LIVEWIRE

Based on a Seventh Sanctum generator plot.
"Setting: dystopia. Theme: politics/splatterpunk story"

“You’re forgetting,” Elliot says.

Lia sighs. “I’m trying to remember.”

The walls are falling apart. It’s not a metaphor. The floor is covered with dust and ripped pages and newspapers, flattened and dampened and sticking like tiles with the words smeared black. A picture here, a headline there. Five killed. Five hundred killed. Sometimes they hear sirens and sometimes they hear screams.

“Try harder.”

There was a speech on the radio last night. The D.O. said in his selfsure voice that he and the other District Officials were doing the very best they could to keep the situation under control. What he should have said was that they couldn’t do anything, really. Political slogans can’t keep the sky from falling.

He said in that voice, “We D.O. put your safety first” Some might have believed it, and maybe some got a snicker out of the broadcast, the pun, or the sheer absurdity if nothing else. Lia, she had grabbed her radio and made another hole in the wall. Then she couldn’t push it all the way through, and Elliot couldn’t pull it back out, so they left it there. Modern decor.

It beeps right now. Still functional.

“Broadcast.”

“Fuck it,” Lia mutters, but the beeps grow louder and pretty soon it’ll vibrate and probably shake the whole place if they ignore it. So Elliot gets up and he kind of wants to smirk or laugh; to make something funny in that concrete mess. He just looks grim.

He leaves the volume very low so the D.O.’s voice is just a hum in the walls. They’re forced to play the messages; they don’t have to listen.

“Well,” Lia says low, “I’m glad we’re not wired.” The radio runs on solar cells. They have no electricity. “It’s hell being on the edge like this, living in shit, but they can’t hear us. At least we still have that.”

“Weren’t you trying to remember?” Elliot asks pointedly.

“I am!” she snaps. “But you know what would be better than remembering?”

The radio voice drones on.

In a flash there’s a knife in her hand. “Better,” she says, “Would be walking the subway tunnel to the waterfront and breaking through the first metal wall I see. Just like that. Wonderwoman. Leave a piece of shit radio lodged in there too. Better would be taking their fucking functional elevator to the top floor penthouse suite, and he—” she gestures to the radio “—he’d be there.

“And I wouldn’t even have to think, I’d just drive this through him.” The knife in her hand twists in a circular motion. “Bam. Done.” She smiles, and she’s seeing the blood. “Wonderwoman.”

Elliot sighs.

“Remember when subways used to run?”

“No.”

“Killing the asshole won’t make you more alive, and it won’t keep us from dying.”

“No,” she says slowly, “I know.” The knife is already back in her belt. “The sky’s falling anyway. But it’d shut him up.”

He can’t disagree with that.

At last the voice-hum stops. The transmission ends with a beep, but Elliot starts coughing and it’s this feral, beastly sound that drowns out the tone. Clouds, Lia thinks, fucking clouds did this. People everywhere dying just from breathing when they used to worry about accidents, diseases and colds.

“I don’t need to remember,” Lia says. “Everything probably sucked back then, too.”