Chapter 16: left behind

The convoy pushed past the barricade, but not far.

Three hundred meters down the road, the lead truck’s engine coughed, sputtered, and died. Then the second truck groaned to a halt, acid-eaten holes in its hull leaking coolant in pale green streams. The dogs had done more damage than anyone realized. Their acid hadn’t just scarred the armor. It had chewed through the wiring beneath.

"Full stop!" Darwin’s voice crackled over the bracelets. "Engineering, assess. Everyone else, hold position."

The soldiers moved fast, popping panels and pulling wires. The recruits were told to stay near the trucks. The red grass hissed around them on all sides, flexing toward the body heat of sixty people like fingers reaching for warmth.

It was the first real silence the convoy had known since the barricade. And silence, out here, felt worse than screaming.

---

They burned the dogs.

It was standard protocol. Mutated creatures carried bioenergy residue, and leaving corpses in the open could attract scavengers. The soldiers stacked the bodies in a shallow pit and set them alight.

Gio watched from a distance, arms crossed. The stench was unbearable, even through the filter mask. Melting hide. Boiling acid. Something sweeter underneath, like burnt sugar.

He was about to turn away when one of the soldiers froze, crouched beside the pit with a metal hook in his hand.

"Commander," the soldier called, his voice tight. "You need to see this."

Darwin approached. So did a few of the recruits, drawn by the tone.

The soldier pointed his hook at the side of the nearest dog carcass. The fire had burned away the outer layer of hairless, glistening skin, revealing the dark flesh beneath. And there, carved into the meat, was a symbol.

It wasn’t a mutation. It wasn’t a scar from some territorial fight. It was deliberate. Deep. Burned into the skin with something hot and sharp, long before the dog had died.

A circle with three lines cutting through it. Like an eye with talons.

Another soldier dragged a second carcass forward. Same symbol. And a third. And a fourth. Every single dog bore the same mark, branded into the same spot on the flank.

Someone had marked these animals.

"Commander," the soldier said quietly. "These weren’t wild."

Darwin stared at the burning pile for a long time. His bionic hand clenched and unclenched at his side. The firelight danced across his face, and for the first time since Gio had met him, the commander looked worried.

"Burn them all," Darwin said finally. "Don’t photograph. Don’t log. Burn every one of them until nothing’s left."

The soldier hesitated. "Sir?"

"That’s an order."

The fire roared higher. The soldiers stepped back. No one spoke.

Gio glanced at Kojiro. The older man’s lazy grin was gone. His eyes were fixed on the flames with an intensity that made Gio uneasy.

’He recognizes that symbol,’ Gio thought. ’Or he’s seen something like it before.’

But Kojiro said nothing. He just watched the fire, and the fire watched back.

---

The repairs took three hours.

Three hours of sitting in the red grass, of watching soldiers solder wires and patch holes while the wind hissed through the blades and the sky hung low and bruised. Three hours of waiting for something else to come.

Nothing came. That was almost worse.

Gio found a spot near the rear of the second truck, his back against a tire, his legs stretched out. His Bioenergy had climbed to 84% during the downtime. The recovery was slow, steady, like a tide filling a basin. He watched the number tick upward and tried not to think about how close he’d come to running dry.

’If the pack had been bigger,’ he thought. ’If there had been one more dog. I would have hit zero. And at zero, I’m just a man with a plasma handgun.’

The thought didn’t comfort him.

"Mind if I sit?"

Melody dropped down beside him without waiting for an answer She looked exhausted. There were acid burns on her left forearm, small white blisters that the medic had salved but not fully healed.

They sat in silence for a while.

"You did good back there," Gio said eventually.

Melody shrugged. "I almost died doing that good."

"But you didn’t."

"Almost counts, Gio." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "Almost counts out here."

Another silence. The grass hissed. Somewhere down the line, Blaze was laughing about something, his voice rough and too loud, trying to fill the quiet with noise.

"I didn’t volunteer because I was desperate, you know" Melody said suddenly.

Gio looked at her.

"Everyone else had a reason. You were running from that gang. The prisoners were sentenced. Lloyd was probably sent by his family to prove something, aristocratic bullshit. Kojiro..." She trailed off. "I don’t even know what Kojiro’s reason is. But me. I wasn’t running from anything. Not at first."

"Then why?"

She was quiet for a long time. Her tail flicked once. Twice.

"I grew up in District Sina," she said. "Top ring. Climate-controlled towers. Clean water. Real food that didn’t taste like cardboard. My parents were on the city planning committee. But they weren’t like the others up there. They actually cared about what was happening beyond the walls. Beyond Sina."

Her claws extended slightly, digging into the dirt.

"They pushed for resource redistribution. For the outer districts. Maria. Rose. They wanted to open supply lines, improve infrastructure, give people in the slums a reason to believe the city hadn’t forgotten them. The upper council called them idealists. Their competitors called them threats."

She paused. Her ears flattened.

"Three months ago, my parents were driving home from a district meeting. A maintenance truck lost control on the elevated corridor. Crashed straight into their car. Official report said it was a mechanical failure, brake malfunction. A simple tragic accident."

Her voice went flat. Reciting. Like she’d read the report so many times the words had lost their edges.

"Except I was in the car. I was in the back seat. And I saw the truck’s driver step out before the collision. He wasn’t driving. He’d already jumped. The truck was remote-guided."

Gio’s jaw tightened.

"They called it an accident," Melody continued. "A memorial was held. Flowers were sent. Condolence notes from the very people who ordered it. And I sat in a hospital bed with a fractured spine and three broken ribs, and I knew. I knew it wasn’t over. They’d killed my parents because they feared change. And I was the only one left who could challenge that."

She looked at Gio. Her eyes were green, bright, and hard in a way he’d never seen before.

"So I did the only thing that kept me alive. I ran. Not toward safety. I ran toward the one place where no political faction could reach me. The one place where it didn’t matter who my parents were or what they’d believed. Out here, in the wasteland, I’m just another recruit. Just another body between the city and the end of the world."

She laughed, short and sharp. "My uncle called me insane. Said I was throwing my life away. That I should stay hidden. Let the lawyers handle it. But lawyers in Sina work for whoever pays them more, And whoever paid to kill my parents was paying very well."

She pulled her knees tighter. "So I chose this. Not because I wanted to be a hero. Because the alternative was waiting in a room for the next ’accident.’ And I decided I’d rather die in the apocalypse on my own terms than be murdered quietly in a car on someone else’s."

Gio stared at her. He thought about his own choice. The gang. The fire. The truck. He’d been running too. Just from something smaller.

But Melody had been running from people who wore smiles and sent flowers and called murder an accident. And she’d looked at that, and she’d walked straight into the wasteland because the monsters out here, at least, didn’t pretend to be anything else.

"That’s not insane," he said quietly. "That’s the bravest thing I’ve heard."

Melody blinked. Then she looked away, and he could see her ears twitch, embarrassed. "Don’t get sentimental on me."

"Too late."

She swatted his arm, gentle, and they sat in the hissing quiet, watching the fire burn the dogs.

A few meters behind them, half-hidden by the truck’s rear panel, Lloyd stood motionless. He’d come to check on the repairs. He’d heard everything.

He thought about his own family. The Vanworth name. The expectations. The quiet, polite pressure to be something he wasn’t. He’d never had a target on his back. Not like Melody. But he understood, suddenly and viscerally, what it felt like to be trapped in a life someone else had designed.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He just stood there, his hand resting on the truck’s dented hull, and looked at his own reflection in the scratched metal.

Then he turned and walked back toward the convoy, and something in his posture had changed. Not much. Not enough for anyone else to notice.

But Gio noticed.

---

The convoy rolled out as the sky darkened.

They found the second barricade two hours later.

This one wasn’t like the first. The first had been built with purpose, welded together, designed to stop. This one had been built to hold. Reinforced. Layered. Desperate.

And it had been torn apart.

Not cut. Not burned. Torn. Massive claw marks gouged through the welded steel plates like they were wet paper. The rebar spikes were bent backward, flattened against the ground. An entire section of the barricade had been ripped free and hurled thirty meters into the red grass.

The convoy stopped. No one spoke.

The soldiers dismounted, weapons raised. Darwin walked to the wreckage, his boots crunching on twisted metal. He crouched beside one of the claw marks and ran his bionic fingers along the grooves.

The grooves were wider than his arm.

"These came from the other side," a soldier whispered. "Whatever did this wasn’t trying to get in. It was trying to get through."

Darwin stood. He looked down the road, into the deepening dark, where the red grass stretched to a horizon that glowed faintly with something that wasn’t sunset.

"Commander," the soldier pressed. "Should we—"

"We move forward."

"Sir, with respect, look at this. Whatever made these—"

"I said we move forward."

The words came out flat and final, but Gio saw it. The way Darwin’s bionic hand trembled. Just once. Just barely.

The convoy rolled on, into the dark, into the red, into whatever waited beyond the second barricade.

And behind them, the torn steel cooled in the wind, its claw marks filling slowly with rust and shadow.