Even the wind is too tired to blow, more of a slow plod through the wrecks of once great war machines as it lazily brushes up dust in miniature swirls. Like the wind, a pair of men are also not in a terrible rush, making their way through the graveyard of dented-up robots and the tools once used to fight them. The tanks and weapons are all that remain of the non-robot side; it's been so long that even this battlefield has been absorbed in the dirt, organic goodies carried off by scavengers ages ago. These two are the largest mammals for miles, a fact that they're reminded of every time a hopping mouse scurries out of their path and into the ruins.
Their pace is not due to a lack of urgency. Really, they'd love to get where they're going (wherever that is), but several things force them to take things slow, no matter how exposed they are in plain view of the city.
"Enough," one of them says, coming to a halt. "It has to go."
The other, younger and leaner, stops as well. The last few times they'd approached the edge of this conversation, he'd laughed it away, or got defensive, or didn't bother and just said fuck off. But it's been long enough that his traveling companion is done beating around the bush and is now confronting him with what they both already know.
He rubs both his hands over his face. "…Fine man. You win."
"There is a spot there," the older man says, gesturing to the carcass of a blimp whose curve provides a slight bit of shade against the noonday sun. "It'll be easier if you find something to elevate your head."
"What, you want to do this now?"
"We both agree it's necessary. What else should we wait for? For your lunch break? The weekend? Some other notch on the timetable by which we no longer base our lives?"
"Fuck Spy. I just meant…Fine. I'll sit on the freaking rock."
He does. After dropping his sawed-off to the side, he holds one hand to his aching jaw, a habit from a vague notion that applying pressure will ease the pain. It never does. He watches Spy remove the small toolkit from within the suit's inner pocket, an asset he always knows is there but tries to forget. Usually, it produces lockpicks or small instruments for hotwiring, but as Spy lifts a pair of nasty looking pliers from the satchel he can't help but wince.
"Just promise when you put in the fake one, you won't stuff it with any useless crap. I don't want to always be thinking about the little guinea hen or whatever that's in my mouth until the end of time," he says.
"And what would you consider useful things to put in a false tooth?" Spy asks, wiping off the pliers with one of their few disinfectant cloths.
"I dunno. Magazine maybe. Or one of those tiny skateboards you can do tricks with using your fingers."
"Alas, I'm out of tiny skateboards. And all my cyanide pills have expired, so I suppose we shall skip the false tooth part of the operation."
"Cyanide expires?"
"Scout," Spy says, armed with firmness since he knows Scout is stalling, but not with the unkindness that used to tinge their first days on the run together. They're past that at this point. All they're trying to do is survive.
Scout relents. He lets the pliers poke past his front teeth to the molar that's gone rotten to its core, spreading infection to the rest of his mouth. Even the barest prod from the instrument sends a jolt of pain down the root, and Scout spasms with a gasp of pain.
The years in the wastes have not made Spy a more emotive man. In fact, they seem to have leached what little there was to begin with, giving him the near perfect stoicism that would have made all the other spies from his past life green with envy. Yet, even so, Scout's pretty sure he can read him better now than he ever could before. The gloved hand holding his chin slackens fractionally, betraying how much Spy doesn't want to go through with this either.
Evenly, because god forbid he ever let that compassion show, Spy says, "…we have exactly one more dose of morphine. No one would judge you. What I am about to do is—notoriously—painful."
"But…" Use their last one, and they'd be shit out of luck if anything worse came along. But another pulse of pain radiates from the diseased tooth, and Scout makes up his mind. "Yeah, sure. I figure at this point if we get shot we're probably as good as dead anyway."
"Never give up, Scout. Especially in times like these." Still he goes to their (ever shrinking) first aid kit.
The morphine makes it easier, but tears still well in Scout's eyes when the god-awful piece of bone is finally ripped free. A sheen of sweat is crawling down his back, and he wishes that shit-ass breeze would do its damn job even a little, and help him survive some of the worst pain he's ever felt. The least the world could do is cool off for a few minutes.
"It's going to be even worse when the drugs wear off," Spy says, delicately wrapping the ugly, blackened thing in the used cloth. "Try to get some rest."
Scout barely remembers those words, already in a muzzy state where he'll vacillate between consciousness and not, having a terrible time telling between the two. The only thing he knows is that when he hears the crash just outside the sky is wavering between black and magenta, and he's on his feet in a matter of seconds.
Admittedly, the pain is bad, but not as bad as the weeks he refused to have it pulled, and it doesn't stop him from scooping up his sawed-off and running to the sound that his mind assures him is an ambush. It's barely soothed when he finds only Spy, hunched over and among the remains of a boxer-robot.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," he waves away, gripping the robot's rusted-in-place arm, its fist clothed in a rivet-studded glove. "I merely…tripped."
Scout isn't having any of it, immediately slipping an arm under Spy's and helping him sit on the nearest patch of elevated concrete. Try as he might, he can't hide the strained look on his face as he gingerly readjusts the reason the two had been picking their way so slowly through the wasteland; Spy's left leg is twisted, the knee pointed slightly wrong and magnifying that slim error all through his body. When it happened, they'd set the thing as best they could and hoped the healing muscles would pull it back into place. They hadn't.
Scout, breathless from the short exertion, drops his back against a mercifully cool slab of rock. "Ain't neither of us getting very far, are we?"
"I am not willing to give up yet." Spy breathes through his teeth. His last cigarette was three years ago. "Though, if it comes to the point where you need me to spit food into your mouth like a baby bird, I am simply going to let you die."
"Yeah I think I'd prefer that too, honestly."
They sit in silence. The silence hounds them always, waiting at the edges for when they run out of things to bitch about. It's been following them for months. With the wears and tears they're accumulating, they can't last much longer as scavengers. They need somewhere to lie low, to recuperate for a while at least. Of course, if they had somewhere like that, they wouldn't be out here in the first place.
"There's a river," Scout says. "Saw it before we got into the lower regions. We could make it if we start going south instead 'a southeast."
Spy, understandably, raises an eyebrow. "Running water means people."
And people are sometimes worse than the bots, yeah. Spy's leg didn't get that way on its own, after all.
"What other choice do we got man?" Scout asks the question.
Spy who, of course, refuses to let them give up, is forced to consider it.
"Could be worse," Scout remarks.
They've located some sort of working dam structure. Working in that it's not started to crumble like the wreckage outside, but at this point it's unclear if it's still producing power. Still, Spy muses. Worth investigating. The nearby city is ripe for scavenging, and if they can find a yet-unpilfered generator in all that, then a reliable source of energy could go a long way.
"Keep your voice down. We don't know if anyone's home."
"Looks abandoned since the war if you ask me," Scout says, but lowers it anyhow. "I'll sketch the perimeter."
He walks off. He'll be fine, Spy tells himself. They still have their weapons (though it's been a while since they've found anything for Spy's pistol) and this is not the first time they've cleared a building together.
They approach the dam from the higher area, where the meandering little river has puffed up and slowed, becoming a lake that eventually falls to the dam's embrace. The structure on top doesn't appear to have controls; more likely a lookout. Or, if from the later part of the robot-wars, a guard tower. Spy cautiously checks each room, and finds a small kitchen and several cots. Promising.
The lookout is well defended from the downriver side, as the red cliffs fence in a floodplain that provides visibility for miles. The rock is a sharp, coral-like substance—inhospitable to anyone who would dare climb to where the wastes suddenly drop off into arable land.
Spy is just starting to examine the area below, where he thinks he sees the moving dots of an active human settlement, when he discovers that those on the floodplain are not the dam's only occupants.
Someone is whistling.
"No sudden movements, mon ami," Spy says to a man's back, having followed the noise to the last unchecked room and discovered its originator. "I warn you, I'm a very good shot."
Most of the time, Spy is completely willing to dispatch unknown humans, but in this case he appears to have caught his victim at an inconvenient time. Shooting a man in the back while he is relieving himself simply seems wrong.
The whistling stops. The man raises his hands above his head, then pauses. "D'ya mind if I zip up before you shoot me?"
"…Fine."
The man lowers his hands, a vwip sound echoes around the small bathroom, and he raises them again.
"Turn around," Spy orders.
The man turns. His gaunt and lanky, though for a reason Spy can't put his finger on, gives the impression he was like that even before the robot takeover. Still, there is a longknife attached to his hip; no one lives this long without at least a sliver of competence.
"How many are with you?" Spy asks.
"Just me."
"And how long have you held this location?"
"Held? From what?"
"Robots, other factions, whoever."
Scout, finally, comes scooting around the corner. "Yo! I heard talking, and- shit!" He spots the stranger, and fumbles for his sawed-off, mercifully not shooting anyone in the foot as he does. It's happened before.
The man grimaces, now looking down two barrels. "Few days, I think?"
"Then, since you're not particularly attached, you will not mind if we take up residence."
His face changes. "Oh sure. There's plenty of space, 'least four beds, plus the couch in the rec room. And you'll hardly even notice me, I don't make much noise."
"That is not what I meant," Spy says. "I mean that we shall be taking control of this base and you-"
"Hey, hang on a second," Scout says hurriedly, shaking Spy's shoulder even though he's told him a thousand times not to do that when he's aiming at something.
"What? " Spy hisses.
"If he's offering to join our team, why do we gotta kick him out?"
"Because he is a filthy bushman, and we do not need-"
"Don't we?" Scout eyes him seriously. "Look, we can't be scavenging full time anymore, and we just found a guy without a bunch of holes in him that's willing to hang out with us. Yo!" he shouts to the beanpole-shaped stranger. "Yo, pally, what's your name?"
"Uh…Mick."
Scout rolls his eyes. "Not that name, moron. Haven't you ever run into another scavenger before?"
"Mostly keep to myself…"
Scout cuts him off. "You don't tell people your name. You tell 'em what you can do. Scout." He points a thumb at himself. "Spy." He jerks it over his shoulder. "So. Who are you?"
After a moment, the man says, "Sniper," and tips his chin to somewhere behind the pair of him. They both look and see that there is, indeed, a sniper rifle leaned against the bathroom wall.
Scout turns to Spy with a look of triumph.
"Fine," Spy spits, jamming his pistol back into its holster. "He does seem…useful."
Sniper, having gone from hostage to valued member of the team within a few minutes, is only mildly perturbed by these developments. He shrugs, and says, "alroight then. Welcome to the cliffs, mates."
"You're awfully…cheery," Spy says. "Not at all concerned about welcoming two armed strangers into your abode?"
"What? Like I'd be worried about some bloke with a pea shooter and his kid?"
Scout, already having decided the conversation was resolved and descending on the boxes of ammunition in the hall, stops rummaging long enough to scoff.
"He is not-" Spy pinches the bridge of his nose. "Scout is my…responsibility."
"Sure. Whatever." Sniper shrugs. "Long as you lads can put holes in robots, I don't care what you're telling yourselves."