In his dreams he moved through fields, without walking, without running, without using his feet. Around him the trees were unscathed, the fields were lush and green and the people looked fed, healthy, without worries. He lived the days that had been before Zero Day, before everything began to change.
Carefree, he jaunted through fields, vaulted colourless stone walls, sang noiselessly in ancient forests. After a time he lay down in the grass and gazed unthinking at the bright sky until his eyes hurt from the effort. Animals - he could barely remember their names - grazed around him, confused by his presence. Eventually, the pain about his eyes became too much to bear and the creatures encircled him, baying lowly, until one specimen began to lick his face gingerly. The saliva dripping onto his face was freezing, chilled like dewdrops falling, and it shocked him, jolted him, startled ...
Here. Where am I? How ... How did I get here?
His eyes - bolted open; the pain in his head - real. The water dripping onto him from above was cold, hard and real, as it had been in the dream, but it came instead from the dead branches in the trees above him. Terrified, he remembered the early days following Zero Day, the days of the Black Rain which had killed so many he had known from those times, and before he truly recalled where he was he rolled away flinching, bunching himself up in the relative dry of a tree hollow. He brushed the water from his face instinctively, hurriedly, desperately.
Stop. He told himself. Think. Where are you? When are you?
It came back to him between the shooting pains in his head. His name; he was called Berynne, Berynne Zerith. Any other personal information was irrelevant at the time being except his gang and that was Tekki. He was a Tekki Beta, clad as such as far as he could tell and ... more crucially, armed as such - he had found, fumbling through his pockets, a revolver. But ...
No. I wasn't given this. I took this. I took this from -
From who - from her, the Delta wheelz in the yellow sportscar. He could remember it, remember lying down in the back and sitting in the passenger side and kicking out the door. Slowly he could remember why he had done that; the plane. Eventually he remembered that in the first return strafe the plane had shot out the windscreen, killing the wheelz. A Tekki plane. He could remember her blood and bullet wounds, but he couldn't remember knowing why Tekkis had been shooting him, which was a reasonably good sign that he hadn't ever known, either.
Scrambling through his pockets revealed nothing else, and on checking the chamber for the revolver he found but one bullet. As he remembered more of the car trip, the pursuit across the field, the vault over the wall and precisely where he was, he both considered and ruled out using this single shot on himself.
No. Then they would have won.
There was not the faintest clue in Berynne's head as to who They were or why They wanted him dead, only that indeed They did want him dead, and that fact alone spurred him onto survival.
He began to reconsider his situation as carefully as he could. From the scant memories he could piece together, it had been mid-afternoon when he had leapt from the car. Now it was much later, getting on towards early evening, and soon it would be dark. Even straining his ears against the overpowering silence of the Wilderness, he couldn't hear the plane. This stood to reason. Only the oldest and most decrepid planes had withstood Zero Day, those whose engines were not electronically controlled and whose technology was reasonably uncomplicated for Tekki Kappas to repair. These planes had small fuel tanks, and Berynne made the assumption that he was suitably far from Tekki territory to have to worry about the plane returning anytime soon. He toyed with the possibility that he was not important enough to come back for. Perhaps the pilot thought that they had killed him.
Berynne was well aware that out of the infinite sea of possibilities, he had chosen those most suited to his own desires. But that was fine by him - he didn't really see any point in being pessimistic about it. Objectivity, that was the way forward.
Time passed. He fancied he could hear some birds somewhere in the thicket, but he wasn't sure. It was unlikely. His eyes were still burning from the impact of his head against the tree, and the curtain of night was falling slowly about him. He realised that as night fell, so did the possibility of the plane returning.
He made a flash decision, and stood up, wincing from the pain in his head. He reached up and felt it instinctively. There was a monstrous bump, and what felt like a scab, but no fresh blood. Taking this as a positive sign, he climbed slowly over the wall, and walked nonchalantly through the field, looking at the numerous bullet-hocks in the ground.
Pushing his way through the shrubs, Berynne hopped down the slope, seeing the highway ahead of him. He looked along it in the direction that the vehicle had last been travelling in and saw the yellow sportscar a little way down the road, leaning against the central barrier. He began to walk.
A few minutes later, he arrived at the vehicle, and examined the corpse properly. She had been beautiful, but in death her body was ugly, writhen in pain. He closed her tortured eyelids and considered whether or not he could dispose of the body. He found nothing more of use on her person, and turned away from it, distraught.
After a pause, he searched the car. There were some blankets in the boot, and biscuits. He took them both and got back into the car through the gap where the passenger door had been - now it lay a few dozen yards behind them on the road. He opened the glovebox, and searched it. There - the two-way radio. He grabbed it, and thumbed the power button, waiting for a signal whilst he continued his search.
Bullets. A bottle of water. A handful of shiny things, obviously personal items. He considered taking them for trading later on, but his conscience put the things in the Delta's pockets. There was no honour in taking them from her in death, not even in this circumstance.
He didn't know how to operate the vehicle, but the ignition was still engaged. Aside from being freezing, the car would otherwise make a good shelter for the harsh night. He looked at the dashboard, and turned what he judged to be the heating up to full blast. Next, he grabbed the wheelz's body, and dragged it from the vehicle, repulsed by the act. Her dead, unstruggling weight was almost crippling, but as he had done so many times before he managed to bring it to the shrubs at the side of the road. He lay her down, and resolved to cover her the following day.
Berynne shuffled down the road to where the door was lying, and carried it back to the car, pulling it back into place from the inside. He climbed over the seats to the back, and covered himself in the blankets. The temperature was slowly rising, and soon he felt vaguely comfortable. Sunset had been and gone, and the long, dangerous night had begun.
For the second time that day, he closed his eyes slowly. Everything could wait. He would still be in grave peril tomorrow.
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