"Soooo," Lloyd said, drawing out the word as he leaned on the handle of his axe, "what are you going to do about them?"

Hyram's transport pod hovered silently next to Tarsus, glowing a faint orange, but this time from the reflected first rays of sunlight peeking from behind the horizon. The casket had cooled down enough for them to take it back with them.

While Lloyd had built the campfire up to something that, according to him, would be a better deterrent against monsters that lived in these woods, Patrick stood between his two friends, feeling more torn and helpless by the minute. He had to make a decision soon. They had one working pod and two badly hurt people. It hadn't been hard to see, once he could get close enough, the scorched wound on the side of Hyram's head and remember the spray of blood that hit his own pod just after the shell had closed. One of the attackers had shot him, and Val had put him in a pod and sent him through.

"What's the note about?"

Wordlessly, Patrick handed the crumpled and smeared mess of paper over. The letters were hastily scribbled in something very dark and flaky. He didn't want to think about what that was.

"Take care of him. I'll keep them off your trail for as long as I can."

Lloyd handed it back and sighed.

"She isn't coming then."

"No."

The idiot! Why would Val stay behind? She was no hero. She didn't do last stands. She always told him to take any chance, any, to get away, no looking back, no hesitation, don't be a hero. Could it be fake, written by one of the Tyrant's minions after they caught her? He doubted it. They wouldn't have let Hyram go, no matter the state he was in. Val had loved the man. If she'd been captured, they would have used him to make her squeal out everything she knew. It was strange to think of her as someone who could actually love anyone, and she would be the first to deny it, but he had seen them together, had seen her. Life as a soldier had been hard on her. It had taken so much of her humanity and sanity that most people would have call her mad. But when she looked at Hyram, there had been something there, something soft and oh so fragile.

Take care of him.

What did it even mean? Let the pod heal him. That was the obvious choice. What if that wasn't what she meant? Give him a merciful end? Bury him in this foreign soil, let him rest in peace?

Tarsus coughed, tried to sit up, and fell back again. Lloyd dropped the axe and held a small metal cup to the kid's mouth. Patrick shook his head in wonder. In the time that man had been here, he had managed to stay alive, find several cargo pods and gather the supplies, collected and cleaned water for drinking, and even found a way to climb to the top of this mountain. It was amazing.

But now that there were four of them, even though the pod would take care of feeding and laving Hyram, that previous wealth of supplies was going to be woefully limited.

He knew what they had to do. There was only one option, really. Tarsus had a better chance at recovery. It would be faster and with a higher chance of a good outcome. As for Hyram, transport pods were medical marvels, but with a head shot like that, there was no way to tell what residual damage there might be. What if it healed the body but left him brain dead? They had to let him go.

"N-no..."

He looked up at the unexpected croak.

"Shhh, relax, you're going to be fine. Here, try another sip."

"N-no... don't..."

Tarsus feebly tried to bat away the cup from his mouth, his eyes bright with fever fixing on Hyram's pod. He shook his head wildly, coughed again.

"Tar," Patrick begun, but the kid grabbed his hand, holding it tight.

"I'll... be fine," he said, though they could barely understand his words.

"I'll fight... I can... I'll be f—"

The word ended abruptly with the light hiss of the hypo-spray. Lloyd shrugged apologetically.

"He shouldn't move this much. We've just cleaned his wounds, he has to get some rest. Let him sleep for a bit."

"He doesn't want it."

"Doesn't want what?"

"The pod. He wants..."

Patrick rubbed at his eyes, feeling more tired than he had in years. He'd thought his time in captivity was bad, but the last several hours had been utterly draining.

"Yeah, I got that. He wants Hyram to have a chance and thinks he'll make it on his own."

"And will he?"

Lloyd sighed, offered the cup with the last drops of water to him, and looked pointedly at what Patrick had been trying to ignore. Awaiting the decision whether to give the pod to Tarsus or not, they had set the broken bones as well as they possibly could without any actual medical knowledge. He found himself curled up on the ground, vomited slime and bile after their first attempt. The feeling of that darkened, bruised, swollen flesh with the pieces of bone shifting in unnatural ways beneath it... it was too much. But it had to be done if he were to have a chance, and it needed two people.

They did what they could, both of them unashamedly weeping in the end, as they wrapped up and splinted the legs. Tarsus had passed out at the first attempt, and they were grateful for it.

"How should I know? I'm not a doctor, I'm an engineer. Besides, I haven't had any coffee in days."

"You know how to survive."

"Not nearly well enough. I do know we can't get him down to my cave. And we have to find shelter before the night falls."

"That thing... it was a zombie, right?"

"Yeah, I would definitely call it that. And they work the graveyard shift."

"An actual zombie. And there are more of them."

"Plenty, that's the trouble with them. Once they know there's fresh meat around, they will all start to zoom in on it. And it doesn't stop with zombies. Just wait until you've met the spiders."

He shuddered, drawing the scraps of fabric he'd taken from the zombie's body tighter around him. They didn't do much in the way of protection, and the idea that they came from a rotting body sickened him. But he no longer was naked and alone here, and that counted for much. In time, maybe Lloyd could get him some of those rabbit furs to make something better, but until then, this would have to do.

They sat, each on one end of Tar's tree, looking out over the fire at the reddening sky.

"She's probably dead."

"No," Lloyd said, after a long, contemplative silence, "I don't think so. She said she would keep them off our trail and I believe she will find a way to do that without endangering herself."

"No heroes, right?"

"That's her, to the bone."

"Hyram's been my right hand for years, just as Val is my left. Even when they tried to break me, even at the worst of times, I knew he was out there, with her, scheming, finding a way to get us out."

"He got you out in the end. They both got all of us out. I was one of the first, but there were others."

The clouds glowed with the majestic orange and pink of the sunrise, slowly brightening as the sun broke free of the mountains in the distance. The sight below was breath-taking. The massive valley with the dense forest stretching out almost to the horizon. And where-ever he looked, he couldn't see any sign of human habitation. No suspiciously open clearings, no rooftops peeking out, not even the telltale serpentines of smoking campfires. An entire world, fresh and new, with just him, Tarsus, Lloyd, and yes, Hyram, in it. The rest of his crew had to be here, in this world, and he would do his best to find all of them.

"That bullet would have hit me," he said, blinking against sudden realization.

"Stop that line of thought right now! Lingering on details like that will get you killed, and where will that leave their sacrifice? Mourn the dead, not the living."

"And I have plenty of those on my conscience," he said bitterly. "Mountains and mountains of them."

A calloused hand lightly smacked the back of his head.

"Enough of that as well. Survival starts with the mind. And," Lloyd picked up his stone axe, slung it over his shoulder, and glanced at the slumbering chicken next to the fire, "with punching enough wood."

The chicken opened one eye, squawked in firm agreement, and went back to sleep.

End of Book 1