Chapter 2: suppression
The hum of the polymer cuffs was a living thing, a vibration in his teeth and bones. It wasn’t draining him anymore; he’d gotten used to it, a bad tune he couldn’t get out of his head. They thought it was a leash. It was just noise. The real problem was the compound fracture in his right leg. He’d felt it go when the big one had tackled him after the net, a sickening, wet snap that stole his breath. Every pulse of his heart sent a thick, nauseating throb up from his shin. The suppression dart was still a cold kiss of nothing against his ribs, muting the world, making everything feel muffled and distant.
They’d gotten sloppy. Overconfident. They’d left one guard, a kid maybe, who couldn’t stop shifting his weight from one foot to the other outside the metal door. Reese could taste his boredom like stale bread. He’d been listening to the rhythms of the place for what felt like days—the shift changes, the distant arguments, the generator coughing to life every few hours. He had a map of their complacency in his head.
He worked his wrists, not against the strength of the cuffs, but against the swollen, torn flesh of his own hands. He pulled, feeling skin tear, warm blood slicking the polymer. It was a lubricant. Agony was a tool. With a brutal, wet twist, he wrenched his left hand free. The gasp he let out was real. The guard outside went still.
“Hey,” the kid’s voice came through the door, uncertain. “You okay in there?”
“Peachy,” Reese croaked, his voice raw. He set to work on the other cuff with bloody, trembling fingers. The locking mechanism was simple. It was the constant hum that was the trick, confusing the nerves, making his fingers feel like sausages. He focused on the pain in his leg instead. Crystal clear. A brilliant, guiding star.
The lock clicked.
The door swung open, light from the corridor stabbing into the cell. The kid stood there, rifle half-raised, eyes wide. He saw the free hands, the blood, the unnatural angle of Reese’s leg. His hesitation was a lifetime long.
Reese moved. He couldn’t stand, so he launched from the floor like a broken-legged spider, grabbing the door frame and using it to swing his body forward. His good leg connected with the kid’s knee. He heard the pop, felt the bright flare of shocked, childish pain, and drank it down in a gulp. It was a thimbleful of water in a desert, but it was something.
He caught the kid as he fell, ignoring the scream, and yanked the rifle from his hands. He used it as a crutch, hobbling into the corridor. Alarms started then—a raw, blaring horn that felt like a spike through his temples. Every step was a calculated blasphemy against his own body. The broken bone grated, a white-hot saw in his calf. He fed on his own screaming nerves, on the distant, rising panic of the enclave members as they scrambled. It wasn’t good food. It was desperate, jagged, and it burned.
He turned a corner and there she was, the woman with the flint-chip eyes, Jorgen behind her. She raised a pistol, her face a mask of cold fury. “You should have stayed broken.”
He threw the rifle at her, a clumsy, one-armed heave. She dodged, but it gave him a second. He lunged, not for her, but for Jorgen. The tech fumbled for a sidearm. Reese’s claws were out, black and sharp. He didn’t go for a kill. He dragged them across Jorgen’s forearm, deep, through tendon and bone. The man’s scream was a symphony of pure, undiluted terror. It hit Reese like a physical wave, a surge of power that momentarily washed away the dizzying drain of the suppressor. It was a full meal, a hot, terrible feast.
He used the burst to spin, backhanding the woman with enough force to send her pistol skittering and her body into the wall. He didn’t wait to see if she got up. He was already moving, half-dragging, half-hopping down another corridor, following the memory of cooler air.
He found a service bay. And there, like a miracle, was a rugged, four-wheeled scout vehicle, its engine block still warm. The keys were in it. Of course they were. They were in their own fortress. No one stole from them.
Getting into the driver’s seat was an exercise in pure, grinding will. He had to lift his broken leg with both hands, weeping and swearing through clenched teeth, to maneuver it inside. He cranked the engine. It roared to life. He smashed his fist through the thin plastech of the garage door controls, and the heavy shutter began to grind upward.
Figures poured into the bay behind him. Gunfire rang out, pocking the metal frame of the vehicle. A round took out the passenger window, showering him with glass. He didn’t care. He slammed the vehicle into gear and stomped on the accelerator.
The scout lurched forward, crashing through the not-fully-open shutter with a scream of tearing metal, and burst out into the world.
Into the searing, hateful glare of full daylight.
It was like diving into a vat of acid. The sunlight didn’t just touch his skin; it dissolved him. The fragile power he’d scavenged from Jorgen’s terror evaporated instantly, leaving a vacuum that the sun rushed to fill. His skin screamed. His eyes felt like they were boiling in their sockets, vision blurring into a hot, white haze. The world became a furnace, and he was made of wax.
He couldn’t see. He could only feel the steering wheel melting under his grip, the agony in his leg becoming a distant, secondary concern to the systemic unraveling happening to every cell in his body. The vehicle swerved violently, tires kicking up gravel and ash. He fought the wheel, blinking against the photonic onslaught, trying to find the haze-shrouded ribbon of the old road.
He didn’t feel the crash. He heard it—a tremendous, final crunch of buckling metal and shattering glass. Then his head slammed into the steering column, and the world didn’t so much go black as it simply ceased to be.
Consciousness returned as a single, unbroken note of pain. He was upside down. Or the world was. Smoke, acrid and chemical, stung his nostrils. The engine ticked, hot metal cooling. The sun was still on him, a weight pinning him to the wreckage. He had to move. Move or dissolve.
He unclipped the shattered remains of his harness and fell onto the crushed roof of the scout. Glass cut into his palms. He kicked at the twisted door with his good leg, once, twice, a third time with a sobbing roar. It gave way.
He crawled. Onto the baking asphalt of the old highway, littered with the skeletal remains of other, older wrecks. The sun was a physical barrier, a wall of radiation he had to push through. He kept his head down, the hood of his torn jacket pulled over his face, but it was like wearing tissue paper against a blowtorch. Each inch was a mile. Each breath scorched his lungs.
He didn’t know how long it took. Time was measured in heartbeats and the crackle of his own drying skin. The road blurred into scrub, then into the broken silhouette of a pre-fall settlement. A gas station. One pump lay on its side like a fallen giant. The main building’s windows were gaping, dark mouths.
His legs, both the broken and the merely ruined, gave out ten feet from the shattered door. He finished the journey on his elbows, dragging himself over the threshold into the beautiful, blessed shade. The cool of the concrete floor was a kiss from a forgotten god. He rolled onto his back, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, his chest heaving.
He was days late. Roman’s three-day window had been a lifetime ago. The thought cut through the pain haze sharper than the suppressor dart ever had. Roman wouldn’t send a team. A dead asset was a useless asset. A missing asset was a liability, and Roman hated loose ends.
He had to check in. Had to make contact. Prove he wasn’t broken. Prove he wasn’t a liability.
With a groan that started deep in his chest, he rolled onto his side. The station was picked clean, a carcass. Empty shelves, toppled racks. The stink of old coolant and dust. He crawled past the empty coolers, his eyes scanning the shadows.
In a back office, behind a moldering desk, he saw it. A small, handheld CB radio, covered in a thick layer of grey dust. An antique. A hope.
He dragged himself to it, swept it off the desk into his lap. The plastic was brittle. The battery compartment was rusted. His bloody fingers fumbled with the latch. Inside, a corroded mess. Useless.
A dry, hacking sound escaped him. He realized it was a laugh. Of course.
He was about to hurl the thing against the wall when his eyes caught the glint of metal under the desk. A small, military-grade portable power cell, the kind used for field comms. It was old, its charge indicator dead, but it looked intact. A frayed wire with a universal adapter snaked from it.
His hands shook as he mated the adapter to the radio’s port. He flicked the radio’s power switch.
Nothing.
He slammed his palm against the side of it. A tiny, red power light flickered, then glowed with a weak, steady insistence.
The static that roared from the small speaker was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. It was the sound of a channel open. The sound of possibility. He leaned his head against the desk leg, breathing in dust and decay, and began to slowly, carefully turn the tuning knob.
The static warbled, shifted, broke into fragmented voices and coded bursts from other, unknown enclaves. He tuned past them, his ears straining for a specific rhythm, a particular encryption pattern he’d heard a thousand times in the background of Roman’s bunker. The bunker signal wasn’t broadcast widely. It was a whisper, a needle in the haystack of the damned.
He kept turning. The red light on the power cell began to dim. His own vision was dimming with it, the agony of his body a vast, consuming ocean he was barely keeping his head above. He had one shot. Maybe less.
Then he heard it. A thin, repeating sequence of digital pips, followed by a carrier wave hum. It was them. It was home.
He fumbled for the transmit button, pressed it. The static cut out.
“This is Asset… this is Reese,” he whispered into the grimy microphone, his voice barely recognizable. A cough wracked him, tasting of blood. “Code Vermilion. I am… off-site. Coordinates… unknown. Near the old…” He blanked, the name of the highway gone. He looked through the broken window, saw the fallen sign in the distance. “Near the Shell station on Route 9. The one with the… fallen dinosaur.”
He released the button. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the hiss of the carrier wave. He could picture it, the comms officer in the bunker staring at his console, the message routing to Roman. He imagined Roman’s face, that flat, analytical stare. Calculating salvage cost versus operational value.
The power cell’s light guttered. The radio’s speaker emitted a final, dying squawk of static.
Then a voice, clipped and utterly familiar, cut through the emptiness.
“Copy. Hold position. Do not transmit again.”
The signal died. The red light went out. The radio was just a dead plastic brick in his hands.
Reese let it drop. It clattered on the concrete. He slid down the leg of the desk onto the floor, his back against the wall. Outside, the sun blazed. Inside, the dark was cool and silent. He closed his eyes.
He’d checked in. The rest was not his problem. The rest was for Roman.
He let the pain take him, a tide pulling him under, with the ghost of a smirk on his cracked lips. The fallen dinosaur. Roman would know the place.
Roman would know the place. The thought was the last coherent string Reese’s mind held onto before the dark current beneath him pulled it loose. He floated in a void where pain was a distant, thrumming bedrock, present but bearable, like the hum of the old cuffs had been. Time didn’t exist here. There was only the cool of the concrete and the deep, cellular scream of his body trying and failing to die.
A sound grated against the silence. Not the wind. Not an animal. The crunch of boot soles on gravel, methodical and slow. Two vehicles, engines cutting, doors opening and closing with solid, armored thumps. He tried to open his eyes. The lid of one peeled back, gummed with blood and grit, showing him a slice of the dingy office ceiling. A shadow crossed the doorway, tall and broad, blocking the punishing light.
“Found him.”
Roman’s voice. Not through a radio’s tinny speaker. Here, in the room, carved from stone and dry air.
Reese tried to speak. A cracked, airless sound happened instead. The shadow moved closer, resolved into boots, tactical pants, a belt of gear. Roman knelt, his face coming into that narrow slice of view. He didn’t look concerned. He looked like a man assessing a piece of machinery that had been mistreated.
“Messy.” Roman’s eyes cataloged everything: the shattered leg, the puckered, inflamed flesh around the suppressor dart still lodged in his side, the tears in his skin from the cuffs. “I told you low profile.”
“They… upgraded,” Reese managed, the words tasting of dust and blood.
Roman didn’t answer. He moved his hands, probing the break in Reese’s leg with impersonal pressure. White fire. Reese arched off the floor, a strangled cry ripping loose.
“Compound,” Roman said to someone else behind him. “And he’s still got their tech in him. That’s causing half the systemic shock.” He looked back at Reese. “This will hurt.”
There was no warning this time. Roman’s fingers dug into the inflamed flesh around the dart, found purchase, and pulled. The sensation was less of removal and more of evisceration, a hook being dragged backwards through his insides. Reese’s world dissolved into a silent, white hole. When it reconstituted, Roman was holding the vile, blood-smeared cylinder between two fingers, examining its delicate, cruel barbs.
“Interesting,” he murmured, dropping it into a specimen bag a soldier handed him.
The next few hours were a blur of harsh light and clinical motion. Roman’s two soldiers—Reese recognized them vaguely from the bunker, a man and a woman with identical blank expressions—worked with brutal efficiency. They stabilized Reese’s leg with a pneumatic splint that hissed and stiffened around the limb, a pain so profound it felt cold. They cleaned wounds, applied foaming antiseptic that stung and smoked, hooked him to an IV drip of something cool and metallic that made the room swim.
Through it all, Roman moved through the gutted gas station like a force of nature, turning it from a ruin into a fortified hold. He directed the soldiers to drag shelving to cover the broken windows, scattering optical chaff that would blur their heat signatures. He set up a low-powered perimeter drone that buzzed softly on the roof like a mechanical insect. The sun, high and vicious, began its slow crawl across the sky outside. Inside, the space became a dim, shadowy cave smelling of medical alcohol and old dust.
Reese floated in and out, tethered to consciousness by the IV and the constant, grinding ache. Once, he woke to see Roman sitting against the opposite wall, cleaning his sidearm under the beam of a small, focused light. His face was all hollows and sharp angles in the gloom, utterly still.
“You came,” Reese mumbled, his throat dry as sand.
Roman didn’t look up from his work. “The ‘fallen dinosaur’ was a adequate landmark. Your signal died faster than we could trace it. Took six hours to sweep the grid.”
“Worth… the fuel?”
Roman slid the pistol’s assembly back together with a decisive click. “Your neuronal patterns are on file. The tech they used on you is new. Their location is now known. This was intelligence retrieval.” He finally looked over, the light catching his flat, grey eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Reese laughed, which became a cough. “Never.”
As the long, suffocating afternoon bled away, the quality of the pain changed. The sharp, screaming edges from the medical intervention softened into a deep, pervasive throbbing. The metallic IV drip had stabilized whatever was crashing inside him. The suppressor’s nullifying cold was gone, leaving his senses raw but his own again. He could feel the slow, hungry stirring in his gut, starved and attentive. The dark was coming.
He woke fully as the last bruise-colored light of dusk faded from the cracks in the shelter. Roman was crouched next to him, holding out a dense nutrient bar and a canteen.
“Eat. We move in twenty.”
Reese took the bar. His hands were steadier. “Bossy.”
“You have two functional limbs. Night is your advantage. We are not waiting here for them to triangulate our position.” Roman stood, his silhouette blocking the last of the light. “Can you stand?”
With the splint, standing was a theoretical concept. Getting upright was a three-stage operation of humiliating struggle, using the wall, a toppled desk, and finally Roman’s offered arm as a crutch. He swayed, his weight on his good leg, the world tilting. The plastic and metal cocoon around his shattered shin felt alien and immense.
“The car’s outside,” Roman said, his voice close to Reese’s ear. He didn’t sound impatient, just factual. “Thirty paces. You walk, or I drag you. Your choice.”
“I’m walking.” Pride was all he had left that wasn’t broken.
The thirty paces were a pilgrimage through agony. Each hobbled step sent jolts up his spine. He bit down on every sound, focusing on the cool night air hitting his face as they exited the station. The black, armored transport sat there like a beetle, its back door open. The two soldiers were already inside, the engine a low rumble.
Getting in was worse than standing. He had to turn, sit on the edge, and haul his braced leg inside like a piece of lumber. Roman pushed from behind, impersonal as a machine. Reese collapsed onto the bench seat, sweat drenching him, breathing in sharp, ragged gasps. Roman circled the vehicle and slid into the passenger seat up front.
“Go,” he said.
The transport moved, tires crunching over debris, then finding the smoother decay of the old highway. They drove in silence, the interior a pool of dim instrument lights. Reese watched the wasteland scroll past the window, a monochrome tapestry of shadows under a star-flecked sky. The hum of the engine, the rhythmic vibration, the simple fact of moving… it felt like escape. The hunger in him yawned, tasting the clean night air filtering through the vents.
He must have dozed. The explosion wasn’t a sound so much as a sudden, violent reordering of the universe.
A blinding white flash erupted from the road ahead. The transport lifted on one side, then slammed down. The world became a violent carousel of screaming metal, shattering glass, and centrifugal force throwing him against the harness. He was weightless, then crushed. The shriek of tearing alloys deafened him.
Impact.
Silence, ringing and absolute, pooled in the wreckage.
Smoke. The sharp, toxic stink of prometheum fuel and cooked electronics. Reese hung sideways from his harness, the transport on its side. His head swam, a new, hot pain radiating from his shoulder. A groan came from the front. One of the soldiers was moving, softly swearing.
Roman’s voice cut through the haze, steady and hard. “Status.”
“Ambush,” the female soldier coughed. “Roadside mine. Predictive. They knew the route.”
“Eyrich is dead,” the male soldier reported, voice tight.
Reese fumbled for his harness release. His fingers were clumsy. Across from him, the soldier named Eyrich was slack, his neck bent at an impossible angle. The sight was strangely mundane. A complication.
“Get out,” Roman ordered. He’d already kicked his door open, the panel groaning in protest. He stood on the angled side of the vehicle, a pistol in his hand, scanning the dark ridges surrounding the road. “They’ll be closing in. Reese, move.”
Reese got the harness loose and fell onto the side window, now a wall of cracked glass. He pushed himself up, using the bench for leverage. His braced leg was a dead, heavy thing. The soldier hauled him up and toward the ragged hole where the back doors had burst open. They tumbled out onto the scarred asphalt.
The night was cold and eerily quiet now. The wreck of their transport burned with a soft, wasteful roar, casting long, dancing shadows. In its light, Reese saw the other vehicle, a lighter scout model, crushed under a fallen pylon fifty yards back. A secondary trap.
Roman was beside him in two strides. “Can you run?”
“What part of ‘compound fracture’ was ambiguous?”
“Then we walk,” Roman said, hauling Reese’s arm over his shoulders. “That way.” He nodded toward a fissure in the rock face lining the road, a dark scar that promised cover. The surviving soldier took point, her rifle sweeping the darkness.
They abandoned the light and the heat of the wreck. The road gave way to scree and dust, each step a jarring negotiation. Reese concentrated on moving his good leg, on bearing down on the pain, on being a weight for Roman to carry rather than a dead one. Shouts echoed behind them, disorganized but getting closer.
The fissure was a crack in the world, narrow and smelling of damp stone. They plunged into its deeper dark, single file. For a hundred yards, it was a limping, desperate scramble. The fissure opened suddenly into a wider canyon, a sheer rock gullet with a slit of starry sky high above.
Roman stopped, listening. The shouts were muted now, confused by the acoustics. The soldier lowered her rifle, breathing hard. “They’ll fan out. They have the numbers to sweep.”
“We need deeper cover before light,” Roman said, his voice low. He looked at Reese, his face a mask of shadow. “A cave. A pipe. Anything.”
The march became a grim shuffle. The canyon floor was treacherous, littered with boulders and dry, brittle scrub. Every hidden dip threatened to buckle Reese’s good knee. He walked through a haze of pain, fed only by the cold fear of the soldiers behind them and Roman’s rigid, unyielding presence beside him. It was thin sustenance. It wasn’t enough.
After an hour, the soldier pointed. “There. Up that rise.”
A darker patch in the canyon wall, an overhang that hinted at a recess beneath. It wasn’t a cave. It was a shallow scoop in the rock, maybe ten feet deep. But it was back from the canyon floor, shielded from view. It would have to do.
They climbed. It was a brutal, final exertion. At the top, Reese collapsed onto the sandy stone, his back against the cool rock wall. The soldier took a position at the edge, watching the canyon below. Roman stood in the mouth of the shallow recess, looking east.
Reese followed his gaze.
A thin, greasy line of yellow was seeping into the lower edge of the sky, leaching the stars. Not the full, blistering dawn. Not yet. But the advance guard. The warning.
He looked at the shallow scoop of rock that was their shelter. He looked at the brightening seam on the horizon. The math was terrible and simple.
“It’s not deep enough,” Reese said, his voice quiet.
Roman didn’t contradict him. He just kept staring at the coming light, his jaw tight. The soldier looked back at them, her expression, for the first time, uncertain.
The hunger in Reese’s chest tighted, not with need, but with a cold, familiar dread. They were out of time, out of road, and out of darkness.