red
kintsugi
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
- Joined
- May 9, 2013
- Messages
- 1,971
- Reaction score
- 1,064
warnings for: my typical amount of cursing, blood, people dying
oh and GEN VII spoilers, maybe?
table of contents:
red
orange
yellow
green
blue
indigo
violet
- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -
“Fuck this. A handful of MK-16's and some biowaste containment device. Screw the payment—Turner can take his orders and go fuck himself; it’s not worth it.”
“Don't forget the pallet of baked beans,” Mira said wearily, shifting in her seat and letting her right hand stray up to the truck's window while her other hand absent-mindedly rubbed at her elbow. “He was very particular that all those arrive in one piece.”
“I hope he shits himself to death from them.” Wren scowled, leaning over the steering wheel to look at the sky ahead. Grey skies and clouds as far as the eye could see. Good. The rain would keep the wolves away, at least until dark came.
“But he does pay well.”
Wren snorted. “He's got us driving through feral heartland, through two government roadblocks, and into the middle of Skull territory because he couldn't be assed to organize a supply run any earlier.” It was hard not to let the frustration slip into her voice. “He better pay well for that. How did we end up working for an idiot who's barely thirty and still doesn't have his life together?”
Mira stopped twirling a lock of brown hair around her index finger to squint out the window, where pine trees were smearing by at breakneck speed. “I think there might be an alpha out there,” she said mildly, one hand straying down beneath the glovebox, before she sat straight up as if struck by lightning. “What day is it?” she asked, suddenly rifling through a stack of papers on the dashboard of the beat-up pickup truck.
“No idea,” Wren muttered, looking up for a moment to glance into the rear-view mirror. No sign of Skull vehicles yet, but that didn't mean that they weren't being watched. “Why do you care?”
“I didn't look too hard last night, but it might be a full moon.”
Wren's eyes widened. “Son of a shit.” She'd driven between San Diego and Seattle half a million times during her undergrad—countless road trips with Mira and the squad, visiting home, looking at med schools—but that had been forever ago. And never once on all of those miles travelled had she imagined that she'd retrace her footsteps fearing werewolves. “Hopefully they'll be scared of the rain and they'll stay in their holes.”
“We can probably handle it.” Even as she reached down to stroke the armored head resting on the gearshift, Mira didn't sound certain. The chimera gurgled back at her, its eyes barely visible through the slits in its wooden helmet, and Wren could've sworn she'd heard a fishlike thump a couple of times against the truck's cracking seats as the creature wagged its tail. “I can't believe Turner's letting us take a chimera on a run this long.”
“I can't believe you've got a chimera on the floor of my truck acting like a little puppy,” Wren shot back. “Did you see what one of the other ugly shits did to that bear in the testing ring? There's a reason we're supposed to keep it in the back with the rest of the cargo. It—” Wren cut herself short as the tail stopped wagging and the chimera's head rose up. Mismatched jaundiced eyes that seemed to glow with a fire of their own pierced through the wooden helmet to glare at her.
“Easy, Dodger,” Mira murmured, petting the creature's crest reassuringly, which seemed to calm it a little. “Wren doesn't mean it." And then, to Wren: “You aren't looking at scars right if you think they're ugly.”
“You named the chimera that's specifically bred to hunt out and kill ferals 'Dodger'? That's a little fucked up.”
Mira smoothed a chunk of dried blood out from between the chimera's otherwise-pristine, slate-grey fur and flicked it out the window. “My family used to have dobermans back before things fell apart,” she said matter-of-factly, now scratching the chimera beneath the chin, in the gap between helmet and fur. “Xavier used to name all of them Dodger. Four in total, one after another. I don't think he'll mind adding a fifth.”
“Your brother is literally the least-creative person I've ever met, except maybe you.”
Mira shrugged. “It runs in the family, I guess. Dodger's a good name, though. Isn't that right, Dodger?”
Wren couldn't help but stare as the scientifically-engineered killing machine affectionately rubbed its head against Mira's palm until she let it nuzzle a cheerio from between her fingers.
While not entirely unwelcome, this was certainly not how she'd seen herself spending her life a year ago. On one hand, it all felt so normal now: she and Mira were casually smuggling contraband across state borders, safe in the knowledge that Turner had already padded enough pockets to guarantee them safe passage through the quarantine zones. Dodger could take out the monsters that bothered them, and Wren was there for the humans. Their first job had been a trainwreck of nerves and early mistakes, but now here they were, clipping through feral heartland at a hundred twenty miles per hour, with only wolves that were too afraid of the rain.
On the other hand, an entire future had been obliterated. Plans of residency, and then neurosurgery at Sacramento General, had all gone out the window when the first rift had opened. Masshibun had been the name given to the scaly, ungodly behemoth that had surfaced on the beaches of San Diego with no warning, a roiling mass of muscles intent on devouring and destroying all in its path. Wren still remembered the feeling of every hair on her body standing on end, the foul stench of bile and rot filling the air, and then the screams as the thing ripped a building in half with bloodred arms five times as thick as her body. With every creature it killed, it grew in size, devouring and devouring and devouring, and there hadn't been time to think, just the fuzzy sense of fear as—
“Eyes on the road, Big Bird,” Mira said, glancing up from fiddling with the dashboard radio, which was unhelpfully spluttering grey noise. “At this speed, I don't think we'd appreciate meeting any of the trees.”
It hadn't been the first day that hurt them the most. “I thought that nickname was going to stay dead.” Wren tilted the wheel back to the left, so that they were safely in the center of the road. It wasn't like there were any cars coming in the other direction anyway.
“Are you kidding? It's the only clever thing I've done,” Mira said, smirking. “Do you think I'm going to let the slow decline of society into anarchy cover that up?”
Wren sighed. Fair enough. Mira always had a protective streak for her ideas. “Anything useful on the radio?”
“Nothing you'd want to hear,” Mira muttered darkly, her eyebrows creased into a fierce frown as she fiddled with the knob. “That's odd…”
Wren tore her eyes off the road for half a second, letting Mira's tawny curls fill her vision for that precious moment. “What's up?”
“Even the government channels are clipping in and out.” Mira moved back for a moment, staring at the radio, and then hit the dashboard. The quality improved for a moment and then went back to its staticky warbles. “Piece of crap. You should've let me hotwire that car in the junkyard back in Fresno; this one's trash. The minivan I saw looked stupid, but it would've had plenty more legroom.”
“And we'd take twice as long to get there because it would barely push seventy miles per hour,” Wren shot back with a grin. “Don't forget to drop the kids off at soccer practice while you're away, okay?”
Mira sighed and leaned back, apparently satisfied in having lost her battle with the radio. “It's weird that we can't even get the standard airwaves. I didn't think the rain was that bad, and we're definitely not that far from San Francisco.”
“Maybe Watari was right, and San Francisco finally went down.” It was easy to say things like that so casually when it was just the two of them, driving through mile after mile of nothingness, the remains of civilization an eternity away. Wren narrowed her eyes as they passed an overgrown highway sign, its chipped reflective paint barely enough to catch the headlights of their dying pickup truck. They still had at least half a day until they got to Seattle.
“I heard the ferals in their area are getting a lot worse. Didn't Watari say that the Bay was practically impassible with all the new stuff that they've been finding in there?”
“Makes sense,” Wren said, and flinched at the newest sound before recognizing the arrival of the rain, coming in thick sheets all of a sudden. She fiddled around with the unfamiliar levers beneath the truck's steering wheel before she finally found the windshield wipers. “The Bay was where the first one of the things appeared; it'd make sense if the mutations are happening there faster than anywhere else.”
“No, but this is different.” Mira let her voice drop a little, as if she were afraid that someone would hear them, sealed as they were in a stolen car rocketing across a deserted highway. “His team was doing research on these giant versions of ranatra fusca—those spiders that walk on water. More than enough differences to be considered a completely different species—you know how much he loves naming these things; he's already named the clade onishizukumo and apparently that's a hilarious pun. But these things are huge. Like, three feet big and still in adolescence, and he was convinced that they were manipulating the water currents somehow. And naturally they were preying on the rest of the fish in the area, and sometimes they were going after some of the people still left on the wharfs… it's a little terrifying, honestly. I thought the forests were bad enough, but now that the coasts are going… Enemies on all sides.” Pause. “I know it’s stupid, but I wish things got back to normal, somehow.”
“We'll make it through somehow. We always do,” Wren replied nonchalantly, her attention suddenly caught by a streak of blue above them. She sensed rather than heard the chimera’s warning growl—that much should’ve made her stop in her tracks. She craned her neck further beneath the windshield, frowning as she tried to focus on the blur in the clouds. Another mutated bird, probably, but if they drew its attention, there would be hell to pay. “What is that?”
“But there has to be a limit to how far things can fall before we can't pick them up any—”
“FUCK!” The tires screeched as Wren wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left, sending them skidding sideways as she bodily slammed her weight against the brakes with a cloud of smoke and seared rubber. The knuckles of her left hand tightened against the steering wheel, but her right arm was flying, too slow, to reach out for Mira because she knew it was too late for them to—”Get out, now!”
“Wren, wha—”
Impact.
A giant chunk of stone plowed downward, first into the glistening asphalt and then into the hood of their car. Wren processed it as if from afar, watching while her body was too slow to respond to the way that the aluminum hood splashed like water under the force, the impulse rippling upward as the frame crumpled. Her own momentum carried her serenely and inexorably forward on a perfect trajectory with the shards of glowing shrapnel that split off from the meteor, shattering the windshield. Cracks spiderwebbed across the safety glass, casting dark shadows over the unfurling airbags that were too slow to stop Wren's head from colliding with steering wheel—
Time sped up. Wren's head shot forward, and her arm snapped back, and then shattered glass was raining down around them as her forehead met dashboard.
Wren awoke to sharp ringing in her ears, the woven fabric of her seatbelt cutting into her sternum like an iron bar. She blinked, trying to force the image into focus, and found a thin trickle of blood kept stubbornly leaking into her vision.
Assess.
Concussion, likely. Her left wrist was crushed beneath her at an odd angle. Fractured, perhaps broken. Minor bruises on the chest area; larger ones developing around the neck and face. The air around them was unnaturally hot, even for the summer.
The car had gotten hit with something she had to move before—
Wren reached for the door handle and then swore with pain as her arm erupted into a cluster of screaming nerves. Wrist was definitely broken. She awkwardly reached around with her right arm and shouldered the door open, stumbling onto the asphalt. Sweaty hair clung to her cheeks. “Mira,” she said aloud, remembering five seconds too slow. “Mira!”
“I'm okay.” Mira was limping toward her from behind the totaled truck, bleeding fiercely from her forehead and favoring her right leg a little. Like a shadow, the chimera hovered protectively behind her; Wren could see its claw marks on Mira’s sweatshirt where it must have grabbed on. “Dodger got me out.”
“Good boy,” Wren breathed with a sigh of relief. Freak of nature that it was, the thing had probably saved their lives.
“What was that?”
“Doesn't matter right now,” Wren was saying grimly, pulling a pistol out of her back pocket and testing the heft in her injured hand before switching to her right with a disgusted sigh. The rain was starting to plaster her hair to her shoulders. “Can you walk? We need to find shelter before anything finds us.”
Dodger let out a low, loose growl that cut across the pouring rain, and Wren hesitated to follow his gaze into the forest, where a pair of gleaming red eyes looked back. They reflected light like no animal she'd ever seen before. “Too late,” Mira whispered in a strangled voice.
Wren swore, and by then, the chimera had leapt into the undergrowth with a fierce snarl, three-inch claws coming unsheathed mid-jump. “Stay close to me,” Wren said in a surprisingly firm voice, pulling Mira in with her uninjured hand before aiming the pistol back at the bushes, which exploded in a cloud of roiling muscle. Wren threw herself and Mira out of the way as Dodger landed back on the street with a fierce snarl, the armored, birdlike talons on his front claws smearing thick, dark blood across the asphalt.
The wolf backed off for a moment, whining as it pulled its weight away from its mangled front leg, and Dodger pulled himself up to his feet. “Look how big its paws are. It's just a cub,” Mira was saying absently when Wren shot it in the head. It crumpled to the ground.
Wren swallowed. The size of a large dog, and Mira said it was just a cub. And they had no transport.
Another roar, this one deeper and more ferocious—the cub's growls sounded like pitiful yammering in comparison—rang out as a second wolf leapt out of the forest, legs the size of Wren's covering the distance between the two humans and the chimera in thick, rapid strides.
“Lugalgan,” Mira breathed in disbelief. “And it looks like an alpha.”
Wren was as ready as she could've been, blinking the rain furiously out of her eyes as she raised the pistol again, but by then Dodger had leapt at the beast and she couldn't get a clear shot.
The wolf beneath him snarled before straightening its wiry, bloodied forelegs and lashing out with all its strength, slamming Dodger to the ground and then bashing the chimera's helmet in with a muscled front paw. Tufts of fur flew in every direction, and then the wolf surged to its feet, first four legs and then two, and it began running in haphazard, hunched steps towards the two humans before it, red fur glinting in the light of the full moon.
Wren's first shot went wild, flying past the matted white fur of the wolf's ear and barely causing it to flinch. Swearing, she lined up the shot again, years of practice echoing in her ears only to be washed away with adrenaline as the crazed wolf pulled up short, flecks of foam flying from its fangs. Wren's second shot caught it in the shoulder, and the momentum sent it staggering back. She fired a third shot, which hit the wolf in the chest, and that was all the time she got before the wolf slammed its legs into the ground and the entire road responded to its command, pillars of stone erupting from nowhere and knocking her ten feet in the air.
Wren hit the ground, hard enough to see stars, and she was blearily trying to focus on the claws running towards her by the time she regained enough understanding to look for her gun.
There was a breath-snatching whoosh of air as Dodger leapt back into the fray, the corded muscle of his back legs tensing as he met the wolf's snapping jaws head on, and then both creatures were on their hind legs, fangs seeking to rip apart the other's neck. The wolf's claws weren't doing much through Dodger's helmet, but they were shredding the tender skin of his underbelly even as Dodger's own talons were slowly turning the wolf's forelegs into ribbons.
In the distance, lightning rumbled, illuminating the entire road, and the wolf threw Dodger down to the ground, rearing back for a killing blow.
Even though every muscle in her body screamed in protest, Wren lined up her fifth shot and fired. The bullet went true, cleanly splitting the wolf's forehead in half and releasing a not-so-clean spray of gurgling blood. Its legs continued to flail, as if unaware that their commander had ceased to exist, and then Dodger let the creature fall back to the ground, slashing its neck open with a quick swipe of his front talons.
“Holy shit,” Mira said breathlessly, her eyes wide as she watched the wolf gurgle and finally stop its advance. Dodger gingerly limped back to her outstretched hand, whining in pain.
Wren refused to meet her eyes even as they both squinted against the pouring rain. Her good hand scrambled to reload the bullets in her pistol, even as her mind cemented the conclusion she'd made long ago. They'd barely managed to take out two, but—”There's got to be more. We have to keep moving. There—”
Her breath caught short as half a dozen more gleaming, red eyes blinked open in the forest around them.
There was a knock at the door. Wren woke up with tears in her eyes.
There was a moment between waking and dreaming where her body was still convinced that it was all real, and then, as she took slow, heaving gulps of air, reality set back in. The other half of the bed was empty and cold. Mira hadn't been there for twelve years.
It hadn't been the first day that hurt the most. It was every day that came after.
oh and GEN VII spoilers, maybe?
SPECTRA
table of contents:
red
orange
yellow
green
blue
indigo
violet
- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -
“Fuck this. A handful of MK-16's and some biowaste containment device. Screw the payment—Turner can take his orders and go fuck himself; it’s not worth it.”
“Don't forget the pallet of baked beans,” Mira said wearily, shifting in her seat and letting her right hand stray up to the truck's window while her other hand absent-mindedly rubbed at her elbow. “He was very particular that all those arrive in one piece.”
“I hope he shits himself to death from them.” Wren scowled, leaning over the steering wheel to look at the sky ahead. Grey skies and clouds as far as the eye could see. Good. The rain would keep the wolves away, at least until dark came.
“But he does pay well.”
Wren snorted. “He's got us driving through feral heartland, through two government roadblocks, and into the middle of Skull territory because he couldn't be assed to organize a supply run any earlier.” It was hard not to let the frustration slip into her voice. “He better pay well for that. How did we end up working for an idiot who's barely thirty and still doesn't have his life together?”
Mira stopped twirling a lock of brown hair around her index finger to squint out the window, where pine trees were smearing by at breakneck speed. “I think there might be an alpha out there,” she said mildly, one hand straying down beneath the glovebox, before she sat straight up as if struck by lightning. “What day is it?” she asked, suddenly rifling through a stack of papers on the dashboard of the beat-up pickup truck.
“No idea,” Wren muttered, looking up for a moment to glance into the rear-view mirror. No sign of Skull vehicles yet, but that didn't mean that they weren't being watched. “Why do you care?”
“I didn't look too hard last night, but it might be a full moon.”
Wren's eyes widened. “Son of a shit.” She'd driven between San Diego and Seattle half a million times during her undergrad—countless road trips with Mira and the squad, visiting home, looking at med schools—but that had been forever ago. And never once on all of those miles travelled had she imagined that she'd retrace her footsteps fearing werewolves. “Hopefully they'll be scared of the rain and they'll stay in their holes.”
“We can probably handle it.” Even as she reached down to stroke the armored head resting on the gearshift, Mira didn't sound certain. The chimera gurgled back at her, its eyes barely visible through the slits in its wooden helmet, and Wren could've sworn she'd heard a fishlike thump a couple of times against the truck's cracking seats as the creature wagged its tail. “I can't believe Turner's letting us take a chimera on a run this long.”
“I can't believe you've got a chimera on the floor of my truck acting like a little puppy,” Wren shot back. “Did you see what one of the other ugly shits did to that bear in the testing ring? There's a reason we're supposed to keep it in the back with the rest of the cargo. It—” Wren cut herself short as the tail stopped wagging and the chimera's head rose up. Mismatched jaundiced eyes that seemed to glow with a fire of their own pierced through the wooden helmet to glare at her.
“Easy, Dodger,” Mira murmured, petting the creature's crest reassuringly, which seemed to calm it a little. “Wren doesn't mean it." And then, to Wren: “You aren't looking at scars right if you think they're ugly.”
“You named the chimera that's specifically bred to hunt out and kill ferals 'Dodger'? That's a little fucked up.”
Mira smoothed a chunk of dried blood out from between the chimera's otherwise-pristine, slate-grey fur and flicked it out the window. “My family used to have dobermans back before things fell apart,” she said matter-of-factly, now scratching the chimera beneath the chin, in the gap between helmet and fur. “Xavier used to name all of them Dodger. Four in total, one after another. I don't think he'll mind adding a fifth.”
“Your brother is literally the least-creative person I've ever met, except maybe you.”
Mira shrugged. “It runs in the family, I guess. Dodger's a good name, though. Isn't that right, Dodger?”
Wren couldn't help but stare as the scientifically-engineered killing machine affectionately rubbed its head against Mira's palm until she let it nuzzle a cheerio from between her fingers.
While not entirely unwelcome, this was certainly not how she'd seen herself spending her life a year ago. On one hand, it all felt so normal now: she and Mira were casually smuggling contraband across state borders, safe in the knowledge that Turner had already padded enough pockets to guarantee them safe passage through the quarantine zones. Dodger could take out the monsters that bothered them, and Wren was there for the humans. Their first job had been a trainwreck of nerves and early mistakes, but now here they were, clipping through feral heartland at a hundred twenty miles per hour, with only wolves that were too afraid of the rain.
On the other hand, an entire future had been obliterated. Plans of residency, and then neurosurgery at Sacramento General, had all gone out the window when the first rift had opened. Masshibun had been the name given to the scaly, ungodly behemoth that had surfaced on the beaches of San Diego with no warning, a roiling mass of muscles intent on devouring and destroying all in its path. Wren still remembered the feeling of every hair on her body standing on end, the foul stench of bile and rot filling the air, and then the screams as the thing ripped a building in half with bloodred arms five times as thick as her body. With every creature it killed, it grew in size, devouring and devouring and devouring, and there hadn't been time to think, just the fuzzy sense of fear as—
“Eyes on the road, Big Bird,” Mira said, glancing up from fiddling with the dashboard radio, which was unhelpfully spluttering grey noise. “At this speed, I don't think we'd appreciate meeting any of the trees.”
It hadn't been the first day that hurt them the most. “I thought that nickname was going to stay dead.” Wren tilted the wheel back to the left, so that they were safely in the center of the road. It wasn't like there were any cars coming in the other direction anyway.
“Are you kidding? It's the only clever thing I've done,” Mira said, smirking. “Do you think I'm going to let the slow decline of society into anarchy cover that up?”
Wren sighed. Fair enough. Mira always had a protective streak for her ideas. “Anything useful on the radio?”
“Nothing you'd want to hear,” Mira muttered darkly, her eyebrows creased into a fierce frown as she fiddled with the knob. “That's odd…”
Wren tore her eyes off the road for half a second, letting Mira's tawny curls fill her vision for that precious moment. “What's up?”
“Even the government channels are clipping in and out.” Mira moved back for a moment, staring at the radio, and then hit the dashboard. The quality improved for a moment and then went back to its staticky warbles. “Piece of crap. You should've let me hotwire that car in the junkyard back in Fresno; this one's trash. The minivan I saw looked stupid, but it would've had plenty more legroom.”
“And we'd take twice as long to get there because it would barely push seventy miles per hour,” Wren shot back with a grin. “Don't forget to drop the kids off at soccer practice while you're away, okay?”
Mira sighed and leaned back, apparently satisfied in having lost her battle with the radio. “It's weird that we can't even get the standard airwaves. I didn't think the rain was that bad, and we're definitely not that far from San Francisco.”
“Maybe Watari was right, and San Francisco finally went down.” It was easy to say things like that so casually when it was just the two of them, driving through mile after mile of nothingness, the remains of civilization an eternity away. Wren narrowed her eyes as they passed an overgrown highway sign, its chipped reflective paint barely enough to catch the headlights of their dying pickup truck. They still had at least half a day until they got to Seattle.
“I heard the ferals in their area are getting a lot worse. Didn't Watari say that the Bay was practically impassible with all the new stuff that they've been finding in there?”
“Makes sense,” Wren said, and flinched at the newest sound before recognizing the arrival of the rain, coming in thick sheets all of a sudden. She fiddled around with the unfamiliar levers beneath the truck's steering wheel before she finally found the windshield wipers. “The Bay was where the first one of the things appeared; it'd make sense if the mutations are happening there faster than anywhere else.”
“No, but this is different.” Mira let her voice drop a little, as if she were afraid that someone would hear them, sealed as they were in a stolen car rocketing across a deserted highway. “His team was doing research on these giant versions of ranatra fusca—those spiders that walk on water. More than enough differences to be considered a completely different species—you know how much he loves naming these things; he's already named the clade onishizukumo and apparently that's a hilarious pun. But these things are huge. Like, three feet big and still in adolescence, and he was convinced that they were manipulating the water currents somehow. And naturally they were preying on the rest of the fish in the area, and sometimes they were going after some of the people still left on the wharfs… it's a little terrifying, honestly. I thought the forests were bad enough, but now that the coasts are going… Enemies on all sides.” Pause. “I know it’s stupid, but I wish things got back to normal, somehow.”
“We'll make it through somehow. We always do,” Wren replied nonchalantly, her attention suddenly caught by a streak of blue above them. She sensed rather than heard the chimera’s warning growl—that much should’ve made her stop in her tracks. She craned her neck further beneath the windshield, frowning as she tried to focus on the blur in the clouds. Another mutated bird, probably, but if they drew its attention, there would be hell to pay. “What is that?”
“But there has to be a limit to how far things can fall before we can't pick them up any—”
“FUCK!” The tires screeched as Wren wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left, sending them skidding sideways as she bodily slammed her weight against the brakes with a cloud of smoke and seared rubber. The knuckles of her left hand tightened against the steering wheel, but her right arm was flying, too slow, to reach out for Mira because she knew it was too late for them to—”Get out, now!”
“Wren, wha—”
Impact.
A giant chunk of stone plowed downward, first into the glistening asphalt and then into the hood of their car. Wren processed it as if from afar, watching while her body was too slow to respond to the way that the aluminum hood splashed like water under the force, the impulse rippling upward as the frame crumpled. Her own momentum carried her serenely and inexorably forward on a perfect trajectory with the shards of glowing shrapnel that split off from the meteor, shattering the windshield. Cracks spiderwebbed across the safety glass, casting dark shadows over the unfurling airbags that were too slow to stop Wren's head from colliding with steering wheel—
Time sped up. Wren's head shot forward, and her arm snapped back, and then shattered glass was raining down around them as her forehead met dashboard.
- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -
Wren awoke to sharp ringing in her ears, the woven fabric of her seatbelt cutting into her sternum like an iron bar. She blinked, trying to force the image into focus, and found a thin trickle of blood kept stubbornly leaking into her vision.
Assess.
Concussion, likely. Her left wrist was crushed beneath her at an odd angle. Fractured, perhaps broken. Minor bruises on the chest area; larger ones developing around the neck and face. The air around them was unnaturally hot, even for the summer.
The car had gotten hit with something she had to move before—
Wren reached for the door handle and then swore with pain as her arm erupted into a cluster of screaming nerves. Wrist was definitely broken. She awkwardly reached around with her right arm and shouldered the door open, stumbling onto the asphalt. Sweaty hair clung to her cheeks. “Mira,” she said aloud, remembering five seconds too slow. “Mira!”
“I'm okay.” Mira was limping toward her from behind the totaled truck, bleeding fiercely from her forehead and favoring her right leg a little. Like a shadow, the chimera hovered protectively behind her; Wren could see its claw marks on Mira’s sweatshirt where it must have grabbed on. “Dodger got me out.”
“Good boy,” Wren breathed with a sigh of relief. Freak of nature that it was, the thing had probably saved their lives.
“What was that?”
“Doesn't matter right now,” Wren was saying grimly, pulling a pistol out of her back pocket and testing the heft in her injured hand before switching to her right with a disgusted sigh. The rain was starting to plaster her hair to her shoulders. “Can you walk? We need to find shelter before anything finds us.”
Dodger let out a low, loose growl that cut across the pouring rain, and Wren hesitated to follow his gaze into the forest, where a pair of gleaming red eyes looked back. They reflected light like no animal she'd ever seen before. “Too late,” Mira whispered in a strangled voice.
Wren swore, and by then, the chimera had leapt into the undergrowth with a fierce snarl, three-inch claws coming unsheathed mid-jump. “Stay close to me,” Wren said in a surprisingly firm voice, pulling Mira in with her uninjured hand before aiming the pistol back at the bushes, which exploded in a cloud of roiling muscle. Wren threw herself and Mira out of the way as Dodger landed back on the street with a fierce snarl, the armored, birdlike talons on his front claws smearing thick, dark blood across the asphalt.
The wolf backed off for a moment, whining as it pulled its weight away from its mangled front leg, and Dodger pulled himself up to his feet. “Look how big its paws are. It's just a cub,” Mira was saying absently when Wren shot it in the head. It crumpled to the ground.
Wren swallowed. The size of a large dog, and Mira said it was just a cub. And they had no transport.
Another roar, this one deeper and more ferocious—the cub's growls sounded like pitiful yammering in comparison—rang out as a second wolf leapt out of the forest, legs the size of Wren's covering the distance between the two humans and the chimera in thick, rapid strides.
“Lugalgan,” Mira breathed in disbelief. “And it looks like an alpha.”
Wren was as ready as she could've been, blinking the rain furiously out of her eyes as she raised the pistol again, but by then Dodger had leapt at the beast and she couldn't get a clear shot.
The wolf beneath him snarled before straightening its wiry, bloodied forelegs and lashing out with all its strength, slamming Dodger to the ground and then bashing the chimera's helmet in with a muscled front paw. Tufts of fur flew in every direction, and then the wolf surged to its feet, first four legs and then two, and it began running in haphazard, hunched steps towards the two humans before it, red fur glinting in the light of the full moon.
Wren's first shot went wild, flying past the matted white fur of the wolf's ear and barely causing it to flinch. Swearing, she lined up the shot again, years of practice echoing in her ears only to be washed away with adrenaline as the crazed wolf pulled up short, flecks of foam flying from its fangs. Wren's second shot caught it in the shoulder, and the momentum sent it staggering back. She fired a third shot, which hit the wolf in the chest, and that was all the time she got before the wolf slammed its legs into the ground and the entire road responded to its command, pillars of stone erupting from nowhere and knocking her ten feet in the air.
Wren hit the ground, hard enough to see stars, and she was blearily trying to focus on the claws running towards her by the time she regained enough understanding to look for her gun.
There was a breath-snatching whoosh of air as Dodger leapt back into the fray, the corded muscle of his back legs tensing as he met the wolf's snapping jaws head on, and then both creatures were on their hind legs, fangs seeking to rip apart the other's neck. The wolf's claws weren't doing much through Dodger's helmet, but they were shredding the tender skin of his underbelly even as Dodger's own talons were slowly turning the wolf's forelegs into ribbons.
In the distance, lightning rumbled, illuminating the entire road, and the wolf threw Dodger down to the ground, rearing back for a killing blow.
Even though every muscle in her body screamed in protest, Wren lined up her fifth shot and fired. The bullet went true, cleanly splitting the wolf's forehead in half and releasing a not-so-clean spray of gurgling blood. Its legs continued to flail, as if unaware that their commander had ceased to exist, and then Dodger let the creature fall back to the ground, slashing its neck open with a quick swipe of his front talons.
“Holy shit,” Mira said breathlessly, her eyes wide as she watched the wolf gurgle and finally stop its advance. Dodger gingerly limped back to her outstretched hand, whining in pain.
Wren refused to meet her eyes even as they both squinted against the pouring rain. Her good hand scrambled to reload the bullets in her pistol, even as her mind cemented the conclusion she'd made long ago. They'd barely managed to take out two, but—”There's got to be more. We have to keep moving. There—”
Her breath caught short as half a dozen more gleaming, red eyes blinked open in the forest around them.
- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -
There was a knock at the door. Wren woke up with tears in her eyes.
There was a moment between waking and dreaming where her body was still convinced that it was all real, and then, as she took slow, heaving gulps of air, reality set back in. The other half of the bed was empty and cold. Mira hadn't been there for twelve years.
It hadn't been the first day that hurt the most. It was every day that came after.
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