------------- Scarlet Underground

After the ruins of Los Angeles were cleaned of their radiation and the land reclaimed, the reconstruction began. Since Dhalgren Industries now owned most of the southwestern United States, including what used to be sunny southern California, I rebuilt LA the only way I knew how, bigger and better. It became a technological marvel, a city of ultramodern convenience, wired into the VR twenty four hours a day. But hardly had construction started on Dhalgren Towers in New LA than the same old problems of human society resurfaced, greed, crime, violence, hatred, all made worse by the year of horror the people who had survived here had gone through. Then we found out. Not everybody had died on that April morning when the sky burned and the skyscrapers of LA became a million tons of shrapnel. Some had survived. Even within five miles of ground zero, some had survived. They had been underground. The poor, the homeless, businessmen and expectant mothers waiting on the metro, cops and sanitation workers, college kids and gang scum. Most died before the year was up. A few that survived would have been better off if they hadn't. A few we managed to save with new anti-radiation treatments. And the very, very small few,... they became something else.

A few heroes came out of this new crop of metahumans, but not many. Most of the survivors who developed metahuman mutations became monsters, if not literally, at least figuratively. And they all lived down there, deep beneath the city streets of New LA, scavenging, stealing, killing, spreading disease and pain as much for the pleasure of it as not. Fortunately, I found one of them that was something special. Samantha Crenshaw was a nobody before the blast. She just happened to be in subway that day, heading to a friend's house for a party. She never made it to the party. The section of railway tunnel that collapsed on her train killed everybody but her. She lay in a coma in a deep hole covered in tons of debris for weeks. Then scavengers dug her out. They thought they had found a prize, something worth selling, after they'd had their way with her. They would have been better off if they left her there. They would, but I wouldn't.

Maybe I'm succumbing to the age old trap of powerful, rich men. I've begun to surround myself with beautiful women. Needless to say, Samantha was reclaimed and came to work for me as one of my Sandmen. Her job, a job that she was imminently suited for after a year of being the top enforcer for the UnderGangs, is to root out the horrors and the bad guys down in the New LA Underground, rescue what's worth saving, and clean up the living hell beneath our feet. Her code name, Scarlet.

-- Personal journals - James Dhalgren, 7 Mar 2057.

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