Desert Hurts
By Puffin/Puffinstuf/Hector Gilbert

Chapter One
"Desert Hurts"

Disclaimer: I don't own Pokémon.

Misty and Brock were older, and - so they thought - stronger now. However, they wanted to leave and that was that. Anywhere would do: a lava pit, a jail - but the further the better, the sooner the better.

They didn't know how long it was since the first of the nukes exploded, to change their youth forever. It was something that they had to forget though, especially in what was left of the highway: large streams of baking desert, the road blown to bedrock and buried by great sandstorms.

Tracey and Brock, as the elders of the group, had split a deal: Tracey could keep Electabuzz (the only Pokémon that the group had left), and in return Brock could keep the group's only pistol (now fully loaded with an eight-bullet clip). Brock also had a motorcycle with him, and Misty's handbag for safekeeping.

Misty held onto Brock's back, at the rear end of the bike. He had made sure that the fuel tank was filled with gas beforehand, so that there was almost no chance that they would have to stop at the middle of the desert way. Brock kept the pistol in his underpants and Misty's handbag over his shoulder. (When Misty asked why he put his gun there, he asked her if she wanted her bag there too, so she decidedly forgot about it.)

This used to be a forest, Misty thought, to think that navigating in a desert is just as bad.

"Are you sure that this is the direction to the City Will told us about?" Misty asked, on the edge of fretting.

"You can trust me here, girl." He seemed oddly focused.

Misty rolled her eyes. "Whatever." Her rump was beginning to hurt; Brock was very husky and took up a lot of the room on the bike, leaving little space for her no matter how thin she was.

They both seemed to relax for a few seconds, in an attempt to ignore the random dead body that made an appearance. Misty arched her head forward and held her nose when she felt yet another nosebleed begin to trickle down. By the time that it was apparent to her, she had sucked it in and now it became a simple salty taste in her throat.

Brock heard the painful gurgle of swallowing mucus-filled blood. "Are you alright there?" Brock asked.

"It's a nosebleed, okay?" Misty replied in a scratched voice.

"Alright, but..."

"Shut up."

Brock sighed and continued driving. He stared in front of him, only to see another couple of bodies in the distance. They didn't seem too badly off. But as he came closer, he realized something.

The supposed bodies were standing up.

"Brock, those are real live people ahead!" Misty exclaimed.

Brock narrowed his eyes. "I know, I know." He began to veer off to the right, away from the bystanders. They were potential robbers, and being mugged was the last thing that Brock needed.

Misty noticed a gleam from one of the shadows ahead, as if there was a piece of glass wedged in the sand. "BROCK! I think one of them has got a gun!"

"WHAT?!" Too late.

After a second of bloodied confusion, pain, and panic, suddenly Misty found herself in the wreckage state. Misty raised her heavy head up for the few seconds needed to notice a fire catching up to her, before the numb devouring calm of post-pain overtook her.

***

The two figures cautiously observed the collapsed motorbike. They had been Rockets once, before James framed them for something and they were drugged out of Team Rocket, left abandoned in the desert. But that didn't stop them from mugging a biker that happened by chance to come their way.

They had their compasses hidden in their coats beforehand, and with them undetected they had no problem with navigating their way to the city. Cassidy also had a .38 successfully hidden in an inner pocket, but with a 'click' after the blast Cassidy discovered that it was now out of ammo.

"That was our last bullet." Cassidy threw her pistol away, leaving it to lie in the sand.

"At least you didn't waste it on a miss," Butch concluded, shielding his eyes from the sun.

"I never miss," Cassidy hissed back. With an oppressive impression of an appearance, she stormed towards where the bike had crashed.

Butch said nothing back. Cassidy was usually more moody a character than he was anyway. Even if Butch did lose his cool over something, there was the simple procedure of hiding it and not retorting. It was hard though, especially since they were no longer Rockets now but simple stragglers desperately attempting to distinguish themselves or at least stand out from the rotting corpses lying everywhere.

At least in the more empty patches it's a good place to have a picnic, Butch shrugged.

When they had found the spectacle, it was what they had expected. The driver lay motionless a few feet away from the bike but the other passenger - a woman in her late-teens - lay tangled in the mess of a sharp metal wreckage. A fire starting in the bike was catching up to her hair, dancing with glee on Nature's sick thought of devouring upon contact. A side-effect of birth.

"I'll check the driver, you check the passenger," Cassidy ordered, heading to where the male one lay.

"Got it," Butch confirmed. They needed to steal some things as long as they were important, just to increase their chances of survival on the short- and long-run.

Butch decided on arrival that if the corpse wasn't burnt by the flame, he had a better chance of finding something valuable to himself. He tore the girl from the motorcycle, bit by bit and cut by cut. At the end of the entire business, Butch realised that she wasn't dead.

She fell in and out of consciousness moment after moment, groaning every few seconds. It resembled an eerie polyphony after a while, disturbing whoever it didn't annoy.

The blood worryingly stained the sand, left behind as her legs were carried and the rest dragged away from the bike's wreckage. It streamed from her torso, her legs, her face, and ironically enough, her nose.

***

Butch and Cassidy were talking about what they found, pointing out where they lay.

"I found nothing from the girl, but she's pretty hurt," Butch observed.

Cassidy shook her head. "I didn't find anything from the driver either. He looks pretty much out too."

Butch's face tensed up into a nervous grimace. "'Looks'?"

***

...

Misty felt a pressing weight everywhere on her body. Her brain didn't respond with pain for she couldn't sense where her wounds were, but she was certain that there were many. She lay back, hoping that sleep was her escape from this numb torture she went through.

From the corner of her eye she noticed a large, dark-skinned man cautiously crawling towards her. He stared at her, looking for life signs.

"Misty?" he whispered.

"Brock!" she wheezed.

Brock placed two fingers at her lips. "Quiet. I found your bag, but all your stuff broke apart in there by my fall."

Misty would have hit him, but now what could she do? "That's okay."

Brock clenched a fist, but Misty didn't see it. "I'm okay. Everything's okay... They're talking... Stay there." Misty only had half a clue of what he was implying but somehow, in her condition, she didn't feel too convinced of that.

"They? What about your gun?" Misty felt her head slam against the sand, rather roughly for the way Brock usually treated a girl.

Brock patted Misty's head comfortably, letting her cough blood-stained sand back to the ground. "You don't appear to have a concussion, so try to sleep. I'll explain everything to you later."

"Brock..." A glancing look from Brock silenced her.

"Go to sleep..." He turned around and crawled away from her sight, heading for wherever they were.

***

"I think that we should go," Butch started, looking down at the sound.

Cassidy nodded. "Agreed. I hope that there's no-"

A tall dark figure leaped from behind Cassidy, with a large weight crashing down.

The skull could be heard cracking and finally crashing down in response to a large weight pressing harder and harder through it's hard surface. Thick red blood shot out of Cassidy's nose, leaving a moderate (but not major) stain in the sand. The skin on the cranium ripped open as if it were a handy zipper, and with that Cassidy died after a sudden instant of confusion and bits of vital organ spilling on hot sand.

Her body crashed to the ground, the thump against the sand forcing the seperated soft and hard remains to shudder a little. The corpse was in good condition from the neck down; her clothes didn't lose a stitch. Butch stepped back and looked above her carcass to see a tall, dark man wielding a black handbag.

"So they say that the desert hurts, huh," Brock commented, looking as if he was talking about the weather.

Butch didn't understand his twisted idea for a joke until he noticed sand slowly trickling through a hole at the bottom of the bag. Blood lined its edges.

Butch stepped back a little, growling half-heartedly. For a second he seemed to imagine a future without Cassidy in the picture, killing somebody for him. She was the brawn, he the brains. When he wanted to kill somebody Cassidy would do it for him and so forth, happily ever after. When Cassidy wanted Butch to help her with something when it came to problems and brains, Butch would help her.

There was a moment of tense silence then. Cassidy was brutally smashed to death by a bag filled with sand. Misty lay beside Brock, cuts everywhere at once. Brock looked down at Misty for a few seconds, inspecting, and suddenly seemed very tensed-up when he looked back at Butch again. After another second of standing still Butch realised that Brock now held a pistol in his hand.

Brock nodded himself off, but Butch still found himself now staring up the long barrel of his gun. "You probably thought that I was dead, otherwise you would have crushed me where I lay." Brock was right. He had played dead and succeeded. Now Cassidy was the real death, lying in a heap with half of a brain.

"Well, Misty didn't seem to be so lucky-" Butch stopped the conversation when he heard a soft howl.

It began as a breeze, but it was growing strength exponentially. As it did, the sand began to move with the flow's direction. In this case, the "lucky one" was Butch.

Butch felt an itching sensation at the back of his neck which turned into a series of sharp stings, but he knew that the uncomfortable feeling was better than looking back. Brock grabbed his eye with his right hand, which dropped the gun that it once held. He cursed at this, not that it would have done him any good.

Butch's eyes weren't vulnerable; they were facing away from the sandstorm. However, Brock was unaware and blinded. Misty held on to herself, crying for everything: all the dead people that she once knew, all of her stolen and/or killed Pokémon, all of Brock and Ash's and Tracey's stolen and/or stolen Pokémon. She cried for herself, for she was a sitting duck, injured in the middle of a fight.

Butch didn't cry for himself in the embodying sandstorm. Rather, he felt frustrated at the isolating shroud, and he broke through in a fit of rage. Rage against Cassidy's killer, and Jessie and James to help fire them from Team Rocket and get them in this new kind of a mess in the first place. Cassidy was his keystone to keep him from going insane.

Butch was in a sandstorm before, and learned some of the tricks of the trade the hard way. He remembered a time when he was blinded and shielded his eyes, looking down rather than forward.

Butch almost tripped over Brock lying down on the sand, his good arm covering his eyes and his other arm looking for his gun, just out of reach on the was-soft sand. The bag that was used to kill Cassidy lay on the other side of where Brock was, pebbles of ground sand flustering out of the small hole weakness.

"So you're looking for this?" Butch asked, taking the pistol and weighing it in his good hand. Brock probably couldn't hear his low-pitch and low-volume words over the wind.

Butch didn't want to delay the inevitable, so he took the pistol's handle grip in the palm of his hand, and scratched the itch on his finger with the trigger. The barrel of the gun happened to aim at Brock's nose.

His head seemed to be launched back, as if someone had kicked it hard. Butch felt a stinging curiosity to look at Brock's face - as it had just been smashed in with a bullet - but he kept himself. Butch knew he was dead anyway.

Butch knelt beside the body, waiting for the sandstorm to clear.

***

When Butch was certain that it had cleared totally, the scene had changed totally. The desert highway was infamous for being covered with bodies. Now Butch knew why it was, and why people wanted to leave them alone. As did Brock.

As he walked away from the scene with gun in hand, he heard a groan. He turned around.

Misty was recovering, and now she was able to stand. Butch aimed the gun at her. His own clashing thought that he would not like to be put out of his misery even when injured made him shiver a little bit and look away from her.

She was maimed by the bicycle's machinery. Her right arm hung limp, her cuts still bleeding. She was no longer able to cry, and now she simply hugged what remained of her jacket to her thin body as if it were a living person still looking out for her.

No. Butch couldn't shoot her. It was uncalled for, and wasting a bullet would be wasting two lives: Misty's, and his own. She seemed to stare into space and ignore the gun, ignore Butch, ignore the scourge of reality. She had nothing left, and neither had he. It was time to stop simply robbing and start looking out for his own basic needs; it was time to just survive.

He turned around and left her there, staring into the horizon with no place to go. Casually, he left.

***

After what seemed to be a long interlude of doing nothing, Misty looked back to see two bodies: the limp, sagging wound of Brock, and what seemed to be a very dead Cassidy. Bits of gore had been scattered in many directions at once from their softening heads during the sandstorm, and most of the once-intelligent mush that they cherished for years before was no longer inside the cranium now, instead simply buried by layer upon layer of the ground rock.

Does he have a compass? Misty thought immediately before suddenly remembering that he didn't.

Then she looked at Cassidy. The first thing that you would notice was the crack on her head, but the second thing was her decorated jacket with all sorts of... Stuff on it. She felt tempted to take the jacket off, but her superstitions got past her logic this time around.

Thinking about wearing something with a collar covered with blood and whatever else, Misty felt sick. In response she shook her head vigorously but nothing happened. Nothing felt better at all around the bodies and around the experience. It was after a while of stifling vomit and taking pauses between intervals of search that Misty found Cassidy's compass.

She knew that the city was roughly west from where the bike was shot down, so she walked over the spectacle and moved on away from the brutal deaths of people she knew. Remarkably, even as she walked over older, rotting bodies in the distance, leaving her past made her feel better, even feel at home from the sight of death, as if the fright had switched "off".

Brock and Cassidy joined the selection that they didn't initially expect or want to join, gradually entering the gradual decay of half-life with the other abandoned ones.

Misty and Butch continued on, in what Misty hoped were opposite directions.