The Ballads of New Salem: From the Old New Salem Diner.

Verse 4

Miss Information

I love this city.
This is the place I was born.
The place I learned and grew.
Made my money, my kills.
Shot, starved, and survived my way to the top.
This is where I was born, and reborn again.
In a baptism of blood and jizz.
You have to go through hell.
But when you do.
You may emerge a stronger soul for it.
Dante didn't see shit in Hell.
That was nothing compared to this place.
Not hell.
This place is what hell wishes it could be.
But.
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
This is where I made myself after all.
This is where I stood atop the carcasses of my enemies and shouted triumphantly.
"I am."
I against, I.
The poison is what makes us strong, down in the ghetto.
We found a way to thrive with it.
To contrapt it.
To use it for our own gain.
Now half the city.
No.
More than that, are hooked on it.
The poison is what they need to survive.
The thing that ultimately destroys them.
Good riddance.
The ones who succumb to the poison are meant to die a dishonored death.
I thrive without it.
I live on.

When I was six years old.
That's when the war started.
Five or six.
I had parents back then.
A mother and a father.
And two older brothers.
We lived on a farm, or what used to be a farm, in between Gouger territory.
And the Great Plain, a vast swath of unusable land where a bomb had fallen years ago.
My father was a simple farmer.
We had a humble existence.
We were happy.
Then the days turned darker.
Another gang of marauder moved into the land directly south of our homestead.
They called themselves Rapers.
Rapers and Gougers.
I bet you can "get" what each of them were up to.
Raping.
And Gouging.
Well...as it turned out, they hated each other with a fierce passion.
And anyone who got in between.
Which, if you remember, was us.
That's when I first new real pain.
When the gougers came.
Great beastly men with beards soaked in deep red war paint.
Riding atop mammoths laden with steel weapons.
Jagged and gleaming in the midday sun.
Some wore the skins of Great Bears and Wolves.
Others the skulls of men and dwarves.
All were ferocious and devoid of love or compassion.
But they were at least fair.
That's what father always said.
"The gouger's will be fair, they wont kill you for no good reason. It just so happens that you being in their way is to them a good enough reason."
"But rapers...will rape you until your are dead."
The gouger chief, who was a giant, came forward and demanded we turn over our crop to them.
His men were tired and hungry from long weeks of skirmishing battles.
Many had been lost, many more were badly wounded.
My father was a smart man.
He gave them everything they asked.
And they rode onward.
Leaving us with nothing.
After that, my father began to grow nervous and weary.
My brothers were of age now, and he feared them being taken by one of the gangs.
He fell into a deep depression.
And so did our farm.
So when the rapers came, he had nothing to offer.
Except us.
My mother and father I never saw again, my brothers were killed.
I was taken away by the rapers.
I would love to tell you there is a happy ending to this story.
There isn't.
I spent little over a year with them.
As a plaything.
Soon I was worn out, and I heard talk of them roasting me.
I could never tell if they were joking or not.
They were losing the war.
Running out of supplies.
Getting desperate.
Maybe they would have eaten me.
They wouldn't get the chance anyway.
The gougers saw to that.
When I was "rescued" I was witness to yet another slaughter.
The gougers came in the night.
Dressed all in black.
Their metal scimitars catching moonlight.
I had become accustomed to sleeping with one eye open while with the rapers.
I saw them come.
Slinking out of the dark black soup of night.
Like some shadow of humanity.
The metal blade singing in the sky as is reigned blood from opening gashes in their throats.
Then they were upon us.
And the night was full of screams and blood and shit.
I crawled away from the rubble, hiding behind the corpse of one of the rapers.
But the gougers found me.
They stood me up.
Brushed me off.
Asked me who I was.
I told them I was a "toy" of Simeon the Grey's (my captor.)
A big mountain of a man stepped forward, a bloody, severed head in his hands.
"This Simeon the Grey?" he asked.
They brought me back to their camp, and I was given to their shield wives.
Women brought along to fuck and fight.
They were hard women, but welcoming.
They knew of the horror I had been through.
Many of them had been through the very same.
But I also knew it was no freedom.
I was only being moved from one captor to the other.
And though the Gougers were fair and just.
They were also men.
I was to be groomed to be a shield wife.
But it was better than the alternative.
I lived with them for the next five years.
I grew up.
Matured.
Grew breasts.
Began to have my period.
Then the men began to notice me.
Thokmarr Odenheim called for my hand in marriage.
THE Thokmarr Odenheim.
As did Ramo Thundersonn.
Clovis the Fat.
Manson Voldmiker.
They all wanted me for their own.
But Thokmarr was the strongest, and most feared.
After only a few days, all the other suitors had stepped down.
We were married on the River of Blood five days later.
I was twelve.
Thokmarr was at least forty.
But it was a peaceful marriage.
I found quickly that Thokmarr, though brave and bold and strong.
Was not a one for intercourse.
He believed that a woman's vagina would steal his manly strength.
And he was fucking Loria the stable boy.
Everyone knew that.
But in a strange way I loved him for that.
He protected me
He loved me.
He took care of me.
But he never touched me.
Except for the one time.
When we made our son, Eiirk.
We lived happy, for the most part, for ten years.
Then Thokmarr went out into the wastes to fight a gang of Highlanders who had been driven into our lands.
After months went by, we gave up on them.
I would find out that he died from a gangrenous wound he suffered in battle.
Three men returned out of the thirty that had left.
I was a widow at 22.
They let me leave after Thokmarr's death.
I took our young son, and made my way toward the city.
Hoping beyond hope that I would make it.
Somehow.
We were lucky.
The great wars were over and it was, for the most part, safe to travel on the main roads again.
We walked for days and saw no more than roving traders and other travelers.
The world was coming back to humanity.
Slowly by surely.
New Salem was unlike any place I had ever seen.
Even from miles away, you could see the bright neon lights bursting out into oblivion.
Like a porch-light calling us home.
It had been seven weeks since we left the camp, and Eiirk had gotten sick on the way.
Radiation poisoning? I wasn't sure.
But he got weaker and weaker as we went on.
With New Salem growing before us.
He was fading away from me.
Only days before I would enter the city, he collapsed while walking.
I tired to catch him, but he crumpled to the dirt with violent fever.
I carried him for a mile, as he died.
And when he did, we were all alone.
I buried him as best I could, by the side of the road.
But I knew the night wolves had got to him once I left.
What else could I do.
He had always been slow, as if born under the moon.
But I loved him.
He was my only son.
And I left him on the side of the road like everyone else I loved.
But I had to.
In this world, its keep moving or die.
Sad as it is to say.
New Salem was a new beginning for me.
I was no longer the raper's plaything.
The gouger's shield wife.
The mother.
I was just another lost soul in a town full of fallen angels, turn-cloaks, and traitors.
When I got there, I gave up the person I used to be.
And everything that came with it.
I didn't forget about that life.
I just moved on to a new one.
This city became my city.
I didn't just live here.
I ran this city.
I made this city what it is.
Without me.
There would be no New Salem.
Just a smoking crater where the Alliance of Unified Peoples army would have dropped a ProtoNuke.
But I changed this city.
I gave it a new life.
I became its mother.

The Ballads of New Salem: From the Old New Salem Diner

Verses 1-3

Detective

It was cold.
It was winter.
It was four in the morning.
There was a dead man's putrid rotting corpse in the back of an alleyway.
He had been there for at least a week.
Cats and rats and stray dogs had feasted on his eyes.
His face.
Beyond recognition.
The ID tag around his neck was registered to the Particle Enhancement Center for Life.
He was a slave; but that meant he was worth something.
They called it in over the netscape.
No known number.
No match.
Non existent.
A slave that belonged to no one.
That was where all the trouble started.
That was the beginning of the end.

His name was Winston.
Ironic.
Maybe.
He was no hero; they do not exist in this town.
Rather, they do not exist in this world.
Not anymore.
Apparently his name was Winston.
That may also be a lie; a fabrication.
A creation.
This corpse was just one more in a pile of dead that was New Salem.
A molten spew afeared in hell itself.
This was just another drop in an ocean.
Just another dead man, in a dead world, holding on to a dead city.
It made sense that he didnt see it then.
It made total sense now.
But back then.
Back then it was a haze.
He got sloppy.
But were getting ahead.
Back in New Salem, things werent at the boiling point yet.

This city was about be rocked from its foundations.
This city would cry out in pain.
This city would know fear and death and hatred and in its growth of understanding, come to accept the world for just what it is.
This city would turn from the sun and be shunned by the world.
This city would die.
This is New Salem.

Mr. Shades

I took the poison into my veins, drunk deep the savory wine of life.
And looking into the veiled fountain.
I saw my reflection was old and fading.
I saw the poison was taking over.
Down in the streets, it was written on every face.
This was a junk town.
And it was full of walking corpses.
High on the supernatural and feeding off the wan torchlight of a neon sign that reads "Cyborg Head."
High on the death and the life that flowed into his eyes and arms like a lovers embrace.
It was the poison.
Sucking the natural life from the streets like a stampeding virus.
They began to disappear.
The old worn and withered faces.
They began to cry and moan and cough in the night air.
One day they would be poxed.
Red marks all over their arms, face, hands, their whole bodies rotting right in front of us.
Junk town.
I still, I.
I still took the poison into my veins.
It was the opening of locked doors.
The embrace of god.
The happiness you always craved but could never quite reach.
The poison is a liar.
It swept the streets and killed the weak and intoxicated and sick and deficient of mind.
It killed them outright.
No joke.
Their bodies changed.
They lost their hair.
Their skin began to rot, then melt, from their bones.
Within hours they were dead.
From one measly flower.
One little thing.
The poison affected children and elderly most of all.
They died in massive numbers.
Too much to even think about.
Too depressing to speak on.
The poison killed most savagely.
But it also could bestow life.
Which was the most horrible thing of all.

Dr. Takagi

It began as fungus.
Temporal.
Usually akin to forests and swamp lands.
Low level danger.
It grew on trees that were dying, or at least thats what we thought.
At first.
Then it began to mutate.
Which was also normal, to a degree.
And we classified it as a sort of weed.
It grew over other plants and ate them slowly as it gestated its seedlings.
Then it mutated again.
Which was not normal.
Or not as normal.
It began to grow rapidly, with speed unrivaled.
We began testing, but it was too late.
14 researchers, myself included, took samples into the Toshinogori Biological Laboratory in Tokyo.
We tested the fungus on plants at first.
But then moved on to animals.
Rats and mice.
We found the fungus affected them as well.
Though in a different way.
About 10-15% of the animals died within hours of exposure.
Another 5-10% showed no affect at all.
The other 75-80% showed a total change in personality.
They became euphoric and lazy.
They stopped eating and drinking.
Many died.
When they did, a new mutation took hold.
The fungi would grow from WITHIN the host's body.
The corpse acted as an incubator for seedlings.
And when they were born, they burst from the stomach of the dead with violent abandon.
In this controlled environment, they could be contained.
But I knew even then, that it was to be our ultimate doom.
We all wondered what the affects on humans would be.
We didn't have to wait long to find out.
March 25th.
The day when it fell apart.
The first human to come down with infection by the plant.
Adam Allerton.
A socialite.
A billionaire.
Heir to the throne of his father's weapon's firm, Allerton Arms.
"someone who need be saved."
He was working in the Congolese Waste when he came down with it.
Rumor was Allerton wanted to weaponize the plant; before this tragic accident.
Rumor was he got a face full of seedlings and began to turn bright green in hours.
He lived for only another 15 days, by the count of Allerton.
Rumor was he didnt even make it that long.
Adam Allerton's death brought the plant to the forefront.
There was a full on media circus.
Then more cases.
And more.
What started out as an obscure disease, was becoming an epidemic.
Then it was becoming pandemic.
The world began to die.
There was nothing that could be done.
We failed to stop it.
And now we too shall die.