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2011, the ruins of zone 12
It’s not technically robbery. You can hardly call it stealing when the so-called owners have been gone for months, leaving only the ghost of a home. When they’ve run off into the not-so-welcoming arms of the desert to make a hypothetical new home, or been force-fed enough propaganda to move to the big city in hopes of a better and more ordinary future, or simply been exterminated and disposed of by a faceless suit.
You can’t claim it’s really taking something away, not when you have to wipe years of dust off the loot before stuffing it in your bags. And you definitely can’t say that it would be missed when you see the state of the shit. Falling apart, rotting, infested by roaches. Wallpaper peeling off, holes in the floorboards, broken windows. Everything bathed in a strange sepia light no matter how the world outside looks. Enough dust to make your eyes water. Nostalgia’s evil twin, a twisted mockery of a childhood home. If you thought anyone would ever come back to those ruins of suburbia, then you were either dumb or delusional. Or both.
That’s what Kobra Kid tells himself as he busts down yet another door. It’s what he does on these jobs: Jet Star knows what’s worth keeping, what they can leave, and what they can sell; Party Poison devises systems for both sorting and searching; Fun Ghoul is always okay with touching the grossest, slimiest, and most bug-eaten things when the others won’t. But Kobra? He gets them in and out, he has pure strength. After all, he knows karate.
This particular door is pretty easy to get through. Enough rot will do that. After only a simple kick, Kobra turns to the others, and nods towards the make-shift entrance. They grab the bags, and are soon inside the decrepit house. It’s not that different from any of the other houses in that part of the desert: northern zone 12 was a pretty pricy neighborhood before the BLI takeover. Not like zone 9, Kobra and Party’s former home, most of which has either been wrecked or repurposed for factories before being completely destroyed.
No, this place had probably been on BLI’s “salvageable” list. Straight laced and conforming, filled with white picket fences and nuclear families — they’d likely tried to persuade the inhabitants to move sides to Mom and Dad before demolishing the place. From the looks of it, they’d mostly succeeded. There were few houses with anything left in them, leaving only bare-bones skeletons of homes, most likely the result of a move to the black and white capital of the desert.
Not this house, though. There’s still furniture, though mainly rotted, and a few toys spread on the living room floor makes it look like the lives of the former inhabitants had been suddenly interrupted without warning. Probably a C/R/O/W hit then, Kobra guesses to himself, as he picks up a trash bag. There are footprints on the floor, he notes, absentmindedly. Just barely visible. The clear imprint of boots in the dust, going from the front door to where he’s now standing and probably continuing throughout the house. Strange. He doesn’t mention it to the others.
“This looks like a good one,” Jet says, and he’s right. You can see that the place had been pretty fancy before the rot got ahold of it, big paintings that are almost fully faded and broken glass chandeliers.
“Alright, listen up, junebugs,” Party says, pulling the gangs attention. “Jet takes the living room, Ghoul takes the kitchen, meanwhile Kobra and me do the second floor. Pool the loot and sort it when we’re done.” The other two nod, and go off to their respective tasks, while Kobra follows their sibling up the stairs.
“I have a weird feeling about this place,” he mumbles, as the stairwell creaks under his feet.
“And why’s that?” Party asked.
“I dunno. I guess it’s just… this place is basically still full, wouldn’t it make sense for another gang to have already taken some?”
“Well, the other gangs ain’t as fast as us.” They smirk. “Don’t be a lawyer about it, we’ll be fine.”
Kobra nods as the two of them reach the second floor, first a relatively small room with three doors.
“Alright,” Party says, looking around. “I take the one on the right, you take the left, then we do the middle together.”
Kobra is just about to open the door, when he stops in his tracks. He hears a strange noise, almost like a wail: it reminds him of when Party had found a kitten in an alley and tried to bring it home in their pocket, back when they still lived in zone 9 with their parents. It’s small and high pitched, just barely audible.
“Do you hear that too?” he asks Party, who is now in the room on the right.
“Hear what?”
“Like a… I don’t know, a weird sound.”
“Probably just pipes,” they say, stuffing some notebooks in their bag.
The pipes in this place have probably been dried up for years, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He’s always been the most paranoid of the group — sometimes a talent, in a place like the zones, but sometimes a deficit. He brushes the thought off and carries on into the room. It’s pretty big, with a bed, a closet, and some bookshelves lining the walls. The wallpaper is faded by the sun, but you can clearly see the baby blue teddy bear pattern. There are moth-eaten stuffed animals on the bed, which is smaller than a regular one — it probably couldn’t fit anyone older than ten.
It’s a kids room. The thought hits Kobra like a well-timed punch. Sure, he knew that, logically, there would have been children in these places, but it hadn’t quite felt real until now. It’s strange to think of a child in this context: life uprooted by things they couldn’t understand. Kobra had been a kid, too, when his parents disappeared and people dressed in gray started patrolling around his neighborhood with guns, when his sibling told him that they had to run away. This felt different, though. The faded pastels and nearly-shattered softness gave the idea of a kind of innocence that Kobra had never been given.
He shakes himself out of his thoughts, and is just about to start with the searching, when he hears the noise again. It’s louder now, he knows for a fact he’s not making it up. Another memory shoots though his head: when he was a kid, there was a lady that lived in the same apartment building. He can’t remember her name, but she had red hair and tired eyes — tired mainly because of her baby, who would cry at all hours of the day. That’s the sound. Kobra looks around the room, frantic, and sees a small movement on the bed. He rushes the few steps towards it and throws off the blanket, and-
Oh.
She’s so tiny.
Her face is scrunched up and a bit reddened, probably from the crying. She’s wrapped in a plain grey blanket, dark curly wisps of hair on her head, and she’s got a hand clutched around one of the less destroyed stuffed animals. Kobra doesn’t know a whole lot about babies, but he guesses she can’t be any older than a few months.
He leans down a bit, and she stops wailing briefly to gaze up at him with wide brown eyes. She reaches up with her tiny little hand, grasping towards him, and he extends a finger. She grabs it, and his heart damn near melts.
“Hey there, dust angel,” he whispers to no one at all. He pulls his finger away, and she looks like she’s about to start crying again, but he knows he has to tell the others. Seriously: what is a baby doing in the zones? Much less a place like this, abandoned and rotted. Maybe he should’ve payed more attention to those footprints…
“Party?” he says, when he’s in the hallway again. “I found something you might want to look at.”
His sibling pokes their head out of the doorway, a curios look on their face.
“What? You found a tape player, or something? You know I need one of those.”
“No, this is…” he trails off, because how do you say something like that? “Just come and see.”
Party shrugs, and follows him into the room. He leads them to the bed. They seem not to notice her, but after a few seconds, their eyes widen.
“Holy horror…” they mutter, leaning down. The baby seems just as surprised. (You would be too, if you spent several hours in some beige box and were then suddenly getting gawked at by two neon freaks.) “That’s a baby. Like, an infant.”
“I know,” Kobra says.
“How would it even get here?!”
“No idea.”
Party stands up, rubbing their head in confusion. They weren’t surprised by much, but this was truly bizarre, even for the zones. “Do you think it, like, lives here?”
“No, this place’s been abandoned for at least a few months. Baby couldn’t survive on its own. I saw some footprints downstairs, though — I think someone might have left it.”
“Hm.”
“What do we do?”
“Tell the others, I’d think.”
******************
Soon enough, all four of them are leaning over the baby, who has gone back to crying.
“What the shit?” Ghoul says, perfectly encompassing the general feeling of the situation.
“Should we, like, bring it with us?” Jet asks.
“No!” Ghoul objects loudly, making the baby cry even harder. “What if it’s, like, a bomb or something.”
“A- a bomb? A bomb,” Party repeats, baffled.
“Yeah! Black and whites wanna wipe us out, they put a bomb inside a baby robot. Trick us into a false sense of security, then, when we least expect it, boom! Blow us into a million little pieces.”
“Ghoul, if they wanted to bomb us, they’d just shoot a missile at our asses,” Kobra reasons. “This is just a kid.”
“I guess. Still, it’s fuckin’ weird.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Jet agrees. “We should still take it home, though, at least for a while.”
“I’m not sure.” Ghoul narrows his eyes.
“The alternative’s leaving it for dead.” Kobra raises his hand. “All in favor.”
Jet raises his hand, Party soon after. Finally, Ghoul relents too, hesitantly joining them.
“Fine. Still think we might end up killin’ it, though: I don’t know shit about kids.”
“My aunt had a daycare for a while, I used to help out there before it shut down,” Jet explains, reaching down to pick the baby up. “I know how to, like, change a diaper.”
“Yeah, I remember when you were in diapers, Kobes,” Party teases, poking their brother in the arm.
“I remember when you ate glitter on a dare,” Kobra retaliates.
“And I’d do it again.” They turn back to the other two. “Anyways, I know a few spots where we could pick up formula and stuff.” They look at the baby. “Whatever a kiddiwink like you might need!” The baby just narrows her tiny dark eyes at them, comically suspicious look on such a tiny face.
Jet picks her up, apparently with enough skills from that brief daycare stint to make her calm down. Kobra collects the things from the room in the trash bag, although he takes the stuffed animal the baby had been holding on to — a beat up old rabbit, missing a button eye — and puts it in his pocket. The four carry the bags out to the Trans-am, but they decide to do the sorting once they’ve dealt with the baby situation.
In the car, Jet sits with the baby clinging onto his torso, and Kobra’s finger seems permanently stuck in her small fist. Poison even agrees to keep their music at the lowest possible volume. The dust dances around the tires of the car, as they drive towards the diner — a place they don’t even know will become a home for all five of them.