Gunpowder
Chapter Thirty Seven

The road ahead of Poppy seemed to blur into a mass of brown and tan that sprawled out for what she could only assume was forever. Drool started to dribble down her chin, though she slurped it up as soon as it began to reach the steering wheel. The gross action reminded her of Rouge, and she immediately tried to forget about it.

Driving was way harder than she had thought it would be. She could drive it, that was no problem, the problem was how long she had to drive. It had only been an hour, but it felt like it had been a whole day. The road ahead was no more than a sprawling wasteland, and she couldn’t help herself from starting to doze off. She truly was tired, and hoped that Axis could take over with the job so that she could take a rest.

Almost the whole drive she had heard no more than bickering from the trailer. It didn’t seem to be aggressive, to her great relief. It more seemed like a disagreement between friends, where they were neither too passionate about the side they were advocating for or against. It was pleasant, despite its aggressive nature, a reminder that she was still with people, and a person that she trusted. She herself did not trust Abbet, and never would after their past together, but she trusted in Axis’s judgment, and didn’t question it. The thing she was most relieved about was that Abbet was under some sort of guard, even if she was unarmed, she could fight. Luckily, so could Axis.

The technician, or at that time the driver, was about to doze off into another half-asleep trance, but was quickly awoken by the clanging of feet on metal. Her mind immediately jumped to the worst popular conclusion: that the two parties had started a fight. This assumption was shut down as quickly as it had sprung up in her mind when the door connecting the two parts of the truck together was slowly opened.

“Hey. You alright?” came Axis’s voice as she walked in and closed the door behind her. Poppy perked up, though she didn’t take her eyes off of what was through the windshield.

“Fine. Tired.” was her simple response. It wasn’t like she could hide her exhaustion, with her chin covered in dried drool and her eyes red from the sleep deprivation.

“I can see. Well, you’ve done a better job than I expected, seeing as how you have never driven before.”

“It wasn’t too hard to learn. I’ve read manuals, think I worked on a car design once. Heck, I’ve been on so many projects that I can’t remember some of them.”

“Well, you look just about ready to fall asleep.”

“I was ready to fall asleep about two hours ago.”

“I could, well, I could go grab Abbet, have her drive while you sleep in the back.”

“No! Um, sorry. I don’t really trust her to drive, of all people. She dosen’t even know where we’re going.”

“I can serve as navigation, and I’ll hit her over the head if she tries anything. With a metal rod.”

This earned a laugh out of Poppy, who then turned back to being serious quite quickly, “I trust you, and I’d say yes if you had a taser on hand. But, sadly, you don’t.”

“You think I don’t have a tazer?”

“I mean, when we were unconscious, I think they stripped us of all our weapons. They took my tazer.”

Axis chuckled and pulled a little black box from her hair, “I have some tricks up my sleeve.. or, uh, hair.”

Poppy slapped her own forehead, though a small smile was clearly visible through her hand.

“Well, I guess there’s no reason not to then. But keep an eye on her, she’s smarter than she looks.”

“I will, I trust her just about as much as you do. And, that is none.”

“Heh, alright. I’ll go sleep.” As Poppy stood up, she wrapped Axis in a hug, “Thanks for this.”

“No problem. I got to sleep, now you do.”

“Be careful with her, now. Trust of others is the most dangerous weapon she has. After a gun, that is. But as far as I know she doesn’t have one.”

Axis patted her head a few times and smoothed down her bleached blonde hair, tucking some it behind her ears.

“Don’t worry about it,” she assured, “I can fight, and I’m armed. I can handle this. You don’t need to worry about a thing. Just sleep, you need the rest,”

Poppy chuckled and gave her roommate a quick hug before walking into the back of the truck. Even though she had been told to relax, she refused to put her guard down. Abbet was still there, after all. She saw her out of her peripheral vision, and screwed her face into a glare.

A sigh of relief left her slightly parted lips as Axis called the woman up to the tractor with her. Abbet gave Poppy a slight smirk as she left.

Laying down seemed to be the best thing she had ever felt at that time. She slowly lowered herself onto the cold ground below, feeling the ruts of the metal floor press into her flesh. She squirmed around for a few minutes, attempting to get in a comfortable position, and eventually ended up in a ball on the floor with the hood of the sweatshirt she was wearing acting like a sort of pillow. She closed her eyes, though she kept her ears perked in case anything were to happen. She told herself that she was not going to sleep, but quickly broke this promise as the mist of rest washed over her.

…........

Not long after she had peacefully fallen asleep, the technician was awoken once more. But this time, she was not in the trailer of a semi, or anywhere even remotely like the back of a semi. She was on solid ground, but wherever this solid ground was, it was loud.

Her eyes popped over, and her place was revealed to her. She seemed to be in the middle of a massive crowd, cheering and shouting, some even chanting. It was hard to see where she was through the giant mass of people, but she could quite clearly see the floor. It was concrete, which would have been insignificant to anyone else, but not to her.

The memories flooded back to her, no matter how much she tried to repel them. She remembered where she was: the city plaza of where she was stationed while working on some sort of nuclear weapons project. She had only been around sixteen at the time, evident by her size that she had just realized she possessed. In the middle of the plaza were two rebels, about to be executed. Or at least that’s what she thought.

That was the first time in her life she had seen such a strange thing. The executions were jut about to take place, she was covering her face, masking it from the horrors she assumed she was about to witness.

That was when the rebels arrived, a whole fleet of their planes, shiny and black like a flock of geese against the morning sun. Not a soldier did jump off, instead, a hail of concussion bombs assaulted the crowd gathered at the plaza. A rope soon was lowered, and the two who were to be killed freed themselves from the ones holding them and hooked themselves onto the end of it like a sloth hugging a tree. Poppy managed to dodge the bombs, but saw many people around her, mostly those nearest to the drop site, fall to the ground.

Though Poppy would never have admitted it at the time, she was glad that those people had been saved. Unlike so many of the others in that crowd, she did not want to see two people die, no matter their allegiance. She did not want to see their red blood pool onto the concrete below, the same red blood pool that would appear if she got shot. Back then, her mindset had been different from all her teammates. Some might have even called it the exact opposite. She knew that all humans bled red, including her, and believed that all humans deserved to live. She never understood what was going on with the war, though she knew she hated it. Even from an early age, she had never understood war. It was the bloodshed of other human beings. Though her teammates may have had that desire to kill instilled in them, she did not. She had no idea where her idea for such defiance had come from. She would have assumed it would have come from her early age, possibly from one of her parents, but such a thing was impossible. She had never known her parents, never even known their names, that was assuming they had names. The new world order had very strict rules regarding reproduction. Only women with a license could carry a child, and only men with features that were considered desirable were allowed to have children with such women. Even with this struggle involved with having a child, it brought no reward. As soon as the child stopped needing breast milk from its mother to live, it was torn away, taken to a “nursery” as they called them, a place that doubled as both a place for very young infants to be raised, and a school that spanned from preschool to high school.

Poppy was snapped from her brief trance as pain shot through her arm. She scanned the crowd around her, and saw that it had degraded into a sort of riot. People were screaming bloody murder and punching each other. Someone, a stronger female wearing a ripped gray T-shirt as a crop top, had seemed to want to take her anger out on the sixteen year old that was standing next to her. She had initiated the battle with a single punch to Poppy’s shoulder. The younger woman stood in shocked silence for a moment, before realizing that the only way to get out of the situation was to fight back. The nursery had always taught her that violence could solve anything, after all.

Though the technician was no fighter, she still had the primal instincts of any human. She reared back one fist and struck her opponent with a punch to the chest. This hardly seemed to do any damage, but it at least knocked the butch back a bit.

The two of them sparred for a while, until Poppy had become concussed after she had been pinned down and had her head slammed into the concrete below. Her opponent seemed to feel no mercy, however, and repeatedly slammed the teenagers skull into the ground, smiling a sick smile every time she heard a crack. Eventually, the defeated managed to tense her legs and get the other off of her with the quick blow to the stomach. This had bought her just enough time to scurry away and get out of the crowd. She had ran and ran and ran and ran until at last she reached the science facility that she was housed in.

But something wasn’t letting her enter. It was not a door or any other kind of physical blockade, but something more mental. She couldn’t take her mind off the scene before.

Poppy shook her head, as if it would clear her of the thoughts she wished to get rid of. She forced herself to remember that it was just a dream, and that the days of living in such a violent and blood-thirsty society were over. But she couldn’t tear herself from the dream. Something was keeping her stuck in the strange dream that served as a sort of flashback for her. She convinced herself that it was the screaming of the crowd that she had left behind, but it was not that.

It was the identity of the two people who were supposed to be executed. She had gotten a decently clear view of them as they were hoisted up on the rope that led them to safety. There had been a man and a woman, one of which was quite elderly, even having long white hair that reminded her of the little children’s stories of Santa clause. But, the man, that was what caught her eye. He looked so.. familiar, with his brown hair tied back in a man bun. His face was slim, but his neck had been quite thick and angled, making him look like a mix of genders.

She realized what she had been reminded of. The man was a spitting image of Axis, except for the fact that he was in his late forties.

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