York went out of business, Charlie was no longer an author. With no college education, neither Charlie nor Rainbow could get jobs in the Gold Quadrant. They were downgraded to the Silver Quadrant and eventually ended up in the ghetto of Copper.
Rainbow still believed in her husband. At least she did when they first moved into the Copper Quadrant. She told him that she would take care of them from then on. All he had to worry about was his writing.