NationStates Jolt Archive

[OOC]: I'm fine with people getting involved in this, but I'd like a quick OOC note (or TG etc.) concerning involvement before I have people jump right in.


A stubborn wind blew a light rain as a man struggled to make a camp. He was tall, armed, and hooded with a gas mask hanging loosely around his neck. The man paused for a second to lament over what a sad scene the dawning sun would create, but he was quickly back to work. Fumbling inside pockets of a khaki coat, covering a kevlar vest, his grubby hands produced a small number of iron nails.

He used a blunt rock to hammer some thin sheet steel and some wood together, creating a wonky lean-to that would keep the rain off him while he slept. He had been running all night, and needed some sleep and some food.

The rain grew more intense, but it no longer bothered him now the shelter was up. As the morning grew lighter and lighter he drifted off to a half-sleep, expecting to be interrupted at any moment. From here it was possible to see miles into the distance, but he did not want to look.

The exhausted traveller winced as he rolled over, disturbing the bandages on his leg. No matter how many times the sun rises on this place, he thought, it will always be a wasteland.


"This is Sergeant Ammit on patrol in sector 6. No sign of the rebels, the rest have escaped."
"How many did you bag?" came the squawk over the radio.
"16 dead, no prisoners."
"Good, I hate prisoners. You find anything interesting?"
"Negative, not a thing. Definitely rebels though."
"Any casualties?"
"Yeah... Heller, Crofin and Merret are all KIA. We've left the bodies, but we managed to keep most of the equipment. We're pretty sure that Willen is dead... he's certainly missing but I don't think they took him prisoner."
"In that case keep an eye out for him. No injuries?"
"Well... Arvis took a shot to the head, but it just clipped him on the side. Went straight through his helmet too; the guy is one tough bastard. Took three of us to hold him down while Smith put a bandage on it."
"Can he still fight?"
"Is he still breathing? Of course he can fight, he's an AMC Marine!"
"Then why don't I get that dedication from the rest of you?"
"Because we aren't as damn crazy as he is. Ammit out."

Sgt. Ammit sighed and put the radio back onto his belt, signalling for the other soldiers to form up and move out. Soldiers of the Agrandov Marine Corps, they were barely distinguishable from any group of bandits in the Yellow Zone. Their weapons weren't even standardised, and their uniforms varied considerably according to when they entered service. The older ones has the older gear. The younger ones had the newer stuff, but nobody had thought to tell the older ones. The youngest of the bunch had the old stuff also, because new gear is expensive and hard to come by.

The Yellow Zone is one of the 5 zones in Agrandov. Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. Each one progressively less inhabitable than the last, with Blue no paradise to begin with. Red is in the centre of the nation, like a cancerous growth, uninhabitable for all but the cockroaches. Like the rings of a rotten onion the other zones surround it, getting more inhabited as it goes outwards. 35% of the nation, and around 10% of the population, lies in the Yellow Zone and beyond.

Since the catastrophe in 1987, the one event that turned a promising nation into a divided wasteland, it was a nation at war. In the Blue and Green zones it was a political war. Whose fault was the explosion? Who is going to fix it? But beyond the border between the Green and Yellow zones, where laws vanish along with currency, - and every other significant advance in the history of human society - it was a fight to survive. It was hard to tell whether the roaming factions were extremely large gangs or in fact small armies, but they were all fighting for their own ends.

To most of the people in the Yellow zone and beyond, the military was just another gang.


Nathan Ruthorn was the President of Agrandov, and the people loved him. Even his political rivals loved him, because no-one ever ran against him. Occasionally someone would try to kill him, but they wouldn't dare put it to a vote. He must be popular, otherwise there would be riots in the streets. And every time an advisor pointed out the fact that there were riots in the streets, Ruthorn insisted that this was not his responsibility and that other people were being paid enough to deal with his problems right now.

In reality, Ruthorn was only hated by the percentage of the population that recognised him as their President. The rest saw him as a nuisance, who was powerless to do anything other than send soldiers out into the irradiated zones.

"Have the measures been enacted?" he asked a short, spectacled advisor.
"Yes, President, all remaining personnel on border patrol have been reassigned to the Green-Yellow border." The man lied smoothly, the last of the border guards had been AWOL for weeks now. This way it would look like it was the President's doing, and if there was some sort of motive to it then people might think he was still in control.
"Send the message."

Nations of the World, specifically those who border Agrandov.

As of today, the Supreme Presidency of Agrandov has decided to adopt an extreme "open border" policy, and that from now on there will be no screening of any kind on our side. This is a notice for neighbouring nations to adjust their border guard accordingly, as from now on any and all crossing responsibility is on them. To those who do not border Agrandov, all civilian airports are now available for landing without restriction provided that the airport has been notified ahead of time.

However, the Agrandian Army and Agrandian Air Force will always be ready to defend our people from anyone attempting to take advantage of our humanitarian intentions.

President N. Ruthorn.

As with most of the world's excessively large and stupidly wealthy nations Crookfur had more than its fair share of leisurely rich, people for whom money was no object and work a dirty phrase, many were nobility but the vast majority came from new money families that had backed the right economic horses in the 2nd half of the 20th centruy. For these folks finding an exciting holiday was often a challange after all there was only so much one could take of tramping around the rain sodden hills and mours of Home Isle, being abused by a grumpy ghillie and waiting patiently to take your oen shot at a deer. In light of a new industry had arrisen, that of "escorted adventure tourism" or as it was more commonly known "wargasm tours" where a bunch of big freindlly men gave you a machine gun, loaded you into an APC and went tearing round some god forsaken hopefully former warzone.

To the companies providing these sorts of servcies the Agrandian anouncement was certainly of great interest and each major airport was shortly inundated with requests for information cocnerning runways, parking slots and arrival/departure times as well as more discrete feelers from Crookfur Arms' sporting goods department about opening up franchises dealing with small arms, ammo and body armour.

All that was not to say that the only Crookfur interests were economic in nature, the missionary arms of Orders Militant also saw the possible opertunities to spread the word and airports nearest the Yellow zone woudl receive queries regarding landing slots for somewhat large civilian registered strategic airlifters(I am assuming that what airports there were in the yellow zone are now either unusuable or only usuaal by the best defended military aircraft).

OOC: characters to follow including 3 very strange fellows...

The bar was like a myriad others dotted in and around the yellow zone of Agrandov. Dimly lit, build in the middle of nowhere, it looked as if only prayers and strategically placed gaffer tape were holding it up. inside, it wasn't much better. The musty smelling damp that covered the walls was consealed more by the depressingly low, flickering lighting than by the thin, peeling wallpaper. the floor was bare, and the boards bore the gosts which suggested that funiture once stood there. The empty bar was completed by the overwieght barman, who gave the impression of constantly wiping the same shot glass over and over again. This was not just a bar - like many others in the area, this establishment had been taken over by one of the many gun and drug running gangs who were the law in this area. The barman was equiped suitably.

The barman himself was no nieve fool with aspirations to run a chain. His baggy clothes concealed the two combat knives and the small handgun he carried. He watched the outlander suspiciously. The newcomer was the only person in the bar that night, and he drank alone in one dingy corner, positioning himself professionally out of site but with a clear veiw to the door. When his origins had been questioned, the stranger had replied with a stony silence, however, the barman's quick trained eye had piccked up the clear, unfamiliar tattoo on the inside of the drinker's left wrist. It was obviously military, but the barman, who had delt with almost all the devisions in the army at some point or another, failed to recognise it. However, from the way the stranger drank, and the fact he was still sitting upright and sober after the best part of a bottle of scotch, showed that he had been drinking for most of his recent life. "foreign ex-military?" the barman wondered, continuing to wipe.

The stranger had left the new republic as soon as news of the relaxed border controls had pieced his drunken stupor. He needed to rebuild his life, and no-one in the new republic had time for run down drunks like him. However, upon reaching Agrandov, he realised he could afford nothing but a small bedsit in the notorious Yellow Zone, and, when no jobs had presented themselves, he returned to drinking. He drank to forget.....


(any probs tell me)

[OOC]: Sorry for the delay.

The midday sun, pushing it's way with ease through the pathetic layer of clouds, uncovered the Agrandovian wasteland in all of it's sad glory. The few roads were unmarked, potholed, and subject to military checkpoints that were probably placed with a map, some pins and a blindfold. Light Ridge - a plateau central to the notorious Red Zone that had once been the epicentre of Agrandovian science - was barely visible in the distance.

The Orange Zone between was also visible, with it's dried-up lakes and scorched remains of forests. In the Yellow Zone it was less extreme, but equally terrible. The trees were blackened, twisted, dead -- leaning away from the Red Zone as if they were trying to escape.

The injured rebel screamed, sprang to his feet and stood there for a second or so. Then the pain in his leg set in, and the man promptly collapsed. He swore, climbing slowly to his feet once more and propping himself up with his shelter. Something wasn't right... it was a feeling in his bones. Smoke drifted from the burning wreckage of a tank - some distance away - and with a flood of sound and colour he remembered the previous night. Was he the only one alive?

The sense of unease continued, as the sound of rain clacking off his metal shelter became more distinct. How strange, he thought, there's not a cloud in the sky. And then it dawned on him, and the colour left his face as dread set in. The clacking sound, growing faster by the second, was not the rain, it was the Geiger counter on his belt. In his panic last night he must have stumbled into a pocket of radiation.

He started to run, in the direction he was facing as fast as he could. He had to find someone, anyone, who could help him find a doctor.

Dmitry Hilikov stepped off of his jet, taking a moment to look around at the wretched landscape. Oh well, he thought, it's just another paycheck. Dmitry Hilikov was used to battle-torn warzones, but nothing like this. On the flight in he nearly had a glimpse of the infamous red zone, before his pilot started to land. As he stood waiting for the APC that was to pick him up and carry them him to the meeting, he heard gunshots in the distance. His fingers tightened around the large, menacing pistol he kept of his belt. You can never be too careful, he thought.

He took a moment to look at his business card, Blackheart Defence Contractors, simply put they were mercenary's. As the APC rolled up and his client stepped out to greet him, Dmitry found himself hoping that this venture would be better than the last, and that it wouldnt cost so many lives.

OOC: reply please...

A stern looking man, ageing but proud in spite of it, glanced casually over a bank of monitors a rookie was intently explaining the situation. Figures, charts, and helpful icons danced across the screen, but neither eyes nor brain made sense of them. I don't need to understand this junk, he thought, that's what subordinates are for. He nodded, agreed, and waited for the Private to continue.

"Well, Sir, it looks like Ammit's squadron was on a routine patrol in sector 6... then on the return into 5 they were ambushes by a group of rebels-"
"How many rebels?" asked the General.
"We don't know, Sir, it could have easily been more than 20. Now, we gave Ammit the order to mop up and return to base... but it looks like he might have strayed into sector 7... maybe even 8. He's vanished, Sir."
"You better have a punchline to this joke, rookie, or I'm putting you on decontamination duty! He disappeared? When?"

The Private gulped, even if the General wasn't serious, the threat of decontamination duty had echoed around the bunker. Instantly, everyone else found something interesting to do, determined to not make this their problem.

"Yesterday Sir... he could be half-way into the Orange Zone by now if we don't act fast. We should-"
"Are you telling me what to do, Private?" asked the General.
"Sir, no, Sir!"
"I think you are, Private. You wanna find Ammit so bad? He must owe you money," said the General with a cruel smile.
"Sir, n-"
"Shut up. You wanna find Ammit so bad, then you can go look for him. You're now part of 71st Infantry... you'll be with a friend of mine... Sergeant Kennet."
"Sir, I don't want to look for Ammit in the Orange Zone, Sir!"
"Damn right you don't... I'll get someone else on it, maybe 83rd..."

The General wandered on, looking for someone else's day to ruin. It was a typical day inside Agrandov Military Bunker 34.


---


The barkeep made the same, smooth, sweeping motion with a rag on the bar top as the only customer was drinking. His boredom was short lived however, as the sound of an engine was clear in the evening air outside. It sounded big too... could be military. They were always big drinkers, but he'd had his bar redecorated a few times with anyone looking at them the wrong way. "Better safe than sorry," he mumbled, as he checked the 12-Gauge shotgun hidden under the bar. Then he remembered.

"Hey, you there!" he called to the stranger, "You look like the kinda guy who can handle himself... I know some people, they're looking for guys like you. They'll have to supply your own... tools... but they pay is good, and you'll get to meet the right people around these parts. What do you think?"


---


A stout, balding businessman disembarked the APC at the airport, and was immediately flanked by six armed men. These weren't your typical bandits, they were better equipped than even the army. Each carried the same model of modern assault rifle, with each one given modern body armour and all manner of equipment for survival in the Orange Zone.

"You must be Dimitry Hilikov... my name is Mr. Martin, it's good to finally meet you in person. I much prefer business face-to-face... there's a lot less room for error this way. I know what you're thinking. Until now, you've done business with an organisation called the Agrandov Fifth Liberation Army... and we're clearly much more than rebels. I'm afraid that the Liberation Army is just a cover, a puppet if you will, for our real organisation."

He stepped forward, and offered a hand to shake.

"Welcome to Stalwart PMC Inc., I'm sure you have a lot of questions."

Dimitry was surprised, but he did not flinch. He'd seen these kind of dealings before. It suited him, as corporations typically paid better and more regularly. He greeted Mr. Martin with a smile, "Pleased to do business with you," and then shook his outstretched hand.

They then climbed into the APC, and Dimitry immediately began talking business, as always. "I'll be needing to know just a few simple things," he said, "How many soldiers you need, how much and what kind of equipment and vehicles, where you need it delivered, how we'll be paid, and just out of curiosity for what purpose. No customer will ever be denied Blackheart Defence Contractors."

It was sunny, for once, in Sun City. The rain that had pounded down for much of the week had abated at long last, and Saturday morning had turned up fine, almost to the point of being uplifting. Smoke drifted lazily from the massed chimneys and funnels of engines and ships, hanging in a faint grey haze over buildings that still gleamed wetly in the blazing morning light, sending shafts of that light sparking through it with dazzling intensity that watered the eyes. On the whole, it was a beautiful day to be in this not-most-beautiful of cities.

The red-brick head offices of the National Imperial Railway Company Limited were no less majestic on that morning than any of the other mighty official structures that littered the capital. Their imported Midlonian brick still showed its original colour, now being steadily erased once more by the steady accumulation of soot that was the inevitable price of self-sufficiency in fuel; the meticulously-carved depictions of wisdom, pride, labour and honesty stared down from their carefully-cut frieze with beneficent faces, and the great brass disc, representing the headlamp of the engine charging forth from the double doors at the entrance, beamed into the eyes of visitors. The tiny, slightly chipped windows were, for the most part, flung open to greet the bright sun, and the workers inside were cheered almost enough to smile – though if asked, they would still moan about the wind, which did not share the sun’s leisurely warmth. Even the lettering, slowly disappearing beneath the accumulating soot (much of it the product of the Company’s own ever-growing fleet of locomotives and the giant factory that formed an integral part of the building), still stood out, tall and proud, beneath the great wheel that had always been the Company’s emblem.

Stepping beneath the great brick columns that formed part of the elaborate main entrance was a woman, at first sight no different from any other. In her early forties, somewhat petite (as was pretty well the norm), pretty in her way, though not a face that might launch a fleet; smartly dressed and businesslike in her movements, her hat perched on her shoulder-length auburn hair at a slightly jaunty angle, Amanda Locklear trotted up the front steps, bidding a sociable good day to those who she new and bestowing a well-mannered smile on those she did not, and bounded up towards the very uppermost floor of the twelve-storey building.

Today, she had a very special piece of information to deliver to her masters. Normally, her work was relatively limited; her position as Head of Overseas Development and Sales was a tough job in terms of combined workload, but all too often her work was meagre to non-existent, and she had wondered from time to time why she hadn’t been laid off during one of the lengthy slack periods that tended to prolong the interval between foreign adventures. Since their last job – the sale of some of the magnificent GD class Turbo-Garratts to the Spizanian Confederate National Railways – work had been scarce indeed. But today, she was going to change that. She breezed into the meeting she had scheduled with the uppermost echelons of the Company, smiling genially, and poured herself a morning coffee before unfolding a laptop computer from within her case and setting it down next to a small projector.

“Good morning, everyone… could you hook that up to the wall… thanks… now, when this thing’s booted up and the projector’s working, I have a little something to show you this morning.” She sat back down and waited for the machines to grind into action. “Ah, yes… here we are.”

Standing up, Locklear paced towards the screen and flicked a laser pen in its general direction. “This”, she intoned with a wholly false air of calm omniscience, “is Agrandov.” She looked at the faces before her and met, as she had expected, only blankness. “I’m not surprised that none of you seem to have heard of it; I hadn’t either until last week. However, for a quick background history, let us just say that Agrandov had a nuclear incident in the 1970s” – she had no idea that she was a decade out with her dates, but it didn’t really matter at this stage – “which converted much of the country’s central regions into an irradiated wasteland. The country has been gradually recovering ever since, but it’s still one hell of a mess, and for many years it’s been essentially inaccessible to outsiders.

She flicked her remote control, and the projector smoothly clicked over to showing a map of Agrandov, its five forbidding zones delineated in garish shades of blue, green, orange and yellow. “As you can see, Agrandov’s government adopted the simple measure of dividing the land into five ‘zones’, radiating from the centre where the disaster occurred, the outermost being the most and innermost the least habitable. From what I’ve researched, the state of play is pretty chaotic; the Orange and Red zones are essentially devoid of life, the Yellow is riven by internecine warfare, and the Green and Blue zones are pretty much run minus the benefit of law or politics in the sense with which we’re familiar.”

Locklear paused and looked around the assembled heads, trying to gauge their reactions so far. Most still seemed blankly indifferent, their poker faces perfected by years of practice and experience gained in stultifying boardroom conditions such as these. On one or two countenances she could see the beginnings of decided derision, and on a few more that little bit of interested curiosity that might be critical if this idea was to be pushed through. Not wishing to lose them, she forged ahead.

“You might, then, be wondering why all this is of any interest to us. The answer is simple: expansion.” She looked around them again, letting the word hang in the air for a few seconds, letting it sink slowly into their minds and begin to simmer. “We are, after all, not confined to these isles, people. Agrandov is a hell-hole, to be certain; but it’s a hell-hole in desperate need of investment from overseas sources. In blunt terms, we have a hell of a lot of money to throw at a railway network in Agrandov and an equal sum of money to be made from it.” Locklear advanced her projection with a deft flick of her braceleted wrist, showing the fields of gas and oil hypothesised to lie somewhere in the deadly Orange zone, along with areas of other potential wealth – bauxite, iron ore, timber; all materials eminently amenable to rail movement. “There are, if we can find investors to extract them, large reserves of material in Agrandov. There are also a significant number of people there, and people need to be moved.” Again Locklear flicked the projector on, showing further the potential for lines shifting people to and from cities and resources. Finally, she shut the humming projector off entirely.

“In addition, we have another factor working to our advantage.” She placed her slim hands on the table, facing the backs of her wrists outwards – it made people trust you more, or so she’d read – and leaned forward, casting half of her face into semi-shadow. “The government out there is powerless, but also essentially spineless. Put simply, if we were to make them an offer of low-cost rebuilding, with high costs later, there’d be surprisingly little they could do about it. It’s my opinion that, especially if we were to unify our efforts with publicity spread among the remaining population in the habitable zones, we could effectively force the government to pay us over the odds for the privilege of having an effective infrastructure out there. A captive market and moreover a captive investor.” She leaned back again, standing straight in front of the blue sky. “And even if not, there’s no reason why the entire venture can’t be built cheaply and strictly for profit at first, until we’re sure of their compliance.” Locklear examined their countenances again, and was concerned to see looks of hesitation on many of them. She’d have to do more persuading now; but she didn’t allow it to bother her, and instead nodded, smiling, to the Director, and re-took her seat. Now the real decision-making began.

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Nearly eight hundred miles (and a considerably greater distance in ideology and experience) away, Haniru Santoa stared listlessly at the grimy, slightly damp street, up towards the gathering clouds that hovered malevolently overhead, and back down towards the street again, all the while keeping a tight grip on a huge, threadbare canvas bag. He didn’t like this area. Little Doomtown, it was called, and mostly its name matched its form flawlessly if you were the sort of guy Santoa was; brought up by an alcoholic father and a mother who’d had more breakdowns than most have shoes, he’d drifted from dump to dump, school to school, lousy care facility to lousy care facility. People had tried, really tried, to help him out; but Santoa was, in his own mind, too far gone for them. When he’d grown unable to take his mother’s constant screaming and shouting, he’d snapped and attacked her with the nearest available implement; after his father, who despite his crippling alcoholism was still, perversely, dedicated to his semi-insane wife, had finished with him, there had been as much of his blood as hers on the living room walls. That was the last time he’d ever seen either of his parents.

Since then he’d been shoved around from care home to care home, sent from school to school, and always it was the same outcome; he learned nothing, stole everything, broke every rule he could find, and was generally violent and obnoxious to anyone he disliked; the only people immune to his occasional rages and more prolonged bouts of depressive, drug-addled, mentally unstable criminality were those very few people he had been able to count as comrades; none of them could ever have been called friends, but they were comrades, all sticking together in the messes they had got into. It was sad that so few were left. Saru had gotten himself killed like they had all expected he would (for even by Santoa’s standards, his urge to pick fights with anyone and everyone was madness); young Haman had been found not a hundred yards from the facility he had been in at the time, his body broken and shredded and tossed aside by the uncaring metal of a locomotive and its long, clanking train; even Kura’s life, barely begun by the time she fathered his child at the age of fifteen, had been ended in a spray of blood and gore by the chattering, kicking machine-pistol of a police officer who had kicked her body aside without even a backward glance before making for Santoa’s hidden form; he still didn’t know how he’d got out of that one. He neither knew nor particularly cared, meanwhile, that the child was long dead.

Today, Santoa was after money. He knew the Doomingslandi Catholics tended to stay reasonably well-off; he had been keeping an eye on the church for several days, and a quick peek inside had been more than enough to tempt him. All the silver in there, and all of it used for nothing more than worshipping some lousy bullshit God? Hell, he was practically taking what was his right. And it wouldn’t be much of a job to go in and get it; the priest would be alone now, the service having finished a few minutes before. Quick, simple, no trouble; and if the priest got in the way, he could probably handle him. Santoa knew that doing anything major would be risky, of course; Doomie Catholics stuck together more than most, and he could probably rely on having his two best friends sent on a long and permanent holiday if he was caught having done anything to a holy man. And in his position, it wasn’t as though the police would care.

Santoa tensed as he rounded the bent and glanced around the graveyard that lay in front of the little church. The light was beginning to fade; street lamps were glowing redly above him. He knew what he wanted to do; go in the back, grab as much as he could without being heard, and get out again. If he could get maybe a couple of those gold candlesticks, he knew a few people who would pay well for them. Hell, even a plate was worth enough to buy some food, some drink, some Allanean drugs and some domestic, cheapo cigarettes. If he could get all three, he might even get a bed for the night. The though was more than enough to drive him on as he skulked, awkwardly crouched, towards the vestry door, tried the lock, shoved its heavy, softly-creaking mass open. The choir were disrobing in the vestry; he ducked quickly through a side door leading to the left transept, and as he did so caught sight of the prize, mere yards from his grasp. Heart pounding, Santoa inched forward, instinctively fearing the bright light, and glanced around the wood framing that surrounded the organ to see the priest and his aides busily seeing out a few stragglers. Now was his chance.

Deftly Santoa darted behind the altar, reached up and whipped the two candlesticks away, stuffing them into his worn, patchy leather jacket’s low, deep inside pickets to clank painfully against his torso. No sound of outrage emerged from anywhere; he had done it! Only the two small collection plates, now; those too quietly slid from the altar table, to join his miscellany of cigarette packets, spent joints, half-empty bottles and tatty clothes in the bag. Only the biggest prize of all left. Santoa held his breath, his mouth dry, fingers shaking with the tension of it, as he reached up for the beautiful, bejewelled, golden cross; it was a magnificent piece of work, and more importantly it would fetch him enough to buy a room for a few nights. He eased its impressive and worrying weight down into the bag, a soft clink of metal on metal accompanying it, and zipped the bag up. Almost done. It was just bad luck that what happened next happened at all.

Santoa reached into his belt, gripping the small, stubby flick-knife grimly, and made himself ready to run; as he bolted, he observed with utter horror that someone was coming through the door he had used to make his entry. Panic shot through him; he had to get through that door! With a crazed yell, Santoa charged headlong at the figure, instantly attracting everyone in the building’s attention. The figure attempted, amazingly, to block the lanky young man’s movement. Santoa would never be able to tell when, why or how it happened, but he would always remember the low shout of pain his victim uttered as his struggling body was pierced by the youth’s ill-aimed, panic-thrust blade. To his exultant relief, the man lost all interest in trying to stop his exit and fell, gasping, to the ground, his blood forming a small red patch on the floor beneath him. Santoa did not hesitate; he hurled the knife away into the bushes and fled on legs that felt like a mixture of lead and rubber. He had just killed a man and robbed a church in Little Doomtown; he might have only minutes to live. With bloodshot, over-wide eyes he frantically searched the street and was filled with relief to see a tram making its rattling way towards a stop; he wiped his bloodstained knuckles almost clean on the grass, kept the offending hand in his pocket and walked onto the packed vehicle, relief draining him of any remaining energy as he held limply onto the handrail and watched people milling about outside the church. He had just killed a man. A Doomie, of all men. And a member of the Church. Now he really was screwed. He had to get out. Had to get out somehow, to anywhere. He didn’t care where. He suddenly didn’t care much about anything. He just wanted to get some kind of gun, and get the hell out of Dodge before the posse found him.

It was, therefore, hardly a surprise that he found himself, two days later and two thousand pounds’ worth of gold poorer, in Agrandov, climbing down from a dilapidated jet to a dilapidated airport stuck in an irradiated country. Here, he reasoned from the advertisement he had seen, he might find some work. He had a gun, an attitude and nothing to lose. Someone would want him. Someone had to want him, somewhere. At the very least, he’d be able to rob someone in the habitable areas – the Blue zones, was it? – and perhaps get enough money together to get himself a bed again.

Santoa stepped out of the grimy airport, watched the rain for a few seconds, and stared listlessly at the grimy, slightly damp street, up towards the gathering clouds that hovered malevolently overhead, and back down towards the street again, all the while keeping a tight grip on a huge, threadbare canvas bag…

The once-truthful needle of a compass flicked back and forth across the cracked disk, seeming to make up it's mind before choosing a different direction altogether. The light was rapidly fading, and although the rain had stopped this was no place to be stranded come nightfall. Sergeant Ammit checked his watch... he had an hour until sundown. His squad of soldiers followed, depressed and silent. They had been marching for hours, monotonously across the wasteland, but still couldn't find any landmarks to navigate from.

"Alright, everybody form up. We need to talk."

They obeyed without question, but that was hardly through loyalty. It was survival, he was the group leader and the only thing getting them out before sundown would be unity and cooperation. In seconds a group of grubby, tired, hungry soldiers had gathered around him. Ammit unsheathed his bayonet and put a cross in the dirt by his feet.

"We're here."
"No shit," came a sarcastic comment from the back. Ammit ignored it.
"And I'm pretty sure that that ridge in front of us is part of sector 7. Bunker 71 is due north of that, and those guys can help us get back to good old 34. Or we could even stay there, I'm sure they wouldn't mind as long as we've got our own rations." Ammit paused, "We do all have our own rations?" A general nod of agreement made it's way around the sorry huddle. "There's running water at the bottom of that ridge, so we'll follow that up-stream to avoid any contamination. Then we can cut west to 71, but we'll have to move fast. We've only got an hour."

The group moved into action, forming up and marching onwards with grim determination. Ammit struggled to steady his hands as he forced the redundant compass back into it's pouch. He was nervous, and it was showing. The Sergeant had been forced to spend a night in the Orange Zone - the area the group had silently accepted they had strayed into - before, and the memory still hung fresh in his mind.

"Hey Smith, you wanna wait for the rest of us," came a jeering voice from one of the troops, calling out the young soldier who had hurried on ahead.
"Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark, is that it?" came another.
"C'mon guys, that's enough. We all know it's not safe at night. We need to get to bunker 71," said Ammit loudly, trying to stop an argument developing.

Despite their continuous efforts, the sun was determined to set and wasn't waiting for anyone. Not even Arvis, who punctuated every fourth step with a curse at their predicament, until Ammit told him to shut up. Things were looking up, however, as the steady crunching of their boots on hard dirt was now softened by the less-hostile soil. The terrain was improving, which meant that they were heading in the right direction.

Marching away from the Red Zone felt like coming up for air, although the process was drawn out to the point of being torturous. In a sense the analogy had merit, as the air in the Orange Zone and beyond was still badly contaminated. Strictly speaking, they should all be wearing gasmasks this far towards the centre, but the penalties were minimal. A few years off your life expectancy was a fair trade for clear communication, especially as survival was always a short-term goal in the Orange Zone.

"We need to stop," ordered Ammit, bringing the group to a disappointing halt. "We need enough light to set up a decent camp, then we can continue at dawn and be at 71's canteen for breakfast. Understood?" A group mumble resembling 'Sir, yes, Sir' came back to him, as they all dug in for the night. Arvis, in his typical style, was the only one to dig a fox-hole before pitching his tent beside it. The rest sad gloomily around in a circle, although Ammit had prohibited fires, as it would compromise their position.

Of all the people to go missing in action, he though, it just had to be Willen. Willen had been carrying the long-range radio, but Ammit doubted that it would have done much good. Electronics had a tendency to fail this far in, or the interference was too bad to get a clear message out. Six tents - one for each member of the squad - were arranged around the point they wished there was a fire. Arvis sat on watch, having volunteered to do so, as the rest took no persuasion to get to sleep.