THE TWO STARTED THEIR return back to Durango traveling backwards, very slowly at first, then faster as they got in sync. After twenty minutes, Robbie began wondering about the unfamiliar terrain. He wasn’t accustomed to watching it move away from him.

“Uh, you know what?” Robbie observed. “I don’t recognize where we are right now. I don’t remember this ravine, anyway. Do you know where we are? And worse yet, it’s getting dark down here.”

“I don’t fucking know what year it is, Robbie. You got my mind going back to that girl from Hesperus. Daisy. Veronica. Whatever. Like, I can’t stop thinking about her. Maybe that’s what happens to people when they’re close to death.”

“Hey, worthless shithead! You’re not close to death. What does your meter say about your oxy levels? Thank God those weren’t damaged in the accident, or we’d be sharing tanks to boot.”

Sord peered down at the small patch on the left shoulder of his suit. “Shows I’m green. Solid green.”

“Me too,” he replied. “At least something’s working right.”

Robbie backed off the accelerator to survey the situation. The walls on either side of the ravine were twenty feet high. It was an old riverbed that had seen no rain for months, and the loose rock and sand were hard to slog through despite the moto’s wide tires.

“Hate to admit. I need to turn us around and retrace a little.”

“Wait!” Sord cautioned. “Damn. Racnines dead ahead. Looks like a shitload.”

Robbie turned backward, bracing his arms against the seat.

“What the fuck?” he screamed. Immediately, he began scanning the walls of the ravine for any type of protection. “There must be a dozen of them; a full fucking pack! This moto in reverse will never outrun those bastards.”

Racnines were hybridized in the 2030s, an outgrowth of numerous animal hybridizations that began in the decade. Although authorities never traced the creators of the breed, the mix of mostly raccoon DNA with certain canine traits created an inquisitive, intelligent, and ferocious predator. Combining the olfactory senses and pack mentality of canines with the front paw dexterity of raccoons allowed these hybrids to spread quickly. Starting in the Northeastern part of the continent, racnines eventually became a ubiquitous and predominant nuisance species across all continents.

Due to their cunning nature and ability to adapt readily to the ever-evolving ecological changes, racnines not only survived GDII, they thrived as the lone remaining alpha predator in North America. Larger alphas were wiped out entirely as their habitats were largely destroyed from the effects of the cellular decoupler and similar annihilation tech unleashed in the brief, deadly war.

“We need to get to that spot,” Robbie yelled, pointing upward to his right.

The racnines were closing in on them, carefully spreading out to limit their escape routes. The lead dog was pacing toward them, but the pack had not yet burst into a full run.

Sliding off the seat, Robbie grabbed under Sord’s left shoulder.

“We have ten seconds to get to that crevice in the rock.”

Robbie was half-carrying Sord forward. As they reached the crevice, the lead dog clamped his jaw solidly onto Robbie’s boot.

“Get the hell in there!” he screamed at Sord, heaving him into the crevice.

The lead racnine was the largest, around seventy pounds. It held tightly onto Robbie’s boot, shaking its head back and forth as canines instinctually do to tear at the tissues and rapidly inflict considerable damage. He knew he needed to shed it quickly and wedge himself into the crevice or risk being torn to shreds by the pack.

The dog ripped part of his suit material off. In its moment of surprise that flesh could so easily fall away, Robbie kicked hard at the lead’s nose. Racnines were accustomed to smaller prey that rarely fought back viciously, so the lead dog returned to the pack, reconsidering how to signal his team to attack their forthcoming meal.

“You need sit up and be aware, buddy. I know how much it hurts, but you can’t lie down on this. Must get your feet moving,” Robbie urged. “I won’t fend them off with my two boots alone. When they come at you, just kick the hell out of them and don’t stop! It’s our only option.”

Sord was on his back, staring at the top of the crevice five inches above him. “No way. Best I can do is stay here on my side and get up on one elbow.”

He groaned loudly as he lifted his body upward, the entire left side shaking. Squirming backward in the crevice, he attempted to gain some backside support in the rock to kick more powerfully and minimize exposure of his shattered arm.

“What are they waiting for?” Sord complained. “Which one of us they’ll eat first? It’ll be the weaker one, the one with the fractured bone and bloody suit.”

Robbie’s section of the small crevice was shallower, and he tried to wedge in tighter. His place was slightly lower in the crevice than Sord’s, giving him less room to protect his body. Sord’s boots were inches above his head.

“They’re planning now,” Robbie warned. “The lead dog is signaling to the others. It’ll be a coordinated attack. Five or six at once, then reinforcements from the rest. I’ve seen them do the same thing to animals. We just need to survive these first few rounds to give them something to think about. If we can challenge them initially, maybe they’ll back off.”

The racnines were crowded together, circling around each other, snarling and growling in wait for the lead’s signal.

“Don’t kick my head, dude,” Robbie warned. “Curl your good hand and fingers under you. They’ll bite and scratch at it. Try to keep your face back as far as possible, but if they come at it, use your knee or boot or whatever to protect. Just don’t let them get to your face or hand. They should go after our appendages first, not the trunk.”

But Robbie knew what was in store for them – a brief, bloody, and valiant effort to stay alive.

Three racnines approached from the top and two from the bottom. The crevice was ten feet above the ravine’s ground level on a sharp incline, forcing the racnines to approach cautiously to avoid slipping back.

“I’ll take these two!” Robbie screamed, his legs flailing as they attacked. He felt the pain of large fangs embedding in his exposed lower calf.

“Fuckers!” Sord yelled, kicking his right leg forward. He knocked two of the three attacking him backward while the third crouched inward to target his face.

“Fuck you!” he screamed, rapping its ribs with the top of his right knee. “Scratched my face, you fucker!”

Robbie was also successful at kicking his two attackers away. “Bleeding. My leg’s bleeding. Watch out!”

The six others worked away at the two, attempting to tire them by backing off slightly at each defensive move.

“Don’t kick unless they’re right in front of you. They want us to waste our energy. Smart fighters. Hold back! Don’t take their dare,” Robbie demanded.

Sord was drenched in his suit, and post-adrenalin body fatigue was setting in. His right leg was getting weaker as was his mental acuity. The lead dog noticed his body relaxing and lunged at his boot. He felt its teeth piercing into his heel. Robbie tilted his head upward and saw Sord’s rapid decline.

“Don’t let him take you!” he warned.

Without a right arm to grasp hold of the rock, Sord knew the dog was working to drag him out from the crevice. He envisioned what was coming next, and hoped the end would be brief.

“Like fuck, he will!” Robbie kicked his leg high above his head, impacting the lead dog’s hind leg and causing it to slide back a few meters. In that brief interlude, Robbie crawled up and placed his body between the racnines and Sord.

“Shit!” Sord screamed. “My arm!”

“Sorry, dude. Move the fuck back, as far back as you can. I’ll try to hold them off . . .”

***

Sord thought of his mother, his poor mother. Wasn’t it enough that she had lost her husband, his father, five years before? She hadn’t recovered from that loss, and she would now face another loss: her only child.

He knew how difficult her early life had been, how she and her mother wandered from camp to camp as stragglers and unlikely survivors, searching for food, shelter, and oxygen. They could never expose who Sara was in the sense of recent Earth history, and were always fearful she might be recognized or DNA tagged, then flayed by angry survivors of the Debacle. Finally, when Becca was ten, they wandered upon the nascent commonwealth of Prosperity, oxygen tanks spent and not having eaten for days.

A picture of the instigator of GDII crossed his mind. Ron the tyrant. Ron the insane. Ron of the decoupler, that abominable genetic code he developed to indiscriminately dissolve cell walls. The code readily rode on the wind, tearing into most plant and animal life forms before it quenched itself fully, leaving only twenty-two percent of organic life on a devastated planet that was once vibrant and diverse in species.

Ron, Vista’s oligarch. Fear became him. Paranoia. The kind of paranoia that creeps slowly upon an individual who has great power but a weak sense of self. Feigning strength. Feigning greatness. Corrupt to his core and corrupting all he touched. Coupled with his oligarchic power and his scientific and technical resources, the terrible and the predictable finally coalesced as reality.

Sord knew little of his grandmother’s role in GDII. He only knew she was one of his ministers. One of Ron’s key ministers, his media expert, to be exact. She enabled his voice and multiple personas to be amplified across a sordid rainbow of communications channels.

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Charmingly entertaining, shockingly sharp-tongued, and disgustingly amoral at the same time, Ron was a constant presence in the minds of his subjects. Revered by many. Reviled by many. The outgrowth of an aimless and meandering societal malignancy.

“Is this what people experience before they die?” he wondered. “Things of the past, not even their past, or of opportunities missed?

Robbie’s head and body were packed in front of him in the crevice, obscuring his vision. Then suddenly, he sensed Robbie’s body relax momentarily as he stopped kicking at the attackers.

A comfortable hum. Lights appeared from above, momentarily distracting the racnines. The beasts had seen such machines before, but never this close.

The drone quickly descended. It was standard issue from Prosperity’s Search and Rescue unit, covered with eight lights and rotors, enough to stir up a large cloud of dirt in the ravine bottom.

Both Robbie and Sord still had their goggles and masks on, but the wind and dust blinded them to the racnines’ locations.

“Drone!” Robbie screamed, not hearing Sord’s weak reply. “But shit, I’ve lost where the dogs are. Too much crap flying everywhere.”

The drone dropped down lower, five feet from the ground and nearly in front of them. Robbie expected a next attack. He looked around, hoping the air would clear enough to see the dogs as they approached.

It hovered for a minute, continuing to stir up dust from the dry creek bed. Robbie suspected the drone had signaled to others, but he had no idea how close a rescue might be. They were lost, and a rescue team or next drone could be kilometers off, whereas death was clearly seconds away.

With its lights blazing and all rotors engaged, he suspected the drone’s batteries would not last long and the attacks would return. Then he saw one edge of it tilt upward. A racnine had jumped and grabbed onto its frame, forcing an edge to the ground. Dirt and rocks flew everywhere as blades on four of the rotors slammed hard onto the ravine bottom.

Within seconds, the racnines’ nemesis had been defeated. Some began to use their front paws to tear into it, braving the rotors that remained operational.

“Are you with me, Sord? Are you there?”

He received no answer.

One racnine jumped up, straight into the last functioning rotor. It was readily discharged into pieces, with entrails and fur flying everywhere. This instant death of their mate further angered the others, and their barking and pacing become more agitated.

A single drone light remained on, casting ghostly silhouettes onto the edges of the ravine. Robbie noticed their dance, reflected on the opposite ledge.

“Perfect! Now I get to see their faces when they kill us,” Robbie complained. A vision of shredded envirosuits and bones stripped of sinew and flesh crossed his mind.

“Come at me, you little fuckers!” he challenged. “I’ll leave at least some of you bruised and battered.”

The lead dog approached, standing on its hind legs momentarily as if to survey the best tasting prospects for his imminent meal.

“Thigh, or do you prefer liver? Closer, my friend. Just a little closer,” he whispered.

It crept towards him and was within inches of his bleeding calf, ready to signal the final attack to his pack.

But it rose again on its hind legs and peered toward the sky.

Robbie used that moment to kick the lead dog hard in the stomach, slamming the top of his boot directly into its exposed ribcage. He heard ribs crack as it squealed in pain and rolled down the incline. It didn’t get up.

Robbie quickly understood why the lead dog gave him that opening. He heard another drone. Then another. Then another. Three drones had dropped from the sky, hovering above. They took turns swooping down to menace and disperse the racnines.

Only one racnine had the courage to stay, despite the noise and commotion. Robbie watched as it grabbed the damaged lead dog, pulling it back, away from the drones.

“Thank God someone found us, but I think we’re in a world of shit, dude, either way” he sighed, wondering if Sord was either unconscious or dead.

“What now?” Sord regurgitated hoarsely. “What gets worse than this?”

***

Sord awoke to a whirring sound next to his ear.

“What the hell’s that noise?” he wondered. “A fan?

He felt a deep, throbbing pain, beginning at the right shoulder and intensifying in his forearm, down to the fingertips.

“Did I sleep the wrong way on this side? And did Mom turn the temp down? It’s cold in here. Where’s my blanket?”

Robbie was sitting up in his hospital bed, a few feet from Sord. His sheets were thrown off, a subtle indication to the hospital staff that he was anxious to get home.

“Dude, are you finally coming to?” he chided, noticing his lips moving.

Sord farted loudly.

Robbie laughed. “Hey, is that your first response after getting patched up? A fart? Look, you shithead, I hear we’re having visitors again in a few minutes. It’d be nice if you could finally wake up to cover me on the storyline. You see, I had to do a little embellishment on what happened.”

“Embellishment?” Sord was stirring to the sound of Robbie’s familiar voice. The anesthesia the attending orthopedic surgeon had used was beginning to wear off. His arm surgery alone required resetting his compound fracture, pinning the bone together, and suturing the opening. Altered stem cells were embedded in the wound to rapidly repair the tissue damage.

Robbie jumped down from his bed, landing on his left foot to avoid jostling the cast covering his right calf.

“You’re awake, dude!” he yelled, gently thumping Sord’s left cheek to force his eyes to open. The next few moments were an unconscious rambling of emotions.

“We’re fucking alive!” Robbie screamed in his face. He then looked around to be sure nobody else was close by. “Fucking alive!” he said, voice lowered. “Do you know how close we came to death? Like, that lead dog was crouching to grab my thigh next. He was a thigh guy, I guess, and his buddies were right behind him ready to pull me out first. Do you remember what happened?”

Sord’s mind was still trying to grasp his whereabouts as his head rolled back and forth.

“I crawled up to cover you. Remember? That dog grabbed your leg and was pulling you like he’d just caught the hind foot of a hare in the hole. After tearing you to shreds in seconds, that space cleared above me would’ve given them opportunity to come in from the top and attack my head as well as the rest of me. So I crawled up in front of you and just kept kicking. You were spent, dude.”

Sord was coming to, reliving the event. “Jesus! I only remember you pushed my arm back and it hurt like hell, you bastard.”

“Yah,” Robbie chuckled. “I pushed your poor little bone-protruding arm back so I could save your life. Saliva was literally pouring from their mouths, and they were taking Vegas bets on who’d get that bloody forearm of yours. It was flagging them saying ‘come chow down here first, no need to bite through the skin. Here doggy, want a bone?’”

“Why are we alive?” Sord recalled the dog grabbing his heel, pulling him from the crevice. Death was near. Terrible pain. “Who saved us? I passed out.”

“You mean, aside from me? Well, in reality, our Search and Rescue team. I only had like ten kicks left in me, then we were both dog meat, literally. Do you recall the first drone? They pulled it down and shattered it like a toy. But four more came a few seconds later, with the whole damn team in arrears.”

The top of Sord’s bed was slightly inclined, and he leaned forward to survey his body. “Why do I feel so shitty everywhere? Where’s my mom? Your mom?”

“Oh, trust me, they’ll be here again, very soon. I’ve had round one with them, and you’ve got to let me lead the explanation. I already excused our stupidity by blaming the elements and unusual circumstances, but definitely not blaming us. I think they believed half of it, at best. Just stick with me, and I’ll do the talking because they’ll want to test your memory and challenge my version. Look, dude, if we appear to them to be as stupid as we actually were, they’ll never let us go out on motos again, not until we’re like fifty-something.”

Sord laid back on the bed, his eyes closed. He was in so much pain in so many places, it was hard for him to ascertain how much damage he had sustained.

“Get my balls?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did they take my nuts? Bite ‘em off?”

Robbie laughed aloud. “Jesus, dude. Where’d you come up with that idea?”

“Saw a video once,” he mumbled. “Racnines attack your balls first. After that, you might as well invite them in for dinner. Did they get us both?”

Still feeling pain in his damaged calf and reluctant to put more pressure on it, Robbie sat back on his bed. “No balls, big guy, but they tore into just about everything else. I mean, look at this leg. See the bandages? I thought they just got one bite there. But no, major contusions and tissue damage. Muscles were all bungled up, swollen and bloody. See my arms?”

“What happened?”

“Fending them off. Scratches, bites, tears, you name it. I had no idea until the adrenalin wore off. That was last night.”

“What time is it?”

“Still early, dude, ten twenty. Happened about sixteen hours ago. School’s in session, and we’re both tardy, like real tardy. We’re not getting back to class, though, not today, and you’ll need a few days longer because you got it worse than me.”

Sord propped himself up on the bed, using his left arm as a brace. “What do you mean? Did they get something else?”

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Here, let me get a mirror for you. I think they hid them because they didn’t want us to see ourselves.”

He jumped off the bed and hobbled around the room, finally locating a small, round mirror in a drawer. He held it out cautiously toward Sord, then pulled back his arm.

“Look, before you grab this, understand the doctor says you’ll eventually look like you did before. The cells they planted into your face will repair almost everything, though you may have a bit of a facial scarring for a while.”

Sord grabbed the mirror and surveyed his looks. The racnine that scratched his face had taken a fair amount of tissue, including muscle and fascia. His cheek was swollen to twice its normal size beneath the bandages.

“Oh, fuck! I’m screwed for life. No chick will ever want this.”

“Bullshit! You know they can grow it back.”

“Yeah, but how long will I look like Frankenstein? Did it get my forehead as well? Like, what’s this big black and blue bump from? Damn moto flipped. Did the seat crush my head?”

Robbie clicked his tongue. “Not quite. I think your forehead was maybe the only place that didn’t have some sort of damage, at least until you got thumped there.”

“Thumped? What thumped me?”

Robbie paused, wondering if he should divulge anything of what happened during the rescue. “Well, your mom’s boyfriend, that Matt guy. He arrived along with the team. Not sure why. Appeared he knew some of them, and maybe your mom forced him to check on us. I don’t know.”

He was hoping to change the subject. “But you’ll be okay, dude. You’ll start healing up fast.”

Sord was confused. “Matt was there? What did Matt have to say? I must’ve been out of it.”

“Yeah, like in shock. Accident. Blood loss. Protruding radius bone. Nasty whacks and bites from racnines.”

“What does Matt have to do with that ugly knot on my forehead?”

Robbie rolled his eyes. He didn’t want to interfere in Sord’s family affairs, knowing from previous conversations that Sord’s mom and her boyfriend was not a fun subject for discussion.

“Well,” he admitted, “suffice it to say that Matt was no happy camper to find us almost dead there. He ran up to us with the first Search and Rescue arrivals. Virtually threw me out of the crevice, much to the chagrin of the others in the party. Then he chucked you even less gently to the ground, with you screaming at the top of your lungs in pain.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t bullshit you, brother. Some temper on that guy. He tore you out of that crack, probably wanting to see if you were dead. I tried to tell him not to, that you had a fractured arm and all, but it was too late.”

“And then, my forehead?”

“Um, appears he was pretty mad, like you’d not only interrupted him watching his favorite movie, but you also drank his six-pack of beer. Steaming, the dude was. He first listened to see if you were breathing, then pulled your right arm there up to check for a pulse.”

“My broken arm?”

“Yeah, it happened so fast before the others could get to him. Once he realized you weren’t dead, he did it. Probably without thinking.”

Robbie stopped talking, knowing this could create future issues.

Sord was surprised. “Did what?” Sord asked, his voice deepening.

“Thumped you, like I just said. I guess you could say he thumped you very hard. Now, the dudes were starting to glom all over me to check my injuries out, but I kept an eye over on you. I can’t say for sure if he whacked your forehead with his backhand knuckles, but that’s what it looked like.”

They both paused, trying to recollect any additional memories. Sord was quiet, his eyes peering up at the ceiling.

“The other rescuers were none-too-pleased with his anger. Now, I heard him claim he just ‘thumped’ you for being so stupid, but that’s not what I saw. I saw his palm up, facing me. You don’t thump someone with your knuckles at close quarters. I call that a backhand smash.”

Sord peered again at his forehead, ignoring his swollen cheek. “Is that what gave me this huge lump and black eyes? Oh, and the headache.”

“I can’t say it’s the only thing, but I’d assume it’s the major thing. I mean, you did get crushed under that moto, and your face was pressed down pretty good by that seat. You never know. But the other dudes were quite disturbed, and they kind of pushed Matt out of the way and told him to back off. After that, things get hazy because there were people ripping my clothes off, as well as yours, and bringing stretchers and all, so I lost track of you until we arrived at the hospital. I didn’t even see you then, not until early this morning after they brought you back from surgery. You’ve been out cold until now.”

Still gazing at his forehead, Sord exhorted, “Stupid fucker. I keep telling Mom he’s bad news. I don’t care if he’s trying, and I don’t give a shit that he had a hard life before. Like, who around here doesn’t have that excuse? Where’s some water?"