Molly - Part 1

Chapter 28

He fished her body out of the midden. She was dead; this Casus was sure of. Her body was languid and while she might have once been pretty she was so translucent it was hard to see her as anything but dead.

He let her fall away. Sometimes he'd fish them out, to see if they couldn't be saved, but no one was alive that came out of downtown.

He pined for the dream world; it was the only world he could really make sense of anymore.

After gathering his things, Casus began up the street, a sharp incline compared to the rest of the city. Going up, his legs flared, and Casus was forced to stop and find rest beneath the canopy of an apartment complex. The rain came and went in soft showers, blending with the red lights and flares of electricity.

Then the fog came, and there standing in a green haze were three men, all dressed in dark garb. Casus immediately thought monsieur, but he couldn't find any gas masks or tanks or dogs and so figured they were squatters, no less dangerous but at least they weren't driven by blood-hunger.

Casus figured they'd seen him, so he stepped out into the middle of the street.

"Hey!"

They turned to him but didn't make a move forward. Confused, Casus began towards them. If anything they should be attacking by now. Their complacency put Casus on edge further than any gunfire; at least then he would know what he was dealing with. This was something different, and if the months had proven anything it was that normalcy was safest.

"That's far enough."

Casus exhaled, sliding a thumb through his belt. "You guys going somewhere?"

He could tell that one was a woman from her face, but for the most part they were so thickly-clothed and the world was so shadowed it was hard to make out any details.

One of them stepped forward and removed his hood.

She reminded him of the body in the river.

"We were trying to get to the border," she said. "I think we're lost. Not that it matters."

Casus nodded. "No hope, yeah?"

"Yeah."

Something moved off to the side. Casus spun around, scanning the rooftops. Meanwhile the woman had revealed a watch and was now parsing through the lights which erupted from the device, her fingers passing air until she shut off the mechanism and put her hood back on. Casus watched all of this in fascination, screwing his eyes back up only to find more nothing.

The three figures broke off, running in opposite directions, leaving Casus alone and even more confused than before. He dove beneath the closest piece of cover he could find: an overturned hovercar, gaskets burned at the tips. He fumbled around for his pistol, eventually drawing it and raising it with shaking hands. He spotted one of the strangers, holding in his or her hand a machine pistol, not so unlike the ones the monsieurs used.

The dogs came first. Three big rottweilers, foaming at the mouth, one with a large gash in its side. They began to sniff the air. They disturbed Casus moreso than the other rabid beasts he'd contended with. It was the eyes: too wide for a dog. He readied his pistol, waiting for the dogs to catch his scent, but they were dead before Casus could even process it, expertly destroyed by the trio's gunfire.

So when the monsieurs came Casus was not surprised to see them mobile, not wasting any time in sneaking through the shadows of the alleyways which spawned them and breaking glass to find more cover. Casus twisted, watched as one of the strangers came up next to a shop the monsieurs had broken into, aiming and then firing, the roar of a dying monsieur breaking through the quiet.