Might be easier to start at the end.

See, butchering was always Marshall’s job.  He was the biggest damn boar of a man the wastelanders had ever seen.  He could go out into the wastes and haul back the kind of game over his shoulders that it’d take three lesser men to haul into camp.  So dismembering the bodies came down to him too, because he was the only one tall enough and strong enough to string up whatever needed to be bled, and despite how rough and clumsy he could be with a lot of things, he had a deft hand with a knife, and he knew what he was doing.  Probably came from having done it all his life.

Marshall was born out in the wastes.  He was near twenty when Forrest met him, looked older, on account of having played the survival game his whole life.  Marshall had shoulders you could’ve thrown an ox’s yoke over and it’d have still fit him.  Bright red mess of hair that always kinda stuck up like flame.  Eyes the kind of blue that you didn’t normally see on people who weren’t psychics or some other kind of mutant, and there wasn’t any telling if Marshall was or not.  Never showed any psychic tendencies.  And if he was a mutant, it was just in how damn big he was, tall and strong and could have wrestled any damn beast in the wastes into submission with his bare hands if he’d set his mind to it.  Covered in freckles from head to toe and perpetually sunburnt across his face and shoulders.

But Marshall was gone now, and the butchering came down to Forrest.

Forrest wasn’t real sure how he’d come by the job.  Thought maybe he’d volunteered at some point--he’d stepped up when Marshall’d been out or ill or taking care of Tabitha, but there were a couple of others in their group that had done the same.  Hell, maybe Marshall’d said something about it once and Forrest had just kind of fallen into the position.

Whatever had happened, here he was doing what Marshall should’ve been doing.

There’s all kinds of ways to butcher a body.  Depends on what you’re working with.  You got something that has an exoskeleton, hard-shelled or otherwise, your first step is to throw the whole thing in boiling water, if you’ve got a pot big enough.  Helps the meat pull apart from the shell.  Then you crack it open, peel the pieces back, and set to work on the flesh inside.  Usually, creatures like that, you’ve gotta be careful to take the organs out first, especially anything that might contain poison or retain water.  Never know when one of them mutated monsters is gonna be carrying a belly full of radiation, waiting for the nick of a knife to infect the entire camp.

You got something with a hide, you start skinning first.  Let somebody else take care of scraping and curing the leather.  It’s easy from there.  Same precautions with the organs, but it ain’t too often you’ve gotta worry about poison or radiation with those things.  Mammals are mammals, seems like, no matter how big or how many horns they’ve got, and there’s an upward limit on how much radiation they can take before they keel over dead.

Now, you get a mammal with skin but no hide to tan, you’ve gotta boil the body real gentle first, get all the fine hair off of it.  And no matter what kind of mammal you’re working with, hide or not, you’ve gotta slit the throat, usually, hang it by its hind legs and drain all the blood out of the body.  A body that’s got blood in it will spoil faster.  Gives you a little more time to work if it’s dry.

Take a wild hog.

You boil it to take the hair off.  You slit the throat--but then, Forrest don’t like to admit he’s squeamish, and that ain’t exactly what it is, but he’s not real comfortable with the idea of it, given the ropey scar across his own throat where he was damn near preemptively bled a few years back--or if you got a choice, you open up the hind limbs, slit the insides of the thighs and all the way down and string the body up right-side-up instead.  It’ll do about as good a job.  Next you gotta take the organs out, especially if they were damaged when the kill happened.  Make a slit down the breastbone and then crack open the ribcage.  Remove anything damaged first to keep sepsis from infecting the meat.  Discard anything unuseable and salvage what you can--intestines, stomach, bladder, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, anything that can be reused, processed, or eaten gets taken out and set aside.  Once you’re done with that, the rest is easy--quarter the body for storage if you can’t start cooking it right away, or start butchering it into cuts.  Some of it you save whole pieces of, cut steaks or roasts and set them aside.  Cut down pieces that will be ground or made into sausage.  Strip anything you can preserve as jerky for hard times.  Disarticulate the joints, work from the bottom up, take the bones and throw them in a pot to boil the last of the meat away.  Get them clean to make into weapons or tools.  Use everything you can.

Split the skull open, careful as you can, and if it’s big enough and intact enough, save the skull cap for a bowl.  It goes with the rest of the bones to be cleaned.  Take the brain out.  Sometimes it’s safe to eat, sometimes it ain’t.  Today it ain’t, so it gets set aside to be buried with the damaged organs and unusable pieces.

You take a wild hog, you break him down until he’s an unrecognisable pile of meat and bones and scraps.  You feed the scraps to animals or bury them, out of respect or as an offering to the wastes that maybe your next meal won’t be somebody you know.

Forrest packs the meat into a container to give to the next person, who will separate it and process what they can and then pass it on, and so it goes, until you can sit down for the funeral supper a few nights later, and you’ll have food to go around for a little while.

Big man like that, he’ll keep everyone’s bellies full for at least a couple of nights, and whatever they preserve will last them until their next big kill.

He scrapes and cleans the bones, ritualistic, trying to ignore that they belonged to somebody he would have called a brother if it had begun to describe the breadth and depth of their relationship.  He pockets the bullets that felled that boar of a man.  Figures maybe he’ll craft ‘em into something later.  The bones, he’s already got plans for.

It ain’t the butchering Forrest minds.  It’s just work.

It’s that Marshall’s dead, and the world’s changed, and Forrest hasn’t been this unsure of anything since he left Absolution twenty years ago.

Might be easier to start at the end.

See, butchering was always Marshall’s job.  He was the biggest damn boar of a man the wastelanders had ever seen.  He could go out into the wastes and haul back the kind of game over his shoulders that it’d take three lesser men to haul into camp.  So dismembering the bodies came down to him too, because he was the only one tall enough and strong enough to string up whatever needed to be bled, and despite how rough and clumsy he could be with a lot of things, he had a deft hand with a knife, and he knew what he was doing.  Probably came from having done it all his life.

Marshall was born out in the wastes.  He was near twenty when Forrest met him, looked older, on account of having played the survival game his whole life.  Marshall had shoulders you could’ve thrown an ox’s yoke over and it’d have still fit him.  Bright red mess of hair that always kinda stuck up like flame.  Eyes the kind of blue that you didn’t normally see on people who weren’t psychics or some other kind of mutant, and there wasn’t any telling if Marshall was or not.  Never showed any psychic tendencies.  And if he was a mutant, it was just in how damn big he was, tall and strong and could have wrestled any damn beast in the wastes into submission with his bare hands if he’d set his mind to it.  Covered in freckles from head to toe and perpetually sunburnt across his face and shoulders.

But Marshall was gone now, and the butchering came down to Forrest.

Forrest wasn’t real sure how he’d come by the job.  Thought maybe he’d volunteered at some point--he’d stepped up when Marshall’d been out or ill or taking care of Tabitha, but there were a couple of others in their group that had done the same.  Hell, maybe Marshall’d said something about it once and Forrest had just kind of fallen into the position.

Whatever had happened, here he was doing what Marshall should’ve been doing.

There’s all kinds of ways to butcher a body.  Depends on what you’re working with.  You got something that has an exoskeleton, hard-shelled or otherwise, your first step is to throw the whole thing in boiling water, if you’ve got a pot big enough.  Helps the meat pull apart from the shell.  Then you crack it open, peel the pieces back, and set to work on the flesh inside.  Usually, creatures like that, you’ve gotta be careful to take the organs out first, especially anything that might contain poison or retain water.  Never know when one of them mutated monsters is gonna be carrying a belly full of radiation, waiting for the nick of a knife to infect the entire camp.

You got something with a hide, you start skinning first.  Let somebody else take care of scraping and curing the leather.  It’s easy from there.  Same precautions with the organs, but it ain’t too often you’ve gotta worry about poison or radiation with those things.  Mammals are mammals, seems like, no matter how big or how many horns they’ve got, and there’s an upward limit on how much radiation they can take before they keel over dead.

Now, you get a mammal with skin but no hide to tan, you’ve gotta boil the body real gentle first, get all the fine hair off of it.  And no matter what kind of mammal you’re working with, hide or not, you’ve gotta slit the throat, usually, hang it by its hind legs and drain all the blood out of the body.  A body that’s got blood in it will spoil faster.  Gives you a little more time to work if it’s dry.

Take a wild hog.

You boil it to take the hair off.  You slit the throat--but then, Forrest don’t like to admit he’s squeamish, and that ain’t exactly what it is, but he’s not real comfortable with the idea of it, given the ropey scar across his own throat where he was damn near preemptively bled a few years back--or if you got a choice, you open up the hind limbs, slit the insides of the thighs and all the way down and string the body up right-side-up instead.  It’ll do about as good a job.  Next you gotta take the organs out, especially if they were damaged when the kill happened.  Make a slit down the breastbone and then crack open the ribcage.  Remove anything damaged first to keep sepsis from infecting the meat.  Discard anything unuseable and salvage what you can--intestines, stomach, bladder, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, anything that can be reused, processed, or eaten gets taken out and set aside.  Once you’re done with that, the rest is easy--quarter the body for storage if you can’t start cooking it right away, or start butchering it into cuts.  Some of it you save whole pieces of, cut steaks or roasts and set them aside.  Cut down pieces that will be ground or made into sausage.  Strip anything you can preserve as jerky for hard times.  Disarticulate the joints, work from the bottom up, take the bones and throw them in a pot to boil the last of the meat away.  Get them clean to make into weapons or tools.  Use everything you can.

Split the skull open, careful as you can, and if it’s big enough and intact enough, save the skull cap for a bowl.  It goes with the rest of the bones to be cleaned.  Take the brain out.  Sometimes it’s safe to eat, sometimes it ain’t.  Today it ain’t, so it gets set aside to be buried with the damaged organs and unusable pieces.

You take a wild hog, you break him down until he’s an unrecognisable pile of meat and bones and scraps.  You feed the scraps to animals or bury them, out of respect or as an offering to the wastes that maybe your next meal won’t be somebody you know.

Forrest packs the meat into a container to give to the next person, who will separate it and process what they can and then pass it on, and so it goes, until you can sit down for the funeral supper a few nights later, and you’ll have food to go around for a little while.

Big man like that, he’ll keep everyone’s bellies full for at least a couple of nights, and whatever they preserve will last them until their next big kill.

He scrapes and cleans the bones, ritualistic, trying to ignore that they belonged to somebody he would have called a brother if it had begun to describe the breadth and depth of their relationship.  He pockets the bullets that felled that boar of a man.  Figures maybe he’ll craft ‘em into something later.  The bones, he’s already got plans for.

It ain’t the butchering Forrest minds.  It’s just work.

It’s that Marshall’s dead, and the world’s changed, and Forrest hasn’t been this unsure of anything since he left Absolution twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago, Absolution.

There’s people who live up in the clouds, but Forrest ain’t never seen ‘em.

Figures this city’s gotta have a border somewhere, too, but he ain’t never seen that either.  Absolution spreads like a plague in all directions.  There’s places in this city that haven’t seen light in decades, maybe longer.  Places shadowed by towers that just keep getting taller, ‘cause whatever’s out there that isn’t the city, if the city isn’t everything, keeps it from spreading out, so it just keeps spreading up.  And the higher you go, the richer the people get, and none of it ever filters down.

Down here on the streets, they don’t see much sunlight.  Pollution blocks out whatever slithers around the spires.  Down here, it’s all neon lights and the flashbeams of the militaristic police that roam like predators.  Nobody’s sure if they’re even human, all dressed in black from helmet to boot, every inch of them sealed in and protected under layers of canvas, kevlar, and leather.  Goggles and gas masks, like they’re afraid of breathing in whatever’s made the people on the streets deserve to live here, like if they get too close they’ll turn into rats themselves, scrambling for survival and scrounging for whatever they can get, deep-sea filter feeders that take whatever they can get drifting down from the midlevels.

But it ain’t as bad as all that.

See, down here on the streets, they’ve at least got family.  They form colonies, keep together, share among themselves.  It’s not the kind of violent anarchy the police or the midlevels or God knows the upper levels would expect to see.  No, it’s damn near peaceful.  Just loud and dirty and always too hot or too cold and people go hungry a lot.  But you can survive like that, day to day, long as you don’t go hungry too many days in a row.

Now, Forrest and his family, they’ve carved out a profession for themselves.  Don’t pay, not exactly, but he figures it’s what they were put on God’s not-so-green earth to do.  They get good trade for it.  They make friends that way.  And word gets around, so they get supplies and they get help, and it ain’t so bad.

See, Forrest and his brothers and their wives and kids, they spend their time procuring water and food from places they ain’t supposed to be getting it from--lower level vendors, sometimes the midlevels if they’re lucky, subsectors and garbage bins and anywhere they can raid--and they take it down to the sublevels.

This city, it don’t stop at the streets.

No, Absolution insinuates itself down into the earth, and if one is inclined to believe that what’s up there above all the smog, up there in the clouds, is heaven, one might be equally inclined to believe what’s down below is hell.

The sublevels are a dark world of monsters.  There’s people living down there, people who sometimes come up to the surface but for the most part have lived their entire lives in the tunnels and sewers and whatever labyrinthine networks still exist from the Great Burning.  Some people say there’s an entire civilisation still surviving down there, oblivious that there’s a city up above them, people who went down there, down into their bunkers before the Great Burning happened, and have been procreating and carrying on ever since, and there’s been generations live and die without ever knowing that there even is a sun, let alone having seen it.

But what Forrest and his family know is that the sublevels work like this: there’s a few levels that are closer to the surface, where you go down in the tunnels and you can still hear people on the streets up above, or where you hunker down in abandoned subway stations and walk the tunnels hoping you don’t come across a live line and get stuck there.  And those levels are as safe as you can get in the underworld.  That’s where people tend to live.  People Forrest and his family deliver supplies to on a regular basis, contraband, things the subdwellers aren’t deemed human enough to have, even if they’re more human than the people who enforce the damn laws.

Those laws are there because of what lives on the levels below that.

Deep down in the pits of the earth, below any sign of humanity, down in tunnels that haven’t been seen in a century by anyone on the streets, there’s mutants, monsters, people who aren’t people anymore and might never have been.  Feral.  Dangerous.  The kind of things that make all them business folk up in their soaring spires have nightmares, so they make these laws to keep them down there and let them all die out, and they ignore that there’s any people down there who are just as flesh-and-blood human as any of them trying to live.

What do they care, anyway?  They don’t come down from their towers.  There’s spiderwebs of sky bridges crisscrossing overhead, up and up and up until they fade in the haze and then beyond, networking the midlevels and upper levels so nobody ever has to set foot out of their climate-controlled and pollution-free environments ever again.  They don’t have to see this.  They don’t even breathe the same air as the lower levels, let alone the sublevels.

So Forrest and his family go about their work, shuttling whatever they can get down to the sublevels, helping where they can, avoiding the peacekeepers and trying their damnedest to survive, no matter what.

There’s this woman, Maggie.  Red-haired, hazel-eyed, looks like she drifted down from up there too.  Too pretty and pure, too clean-pale-skinned to be on the streets.  And maybe she wasn’t from the lower levels, originally, nobody really knows, and she ain’t too keen to talk about it.  But here she is, and she happens across Forrest and his family one day, and she asks for help.  And being who they are, they give it, gladly.

Forrest himself is just barely twenty.  Down here, you grow up fast.  His younger brother’s sixteen and married and they have a kid.  His older brother’s twenty-five and married with three kids, and those kids are all old enough to be helping out.  Forrest himself, he’s never met anybody who he felt like settling down with.  Wasn’t ever sure he was cut out for it.

But Maggie...she’s something else.

And she takes a shining to him.  Flirts with him, gets him choked up and stumbling in ways he never has before.  He ain’t sure he likes the feeling.  Thought he mighta been getting sick at first, and his brothers laugh and tell him it was about damn time, and he goes out on his own to go digging for supplies one day, just to get away from them for a little while.  Get some space to think.

Maggie must’ve followed him.  Startles him, much as anybody ever does, when she finally decides to announce herself.

“How come it is that your brothers both got themselves a girl and you don’t?  You’re better-looking than either one of ‘em.”

Forrest glances up but doesn’t reply.

She’s smiling, this coy little smile like maybe she knows a secret, like maybe he’s already told her more than he ever meant to without saying a damn word.  (It occurs to him, once or twice, she might be psychic, she might know what’s going on in his head, but then, least one of the kids is a little bit psychic, and she don’t ever know what her Uncle Forrest is thinking.  Nobody does.)

“You don’t talk much, do you?”

He grunts in assent and goes back to work.

She laughs, soft little sound that carries over the rattling noise around him, echoing off the sides of the dumpster.  Hates it sometimes, finding as much as he does down here, knowing that whatever he does find is what’s been thrown out up above, picked over at the midlevels and then thrown out again, and it all finds its way down to the streets, and some of it’s damn good, little rattled and broken but still edible, and he hates finding it because it shows exactly the kind of life they have up there, throwing out the less-than-perfect when there’s people starving and dying down below that they’d let starve and die just for peace of mind they don’t need to enforce.

There’s a bag of bruised-up apples, haven’t gone bad yet, that he pulls out, figures he can keep a few of the worse-off ones for a mash.  Breads and cakes still in their bags, maybe with a piece torn off or maybe crumbled a little, maybe with a few spots of mold but nothing that would kill anybody.  He finds some hard candy that’s melted together from the humidity, lumped up like a solid rock of sugar.  He pockets that.  Useful, if nothing else, but hell, he’s always had a sweet tooth, whenever he can indulge it.

“You need any help up there?” Maggie asks.

Forrest straightens up, tosses the finds out, and then swings himself out of the bin.  He dusts off his pants and takes his hat off for a minute.  Eyes her like he’s looking into the background of a photograph, trying to figure out what’s there.

“What exactly is it,” he says, accent loose but his consonants concise, “that you want here?”

“Thought you’d never ask, Mr. Forrest,” she says, and she walks up to him, and he starts thinking maybe for the first time in his life he’s the prey, never felt like that even with the peacekeepers on his ass with their guns loaded.  She takes his hat and puts it on, then picks up some of the food and heads back towards camp.

Forrest takes a minute, turning it over, then gathers up the rest and follows her.

They dance like this for days, with Maggie twirling circles around Forrest and Forrest uncertain where the openings are to join in.  His brothers nudge at him.  Maggie tugs at him.  And Forrest, as always, doesn’t budge--not because, as always before, he’s just that grounded, that steady, that certain of his footing.  No, he don’t budge now because he don’t know what the first step is.

But Maggie, she doesn’t give up.  Maybe figures, something’s gotta give sooner or later, maybe he’ll figure it out or maybe he won’t, but anyway, she’s part of the family now, running with them and making deliveries with them and helping with the business, whether she’s blood-bound to them or not.

Fact of the matter is, Forrest doesn’t trust much of anybody.  Never has.  Knows too well what happens when you start trusting people--people die, usually people you love.

Maybe with her, maybe for once, he can make an exception.

So he does.

And more than trust her, he falls in love with her.  He’d long since resigned himself to the thought that he just wasn’t the type to fall in love, but short as years tend to be in this kind of situation, maybe he just never had the chance.

They get married damn quick, because short as years tend to be, they don’t want to waste any time.  Months pass.  They’re happy.

And then the trouble starts, because don’t it always?

Forrest figures at first that it’s his own damn fault for letting himself trust anybody.

But then figures, no, this ain’t his fault, not remotely, it’s the city’s, the peacekeepers’, it’s Absolution as a whole at fault, and there’s some part of him that wants to make them pay, but knows he never can.  Not the way he wants to.

He’s back at camp with the kids brewing moonshine--safest damn thing you can do with the water here, and it ain’t a guarantee, but your chances of surviving are higher that way--and his brothers are out on a run.  Maggie’s gone with them, and his younger brother’s wife.  It gets on towards dark--funny phrase, outdated, the light’s the same in this hellhole no matter what time of day it is--but it’s getting on towards evening and there’s no sign of them back yet.

Forrest stays calm.  If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s that.

Later it gets, the less calm he gets.  Don’t really start getting antsy until it’s time to put the kids down and there’s no sign of them back.  And they’ve got rules, this family, that if someone goes missing, they don’t go after them.  Always been that way.  And always before, they showed up eventually, maybe a little worse for wear but usually in one piece.  But going after them is suicide.  Damn good way to get them and you killed, or worse.

It ain’t until Forrest’s been trying to doze off for an hour or so that he hears movement around their camp.  

He’s bolt upright with his hat on and his gun in hand before he has time to register he’s moving.  Reflex.  Ain’t much noise--low voices, shuffling feet, scraping sounds.  The drone of the city is rising to a thrumming pitch.  Something’s gonna happen.  Forrest can’t tell what yet, but there’s a feeling welling up inside him like something’s gonna happen tonight, and it’s gonna be bad.

Hand clenched tight around the stock of his rifle, he picks his way around the rest of his sleeping family, careful and quiet, and makes his way to the entryway of their makeshift shelter.

Out front, his baby brother Jack’s talking with someone he recognises from a ways down the street, somebody else in this haphazard community.  Jack looks half-scared out of his head, pacing and pulling at his sleeves, and the other person, a girl a little older than him, looks like she’s trying to calm him down, but it ain’t working.

“Forrest is gonna kill me,” Jack keeps saying, over and over.  Sounds like he’s about to cry.  “He’s gonna kill me, oh god, he’s gonna kill me.”

“Not if you don’t give me a reason to,” Forrest says, and Jack yelps, jesus, that boy’s more skittery than a subdweller in daylight.

“Jesus fucking christ, Forrest, go on and give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”

Forrest can’t tell how serious Jack’s being.  He’s got one hand clutching his chest and the other on his knee propping him up while he catches his breath.  His breathing’s ragged, wheezy.  It’s a freezing cold night, but there’s sweat pouring down his face and soaking his shirt front.

“What happened?”

“I--I-I-I swear, it wasn’t my fault, Forrest, I did what you always told me to, I hunkered down and stayed quiet, I swear it wasn’t my fault, please don’t kill me.”

“Now, Jack, I ain’t gonna kill you.  That don’t answer my question.  Where’s Howard and Maggie?”

Jack wrings his hands, pulls at them, looks around like he’s looking for an exit, or someplace to hide.

“Jack.”

“They got ‘em, Forrest, jesus christ, I’m sorry, they got ‘em.”

Forrest goes steel-cold.

“Peacekeepers?” he growls.

“Yeah, I--christ, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to do, god I’m so sorry, Forrest--”

“Jack, shut up and go get my jacket.”

Jack vanishes inside of the tent.  The girl from down the street’s looking at him, a little wide-eyed herself, like she don’t quite know if she should still be here.  Forrest glances over at her, then tells her in a voice just barely still human for all the anger he’s trying to clamp down, “go on home.  Don’t wake nobody up.”

She nods, and slips away into the icy mist settling over the street.

Jack emerges with Forrest’s coat in hand.  Forrest hands Jack his gun long enough to sling it on, then takes it back.  “Where’d you see ‘em last?” Forrest asks.

“Wh-w-what?  You--but--you--damnit, Forrest, you always said, don’t go after anybody.  You’re gonna get yourself killed out there.  Don’t you dare.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do, Jack.”

“Forrest, goddamnit, I ain’t losing both my brothers in one night.”

“You hush and stay put, and you ain’t gonna lose either of us.”

Jack stammers a little more, still shaking, still looking like he don’t know what he ought to be doing, then sets his jaw and goes back in the tent.

Forrest’s only a few steps away when Jack comes back out, following him.  Gun in hand.

“Jack, goddamnit.”

“I ain’t letting you go back out there alone, Forrest.  And I saw ‘em last, it’s easier if I just show you instead of tryin’ to tell you.  I’m going with you.”

“Jack,” Forrest barks, and Jack shrinks, then straightens his shoulders.

“No, Forrest.  I’m goin’ whether you want me to or not.  Come on, we’re killin’ time standin’ here arguing, just lemme go with you.”

Forrest glares at him for a long minute, and Jack looks like a rabbit caught in a wild cat’s stare, but he don’t make any move to go back in the shelter.  Forrest doesn’t say anything else, just turns around and heads off.

Jack chases after.

It’s a long trek through the city, through back alleys and down abandoned passages, over ground and under, avoiding anywhere the peacekeepers are known to patrol or anywhere too populated.  It takes an hour and a half easy to find where Jack last was.  There’s blood on the ground.  Still wet, no chance to dry in the midnight humidity.  Forrest crouches down to see the way the streetlights glint off of the damp asphalt, trying to pick out the trail of dark red against dark grey.

“Where were you?” he asks Jack.

Jack looks around.  “Uh.  I was.  Over there,” he says, indicating a narrow space between buildings a couple of yards away.

Forrest looks at the space and then back up the street.  “You didn’t see nothin’?”

“I--I saw peacekeepers.  Saw ‘em coming.  So did Howard and Maggie, they just--they got to us ‘fore we could all run.  Tried to split up.  They caught Howard first, then found Maggie, don’t know why they didn’t find me, jesus christ, Forrest, I don’t know why the didn’t find me.”

Angry as Forrest is, he straightens up and puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and talks to him in soft tones.  “Now, Jack, there’s no call for that.  Get yourself together.  We’ll find ‘em.  Promise we will.  You hear?”

Jack swallows and nods.  “Yeah.  Yeah, alright, okay, what are we gonna do?”

Forrest sighs through his nose, thinking.  Then he heads up the street, following the faint trail of blood.  “Come on,” he says.

The trail goes dead a block away.  Forrest spends a long minute looking around, trying to figure out where to go next.  He ain’t ever been too bad at thinking like a peacekeeper--they’re direct, obedient, don’t tend to deviate from orders or known paths.

Figures maybe the only way he’s gonna track ‘em down is by doing what they’d do.

He heads up the street to the next intersection, and heads left, into the fire, towards the nearest peacekeeper haven.

Jack follows at a distance now, likely out of fear, and Forrest kind of regrets bringing him along, but figures he probably wouldn’t have been able to leave him behind anyway, so there’s no point in regretting it.

Blue lights mark the entryway to their haven--not quite an office, not quite a home.  Something like a bunker, heavily armoured but not heavily armed.  Don’t know how many will be around this time of night; sometimes the shifts are lighter than others, and there’s no discernible pattern to it.  He readies his rifle and heads up towards the lights.

“Forrest!” Jack hisses.  “The hell are you doing?”

Forrest gives Jack a hard look over his shoulder but doesn’t say anything.

“You can’t just walk up to their door!”

He does anyway.  Quiet, glancing around.  There’s cameras, but God only knows how long they’ve been there, or if they’re there for show more than function.  He takes aim and takes them out regardless.  Inside the haven, there’s no noise, nothing he can hear echoing up off the concrete walls through the iron hatch.

Truth be told, he doesn’t know exactly what they’d have done with Howard and Maggie.  Maybe took ‘em in to imprison, maybe killed ‘em already.  There’s no telling.  And maybe walking up and investigating like this ain’t the brightest idea, but it’s the only one he’s got, and this city is too damned big for them to spend all night coming up with alternatives.  He’s not gonna let himself start thinking about giving up.  

“Forrest!” Jack hisses again.

Forrest turns to tell him to hush, but Jack’s a few more paces away now, looks like he might be onto something, so Forrest heads over to him.

“I.  I think I hear somethin’.”

Jack points down another street.

Forrest stays stock still, closes his eyes, and listens.

There’s a breeze from nowhere hissing between buildings, little vortexes that form from the strangeness of the air pressure and the twisting, winding spaces.  

Somewhere in the mist and the unnatural noises of the city sleeping, he hears it, faint, but unmistakably human, and unmistakably Maggie.

He takes off running.