Nathan is a freelance mercenary born and raised after a Magically Enhanced Thermo Nuclear War tore civilization apart. Nature works to reclaim the planet and the sentient races work to reclaim some semblance of security in a fantasy world that had once been tamed and is now more dangerous than ever. Nathan moves northward after being betrayed with his mostly mute Kitsune partner Sierra. Together they’ll attempt to carve out a piece of a broken Arcology, but they can’t do it alone.

I leaned against the cool shaded concrete pillar of some pre-war building holding my Lenoraz 6mm carbine dead still, business end pointed out into the small glade between the buildings. A thousand shades of green decorated the ruins, mother nature slowly reclaiming what once had been mankind's defiance of her will. The birds chipped, the squirrels chattered, and I stood still as a statue, doing an excellent impression of the concrete pillar that was my post until movement caught my eye. Sierra leaned out of the shadows and into the light. The fox-like ears on the dark eyed kitsune's head swiveled. I pulled my hand off the carbine long enough to make a gesture. -Do you see anything?-

The woman held up two fingers, then a motion to her mouth, and finally a thumb pointing out a direction. -Two Screechers, that way.-

I gave her a nod and Sierra faded back into the shadows. Then came the waiting, after what subjectively felt like forever, a shambling corpse appeared. It was wrong to call the screechers undead. They were some type of plant monstrosity that infested and then animated humanoid corpses. I didn't know how or why and I honestly didn't much care. We only needed to let these shambling aberrations pass so we could move on to our objective. Unfortunately, counter to all protocol, Demitri once again, chose that exact moment to remotely increase the volume on my pocket-com and speak.

"Nathan. Change of plans. Return to the Beta extraction point."

I swore as the two screechers stood up straight, unfolded the flaps of the corpses’ head like some sort of macabre blossom, and let out an ear piercing screech. I grit my teeth and tried to endure the pain. As soon as the creatures stopped their auditory assault and started running at full sprint, I brought the Lenoraz 6mm carbine to bear on the closest corpse and pulled the trigger. The crack of the firearm echoed throughout the ruins along with the return calls of a dozen other screechers. I wrenched the bolt up and pulled it back, ejecting the spent cartridge which flew through the air and hit the ground with a muffled metallic clink, then shoved the bolt forward driving another round home into the chamber and locked the bolt in place. Hand returning to the trigger, I exhaled and aimed at the other screecher who was now too damn close for comfort. One more crack of the gun and, only pausing long enough to snatch the spent brass casing from the ground, I ran like hell. I didn't have time to check if the screechers were actually dead, likely they weren't. We, more accurately I, needed to break contact before the other aberrations showed up and cut off my means of egress.

"Damn it Nathan. Are you out there?" Squawked the pocket-com.

"I'm fucking comeing."I growled back.

"About time."

Demitri really needed a bullet to the head. Once I was far enough from my last point of, way too damn much sound, I slowed and pulled back the bolt of the carbine, quietly pulling out the spent cartridge and sliding the two empty casings into my bandolier. Two full rounds were removed and pushed into the Lenoraz’s five round interior magazine. I quietly made it another hundred or so yards before falling into the shadows and waiting. Sierra appeared after a few minutes, just barely visible behind a rusty and long abandoned vehicle. She gave a thumbs up. I returned the gesture and she darted away, furry kitsune tail trailing behind her.

Demitri was sitting in the open rear of a modified SUV, smoking a cigarette and idly fiddling with the 12mm Heavy Machine Gun mounted to the roof. "Took you long enough." Snapped the asshole I had the misfortune of needing to please.

"You are not supposed to increase the volume of my pocket-com while I'm in the field." I kept my tone neutral and matter of fact. Demitri looked out at one of the buildings like he had just seen something. Nathan followed his gaze, but couldn't make out any movement.

"Your rifle. Quick, quick." I mentally sighed. The last thing I wanted to do was give this asshat my weapon, but I had to keep the client happy. Even if the guy was a piece of shit.

"It's loaded." I said as i tossed the carbine up to Demitri.

"Good." Demitri replied as he caught the weapon, clicked off the safety, and then fucking pointed it at me. I don’t quite remember what went through my mind at that moment, something along the lines of, “should have seen that coming idiot.” Fiery hot pain washed over and through my torso, the sound of my own gun echoed in my ears and the ground jumped up. I looked down at hands covered in my own blood from the entry wound, the exit wound would be worse. I couldn't breathe. Fuck.

Demitri took a long drag from his cigarette. "Mr. Menza wanted me to tell you that it’s nothing personal. I of course realized that saying something before you were going to die would be putting my life in danger. So you'll have to bleed out." Demetri looked up at the distant cry of a screecher. He pounded the top of the SUV and the vehicle roared to life. "Or get eaten. Whichever comes first. Consider your contract terminated."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The fucker gave me a sadistically pleased smile as the vehicle began moving down the trail. The sick fucker wasn’t even going to waste the bullet to end me quickly. “Well shit.” I tried to get up. Get my feet underneath me, but the world moved and the ground lurched again.

***

I have to admit I was a bit surprised to open my eyes. At least I was pretty sure they were open. A dim glow illuminated what was likely the wall of a collapsed building, currently functioning as a sloped ceiling. The pain in my side sucked, but did confirm without a doubt that I was alive. The back of my head felt almost as bad and I took some time to try to remember what had happened. I had some vague flashes of being pulled, dragged really, and a lot of pain in my chest. How did I not bleed out? A through shot in the chest was certain death and while it hurt to breathe, it didn’t feel like the lung was collapsed. I suppose I didn’t really know what that felt like though.

I turned my head to find Sierra crouched over a small camp stove stirring something in a tin pot. Most of her tactical gear was in a pile against the wall. That little Kitsune girl was the secret to my track record as a solitary mercenary. No one had ever suspected my little pet to be anything more than just a house slave. The success of every solo mission lay in the fact that I wasn't actually alone, and Sierra had proved her worth yet again.

"Sierra." I croaked, mouth dry as a desert. Her ears turned towards me before her head did and her dark eyes looked me up and down before she pointed to a canteen within arms reach. Painfully, I got it open, and let nature's cool miracle liquid hydrate the barren wasteland of my insides. "Sierra. How bad is the wound?"

She looked up again, held a hand up, and seesawed it. -so-so. She then reached over and grabbed another tin pot. The kistune handed it over, then took a position behind the campstove where she could see both me and whatever she was stirring. I looked down at the contents, bloodily fragments of metal. That was odd. I had been shot, not hit by a grenade. "Did you pull this out of me?" Two consonant clicks, Sierra's sound for Yes. "How long have I been out?" She held out a hand, swirled it, then showed five fingers twice. "About ten hours?" Two clicks in the affirmative. I poked at the fragments for a minute. "I don't understand."

Sierra stopped stirring. She held up one hand, thumb and forefinger touching at the tips to form a circle. She made a finger gun with the other hand. Making a "pop" sound, the hand forming the circle opened. It hit me like, well, a bullet. "The medallion!" Two clicks. The medallion was a solid round of metal that I had never gotten around to getting identified. About the size of a silver dollar, polished smooth on all sides, and heavier than a lead weight. I had picked it up as a random keepsake on a mission some three or so years ago. I had always considered it lucky, though today was the only time where it had actually helped me. I almost can’t believe Demitri just so happened to shoot me in the specific pocket the medallion resided in. I’d take an inch or so of metal fragments over a rifle round straight through any day of the week.

Sierra pulled the pot off the campstove, shrugged, and rolled a trill, a sound that sounded somewhere between a rolled R and a purr. "Why did Menza, or at least Demitri betray us?" Sierra cocked her head for a moment, then nodded. An action that meant I had not correctly guessed her question, but had guessed another that she wanted the answer to. "No damn idea." The kitsune girl moved to sit next to me.

"What will we do now?" She asked in her usual voiceless whisper.

"I don't know. Revenge sounds good, but I know better than to think Menza won't notice the moment we get back home. Maybe we should head north. Start over. I don’t know. What do you think?"

"I go, where you go." She whispered.

I nodded. I had expected her to say something along those lines. Still, I had to ask. "We'll sleep on it. What did you make to eat?"

"Not food. Medicine."

"Oh. So, rations again."

Two clicks.

***

It had been slow going for the last two weeks. I didn’t have my carbine and I wasn’t moving very fast. The vegetation choked forest and reclaimed urban areas were crawling with everything from screechers to dire wolves and even a far too close encounter with a solitary terror lizard. On the plus side, my wound hadn’t gotten infected. That would have been a bitch, surviving a shot in the chest only to die two weeks later of infection. We eventually found an old mag-lev line. A raised platform with a single massive track that ran above the forest in a straight line as far as the eye could see. In the fifty or so years since the war the track had become a mostly forested line, but a lack of water retention kept the path mostly free of large obstructions, save the few points where it had collapsed and we needed to repel down into the forest below and find the next support pillar. Beyond speed of travel, the greatest advantage of using the elevated highway as it were, was the distinct lack of things that wanted to eat a passerby. That and the fact that all these mag-levs ran to a polis.

It was a couple days of following the track before the forest became suddenly dense and uniformly level. Twisted spires of metal reached into the sky stubbornly holding up their sections of the, not actually glass, bubble that once covered the Arcology in a solid dome. The south side seemed remarkably intact. The once clear dome now stained with time and covered in dust and bird nests. A few sturdy skyscrapers could be seen through the holes where the dome panels had fallen in. It took another day and half to arrive at the massive city walls and we spent a good ten or so hours scoping the entrance out before daring to enter. Best not get shot on our first day in.

Sierra and I sat perched up on a mostly intact building overlooking a solid chunk of the city. No idea what the place may have looked like in its heyday, but now it was hundreds of square miles of ruins. Skeletal skyscrapers reached into the air. Their mirror-like glass was missing or shattered. Multi story roadways stood cracked or missing chunks. The concrete having fallen to the lower levels long ago, their rebar reinforcement dangling like cut tendons. Cars littered the streets like discarded trash and all of it covered in vegetation. Trees grew out of roads, cars, and buildings, a half century's worth of growth. The thin layer of dirt and vegetation on the dome filtered the light making the world below dim and hazy. It was dripping. A weather phenomenon well known to people who lived under such structures. Some difference in temperatures or pressures caused condensation to form on the underside of the dome and drip like a slow fat rain.

I pulled out my second to last cigarette, lit it, and let the thick smoke fill my lungs before handing it off to Sierra. On a scrap of paper I sketched out a few landmarks. A twisted tower here, a toppled skyscraper there, and a rather large lake. With the main markers set in we waited for the sun to lower. Sierra pointed out a flattened area that may have been filled with crops, though it was impossible to tell at this point. As the sun sunk down beyond the horizon casting the outside sky in pastel colors and the interior of the domed area cast dark shadows across the former mega city, the lights started turning on. They winked slowly into existence like hesitant fireflies. I marked my map and pondered my last cigarette. The retort of a rifle echoed across the city, followed by several replies from smaller arms.

“Well, I suppose we should say hello to the new neighbors.”