Prepared, And Yet Not

It's warm when you wake, a tropical storm is expected in the next few days, and you slip into comfy jeans that hug your ass, pulling an off-white croptop snugly over your fair breasts. A holstered pistol is buckled on at your right hip, it never hurts to be armed, and you brush your hair from your face as you pass a mirror. A youthful woman stares back, she pouts sensually and tilts her head.

After a moment you shake free of your self-admiration and quickly step from your apartment, moving to press yourself against the support pillar opposite. You feel confident when no bullet whizzes past your cover, you still peek at the street, and then set off towards the cluster of highrise towers at the center of town. A few bodies lie on the pavement in your path, victims of drive-by shootings, and you eye a large-breasted woman slumped against a wall, a trio of holes punched into the flesh of her bared midriff. A pistol is in one hand and you glance both up and down the street, wondering if the woman had managed to fire back at her killer.

It's the screeching of tires that catches your attention sometime later, the towers now looming above you. You turn in time to see a groundcar roaring towards you, likely a drugged-up partygirl on her way home, and don't even notice the gun she's holding until the car is level with you. A hand drops to your pistol but too slowly, you're staggering back as bullets stitch across your breasts. You hit a wall and drop, blood smearing the concrete and darkening your hair.

You're gasping, blood mixed with your wet breath, and your vision darkens as your heart stutters. You're just another corpse when your killer tries for another victim further along the street, this time underestimating her target. The groundcar crashes hard into a lamp-post, its driver leaning back in her seat with a new eye in her forehead. You, her, and the woman you passed all remain where you died until a morgue wagon sweeps past, each of you mocked by pedestrians who think they're invincible, that they'd never come to such an end. Those same thoughts ran through your head when you woke only a few hours earlier, never imagining you wouldn't live to see even midday.