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"Of course I'm not going alone," the girl said loftily, tucking things back in her older self's purse just so. "You're coming with me. You're not the kind of man who would let a scared little girl ride the subway all on her own, are you?"

She was starting to get a better feel for this guy. He seemed... like that eighth grader that Cindy Samuels had gotten to buy her a new CD player, just by putting it at the register while he was paying for a case of pop, and saying, 'Buy this.' He definitely didn't seem like the sort of guy that man-handled little girls into going to places they didn't want. Maybe this was her apartment, and maybe she did get here all on her own. But taking her somewhere else against her will? That would definitely be kidnapping. Her threat of screaming stood.

"You need to think about this logically," the little redhead said, tucking the purse over her shoulder. "When crazy things happen, who gets information about it first? News stations. Right? So if you want to help me, then clearly we need to go to the news station. Not the... Mansion."

The Mansion. Was that... Xavier's? As in, her brother's high school? That giant dorky place full of people who dressed in eighties spandex, even though it was so the nineties now? Clark fan-girled over their super-secret missions so much that she was already sick of them.

No. Thank you.

Maxine winced at the sudden mix of Russian and gunfire. All those bullets, wasted—when they would have made such good trades over at Celeste's. At least they'd be able to bring in the guns themselves. And vouch for their good firing condition. When it was an Amazon vouching, Celeste could believe it, no questions asked.

As to the Russian—she had no idea what the blonde booster shouted at times like these, but it sounded filthy. The redhead approved.

"That sounds like a wrap," she said, as that quaintly useless sound of dry firing mixed with the alarmed shouts of the growers. Well, more alarmed. Aura and Kitra were rapidly removing even empty guns from the hands of their owners. "Harvest time, ladies!"

Maxine slid off her own velvety black dog, grabbing the empty saddlebags off its back as she went. 'Saddlebags' was a bit of a high-flung term: they were really patched up backpacks, tied together in pairs by rope, but they got the job done. There was one for each of her dogs. She tossed a set to each Amazon who wasn't actively disarming the providers of this sumptuous banquet. Plant mutants really were a marvel: over there was corn and squash, here were tomatoes and cucumbers, all of them ripe out of their season. How many harvests did they get a summer? Three, four? Really, it was crime that they didn't share. She knew from experience that they grew wheat in the back—the Amazons would leave that alone. Why steal the ingredients for bread, when you can steal bread?

"Lady Syn, would you care to check the house with me?" It was about lunch time: they might get lucky, and not have to overturn everything looking for where these people hid their stored goods. Maybe there'd be a few choice morsels already set out for them.

In passing, she tossed the last set of saddlebags at Kaitlyn's head, as the girl continued her gleeful gluttony. "Make sure some of those get in the bags, all right?"

((ooc: In case anyone missed the cbox memo: we're going to hit up a farm first, to give the townies some extra time to plot.

Also: For funsies, I'm giving Maxine only five War Dogs, besides her own (six total). Should make things a little more convoluted interesting on our end. I'll leave it up to you gals to decide who has a papery steed, who's riding double, and who has to find their own way of picking through the rubble. <3

PS: Don't be afraid to skip me some days, if I'm being a slow poster! I made that "one post per day" rule with slow folks like me in mind. I'm sure you gals can get up to all kinds of mischief just fine without me. <3))



It wasn't as hard to get around the city these days as it had been, back in the beginning.

Like forests receding as villages became towns, the city ruins were being shifted and cannibalized wherever groups gathered for long. It might be as simple as a patch of ground swept clean by a group that needed to sleep for the night, or as progressive and deliberate as a town trying to rebuild society from its rubble.

Townies, incidentally, tended to have great shoes. The Town with a capital T even had a cobbler—apparently he'd been trying to make a living selling his wares at Renaissance festivals a few years back. With production lines and cheap Chinese labor out of the picture, she bet he was turning a better living now that he'd ever made back before the world ended.

She would love to get her hands on a pair of those shoes.

But first: groceries.

Most of the farms were outside of the city limits, of course; out where farms had always been. She'd rented out one of Celeste's Geiger counters for a day, once, and run it over some of the donations they'd collected way out there. Suffice it to say: it hadn't been worth a second trip. She didn't know why, but the closer crops were grown to Sebastian's church, the safer they seemed to be. Not that she was about to point that out to any of his believers—she did not buy in to the rapture spiel, and would rather not give those promise-bound converts any more ammunition. A sparkling white symbol of healing and purity as their deity was bad enough.

Whatever the reason, she believed in eating locally.

The farms had been a scattered thing at first: little plantings here and there, where there were ready green spaces, and exposed soil in tracks big enough to work with. Central Park had been a quick convert; other parks had soon followed suit, rows of corn fencing in cracked basketball courts, and string beans planted in neat rows, climbing up and over swing sets re-appropriated to act as trellises. They weren't all in the most... defensible locations. Parks rarely were. Some effort had been made to stack their rubble into stone walls as they'd grown, but the ones set away from major groups were not exactly heavily defended.

It was to one of those that they were aiming now: to the former site of Bryant Park. The New York City Library had once stood adjacent to it; parts of it still stood, marking the refurbished walls of a quaint little commune of plant and earth mutants who liked to mind their own business. She had no idea what had become of the library's books. Probably traded off to people who cared for literary light, or burned for a more literal light, back when things were still so cold.

Cold was not an issue they had during the days anymore. Not during summer, anyway. Maxine wore her dusty leather coat, but it was only for protection against scrapes and bruises and the occasional too close set of claws, not for the weather.

The redhead let her paper dog pick its way through the ruins as it saw fit. For the most part, that was straight through: having paws that couldn't feel traditional pain came with the perk of not caring about sharp rocks and broken glass. Legs of the same meant that climbing up the slanted side of a fallen building or jumping a crumpled wall was no more tiring than picking a gentler way around. For any of their members traveling on foot, it might not be so easy, of course; but the mounted Amazons waited for their stragglers to catch up, and never let the groups get too far apart.

Strength in numbers was a lesson she'd learned early.

Another reason the city was easier to travel these days: it was home. It wasn't what it had been, but the twisting paths, the blind alleys, the hiding places and ambush spots formed by its ruins—to any group living outside of a neatly cleared town, these were home. Finding a path through was no harder than navigating the old city's streets had been, for girls with a reason to learn their geography

The farm was out of sight right up until that last turn of street; then a green space suddenly opened up in the field of broken, towering gray.

"Would you look at that," Maxine said quietly, with an air of almost reverence, "they grew strawberries for us."

So considerate.

She didn't know how long it had been watching her, or how long it had been... well, alive. She'd been getting headaches: she hadn't realized that they were those headaches. Caused by her powers. She'd been... distracted lately. And not thinking. The dust had cleared, but maybe she'd breathed in too much of it: her mind felt fuzzy, muddled, all the time.

It was a clear night. Stars, but no moon.

The paper dog stood about forty feet off, in the darkness. She didn't know if it was her eyes that saw it, or that other something; that something that let her know that the rasp of paper-on-paper deep in its belly would sound like a persistent growl, if she were close enough.

She'd figured out what paper's problem with her was: it was top dog, and she was just a stray in its territory. Back before the world had ended, she'd have just dumped a bottle of water on the thing when it tried to attack her. Not if: when.

Because it was standing there, and it was going to attack her. Just for living: just for having the grave misfortune of... of being who she was.

Maxine rolled stiffly out of her blanket. A sleepy hand caught at her arm.

"Where y' going?" He mumbled.

"Bathroom."

"Come back soon. 'S cold without you."

"I will."

He was just talking in his sleep. If he hadn't been, if he'd really woken up, then he would have heard the edge in her voice and he'd never have let her slip out of his grip.

The dog braced itself as she approached, the papers on its back shifting into spikes like hackles. It was a mongrel thing: nothing like the purebred constructs of white copier paper that she'd animated before. It was made of scraps of newspapers and fliers; crinkled paper, with blurred stains where rain had tried to wash the writing away. Its muzzle was wrapped in pages from some girl's diary:

June 22, 2012

I love him. I love him I love him I—

She didn't know who was more surprised when she tore that sheet off: the dog, or herself. She didn't have time to think about it, either: the paper lunged for her throat.

She swatted it back, with a heavy hand of something that tore it apart; that willed every individual sheet in its body to stop being so damn—so damn collected, confident, in control. The paper sheets that composed it scattered back from her in a cloud, and reformed; it lunged again. She forced it to the ground and held it there, without ever moving an inch from where she stood.

"Now you listen to me, you alpha bitch. I am not here for you to—to attack. I don't take that crap from—from—"

For a moment, the old Maxine was there, speaking through her: the one who poked fun at the city's most dangerous mutants with absolute impunity; who saw fights in progress, and only thought about keeping her camera safe. The one who chased all the boys, hoping that one of them would love her.

Well, one of them did.

But I don't love him.

I really don't love him.

I hate him.

I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

When did she become a girl who went for safety over—over the chance to chase something better?

Not that they'd just let her leave.

The dog struggled and growled, and finally stilled. If it had lungs, it would have been panting; instead, it just became utterly silent at her feet.

It was from a quiet place that Maxine gave her first order. "You deal with Samson."

The dog's ears pricked; two corners of the same newspaper, one saying Thousands Flee Colorado Springs Wildfire, and the other 92° and Sunny. When she let it get up, it obeyed to its new pack leader without hesitation.

You can't shoot paper. You can't stab paper. You can't kick it, punch it, hold it down, hold it off: you can try running, but paper is fast.

Former quarterbacks are fast, too. "Over here!" Maxine called out, as he scrambled away from the confusion at the center of camp. In the darkness it was hard for any of them to see, let alone to know what was attacking them. Shots were finding targets, but not the right ones. He came running to her voice like a dog to its master.

Men. Men, you can stab. The blade goes in just fine, and stays there until you take it out. It was the second time she'd seen a dead man who was still alive. He wrapped his hands over hers, not understanding.

"But I l—

"I don't."

Maybe she could have, in different times. But the apocalypse changes people.

She wiped the knife off on his shirt, and tucked it into her belt.

They talked about it: they talked about it over peaches and cold tomato soup, and the occasional treat of beef jerky. They talked about it, and they agreed: if no one was coming for them, they had to help themselves.

They started out the next morning, early: it paid to be naturally early risers in a world without alarm clocks. Usually, it took the rest of the city a few hours to catch up with them.

They made good time, and managed to find a passable bridge off the island—though crossing it was a dicey affair that had involved a lot of crouching, and watching the feet of others as they passed by. Once they'd cowered behind an SUV with a girl doing the same, but she hadn't stuck around afterwards. Maxine couldn't blame her: groups were only safe if you were a member. They knew they wouldn't turn on the girl just as soon as the larger group had passed, but she hadn't. It was the safest thing she could have done, besides joining up with them.

By the next afternoon, they had found the edge where city falls away to suburbia.

She didn't know what she'd been expecting. Maybe something better.

"Let's keep going," he said, finally. "It has to end somewhere. Let's try Newark, maybe."

"Right," she said, "because the air quality is always better in Newark."

She didn't even know where that had come from, but at least it made him laugh.

They never made it to Newark. They never even made it out of the New York city bounds. They stood looking for so long, that someone else found them first.

It was the group from the bridge. The big one: the one that had passed them, while they'd huddled behind the SUV with the girl.

The girl was with them.

Maxine should have run then, but she didn't, because her friend jolted where he stood.

"Terry? Terry Samson?"

A big guy towards the center looked just as surprised. A grin split his face. "Jesus, man, I didn't recognize you."

"It's all right, Maxine, calm down—I know him. We went to high school together. God, we played football together—you were a linebacker, weren't you?"

"Look at you. Orange County's star quarterback, carrying the ball into the apocalypse." They did that guy hug: the one that involved a lot more back bruising than anything Maxine would have wanted. Maybe that's what made her so uncomfortable.

"This chic yours?" The former linebacker asked, to which her friend flushed a brilliant, stammering red. The linebacker waved a careless hand behind him. "Chill, guys—he's a friend of mine."

The guys eased down, but the girl from the bridge didn't look up.

When she batted the dust out of his hair, she found brown curls underneath. But his eyes really were gray.

"Stop that," he said, ducking away.

"God, you need a bath," Maxine said. "Me, too." It had been a week. At least. Maybe two? It was really hard to keep track of days, when the nights were so similar. There'd been odd winds recently that seemed to clear things out for awhile, but they weren't making a dent very fast. Probably another mutant. She'd just as soon avoid someone that strong: they were having enough trouble dealing with the humans they ran across. Whether everyone was really that much of a jerk, or everyone was as wary as they were, it really didn't seem wise to hook up with total strangers. Not with the... the things they'd sat quiet and watched total strangers do to one another. Maybe a hero would have tried stepping in. But Maxine had seen what happened to heroes. She wasn't a bullet taker; she was a reporter. And she was doing her best to remember faces, for when society caught back up to them. There was no way she was letting these people get away with what they'd done.

"No bathing with the drinking supply," her new friend chided, drawing his blanket over himself. "Even if you do smell worse than a—"

Arm punches: just as effective during disasters.

They were doing good. As good as people could do: they could hoard with the best of them, and they'd found a little corner of the devastation all their own to hide out in. It was hard to wiggle into and out of: only a child, or someone as skinny as they were, would even think to try. It was big enough to pile food in one corner and blankets in the other, and small enough that two bodies could keep it warm at night.

It wasn't the worst way to live. At least they were alive. And they had enough in canned peaches and water to last until help came.