Dog Days

 

He’s almost five hundred miles from the Border and the heat is stifling. One hundred twenty-nine degrees and rising, it’ll hit one thirty-eight by the time three o’clock rolls around, and even in the dark of night it won’t fall beneath a hundred. As far as the history books are concerned, the last time it was anywhere in the nineties was over a three centuries ago. That’s what war gets you, a change in planetary alignment and shift in magnetic poles that leaves half a planet covered in ice and the other half so blistering hot you can’t survive more than a few hours under direct sunlight.

It had been a bitch during the Second Civil War.

The closest human being is roughly a hundred fifty miles off or, at least, that had been the case five years ago. Almost the entire population lives in the Border, but there are still some pioneers who live out in the desert, just like there are some crazies who live in the frigid snow. Even this close to the Border it’s rare to find a town above ground, most have already dug their way into the shadow of the baked earth.

Stork’s been holed up in an abandoned Universal Federal Alliance hangar for the past two weeks working on his ship. When he’d touched down he was surprised to find Gavin and Heidi still recognized him, and greeted him with smiles no less. He’d forgotten that they hadn’t seen the real him back then, they’d only caught a glimpse of a man wandering the bleached desert, trapped in his own hallucinations, almost dead from dehydration, and alone. It had done wonders for his disposition.

“I remember this place. August of ’22, right?”

Eleven months Stork’s been waiting to hear that voice, and for the past two weeks every noise has sent him looking over his shoulder, expecting him to be standing there. Now he is, lingering just inside the hangar doors, and the area between Stork’s exposed shoulder blades prickles.

Having anticipated it, having gone over all the possibilities of how this meeting would go over and over again in his mind, doesn’t keep Stork’s muscles from tensing as though he’s on the firing line. He forces himself to keep his eyes on what he’s doing, to keep working, twisting the slender wrench in his hand, lifting it, placing it, and twisting it again. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t do anything but stare down at the bolt in front of him, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt and his temples ache.

“We were in… what, Mongolia?” The familiar voice asks as though it’s question, but they both know he’s right, no matter how old the name is. If you’re going to war on a planet, you might as well know the history, even if it is a couple thousand years old. “The four of us were the only ones left.” A soft whistle echoes through the concrete hangar, fading slowly. The whistle is for show; he’s trying to get a read on how large the space is, whether there are any walls to gain cover from.

Stork knows because it’s a skill they honed together fighting in caves and bunkers.

 

“We don’t get any cash for something like this you know.”

Pillage was usually the one who complained about money and whether or not they were getting any. Even when they were getting it he never thought it was enough. What the hell did they need it for anyway? Anyone who recognized them rolled over on their backs so fast everything they had fell out their pockets, as though surrendering might actually save their lives.

“Shut up,” Plunder snapped as she moved from body to body, rifling through pockets. She liked to collect things, a trinket from every corpse she left in her wake to help her recall fond memories of blood and carnage. Already she had a number of prizes. A dozen or so dog tags hung around her neck from mediocre kills; people she clipped accidentally or ones who had caught the edge of a blast, people who didn’t really deserve to give her anything better. A gold wedding band fit loosely around her thumb from a man she’d executed; it was somewhat more personal but still a relatively average death. Then there was the sliced off trigger finger wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth hidden in her breast pocket, formerly belonging to a man she’d strangled, the one who started it all, personal and impressive. Even while she’d been on top of him, his neck turned around so far his eyes were rolling up into his head, he’d been trying to shoot her. It was a good souvenir from a more noteworthy man. She looked up from the man she was currently crouched over and, with a shout, tossed something into the air.

“Murder. Rape.”

Murder looked up, his dark eyes flashing from her blood splattered face to the object coming at him. His hand shot out, fingers closing around it expertly. Exhaling, he turned the plastic card over in his hands, inspecting it through the thin haze of fog from his cigar. Cigars were rare and saved for massive UFA raids that were few and far between. They were already on the Alliance’s shit list, and while that didn’t mean all that much to them, they didn’t go looking for blatant trouble all that often. But sometimes they just stumbled into it – and maybe they could have avoided it more often than they did, but what was the fun in that?

 Rape looked over his shoulder. It was an indent key-card for an arms base on Europa. He whistled low under his breath and reached over to pluck the card out of Murder’s hand, flipping it over a few times and finally landing it face up, tapping it against the rail in front of them, his lips curving into a menacing smile. “Interesting.”

 

“Place damn near saved our lives. Not that it helped you, nearly dying trying to get to the Border.” He laughs. It's nothing more than a throaty breath of air, but Stork knows him well enough to know what it is. There are a few things that haven’t changed since back then. Not much, but a few.

The bolt is finally tight enough to be satisfactory, and he stands, sliding the wrench into his pocket as he pivots and turns his unwavering attention on the other man. Cray looks the same as he did eleven months ago, the same lithe figure, same angular features, same scalpel sharp eyes. But he’s not the same man Stork remembers him as, he’d gotten a glimpse of it back in September, but now he’s actually seeing it. This man… he’s not Cray. He’s not the man Stork met back in the summer of 3519, not the man he fought side by side with all those years.

“So, back again.”

Cray’s thumbs are hooked in the front two belt loops of his dusty jeans. It’s impossible to stay clean in this place, the dirt gets everywhere, settles in places you didn’t think anything foreign would, or could, ever go. After figuring out showers only meant cleanliness for a few seconds at most, and a fine sheen of mud instead of dirt at worst, they’d all tried to go as long as possible between them, which wasn’t hard to do considering they were at war and filling a canteen had been hard enough. After awhile dry washing with dust and sand was more than satisfactory.

Stork nods, staring him straight in the eye. He doesn’t want to challenge Cray, mainly because he doesn’t know what the outcome would be. But it doesn’t matter what he wants, because the mere fact that he’s here is defiance enough.

Life has made them into dogs of men, and whenever anybody looks them in the eye it’s a challenge. Cray pushes, he pushes back. If he wants to be left alone – if he wants any chance of leaving this hellish planet and going back to the life he’d begun to make for himself outside of those memories and the monster he was is in them, he has to stand his ground and stake his claim.

“You trying to be poetic or something?” With a flick of his wrist, Cray gestures to the ship, the hangar, the whole god damned planet, and his lips twist into something sinister, mocking and dark. “End it where it all started or something like that?”

 That wasn’t actually what Stork had been thinking when he’d left the ship here. It had just seemed like the best idea at the time. Leave it on Earth, a desert planet with a population of almost nothing in planetary standards, with Gavin and Heidi so he could rest assured that nobody else would come searching for it.

“Only you’d find something like that poetic.” Stork moves forward, walking down the span of the wing he’d been working on. He hesitates at the tip and towers over the Cray who’s still a few yards off. Close enough that he’ll be able to tell a threatening movement from any other, far enough that he’d have plenty of time to react. “Anyway, I doubt it’ll ever end.”

 

“Do you see that?” Pillage laughed; belting it out, his eyes sparkling, his mouth hanging open, his whole body shaking with it. “Do you see it?” He asked again, as though not sure they had heard him the first time, and the question brought about a whole new fit of hysteria. “They’re calling us fucking terrorists!”

They were in an old hangar, somewhere in China. Plunder said it was nearby someplace that had been called Lhasa back in the day, and they went ahead and took her word for it. They’d been walking through the nights and digging shallow holes to last out the days. The Border had only been three hundred miles off, but Plunder remembered seeing a base, said it was closer than the Border, and they decided to head for that instead. Restock on supplies, and get a grip on what was going on since their radio communication had been down for almost two weeks. Their jeep ran out of gas and they’d been stuck on foot, and now they were finally there.

It was abandoned but was clean and still had some fresh stock. They found out why soon enough. UFA had backed out over a fortnight ago. Declared the war over, packed up, and left the planet in a frenzy so rushed there’d still been half a block of cheese in one of the kitchen’s refrigerators.

 Now the four of them were hanging around, shitting about, listening to the radio and trying to figure out what they were going to do with themselves. With Pillage spending all his time on the database, it was only a matter of time until he called them all in with a scream that was part fury and part delight.

An internal UFA message to all Delta Squad Captains who had been on Earth demanded information regarding the last whereabouts of a rogue Delta team who had committed ‘several infarctions and countless war crimes’ and now, with the new peace treaty having been signed between UFA and Earth, were terrorists and needed to be ‘perused and tried to ensure justice is shown to always be upheld.’

“Bastards!” Plunder hissed between clenched teeth, her eyes narrowed to mere slits as she glared at the screen.

Snorting, Murder shook his head and pushed off the back of Pillage’s chair, straightening himself and walking out of the room. Two years on a planet that tried as hard as a planet could to kill its inhabitants, and this was what he got for it.

“What do you think?”

He didn’t look at Rape, just turned his attention to the tactical vest he was wearing and the rough, frayed, dirt and blood stained patch sewn onto its breast.  His fingers brushed by its worn edges, and the short strands of string spooling off from it tugged at the roughly calloused pads of his fingers. Grabbing a ragged edge, he pulled. The thin thread easily gave way with little effort, and with a broken tearing, the patch ripped free. “Fuck ‘em.” He growled it out, something low and terrible. It rumbled up from his chest and lashed out at the sun bleached UFA Delta Force patch in his hand before he tossed it to the floor.

 

Cray stops smiling, which is one thing he can appreciate. Plunder never stops, just smiles and smiles until you want to slap it off her face. Cray knows when’s when.

“Probably not.”

He breaks eye contact with Stork for the first time and looks around the hangar, his attention finally coming to rest on an array of materials stacked in the corner – large buckets of paint, the same deep dark blue that the sky turns at night on Earth, and a table already loaded with machinery taken out and even more that needs to be put back in. Among it all is a familiar object, small and silver. It’s the harmonica Stork found during the war and started playing to help pass those long hot nights in the dirt. Cray’s lips quirk again. “No matter what you do, it’ll always be the same ship.”

“Where are the others?”

Cray shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Which is a blatant lie, Stork knows that. They both know it. There’s no way Cray doesn’t know where the others are, but he’s staring back at Stork again, eyes hard with resolve. He’s not giving anything away, whether they’re off doing their own thing, or if they’re just outside sitting in their ships, waiting for the signal to rush in and join the fight.

As soon as Stork thinks it, he knows they’re not there. They’re not even on the planet. Cray has that look in his eye, that sharp spark that he gets when he’s about to lie and tell someone they’ll live if they walk away from a duel. He’s not going to be letting the others impede on this, they might not even know he’s here at all.

“So why are you here, Cray?” Stork finally jumps off the wing and finds himself eye level with the other man, his muscles twitching, his nerves tingling, every sensation in his body heightened and suddenly the heat of the day has faded into nothing as his mind shuts out everything that could distract him, everything that could potentially make him lose his focus on the man in front of him.

“To confirm.”

Stork’s eyes narrow, his pupils dilate as his vision focuses on the man in front of him. “Confirm?” He doesn’t need to ask because he knows exactly what Cray’s referring to, but he does it anyway. Maybe in this moment of hesitation, in having to think about it and say it out loud, Cray will just turn around and walk away. Turn around, walk away, and leave him be.

But Cray’s smiling again now, just an ever so slight turn of the lips and that bright shine in his eyes. “That you’re really not coming back.” And then the smile’s gone, faded into a flat-featured face and dead eyes. “Just talk to you myself about this decision of yours.” His voice is a low murmur, the same guttural sounds rumbling up from his chest that he developed while talking to the enemy back then.

They all used to torture people, it wasn’t an uncommon thing to do when you were trying to get information, trying to save yourself by killing someone else, but out of the four of them Stork had taken pride in being able to terrify someone with words alone. Cray witnessed it once, fell in love with it, adopted it. When Stork saw him bent over and whispering in the ear of some man whose features were twisted with fear, pants wet and putrid, he was sure that was when Cray had been enjoying himself the most.

“You left without saying anything.”

Stork shrugs, a motion of his left shoulder so casual and relaxed that it makes the tear duct of Cray’s left eye start to twitch with barely suppressed annoyance at the utter lack of respect.

“There’s also the matter of what you did to Pillage and Plunder.” The statement lashes through the room, and had Stork not been expecting it, had he not been thinking those very words and had he found any shame or guilt in them, they might have stung.

Pillage is the one who broke him out. They never did get along that well, even in the beginning. Pillage was always too boisterous for his liking, always a threat in the time of war, and it wasn’t any better when they were alone in the middle of space with alarms going off, running as fast as they could with a dozen UFA officers on their tail. Half beaten, just having healed from wounds that nearly finished him off all together, Stork hadn’t been willing to put up with any more of the other’s shit. Pillage lost his left pinky and knew what it felt like to have an ear nearly bitten off, and Stork had a new scar across his face.

Plunder had showed up when Stork was still washing Pillage’s blood off his hands and out of his mouth. She tried to stop him, stood with her hands on her hips and her bust nearly spilling out of her shirt that was still sprayed with the blood of her last job, and told him point blank that they knew about Kael and Davin. He left her unconscious and bleeding from the head, stripped of her weapons. To add insult to injury, and mostly out of spite, he stole her ship, using it to get far enough away to be a convenience for him and more than an inconvenience for them.

“They shouldn’t have pushed.”

“They said you still might come back. I tried to tell them it was pretty obvious what your choice was.”

Stork nods. He thought they would have gotten the message well enough. Pillage didn’t have a God damned finger and half his ear was gone for shit’s sake. “There’s a reason they turned to you and me.” He let’s his own lips twitch into a smile for the first time in a long time. The same smile that developed out here in this heat, on this planet. A smile he perfected in two years of fighting and bloodshed, and utilized to its fullest potential in the following years pirating. Death’s smile.

 

“Damn they’re fucking scary. Did you hear what they did in Skartan? Fuckin’ insanity.”

“They were the only ones to walk away. How the fuck does that happen? It’s a Delta team, and only four of them?”

“I heard they didn’t like the way they were treated, so they just decided to kill everybody.”

“And what about that shit in Ghuvaj? I’ve heard stories, man, really bad shit happened there.”

“Heard they decapitated all the men and put their heads on pikes. All the women and children too, mass graves.”

“Women and children?”

“It was a town. Supposedly just went in and slaughtered everybody. Thought they were gonna start fighting or something, I don’t know. Just went in and killed everybody.”

“Shit…”

“I heard they eat the eyes of people they kill.”

“Now that’s ridiculous.”

“Nothing about these guys is ridiculous. They’re fucking psychotic. Why the hell wouldn’t they eat people’s eyes for Christ’s sake?”

“It takes too much time.”

All heads whipped around, eyes so wide their whites shown bright in the fire they were gathered around. Murder grinned, his lips pulled back in a wide smile, teeth shining bright – a lion waiting for the kill. The men stared, breath choked in their throats, and when his glowing eyes darted around he saw more than a few pairs of lips moving as though in prayer. He chuckled, low and bitter, it rose up out of his chest and spilled among them like a snake for how it made them go pale. A few men flinching back from him but couldn’t make themselves look away, much less flee.

“Eyes though, something particular about them. Raw - they just kind of squish in your mouth, like tomatoes.” His grin widened, and his eyes snapped to a man across the fire, a boy really, couldn’t have been any more than nineteen. The kid went rigid, eyes wide enough they looked ready fall right out of his head. “Don’t really like them cooked. But that’s a personal preference of mine.”

He stood, patting the shoulder of the man closest to him as he righted himself and rested his gaze on everyone in the circle, instilling that one last jagged stab of fear into their hearts.

They all did it. Sneaking into camps to get supplies there was more than a small chance of overhearing the current gossip, which was more and more often about them, and scaring the shit out of everybody. It was a great way to spread rumors, and an even more fantastic way to gloat about the truth. Last time he told them they ate babies, only within a few months of being born. It’d gotten him some of the best looks yet, and was satisfied to hear from Pillage that it already started spreading. Eyeballs were not nearly in the same league as baby eating, but unlike some of the others, it was true.

Small tomatoes with a somewhat tough rind, yet uniquely special in their taste. They hardened a little bit when they were cooked too much and it was too difficult to tell when they were just right, so – raw was the way to go.

 

“You sure?” Cray asks, even though they both know the decision has long since been made, but this is a formality bought from owing each other their lives more than a few times over.

“I’m sure.”

The wrench pulls at Stork’s pocket, long and lean, but made of good metal and plenty enough of a weapon. He doesn’t need a weapon, but Cray has a knack for not being the cleanest of fighters and he doesn’t expect that to change, even with their history.

He wants to leave that part of his life behind him. He doesn’t want to think of himself that way any more. While spending five months with Dana had been a wakeup call, it had been nothing like looking in the mirror after doing that job with Davin and killing those people. They hadn’t had a choice, it was kill or be killed, but it didn’t stop him from looking at himself and seeing Murder staring back at him, all cold eyes and tight jaw. As Kael walked past behind him, his eyes had narrowed, his fists clenched, and he was instantly thinking of the most efficient and silent way to kill her. Her blood would have still been warm by the time he got off the ship.

Stork doesn’t want to be that person any more. He doesn’t want that name.

His hands are in his pockets, and when they got there he’s not quite sure, but he’s fingering the wrench while he watches Cray, following his every movement, every breath, every twitch of muscle. Cray has a gun on him somewhere; he knows that because they never don’t have guns on them… except for himself, right now. Cray has a gun, but he’s smiling now, smiling that duel smile of his and pulls out his weapon.

“You’re sure.”

Stork nods again and Cray lets the magazine fall into his waiting palm, drops it to the ground and slides it aside, pops the single .45 out of the chamber and tosses it over his shoulder, and finally crouches down to place the empty weapon at his feet. He looks up and raises an eyebrow expectantly, waiting as Stork draws out the wrench and lets it fall to the floor.

They’re already going at each other before it hits the ground, Cray’s fist connecting with the side of his face as the thud of metal hitting cracked concrete rings through the hangar, reverberating off the walls and falling on deaf ears as Stork shakes the spots out of his eyes and crouches to take a breath and focus. It’s a hundred forty degrees outside, and the air burns in his lungs like fire, his worn jeans cling to his legs, and his shirt feels damp and constricting, but for now they have the shade.

 

End

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