“Here!” Rhea said and tossed the pistol to Will. The weapon was outlined on the HUD, and he caught it.
The party made their way forward. Rhea raised her hood and tightened the bottom to form a scarf. She donned the visor that Will gave her to protect her mechanical eyes. Will himself had wrapped up his face quite well, and he’d lowered protective shields from the thin visor that rested below his brows to preserve his eyes. Even Horatio attached special covers over his camera lenses.
As they advanced, they occasionally had to dodge a limb of a blinded bioweapon that stepped too close. That happened seven times in total. The first four incidents occurred one after the other, while the final three were more sporadic. After that, the events stopped entirely—the bioweapons had become completely lost in that storm.
“Nothing like a good Gritstorm to save the day,” Will sent above the howling wind.
He recalled Gizmo: it damaged the rotors of the machine to fly for too long in that mess. Plus, the near zero visibility made the drone essentially useless. The wind knocked about Gizmo as the drone descended, almost smashing the aerial machine against the rocks of the defile. When Gizmo finally landed, Will immediately stowed the drone in his pack.
The party proceeded through the swirling murk of the storm. Sometimes Rhea caught glimpses of Will ahead of her, but usually he was lost to the grit an instant later. She occasionally stumbled on rocks or small boulders not displayed on the HUD—small changes in the landscape that had transpired since the last time the map had been updated, possibly due to the storm itself. But otherwise the map data proved impeccable. Horatio, in the lead, usually warned the others if he spotted something they needed to watch for.
They stayed close to the leftmost edge of the defile at first, but when the grit began to pile up there, forming drifts, the party switched to the right side instead, which was spared from any sediment. For now.
She had a thought.
“I seem to recall reading somewhere on the Net that Gritstorms can last for days,” Rhea sent
“That’s right,” Will said. “So?”
“Check the map,” Rhea told him. “The storm cut across not just our path, but the path of the second wave of bioweapons. Those headed to Rust Town. They’ll be blinded, wandering around lost in the grit. We can use the storm to get ahead of them!”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea…” Will said.
“Think about it,” Rhea continued. “We have advanced mapping tech to ensure we never get lost, whereas they don’t. Also, they won’t be able to track whatever scent has been laid down for them either. Not while the storm is active. We’ve seen that already.”
Will remained quiet for several seconds. “I vote no. We have our own lives to look out for at the moment. We barely survived back there as it was. Plus, you forget why we’re out here. We’re salvagers: we collect salvage. We don’t hunt bioweapons, and we certainly don’t backtrack to warn settlements of imagined threats. Look, if we detour all the way back to Rust Town, we’ll probably use up every last credit of profit earned since leaving the settlement, because we’ll have to purchase more rations and supplies. You know how much water costs these days, right? It’ll be like the last two weeks were wasted. You might even end up deeper in debt, considering how poor your haul is. So I say we cut and run. Press on. We can’t help them. Even if we warn the residents, they’ll never flee in time. Rust Town is doomed.”
“You don’t know that,” Rhea insisted. “We have to try.”
But Will continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Who knows, maybe Sebastian lied, and the Hydras aren’t headed to Rust Town at all.”
“You bastard,” she said.
His outline shrugged on her HUD. “What? It’s a possibility.”
Rhea couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What happened to the Will I knew? The Will who wouldn’t stand by and watch while innocents succumbed, and who believed all life was sacred? The Will who saved me from the rubble?”
He didn’t answer.
“Rust Town has to be warned…” she pressed.
Still no response.
“I’m going to have to turn back without you then, if you won’t come,” Rhea threatened.
“As if I’ll let you,” Will finally said.
“You can’t stop me,” she said.
“What about your debt?” he pressed.
“I’ll repay it, someday,” she said. “I’ll find you after I’ve gone to Rust Town. Then we’ll continue salvaging.”
“If you survive.” Will paused, then sighed over the comm, a sound barely audible above the raging wind. “Okay. We’ll head northeast and try to cut in front of the bioweapons. You do know we risk putting ourselves directly in their path if the storm ends early, right?”
“I know,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Because if that happens, we’re probably all dead. You still want to do this?”
In answer, she selected a destination waypoint on her HUD, corresponding to Rust Town’s location.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Will told her.
And so, when the party emerged from the mountain pass, they followed along the ridge until it fell away, and then swung northeast through the storm, using their mapping technology to keep them on the fastest and best route to Rust Town.
23
Rhea trudged on through the Gritstorm with her companions. At first, she kept expecting the dark shapes of bioweapons to come charging through the swirling murk at them. But that feeling slowly subsided, replaced by a sense of general unease. She sometimes felt like the party was traveling right in the middle of a pack of Hydras but simply couldn’t see them: an errant step to the left or right and she’d find herself stepping directly into one of their jaws. An imagined threat, perhaps, but that made it no less real to her. She just wished visibility was greater. But then again, if she and her companions were truly surrounded by bioweapons
