Dust, Death & Paint

Sandy Blonde

Sandy was her only name.  

She had no last name because she never knew her parents.  She had been discovered by the side of the road near an ambushed caravan.  The adults were all dead and Sandy had been found apart from them.  There was nothing to indicate which of the slain were her folks, or even if any of them were?

So Sandy had been brought back to Big Boulder by the NWC patrol that had stumbled upon the ambush site and raised in a government orphanage.  The 'orphanage' was just an unused, ramshackle building down by the far end of town, the place where the children without parents, the drunks, vagrants and other social undesirables were put away to keep them out of the public eye.

Sandy hadn't regretted her childhood upbringing, the local widows had taken it upon themselves to help educate and raise the orphans.  She had been raised with multiple mothers instead of just one.   They had named her 'Sandy' because of her bright, sandy blonde hair, and, according to some of them, because the NWC patrol had discovered her playing in a patch of sand by the road.  

Today, with the sun hanging high in the sky above the high desert of Pennsylvania, a strong eastern wind was rolling in, offering scant showers in the face of the wasteland's blistering heat.  Sandy shielded her eyes with her off hand as she watched a hawk fly high overhead, its silhouette fading into the blazing blindness of the noonday sun.

In her other hand, Sandy carried a rusty pale with which to draw water from the nearby well.  She would also use it as a defensive weapon against the creatures that skittered and stalked the high desert.  The large Black Snakes were among the worst.  Highly mutated creatures, they were longer than a fully-grown man and had a bite hard enough to sheer through light metals.  They weren't poisonious, thankfully, but a single snap of their over-muscled jaws could take off some fingers or even your whole hand.  

Thankfully, the Black Snakes weren't found in Big Boulder often.  The climate wasn't right, and the NWC made a good effort to sweep the town weekly looking for them and similar pests that could pose a risk to the inhabitants.  The NWC wasn't perfect, mind you, but they did keep efforts to protect their citizens.  

You can't tax dead people, after all. 

Sandy threw the pale down the well and roped it back up again.  She admired the colossus stranded amid the wreckage of the mountain seemingly not that far away as she drew the water up.  After retiring the rope bandied to the well, she turned around to head back up to the tavern where she worked...

...And realized there was a beautiful mural of the collapsed giant spray painted onto the corrugated metal siding of a nearby shack.  It was a beautifully rendered vista, with a clear progression of perspective and the minute details of the fallen robots metal workings rendered in exquisite detail. 

Sandy smiled, knowing full well who was behind this.  Even without the 'S' tag artfully spray painted into the lower-left corner of the mural, there was no mistaking the style.  

The work appeared to be recent.  Very recent.  So recent in fact that Sandy would wager she was the first person to even see it, after the artist who had made it in the first place.  That person was long gone and rightfully so, NWC law was very strict about vandalism and curfew charges.  But then, there was precious little that the law wasn't strict about. 

Sandy moved to better admire the brightly colored mural, fashioned from verdant blues, greens and reds which all clashed with the drab brown hues of the high desert.  It was a wonderful and imaginative work of art that brought some liveliness to the ramshackle town of Big Boulder.  

Unfortunately, it didn't last long.  Due to its illegal creation, Bragg had it removed and demolished by Peacekeepers shortly after learning of its existence.  A warrant was issued for the perpetrator who had made it and for anyone who knowingly withheld info that could lead to the person being identified.