A lighting fist of fear and dread clenched around my heart and I took a wobbling step forward. My implants locked on the place the gunshots had come from. I forced myself to take another step, gritting my teeth and forcing down the terror that was screaming at me to turn and run. Inch by inch, I shuffled down the winding game trail that ran through the knee high grass.

It was probably pointless. Curi was most likely dead.

But she might be hurt. She might need help.

Either way, someone had to go and retrieve the gun. I sped up from a shuffle to a walk, my mind racing back to the night Meds had died. We were arguing, I can’t remember what for, but I kept shouting at her even after she begged me to stop, even after she said she saw something in the trees behind me. I hadn’t listened. I kept screaming and brought something down on us. Trying to remember it made my hands tingle and my head ache so I pushed the creature far from my mind. It was big. It turned Meds into a greasy patch on the dirt in less than a second. And it ran when Curi shot it. That’s all I needed to remember. Even if she was dead, we had to get Curi’s gun because we sure as hell wouldn’t survive the night without it.

The trail sloped down towards a narrow gully choked with creeping red vines and more of the sickly yellow mushrooms. If I was running from something trying to kill me, it’s where I would go. Apart from our tents it was the only cover for miles. The Zone stretched out in gentle waves of grass and thorny shrubs all around us. Empty. Barren. Exposed. I dialed up the sensitivity on my implants, scanning for anything that might be waiting to jump us.

The scan found two bodies lying in the vines at the bottom of the gully.

I broke into a run and deployed the tool kit built into my left arm. My hand split in half and folded to either side of my forearm while a small drill and a soldering iron ratcheted out of my wrist. As far as weapons went it was pretty much dog shit, but it was sharp and that counted for something.

A root snared my ankle as I ran, spilling me to the sodden ground with a splat. A dull red flare of pain rolled up my right hand, and I tumbled head over heels down the bank before coming to a stop in a narrow stream of reddish-brown water that smelled like wet leaves and iodine. The holographic display on my implanted lenses flashed me a radiation warning and an internal rebreather stiffened in my chest, preventing me from inhaling anything seriously unhealthy.

I pushed myself to my feet with a curse, wincing as I put weight on my right ankle. Great, that was going to make carrying Curi out of here an even bigger pain in the ass.

According to my scans, she was lying around the next bend in the ravine. Sheer walls of stone curtained in red, thorny vines sloped up sharply to either side of me, leaving just barely enough room for me to creep through the poison water without turning sideways. I stepped as slowly and carefully as I could, but there was no sneaking through the rotten creek. Every footfall sent up a small splash, a ripple on the water that was as loud as gunfire compared to the silent stillness of this part of the Zone. I crept around the bend and froze, my heart leaping into my throat. Curi was pinned underneath a figure in a tattered black jumpsuit. The creature had outgrown its clothes a long time ago and the legs of the jumpsuit barely reached past its knees. Its legs were thin and bony, too long, like they’d been stretched on a rack, and its feet ended in curved, yellowed claws that burst through the cracked remains of leather boots.

The creature growled. Curi’s legs kicked weakly in the contaminated water.

“Get off her!” I shouted, raising my drill hand and charging forward. The dozen aches and pains plaguing me melted under a storm surge of red hot adrenaline.

The monster turned its head towards me. The upper half of its face was hidden by a helmet with a mirrored faceplate that had been drilled into the creature's skull. Shiny steel screw heads were spaced evenly around the helm and corresponding tracks of dried blood ran down the monster’s pale cheeks. Its mouth fell open, stretching and distending like a snake until a maw of cracked yellow teeth yawned before me, big enough to swallow my whole head in one go.

The creature screamed, letting out a high piercing wail that matched the Hum almost perfectly. Higher pitched. But it graphed the same way. I faltered and stumbled to a stop, throwing my hands over my ears. The creature kept screaming and stalked forward on all fours.

Behind the monster, Curi scrambled to a sitting position and grabbed the gun. Three more shots split the air and the creature staggered forward a step. Black gore splashed into the stream. The creature shuddered. The Hum grew, building and building until the pain drove me to my knees. The gun barked one last time and clicked empty. The signal built to a crescendo, and bleeding from a dozen bullet wounds, the misshapen thing in the creek leapt into the air and coiled inwards on itself, vanishing in a puff of sulfur scented smoke and a peak of static.

The Hum receded, and my implants got to work tracing the signal’s new location.

I reached down and helped Curi to her feet. "Jesus Christ. What the fuck was that?"

Curi shook her head and slipped the empty gun back into the holster strapped to her thigh. "No idea."

"Are you okay?" I asked. Curi's ginger hair was splattered with mud and she had a darkening bruise on her left cheek.

She turned her head and spat a wad of blood and phlegm into the poison stream. "Scrapes and bruises. Nothing serious. Damn near pissed myself when that thing jumped me."

"Those are new, right?" I asked.

Curi shrugged. "Pretty sure, yeah, but you know I have a big blank spot in my journal."

"We all do."

Curi headed further downstream and waved for me to follow. "The memory loss is the least of my worries now. That thing ate the whole clip and didn't slow down."

"Shit," I said. "So on top of everything else, we're out of bullets too?"

Curi sighed, but couldn't hide the tremor in her voice. "That's been a long time coming."

"Great," I said. "And you were keeping that secret just for fun?"

"No. I didn't want to upset you and Crypto."

I stopped short, sinking to my ankles in the radioactive mud. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Curi turned and rolled her eyes. "It means you two get jumpy. And the last thing I need is to be babysitting you two on top of all the other bullshit here."

"All of that 'other bullshit' needs the damn gun to fix. Christ, half the plants in here try to kill us when they get the chance. I think we had a right to know we were running out of bullets for the only gun we had."

Curi turned and kept heading downstream. "How would that have helped?"

"We could have planned or something … I don't know."

"Planned how, Tech? You're buried in graphs and loose data every night. Crypto spends her days looking at moths and flowers. I'm the only one here worried about the practical shit, anyway."

"That doesn't mean you get to decide all that on your own."

Curi slowed to a stop and kicked a stone into the water. "Let's take a vote then. I vote to keep things the way they are, you want to change shit for no reason, and look, Crypto is nowhere to be found. Like always."

Crypto's voice echoed down the ravine. "I'm here," she shouted. "You need to see this."

Curi drew the empty gun by force of habit and crept forward, winding quickly and quietly down the winding stream bed. I fell into step behind her and deployed my drill bits again. If Crypto found another one of those monsters things were going to get ugly.

We turned another corner in the ravine and came face to face with a massive door built into the hillside. The door was made of shiny black metal with a rusted wheel at the center.

Crypto stood in front of the door with one hand on the locking wheel. "I think it's open. We should check it out, right?"

"We should wait," said Curi. "We have no idea what's in there."

Crypto smiled. "Lichens, moss. Ooh maybe more of those mushrooms with teeth."

She twisted the locking wheel and hauled the door open. It protested with a shriek of metal and rust before swinging open to reveal a long concrete hallway that stretched on forever, into the darkness.