Gunpowder

The knife in Poppy’s hand was covered in sweat, nearly falling out of her shaking hands. She could barely hold the thing, much less aim it, but she managed anyways.

When the door opened, she had expected some attacker to come in, brandishing a gun, ready to end her life or something. Her mind was convinced that the people on that “Read It” page were tracking her. They knew her name, what was to say that they didn’t know her address too?

Ever since she had arrived in the rebel city, she had made a motto for herself: I will not sit and die like cattle. It was what had driven her to attack the doctor trying to take her back into the hospital, and it was what drove her now to brandish a kitchen knife against whoever came through that door.

But, what she hadn’t expected, was who had come through it. She recognized her face almost instantly, and almost instantly also regretted pointing a kitchen knife in her face.

The moment was quite violent, but also quite awkward as she stared in Axis’s faces nervously. She was relieved when the taller woman grasped the knife handle and effortlessly tore it out of her hand. Poppy expected to be in trouble, to have made the woman made, but what happened next was quite the opposite.

“What’s wrong?” asked Axis, shoving the knife in an empty holster hanging from her belt.

Poppy didn’t know how to answer. She had never been the best conversationalist, so she just tried to say the first thing that came to mind. And that thing was:

“Sorry,”

“No need to be. D-Did you have another bad dream?”

“It wasn’t a dream, Axis. It was real.”

Axis put her hand on Poppy’s shoulder and led her over to the bed, where both of them sat down.

“What happened? You’re not in trouble, but I’m worried. It’s not normal to just brandish a knife at someone, at least not here,”

“I was scared, I guess,”

“Scared of me?”

“No. Not scared of you, not scared of you at all. I-I saw something, that’s all,”

“Are you comfortable telling me what you saw?”

“Something on the internet. Nothing important really,”

“It must have been important if you’re this scared about it,”

“It’s just, I saw something on a website. Of.. some kind of thing just labeled “Ex-Loyals...”

And so Poppy told Axis everything that had happened: How she had cracked the code, how there were over nine hundred people supposed to be in on the thing, how they had some sort of “plan,” how the posts got crazier each time, and, of course, how the woman in the chat room had known her name.

“I-I can see why you’d be scared of such a thing,”

“And, well.. Did Abbet make it?”

“Abbet?”

“The other woman in the car with me,”

“Y-Yes, she made it. She’s alive, well in body, but not well in mind. I don’t know what happened to her, but I know she lived. They had to remove her eyes, they were too far gone, and they would only have gotten infected. After that, she left the hospital, and I never heard about her again,”

“Well, I think that it was her talking to me. It just... sounded like her is the best way I can explain it. And, I read her post on there. She said that “they” didn’t suspect a thing, and that she would kill all of the cats and the rats and the mice right under their noses, how she was dog in a flock of sheep, though everyone thought she was one of them.”

“Well, I’ll lock the doors tonight, and, here,” Axis fiddled in her pocket for a moment before pulling out something that made Poppy flinch: A tazer, “I want you to have this. If someone attacks you, attack back. There’s no crime in self defense. Just don’t do anything stupid with it. Also don’t taze yourself. Trust me, I know from experience how fun that is,”

“You tazed yourself?” Poppy chuckled as she was handed the stun gun.

“Eh... Maybe... It was an accident. Lesson learned: Don’t have a tazer on you after you get your wisdom teeth removed,”

“Well, thanks, I will not do that,”

Poppy figured out how to use the tazer fairly quickly. It was a remarkably simple device; All that had to be done was flip a little switch, which turned it on. Turning it off was the exact same process.

“You’re trusting me with a weapon?” Poppy inquired, her tone quickly switching to serious.

“Yes, because I trust you Poppy,”

“Why trust the enemy?”

“I should be asking you the same question,”

“I guess it’s just mutual trust then,”

“I’m not either. I guess that’s one thing we have in common,”

“Guess so,”

“So, um, what are you going to do with your computer. Are you gonna use it, or, is it like, infected or something?”

“It’s not infected. I set the computer up to prompt me whenever anything wanted to download anything. That website couldn’t download a thing onto my computer unless I gave it permission, which I didn’t. I think I’m gonna yank out the battery and do a whole system restart, just to get me off that website,”

“You know, you might want to tell the authorities about that site,”

“I thought you were the authorities,”

“Oh please. I’m practically a meter maid. I’ll make sure to tell my boss about it, though. I have heard quite a bit of rumors about ex-loyals escaping over the years,”

“Really?”

“Really,”

“Well, maybe they are escaping. Maybe that site is how they communicate!”

“Maybe you’re right. Don’t worry about it though. You’re armed, I’m armed, nothing can attack us here,”

“Alright,”

“Sorry to change the subject, but um, it’s almost lunchtime. And, I don’t really trust myself to cook, at all. Do you cook?”

“I will probably burn down this house if I attempt to make anything more complicated than a bowl of cereal,”

This earned a chuckle out of Axis, “Well, I guess if I can’t cook, and you can’t cook, then we should, maybe, like, eat at a restaurant?”

“What’s a restaurant?”

“You don’t know what a restaurant is?”

Poppy shook her head.

“Well, it’s a place where you go to get food, and other people cook the food for you, and then you eat it there and you pay them for the food,”

“I-I don’t really want to go out there, in public, again..”

“Hm? Why not?”

“I saw how they looked at me. They were scared, I could tell that. And some of them, they were angry,”

“Oh.. You noticed?”

“I may be oblivious to a lot of things but I’m not blind,”

“Well, we don’t have to go to a restaurant. We could order a pizza or something,”

“Okay. I understood the first sentence you said there, but I have absolutely no idea what you said afterwords,”

“Oh, yeah, forgot. English isn’t your first language. I guess I should speak slower then, huh?”

“No, no, it’s not that. I heard what you said but, well, I have no clue what ‘ordering a pizza’ means,”

“Um, it’s when you call someone and they bring a pizza to your house and then you pay them for the pizza,”

“Interesting. But, uh, stupid question but, what’s a pizza?”

“Not a stupid question at all! A pizza is a food dish, where, um.. There’s a circle of dough, and then you put tomato sauce on it, and then you put cheese on it, and then you put other stuff on, and you bake it!”

“Doesn’t sound half bad. I’d be willing to try it,”

“So, you wanna order a pizza?”

“Yeah, it sounds good,”

“Heh. Maybe we can watch TV while eating,”

“Remarkably, I know what TV is,”

“Good to know that you didn’t live an entirely terrible life then, huh?”