“Why did they do this?” cried the little girl, ash from her burning home on her tear-stained cheeks.

“They’re humans, little bug. That’s what they do,” said her mother as she hugged her child with all four of her arms.

The Evil Species: An Unbiased Documentary About Humans

Safira

Bela Vista, Planet Seguro

The next morning came far too soon. Safira woke still feeling tired and sore from sleeping half on top of Tanque. She missed her hammock and had sand creeping into places where sand really shouldn’t be. The morning was cooler than usual, with a slight breeze, which would have been a blessing if it wasn’t a warning sign of an impending sand storm. It would hit some time in the next three days or so. The more it delayed, the more mornings of cooler air, the worse it would be.

“We need to get back,” said Safira, shaking Tanque to wake him. He jerked awake, his eyes roving for danger. Then he noticed the temperature.

“Let’s pack it up, we’ll eat while we walk,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught outside the walls.”

Twenty minutes later, the pair were power walking back towards the city, eyes watching the horizon for any sign of haze. If they spotted haze, they would need to hunker down under the crawler while wrapped in a tarp and pray that the winds wouldn’t be strong enough to tip the crawler over.

By late morning, they were most of the way back to Bela Vista. Distracted by watching the sky, Safira almost didn’t notice the three grinning men walking towards them. Two of them had knives in hand, while the third had a rifle slug-thrower pointed vaguely at the ground.

“Tanque!” she called urgently. He’d been watching the horizon behind them. He turned around to see who was coming.

“Ragers!” he said. He pulled his dagger and tossed it to her. “Safira, get down!”

In a single motion, he pulled his own slug-thrower from his belt and fired it at the man carrying the rifle. Even as he did so, the rifle bearer raised his gun and fired at Tanque. Safira dove to one side just before the slug-throwers started throwing rounds. But she didn’t sit still, she crawled into a shallow ditch and began to do a half crawl, half crouch through it towards the other two men.

“Ooh, I do get to play today! And I thought Bula would get all the fun!” crowed one of the knife wielders.

Safira readied Tanque’s dagger, staying low. The man swaggered over to her, while the other stood there and smirked. Neither were ready when she darted in far swifter than they’d anticipated. Her dagger was already in the man’s thigh and ripping its way out when he stabbed down at her.

She had anticipated the attack, and dove to the side. The sand beneath her feet, however, betrayed her. Safira slipped slightly as she moved. The bleeding man’s blade missed her, but his follow-up punch from his other arm turned her dive into an uncontrolled tumble.

Safira rolled to her feet in time to see the knife wielding Rager fall face-first into the dirt. She smirked at the last gangster, who had lost his own smug smile.

“Bitch, you’re gonna pay -” The thug fell to the sand with a bullet between the eyes. Safira turned to see that all three Ragers were down.

“Ha!” shouted Safira. “Tanque! We got ‘em all!”

She looked at Tanque who was grinning back at her. Together they began to loot the bodies for anything valuable. A few knives and the rifle were the best loot, along with a few copper denars. Safira took one of their shemaghs, as it was in much better condition than hers. It was a dark red color, a little unusual but not enough to stand out.

As they stood up from the last corpse, Safira turned to Tanque to crack a little joke with a grin on her face. A single crack rang out, so she whipped around to see a fourth Rager already running away. Safira heard Tanque fire back, and saw the Rager grab his leg and collapse.

“Let him go, I’m worried about the sand storm,” said Safira. “The storm will kill him, if the desert doesn’t.”

“I…” groaned Tanque. “He got me.”

Safira turned to look at him. He was holding the left side of his stomach. He staggered for a moment, then she saw a bloodstain start to spread in the fabric of his shirt.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she cried out as she ran towards him. “Let’s get you to the crawler.”

She quickly got under his good side just as he started to sag. He was heavy, so heavy. “Come on, stay with me. We’ll get you to a doctor. Your boss has a doctor, right?”

Tanque managed to nod. Together, they staggered over to the crawler. Tanque leaned against it while Safira frantically cut a strip of fabric off of the tarp covering the crates. By the time she got back to him, he was noticeably paler.

“Move your hands, let me bandage it,” she said.

Roughly, she shoved his shirt out of the way and shoved a wad of the tarp into the wound. She then took the long strip she’d cut and tied it around his waist, making it as tight as she dared.

“Hold that in place.” Then she raced back around the crawler, frantically untying one corner and tossing empty crates haphazardly into the sand. When she’d made a space large enough for Tanque, she came back to him. He was slumping a little more.

Safira slid his arm on his good side around her shoulders. “Come on, let’s get on the crawler.”

Tanque groaned in pain as they got to the side of the crawler. The crawler’s cargo bed was a full meter off the ground, with six large heavy tread tires. It took far too long, in Safira’s frantic opinion, to get Tanque over them and seated on the crawler.

“Give me the control ring,” she said, holding out her hand.

Tanque fumbled with a pocket, so Safira pushed his hand away. She reached in and grabbed a ring out of it. It was a bracelet-sized ring, with three buttons - forward, reverse, and stop. The crawler would follow the ring as long as it was able, detecting for itself the best path to follow. Seconds later, she was jogging in front of the crawler. Not designed for quick movement, the crawler barely kept up.

As she ran, Safira kept a careful eye on the horizon. She didn’t detect any haze yet, which was good. But the temperature still hadn’t climbed as high as it should, which was very bad. What was she going to do if Tanque died? He was her only friend, possibly more than friend. She hadn’t even had a chance to explore that with him yet!

A haze on the horizon caught her eye just as the city walls came into view. The sand storm was here. It came on quick, so it wouldn’t be a terrible storm, but they had to get to shelter. Even smaller storms were deadly. But if they sheltered, Tanque would probably bleed to death.

Safira pressed on, and hoped against hope that they could beat the storm. The winds were picking up. Sand was starting to pepper the small amount of exposed skin on her face. She stopped and ran back to Tanque, who was holding his side grimly, but was still conscious. His pallour was far too pale, and most of his shirt was a dark red now.

“We need to cover your face,” she said. “The storm is almost here. I’m running for it.”

“No, don’t,” he said weakly. “You need to get to shelter.”

“I am getting to shelter. The city walls are just over the rise. We don’t have time to argue.” Safira adjusted Tanque’s shemagh until it was over his eyes. He wouldn’t really be able to see, but at least the sand wouldn’t blind him.

Safira re-adjusted her own shemagh as she returned to her position in front of the crawler. She ran faster now, not as fast as she could, but fast enough that she knew she’d be unable to breathe well underneath the shemagh. She wasn’t in the right condition for this. She was undernourished and not in the right condition for an endurance run. But she also had no alternative. Safira could only hope that fear and adrenaline could keep her and Tanque alive.

The speed of the wind began to accelerate, and the sand was blasting her now. Safira’s shemagh was pulled as low as it could be, and the fabric that covered her mouth and nose was lifted up so that only a tiny slit was left for her to look through. She prayed that she didn’t trip.

Ahead the city gate came into view. It wasn’t closed yet, and the two gate guards in Tutelum Comitatus were watching carefully, keeping an eye out for any stragglers coming in from the junk fields. Safira waved her arms frantically over her head. One of the guards spotted her and ran over.

“We have wounded!” shouted Safira.

The guard shouted back, but it was lost in the wind. Safira ran faster, leaving the crawler to follow behind her at a slower pace. If it didn’t catch up with her soon, it would stop, but Safira needed to get help.

The guard realized something was wrong, and ran over toward her.

“We have wounded,” gasped Safira as she stumbled to a stop in front of the guard. “Need… doctor….”

“Get inside the gate, there’s a warehouse to your right. I’ll radio for a doctor to meet you there,” said the guard.

The crawler had caught back up again, the sand storm blasting it from behind. Safira ran on, straight through the gate, and into the warehouse. She stumbled to a stop and turned off the crawler as she walked back towards Tanque.

When she got to his side, she peeled his shemagh away from his face. His face was a rictus of pain. Safira couldn’t tell if he was alive.

“Tanque?” she asked tentatively. “You’d blasted better be alive!”

Tanque’s eyes opened and looked into hers. He began to fumble at his waist with his good hand, before finding the pouch he wanted.

“Take… take this…” he said, his words slow and hard to make out.

“What is it?” she asked as his massive hand reached out towards hers. His hand dropped heavily into both of hers, and she was suddenly supporting the weight of his arm. She eased it back down, careful to avoid his wound. When he opened his hand, two objects fell into her palms.

“Wish… I had… courage… to ask… sooner,” he mumbled.

Safira looked down to see a solid bracelet with a single hinge, its open side a clasp, and a key. Both were covered in blood. She recognized the bracelet as a wedding band. She knew that Tanque cared for her as more than a friend, something she’d only truly begun to acknowledge a few days before. His affections were not unwelcome; in fact, they made her feel really good. Her heart flooded with warmth and sorrow at the same time.

With jerky, fast motions, she pulled Tanque’s dagger from her belt and nicked her pinky finger. With Tanque watching her, she dripped her own blood onto his on the bracelet. She turned his good hand over, put the bracelet around her right wrist, and rested her wrist in his hand. Then using her free hand, Safira made him close his fingers around the bracelet to close it. The clasp snapped together.

“Now listen here, asshole, you had damn well better live after all of that,” she said. A single tear ran down her face. Safira scrubbed it away furiously. “I’m not about to lose you because of some stupid bullet.”

“Okay…” he said with a pained smile. “Key… is to… my place… ‘member… where…”

“Yes, I know where it is. I’ll be taking you there once you’re better,” she said firmly.

“Just… in case…”

“No, not just in case. You concentrate on living, I’ll worry about the rest,” she countered. “You hear me?”

Just then, two men ran in from the storm carrying a stretcher, wearing goggles and with every inch of their body covered in cloth. The stretcher had a blanket zipped onto it, which they quickly unzipped. It took them only a moment to transfer Tanque to the stretcher and zip the blanket back into place.

“Your his,” one of the men started, but paused for a moment when he saw the bracelet, “wife? Follow us, if you can run. Otherwise, ask for the -”

“I can run,” she said.

When the man said ‘run’, he meant it. The two stretcher carriers bolted out of the warehouse and into the storm. Safira ran after them, barely able to keep them in sight through the tiny slit in her shemagh. They ran a few blocks to a side street, and into a building with a sign in front of it that Safira couldn’t read. Safira ran in after them.

Tanque was being carried into another room, the blanket protecting him already gone. A middle-aged woman waited by the door, and stopped Safira when she went to follow.

“It’s okay, dear heart, he’s in good hands,” she said. “The doctor is in with him. He’ll do everything he can. Would you like a glass of water?”

Safira managed a jerky nod, then realized the woman had guided her to a comfortable chair. She sat, because she didn’t know what else to do. Moments later, the woman returned with a glass of water. She hadn’t even noticed the woman leave.