Bee kept quiet as they walked. Now wasn't really the best time to start in with her preaching, that would be better left to when and where she could gather a crowd that would both hear her words and pass them on to others that they encountered. She hadn't heard Layla talking to herself because she was too busy scratching her arm, her forehead, that annoying little part where the collarbone meets the base of the next and the soft spot behind her left knee. She'd forgotten just how itchy her muscles could feel or how much her stomach could grumble.

More than a few times she wanted to start up a conversation about music or dancing or treasure hunting but when she would open her mouth to start talking, she would form the first part of the first word and then give up. She didn't want to feel stupid or look stupid in front of these new people and she really wanted to get on their good side at least until she got some food.

To wave off her boredom she stuck her right hand in her pocket and played with a few of her beloved treasures. It didn't take her long to make a little game of locating the chipped marble with her finger and trying to shoot it back and forth through the loop in the rubberband. It was a simple game but one that didn't distract her enough that she could still concentrate on watching her footing enough to avoid walking through puddles and soaking her socks.

The trio had scarcely cleared the next block when sound of gunfire and inhuman shrieks came from a few blocks behind them. Whitaker clicked off the safety on his 9mill, but kept his eyes forward, and his pace even. He knew there was no sense in running. "Keep cool, keep your eyes open."

Sweat formed in thick beads on his waxy forehead, and he wished that he could follow his own advice. Not that he didn't trust the Border Gang's efficiency. They were using his weapons, after all. Still he counted the blocks to his gymnasium, not without a trace of anxiety.

It was then that he heard the slap of running behind them. He turned and raised his gun. It was a man. Shoeless, shadowed and, it would seem, in the throes of sheer panic. The threads of his tattered clothes were brilliant white algae as he ran beneath the nearest streetlight, and a face drawn taut with terror was extinguished in blackness as he left the streetlight behind. Whitaker lowered his gun and relaxed.

Then he jumped and accidentally emptied a round into the blacktop when an arc of fire leaped out from beside him and consumed the approaching man. He almost dropped his gun as he saw Layla, eyes narrowed into violent pricks of light, an inferno engorging the air between her outstretched fingertips and the collapsed hulk of barbecue leavings that was once a man.

Then, he raised it and opened fire on her. That man had been his epheme steel connection.

Layla had turned in step with Whitaker to see the runner approaching them. She heard the animal panting, saw the haggard features, the speed with which he closed the distance between them. Melissa roiled up in her and took over, desecrating the man's existence completely. Gore spat out and crackled midair as the concentrated blaze ruptured his midriff. Burn, baby, burn.

Her vision was consumed by the fire, and she breathed in and out in ecstasy, turning up the heat, until all she could see was the heat. She never saw the gunshots coming. The first went through her jaw and illuminated her skull, frying her eyeballs in white light. The fire dripped midair into nothingness, and Layla spun, shock suppressing any outcry.

The next tore directly through her hand. It was a wild shot, but a lucky one. The third buried itself in her crotch and blasted her pelvis wide open like a peach in a pressure chamber. That one was aimed.

She fell, one hand gripping the other, and both hands cupping her crotch. The magic had turned inward with the loss of her sight, and as she hit the ground, her skull blew open in a fury of sparks and molten brain slag that spiraled out from one broken sidewalk to the other.

Whitaker strolled up to the writhing corpse and emptied round after round into her until there was nothing recognizable left, and the gunsmoke filled him and made him cough. Then he reloaded his gun and walked onward. "Prissy bitch."

With barely enough time to even register the sound of the footsteps of the man who had run up on them from behind, Bee had to cover her face to protect the soft tissue of her eyes from the heat that Layla put off at the first sign of danger. The intense heat that radiated from the girl's body dried the moisture out the air around her and sought to do the same to Bee's eyes and skin.

Her skin itched, cracked around her nostrils and lips and in places where dirt had not managed to cover her arms and face, it turned a rosy pink color. Bee had to cover her eyes from the heat and the bright flames that shot forth from her companion. Between the gaps of her fingers she caught glimpses of oranges mixing with yellows in a colorful display of the other girl's power that would have been a beautiful site against the dark night had it not been for the ear-piercing screams of a man being burnt to death, but before Bee could fully take in what was going on around her, she had to shut her eyes completely against the blinding light of the gun again.

She heard the gun fire shot after shot, but as to where those shots were being fired, she had no idea. For all she knew they could be under attack again by another Beastant, or several of them. The damn mutants traveled in packs and when one was spotted, they were sure to be a lot more nearby. For all she knew, the others could have snuck up on them as they had made their way down the street and could have attacked while the screaming man had distracted them.

When finally the blinding white light of the sun-tech gun had faded from her eyes and she was once again able to take in the darkness of the alley, Bee saw not the bodies of Beastants, but that of the burnt corpse of the man who had run up upon them and the body of the other girl who had been ripped apart by gunfire. Why did he kill her? Bee thought, but she was still in shock from the presence of the bodies at her feet to question the other man.

It was far from the first time that Bee had been in the presence of dead bodies but they were usually the bodies of people that had been long dead from some unknown cause and most were at least partially disfigured by some sort of creature that had stolen a meal from them. In her sheltered little life of partying, Bee rarely encountered death in such a way as to feel any sort of connection to it. Just moments before these people had been alive and now they were not, she wasn't fully sure how she felt about it, but it did effect her in a way.

Then she took a moment to think about it.

They were dead after all. There was nothing she could have done to prevent there deaths, and if she could have, would she have? And now that they were dead, there was nothing she could do for them. They were dead, she was not and she still had to go on living. So she might as well make the most of it.

The body of the man was too far burnt to even really be all that recognizable as being a human at all. The girl on the other hand, she might have been been torn apart somewhat and full of holes but that didn't mean that she was completely useless. She still had things. From her neck, Bee took an old silver necklace with a blue gem on it; she could have sworn that she had seen it give off a faint glow earlier in the night but it wasn't at the time that she pocketed the item. From her waist she took a belt with two small knives and a bottle of water and in one of her pockets, Bee found a few gunmetal, not much bet again it wasn't like a dead person was going to have much use of it. Finally, there were the girl's shoes. Bee made quick work of pulling off the girl's shoes, knotting the laces together and throwing one of them over her shoulder with the belt.

She turned her head from left to right to check for where the older man had managed to disappear to, and she spotted him making his way down the street still only farther ahead. Bee picked up her feet and ran after him, only slowing pace when she managed to catch up to him again. "You walk fast."

Whitaker tossed his head contemptuously, not bothering to look at her. "You loot slow."

Things had gone eerily silent in the surrounding streets. No more gunfire or screams coming from behind them, no sound of running or of brawling. Then again, Whitaker's ears had to stop ringing before he could be a decent judge of that.

He looked down and noticed that his hands were shaking. What would he say if Bee called him out on it? That he didn't like having to kill girls? Yes, that will do nicely. But then he remembered the viciousness with which he had ended the misguided little freak's life, and the cold, harsh utterance he had left with the body. Bitch.

Well, well. He tried to calm his hands, wiping the sweat on his grubby cotton tee shirt and rotating his wrists to loosen them up. His gun switched hands through this process, its dead weight oblivious to the things it had done, now and in the past.

As he walked, he looked back at Bee again, resigning himself to her presence with the thought that, should the worst happen, they would probably eat her first. "So. You get any good loot?"

Bee was happy with her loot. Who wouldn't be happy with new shoes? The coins didn't matter much to her, she really didn't need the belt even if it was a cool new accessory, and whatever it was within the bottle would probably just be consumed before nightfall. The necklace on the other hand held its own sort of value, maybe not so much in a monetary sense but under the tarnish of the old silver necklace, there was a nice oval cut stone that matched Bee's hair color. Pretty.

"She didn't really have much on her, a few things but not much. I can share it, we both found it." Well maybe not found it, but they both were there when she died and as such the loot should be split between them. In the eyes of Bee, that was how it was done. Loot was to be shared between those that went treasure hunting and found it.

In thinking about her new found treasure and what she was going to do with her fair share of it, Bee hadn't noticed the shaking of Whitaker's hands, nor the way he looked back for other monsters that could be hiding in the shadows. She knew as much as he did that they were out there but somehow spending years among the Psychoravers had taken that fear away. She no longer jumped at every unknown sound she heard, cowered in the corner of an old shack or prayer that she would live through each night. She liked to think it was courage and bravery that she had gained from the others, the willingness to venture out into the dark without fear of monsters, but in reality is wasn't so much that she was no longer afraid of Beastants and countless other mutations that feasted on people, it was that she had grown tired of being afraid and come to the realization that without actually going out and living her life, she wasn't really living at all.

That was really what set the foundation for all that she had learned from Gabbahtron and his other followers, she learned that she had to enjoy what she could and make the most of what she had because it was just too easy to lose it all, and it was pointless to live a life in which you aren't really living.

From there she began to daydreamed as she followed the older man down the street. She thought of Armadillo mostly. He had always been the one to take on a leadership position among the group, he rallied the others, voiced the groups overall opinion and it was he that stood up each night to give his own mini sermon to the group. He had inspired her passion for the teachings of The Neon Messiah, and showed her their way of life; so as she walked down the street, it was he that she thought of.

Whitaker's mind, however, was fully on the present. As they neared the gutted building with the gymnasium in the basement, his greasy head wheeled left and right, looking for signs of movement down either end of the intersecting street, before crossing quickly to a glassless, dark window frame that was flush with the rutted ground. He continued to pointedly ignore Bee as he ducked in and made the short jump to the ground. The dark, cool space pricked at his skin, and he scanned the familiar rows of ravaged equipment, looking for anything out of place. Nothing was.

He looked behind him to observe Bee's descent into the chill, damp space as he prowled towards the steel hatch that would open up into his cellar abode. He smiled perversely at the way she clutched at her belongings, her handholds, and herself, the way a newborn latches its way through the sources of its daily sustenance. Her naivete could also be compared with that of a newborn, the way she blithely followed a cold-blooded killer into his lair. She, with her gangly, sapling limbs, her youthful eyes and her rosebud nipples. It was lucky for her that all he wanted was everything she owned.

He swung the hatch open remotely, and the muddy stairs creaked beneath the indecent weight of his descent. He made a mental note to get Garnet to fix them up. "Get in here quick before you let the heat out."

Bee followed Whitaker through the dark streets, jumped down from the ledge that had once been a gymnasium window, and into the even darker building. It had seemed almost impossible at first that the old gymnasium could be even darker than that of outside, but there Bee stood squinting dark to try to see what stood just beyond her feet. She had to almost find her way by feel.

She crossed the old wooden floor at a slower pace than that that she had used when walking outside until her eyes became adjusted to lack of light. When Whitaker opened the door to his little hideout below and descended the stairs, Bee followed the light that crept up from below.

A sharp left at the foot of the stairs brought Whitaker from the destitute hallway and into the flickering light of a cramped, stained kitchen. He folded a flimsy table out from the wall, and sat down, his back to the room's entryway. He lit a cigarette, and tossed the pouch of tobacco across the table to where Bee would take her seat. Smoke curled up into swathes of lazy coitus with the lingering dust, and the room's light leavened into a darker shade of yellow.

There a was a quiet like no other in this musky space, made more heady by the intermittent snickering of a malfunctioning beam-powered stove element. One could feel the very texture of the sound made as Whitaker reached into his pants and indulged himself with a prolonged scratch. "Well, sister. Lay it out."

Bee was highly impressed with the place that Whikater called home. Sure it was cramped, awkwardly designed and in need of some love, but it was a building with walls and a roof and from what Bee could gather as she descended the stairs, it had light and heat and most importantly it offered a safe place to retreat to. Here in this underground hideaway they were hidden from the creatures that stalked the dark streets above looking to make tasty meals of the drunks and druggies that passed out in the garbage heaps in the back alleys unable or unwilling to crawl back to whatever hole in a way they called home, but this place, this place resembled a real home.

She had to squeeze between the back of Whitaker's and the wall behind him to make it into the kitchen area where he had set up a table for the two of them. A table that came out of the wall, well that was a new place to put one. When she made it around the table, she sat down on the stool provided and began to unload her new-found treasures on to the table. That's how trading always happened. You had to have a table and you had to sit down at it to trade things, everyone knew that much. So she tossed the belt and old knives on the tabletop, she removed the necklace from around her neck and set it down next to the canister of who-knew-what and she placed the new pair of shoes closest to herself. Of everything on the table, it was the shoes that she was determined in keeping. The shoes were the only real thing of any value. Well maybe the necklace too, but a necklace wouldn't actually do anything for her.

"So whatda you got?"

She ignored the smoke he breathed in her face for the most part, and the tobacco he left on the table. Bee had never really taken to the stuff as the others had, she didn't really care for the taste of it and it didn't give her that nice high feeling that some of the other things she had partaken in had.

Whitaker only intended to put one thing on the table. He reached to his hip and lifted it up. It landed heavily on the table, and he leaned back and folded his arms, allowing her to admire the modified 9mm. It was the same piece with which he had murdered Layla.

He didn't bother saying anything, instead choosing to adopt a smug, challenging expression. Now's the time to leave, little girl.

Meanwhile, the basement window into the gymnasium was host to a new figure. Garnet was back from a shift on a construction site. He had been contracted by the Border Gang, who were busily fortifying the streets and intersections surrounding the nameless little community. His hands were raw, and he flexed them, stretching out the callused skin. He had been sawing and hammering all day, and he was looking forward to dipping them in water and relaxing on his couch for a bit.

He was dog tired, and he walked blithely through the shadowy ranks of outdated and gutted exercise equipment. I hope Whitaker doesn't have company over.