"That's right, Jill. The aliens have finished fortifying their crossing of the Waimakariri River, occupied most of north Christchurch, and are now pushing further into the city. The U.N. task force is trying to contain the situation, but the creatures seem much less affected by smaller munitions than a human or animal would be. 

The aliens also don't seem to care about their casualties and keep charging our fortified quarantine lines. The fighting has become some of the most brutal since the trench wars. 

Official reports indicate that a few aliens have even displayed abilities like the Returned have, and requests have gone out to U.N. members to send their Returned to counter these threats. 

None have arrived to help yet. 

Some of the soldiers here have shared with me that the only man-portable weapons that can stop them are heavy calibre machine guns and high explosives."

"Oh yes, we can see the explosions behind you. They sound very loud. Are they loud for you?"

"... yes, Jill, they are loud."

"It looks like you're very close to the front lines, Ron. Is it dangerous?"

"Yes... It's a combat zone, Jill. Of course, it's <beep>ing dangerous."

"Ah, yes. Well, do be careful. But are we sure they are aliens, Ron?"

"<beep> if I <beep>ing know, you stupid <beep>. Where the <beep> do you <beep>ing think they come from!?"

"Sorry?"

"<beep> off, they're not paying me enough to stand within spitting distance of these things answering some big-titted airhead's stupid <beep>ing questions."

"...."

• Ronald Beckers' final live broadcast during the fall of New Zeeland. May 19th, 2013. - Cycle R42

***

"Sh...ugar," I hissed in pain, swallowing my half-chewed mouthful with difficulty instead of continuing to pull at my wound by finishing chewing. 

My wound quickly drenched the fresh makeshift bandage when the scab split for the umpteenth time. 

Clara had redone her duct taping to pinch the wound closed as well as she could without sutures, but had left most of it open so it was easier to clean. Covering the mess was a makeshift bandage made from a cut-up t-shirt stuck into place with more duct tape. 

A moment later, I hissed in pain again when Clara ripped it off with a quick yank and tossed me another quarter t-shirt. 

Bitch.

I folded the t-shirt and pressed it against my dribbling wound with one hand. That was becoming a disturbingly familiar pose.

We'd used some of our limited water to clean the gash a few times already as we crept through the city, but Clara'd already said the water wasn't enough to clean up the infection that had set in. 

I felt horrible, was running a fever, and really wanted to crawl into a warm bed until I felt better, but that wasn't an option in this hellscape. 

SURVIVE.

Halfway through the afternoon, the constant throbbing pain, fever, and dribbling puss had made me suggest cauterising the wound, even knowing that would probably hurt a ton more than any burn I'd ever had. 

Clara had called me an idiot, except with far cruder and more graphic expressions. 

Apparently, most films and books with cauterisations were a complete crock of sugar. 

Cauterising a wound might kill the infection and stop bleeding, but it'd also kill the cells around the injury and any natural defences you'd still have against hostile bacteria. That'd create an even more fertile breeding ground for infections. 

You'd effectively kill yourself if you couldn't get antibiotics and some specific treatment immediately after. 

I think Clara was some kind of army medic. When I'd asked, she'd told me it was none of my fudging business, but she gave me a military vibe. She knew about injuries and how to treat them, at least. 

She didn't strike me as smart enough to be a regular doctor, and a nurse was right out. I might be generalising more than a bit here, but nurses were supposed to be social and caring. Right?

Clara was neither. 

Of course, she might be a prepper survival nut out to bring down 'the government', but I'd prefer to think of my only ally as having some kind of formal government training instead. 

Even if she was a grade-a bitch. 

She swore enough to be a sailor, so maybe she was a Navy medic? 

Did the Navy have medics? Or were there doctors and nurses on the ships? Did sailors even swear particularly much, or was that another stupid stereotype? 

I sighed. I missed the internet and its answers more than I'd ever expected I could.

Since this morning, we'd slowly but steadily been heading south through the ruins. We'd run across two ransacked supermarkets and a partially ransacked sporting goods store that were still partially standing when we got deeper into the devastated city. 

The aisles with any consumables had been stripped bare, but I'd been able to change my haphazard clothes and shoes for a clean water-repellant set of hiking wear that fit me. It wasn't anything spectacular, just solid boots, a coat that came down to my thighs, and solid trousers. All in that standard light brown colour. Underneath I wore a green long-sleeved jumper, a grey T-shirt, and basic green underwear.  

Clara thought it hilarious that I had to get the boots from the kids' section and cut short sleeves and trouser legs. I ignored her jabs about being tiny. 

SURVIVE.

I also traded my school backpack for a good hiking backpack that distributed its weight on my hips instead of hanging off my shoulders. 

In addition to clean underwear and t-shirts, we filled our packs with paper towels, a clothesline, and other small items that might come in handy but didn't weigh too much. 

In the second supermarket, we found half a dozen cans of green beans and even a dented can of hot dogs, which were miraculously still intact under a shelving unit that had fallen over at some point. 

Anything resembling medical supplies had long been taken, but I did luck out with a few packets of aspirin that had just been lying next to a shelf. It wasn't antibiotics, but they helped with my headache and bruised ribs. Or cracked ribs. 

With my luck, they were cracked. 

Even with a morning hike behind us, I didn't feel like death warmed over anymore. I felt better than I probably should be feeling after a single night of sleep and a few bars of food. 

My headache was now a dull throb, not a pounding marching band wearing spiked shoes stamping through my skull. The world wasn't a dark shade of dark red anymore, just slightly pink. 

I was well enough to move through the ruins carrying a backpack and socking great big sword. Not easily or without pain, but I could do it. 

Which I think shouldn't have been possible with how hurt I'd been. 

Don't get me wrong; I still had a badly infected wound dribbling puss, a fever probably around forty degrees and every step I took sent pulses of pain through my ribs. 

SURVIVE.

But I could take those steps. And I didn't know how or why. Maybe it was just fear of being left to die spurning me on, but somehow I doubted it. 

Emotions didn't make burst capillaries stop bleeding. 

The only thing that made any sense was that whatever the implant did to give me my psychic abilities, it was helping me here as well.  

Trying to comprehend what was happening, I checked the Bracer's sigils. It still displayed Integration at seventeen per cent, but the sigil indicating the Pressure level had changed. It now showed a different jagged sigil which implied Apex, Superlative, Full, Climax, Apotheosis, Zenith, or Orgasm. 

Which was better than being rated as pregnant, I guess, but told me very little I didn't know already. 

In the second supermarket, we'd found a windowless break room with a solid enough door, and we'd feasted on cold hot dogs and green beans for a late lunch, using Clara's sword to cut them open. 

Unlike my socking great weapon dragging me down, hers was only sixty centimetres or so long, of which the blade was maybe two-thirds that length. Clara called it an arming sword, but I think it looked more like one of those Roman swords. 

But that might be two names for the same thing. I didn't know much about weapons. 

It didn't matter either, I guess. Except to underline again how much I missed just being able to look things up. 

What was important was that Clara could make her sword sharper. Or at least make it cut things considerably better than it usually did. 

She'd gone over my uselessness when fighting the Bug at length, repeatedly spelling out where I'd fallen short and what I shouldn't have done.  

Mostly it was that I never should have gotten close, and that I'd not 'powered' my sword. 

With everything else happening, I'd completely forgotten how we'd been forced to move heat from our implants through our arms into the weapons before we were thrown into the ruins. 

Whatever it was, it did something to the edge of the weapons they gave us. But only with those weapons, not with the utensils I'd tried the same trick with.

Even after spending more than a bit of time testing before we headed out that morning, I still had no idea how it worked. I knew it had to be some form of technology, but how it functioned utterly eluded me. There was no vibration, no heat, nothing except for the undeniable fact that it was easier to cut things when powered. 

Clara called it who-the-fudge-gives-a-fudge. I again sanitised that phrasing. 

Her reasoning was... fair, I guess. 

Clara was focused on survival and getting home. Amid a very impressive use of disgusting profanity, she said my constant need to question, attempt to quantify, and looking for answers would get me killed. 

She might have had a point there. Still, I thought not knowing things would kill me just as fast. I just needed to find the balance. 

SURVIVE.

While carefully eating, I skimmed through a few old newspapers we'd found in the shop and tried to piece together what had happened here. If the dates of our two different... worlds? -I guess- aligned, the papers were from about three months ago. A timeline I judged didn't match the state of the dead people outside, but they might have stopped printing papers a while ago. 

Or our dates just didn't match up, which was something that wasn't important but still bothered me not knowing. I delegated the question to Future Lana again, even if that was getting annoying. 

The papers mainly described what areas had been overrun and what the British military was doing to stop what they called the 'Anathema' or 'Aberrants.' 

Most of it read like propaganda. Far too optimistic about the war efforts by far. I don't know why I drew that conclusion, but that's what it looked like to my -admittedly- inexpert eye. The military was 'containing' virtually everything, and the 'Legion's' help had proven 'instrumental' almost everywhere for absolutely everything. They were handily preventing any Anathema from landing on the British Isles. 

A picture of a group of 'legionnaires' wearing the same heavy armour as my kidnappers told me who this Legion was. I frowned at the name. 

Why do pretentious pricks always use ancient Roman or Greek names for themselves? 

A map on page six of one of the papers showed that most of Asia, all of Oceania, a good deal of southern Africa, and the west coasts of North and South America were red, turning orange the further towards Europe they went. Swaths of Europe were yellow, leaving only a bit of northern France, Belgium, western Germany, and the Netherlands green. 

The meaning of the colours was depressingly self-evident, even without the legend shown under the map. 

Brittain had a separate map, where it was a greener shade of yellow than any other yellow used. The legend underneath that map said the Legion was deployed with the military in defensive positions. 

I went through the different maps again and formulated a rough timeline. It took a little over a decade to lose most of the planet. Anything yellow was orange within six months. Every country that showed yellow was red for two years, and the less industrialised ones didn't even make it a year. 

I frowned again. How did the aliens spread so fast?

I was undoubtedly missing something. 

The Bugs might be a little larger and tougher than a person, but no way that a modern army wouldn't scythe through them. Clara had told me about the Hounds, which seemed even less tough. Just fast and intimidating to people, not tanks, planes and combat drones. 

Couple that with that I'd also been stumbling around the city for days and seen hundreds of dead people. But I'd only seen a few Anathema, nowhere near the hundreds needed to execute a surprise attack on this level. Make that thousands. Or tens of thousands even. 

At least, I suspected it had to be a surprise attack: the dead all looked like they had been going about their day judging by the clothing. I had to be missing something, and that something might get me killed.

"You look like you're being assfucked without even the courtesy of spit," the foulmouthed woman across from me interrupted my thoughts.  

SURVIVE.

I sighed internally before dropping the line of thought. The papers didn't describe the Aberrants, so there was no way I'd learn what I was missing. I did, however, learn something of interest.

"Look at this," I said, using my unoccupied hand to awkwardly arrange the papers' maps on the table between us. 

"It looks like these things started from New Zeeland and spread over the planet, leaving Europe as a final bastion."

"So?"

"So, according to their dates, this was three months ago, but they'd have progressed, right? If they're here," I stabbed the yellow zone of England with my index finger, "Which they are because we've seen them, wouldn't it be safe to assume that they'd of advanced on each side of the map?"

"Yeah, so fucking what?" Clara asked again. 

"We were told to get to the fortress city of Alkmaar. That implies it still exists and is probably not overrun by these Anathema. Which would put it somewhere here," I circled the green zones of France, Germany, Belgium, and… the Netherlands. 

Where they spoke Dutch; the language the bastards that took us spoke. A language I could suddenly understand after I'd passed out when I'd psychically savaged Glasshand. 

The map showed five dots in the Netherlands, but none had names. 

"Did you understand what the kidnappers said?" I voiced my first thought. 

Clara frowned at my apparent change of subject but answered anyway, "I knew what the fuckers wanted, didn't understand what they said until the shitlicker poking me spoke English to me." 

"What did they tell you?" I asked half-absently, still staring at the five doits in the Netherlands.

"The assdrips brainfucked me and fucking made me tell them everything about me," Clara growled, "what the fuck has that got to do with this?"

I looked up to see the woman glare at me. 

"It was Dutch. The... uhm.. legionnaires spoke Dutch. They speak that in the Netherlands," I explained, my finger tapping the green zone to the east of Great Britain, "Seems logical that they'd speak the language of the place where they set up their fortresses, right?"

"They fucking speak Dutch in South Africa," Clara mercilessly poked a hole in my hastily constructed hypothesis. 

I wasn't sure the South Africans spoke Dutch. Actually, I was pretty sure they didn't, but I didn't want to get into semantics. I had another way to shut that line of thought down. 

"South Africa's red. So if Alkmaar turns out to be in South Africa, we're dead anyway. So we might as well aim for something that we can reach."

Clara grunted. I imagined it was probably meant to be taken as a taciturn agreement. 

"Regardless, we'll need to cross the sea at some point, and this thin part seems like the most logical part, so we should aim for here," I said, poking one of the dots in southeast England. 

The woman across from me was silent for a while before she gave a minute nod.

"You fucking need proper meds first. Hoofing it'll take a fuckton of time, and even if we find a fucking car that still works, you'll be too fucked to be useful in a few days. Dead a few hours later."

That brought me up short. 

Clara wouldn't hesitate to leave me to die if I became a liability. She'd made that clear from the get-go. Somehow I'd forgotten that. Or at least not thought about it. 

SURVIVE.

To the top of the list that went. 

"So, hospital. Which probably means the centre of the city, right?"

Clara sighed loudly. She wasn't very good at non-profanity verbal communication, but I was getting an idea of how I might eventually read her like a book with her grunts, sighs, and sniffs. 

I held my tongue and waited for her to elaborate. 

"Shitsticks will have them fucking fortified, stripped, or whoever invaded will have boobytrapped the place to hell. It's what I would fucking do.'

"So, we need to find a general practitioner's office?" I pushed when she didn't continue.

"Or a vet. Fucking animals usually get the same meds we get."

That was odd, but it had a logic to it. Mammals would probably react to most medicines in the same way, right?

"How do you even know that?" I blurted out before I could stop myself. 

"None of your fucking business. Now finish up. We move out in five, and I need to patch that horrorshow you call a mug."

I glared at her, and she just gave me a smile with too many teeth. That wasn't a fight I would win; I could see she was enjoying herself.   

I wiped off my dripping wound with barely a hiss of pain and quickly washed away another aspirin with the last of the fluids my green beans had been in. Then, I folded up the map part of the newspaper and stuffed it into my backpack. It might be useful. 

It took everything for me not to let Clara see how much it hurt when she methodically taped a new makeshift bandage on my face. 

"We'll still need a real map of England and the rest of Europe," I mentioned after I'd recovered enough to start carefully strapping my sword to the side of my backpack with spare belts. 

Clara grunted what sounded like her agreement, then looked at me disapprovingly while I secured my sodding great weapon. A moment later, she turned around without telling me to leave it again. Even if it was bloody heavy, far too large, and I didn't even know how to use it properly; I wouldn't leave it. 

SURVIVE.

HUNT.

It was my only weapon, and I was convinced the dead city would eventually kill me if all I had to fight were my psychics and plucky attitude. 

Because as it stood now, Clara would probably leave me before long. 

 ***

We spent the rest of the day creeping through the ruins of what had once been a metropolis filled with millions. 

The ruins were drenched in the pervasive miasma of burned everything, putrid flesh, and open sewers. At least we did see life, even if it was only scavenger birds eating corpses. 

And there were an incomprehensible amount of dead.

There were dozens upon dozens of bodies of the residents scattered around the war-torn streets. Most were missing body parts. As if they'd been caught in one of those war movie bombing runs. Every corpse had distinct wounds, but all of them had the backs of their heads blown out from the inside. 

We found two more dead Ironhides not far from each other. Both had had the machine ripped out of their implants in a similar method as the others I'd found. Clara said they had been dead for at least a couple of days. 

With every step we took, the dead reminded me that a single misstep would get me killed. I couldn't help but stare at every nook and cranny to ensure nothing was in there, ready to kill me.

That was probably why I saw the Bug long before it saw us. 

SURVIVE.

HUNT.

We were just about to move from one set of collapsed apartment buildings to the other side of the street, where there were office buildings that didn't look utterly demolished. 

We needed more water to wash out the foul gunk drenching my bandage, which had started leaking again, and there wasn't a better place than toilet reservoirs to get clean water as far as we'd found out. 

During our trek, I had been feeling worse and worse, and I'd caught Clara giving it a sidelong look more than once. 

The meaning of those glances had been unmistakable; my wound looked horrific. It smelled that way. Clara'd leave me in a heartbeat if she thought I'd reduce her chances of staying alive, and every look she gave my face told me she was leaning that way. 

Let's be fair; she'd probably drop me like a bad habit if I didn't improve her chances. She'd dropped enough hints during the day, saying as much.

SURVIVE.

Those thoughts and the aspirin I was knocking back kept me moving, even with my fever rising. 

Still, I needed to prove that I could improve Clara's chances so she'd help me survive. 

HUNT.

The Bug down the street would help me do that. 

I pssssst'd at Clara to get her attention. I wasn't worried about tipping the Bug off. Clara continuously kept the sounds we made blocked off with her ability so we'd avoid alerting anything when we moved.

As soon as she looked up, I pointed towards the Bug. 

The wreck of a traditional double-decker bus sat in the middle of the road. It looked like it had exploded from the inside, ripping at least a third off entirely. Large pieces of metal were pealed outward from the remaining two-thirds, allowing us to see the surprisingly unscathed interior.  

The Anathema sat inside the passenger compartment. Like a chameleon, it was camouflaged, and I probably wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't for it missing its lower right arm and a good portion of that side of its thorax and abdominal chitin. The wounds hadn't changed colour to blend in, and the dried blood red clashed with the bus' burned interior. 

Clara followed the direction of my pointed finger and, judging from the widening in her eyes, eventually saw the creature waiting for prey. The thing reminded me more of a praying mantis now than ever before. 

"You ready for this, Princess?" Clara whispered. 

SURVIVE.

HUNT.

I nodded, and the foulmouthed woman exhaled sharply before inhaling again slowly. She turned her right palm upwards, and I could see the air streams being forced into what looked like a greyish-blue ball above her open hand. 

Very weird. 

We'd discussed this before leaving the garage this morning and had hashed out a rough plan for working together. 

Clara said she could take care of a Bug easily enough. If she hit. However, her ability was difficult to aim at a moving target, and creating a ball of compressed air that could punch through their armoured carapace took at least thirty seconds. 

My job was to keep the Bug immobilised while Clara blew its head off. 

A simple enough plan. 

Except I was the bait. 

SURVIVE.

I dropped my backpack to free myself from its weight while Clara got ready. I looked at my sword before deciding it'd do more harm than good. 

When Clara gave me a quick nod indicating she was ready a little while later, I scrambled up a pile of building rubble, ensuring I slipped enough to kick loose smaller pieces of concrete. 

I stopped biting back the pain every step I took caused and whimpered with every step. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Bug react, slowly turning its head towards me. 

HUNT.

Heart hammering in my throat, I acted like I hadn't seen it and started descending on the other side of the rubble, limping and whimpering with each step.  

As soon as I was halfway down and wouldn't be able to quickly move up the debris again, the Bug moved. 

It shot forward, closing within twenty meters or so in a few seconds. 

Fudge, this thing was fast. Faster than either of the others I'd seen. It was also smart, with it waiting until I had nowhere to go. 

It lingered there, standing completely still in the middle of the ruined road, its camouflage and bloody side making it stand out instead of blending in. 

I then 'noticed' it and started backing up, whimpering even more and scrabbling my way back up the rubble I'd descended. 

The Bug started bobbing its head up and down, weaving its upper body left and right while opening and closing its three remaining claws. The spiked limb extending from underneath its left wing-casing swayed in counterpoint to its body. The other side was a bloody mess, so I assumed it was missing. 

Then, it took a step forward. 

HUNT.

It wasn't worried or scared of any threat I might pose. It wasn't concerned at all. I think it was enjoying this. It was like a cat playing with its helpless prey. Realising that sent my heart into overdrive. 

I could die here.

SURVIVE.

Clara stepped up behind me, and the Bug instantly saw a threat. It shifted its weight forward, immediately dropping the 'playing with its food' thing and hurling itself towards me. 

HUNT.

My turn.

Heat from my implant flowed into my head as it had done before. It might have been minutely easier, but there was no decrease in the feeling of fire flooding through my skull. 

The Bug had already closed half the distance in the moments it took me to prepare my ability, but it was over.  

[STOP]

The Command slammed into it, and it froze completely. 

Him. It was a male. 

I don't know how I knew, but as soon as I pushed through the high-pressure water protecting its mind, I knew. It resisted but was nowhere as strong as the one I stopped yesterday.

My Command remained squarely in the middle of the stream, barely moving a fraction. 

It was... almost effortless. 

I could probably push it even further. Deeper into the Anathema. 

With that thought, I started to force my Command through the high-pressure water. 

It worked flawlessly. 

It might as well have been actual water pushing me back, but I increased the pressure and felt my Command move beyond the outside. 

And then, like a soap bubble popping, it was instantly gone. I mentally stumbled when it just disappeared. 

"Fuck yeah!" Clara whooped behind me, and I saw the suddenly headless Bug fall and flail around its sharp claws. 

"That was fucking awesome, Professor!" she skidded to a halt beside me and clapped me on the back. 

Shit. 

Pain exploded from my ribs, and I fell to my knees, coughing loudly. The movement ripped the scab on my cheek completely open again, causing a flood of foul-smelling blood and puss to drip down my chin. I was in a bad way. 

"Shit. Fuck. Sorry about that," the woman said, sounding slightly abashed. She pulled me to my feet while I was still coughing, holding my shoulders with both hands to steady me and took me in the eye. 

"Oh, you're fucked, Princess. We gotta get you patched up. Can't let you fuck off now. You turning them into sitting ducks lets me take them out in one shot. Easy fucking peasy."

Clara propped me up with her arm, awkwardly dragging my backpack along with the other. I quietly thanked her for that; I don't think I could have carried that. 

Unceremoniously, she hauled me to the other side of the street. I grit my teeth with every step, but something had gone out of me after the Bug was killed. 

I felt weak as a kitten and every step hurt. 

With Clara's help, I still made it a few hundred meters away from the Bugg's corpse, where she dragged me into one of the ruins. 

It was one of the more intact buildings, though that wasn't saying much. The place looked like it had been shredded by whatever bombs blew craters into the street outside, but the elevator shafts still stood, actually keeping the upper floors upstairs. 

Clara guided me past them towards the bathrooms, which traditionally could be found behind elevators in office buildings like these. 

She leaned me against the wall before switching on a flashlight and opening the bathroom door. She looked around inside and checked the stalls before dragging me inside and sitting me down on one of the toilets. 

Clara rummaged through my bag, pulling out my coffee mug, another of the diminishing supply of cut-up t-shirts and a roll of paper towels. She unceremoniously ripped off the old bandage before roughly wiping my wound with the paper towels. 

I was too tired to stop my whimpering. At least this time, Clara didn't look like she enjoyed the pain she was causing me.

After she was satisfied, she shone the flashlight at my face, intently looking at my wound. 

"Fuck me. Infection shouldn't be this fucking bad. It's only been a few fucking hours," she muttered. 

Well, that didn't sound good at all.