Interlude: Man in the Long Black Coat (Coda)

Not here.

He stands in the center of the burning village, soot-streaked and bloodstained and shaking with rage. There is no one left to interrogate and the roofs are caving in.

Leaping flames cast an infernal glow on the palm-sized device in his hands. Its flat black screen remains blank. In a fit of rage he hurls the dead machine into an inferno that had once been a home.

There had been two signals; the first woke him from his apathy in the Waste, and he followed it like a faithful dog to a locked door in the side of a mountain that would not open, not even for him.

And he would have died there if not for another network coming online, sending its own signal, also authorized by Operative E1074. Who is not here. Not in the last three towns either.

His uniform is gone. His knife. His scanner. All the little pieces of him, everything that mattered. Only the mission, now. Only his victory.

Subhuman things scream through the streets, fighting over scraps and trinkets. His Irregulars. Another tried to command their loyalty, but he is nothing but a heap of gnawed bones beneath the blowing dust. Death is the only law that matters in the Wasteland.

For months he’d wandered, watching his men die or disappear as their supplies ran out. Hunting. Surviving. He is better now than he has ever been, better than 23, better than any of them. Unstoppable. This is only a setback.

I’m coming, 63 promises the blinking light, thinking of the last two bullets sleeping in the magazine of his handgun. You can run, but not forever.