Chapter 8 Roamers

POV: Phoenix Kade

We've barely cleared the ruins when I see them.

A group of people moving through the sand ahead of us, maybe eight or nine of them, strung out in a loose line the way people walk when they've been walking a long time and the effort of staying together has become too much. Their clothes are rags. Their movement is slow and heavy, the particular shuffle of people running on empty. From here they look like scavengers, like the people I just left behind in the camp, like every desperate soul I've ever known in the Shatterlands.

Wanderers. Looking for shelter, maybe. Food. The same things everyone out here is always looking for.

I expect Slyfox to steer around them.

Instead, the engine note changes. Deepens. The vehicle surges forward and the ruins blur faster in the windows and my stomach turns over before my brain has finished processing what I'm seeing.

"Careful!" The word tears out of me before I can stop it. "There are people there!"

Slyfox doesn't slow down.

The vehicle hits the first person at full speed.

I've seen violence. I've grown up inside it, been shaped by it, carry its marks on my skin. I know what it looks like when something living stops being alive. I thought I was past being shocked by it.

I was wrong.

The bladed bumper goes through the man like he isn't there. Like he's made of something less substantial than flesh and bone, like the rules that apply to living bodies simply don't apply when there's enough metal moving fast enough behind the impact. The sound is wrong, too solid and too wet at the same time, and then blood hits the windshield in a sheet, a flat crimson wave that covers the glass completely for one terrible second, and there are things in it that I can't look at and can't stop seeing.

It spatters through the gap in the window. Hits my face. My hands. The inside of the cab.

I don't move.

I can't move. Every muscle in my body has locked up simultaneously, the same full-body freeze that hit me the first time a mutabeast charged me, before I learned to override it. I sit there with someone else's blood on my face and my hands gripping the door handle hard enough that the bent fingers scream, and I watch.

Slyfox throws his head back and laughs.

It's a real laugh. Full and genuine, rolling up from somewhere deep in that massive chest, completely unself-conscious. The laugh of a man doing something he enjoys.

"Bahahahahaha!"

He flips on the windshield wiper with one casual hand. It sweeps across the glass in long wet arcs, smearing blood and worse things into streaks, clearing the view. Then he turns the wheel and the vehicle swings hard and I feel it when we hit the second person, feel it through the seat and the floor and the chassis, that specific sickening give of bones breaking under weight that I will never be able to un-know.

The body goes under. The wheels go over. The vehicle bucks slightly and then levels out and keeps moving.

"Awesome," a rider shouts from outside. "Absolutely fucking awesome!"

They've fanned out around the group, the birds moving fast across the sand, cutting off escape routes with the practiced ease of predators that have done this before. One rider sinks a hook into a man's jaw, the sound of it carrying even over the engine, and the bird accelerates and the man goes with it, dragged across the sand in a long smear of red that stretches out behind the mount like a brushstroke.

A third person goes into the air when the vehicle catches him, tumbling end over end, limbs loose and wrong, hitting the ground in a way that makes it immediately clear he won't be getting up.

My whole body has gone cold.

Not the cold of fear, exactly. Something deeper than that. Something that sits below fear in the body, in the place where you keep the things you can't process in real time and have to file away for later because right now there is no later, there is only right now, only this, only the blood on my hands and the laughter and the wiper still moving across the glass in steady mechanical arcs.

I turn to Slyfox.

He glances at me. Takes in whatever is on my face. Smirks.

"W-why." My voice comes out wrong, too quiet, fractured somewhere in the middle. I try again. "Why are you doing this?"

Scavengers kill. I know that. I've done it myself, or close enough. But scavengers kill because they're starving, because it's survive or die, because the Shatterlands narrows every choice down to the same brutal arithmetic eventually. These men have food. They have weapons and vehicles and a base somewhere. They are not doing this because they have to.

They are doing this because they want to.

Slyfox spits out the window. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Hah. None of your fucking business." He steers around a chunk of exposed rock without looking away from me. "And you don't know shit. These are roamers. Killing them is doing a service to the Shatterlands."

I say nothing. I wait.

He keeps talking, which is what I expected, because men like Slyfox always want you to understand their logic. They need you to understand it. It matters to them that the arithmetic makes sense, even if the arithmetic is theirs and nobody else's.

"There are four kinds of people out here, kid. Scavengers, excavators, nomads, and sweepers. Scavs are at the bottom, you know that already. Once you learn to work machines or master a trade, you move up, become diggers like us. But some scavs, they drink too much contaminated water, eat too much mutated food, and it changes them. Body and mind both. They go feral. Turn into roamers who prey on anything they can reach. And when enough roamers find each other and group up, they become sweepers."

He takes a long drag of his cigar.

"So we're putting down animals before they become monsters. You understand now?"

I look out through the smeared windshield at the sand.

I want to argue. The words are there, somewhere, the things the old man would have said about decency and the human thing and where the line is between survival and savagery. They're in my head, fully formed, waiting.

But I keep them there. Behind my teeth, behind my face, filed away next to everything else I can't process right now.

Because I am one person in a vehicle full of armed mercenaries in the middle of the Shatterlands, and I am injured and still half-starved and I have a shortsword I haven't even picked up yet. And the old man also taught me this: choose your battles carefully, because you only get so many, and wasting one is the same as losing one.

Maybe Slyfox is right. Maybe the roamers were already gone, already past saving, already something less than the people they used to be.

Maybe he's just a man who enjoys killing and found a philosophy that lets him do it without having to think of himself as a monster.

I don't know. Out here the line between survival and savagery gets blurrier every day, and I've been awake since dawn and covered in blood, mine and a mutabeast's and now a stranger's, and I am so tired of not knowing where the lines are anymore.

I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and look at the horizon and say nothing.

Slyfox seems satisfied with my silence. He smokes his cigar and drives, and neither of us speaks again for a long time.