Poison Spiral

by Evil Riggs

Later in life, Naruto Uzumaki is deployed to a distant industrial town on cryptic orders. In a city torn between warring clans and rotten with secrets, Naruto slowly finds himself coming unraveled. For those who like a bit of noir with your ninjutsu. Conceived of before—and does not follow—the series' canon ending. Rated M for blood, sweat, tears, and other precious bodily fluids.

2. 2

2

As the sun has risen, the glare off the chalk-white road has become ever more intolerable. Dust hangs about him like a crystal fog. He can taste the stuff even through the elaborate layers of cloth wrapped about his nose and mouth. All gritty and caustic. Sweat oozes over his temples and paints his exposed skin with streaks of corpse-colored grime. What a lovely mission this has turned out to be.

Five weeks he's been on the road. Five weeks and much of a continent. Five weeks and multiple border crossings. Five weeks—and now he's beyond borders, out where the frontiers are still being carved out and conquered. Five weeks—and he's half-sure that he's lost, wandering in circles through the mummified ass-crack of the world.

He tilts the brim of his hat back and squints against the rancid glint of the sun. About the footpath twist stands of scrub juniper and spiny bushes. Piñon pines grasp upward from the tangle like broken hands. Among this stunted forest rise outcroppings of stone the same color as an iron tool left to the elements—a grimy, halfhearted red. It's the sort of color that brings to mind battlefield infections.

None of it—not a single goddamn bush—provides any shade. What a worthless fucking country.

The sky is cloudless but for the billows of dust as they dance and ripple above the path. The sun is absolute.

Eyes dipping back down, he sees the hint of a turn in the path ahead. A leftward jag that leads off deeper into the hills, obscured by floating sand and copses of sad little trees.

Yet more road. Yet more empty, forgotten wilderness.

What a goddamn joke.

And yet: His pace slows. He squints. There. Something sits at the elbow-bend in the road. Some kind of nonsensical clapboard building stands sentinel at the side of the path, so surrounded by gnarled trees that it almost looks abandoned. Even this far out, he can see the recent paint job on the sign hanging above the shack's front door. Not just some vacant squat, then.

All right. Well, then. It's better than nothing.

Naruto Uzumaki shrugs hard, pulling down and adjusting the straps of his increasingly simpatico traveling pack. Parched and exhausted and fed up as he is, he manages to summon a bit more hustle from his aching calves. With any luck, there will be someone in that shit-pile up ahead who knows where the fuck he is.