Field Log: First Blood

Date: 8.23.2224

Location: Baytown Industrial District

This wasn't a conversation.

It was an ambush.

I'd barely made it beyond the old Red Rocket when two men came out from between a collapsed shipping container and the shell of an abandoned Corvega sedan. No greeting. No warning. No demand for caps. They weren't traders. They weren't looking to negotiate. They were Bay Runners, or at least they carried themselves like the ones I'd met before—patched armor, scavenged combat gear, faces wrapped against the dust. These weren't interested in tolls.

They wanted what I had.

I didn't have time to think.

Only to move.

One rushed with a rusted tire iron while the other circled wide with a pipe pistol, trying to drive me into the open. My Threshold Logic took over before fear could. The road disappeared. There was only distance, timing, and whatever the world had left lying around.

A loose cinder block.

A bent highway sign.

Broken bottles.

An overturned mailbox half-buried in gravel.

The first swing caught my shoulder anyway. I felt something tear. My arm went numb for a heartbeat. The second man fired once. The shot struck the Corvega behind me, showering the street with rust and glass instead of lead.

I grabbed the broken highway sign and drove it into the tire-iron man's chest—not enough to kill him, just enough to steal his balance. Momentum did the rest. He crashed backward into a heap of cracked concrete.

The pistol wielder hesitated.

That hesitation saved me.

A pair of half-starved stray cats burst from beneath the wrecked car, hissing and clawing at anything that moved. Startled, the gunman looked down for the smallest fraction of a second.

Long enough.

I shoved the mailbox into him with everything I had left. He stumbled, dropped the pistol, and rolled hard against the pavement.

I didn't stay to see who got back up.

That's another thing the road teaches.

Winning and surviving aren't always the same thing.

I ran.

Hard.

By the time I stopped beneath the rusted skeleton of an old loading crane, my shoulder burned, my ribs ached, and blood had soaked through my sleeve. Nothing broken, I don't think. Just enough pain to remind me I'm still alive.

When I finally caught my breath, I emptied my pockets to see what I'd managed to take in the scramble.

Twenty-three bottle caps. A handful of .38 rounds I still can't use. A faded photograph of a family I didn't recognize.

I turned the photograph over.

Nothing written on the back.

I put it away anyway.

The caps went into my pocket.

Yesterday they belonged to somebody else.

Today they're part of what I carry.

My shoulder was still bleeding.

I started walking.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel