"Everything alright, Ollie?"
"Not sure," Oliver admitted, with furrowed brows. The winch wasn't moving anymore, and no amount of manual force he added was budging it. He squinted as he craned his head back and forth around the cable, trying to spot any snags or frays along the length.
"I told you to check everything before we left." Vicky was getting impatient, and this was a bad time to have her temper building, even if it was ever amusing to him.
"I did, love, I did."
Nothing. Oliver scratched his beard thoughtfully. Their dinged up whaler was hardly the bulkiest vessel on the water, but it was surely strong enough to hoist some metal, wasn't it? They hadn't had any trouble dredging up omnic scraps passing by with the current before. Whatever was on the magnet suddenly gave a little, and the winch sputtered to life for a few reels, before catching again. So much resistance, for what was supposed to be bits and pieces blown apart…
"Bloody hell! Just once, fucking once, can something not go ass upwards for us?!"
His chuckle only served to frazzle the woman more. "No worries, no worries. I'll sort it out."
But secretly, even he was becoming a bit tense. If they didn't hurry up, the morning advantage would be lost, and the vultures would be upon them, chasing the same headlines that Ollie and his wife currently were. At their age, there was no competing with the younger punks infesting the outback. After cracking his knuckles, Oliver clamped down on the winch's crank, and pushed with all his might. After a few tooth-grinding, skull-pounding moments of agony, the cable began to wind again.
"Oi," he called, between clenched teeth. "Drop the anchor. From the deck, if you can get it around."
Some weight would keep them from tilting. Their catch was proving to be a struggle, but the cable was rolling up more and more. If they could at least get it up far enough to hitch it to the boat, they could try to drag it back to land, though getting their haul past any Junkers would still require some tact.
"Anchor down!" Vicky cried, as the water crashed around the heavy piece of iron.
Things were definitely looking up, but Oliver's delight would be short-lived. The hooked metal came closer, and closer, until there was something almost visible beneath the water. With only a crack of sunlight out at this hour, it was hard to make out, but from what he could see, it was something...pink?
Vicky piped up from across the boat, just as their catch neared the surface. "Oh, just drop this one! We're not wasting the dead hours of the morn' with this shit, there must be plenty more floating about that aren't in such big chunks!"
After fully getting a peek at what was on the end of their magnet, Oliver's blood went cold.
"What are you doing," he heard his wife snapping, as he frantically fumbled around through piles of discarded equipment. He soon found the pry bar he was looking for, and quickly plunged it beneath a bent chunk of pink casing, heaving as if his life depended on it. Though his body still stung from pulling it up to begin with, he forced himself to put the pain aside. There would be time for aching later.
Vicky had stomped her way down to get an answer from him, but she too was treated to the chilling sight, stunning her into open-jawed silence. "Oh my god…"
After prying open enough casing to get beneath the very cracked windshield of the mech, Oliver tried in vain to detach it, before the stress finally got to him and he resorted to smashing his way through. Despite the mech hunching itself over in an apparent attempt to airlock the upper half of the cockpit, the cracks had breached, leaving the pilot up to her nose in water, murk, and who-knows-what-else. Ripping the bloodied and limp young woman out of the hatch, Oliver tore off her oxygen mask, as well as the tubing wrapped around her neck.
"Is she dead-"
"Quiet," he forced himself to grunt, to his wife's chagrin. Propping the girl up in his arms, he planted an ear against her chest, listening through the skintight suit. Vicky's panicked yelping made it hard to spot, but after a moment of tension thick enough to nearly suffocate him, he finally heard it: a faint thumping that made his own heart start to pound.
"Still alive, barely."
"She needs CPR! Come on, would you give her to me-" In an instant, Vicky was scrambling to pull the pilot from his arms. Laying her flat on the deck, she set to pumping against the girl's abdomen, and puffing air down her throat. "C'mon," she whispered hoarsely, between palm thrusts. "Stay with me, stay with me."
The panic in her voice didn't fall upon deaf ears. By the time Oliver had gotten his numb body moving in search of an aid kit, the pilot was already vomiting up salt water. Through cooed warnings not to move, Vicky had draped her coat over the catatonic girl, wrapping her up tight. No amount of bandages would fix the leg that was bent in what was certainly the wrong direction, but they could at least patch up the cuts and scrapes across her shoulders and face. Though shallow, the girl was breathing, and that was enough to bring palpable relief to the couple. She was battered, and definitely suffering from hypothermia, but she was alive.
"She's hurt," Vicky mumbled. "Bad."
"…we're gonna have to get her ashore."
There was no small amount of bitterness in the woman's expression at what that implied. Looking out to the ocean again, and the sunlight now beginning to sparkle over the horizon, she gave a great, heaving sigh. "I suppose we're leaving the scrap, then."
"It's the right thing to do," Oliver eventually conceded.
"Doesn't mean I can't bitch and moan about it..."
That much, he would give her. But regardless of the show she'd make of sulking, she would still do the right thing in the end, which was exactly why he loved the old broad. Patting his wife's shoulder, Oliver hustled to draw the anchor up, and then switched on the boat's ignition. After one last wistful glance at the early retirement he was abandoning, he pushed off for land, dragging the downed mech along behind them through the morning's choppy waves.
It hurt to breathe. It also hurt to think, but it mostly hurt to breathe, and Hana could only abstain from one of those two things.
Her eyes cracked open slowly, and after a few blinks, the world came into focus. Rickety walls that she didn't recognize boxed her in, which set her into a bit of a panic. Hana forced herself to sit up, wincing with the movement and every flex of her lungs. Where was she? Certainly it wasn't a hospital, judging from the condition of the place, nor was it the barracks back home. Maybe an emergency outpost of some sort? But why would she even be in one in the first place? It would be a lot easier to think right about now if she had a couple dozen ibuprofen...
Focus, she chided herself. The pictures she spotted on the wall indicated that she was somewhere domestic, but she couldn't recognize the figures in the frames. She tried to make out through bleary eyes who the couple might be, right up until she finally noticed the thick cast around her leg.
All at once, the memories hit her, searing like a fiery poison in her veins. Five lights, then four lights, three lights, two, and then just one. Last man standing against the king. Screams, plasma searing, leg snapping, and the salty sting of the ocean, coupled with word "ABORT" flashing in her face, now burned into the back of her retinas for life. The pressure squeezed at her throat, forcing her to clamp both hands into her hair and softly twist in an attempt to ground herself. Calm down, she pleaded with herself internally, eyes bugged out and prickling with tears that she refused to let slip. Crying wouldn't help anything.
Sharp inhale after sharp inhale, Hana eventually calmed herself (as much as she could be in this situation, anyway). It was enough to start breathing normally again, and that was a start. In her attempts to distract herself from the pain with something, anything, she wound up taking inventory of the wounds she'd obtained. Bandages wound their way up her legs, and up under the oversized jumper she'd been changed into (cream colored, and soft), and well up past that. A glance into the collar made her cringe, particularly at the wide wrapping around her midsection. She would definitely be feeling this later, she realized, with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.
Before she could get too far into her inspection, there was a knock at the door, which prompted Hana to pat the sweater back down in a hurry. "H-hello?" she asked, cursing herself for the stammer. "Who is it?"
The reply she got was audibly relieved, and thick with an accent. "You're awake, finally." The door opened halfway, and a blonde woman peeked through. Though her face was lined with a bit of age, her stout shoulders and warm smile didn't seem to be held down by it. "Name's Vicky. Mind if I come in?"
She was still on edge, but nodded anyway, allowing Vicky to meekly enter. She carried a yellow canister in her hands, which she cracked open partially before bringing it to Hana's face. "Take a lay down for me, cobber." The gas it released burned at first, like the raw sting of paint thinner, and was quite a challenge to breathe in without coughing. Soon, though, a wave of sweet relief crashed through her, from head to aching toe. The broken leg still hurt, of course, but the rest of the pain all but faded, and some of her wounds even felt smaller. "There are no hospitals 'round these parts, but we make do. Some bandages, a splint, little of this stuff, and you're golden."
No hospitals? How far out into the countryside had she wiped out? "Thank you," she mumbled, arching her back a bit. That's the stuff...
"Not a thing, really. Your mech's safe and sound, by the way. Well, safe and sound as it was when we found it. Thing's bloody fucked, from what my husband said," Vicky laughed uneasily. "Really don't know how you hung on for that long."
Hana was silent.
"Not that it matters. You're okay, and that's the most important thing. I mean, with a few bruised ribs, and the leg fracture, but otherwise, okay!" The stress on the woman's face was obvious, but so too was how hard she was trying to stay upbeat. It relaxed Hana somewhat, and helped to shake her of the panic she'd woken in.
"Totally." She smiled, only slightly by force. "I should probably go take a look at it now. I've gotta get home as soon as I can-" Trying to pull herself from the bed, Hana hissed in pain. Stupid, busted leg.
"Nope. You can tinker with it later, you're resting for now. And no buts," Vicky suddenly snapped, as Hana's mouth opened to argue.
"Are you for real? Come on…!"
"For really real."
"I've got this, alright?" Drawing forth every cocksure bit of her very soul that she could, Hana jerked a thumb at herself, complete with a charismatic grin. "I appreciate the concern, but I'm top of the scoreboard, thanks to that medicine stuff. Just watch and see." Her confidence faltered a bit under the folded arms and arched brow of her host, but Hana wouldn't be stopped. Clenching her teeth together, she moved her healthy leg over to the edge of the bed. So far, so good. Then, she moved the other leg o-
"Oww, oww, oww, oww, oww!"
With only a little bit of pity in her eyes, along with plenty of irritation, Vicky shook her head at the wounded pilot. "Don't be a shithead, yeah? No one's keeping you once you've gotten better, but you can hardly sit up proper for the time being. Just lay down, would you?"
Though very displeased with defeat, and the notion of having clipped wings for however long this recuperation would take, Hana could admit that it was perhaps justified in this instance. Really, there wasn't much maintenance she could do without one of her legs to stand on anyway, was there? "Fiiine..." After pouting to herself for a moment, and tapping her other bare foot against the bulk of the cast, she asked, "Can you at least tell me where I am?"
The creases on Vicky's brow deepened with her frown. "Yeah," she said somberly. "We found you sunk on the coast of Australia. And now, you're in the outback."
That was a lot further from home than she would have liked to hear. In fact, she almost didn't believe it. Drifting out to sea that far? It seemed impossible. A bubble of dread began to inflate in her stomach, one that only grew when she looked out the empty window of the room. Even from just her spot on the bed, she could see a barren wasteland sprawled out to the horizon and beyond, bleached and lifeless, save for something resembling a shanty town of steel in the distance. Any shrubbery across the way was gnarled and black, poisoned to the very root of the land it was planted in. A nightmare she'd only heard about over the news at the dead of night, now made into her reality. What little life was here, was here to die, something promised to her by the hollow sound of the wind blowing by.
Something inside of her curled up like a ball, ready to die, but she made no show of it. She always was good at hiding that kind of thing.
"Nice place you have here." She'd wanted to chuckle after that, but all she could force out was a raspy breath.
"It's a real bitch, ain't it," laughed Vicky, bitter and coarse, as she joined Hana in looking out over the desolate land. "But hey, from one lost soul to another…welcome to the apocalypse."