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Drifter stood by the campfire, his back to the lake, flipping coins along his knuckles. The two Eliksni cowered near him beside the wood pile. The cast iron frying pan was sitting on the fire. It was filled with coals. A folded cloth bag was draped across its handle.
The frogs and crickets had fallen silent.
An Awoken man stepped out from behind a tree on the other side of the campsite. He held a shotgun with the barrel tipped back against his shoulder. He had short dark hair and unkind eyes. His smile was cruel and he walked forward with an almost exaggerated swagger.
Drifter laughed.
“Marcus?”
“Long time no see, Hope.”
“It’s Drifter now. Very long time. What brings you here?”
“Oh you know, just the same old same old, running guns and killing snitches who get in bed with the Vanguard, how about you?”
“Nothin’ much, nothin’ much, I'm on vacation.” The Drifter’s voice sounded like he was greeting an old friend. His smile was practiced, disarming, friendly. His eyes were snake-like. Ice cold.
“On vacation.” Marcus smiled back. His eyes, too, were ice cold.
“Yeah it's great. You should try it sometime. Find a nice quiet spot, fuck the brains out of someone you've been wanting to get with for a good long while, stare up at the stars.” The Drifter palmed a coin, and spread his arm out dramatically while he talked, scanning the treeline, noting every misplaced shadow, every hint of movement.
He twisted his wrist as he turned back to Marcus, the coin reappearing on his knuckles, tumbling again. “This is my first vacation and I'm loving it. I gotta take more of these.”
“Well ain't that sweet.” Marcus made a hand movement and several bushes behind him shuddered. “I always said you, of all people, deserved to die happy. And here we are, you all happy and about to die.”
“Nah, you don't want me dead yet.” The Drifter changed his stance slightly, shifting his weight, coiling, preparing to strike.
“If you did those two snipers of yours in the trees would've already shot me right between the eyes.” Drifter palmed his coins and pointed out the locations of both snipers with both his hands.
Chan’a’s eyes followed where the Drifter pointed and then gripped one of Nifflit’s four hands in hers.
“You want somethin’,” Drifter continued, smiling a knowing smile. “What can I do ya for, Marcus?”
“I mean, if there weren’t a hell of a lot of glimmer on the line, you absolutely would be dead right now, Hope, but you’re a popular guy. Seem’s there’s a few people willin’ to pay real good just to have a little chat with ya. One in particular’s been keepin’ tabs on ya real close-like. Apparently you left a sign up in your little hole in the tower. Tipped everyone off you’d be out and about. Quite a few of us been lookin’ for ya, past couple days. Real stroke of luck one of my associates saw that flash of green in the lake during their flyby last night.”
“Oh come on now, Marcus. I ain’t never crossed you.” The coins reappeared. The Drifter kept both hands where everyone could see them, multiple coins tumbling across the knuckles of each of them. “What I done to make you want me dead? And how much are you getting paid to deliver me? Maybe I can give you a better offer. Lotta money in the operation I’m runnin’ right now. I could make ya rich, brother.”
Marcus spat on the ground.
“What’s your problem, Marcus?” Drifter asked, all smiles, his eyes dead, watching, calculating.
“You ain’t my brother, Hope. You got my brother killed. And where I’m takin’ ya, you ain’t gonna walk away from.”
“It’s Drifter. And your brother made his choice. Ain’t no one able to change that boy's mind when he got an idea in his head. You know that. He decided and then he acted on that decision. That one is not on me.” The Drifter tilted his head, still grinning, still charming.
“Besides, if I recall correctly, the whole reason your brother was on my crew in the first place was that you were tryin’ to kill him.” He winked.
“Oh yeah? Well I heard different. Rumor has it you killed and ate your entire crew out there, my brother included.”
Marcus raised the hand not holding the shotgun and and twirled one finger in the air. Six more gunslingers stepped out of the trees: Four exos, a woman with an eyepatch, and a large man with a machine gun. They made no attempts to silence their footfalls. One of the exos loudly reloaded a scout rifle.
“Rumor says a lot of things, Marcus, but you know what rumor don't explain? You involving clueless civilian nobodies to do your dirty work. Since when do you do that, Marcus?” The coins continued to tumble back and forth across the Drifter’s knuckles on both hands.
The Drifter’s eyes flicked about as he talked, locating, assessing, analyzing. “That ain't like you. That ain't like you at all. But they did it.” He nodded. “You got me. How about you let the nice crab people go and we settle this all gentleman-like. You’re still a gentleman, right Marcus?” The Drifter licked his lips, his eyes flashing.
Marcus snorted. “Since when do you, of all people, give a rats ass about Fallen?”
“Oh come on now. Get with the times. We don't call ‘em that any more unless we fightin’ ‘em. These ones are harmless. Come on. Let ‘em go Marcus. They got kids.” The Drifter’s voice was honey-sweet. He scanned the faces of the six people behind Marcus, looking for any hint of a reaction, the slightest bit of empathy. He found none. “You and I, we done enough shitty things already. We don’t need that on our conscience too.”
Marcus nearly doubled over in laughter and slapped his knee. “You. A conscience. Oh that’s a funny joke, Hope. Real funny coming from you. Ha! Hahaha! Tell ya what, since you made me laugh, you put down all your weapons and let my people tie you up like a nicely wrapped present… and I'll let the Fallen go.”
“See? I knew you were still a gentleman, Marcus. Now, which one of these fine employees of yours has the keys to those nasty collars?”
The woman with the eyepatch stepped forward flipping a device in her hand with metal on one end and a blinking button on the other.
Marcus nodded and she walked over to the Eliksni family.
Drifter un-slung his scout rifle from his back with one hand and tossed it away toward the trees.
The woman with the key walked up to Chan'a. Drifter watched in slow motion as the corner of the woman's mouth turned up in a smirk and she flipped the key so the button was under her thumb.
Several things happened at once.
With cool precision, the Drifter flicked the coin on his knuckles at the woman with the eyepatch. It became a stasis grenade mid way through the air and she froze solid as it touched her.
Drifter also slid down to one knee, tucked, and rolled as multiple sniper bullets whizzed over his head into the lake.
At the same time and in one fluid motion, Chan'a pulled the small hatchet Eris and the Drifter had been using to chop wood out of the wood pile at her feet. She kept her two dominant hands on the handle and sliced down with full force. The hatchet lopped off the hand holding the key from the frozen woman’s body at the wrist. Nixit caught the frozen hand. Both aliens turned and ran into the trees.
The Drifter came up out of his roll standing between the gunslingers and the two Eliksni.
He took two shots in the chest which had been meant for the Eliksni as he spun on one heel, reaching down and back, picking up the cast iron frying pan full of coals by the cloth on its handle. He continued turning, dumping the flaming coals into the face of the man with the machine gun. The Drifter allowed the momentum to keep spinning him so he could take another step over and sink the side of the searing hot heavy pan into the face of an exo aiming a scout rifle at his head. The exo went down, its face almost folded in half around the pan in a satisfying crumple.
Asp-quick, Drifter flicked another coin. It landed against the chest of another exo gunslinger with a loud “Ding!” and she froze solid just before a shot from Trust shattered her completely. She burst into thousands of shards as though she had been made of glass.
A solar round to the face took out another exo and then the Drifter was dancing again.
He tumbled sideways, leaving blood on the bare stone ground and came up on his feet in front of a fourth exo.
An elbow to the face and a pivot and now the Drifter had a shield for the next hail of bullets as he shuffled to the side, returning fire from behind the exo’s body as it jerked with each shot from its companions.
Two more gunslingers in the trees went down with precision headshots from the Drifter’s hand cannon.
Thirteen left plus Marcus: two of them snipers, the blinded machine gunner, and nine more, location unknown.
The Drifter flung a stasis grenade, deliberately hitting the ground this time. It spawned a wall of ice he could take cover behind while his enemies opened fire.
His ears noted where the shots had come from and when he ducked out from behind his wall, three more headshots took out three more assailants. The blind machine gunner tumbled screaming into the lake. Drifter shot from the hip and the large man was silent.
Marcus, two snipers, seven unknown.
His pulse pounding in his ears, the taste of metal in his mouth, Drifter tossed a flaming coin into the middle of the clearing to explode in a brilliant flash of solar light as he dove for the trees.
A sniper bullet clipped his shoulder as he slid into the treeline. Dodging and weaving, he made his way toward the sniper on his right.
“You're hit pretty bad, Hope,” Marcus called out from behind a rock across the clearing. “Why don't you come on out and we'll get this done cleanly so you don't suffer. You never did like pain. Always complainin’ about how much you hated gettin’ shot.”
The Drifter darted through an open space between two trees. A bullet caused an explosion of bark by his head.
“Keep movin’ he whispered to himself as he danced around a large rock.
Drifter could see the sniper from where he was but to get a clear shot he'd have to step into the open where the other one could take him out. As he was preparing a stasis grenade, the sniper he was watching twitched and fell out of the tree, bleeding between the eyes.
The Drifter smiled.
Good shot, you Awoken sneak.
The other sniper fell to the ground with a thud, his throat slit.
Three-eyed woman of my dreams.
“You sure you don’t wanna maybe call your people off while they still breathin’ Marcus?” the Drifter called back. “Cuz if they don’t run now, they ain’t gonna be breathin’ much longer.”
He ducked and pivoted again as another bullet just missed him.
The Drifter mentally patted himself on the back for having first combed through the woods near the camp with Eris, foraging, and then stalking each other in the night. His familiarity with the terrain was benefitting him greatly now. Despite being tired and losing quite a bit of blood he was able to deftly maneuver around several assailants without giving away his position. He worked his way around to where he figured Marcus was hiding.
Cut the head off the snake and the rest will scatter. No loyalty in this game. Drifter knew it well. And, with Crow and Eris, he now had the upper hand.
A bush far ahead of him moved. The Drifter tumbled between two large rocks and stood behind a large tree, bracing his now-shaking wrist against its trunk to steady his next shot.
Pine needles crunched behind him.
He spun around, a flaming coin appearing in his free hand. He came face to face with Marcus and also, unfortunately, Marcus’ shotgun.
The muzzle was an inch away from the Drifter’s chest.
“Ah, shit.”
Marcus locked eyes with the Drifter as he pulled the trigger. The Drifter blinked as the shotgun blast ripped through him. Marcus grinned and pulled the trigger again.