Sampah's morning life begins before the sun arrives, sometimes before the last one sets. The variety of Sampah's trading offering means that the hub never really settles; the market simply moves underground where it can only be found by those in the know. It just so happened that it became time for them to return under the sunlight when Abdus and Subjek came out of the building.

The streets lit up once again with the commotion of merchants promoting their products and customers haggling for a cheaper trade. It was hard to tell which was a loud conversation or a heated argument. Every common scent one could sense in the wasteland; be it gun oil, rotting Tengkoda steak, friend Bantam skin, thick fabric, the smell of metal; all rolled into one overwhelming, homogenous stench. Walking was no longer a viable mode of transportation; everyone either slithered their way through the bustling crowd, push through it with brute force, go with the spontaneous flow, or give in and get trampled. It was easier to see boots and shoes and feet on the ground than the street itself. Fresh, open air became a luxury; there wasn’t a spot one could take in a breath that hadn't gone through at least a dozen or so pairs of huffing, sweating, heaving lungs.

The stalls ranged from makeshift carriages to makeshift racks to makeshift cabinets to makeshift mats on the ground. Some had the comfort of a tarp suspended upon a canopy of stilts to shield themselves from the heat while others had to bear the full power of the blazing, morning sun beating its light down from above with the might of a perpetual shotgun blast. If there were anything more varied than the stalls themselves were the merchants and their merchandise. The essentials, of course, had a major monopoly. For every five stalls, there were at least three that sold edible consumables and weaponry, both blunt and projectile-based. For the remaining two, anything was possible. From simple fashion to assorted tools to niche trinkets; if it had a fraction of a market could be found in display on at least one spot among the hundred others clogging up the side of the streets.

Abdus knew as well as everyone else that anything sold in the open market is an overpriced rip-off reserved for the desperate. If he needed anything, he'd go look for the supplier themselves or find a guy that has direct contact with the suppliers under a small middle-man fee. The latter hinges with great dependence on how many favours the guy owes, but anything was better than a stranger on a cheap rug selling a rusty can of jerkies that may or may not be laced with homemade laxatives; there was no shortage of psychopaths peppered across the wasteland looking to have a fix for their sick kicks.

Sampah also knew this all too well. Using their established location and their collective manpower to their advantage, they strike trade contracts between known caravan convoys to snatch reliable sources for supplies and equipment. In exchange, Sampah offers their protection and their reputation as a trading hub as a form of business exposure. As such, some merchants would take advantage of Sampah’s contract and set up permanent shops within the town’s walls with the takeaway of offering their services to the town itself at a considerable discount. Considering that the acquired commodity is ensured safety, in comparison to a minor cut in their profit margins, it was a price that’s dirt-cheap to pay.

Of course, not every merchant can just walk in and strike up a deal with Sampah. If Sampah deems them dubious, or nonessential, or any combination of the two, they will be shown the door with no hesitancy; plus, with the aforementioned presence of lunatics in the wasteland, the door isn’t open as often as it is locked tight with rotating guards making shifts to guard the front steps. That is unless they offer top-notch weaponry, lasting provisions, or alcohol; commodities befitting for its the goal of providing comfort, bringing joy, and numbing pain, in whichever order.

Abdus was heading towards one of those establishments, letting Subjek walk in front of him as he steered the bandaged man in whichever direction he willed to proceed towards. To the tired man’s surprise, Subjek didn’t put up much of a fight. The bandaged man was content with getting pushed against the brunt of the crowd while Abdus himself took light, strolling steps behind him in a pocket of space free from the ever conflicting currents of humanity choking the streets and the sidewalks.

But Subjek wasn’t complaining; not that he could, and Abdus felt like he could take this guilty burden to his quarters and sleep like a log still, so he kept going.

Five minutes later, they reached a bar.

It sat at an obscured corner of Sampah, hidden behind the stalls and traders and merchants and situated well away from the bulk of the foot traffic. It operated inside one of the many dilapidated buildings in the area, making use of the fallen remnants of the past. The bar seemed to be fond of the remnant’s condition because there were next to no changes made to the structure’s natural condition. The walls had been peeled off by the slow, geriatric hands of the weather, exposing the crumbling concrete to the open air. The storefront consisted of no more than some wooden planks nailed onto the open windows. Of what little crevices there are between the wooden planks, not a single speck of light penetrated through. There wasn’t even a sign indicating an operating establishment. The most Abdus could infer from the bar that it is, in fact, a bar, was from the entrance, where a pair of thick curtains parted over an open doorway; an elementary graphic of an overturned shot glass stitched onto the fabric of the curtain itself.

Abdus made a beeline towards the open doorway with Subjek acting as his front bumper still. The bandaged man crashed his head through the curtain, leaving the fabric fluttering behind his wake.

The bar was a bar in the barest definition of what a bar is. It had tables; no chairs; a patron or two, a makeshift counter, a bartender manning the aforementioned counter, and what little booze there is behind her. Even the layout of the room suggested that the building wasn’t built with the intention to host a drinking establishment. Lit glass lamps hung from a series of hanging ropes tied to the ceiling. Cracks permeated across the grey concrete walls. Some portions of the walls were covered behind several tarps. There were hints of exposed bricks peeking from the sides. There was also graffiti scrawled across the floors and walls, some even on the table; the sketches ranged from crude depictions of women with impossible figures and giant penises. As barren as the bar seemed, though it wasn't their priority, it was evident that the establishment still valued hospitality to some degree. After all, a bar is a prime venue to get intoxicated among comrades and strangers alike, to escape from the murderous, urban decay outside; a place where the biggest danger to one's mortality is a bar fight and not a stray bullet or radiation poisoning.

Abdus sped past the deserted tables and went straight for the counter itself, crashing onto the surface. The resulting noise from the impact caught the bartender’s attention, who was busy wiping off some metal cups from the dilapidated rack behind her.

Without looking up, Abdus let out a groan, “Coffee, black.”

“Morning to you too,” the bartender before him had a sweet, tender voice that carried with it a mature tone, “Anything to eat?”

Abdus kept his head on the counter, “Kertau steak.”

The bartender put one of the metal cups back on the rack behind her, “We’re out.”

“Fried Bikus lard.”

The bartender grabbed another cup from the rack and continued wiping, “We’re also out.”

“What else do you have that isn’t out?”

The bartender shrugged as she left the wiped cup on the counter, “We’ve always got spare dog food.”

The tired man let out what seemed to be a record-breaking sigh, “Fine.”

“On it,” the bartender tossed the wet, tattered rag she used to wipe the cups over her shoulder and reached under the counter, “How about your friend there, behind you?”

The tired man sighed again, “What’s your cheapest?”

The bartender came back out from underneath the counter with a tin that reeked of coffee powder, “Hardtack.”

“Give him that.”

“Alright,” the bartender reached into the tin and dumped a spoonful of thick, rigid, crushed coffee beans into the metal mug, “Anything for you to drink… what’s your name?”

Abdus raised his head off the counter, propping his head against his arm, “Call him Freak.”

The bartender ignored Abdus and glanced towards Subjek, who still stood behind the tired man, “What’s your name, kid? What’s with the bandages?”

All the bartender had as a response from the bandaged man was her reflection from the viewports of his goggles. From the lenses, a young lady looked back at the bartender. She held a physique that spoke of nothing but brawn. Though her figure still held some semblance of curvatures belonging to the common female anatomy, the majority of her body was constructed with trained, toned muscles that gleamed with her tanned complexion, though that trait was attributed to the dark lighting of her workplace. She stood at an above-average height, edging out above Subjek by about a few centimetres; around half a head if you count the hair bun she had tied on her dark, oil-stained hair. She was dressed in a dirt-caked apron draped around her neck and down to her knees that didn’t seem to serve much in preventing excess filth from reaching her tank top and her long fatigue pants whose colours were drained out by the grime and miasma sourced from a prolonged period of serving in a dingy bar and a kitchen operating with no cleanliness regulations in mind. Even so, despite the elements, the lady’s bearing still held a degree of cheerful radiance. Her rounded cheeks and angled chin bore a perpetual grin while her brown pupils shone brighter than any overhanging lights in the bar, though they weren’t much of a competition, to begin with.

The bartender reached a hand towards Subjek and waved her palm, “Hello? Earth to kid? You there?”

Subjek remained silent and stationary.

The bartender glanced towards Abdus, “Is he a slow one?”

The tired man grabbed the metal mug and brought it over his nose, breathing in the raw scent of the cheap, crushed coffee beans, “Give it a moment.”

Subjek shifted his shoulders and took off his sack, catching the bartender’s attention. The bandaged man swivelling the sack down to his elbow, untied the mouth, reached inside, and pulled out a journal, further intriguing the bartender. With a single hand, Subjek flipped through the pages of the journal and showed it to the bartender.

The bartender squinted at the book, “Sub… jek?”

The bandaged man tossed the book into the sack and threw it over his back.

“Huh,” the bartender kept her eyes on the bandaged man as she reached down the counter once again, “That’s your name? Subjek?”

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The bandaged man was unresponsive.

The bartender came back out with a kettle in one hand and a metal bowl in another, “Can you talk?”

The bandaged man stayed quiet.

The bartender set the metal bowl before Abdus, “Can’t he talk?”

“Don’t know,” the tired man raised himself from his slouched posture and lifted the metal cup towards the bartender, letting her pour fresh, boiling water into it from the kettle as the cup’s contents began to grow a shallow, muddy texture, “Better if he doesn’t.”

“Hey,” the bartender glanced back towards the bandaged man as she lowered the kettle back under the counter, “You want something to drink, Subjek?”

The bandaged man kept his goggles straight on the bartender.

“You want some water?”

The bandaged man didn’t answer.

“Water it is,” the bartender fetched a metal mug from the rack behind her and knocked it on the counter a couple of times before setting it down, “Come here, don’t be shy.”

Subjek stayed in place for a moment before walking up to the counter to Abdus's side, just as the bartender fetched a half-opened can of wet dog food and a crooked spoon. She dropped the spoon into the metal bowl before Abdus and poured what's left in the can into the bowl. A sludge of dark, brown meat came seeping out from the opening in heavy chunks. Drips of thick gravy leaked out of the can and into the bottom in a slow deluge just before the main course came crashing down, splattering the sauce all across the bowl and the spoon. The bartender held the can over the bowl, letting its contents roll out for a while as she fetched the kettle again and poured Subjek a warm cup of water.

Abdus took the spoon from the bowl and poked around the meat, "How old was this?"

"Last week," the bartender pulled both the kettle and the can away, returning them back under the counter.

"Found or opened?"

"Opened."

Abdus looked down to his bowl, gave it a whiff, hesitated over the scent for a while, shrugged, and took a bite.

"Hm," the tired man swallowed, "Not bad."

The bartender came back out from the counter with a small, square piece of cardboard, "You're welcome for that."

"Not you," Abdus gulped down another spoonful, "The guys who used to make these."

"And me," the bartender reached under the counter again, "I've put my own spice in this."

The tired man spoke with a full mouth, "Wha's thar’?"

The bartender winked, "Trade secret."

Abdus snorted, and swallowed, "So be it."

The bartender fetched one thick, rectangular piece of hardtack from under the counter, dropped it on the cardboard piece she pulled out, and pushed both that and the mug of water towards Subjek, “Here you go, kid.”

The bandaged man stared at the mug and the hardtack. He paid more attention to the latter, scrutinizing its fat, rounded edges and its brown, baked texture as he poked around its bubbling surface with his finger.

The bartender fetched the wet rag from her shoulder and went back to wiping mugs from the rack behind her, “Help yourself, kid. I didn’t put anything funny in there. It’s safe.”

Abdus looked up from his bowl and chimed in, “But you put them in mine?”

The bartender shot the tired man a leer, “Do you still want it?”

“I’m just asking,” Abdus took a sip of his coffee.

Then Subjek took off his bandages and his goggles, putting them to his side.

The first to notice was the bartender, whose hand was reaching towards one of the mugs on the rack when she saw the bandaged man unbandage himself. There, the bartender’s hand stayed, along with her eyes, as the sight before her wrangled her attention and kept it in a tight grip. Abdus saw the bartender’s reaction, got intrigued, traced her line of sight to the subject and spit out a bit of his coffee back into his mug.

Dehydrated, wrinkled, bald from hair to eyelash, and devoid of life. It was like looking at the walking corpse of a young old man, or an elderly youth. His facial structure was clean and sharp, but his skin seemed to be washed with a few decades’ worths of life and weather. It was as if he had skipped tens of his age and left his body to keep up on its own. The two couldn’t tell how old he truly was for they’d never seen someone look this geriatric and juvenile at the same time. His dermatological condition didn't help either, as they were unsure whether it was cast shadows from the bar’s dim lighting or yet another mismatched patch of skin he was looking at. The confusion was multiplied tenfold for the bartender, who had no acquaintance with Subjek’s skin condition until now. All the two could tell about Subjek were his tight, dipping cheeks, small rounded nose, and cracked lips.

Even as bizarre as his face was, there was something else to Subjek that tied everything together into one freakish, uncanny package; his eyes. They were the last thing to catch the bartender and Abdul’s eyes, but they soon became the captivating power to Subjek’s appearance. They, unlike the plain, black pupils the overwhelming majority of Sampah’s population had, were green from eyelid to eyelid, with varying shades differentiating his pupils from his sclera. If that wasn’t enough, they also glowed akin to a lightbulb running on a hand-cranked generator. They weren’t so bright that they shone like a lamp, only enough to give his eyes these small, radiating circles of green that illuminated his already barren face under a collection of eerie, spectral shadows.

The sight was all the more surreal when Subjek, now fresh out of his wrappings, began eating the hardtack before him and drinking water from the mug. It wasn't every day that they got to watch a freak of nature such as the unbandaged man go through the regular routines of life as a regular person would, but alas, there he was, eating and drinking like a regular man in front of the bartender and Abdus.

The bartender stared at Subjek for a long while, before pivoting her eyes towards Abdus. He was just as, if not more stupefied than the bartender by the sudden reveal of the near-eldritch face belonging to the man who the tired man had spent a night together with no more than a few iron bars for a cell sitting between them. Before the night, the tired man didn’t think much of what Subjek can do. After this morning, he wasn’t sure what Subjek would do. Now, there was no telling what else Subjek could do.

“Hey, Abdus,” the bartender nudged against the tired man’s shoulders as she kept her eyes on the unbandaged man, “Quite a… something you brought.”

It took a few seconds for Abdus to mummer, “Tell me about it.”

“Really,” the bartender watched as the unbandaged man drew a small sip of water through his discoloured lips, “What the hell is Subjek?”

It took another few seconds for Abdus to mummer, “I wanna know too.”

The bartender leaned towards the tired man as Subjek took another bite from the hardtack, “Where’d he come from?”

“Came to us,” Abdus raised his mug to his mouth, his eyes staying on the unbandaged man, “Claimed he survived a Tengkoda raid.”

The bartender shot up from the counter, surprising the tired man.

“No way,” she breathed out.

“That’s what I thought,” the tired man shrugged.

“But it’s an ambush,” the bartender slumped back down onto the counter, staring at Subjek with newfound fascination in her already gleaming expression, “With shotguns and all.”

“I don’t believe it either,” Abdus took another gulp from his coffee, “But Boss trusts him, and Boss’s orders are orders.”

“Isn’t it dangerous? To lug him around here,” the bartender kept attentive eyes on the unbandaged man, “I mean, he survived an ambush from the boys.”

“I’ll give him that, but now he’s in the middle of town, with us on high alert patrolling the shit out of everywhere. Plus, from what I can tell, Boss has something he wants. He’s a freak, but so far, he’s not showing to be a retard; yet, anyway. I’m more worried about the radiation,” Abdus sipped from his coffee again and showed the mug to the bartender, “Refill.”

The bartender reached under the counter and pulled out the kettle again, pouring it into the tired man’s mug, “Radiation?”

“He’s got some electric panel stuck in his chest. Looks like a damn bomb to me. Has a screen and everything. It probably runs his heart, or is his heart. I don’t know, and I don’t trust it,” Abdus nudged his refilled mug towards Subjek as the unbandaged man bit down his hardtack, “His shit runs on something called Micro-whatever-it-is cells.”

The bartender returned the kettle under the counter, “Microfusion cells?”

Abdus turned towards the bartender in surprise, “You know about this?”

“People barter a lot of things to erase their tabs,” the bartender glanced back at the tired man, “A cell, even a drained one, can clear a whole tab, and then some.”

Abdus raised an eyebrow, “You sure?”

“I run the business here,” the bartender glanced back at Subjek, “I’m sure.”

The tired man returned his eyes to the unbandaged man and for once, his gaze held something else beyond aversion, “I see.”

Abdus took another sip from his coffee and smirked.

“Maybe he’ll actually be of use.”

----------------------------------------

The old lady woke up right as Abdus was asking for his second coffee refill in the bar some kilometres away from her. The first thing she did was lay there for an extra minute as her body began accustoming itself to the elements. Age tends to slow things down a lot. Once her limbs recalibrated and remembered that they’re laying on an unwashed concrete floor with nothing but a thin sheet of cardboard in between, the old lady took this as a motivation to sit herself up. She lifted her heavy head off the cardboard, shifted her joints to prevent them from falling asleep again, smacked her dried lips wet, and decided, at last, to open her eyes. It took a while for her geriatric eyes to focus. By the time her sight became clear, she realized she had awakened to a crowd of three spectating her; a man and a woman standing against iron bars with another man watching from a chair behind.

“Why,” she smiled to them, “Good morning.”

They gave no response.

The old lady looked down and adjusted her clothes, which had been crumpled and wrinkled from a night’s worth of turning. A sharp jolt of pain hit her shoulder when she went to pull her sleeve. The shotgun’s recoil from yesterday had done a number on her arm, and it’s all coming to her in an instant.

“Oh,” the old lady did her best to hide it, “How unsightly…”

She turned back to meet the three watching her in the cell, “Say, where’s the boy gone?”

The dark woman on the front spoke first, “Slept well, Raksa?”

“As well as I could,” the old lady, Raksa, squinted her eyes, “Hawa… was it?”

As if an instinctual reaction, the other man beside the dark woman, Ali, threw out his baton and smacked it hard against the iron bar. The result was a loud metallic bang followed by a ring that lasted almost half a minute.

Ali shot Raksa a glare infused with enough malice to kill a bug on sight, “It’s Boss for you, hag.”

“Stand down,” Hawa, or Boss, raised a palm against the other man, “I allow it. See it as a special case.”

Ali looked to his superior, choked on some unsavoury comments for a second’s worth of contemplation, swallowed it, and drew his baton back into his belt with painful reluctance.

Raksa pushed herself against the floor, standing up on her worn, rattling knees, “I suppose this isn’t a belated welcome party.”

“This would be if we can afford one,” Hawa snapped her fingers towards Haikal, who was seated behind her, “You want breakfast? We can talk things over from there.”

“Oh, we don’t need to,” Raksa began doing stretches, pulling her elbows over her head as she pulled her leg out from beneath her robes, bending her ankles in a circular motion. As old and stout as she was, Raksa was spryer than most other of her age; though there weren’t many who can claim to have lived that old, with a degree of energy that lacked nothing but haste. She wasn’t beyond human, but she was beyond expectations.

Haikal passed the keys from the desk to Hawa as his superior leaned in closer to the cell, concern creeping into her tone of voice, “You aren’t hungry?”

“We don’t need breakfast to talk things over,” the old lady linked her fingers together and pushed her palms outwards, “We can just do it here.”

The dark woman raised an eyebrow as the cell gate’s keys hung by her wrist on a ring, “You said we needed a whole new day to discuss things.”

“I did, but new circumstances came up today,” Raksa bent her back, dangling her hands above the floor, “For the better, of course.”

Hawa clutched onto the iron bar of the cell, “I don’t like wasting time.”

“You don’t need to,” the old lady stood back up and gave her hips a twist, “The man you need is here in Sampah.”

Hawa’s eyes widened, “What man? Which part of town? Where is he?”

“Calm yourself, Hawa. No need for such excess,” Raksa gave her signature warm smile as she sat back down on the cardboard sheet, “He’s in here with us after all.”