The Restoration Project

1.02 - Plain-Faced Charley

Life on the outside wasn't that bad—once you got past the rapists and thieves, the looters and pillagers, the rebels and the Baldies. It was a chance to start over and shed the baggage of your previous life. For Charley, that was easy—it wasn't like she had many friends, and her family had abandoned her long before the nanobots. She was a bland girl living a bland life as a clerk at a bland gas station. She kept her straw coloured hair in a short bob that framed her circular face and little stub of a nose. Her square shoulders made her look more like a tomboy and she rarely received interest from men. That didn't bother her, although when the world went to shit she saw it as an opportunity to reinvent herself.

What a joke that had been.

She sat on the trunk of a car next to a busted left taillight. The front of the car was submerged in a foot and a half of water, which was part of a puddle created by a half-excavated construction site. Back-hoes and dump trunks loomed behind her, once used for modifications to the highway, now they provided shade for a family of rabbits.

A beast of a man lumbered out from behind a support pillar. He zipped up his fly and grabbed a long pool skimmer leaning against the pillar. He had thick, dark hair, with matching patches on his exposed forearms. His face looked squashed and pinched, like it was too small for his body. He was Skillet. He earned the name from a combination of his size and the fact he was dumber than a bucket of nails—or whatever phrase you used to describe someone who's IQ can only dream of hitting the triple digits. But he was lovable and loyal. One time, some traveler catcalled Charley and Skillet open-hand slapped him. The site of contact turned bright red, as if the man had been hit with a frying pan. Or a skillet.

Her other companion was Righty, although it was a rather recent designation. It was not because he was her right-hand man—that was Skillet, no doubt—but because he only had his right hand. Before Righty he was Zippy, because he could never contain his enthusiasm—and keeping him focused on a task longer than a handful of seconds was tougher than teaching Skillet the six times table. But circumstances changed and Righty just fit him better. She enjoyed Righty's company because he was like her—an outsider. His faded green mohawk would need another dying soon and he appeared more tattoo than skin. The tattoos didn't concern her, but his piercings did, the one in his nose making a particularly easy target in a fight. But he refused to remove them; he liked his body the way it was. The way he made it. Minus the left hand, of course. She was there when they cut it off—some poisonous insect bit him and it ballooned to twice its size. He refused to explain what the insect was or why he let it bite.

To keep things fair, she let them call her Plain Faced Charley. There were worse nicknames in the world. And she was no beauty queen.

"Well, what do you think?" Righty shifted his weight beside her, causing the car to dig deeper into the muddy ground.

He raised a badly photocopied image in front of her face. Scan lines blurred the image and a lack of toner washed out the colour. But Charley could make out the important details: a large man sat beside a pool, a massive drink on a wicker table beside him with a little umbrella poking out one side. His gut spilled over his swim trunks, threatening to crush whatever manhood hid between his legs. His face was round and puffy, his eyes locked on his hand as it shovelled a forkful of chocolate cake into his mouth.

She lowered the paper and peered across the Delaware Expressway at a fenced in construction yard. There was a trailer parked along the eastern side, its windows shattered. A cement mixer sat by the gate, facing south. Behind the mixer, a car had fallen off the expressway and landed upside down, its nose crumpling part of the fence. It created a ramp along its underside leading into the yard, but would require climbing skills in order to get out. And Baldie's weren't known to climb.