She tried to keep her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the dunes ahead. Tried not to think about what had happened just few minutes ago. Tried not to think about it too hard.

It hadn’t been too easy for Logan, but when Vasquez had refused to follow them, claiming that she would stay silent no matter what the possible interrogators did…

“Drive past those settlements. We can use them as a bumper between us and whoever it is that’s following us,” Logan grunted. She nodded.

She could see from the corner of her eye something, a scrap of paper, cloth?

“Shit. Who would have thought that there’d be so much blood in so little woman.”

When she could no longer see the red dots on the radar, but first settlement gleaming further down the desert she stepped on the brake and turned off the engine. Sat for a while. Then turned to look at Logan.

There was blood all over him, small speckles on his face, larger blotches on his torso. His hands and wrists were still caked with clotted layer, small scraps of paper stuck on it. Whole cab of the truck reeked of red, rusted copper.

“I warned her,” Logan said, his voice as hollow as his eyes. She just stared at him, not knowing what to do, what to say.
“I warned her. She had an option. It was her choice,” Logan repeated little louder, but she could see from his eyes that he was beginning to crack.
“I told her… I… I told her what would happen if they caught her! Why the fuck did she have to be so fucking stubborn?” He stuttered slightly, then opened the door and all but fell out, scrambling away from her sight, cursing and hissing when the scorching hot sand burned his bare palms.

For a long while Marie sat and stared at the empty seat beside her, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel.

Logan had killed Vasquez.

In a way it had been pre-emptive self-defense.

Vasquez had been the one thing that would have gotten them caught, the last loose end.

Why the hell it made her afraid of him all of a sudden?



He could still see the look on Vasquez’s face when the woman finally realized that he wasn’t joking. Too bad that it had been already too late, his claws firmly embedded in to her stomach, opening the wound they had earlier tried to protect from tearing. It was already partially healed, just fresh, clean tissues. Vasquez would have made it, she would have made it.

He leaned his back to the tire of the truck. He could see the last rays of sun reflecting from the settlement at the distance. People. Real people. Men, women, children. Muties? Who knew. Human? Most likely. Living their lives, scraping together what they could and pushing through the days, weeks, months, years. Not knowing, not caring about the war and world around them.

He could see them in his mind’s eye.

Children running around in dust, laughing.

Men and women working, tending small gardens, gathering the harvest, taking care of things.

Then one of them would raise his gaze from the chores; wipe the sweat from his brow.

See the ugly horde approaching.

They probably would have the time to get really scared, then it would be over. They wouldn’t have the training, they wouldn’t have weaponry.

As easily as he could imagine that, he could see what would happen if he turned now. If he told to Marie to go round the settlements. The truck would break down. He’d get caught. Marie would get caught.

“I’m so fucking tired of this shit…” His own broken voice brought him out of the stupor, awakened him to the fact that probably better half of an hour he had been just sitting zoned out, and why the fuck was the radar going berserk, and why the fuck hadn’t Marie come and warned him?

“What’s up? How many and how close are they?” He asked, vaulting on to the passenger’s seat. Marie all but screamed, scrambling out from the truck, away from him. What he saw on the radar made the blood in his veins thicken to the point where it felt like his veins would burst from the sheer pressure.

There were no red dots on the green. There were, however, little scraps of green visible from amidst of huge swarm of red dots.

When he looked outside he could see only blank desert, nothing out of the ordinary, but the radar told him otherwise.

“Marie, I think you should get back…” Her scream interrupted him.
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