"Shit, shit, shit..."
A woman runs through the ruins of what was once Quincy. Her oversized coat makes her look like a bipedal deer, with a round, thick body and stick thin legs which are currently pumping as hard as they can to navigate the decrepit streets. Bullets tear into the ground around her, sending up plumes of dust and dirt, but she hardly minds them. As long as they aren't embedding into my flesh, she thinks, I have no reason to care.
She dives behind a wall, her breath ragged as she bends at the waist and attempts to pull oxygen into her lungs. Just a bit further. Just a bit further, and she is out of Quincy and can run to safety and not have to worry anymore about Gunners and their assortment of high-end weaponry.
It is, of course, unfortunate. She didn't quite see through what she had hoped to. Again. Instead, she grossly underestimated the sheer manpower of the people her targets surrounded themselves with and now she is paying the price. Again.
"Willow." says a soft voice. One that Willow recognizes all too well. She ignores it. She ignores the girl, 13 or 14 or so, long, wavy red hair and freckles and green eyes and a look of concern as she leans out to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the wall. "Willow, someone's coming."
Of course, Willow knows this. She does not need her to tell her this - she can hear gravel crunching beneath the feet of whoever it is who has followed them. She is simply waiting for the right moment, and then...
Suddenly, she spins and steps out from behind the wall, lifting her beloved lazer rifle and squeezing the trigger. A beam of searing red light blasts from the tip and puts a hole through a Gunner's chest – he looks to be maybe only a few years older than Willow. Too young to die. But Willow feels no remorse – if it is them or her, she is choosing herself every time. She takes a moment to down two more of his colleagues, before she turns and sprints toward the gate. She's close. So God damn close.
"We're almost there!" the girl exclaims as she runs at her side, matching her speed. Whereas Willow's choppy black hair is matted and stuck to her face with sweat, the girl's vibrant red hair seems to flow in the wind freely, almost ethereally. Willow grits her teeth, her eyes flicking up to a man on a rooftop. He is loading a missile into a launcher. Oh, fuck.
Her eyes dart around quickly as she looks for anywhere she can take cover. And she spots it - a hole in the wall of a building. She leaps through it and pushes herself against the opposite wall and covers her ears as she hears the sound of a missile whistling through the air. It collides with the wall she had just come through, blowing it wide open and sending debris hurtling toward her.
"Fuck, ah!" She clenches her jaw and grabs at her leg where a sizeable chunk of wall managed to hit her. She pulls in a shaky breath and pats her pockets quickly, before she finds a syringe. Psycho. She isn't exactly fond of chems or having to use them, but desperate times...
She injects the drug and feels an immediate surge of white-hot rage rip through her body – a sensation so intense that she can't even feel the pain in her leg anymore. She even considers sticking around to try and fight it out, but she thinks better of it even in her not-entirely-sober-anymore state and turns, ripping through the building until she finds a window on the opposite side to leap out of. Her aching feet collide roughly with the ground, and it seems as though her obstacles are as endless as the gunfire behind her. But, a couple of blocks later, she is out of Quincy. She doesn't look back - she simply runs and runs and runs until she is safely across the bridge and the gunshots stop ringing out through the air. And only then does she stop.
She collapses to the dirt and pushes herself against an old mailbox, her head falling back against the cold, green metal. Her breath is laboured, strained, but eventually, it slows. She swallows, and immediately notices how dry her mouth is. And how much her leg hurts. And how the little girl with the red hair and the green eyes and the pep in her step is now nowhere to be found. And this comforts Willow, if only for now. Because that little girl should never have been there to begin with.
Because that little girl has been dead for years.