Dawn can’t believe she’s finally here. Alive and awake. Waking up to her first morning. Living up to her last promise. The sacred promise, the one she’d made to herself, the one that got her through the blood-filled toilets, the hair clogged showers, the interminable waiting – while she’d been terminally ill. The promise that took on its own persona and soothed her tears of frustration. The reassuring promise that someday she’d be here, just like this, alive and awake – but Dawn still can’t believe she’s really here.
She pulls back the curtain, ignoring how the harsh desert light makes her snoring sister burrow further into the duvet, and shrieks as a naked man calmly walks past their camper. Ver, her sister, goes from dormant sleep to active nursemaid in a single instant, almost without transition. The arms that had been wrestling the duvet a moment before are tenderly holding Dawn’s shoulders the next.
“What is it?” she asks, “What’s wrong?”
By this stage Dawn’s hostage to a tenacious attack of the giggles and can only gesticulate weakly at the lace curtain through tear-cut-crystal sight. Ver tentatively takes a hesitant peek, which evolves into an open mouth stare that might even be classified as an ogle. The naked young man in question spots them and gives a nonchalant wave. The curtain falls back as both sisters collapse onto Dawn’s bunk in gleeful hysterics. It’s a tonic to see Dawn laugh again, to feel the warmth of life chase that miserable specter of death from her cheeks, to touch the fuzz of grey hair that lends a downy hue to her baldness.
Showers aren’t allowed and they don’t take time to dress much before nervously exiting their RV. Dawn wears sunblock, outsized shades and a bright floppy hat that teeters precariously over a wraparound dress of colors so vibrant they almost look wet. Ver’s less frightened of the sun, but sports a vivacious bandana in empathy, confident that it sets-off her otherwise plain jeans and T-shirt. A bunch of hand crocheted coasters are nervously clutched to the remains of Dawn’s chest. She’s feeling a little less confident about the coasters now – less confident than she’d felt throughout the months of arts-and-crafts rehabilitation.
The sun’s kiln hot and blinding even through sunglasses. It makes the hot air shimmer across the vast plain, flat and unearthly as far as the eye can see – the vista broken only by other campers, and the endless traffic of bicycles, mono-cycles, motorbikes and stilts. Dawn cowers against the brushed aluminum sides of their camper as Ver locks up, then they link arms and set out in search of coffee, which is rumored to be at the junction of Saturn-and-Capricorn. It isn’t difficult to find.
Dawn shyly passes her crocheted coasters to the fierce barista in the coffee tent. He looks like a wrestling pro, or a convict, all muscle bound and bearded with an age-old scar that runs close to his nose.
“I’d like two coffees please” she says, then adds “And I’d be honored to give you these as a gift.”
His face readjusts, piece by piece with all the mystery of a solved Rubik’s Cube until, without warning, he’s smiling and lovely.
“You make these yourself?” he asks. Dawn nods.
“These are mighty fine” he says, marveling distractedly at the intricate patterns. Patterns that made most sense to Dawn when morphine and AC-T were assaulting her veins and crochet was a distraction from chemo-therapy.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he says, “We’ll space these beauties across the countertop,
and you girls can have free coffee all week.”
Outside, they sit side by side behind steaming lattes, so they both have unrestricted views of the arty, colorful antics that parade up and down the Tropic-of-Capricorn. Five festival days stretch languidly ahead of them, shimmering in the Nevada heat and giving every indication that this holiday might never end. They plan to rent bicycles – decorated with pretty neon tubing, drink beer, join the parades, fire dance and make friends.
Costumed aliens on stilts teeter good humoredly past their table. Modified rides limber up for the nightly pageants when their dragon heads will belch fire and alien light will glower beneath their saucer shapes. From their vantage point they can see a solar-powered pirate ship, a trampoline that throws a raucous couple of bikini-clad girls far into the desert sky, a beautiful fair-haired boy struggling to control his mechanical mammoth, a steam-punk nautilus attended to by quivering neon jellyfish.
Everywhere there’s excitement and it does Dawn’s heart good to see so much life. Human life at it’s great, divergent abundance. She smiles proudly at this, the fruits of sheer, dogged determination and vows to herself that Ver has to get some pics of her dancing beneath the effigy of the Burning Man. Quality pics. Pics to frame and reminisce by.
The old hands flip goggles down and raise kerchiefs over their mouths at the first sound of a helicopter. They know how hard the dry Nevada desert sand can blow and don’t want scratched retinas or scored throats. Helicopter visits have become less unusual as the community embraces – actually struggles to embrace – the wealthy and the superrich.
Some alarm begins to show as it becomes obvious that this isn’t just a helicopter – it’s a fleet of them – flying low over the plains in an inverted V pattern that looks like an attack formation to veterans and gamers alike. The noise is deafening by the time they slow to a menacing hover at one side of the amphitheater. Dawn darts frightened glances at Ver who smiles confusedly, as though this is just another manifestation of the crazy, neo-hippy, frequently naked, drug-dancing inhabitants of Black Rock City. The noise is too great to shout over and they each hold an arm across their foreheads to shield their faces and hold sunglasses in place. Dawn’s glorious hat has long since taken flight.
Then the shooting starts.
When the shooting starts, heavy artillery makes shriek-spit sounds through the air that end with the fleshy thump of a butcher’s cleaver. People can be heard screaming over the persistent whir, whir of the copter blades. Dawn registers the look of shock on Ver’s face as something explodes violently from her back before two neat blood-roses gently blossom on her chest. Both Dawn and the boy who had been fighting for control of his mechanical mammoth realize in the same instant that his hobby-toy is a poor shield. An arc of bullets throws him to the ground and pins him there.
She watches with continued confusion as her left arm detaches beneath the biceps and dangles to the side of her chair by some scorched skin. She sees the best of mankind – the free spirits, the colorful artists, the drinkers and the dancers – fall at the feet of the worst.
She thinks herself a lucky survivor as the gunships pass overhead. One of the very few to witness this latest atrocity. She has time to cry and wonder how she’ll tell her Dad that Ver has been murdered. The same Dad who had worried himself thin at her bedside for the past eighteen months. She imagines saying “I’m fine Dad, but Ver’s dead.” Suddenly and without warning, the daughter he half expected to lose is OK, but the one he’d grown to rely on is inexplicable shot down in her prime.
Dawn needn’t have worried.
After a slow and methodical sweep of the site with rounds of armor-piercing ammunition, the helicopters carefully turn a perfect 360 and face back the way they’d come. After a few minute’s pause, presumably to change weapons, they return. This time great jets of liquid fire rain down on the tents, the RVs, the balsa art installations, the tinder dry wooden monuments and the communal canvas structures that are already bone dry beneath the Nevada sun.
Fate keeps its promise not to let Dawn die of cancer in the relative comfort of a hospital. Dawn keeps the same promise to herself. She dies screaming within a pool of flammable agent that sets her lungs alight, fuses her fingers together and sears her eyelids off in the first half second of contact.
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