Writer Renegade - 2.2

The first thing I noticed was the stale stench in my nose. Dirty laundry and disinfectant only begins to describe the smell. Then I noticed the weight of the air on me and how it was cooler than it should have been.

I was baking in the sun. I had to be. I collapsed by the side of a deserted road. I was dead. I was not getting up to stumble around, sick, hot, and tired.

But none of that was true. It was warm, yes. The air was thick with heat, but it wasn't beating down on me, only sitting on top of me.

My interest was piqued. I opened my eyes. I wasn't lying beside the road. I was lying on the floor of a dirty bathroom.

I did not react right away. I was too much in shock to be scared or confused. There were no stalls, only a toilet, one sink, and a broken mirror. I was jolted back to something I wrote–something about a broken mirror. I started to remember. I could feel myself slipping into the memory–the headache, the numbness–when I caught a glimpse of the open door. A little girl peered through the crack with wide, surprised eyes. She slammed the door shut.

I took two large steps to the door and yanked on the doorknob. I couldn't pull the door open, but someone pulled it open from the other side.

A wave of dizziness washed over me suddenly, and I collapsed again, but I did not lose consciousness. I slid to the floor against the door frame, steadied by a pair of hands. I was handed a cup and I drank without questioning.

"Who are you?" I heard. I looked up. Several blurry figures stood before me. I blinked them into focus–four men and the little girl.

She stayed in the back, but she stared at me with interest while the others stared me down.

"Where am I?"

I didn't expect an answer. I didn't give them one myself.

The shortest man stepped away, as though he were angered by me. Another man stepped forward, this one with red hair that could have challenged the vibrancy of a sunset.

He looked at me without saying anything. I felt it happen again. The numbness, the pain in my head. I tried to warn them, but they disappeared. The next thing I knew, I was alone again, mostly. The little girl was watching over me from the door.

I held the pen tight in my hand. For a moment I felt like I understood it better than the situation. The paper was on the floor. My foot was on top of a corner.

I was less trusting with these people than I ever was with Clutch. They had me locked away in a bathroom where they could be sure I couldn't hurt anyone. No sooner had I thought about that than I realized that my ray gun was missing.

"Where is it?" I asked. The girl blinked at me. I stormed in her direction and demanded an answer. With a small shriek she fled and slammed the door in my face.

"Let me out! You can't leave me in here!" I screamed like I was mad, but it was fear that fueled my anger.

The door opened as I pounded on it, and I almost fell onto the short man who seemed to dislike me the most.

"Calm down," he said. I was taken by surprise by how calm he sounded. He held me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye. "You're somewhere safe," he said. "Now will you tell us who you are?"

I started to bite my lip.

"Why do you need to know?"

"It's not everyday we find a Killjoy this far out."

"Is that why you took my only weapon?"

The man smirked. "Can't be too careful."

I stepped back, away from his grip, away from the other me, and I looked at the pen in my hand.

"The only name I can give you is Writer Renegade."

"Do you mind telling us what brought you out here? And uh," he gestured to the paper on the floor, "what happened?"

The man with the red hair stepped past me and grabbed the paper. Without thinking I blurted out, "I need to find Party Poison. I need him to help me find Dr. Death Defying."

"Why?" the red-head asked.

I hesitated for a split second, then said, "That's a secret."

"I'm Party Poison." He glanced at the paper, then held it out to me. "Explain."

Still eying him, and completely taken by surprise, I took the paper and read it. The message was short.


Writer Renegade
Catch that fool!
Party Poison is a threat. He leads, they follow. They know they can't risk it.
Catch that fool!


It took quite some time to share what I knew with Party Poison and the others. It was odd since I had been searching for him all along, but I was having trouble trusting them after they locked me in a diner bathroom.

I shared my other notes with them, and I told them what I could and couldn't remember. They were skeptic that Dr. Death Defying could help, but they didn't turn me away. They did leave me alone again, with the little girl keeping watch.

Finally I became fed up with the game. "I want out," I said to the girl.

"I can't let you out."

"Too bad." I looked at her. Her wide eyes were scared but defiant. She held her ground. I didn't want to have to fight a little girl.

I shoved her away from the door and pushed on it.

"Stop!" the girl shouted. I didn't turn around, and very soon after I felt her grab my legs and pull me to the floor. I yanked them away, but before I could get up, I was stopped by Party Poison standing in front of me.

I was more scared I would be locked in the bathroom again than I was of this man. He smirked, amused.

"You want to talk to the doctor?"

"So you believe me?" I asked, still on the floor.

"Oh honey, we never didn't. We just wanted to be sure."

He held out a hand to help me up, and then the girl. In the smallest voice she said, "Sorry."

Dr. Death Defying was a leather-clad demon in an electric wheelchair. His voice was booming even when not transmitting over the radio. He didn't have any doubt that somebody was behind my memory problems, and he was confident he knew who it was.

"To think Better Living would do something like this," one of the other Killjoys, Kobra Kid, said.

"You really don't believe it?" Party Poison said. "You know what they do."

"I think I'm a failed experiment."

"Probably," Dr. Death Defying said. He shuffled through all the papers I had written on and picked out certain phrases. "This was their work."

"Brainwashing."

"You were their practice. Before the world we're in now."

"That time I can't remember."

"Exactly."

After hours of discussion we decided that I was a first attempt at brainwashing gone horribly wrong. I was supposed to forget the world we used to live in, but instead I forgot the years they kept me locked away–the darkness.

It wasn't much to go on, but with a little bit of time, Dr. Death Defying said he'd have a name for me.

He turned back to the radio. He pulled a record out of a bag and set it up to play.

Suddenly I felt pain–sharp stabs splitting my head in half. I was waiting for my legs to go numb, but they didn't. I dropped to my knees. The music pounded through my ears and blocked out anything anyone might have said. I waited for the pain to stop, but it didn't.

Then suddenly, it did.

Fun Ghoul–the short Killjoy–tried to steady me as I got to my feet.

"Does that happen a lot?"

"No. I usually go numb and write something." I noticed then that the music had stopped. That's when I remembered, "One day, they sat me down and convinced me that color was bad."

Everyone turned to look at me.

"I-I remember it. Clear as day. Red was the color of blood. Deadly. And all the other colors stemmed from it."

"Someone likes A Clockwork Orange a little too much."

"I remember that," I said, still hung up on that fact. "I didn't write it down. I remembered it."