It was a torrential downpour in the dead wilds when a convoy of three all-terrain vehicles built like armored busses and half a dozen gun platforms decorated with the ICC rook plowed through a forest in the process of turning into badlands.

In the second transport from the front, Holt and Tori looked over a map projection while a recording of Reeve’s conversation with Craid played in the background. Holt had his feet up on a table as he filed a report while his ward paced restlessly.

“Something the matter?” Holt asked.

Tori shook her head. “This is the furthest I’ve been from a city.”

“You’ve flown farther.”

“That’s different. I’ve never heard an ‘Ike’ before, what’s he doing so far out from civilization?”

“He’s sort of the Phoenix Brigade’s answer to our surveyor’s corps. Not as likely to kill you for bumping into him, still not fun to deal with.”

“Ugh, another Phoenix Brigade. Loose cannons and unstable psychopaths.”

“You’re not wrong, but the world would be a much harder place to live in without a few trigger-happy jar heads who consider the term ‘biological immortality’ a personal challenge.”

“They’re all high on gunpowder fumes and THC! Their leader doesn’t have any better idea what’s in that case than us and they’ve already decided to destroy it!”

“Our goal is still the same. Find and recover the package, shoot anyone who tries to stop us.”

“And if we fail?!”

“Nothing changes. If the Brigade is anything, they’re thorough. Whether the package is the next world ending super plague or a miracle cure, they won’t leave enough of it behind for anyone to find out.”

Tori hit the wall in passing, denting the metal plating and sending a crack along a nearby window.

“Don’t get worked up over hypotheticals. Need a muscle relaxant?”

“I’m fine,” Tori insisted, taking a seat and going through breathing exercises, continuing once she got her heartrate down. “Why do we even want Ike?”

“You mean besides the probability he’s the last living person to lay eyes on the package?”

“That would have been over two months ago.”

“Sure, but he might know something that could fill in some blanks, wipe away some of the black ink. By the way, don’t think I don’t appreciate that you shut up during meetings, but I shouldn’t have to do all the talking. I’m your partner, not your drill sergeant.”

“Fine. I’ll do the talking once we find him.”

“Oh, we’re not ‘finding’ Ike,” Holt chortled. “People who spend months on end exploring the dead wilds don’t survive by making themselves easy to ‘find.’ We’re headed to the last base he checked in at. With luck, he filed a report.”

“Doubtful. I just hope all our harassment doesn’t instigate a conflict.”

“The Brigade doesn’t need an excuse to start a fight. If they really wanted a war with ICC, they wouldn’t wait for us to give them a reason.”

“I’m not worried about doing our job. It’s just… Phoenix Brigade operators tend to have a really short fuse. They have a few members I’d prefer not to enrage.”

“Oh, well, in that regard you should be worried.”

The lights suddenly went out and a red hue flooded the cabin. The other transports did the same.

“What’s going on?” Holt demanded. “Status!”

“I don’t know!” the driver frantically replied. “I just got the order to go dark! Wait… lookout says they saw something!”

“Augers?”

Before they could get their answer the bus was knocked into the air and went tumbling end over end. When Tori regained her senses, she was sprawled out in the rain, the armored bus cracked in two and heaped with the rest of the convoy like a junkyard, anyone still conscious firing wildly into the storm. For a brief moment, she saw some canid or felid creature as large as a house silhouetted against a sky damp with lightning.

It was untraceable between flashes. Darting with supernatural agility through the ranks of ICC troopers like a shadow in the dark. Hiding was useless, a swarm of barb tipped tentacles surged from its mouth to seek out prey to dismember as it was dragged into the beast’s mouth.

Tori spotted Holt pinned under some wreckage across the clearing and ran to his side.

“Tori!” he grunted through grit teeth.

“How bad is it?”

“Right leg’s fractured. Probably shattered. Left should hold weight.”

“Hold still.” Tori got a grip on the bus fragment holding her partner down and her clothes became incredibly tight. With a grunt, the bulkhead went up, she held it there with one arm and the opposite shoulder and dragged Holt out. After that, carrying him was a breeze, but by the time they made it to the most intact piece of discarded bus, the auger was running low on targets.

Tori hadn’t set Holt down when he suddenly covered her mouth and lurched both of them behind cover. She was thankful for it, because she might have let a gasp slip when she saw the creature illuminated by a flash of lightning prowling right over their hiding place.

The gunfire was dead. Any trooper unlucky enough to be alive wisely hid. But the thing knew they were there. It prowled because it knew.

Holt held a finger to his lips and made a series of hand gestures, to which Tori nodded an understanding. He threw a shard of glass and Tori ran in the opposite direction, thankful for the rain to mask her footsteps.

She slid to a stop at the opposite end of the artificial clearing and took refuge between two rocks. Steeling herself, she exposed only enough of herself to see what was going on. She quickly hid when lightning exposed the thing rooting around at the far end of the wreckage hiding Holt, probing every crack with its tentacles. She caught her breath and noticed a terrified trooper hiding under a rock, clamping his hands over his mouth like a vice. Tori missed working with special forces, but she wasn’t exactly the image of a perfect soldier at this moment.

Taking a higher position, she aimed her sidearm at the auger. Two terrifying lightning flashes went by before she opted to steady her arm on the rock in front of her. When the next flash illuminated her target, she fired and missed its eye by centimeters.

The flinch was enough time for her to slide into cover far enough away that when the creature scoured the area she was out of reach of its tentacles, but only so long as it didn’t wander to its left, the other direction taking it to the hiding trooper.

Holt swore under his breath and readied his gun.

Tori never found it so difficult to breathe quietly, she was glad the soldier wasn’t there to see her mimic his mouth covering as the sound of clawed tentacles scraping wet sand and stone drew closer. Her heart skipped a beat when the shot rang out, and another when the auger screamed in pain barely a dozen feet from her hiding place. Running was difficult from the tremors of the titanic auger thrashing around, but Tori made it to a torn-up bus fragment. Knowing Holt couldn’t run, she wolf whistled and its head snapped in her direction, spotting her in a shattered image with an eye ruptured and hastily healed into a cluster of three new ones.

A full sprint got her to the back of the bus and out of reach of the tentacles. By then, the auger’s movements seemed slow and sluggish. As she clambered out a broken window, she sped up her breathing and increased her heartrate so when she touched solid ground, the world was moving in slow motion. Rain fell like it was sliding down a glass pane, lightning flashed for seconds on end, it was a bombardment on her senses.

Holt was rummaging through storage compartments the moment he got his shot off. He found an ordinance cache and hobbled out of the bus with a rocket launcher on his shoulder.

As if moving underwater, Tori charged under the auger, knocking its front leg aside and rammed a back leg to the point of inverting. The adrenalin coursing through her thick as blood prevented her from knowing if the crunching sound coursing through them was its bones or hers, but she didn’t stop. In what seemed like minutes, only a second to anyone else, she was across the clearing and grabbed a wrecked truck. Too heavy. She ripped its door from the hinges and launched it through the air, embedding in the auger’s head as it freed itself from the other bus.

Running with a broken leg and a fractured one inevitably resulted in falling into the mud. When he righted himself to take the shot, Holt swore up and down at the unnecessary technology jammed up by the spill.

The ground was wet and her sense of inertia shot from the bullet time, Tori’s legs flew out from under her. The auger was on her like a dog on a rabbit. The clawed tentacles didn’t puncture all the way through the weave of her clothes and though her adrenalin was ebbing, but she had the strength to resist dismemberment and even tear a few from their sockets. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop them lifting her into the air and pulling her toward its mouth.

She only saw what happened next because her perception of time was not fully normalized.

A metal cylinder passed through its neck, then a second through its head in a span of time that to a passive observer it looked like a single explosion.

Tori had to crawl out from under the auger’s head where they landed a good seven yards away. She lay there on her back, breathing through clenched teeth. She couldn’t unclench her jaw, every muscle in her body was stiffening, she even lacked control of her eyelids.

Holt hobbled over with a med kit under his arm, dug out the muscle relaxants and gave her a double dose. “Are you going to live?”

“No,” she whimpered as the tension in her body eased painfully slowly.

“You’ll live.” He dumped out the kit and gave himself a shot of painkillers. Before they had the chance to kick in, he put his legs in their proper shape and delivered injections of a cloudy white substance as deep and near to the bones as he could, then sat back against the auger’s head and let them do their work. He offered a can of healing spray to Tori, but at this point it was patronizing and she turned him down.

The rain began to let up, but the sky didn’t show any signs of getting brighter. Every muscle was in pain, but Tori sat up and surveyed the decaying carcass. “That wasn’t you.”

Holt shook his head. “Misfired. You see who made the shot?”

“No.” However, she traced the trajectory of the cylinders to a ridge some miles away. “There.”

“Heluva shot.”

“Yeah,” she panted. “You good to walk?”

Holt flexed his feet. He couldn’t feel his toes, but he couldn’t tell if that was because the breaks weren’t healed, the cold, or the painkillers. “Good enough.”

Through no small amount of effort, they both got to their feet and began the trek to the ridge. The going was slow, both limped and their boots stuck in the mud. Tori occupied her mind by refilling their clips, both kept their eyes open for anything attracted by the blast.

They saw the tire tracks first. Small but heavy, starting at skid marks where the shot was taken at the ridge’s peak. The shock made the earth settle, covering up the trail before the shot, the rest led under an overhanging rock formation where a heavily modified jeep with red fire mark painted on the door parked where it was dry. Armed out the ass, with guns and ammunitions strapped to the hull like quills on a porcupine, a man was on the roof, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the three rotting dead struggling to pry at the plating as he cleaned a meter gun mounted on top of the vehicle, so named for the size of the hole it leaves in concrete fortifications.

Holt stopped Tori before the got too close and hailed the jeep. The man maintaining the cannon lifted the brim of his slouch hat and grinned when he saw the trench coats struggling to stand. “G’day, ICC puppets. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You’re Ike, I take it?” Holt replied.

“Bullshit,” Tori replied.

“Aye, that’s me. You fans or am I under arrest?” he asked, casually drawing a .45.

“Little bit of both, not really either,” Holt answered. “Have to say, love your handiwork laying out in that ditch.”

“You like that, did you?” Ike replied, amicably holstering his gun. “Would’a shot sooner, but the blasted thing wouldn’t sit still. Lightning wasn’t flashing long enough to draw a bead and the night specs died last week.”

“Bullshit, there’s no way you’d just stumble on us,” Tori insisted.

“But it was you and your secret police who stumbled on me,” Ike gladly retorted. “Been tracking that beastie for three weeks. I have to thank you. If it hadn’t stopped to massacre your convoy, I’d still be on the hunt. How many o’ you survived?”

“Just us,” Holt admitted.

“Pity,” Ike said apathetically. He jumped down from the roof and relieved the zombies pawing at his car of their frontal lobes with one of several knives sheathed in his vest. “Can’t say I’m too cut up about it, they died like bitches. You, on the other hand nearly gave me a heart attack.” He pointed at Tori. “If I hadn’t seen you standing next to someone, I’d have hauled ass.”

“We appreciate that you didn’t, because we need to ask you some questions.”

As if oblivious, Ike asked, “What are you spooks doing on the ground anyways?”

“We’re here to ask you about an agent you helped a few months ago.”

“Should have known,” he sighed. “Guess I shouldn’t complain. Don’t have company very often. I found your spook at a crash site. Long distance VTOL, one of yours, I think. Thing was up in smoke, thought it would attract some augers, so I set up a position to pick ‘em off. Somehow, over half the crew was still alive. Alive and digging in. Wasn’t about to give up good bait, but your spook sees me and hauls ass to my position. She had a wild look in her eyes, like she was on something a might bit stronger than a stim. Thought she’d turned at first. Kept yapping about her case, how something’s hunting her for it. Would have turned her away, but somewhere in the mess she said ‘Gennex,’ and that changed my tune.”

“You didn’t stay to kill what was after her?” Holt asked suspiciously.

Ike laughed as he strapped down the meter gun. “I’m not equipped to take on anyone from Gennex. But if getting your friend to her friends rubbed them the wrong way, I was all for it. Whatever happened to her?”

“She’s dead.”

“Pity,” Ike shrugged. “Heard about your city. Thought one of your types would survive it.”

“Did she say anything?” Tori asked. “What she was doing, what was in the case?”

“She’d just as soon bite you as say hello. The crash shook her up something fierce, but mostly she kept her eyes on our tracks. Didn’t sleep a wink the two days it took getting her to one of your outposts.”

“You sure she didn’t say anything?”

“Swear on me mum,” Ike sardonically replied.

Tori sneered and ran a hand through her hair.

“Nothing much happened between the crash and the outpost, but a few days after dropping her off, I shot down three buzz drones trying to pick up my trail.”

Holt and Tori shared a pensive glance.

“Now Hedron’s involved?” Tori asked.

“Hard to hide anything from them,” Holt replied. He called out to Ike.

“How can I help you?”

“My partner and I have found ourselves in need of transportation.”

“There’s the rub. What were you doing on the ground and not in one of your planes or helicopters?”

“Birds have been going down in the area. Nothing that’s flown over the Chattanooga badlands has been seen again.”

“Chattanooga you say?” Ike pulled out a map and added to a long pencil trail spanning the map and circled an area marked in red. “Much obliged.”

“We were headed for base Nacogdoches,” Tori stated. “If you could leave us with your friends there, we’ll set you up with some ordinance.”

“Sorry, love. Just came from that way. Once I bag what’s knocking down your birds, I’m headed east.”

“That’s all well and good, but I’d rather not walk anywhere ‘til I see a doctor about my legs.” Holt replied.

Ike sized the agents up. “Normally, I’d tell you to piss off, but I’m in a good mood today. Just bagged a beast, got a bead on my next quarry, and you might not have known, but I enjoy the company. I can take you as far as Concord.”

“Concord?” Tori asked, not recognizing the name.

“What? No. No!” Holt insisted. “I’m not going to see a goddamn Rust Devil doctor!”

“That’s a crying shame,” Ike responded. “Concord’s the closest I’m coming to civilization ‘til I run out of ammo. Don’t worry, they love me there. Fished up a nasty mutator poisoning their water.”

“We don’t have many options, unless you think we can survive a walk back to Chattanooga,” Tori acknowledged. Holt gave her a look and she replied, “I’m not carrying you.”

“Fine!” Holt relented. “Take us to Concord.”

“Splendid,” Ike replied. “Take a seat anywhere, just don’t touch my shells or I’ll cut your arms off. Oh, and if you ever bump into Craid, tell him I helped you.”