The two made their way through the dusty, overgrown road heading east.

“I didn’t expect finding a boat would be such a problem this time of year…” the double-masked man remarked.

His baggage carrier followed him, bags aside, she was also carrying two bulletproof vests, two assault rifles and a pistol.

“Everybody’s going to the festival in Athens…” she explained audibly out of breath from the mountain of weight she was dragging for several hours already.

“Festival?” the man questioned.

“You never heard about it?” she asked in disbelief, “I heard all the surrounding countries heard about the big event!” she added.

The man shook his head.

“Well, up until two years ago I was stuck travelling through Africa,” he explained.

The thief shrugged. “Never been there…”

“Hey, man… you think we could take a break? I might be developing spine problems…” she asked.

“Nope,” the man replied with his arms crossed behind his head.

“Come on… it’s been like… hours since our last break…” she continued.

“We can’t afford to slack off!” the man said gesturing to the distant silhouette of a city.

The thief breathed an angry sigh.

“It’s easy for you to talk, you haven’t been lugging all this junk around…” she replied wryly.

The man shrugged.

“I’m not carrying it because I’m not a baggage carrier!” he explained.

“Besides, I’ve been carrying stuff around for years, don’t be such a baby…”

The thief gritted her teeth.

“Yeah, with your over-powered virus, I’m sure you walked around carrying fucking skyscrapers…” she said sarcastically.

The man shook his head.

“My virus only kills other viruses, that’s all.” He reminded her.

“It floods the host’s body, killing any other viruses and making them uninfectable,”

“A small ‘virus jail’ is kept for one or two samples of each virus, in theory, I can release the virus, let it multiply and assume give others their or other people’s viruses back,” he explained.

The thief wasn’t listening to him, the blistering sun was the main concern of the exhausted luggage carrier.

“But I can’t personally use other people’s abilities without essentially disabling my virus both in my and in every other body,”

“So, all those ‘virus jails’ will be dissolved and people who I ‘cured’ will become a battle-royal game for the prisoner-viruses, the one most suited for the host will live on becoming their virus.”

The thief heard that part.

“HOLD ON!” she exclaimed.

“So, if you ever use a different ability, I could get, like, the ability to fly?!” the thief stopped in her tracks for dramatic effect, in reality, it was an excuse to stand around for a bit.

The man also stopped and turned around.

“Yeah, and so will the roughly three-thousand bad guys I’ve stripped of their abilities so far!” he added.

Reluctantly the man sat down on the dry grass signalling to the thief that they were, in fact, taking a break.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The thief practically collapsed to the soft grass which felt ungodly soft and comfy after all the walking.

Not one minute later, she passed out and began to snore loudly.

The double-masked man pulled out a small metal canteen from his bag which was still worn by the sleeping thief.

He drank the lukewarm water from within before putting it back and leaning back on the grass.

“I was kind of hoping she’d fuck off and leave me alone if I got her to carry all this stuff…” he thought glancing up to the cloudless sky above.

“I mean, one of the bags I got her to carry is literally just filled with rocks...”

He squinted his eyes remembering the thief definitely saw him load the bag with ordinary rocks.

“What’s with her!?”

He glanced over to the thief who was still ungracefully sleeping with her face in the grass.

“Sleeping like that is how you get those seven-spiders-in-a-year statistics…” the man thought.

Reluctantly, the man closed his eyes.

The stranger’s dreams were filled with hazy memories of an ice barge equipped with many crew members on its journey south through the ice and storms.

Slowly, the distant silhouette of an impossibly tall radio tower filling everybody’s ears and eyes and minds with static from which emerged an unblinking eye that barged into the dream, like the lucid dreamer in someone else’s dream.

The man was jolted awake covered in sweat, he reached for the knife he held in his pocket and jumped to his feet.

He looked around seeing that it was dark.

The light of the moon and stars granted him enough sight to be able to tell that the thief was still soundly asleep and that they weren’t in any immediate danger.

After a few deep breaths, the fuzzy static left his mind as he sat back down onto the ground.

Feeling the chill of what must have at this point been the early morning, the man got around to starting a small fire

As the flames crackled letting the glowing sparks join the sky-bound collage in its shimmering brilliance the stranger’s eyes were fixated on the lunar light which radiated onto the earth in approximately one and one-third seconds.

“Fuck… my everything hurts…” the thief remarked sipping out of the bags and sitting up.

“Cool,” the stranger remarked, uninterested.

“Sadist…” she sighed.

“Luggage carrier…” he replied.

The man gestured for the thief to pass him his bag.

With the speed and grace of a rusty construction crane, the thief grabbed a sack and tossed it at the double-masked man.

It landed on the man’s knees with a worrying crunch coming from his leg.

“…”

“…”

Neither of them said anything as the man opened the sack confirming his suspicions that it was the rock-filled sack.

“Hey now, why would you throw me the rock sack?” he asked with a straight face, masking the pain radiating from his kneecap.

The thief played dumb.

“I thought that’s the one you wanted; you didn’t specify which bag you needed…” she explained innocently while still holding her aching arms in a position as if she was pretending to be a robot.

“WHY WOULD I WANT THE ROCK ONE?!” he demanded.

“OH, I DUNNO; MAYBE YOU WANTED TO CARRY IT AROUND AS PENANCE FOR MAKING ME DRAG IT ALL THE WAY OUT HERE!” she yelled back.

The man jumped to his feet feeling his leg buckle under his own weight before sitting back down gracefully.

The sudden burst of pain his stunt provided calmed him down.

“Look, an injury in the wild is basically a death sentence, you shouldn’t be so quick to injure your fellow traveller!” he said with folded arms.

“WHAT ABOUT MY FUCKING SPINE?!” she demanded.

“That’s different, if the luggage person doesn’t do the luggage thing, what’s the point of them in the group?” he asked.

“I can do so much more than carrying luggage!” she exclaimed.

The cross-armed man sat silently awaiting her elaboration.

“L-like…” she began.

“I can keep watch at night while you sleep!” she offered with a satisfied smile.

The man let out a sarcastic gasp.

“Wow… you can use your eyes… Impressive!”

Her expression soured.

“You have about thirty-nine million people beat in that regard…” he said with a thumbs up.

“Well, I suppose the number is smaller now… but the proportion is probably higher…” the man continued.

The thief watched the man talk to himself.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Statistics, you guys don’t have those anymore,” he said smugly.

“What do y-… Oh no…” she began.

“You’re on of those…” she said with a look of palpable scorn.

The man raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean?” he questioned.

She shook her head.

“All you pre-apocalypse assholes with some sort of superiority complex…” she shuddered.

“H-hold on, how fucking old are you!?” she demanded.

The man shrugged.

“Isn’t it rude to ask someone that question?” he shook his head.

The thief clenched her fists.

“It’s rude to ask a lady that!” she corrected him.

“Oh,” the man replied, “So, how old are you?” he asked.

The thief looked at him in stunned silence.

“I dislike you on a very personal level.” She said with a serious expression of contempt.

The man nodded.

“I do what I can.”

The two remained silent for a while before the thief spoke up.

“Around twenty I think…” she replied.

The man turned to her as if he didn’t expect her to reply to his insult slash question.

“Born two-decades into the apocalypse, eh…?” he asked, leaning back.

She nodded.

“I stopped counting my age, but I was almost thirty when the apocalypse started.” He explained.

The thief’s expression grew confused as she began counting the man’s age in her mind.

“Hold on…” she began.

The man breathed a muffled sigh.

“Don’t think too much about it,” he recommended.

The two remained silent for a while, staring into the fire.

“I’m still pretty handsome, though.” He remarked.

“Fuck off, gramps.”

“I KICKED YOUR ASS ONCE; I CAN DO IT AGAIN!” he cried desperately.

After a few more threats, they finally continued their journey towards the distant city.