Post by Ashe Kandor on Aug 8, 2012 18:27:50 GMT -6
Ashe had been down this stretch of highway enough times that she knew every crack in the asphalt. Driving into the city wasn’t something she really had to think about anymore—she could change lanes to avoid debris and skirt around clumps of weeds without taking her eyes from the city’s skyline. With company, though, Ashe became aware of how hazardous the highway seemed, of how easy it was to wipe out if you didn’t know how to weave through the obstacles. She kept checking in her mirrors, behind her shoulder. Were they keeping up? Had anyone fallen off? The worry was constant.[/blockquote]
After glancing behind her for the fifteenth time, Ashe clenched the brakes and skidded to a stop. Before her, the road was packed with rusting, abandoned cars, the buildup of a collision ten years gone. Ashe turned off her bike and dismounted, but kept a firm grip on the handlebars. “This part’s too tricky to ride through,” she called to Griffin and Avery. “We’ll have to walk it.” With that, she began pushing her bike down the narrow, jagged path through the wreckage.
Shoulders hunched under her leather jacket, Ashe squinted up at the cloud-spotted sky. It had been getting colder lately, and sometimes at night she woke up with the wound in her elbow aching. Evan had only recently allowed her to use her left arm again, and he’d warned her that too much strenuous activity could reopen it. Despite her pushing the boundaries a bit, it seemed to be healing just fine.
But whenever she looked at it, she felt bitter bile surge up her throat.
For months Tobias had stayed with Haven, weeding their garden and helping build windmills and feeding information to the Sanctum the whole time. Smiling and joking and waiting. And when the Sanctum had come for Terra, he’d turned on Haven with that trickster’s grin, no hesitation. They—she—had taken him in, shared both luck and labor with him, and he’d repaid them with betrayal and pain. Her home. Her family. They’d meant nothing to Tobias.
She hoped that whatever stunted abomination of a conscience he had left twisted in agony every waking second. She hoped that when he looked at the ranks of cultists, he saw her and her family’s faces. She hoped that his food turned to dust on his tongue when he remembered the meals he’d shared with them. And most of all, she hoped that he would beg her not to shoot when she came to kill him.
Senses sharp with thoughts of retribution, Ashe caught a ripple of motion in her peripheral vision. She snapped her head to the left to hone in on it… and could only blink at what she saw.
A man was sprinting along the rooftops of the bungalows that flanked the highway. Impressive on its own, but the real show-stopper was the dark-furred Infected chasing after him—and rapidly gaining. As it leapt across a gap between two houses, it let out a voracious roar; something in the frequencies seemed to vibrate down Ashe’s spine, and she jerked back into action.
Snapping out the kickstand with her foot, she left her bike and started clambering over the hood of a 2038 Honda Peregrine. “Come on, we need to help him,” she hollered behind her. Two cars later, she had cleared the pile-up and was running for the exit ramp. She glanced up to where she’d seen the chase, but both man and beast were gone. Ashe cursed and kept running, angling onto the street that crossed over the highway and heading for the spot that she’d last seen them.
Her injured elbow throbbed in time with her accelerating heart rate, and a voice full of anger whispered, this is just another trap. Even so, she didn’t slow down. Nobody was fool enough to provoke an Infected just for the chance of maybe trapping a few travelers. And if they were, well, they were doubly unfortunate. First, for being utterly stupid. And second, for crossing Ashe when she was in this kind of mood.
Three and a half months of waiting for her arm to heal hadn’t done Ashe’s respiratory system any favors. By the time she hit the residential area, she was breathing more heavily than she would have liked. She slowed to a jog, both to save her lungs and to cut down on the noise she was making, and scanned the area for any signs of the man or the Infected. A furious snarl ripped through the air, and Ashe immediately backed into an alley and let the shadows wrap around her. Her heart still pounding, though not for all the same reasons as before, she snuck in the direction of the sound. More growls led her on, until, just as she reached the mouth of the alley, they were abruptly silenced with a yelp.
Ashe paused to draw her pistol, then continued at the same steady pace until she finally reached the source of the sounds. And she was forced to admit, she was impressed by what she saw.