“She's coming to,” says the man wearing the dusty poncho and the silver-plated dental grill and the jungle of black beard. These are the first words the girl has ever heard spoken and this biker or barbarian—or just whatever the Hell he's supposed to be—his is the first human face she's seen.

Her head throbs and reaching up she expects to feel a swollen lump but her wrists are manacled in crude, iron cuffs connected to a heavy chain. She spreads her fingers and her hands are those of a child. Is she a child? When the wagon lurches over a rut in the road she must brace with all her might to keep her balance. These hands, this body – none of it feels right.

The chains rattle and she realizes there are others here, captives, all shackled together by their wrists, caged in a prisoner cart like something out of a cowboy movie. A pair of hungry-looking buckskin stallions drag the cart along a desert highway which the girl does not recognize, driven by the whip of a man wearing a black hood and whose face she cannot see.

She is the prisoner of an endless slave caravan; a motley armada of irregular vehicles rampaging maniacally out of a perpetual dust storm, numbering in the hundreds, with primitive horse-drawn carts and wagons flanked by rust-eaten pickup trucks equipped with crude machine-gun turrets, dune-buggies kicking up rooster-tails alongside heavily-armored recreational vehicles, and motorcycles with side-cars, their passengers wielding long spikes like knights at a joust.

Everywhere there is dust and ash stirred up by their advance. Everywhere there are men in black hoods wearing black leather jackets emblazoned with the name of their gang: Human Resources. And more prisoner carts than she can begin to count. There's no way around it: she's somehow been plopped directly into an apocalyptic hell-scape.

The other prisoners are all staring as if they expect her to speak but she doesn't know how to begin. There is nothing in this universe with which she is immediately familiar. There is nothing which has prepared her for a scene such as this. Is it amnesia? It's almost as if she's just been born. Is this brain damage? Her limbs tingle, simultaneously numb and raw.

The question is immediately more complicated and surreal than: where am I?

It's more like: am I?

“I'm Sawyer,” blurts the shirtless, sun-burned, and whip-scarred man chained to her on the left, “welcome to Big Traffick, courtesy of Human Resources.”

“Bach,” says the caveman with the silver grill, indicating himself by touching the chest of his poncho and bowing his head, polite gestures both oddly delicate and endearing.

Continuing clockwise around the wagon the others make their introductions. First there's a middle-aged woman with her hair up in a gray bun and whose eyes are dark and tired. Her voice trembles when she says, “I'm Ellie.”

And chained between her and the girl are a pair of fraternal twins, a brother and sister called Uri and Uma, respectively, who cling to one another inseparably. They're only children—teenagers at most—but it looks like they've had it rough. Their heads are shaved and their faces are dirty and their collarbones have been sharpened by hunger.

The girl with no memories manages a meek smile in answer to everyone's introductions but it feels all wrong. These are strangers – but they are essentially her clan now. This is everyone she knows in the entire world. And she'd like to tell them her name, too – but she doesn't know what it is.

“I'm sorry, I—” hearing the voice stops her short – she is a stranger to herself.

But the one called Bach quickly comes to her rescue:

“She's Ava,” he says.

And the other prisoners gasp.

It isn't simply: I'm who?

It's more like: who's that?

“You're sure she's Ava?” Sawyer asks. He leans in uncomfortably close to survey her face and he smells like dirt. “I don't know why, I didn't think they'd be.... just a girl, I guess. How old are you, Missy? Fourteen? Fifteen?” She twists away as well as she can but they are still shackled to one another and he continues to invade her space until Bach jerks the chain and drags him back.

“Alright,” he barks, “take it easy, Bud. I told you she's Ava and now I'm telling you to back off.”

For a moment Sawyer seethes but Bach smiles and his silver-plated fronts are upon closer inspection revealed to be silver bullets implanted where most men have teeth. Sawyer takes a deep breath and sits back, blinking. “Right,” he mumbles, mostly to his own feet and barely audible over the clip-clops of the horses' hooves, “sorry. I'm sorry.”

“How do you know my name?” she asks Bach – but right then they are all deafened by an explosion ahead of them in the convoy. A fireball roils overhead and the prisoners instinctively hunch down and cover their heads as best they can while chained to one another. The heat is immense and the stallions shriek and rear.

One horse breaks free and dashes for freedom in the desert and the other also attempts to bolt but this time the harness holds and he strains and falls, taking the whole cart crashing down with him. The wagon thuds on its side in the sand and the driver is sent cussing and sprawling.

The prisoners smack together and fall in a heap, chains clattering. And now Ava can hear shouting and gunfire and another explosion. This is suddenly a war-zone.

“Who is it?” cries the woman named Ellie, “say it isn't!”

“Scums.” Bach grimaces, craning his neck to scan the road ahead. “A whole murder of them.”

Ava looks in the faces of the siblings Uri and Uma and sees them both wearing the same blank expression, seeming to share a single mind as they disassociate together. Sawyer pulls at his chains frantic as a man on fire but it's no use. He's stuck. They're all stuck. Ellie shrieks about God and what a bastard He is.

And then Bach, this freak with his bullet teeth, grips the thick chain in both hands and bites it. Ava hears it groan and pop and he thrashes his head once to the side like a junkyard dog and the links snap apart and he gnaws for a moment at his other wrist and the manacle crumbles. He grins and his eyes narrow.

The hooded driver struggles beside the cart, pulling on the reins in an attempt to get his remaining stallion upright – and when the moment is opportune Bach springs into action. Something begins to grind and churn within him, a sound like rocks in a tumbler. He stretches his arm out between the bars and snatches the hooded driver by his shoulder—Ava sees that Bach's hand is some sort of fully mechanical prosthesis—and then in the next instant there is a pulse of crackling electricity and the driver seizes and spasms.

Sparks leap out of Bach's mouth like a firework—he's not real—he's a machine or a figment from a dream. Could she be dreaming? Her head swims and the world dims and she watches him release his grip on the driver.

That man is suddenly a corpse, collapsed where he just stood, foam bubbling out from the mouth-hole cut in his hood. Electrocuted by Bach's mere touch.

“What are you?” Ava asks under her breath, still feeling faint, too quiet for anyone on the battlefield to hear.

And that's what it is now around them: a full-blown battlefield. A surreal battlefield like something out of a comic book. The caravan has been ambushed by weird wild men, hunch-backed and bearing all manner of injury and deformity. Impossible men with their tongues excised and their ear-cavities melon-balled to black pocks, galloping along on their knuckles like deranged gorillas. No two alike in their gruesome mutations.

She witnesses one with his arm missing at the elbow, a machete's blade seemingly sprouted from the stump. He swings it and decapitates a man while she watches. Another freak comes swooping in suddenly, gliding through the air on what appear to be mechanical bat-wings, wielding a sub-machine gun in each hand.

And she sees a man breathing out a column of fire and when he is finished he is charred black from brow to breast and his flesh flakes off and his eyes melt out from their sockets and he roars triumphantly until his jaw crumbles off his face.

This murder of Scums, Bach called them, is rapidly overwhelming the caravan by their sheer numbers and capacity for ferocious and bizarre violence. Violence so incomprehensible it quickly becomes hypnotic, and Ava can only stare in shock.

Suddenly from the dull periphery Bach re-materializes with the key-ring he's taken from the dead driver's pocket. He unlocks the shackles on Ava's wrists and then he unlocks the door to the wagon and throws it open.

“Come,” he says to her and her alone, “we must flee if we are to survive.”

“What about us?” Sawyer begs.

“You can't just leave us here!” Ellie screams.

The twins are silent and saucer-eyed. Ava hesitates, mouthing a silent plea, unwilling to abandon the others – the family she's just met.

“We have to go,” Bach insists, waving for her to follow as he crawls out of the sideways wagon. Plumes of flame erupt in the distance. Gunfire pops and flashes.

“We can't leave them like this!” She shouts, staying put. He sighs. An explosive detonates nearby, pelting them with sediment.

“As you wish,” he yells above the din, tossing the key-ring to Ava. “Get their cuffs off. Quickly!”

She starts with the other kids, Uma and Uri. They crawl away like dazed kittens. Then she frees Ellie, and she thanks Ava and then follows the children out to where Bach is inspecting a pistol he's taken off the driver's body – popping and spinning the cylinder, peering down the barrel. Finally Ava comes to release Sawyer. The way he looks at her makes her skin crawl but she ignores it to get on with the task. She unlocks his cuffs and he rubs his wrists and thanks her and scrambles out of the wagon and she follows on his heels. Then for a moment they all just stand there in the center of the mayhem, dumbstruck.

Bach pops the cylinder back into his new revolver.

“Well, come on.”

They flee until the sun sets, Bach selectively gunning or zapping to death any who stand in their way, conserving his bullets when possible. They flee until twilight fades into darkness, until the desert plains become sloping foothills and beyond them black and towering mountains.

Bach leads the fugitives down into a ravine snarled with scrub oak.

They pass a capsized and burnt-out wood-panel station-wagon with its passengers still residing stiffly inside, a nuclear family mummified and scorched. Ava isn't okay seeing dead people. She closes her eyes and holds the hem of Bach's poncho so she won't get lost. When it is safe he tells her to look and she sees that despite the dark he has brought them to a secret campsite. A log to sit upon beside a fire-pit for cooking outside a shallow cave for sleeping. He sticks his head inside the cave to have a look-see.

"Okay, no bears nor pumas,” he says, “this is us for the night, so get comfortable.”

“It's so dark.” Ava studies the sky. “No moon tonight, I guess.”

“No moon any night,” Sawyer explains, “can't see it because of all that junk.”

“Junk?”

“In space—all the old crap we launched up there and forgot about—those aren't stars you see sparkling. Those're old derelict satellites, space-trash, blocking out the real stars.”

“It's weird she doesn't know stuff like that,” Uri says, “right?”

“Give it time.” Ellie lays her hand gently on Ava's shoulder.

“But he's not wrong,” Ava says, “it is weird. I don't know anything, seems like. I don't even know what's wrong with me.”

“Be patient, it'll all come back to you soon.” Bach sounds so certain. “But right now we've got other concerns. Don't know 'bout the rest of you but I'm starving. I'll forage up some grub, if you'll be so kind as to gather us some kindling." He smiles, gun-mouth glinting with the reflected light of dead and drifting satellites.

And time just stops.

And we fade to black.

It's like a dream. Or maybe a seizure. Her signal has been scrambled. She's dreaming of infinite screens, cycling through them at ludicrous speed. She's peering out from inside a machine. She might actually be the machine – and she's searching for something. She remotely views isolated places, far-away places, dreaming in footage from web-cams that must be all over the world.

For a fraction of a second she's seeing the faces of normal, clean, non-traumatized people. People who haven't been forced to survive an apocalypse. People who look like they're having fun. It's like she's inside their devices watching them – and 'monitor' has more than one meaning. All at once she has this greater understanding. It isn't a dream or a vision. She simply shares a connection with everything. She is everywhere.

The question isn’t as complicated as: How did I get here?

It's more like: I?

And then the cycling just stops and only one screen remains:

“Ava?” Bach kneels above her as she lays on the ground. “Are you alright?”

“What happened?” In her fist she holds a bundle of sticks she does not recall collecting. “What was that?”

“You lost consciousness. Must have a bad implant.”

“A what?”

“It's like a microchip.” He helps her sit up. The others crowd around, just shadows in the dark. “Whoever you belonged to would have installed modules depending on your purpose. All slaves have them, but one of yours seems to be malfunctioning.”

“You're corrupted,” Sawyer says, “need a reboot. Probably a de-frag. We better get her to a 'chipper A-S-A-P.”

The question isn't as concise as: what?

It's more like: what the actual fuck?

“I don't understand anything you're saying.” Ava struggles to her knees, still too wobbly to make her feet. The twigs in her fist snap and crackle. “I need a reboot? Someone enslaved me and put a microchip in my body?”

“In your brain,” Ellie clarifies, from the darkness.