Ross didn't believe in auras, but if he had, then today The Slayer's would be black as ink.
The big man seemed colder somehow. Quieter, if such a thing were possible for someone who didn't speak. And instead of continuously scanning the ground passing beneath the helicopter, his eyes were fixed in the direction of White Sands, like it was the only place in the world that wasn't a barren wasteland.
Ross himself could not keep his eyes off the ground because an immense field of fireweed had blossomed overnight. Hundreds of thousands of the fast-growing plants had colonized the scorched earth in this part of Colorado, where Hell's forces had burned down the native vegetation seemingly just to make a wall of smoke that had been visible all the way to Denver. Psychological warfare, which made Ross nervous because of the implied intelligence behind it.
Fireweed was not named for its vibrant pink flowers, but because it was the first sign that an area was recovering from a wildfire. For the next five years these hardy plants would keep the topsoil from blowing away, return nutrients to the ravaged soil, offer shade to small creatures and fragile seedlings, while feeding bees, butterflies and animals alike. The plants were vitamin-rich, fire-resistant, and could reportedly even draw infection out of a wound. In a few years when the more delicate plant species began to return, these eight-foot giants would politely bow out until the next disaster.
Suddenly Thompson grabbed the binoculars from their hook over Ross's seat.
"What? What is it?" Ross tried to squint in the direction Thompson was looking. There was movement in the wildflowers several hundred yards to the east.
Thompson said slowly, "And I thought I'd seen everything."
"What?" Garcia craned his neck, his experienced hands keeping the aircraft on course in spite of his distraction. Philips also strained to get a look.
"Bear," Thompson said simply, handing Ross the binos and tapping the switch on Garcia's helmet that flicked the long-range viewing lens down over the pilot's eye.
Before the war, humanity had actually been doing a decent job of cloning and repopulating species that had experienced man-made extinction, like the North American brown bear, also known as a "grizzly" if it got big enough and old enough to have that stippled tan fur and classic hump of muscle over the withers.
Full-grown grizzlies could sprint almost as fast as The Slayer, but they couldn't maintain that speed for miles and miles. Still, this poor, brave creature was loping as fast as it could go with six Prowlers harassing it.
The Slayer thumped the ceiling of the helicopter.
"Yes, sir," responded Garcia as he turned the aircraft toward the besieged animal.
The Prowlers slowed their manic teleporting and sideways dashes when they saw a door slide open in mid-air and a man jump out, but they did not stop completely. Ross wondered if there had originally been more demons and the bear had killed everything but the slippery Prowlers. He'd like to think so.
They dropped The Slayer about fifty yards away and lifted off again when he waved them up out of Prowler range.
The bear took the opportunity to rear up on its hind legs and give voice to its frustration.
Even as big as it was – a ten-foot-tall apex predator belting out a tremendous roar that every human was hardwired to fear – the grizzly bear was no match for six Prowlers. Bears might have powerful muscles protected by thick hides and layers upon layers of fat, but they didn't have the opposable thumbs or grotesquely long arms of Prowler demons. And they couldn't teleport.
One of the purple monstrosities leapt in close and slashed across the bear's exposed belly with a single talon. Ross saw through the binoculars that the bear was criss-crossed with dozens of such painful, razorlike cuts. The animal's roar cut off with a pained squeal, and it dropped back to all fours.
Ross realized then that they weren't trying to kill the bear. They were toying with it. God knew how many hours it had been running as fast as it could, getting sliced to ribbons every time it tried to fight back.
The Slayer blew the head off that Prowler with a well-placed shotgun blast. The remaining five started maneuvering to keep the bear between themselves and The Slayer.
"Oh, shit," Ross said out loud, impressed in spite of himself.
"What?" Thompson asked as he set up his sniper rifle and Garcia tried to get a good angle to shoot from.
"They recognize him," Ross explained. "They're using the bear as a meat shield because they know him well enough to remember he won't shoot through an innocent animal to get them."
The Slayer had reached the scene, but his job was made more complicated by the fact that the bear was moving around so much, roaring and swiping, making lunges at its tormentors and coming oh-so-close to hitting them back. Thompson took his rifle off the tripod and slid the door shut again. "Can't get a clear shot."
The Slayer also gave up on his ballistic firearms that might wound the animal he was trying to save, and extended his arm blade instead. For a moment they stood back to back, the grizzly and the marine, each slashing with their chosen weapons.
The Slayer removed most of one demon's hand, and the bear managed to daze another with a back-handed strike long enough for the marine to decapitate it. While he was doing that, though, a different Prowler sliced off the bear's left ear. The animal squealed again, tossing its head as if the cut were a fly it could shake off, and a long streamer of its blood painted a stripe across The Slayer's back.
Ross had a depressing realization: demon blood and tissue burned away; the bear's didn't. Which meant every time The Slayer had shown up in Denver or White Sands covered in blood, it was because he'd been close enough to a dying animal or human that their blood got onto him. One time he'd been so soaked in it that it looked like his entire suit was red. God, that must have been a literal bloodbath….
The frenzied jockeying for position of six large predators was quickly flattening down the fireweed field, making it easier to see the purple Prowlers among the brilliant fuchsia flowers that had already reached five feet in height.
Grizzlies' curved fangs and claws are more blunt than sharp, but "blunt" in the same way that a bullet is "blunt". It is the force propelling a bullet that makes that rounded bit of metal a threat, and this bear was close to a thousand pounds of mostly bone and muscle. The bear's own size and strength were working against it, however; it could not land its powerful blows before the Prowlers teleported away again. Those platter-sized forepaws tipped with four-inch keratin spikes were slashing nothing but air. The Prowlers were simply too fast.
The Slayer paused in mid-motion, poised like a kendo sword master about to chop through a bamboo target. Then he lunged at nothing, striking out with his blade. An unlucky Prowler teleported its cranium straight into the razor-like edge.
"He guessed!" Philips said in excitement. "How the hell did he predict where that one would teleport? Even I haven't been able to find a pattern."
"Now that you know it's possible, should make it easier to figure out, no?" Garcia asked casually.
When the bear stood up to roar again, The Slayer took advantage of its stationary position to bring out his shotgun, blast a Prowler into chunks, then fire the hook into another and pull it toward him for a head-splitting blow.
Down to one.
Distracted by The Slayer dispatching its comrades, the Prowler made the mistake of turning its back on the grizzly.
The Earth mammal clamped its jaws onto the Prowler's upper arm and crushed it with less effort than a diner breaking open a crab leg, then ripped it off just as easily. The Prowler made that bubbling squeal and swung at the bear with its remaining arm. The bear swatted the demon's hand aside and sank the claws of its other paw into the joint between the Prowler's arm and body. Then it pushed down sharply, stripping the ligaments and muscle fibers clean off the bones.
Knocking the demon to the ground with both forepaws, the animal leaned hard on its chest and fastened its jaws onto the Prowler's face.
Maybe the bear's leverage was hampered by how wide it had needed to open its mouth to fit the Prowler's face inside, or maybe the beast had a fractured jaw, but crushing the demon's skull took significantly longer than required. The wretched, armless thing squealed and thrashed until the very last crunch.
Ross went cold at the sight of an animal torturing another creature to death for revenge. That was a little too … human.
The Slayer fired a final round into the fourth Prowler's head because the legs had still been twitching.
The grizzly turned its tiny amber-colored eyes on The Slayer, who was the biggest threat now that the Prowlers were dead.
"Sir?" Thompson asked Ross as he aimed his sniper rifle.
"No," Ross ordered. "Don't shoot it. It's not like it can hurt him, and he just went through all that trouble saving it."
It lumbered toward The Slayer with strings of bloody saliva dripping from its slack mouth. There was too much bleeding for it to be a tongue or jaw injury; something deep inside the grizzly was badly damaged.
The Slayer put his gun away.
The bear charged him.
He retracted his arm blade.
Mere feet from the marine, the bear reared up again and bellowed in rage, its gaping maw painted crimson with its own blood.
The Slayer stood still.
The animal swiped at him, trying to take out his legs. Its huge claws screeched across the indestructible metal without even scratching the paint.
The Slayer put a hand up, palm out. The bear focused on it, seemingly mesmerized. He brought his hand slowly forward and rested it on the bear's forehead between its eyes.
The beast collapsed.
One of the biggest land predators in North America – possibly one of the last – struggled to lift its head. The Slayer knelt and slipped his right hand beneath its jaw for support. The animal's face was as wide as The Slayer's torso. Even from this distance, Ross could see pain and resignation in the way it was panting. Bright pink froth foamed out of its mouth. Aerated blood. Severe lung damage.
The Slayer laid his other hand on top of the animal's huge skull. Was he … petting it? Petting a grizzly bear like a dog at the vet?
The tension went out of the bear's body and it closed its eyes, seeming to enjoy the soothing touch.
"What are we going to do with it?" Philips whispered to him. "We can't get something that big into the helicopter, and –"
So quickly that Ross almost missed it, The Slayer slit the bear's throat.
All morning at White Sands, Ross could not stop thinking about the bear as it lay there, quietly bleeding out in a field of immortal flowers. He wasn't sure if it had been The Slayer's touch on its head or the surgical precision of the cut, but the animal had gone peacefully, almost happily, into the great beyond.
The Slayer had knelt there at its side for the better part of an hour. Making sure it was dead, Ross assumed. Was it possible he hadn't wanted even a fierce predator like a grizzly bear to die alone?
'I shouldn't be surprised,' Ross thought. 'He cared enough to round up dozens of lost pets and ask-slash-order Oppenheim to let refugees bring their animals. And there's no reason he should be too intimidated by a bear to offer it comfort.'
Coming back to the Forge with a sandwich that he probably wasn't going to eat, Ross halted at the sight of the physicist.
"Philips," Ross said in exasperation, "what did you do this time?"
His friend's sheepish expression was definitely related to the many strips of duct tape holding him to the wall like an upright mummy. He swung his dangling feet and stared at the ceiling.
"Philips?"
He sighed. "I got too close to the power source."
Bailey was quietly snickering over at his console. Tucker must be watching the video from his security booth and also having a good laugh at Philips's predicament.
"Come on, man," scolded Ross. "You know better than to touch The Slayer's things. Do I have to zip-tie your hands to your ankles every day?"
"But it's humming now! Don't you want to know why it's humming?"
Ross hadn't noticed yet because the vibration was so subtle, but there was a slight tremor in the concrete beneath his feet. Looking over at The Slayer fiddling with the Slipgate's jury-rigged control panel, Ross felt a preemptive pang of loss and knew instinctively that today was the day.
The Slayer was leaving.
Ross put away his sandwich and keyed up Oppenheim on his earpiece.
"Sir. I think The Slayer is about to switch on the Gate."
The Slipgate was twelve feet in diameter; a bare metal ring with flat sides that looked nothing like the elegant designs that various ARCs had come up with. 'I guess he doesn't feel the need to make things beautiful,' thought Ross, 'as long as they work.'
Striding quickly toward them and only halting when Ross took a step back to avoid having his toes stepped on, The Slayer held up a data token. It was one of the thick, elongated trapezoids that could hold entire libraries' worth of information. Ross put out his hand, and The Slayer placed the data in his palm.
Ross met his eyes through the murky visor. "Slipgate blueprints?"
He got a rare nod from The Slayer.
"Thank you." Ross was too depressed to put much cheerfulness into his words. "You're leaving, then?"
Another nod.
"Are … are you coming back?"
There were no words for the relief Ross felt when The Slayer nodded for a third time.
"When?" he asked eagerly. "Is there anything we should do while you're gone? Should we keep the portal open as long as the power doesn't run out? Build more Gates?"
The Slayer was done answering questions, it seemed, because he walked back to the Gate's homemade control panel and placed both hands around the circular edge, like someone peering down at their reflection in a sink full of water.
A shift in the constant vibration began. It rose and fell, started and stopped, got stronger and then faded to almost nothing, over and over again, while light blue runes scrolled across the console's surface.
"It's searching!" Philips said in excitement, struggling against the tenacious glue of the duct tape.
"Huh?" Ross asked. Bailey also cocked his head in question.
Philips almost shouted, "The barrier is Swiss cheese!"
"Okay, you're gonna have to explain that one for the kids at the back of the class." Ross indicated himself and Bailey.
"Think about it. Why would the barrier between dimensions – whatever force keeps alternate realities from intruding on each other – be uniform? Quantum foam, interstellar space, even time itself has places where it is 'thinner' or 'thicker'." He sighed when they still looked confused. "The dimension barrier must be weaker in some places than others. Easier to connect a wormhole to. The Gate is looking for one of those wherever he's going, so it doesn't have to use up all its power to punch through."
"Oh, so that's why Denver survived until he got here!" Ross exclaimed.
"Okay, what?" It was Philips's turn to be confused.
"If the demons want to open one of the big portals – not just the little one-at-a-time deals, but a large, stable one you can march an army through – they need to do it in a place with a big enough weak spot. That's why they always come in from the outskirts of the city; inside Denver the barrier must be too thick for whatever Gate technology they're using."
"Damn," Bailey commented. "You guys got lucky even before The Slayer showed up."
Ross tapped his lips, thinking. "I don't think it has to do with the altitude …"
"You'd be surprised at what might be influencing the dimensional barrier. Subatomic space is weird." Philips bugged out his already-large eyes for emphasis.
Their conversation was interrupted by an inaudible boom that made Ross's bones feel strange, and then the ARC's first-ever portal opened like a widening whirlpool.
It was beautiful. Soft blue light emanated from the glow around the dark disc's edges, and Ross imagined he could almost hear music. It felt nothing like the Hell portals, which even in freeze-frame looked like bleeding wounds in space-time. No, this portal … it was meant to be there. It always had. This spot, since time immemorial, had been waiting for the Gate to open.
Philips made a gleeful noise, and Bailey also smiled. They were feeling it, too.
The Slayer stood motionless with the blue-black swirl pattern of the active portal obscuring his visor.
"Uh …" Philips asked. "Is he gonna go through? Y'know, sometime today?"
Ross shrugged. "Does it matter? He said he'll be right back."
"He most definitely did not say he'll be 'right back'," chided Bailey. "He only said he would come back. Date to be determined."
"Like Jesus," Philips said cheerfully. "Two thousand years and counting." He was a devout Catholic, which made his statement even more chilling.
Ross, raised by a Buddhist mother and a Jewish father who were never very interested in their religious roots, frowned, trying to think back to his Comparative Religion course. He'd been rushed through his bachelor's degree while still a teenager and there hadn't been time to pay attention to every subject, especially if it wasn't science. All he'd really gotten out of the class was that whoever the ultimate being was, they would do the right thing whether or not Ross selected an official religion.
"Isn't there supposed to be some big catastrophic event when the Messiah returns?" Ross asked, combing through his sparse memories. "Like a worldwide apo…ca…lypse…" He slowly came to a halt.
Philips looked as disquieted as he felt. "Uh," said the devout Catholic, "I'm more into the 'how to be a decent human being' part of the book. I haven't read the end in a long time. Too depressing. Entire armies being wiped out, chaos and death and billions of people disappearing without a trace …" Philips also trailed off.
Ross was undecided regarding specific religious figures, but the hair at the nape of his neck seemed to believe in the metaphysical because it was standing straight up.
He cast an alarmed glance at Bailey, who shrugged.
"Don't look at me for an explanation," the agent said. "I'm Wiccan."
"Shinto," Tucker identified himself through the speakers.
"What, really?"
"Yeah."
"I never would have guessed."
"You don't have to be born in Japan to appreciate a well-thought-out belief system."
"True enough. Wow, four scientists and nobody's an atheist? That's got to be some kind of record."
"You know the old saying," Tucker reminded them. "There are no atheists in a foxhole."
"Yeah, but we all believed in the supernatural before the war. It's a little odd. Especially because we're all scientists."
" 'Supernatural' just means we don't understand the science yet. Let me tell you sometime about how the web of galaxies behaves like a neural network," Philips said. "It'll knock your socks off."
"You tried already. I fell asleep."
There was an awkward silence while they watched The Slayer, and The Slayer watched the portal.
"He doesn't look Middle Eastern to me," Bailey finally declared. "Not that you can see much of his face in there."
Ross sighed. "I cannot believe I have to say this to people who work with facts for a living: The Slayer is not the reincarnation of an ancient savior deity."
The Slayer turned his head slightly, as if someone had called his name from far away.
Ross's neck hair practically tied itself in knots.
"Oh, boy," Philips said in a tiny voice, and huddled inside his duct tape like a bug in a cocoon.
"You're not, right?" Ross asked The Slayer. "I mean, you're not some kind of god in human form. That would be silly." He laughed awkwardly.
The Slayer returned his attention to the portal.
Ross gulped.
"Oh, boy," Philips whispered again.
"I'm getting the heebie-jeebies," Bailey admitted. "Can we stop talking?"
"Yeah."
"Absolutely."
They fell silent.
Philips waited.
Bailey and Tucker waited.
Ross started to get hungry for that sandwich.
Oppenheim, who had been very quiet, finally asked, "What's happening, Friedmann?" The director had a video link, but that was limited to certain angles.
"Nothing, sir. He's just standing there. Maybe he's transmitting information to someone on the other side."
Slowly the big marine reached into one of his belt pouches and drew out an object. It turned out to be a small cube of clear resin with something suspended inside it. Ross couldn't be sure from way across the room, but it almost looked like a scrap of plaid cloth.
The Slayer stared down at the cube in his palm as if he were viewing a tiny hologram from a hand projector. After an uncomfortably long time, he put it away.
The big man looked around him, searching for something, and finally picked up a small metal washer that was bare steel on one side and painted black on the other. The Slayer rested it on the thumb of his closed fist and flicked it into the air, then slapped it down onto the back of his left gauntlet.
Ross tensed. Flipping a coin? Why would The Slayer be flipping a coin?
There was another uncomfortably long span, in which Ross and Philips and Bailey made I dunno, do you have any idea? faces at each other, and the marine stared down at his crossed hands.
Suddenly and without looking at the results of his toss-up, he threw the washer into a corner of the room and strode decisively back to the console. Touching the panel made the blue-black portal close like an iris, then expand again. Before it had even dilated to maximum, The Slayer stepped through.
"Uhhh," Philips said. "What do we do now?"
Over the speakers Tucker confirmed, "Security scans show he's no longer in the complex."
"Well," Ross said, feeling like a deflated balloon after a party. "He said he'd be back. I guess we wait."
"Yeah," Philips said, "but the question is: will this be a 'for the bus' kind of wait, or a 'for the second coming of Christ' kind of wait?"
"We don't have any way to influence that, so it's best not to dwell on it," said Oppenheim. "Tell Philips to get to work on the data in that token. Then I want you and Vera to –" Oppenheim's call was interrupted with Catherine's urgent voice in the background. Ross couldn't make out her words.
"Sir?" he asked.
There was a growing commotion on the other end of the link.
"He's here," Oppenheim said with forced calm. "He opened a portal into a maintenance closet in Fabrication and kicked down the door. Scared the hell out of Bruce."
"I'll bet." The Slayer hadn't been back inside the ARC since the evening of the NORAD incident, so seeing him pop out of a closet next to you would have been quite a shock. "Where is he now?"
"Looks like he's clocking out for the day. I must admit, I am very curious about what will happen tomorrow."
"You and me both, sir."
"Shit," Lizzie cursed, fumbling with the lock on the skunks' carrier. "Every damn thing I touch today is broken. Ow!" She hissed, showing Vincent the nail she had broken on the latch. "The sink's leaking, Charlie tripped me and I dropped a mug, I got ketchup on my jeans, your beautiful birthday present gave me a splinter, I just ripped off half a fingernail … Look, even my shirt has a hole in it." She lifted the hem of her plaid button-down to show him an inch-wide gap that was already starting to fray, the way that unfinished flannel edges are prone to do.
"Must have caught it on a metal corner," Vincent guessed.
"Perfect." She peeled off the rest of her broken nail and tried the lock again.
Even the Doors of Durin etched into the new library doors hadn't cheered her up. Running her hand over the pattern gave her a huge splinter, so they'd decided to get out of the house and take the skunks on a field trip. The babies needed to learn how to be wild. They couldn't stay in the bunker forever, and even a domesticated skunk like Veronica deserved fresh air and grass to dig around in.
Vincent pried her hands away from the cage. "Let me do that; I don't have long fingernails anyway. How about you collect some of that fireweed over there."
She sighed, trying to shake off her foul mood. "Sure, Vincent. Which part am I harvesting?"
"It's all usable when the flowers are young. The leaves can be made into salad or tea, the flowers into jam, and we can even eat the pith inside the stalks. Take my pocket knife and cut down a bundle as big as you can carry. Just be careful. Cut away from yourself, not toward."
She pushed her way through the man-high stalks and into the trees, going out of hearing range so her annoyed sighs wouldn't trouble Vincent as he tried to unstick the rusty lock.
Lizzie hadn't been back to her destroyed cottage since she'd seen it from down the street while helping Vincent salvage a few things from his old house. It had been clear that the structure had burned after collapsing, and books would have been the first things to go. There was nothing else of value in the rubble since she had very few possessions, no heirlooms and no jewelry.
What troubled her more was the destruction of Vincent's farm. The hand-built kennels, enclosures, tiny houses and play areas he'd built for what he called "the educated citizenry of Skunktopia" had been run over by tanks or charred by fire. Walking through the ruins had been disturbing until just this week, when the fireweed began blooming. It still looked like an apocalyptic wasteland, but one that the Earth was slowly reclaiming.
The fireweed was so high and so thick that she could have been completely surrounded by the adorable black-and-white creatures and she wouldn't know. Even now she heard a quiet rustling in the grass, and for the first time in months she didn't wonder if it could be a demon creeping up on her. She closed her eyes momentarily as a feeling of relaxation poured over her, like walking through the curtain of a warm waterfall.
Into the afternoon light stepped a tall figure in black and gold. He held a helmet in his hands like a bowl, overflowing with fireweed blossoms.
Now she knew why she'd felt so safe. Ayers had been nearby.
She smiled at him as he approached.
Ayers held out the helmet like a new neighbor delivering a casserole.
"Not exactly a bouquet, but I'll take it." She winked, accepting the helmet.
He grinned in satisfaction.
"What happened to Baton Rouge?"
He crossed his forearms in an X.
"Canceled?"
Ayers nodded.
She wrinkled her brow. "Too late, or no longer needed?" There was a third possibility she didn't mention: Delta-22 might have decided the government pay wasn't worth the risk.
No longer needed.
"Oh, that's a relief. But you still get paid, right?"
Sort of.
"Sort of?"
He crossed his arms in another X. "Profit," he said, and shook his head. They don't make a profit, so I don't get paid a whole lot.
"They only charge at-cost?"
"War," he confirmed. They aren't war-profiteering. Especially not now.
"Ah. Well. Now I feel bad for thinking they might be greedy bastards."
He chuckled silently.
"Come on." She waved him back the way she'd come. "There's a whole lot of cuties waiting to see you." Lizzie wrapped both arms around the helmet so she wouldn't start rubbing her hands up and down his arms or something.
"Guess who I found?" Lizzie announced as they re-entered the small clearing.
"Welcome back, son," Vincent said without looking. "You almost missed it." He unlatched the stubborn cage, and the excited skunks fell all over each other trying to be the first one out. "The kits' first introduction to the big, wide world."
He stood, dusted off his hands and took the pocket knife from Lizzie. Giving Ayers a friendly glance, he said, "You two watch the little ones. I'm going to harvest some more fireweed. We'll saute the leaves for spaghetti and meatballs. Trust me, it's delicious."
Ayers nodded politely, and Vincent clapped him on the shoulder as he passed. The squeaking and high-pitched grunts from seven skunks as they swarmed around the merc's feet almost drowned Lizzie out.
"So Vincent finally unveiled the library doors you two have been working on." She put down the helmet and grabbed a couple of kits so he could scoop the rest into his arms, then deposited hers with the rest. The babies jostled each other to be the first to nuzzle his face. Lizzie lifted Veronica into her favorite spot, draped around his neck like a living scarf.
"Did you do any of the woodburning? The Doors of Durin symbols are really impressive."
Ayers made a series of small gestures with his fingers and said, "Polish." No, I didn't do the woodburning. That was Vincent. I did the joining and polishing, though.
"He says every plank is joined with lengthwise dovetail cuts. No wood glue or nails."
He nodded in confirmation.
"It's really quite something to do a whole set of doors that way. Do you have a background in carpentry?"
A little, from when I was younger.
"Before you joined the marines?"
Yeah.
Vito and Vanessa asked to be let down, and Lizzie placed them back on the ground. They immediately pounced into Ayers's overturned helmet and began rooting around in the flowers, scattering dark pink petals everywhere.
"You guys," Lizzie scolded. "Come on. First the peanut plants, now this?"
Ayers shook his head fondly. Skunks will be skunks.
"I guess that's true." She gestured around them. "And it's not like we're hurting for wildflowers. I knew fireweed liked to grow in burn scars, but that's usually farther north or up in the mountains. Strange to see them down here." She ran her index and middle finger up a stalk. "Strange, but beautiful. Vincent says they're Earth's way of giving the middle finger to a destructive force." She grinned at him. "Even our flowers won't give up."
He smiled. I hadn't thought about it like that.
Vincent blew back into the clearing with a person-sized bundle of fireweed in his arms. "Hey, kids: who's hungry?"
She raised her eyebrows at Ayers, who nodded.
I could eat.
"I bet. You must have a metabolism like a blast furnace." She placed the two troublemakers in his arms and grabbed the cat carrier and his helmet. By unspoken agreement they sauntered slowly back to the bunker entrance, enjoying the simple pleasure of being together outdoors. "It's a good thing the company gives you rations," she noted. "You'd spend all your paycheck on food and have to sleep under a bridge or something." Lizzie turned slightly toward him as they walked. "You're not sleeping under a bridge, right?"
No.
"Does Delta-22 have barracks?"
Yes, but I have my own place.
"Around here somewhere?"
The other side of Denver.
"Lakewood?"
Yes.
"You have everything you need?" Vincent was frowning slightly. "Running water? Furniture? Electricity?"
Running water, furniture, sometimes electricity.
"Sometimes?" Now Lizzie was also concerned.
The power grid isn't so great in Lakewood. Still a lot of damage over there.
"Now I know why you spend so much time at our place," Vincent said knowingly.
Lizzie eyed her friend.
"I mean we're the ones with the big TV," he clarified.
"Ah."
Ayers nodded. I do like a good Buffy episode after work.
"Well, you'll have to show us your place sometime," Lizzie said. "Gotta make sure you're not living in squalor."
He raised an eyebrow. What if I like squalor?
"Well, then we need to make sure it's high-quality squalor. Only the finest rubble and downed powerlines for our favorite merc."
He grinned. Deal.
"It's settled then," Vincent declared. "Next week you're going to give us a tour of your ultra-fancy hovel, and we'll decide if it's wretched enough to meet our high standards."
You got it.
"So, Liz," the old man continued. "Is there anyone you'd like to do on your birthday?"
"Vincent!" she hissed in rebuke.
"Thing. I meant to say 'thing'. Is there anything else you'd like to do on your birthday?"
She glared at him around the merc's armful of skunks and growled, "Pasta will be fine."
Lizzie could feel Ayers's silent laughter in the air, and her cheeks went as pink as wildflowers.