Elemental

Chapter 1

Christine Cooper had been trying to gut the deer she'd just killed when a two-headed wolf caught the scent. With her hands deep in the dead carcass, she didn't have time to grab her gun before the wolf lunged at her. It got in a good swipe before Bane, her unnaturally bulky dog, jumped to her rescue. They tumbled along the ground; the wolf not much bigger than Bane. But with two heads on each of the wolf's shoulders, Bane had more to block. Christine reached for the gun at her hip and shot at the wolf, careful to avoid Bane. She'd been taught to shoot a gun at six and with ten years of training under her belt, she rarely missed.

She got it in the eye and it roared, kicking Bane off of him. It stumbled to its feet and snarled at her. Christine shot it again, in another eye and then its chest. It barely faltered and determinedly kept moving towards her. Throwing her useless gun aside, she raised her hands. Roots shot up from the ground and wrapped around the wolf. Christine clenched her fists and the roots crushed it with several sickening cracks. The dead body slumped to the ground and she spat blood on the ground, one of the lovely side effects to using her powers.

If Christine could help it, she never used her powers. She didn't want to end up like the dictators who used their abilities to level cities when the world didn't bow to their whims. That was the reason she went on the run. Someone had seen her using her abilities when she was ten and told the Raiders, the dictators' lapdogs. Her dad had died so she could escape and she's been on the run ever since. So, she survived for him and lived without gifts for her conscience. Her conscience was already damned for many other reasons.

Christine pulled off her pack, wincing as it slid across her wound. She ruffled through her pack and cursed when she realized that she had used up her first aid kit. Pulling out a shirt, she used it to wrap around her bicep and part of her shoulder. The scratch was long but not too deep, she'd be able to make a quick trip into town. She pulled out her coat and shrugged it on, hiding her face with the hood. It was starting to get cold, so a girl with the hood of her coat up and a scarf covering part of her face, wouldn't raise much alarm. Bane walked up to her and nudged her chest, letting out a small whimper.

"I'll be all right, boy," she smiled, scratching behind his ear. "But you've got to wait here for me. You know the drill."

Christine had met Bane a few months after she had gone on the run. He wasn't nearly as big then, he had been the size of an average dog, well what used to be considered average. Average animals and their size as well as biology had been corrupted before Christine had been born. Labs had started getting less cautious when it came to getting rid of their nuclear and chemical waste in their race to stop global warming and it had been detrimental to animals. Those that weren't killed were mutated. The mutations weren't always bad, it usually just enhanced. It made the most intelligent animals even more intelligent and the most aggressive animals even more so. It was their bodies too that enhanced but not in a consistent way, no two animals looked the same anymore, what enhanced depended on what and how much of the waste of consumed, let it be Sigon or Haizene. The dictators took over not long after that, so the world had bigger things to worry about than finding out the logistics of the mutations.

Bane, with his German Shepard genes being enhanced, was extremely smart and loyal as well as around six hundred pounds. A constant companion that Christine didn't know what she'd do without. He looked at her with his deep brown eyes and sat down to show her that he knew what she wanted him to do.

"I'll whistle if I need you," she said before heading off on her own.