Brick stood nowhere, in absolute darkness. He could feel his animal all around him, unspeakably enormous and all consuming, and although he couldn't see it, he sensed its reptilian mind and the hideous thrum of its creature's heart. The world was so noiseless that Brick could hear the steady bwap bwap bwap of his own heartbeat, and the blood shushing through his veins.
A pale disc sailed overhead, a mere silver slit in the distance, slipping and jittering across the curved void. Brick might not have spotted it if there were anything else in the sky. He thought it might be a ship, but it didn't move right for a ship. It didn't move like anything he'd ever seen. Except, maybe, the herky-jerky gait of a stalking predator. Peer, stop, peer, stop. It seemed to search for something.
Brick suddenly recognized the disc as the moon from his dreams. Then, as if could feel the direction of his thoughts, it stopped its awkward slide across the sky. It bulged toward Brick with sickening speed.
He flinched, but it stopped just short, close enough that Brick could have run his fingers across its palely luminescent surface. A single word cracked like a whip in his mind.
GOTCHA.
The moon blinked out. Everything blinked out. Then, from somewhere far away, came a different voice, a nostalgic croon that brought tears to Brick's eyes. The singing came through the crackle of static.
I got some friends on the other shore...and I wanna see 'em more and more...when I get to heaven, gonna live at ease...cause me and God gonna do as we please...
Wake up, Jacob, day is a breakin'...
Peas in the pot and hoe-cakes a' bakin'. He remembered, at last, the second half of that old rhyme.
He was awake. He could feel the tickle of his animal's sated snores, it curled into a lump in his belly. Everything hurt. He tried to sit up, but the pain forced a cry from him, and he laid back down. He could barely see the junction where the walls and ceiling met above, and it was too dark in the room to make out anything else.
Something stirred in the shadows. Brick jolted, then realized that he'd been lying unconscious, and anything that meant to kill him could have done it already. Whatever it was, it was seemed almost afraid to make itself known.
"Who's there?" Brick grunted.
"Babe..."
"Mordy?"
The figure laughed, a sound as soft as a summer night, and Brick realized his mistake. "Rocko. Shit. What happened?" The words were mush in his mouth, running together the way written words sometimes did.
"Thank God," Rocko breathed. "I didn't know what I was going to do if...never mind. Are you okay?"
Brick guessed what he meant. He was talking about Brick's animal. He'd never seen it before, and must have thought Brick's mind had snapped. Maybe he'd tried to talk to him, or touch him...
"Are you okay?" Brick asked.
"I'm fine. We're fine." Rocko hesitated. His barely visible figure shifted forward, and his hands enfolded one of Brick's larger, calloused ones. "All three of us."
Kindle. Brick had forgotten. His animal had allowed him to forget, at least for a moment. Maybe someday the image of the girl's broken body and glassy eyes would be one of the things he couldn't think about, one of the memories that his animal wrapped itself around, blocked from view behind its meaty side.
For now, Brick only had gaps in his memory. He couldn't recall what he'd done to Briggs - because he'd certainly done something terrible to Briggs - but he remembered Kindle lying on the mess hall floor, the security key clenched in her lifeless hand.
"The chip...I took it."
"I got it from you. Listen, I don't know what happened to you, or if you remember, but you were unstoppable. You kept the guards busy while Tina got her bombs finished. She took them down to the boiler room and blew the whole place open, right out the side of the plateau."
"So..."
"So, we're out."
All that time. All the arguing, the planning, and it was that easy. Part of Brick knew they couldn't have done it sooner. The reptilian beast who now dozed, belly swollen, was stronger than Brick could be on his own. Immune to pain. It's mind sharp enough to cut through the clouds of grief and confusion. Brick alone could never have distracted the guards long enough for Rocko to unlock the boiler room, long enough for Tina to do her work. It was his animal who'd done that, and only because of Kindle.
She'd been right from the beginning. Left to Brick, they would have rotted down in that hole for months, maybe years. But Kindle had kept her promise. She'd freed them.
"She...I didn't..." Brick rasped, not sure what he meant to say. He sensed Rocko leaning closer, still hidden by darkness, to plant a chaste kiss against Brick's clammy forehead.
"Take it easy. We're safe here, and Tina's on watch. You got pretty roughed up. After we got out of there, you just kept going. We followed you until you passed out. Not like fainting. You laid down and fell asleep, like you were just tired. Deepest I've ever seen you sleep."
Because it couldn't find me, Brick thought. The moon didn't know where I was for awhile. He tried to speak, but his infuriatingly uncooperative lips wouldn't form the words. Maybe he would rest. He closed his eyes.
In the theater of his mind, he saw Kindle's tiny, tightly clenched fist.
Somewhere, Rocko was still talking. Brick barely heard him. "...found this shack...nobody here...picked clean...dragged..." Brick's mind was somewhere else, kneeling on the ground beside the dead girl, her hand in his. He saw every detail vividly: Her short, bitten fingernails. Pale palms, lighter than the backs of her hands, just like Amanda's had been.
Brick opened his eyes. The images remained, grafted onto the darkness. Rocko had stopped talking. He hummed a soothing melody and rubbed a thumb over the backs of Brick's bruised knuckles.
A loon called outside, making Brick think he'd fallen asleep again, slipped back into a dream of the Garden. But Rocko's hand remained in his, warm and real.
"What?" the younger man asked- not to Brick, but to the loon.
"It's the signal, dummy. We got company."
"Ah, damn," Rocko said, shuffling in the darkness. "Alright, hon, how do you feel? You think you can get up?"
Brick didn't know. He rose shakily to his feet, and found that in spite of the ache radiating from his muscles and a few shallow wounds, he seemed alright. He'd been badly injured enough to know what it felt like, and he didn't think he had any broken bones or embedded bullets.
He clutched Rocko's side and they fumbled their way toward the door. They staggered outside, blinking in the sudden wash of moonlight. It was sometime during Pandora's long dusk, neither full night or day, the bluffs a stretch of blue and purple shadow, the craggy dunes cold under Brick's bare feet.
Skags watched them from maybe a dozen yards away, a distance that could be easily closed by the beasts. They watched but didn't come, and Brick didn't know why. Their ragtag trio couldn't look like much of a threat. There were at least three of the skags, all hulking alphas, their eyes glowing like red stars in the darkness.
"Midget riders," Rocko whispered, as if Brick had asked aloud what he'd been wondering.
Now Brick could see it. Figures perched on the backs of the skags, the tallest no larger than Tina, but immeasurably thicker and more formidable. They wore strange, craggy armor that made them look like extensions of the skags they rode, probably crafted from the creature's hides.
The group circled, drawing closer by increments.
"Maybe they think its a trap," Rocko said, pulling Tina toward him. "It's strange to find defenseless idiots in the middle of the desert. They might think we're trying to lure people in to rob them."
The skag riders sprang forward, crossing the distance with such dizzying speed that it made Brick think of his dream moon. He lunged out in front of Rocko and Tina, braced for the assault, but, like the moon, the lead rider stopped just short.
The rider stared down at Brick. At least, Brick assumed he was looking at him. It was impossible to tell. The rider's face was hidden behind a helmet: a heavy looking, medieval mask with pronged horns on either side.
"Did you guys do that?" the rider asked, his voice like a small dog's bark. The dwarf pointed to something on the eastern horizon. Brick looked that way and saw, for the first time, the smoke rising from a distant plateau...from Lockdown Palace.
They had wandered a long way, then - Brick plunging mindlessly through the wastes, Rocko and Tina hurrying along after him - if they were so far from the prison. It was still smoldering, too, Brick noticed appreciatively. Some fireworks. At least he'd probably looked like a badass, tearing away from the explosions without looking back.
"Yeah, it was us!" Tina answered, when Brick failed to do anything besides gawk at the dark swathe of smoke against the skyline. "We blew that sucka up."
The skag rider regarded her for an infinitely long moment. Brick noticed the bandoleer of grenades around his shoulder, and the shotgun, almost comically large for such a short person, holstered at his hip. But the moment passed, and the rider spoke again.
"Oh. My. God. That is epic. We were just hanging out, chilling, and we heard explosions. I was like, Whoah! Casey, did you hear that shit? Sounded like...ah, dang, what did I say? I had a good one. You remember?"
"Uh, I donno. Something about Mister Torgue."
"Like Mister Torgue getting it on with a bullymong! Yeah, never mind, that wasn't good. But it was seriously that loud. Scared the shit out of Jackie over there. Didn't it, Jax?"
"Al~ex! Don't tell them that."
Alex ignored Jackie's protest. "Anyway, that was fabulous. Those Hyperion guys are such drips. Hey, big guy. Don't be shy. You can pet my Johnson, if you want. I see you staring at it."
"Wha...?" Brick stuttered.
"That's my skag. Johnson," the rider explained, and chuckled at his own joke.
Tina stepped forward to accept the offer to pet Johnson. The skag snapped its trisected jaws, and Tina pulled away just in time, unfazed by nearly losing her arm. "That's crazy, gurl! Johnson is exactly what I was gonna name my daughter someday. Now I gotta come up with another one. Maybe...uh..."
"Gaylord," Brick said.
"Nah," Tina frowned.
"Dick?" Alex suggested.
Tina shook her head. "Don't like Dick."
"Why don't you like Dick? Dick's great!" The rider sat back, indignant.
"Ew, no way. Dicks are all veiny and gross."
"Oh, for God's sake," Rocko exclaimed. "Are you scavengers, or not? Because if you're going to rob us, please, get it over with. We don't have anything, anyway."
"Nah. I mean, we are scavengers, but we wouldn't steal from such a cute little family. Especially not a DILF like you. I'm winking, by the way." The mask was turned in the approximate direction of Brick.
Brick blushed. "Uh..."
Tina grinned up at the rider. "Are you, like, my long lost sister? Because I feel so connected to you right now."
One of the other riders, the one who shit their pants earlier, chimed in. "You three need a ride? Is your clan around here?"
Brick shook his head. "If you could point us to a station, I got a Catch-a-ride code. Hey, you guys want a car? We could get you a Lancer or something."
"They don't make Lancers anymore. And thanks, but we're good. I've got my Johnson. Jax and Case have Pecker and Dong, and that's all we need."
"Oh, they're all named after genitals. That's beautiful," Rocko said sourly. He sounded the way he always did when Brick and the girls made fart jokes. Only one girl, now, Brick thought, and forced a wall down around the thought.
"The station is, like, super close. Just around that cliff. You could walk, but if you'd rather ride...Come on, big boy. I'll let you put your arms around me." The leading rider patted the skag's butt.
"We're good," Brick said.
"He don't play for your team, gurl," Tina added.
Alex laughed, but it wasn't exactly a laugh- more like a giggle. Brick finally understood that the rider was a woman, and wondered how Tina had been able to tell.
"I know, I know. I'm just so bad. Well, if you're sure, we'll get out of here. Good job on those Hyperion douches." She turned to look at the riders gathered around her. "Let's ride, girls!"
They turned, all howling, midgets and skags both, and plunged into the darkening desert. Tina howled after them. Brick and Rocko joined her after a moment, and continued the chorus until the scavengers were out of sight.
"We should go," Rocko said. He was staring at something in the distance. The spindly silhouette of a drifter lurched across the dunes.
Tina yawned and grabbed Brick's hand, her fingers curling tightly around his. Even though she'd seen his animal walk, even though he'd screwed up in New Haven and again in the prison, she held Brick's hand like a vice and grabbed Rocko's with the other, and Brick's heart broke a little more.
"I wanna have a skag someday," she said, her words stretched by another yawn. "I'll ride it, an' name it...something. I donno. Dick, I guess."
They made their way toward the Catch-a-Ride station like that, Tina holding hands between Brick and Rocko, their breath puffing away in the cold night air.