"Come on, you sons of bitches! Come on, what are you bein' paid for?"

"We ain't paid at all, you little shit!"

"Huh. Well, I can see why!"

Another dart pinged the wall behind him as he dexterously rolled to avoid its trajectory. He made that one number seventeen—a personal record, by all accounts.

His job specification in the bunker was dictated by how he felt on any given day. Today, he felt like training with the lads. Each couldn't have been older than 17, yet they slung those rifles over their shoulders like they were trained baby-killers of "Nam, for Chrissakes. There was something about it he couldn't stand. He couldn't stand a young man, full of life, looking like he was dead inside. Those dull, dead stares they threw at him when they staggered back through the bunker elevator told him of the horrors of the world outside – nightmares he had only heard whispered during these soldiers" restless dreams. He heard them sometimes cry out at night and slowly realize they weren't being mauled by some stone-faced brute or chewed apart in the serrated jaws of a giant arachnid armada. Instead, they woke up shuddering and surrounded by four chrome walls, with only the dead droning of electrical lights buzzing around them. He wasn't sure if that made them feel more secure or not.

There's no prosthetic for an amputated spirit and no remedy for a mind with nothing to believe in. There was no better summary of a human's experience of The Deadlands than this.

At least he had Nicole. They'd joke about that. The most beautiful woman in the lab team and her "man" was a wise-talking mongrel. The soldiers had whispered among themselves sometimes about whisking her away to their quarters, and minutes later, always found their posterior ached unusually more than usual, and the teeth-prints of a particular dog had embedded themselves dangerously close to their asshole. Those soldiers seldom spoke of such things again.

He had found probably the most dejected group he had ever encountered smoking and playing cards in the Mess Hall – some variation of Go Fish that everyone barely remembered how to play. Their training guns were still slung over them - more of a comfort than anything else. So, as only he could, he convinced them to get in some target practice on this fine sunny afternoon.

"Ach Jespar, give us peace," one lad said, waving him away. "How d'fuck d'you know if it's sunny or not?"

He feigned astonishment.

"Why, my dear boy," he said in his most condescending tone. "Sun comes not from the sky, but from the soul within. Let your light shine on me! Shiiiiiine!"

"Gimmie a break," the boy laughed.

"A break"s exactly what you crazy jarheads need," Jespar laughed back. "Come on – pick up them dart guns and have a go at me. I'm a spooky creature of The Deadlands coming to get you. Fear me! And fire!"

"Hey, don't joke about that, Jespar!" Another boy broke in, throwing his cards on their table. "You ain't seen what it's like out there."

"Can't be any worse than in here," the teasing hound smirked. "When was the last time you had a little fun? Hey, if I'm bothering you, take your best shot. Otherwise, deal me in, lads."

"So you can clear us out again?" One of the other boys laughed, choking on his dying cigarette. "You're a weasel, Jespar. Not a dog. If you're asking me whether I wanna play cards with ya or try shootin' ya, pass me the fuckin' gun."

The coarse, dry laughter of the boys echoed down the walls of the usually silent Mess Hall. Several men and women looked up for only a moment before returning to their scraps of packaged military rations.

Jespar proudly poked his head in the air and walked with the boys to the back room of the Mess. There they remained for the best part of an hour, just some pent-up youths and a dog that kept slipping from their grasp – at one point, even catching one of their plastic darts in his mouth and strutting around with it as a gentleman with a sweet-smelling rose clenched between his fangs. He was ready to ask them to be his salsa partners.

"Take your best shot, boys! One single bullseye and I'll return some of those porno mags I won in our friendly game of Gin Rummy last week."

"The fuck do you even need them for!" One flustered but admittedly chuckling boy shouted back, steadying his aim. "Not like you can do shit with them!"

The group laughed, and for a time, their dance continued, growing more excitable by the minute. Jespar leaped through the air like a born acrobat, his spins and pirouettes becoming more fanciful and dexterous. The boys" laughter only egged him on.

Then the harsh feedback from a single gunshot punctuated their reverie.

"FUCK!"

Jespar slumped to the ground, shaking uncontrollably and staring with disbelief at the lead bullet lodged in his front paw, surrounded by a gaping gap of pulsing crimson. Blood. His blood.

He frantically scanned the room, seeing the terrified faces of the soldiers who instantly stood to attention, filing up like a rank of obedient automatons. None of them dared look at the fallen hound.

Jespar whined in agony, his body only now responding to the shock of the impact and the invasion of this foreign sensation into his being, flooding into him like a poison being seeped from the bullet that had been slammed into his paw.

"Never felt that before, have you?"

A voice reached his ringing ears from the back of the assembled peons. He knew who it belonged to.

His grim face appeared harsh and rough from the shadows, like a gravestone grafted onto a human skull, chipped only by three slashes across the left eye. He wore the standard beige fatigues as the rest, except his sleeves were torn and withered, displaying his slabs of muscle lined with scar tissue and shrapnel fragments. He never allowed any alterations to his skin or his uniform. They said he liked it this way.

He fixed Jespar with his wolf-like eyes, betraying his lycanthropic core. Then, without a smile, he turned those eyes on his men.

"Take a good look, boys," he said, and they did so. Gone were their youthful smiles. Now they wore the same dead expression that he did. The pack had to obey the wolf with the strongest bite.

"Look at him now," he continued. "Ain't nothing like a little pressure to make a maggot squirm. Apply enough pressure over time, and any beast will become obedient."

He stalked over to his fallen target, quivering as its blood began to pool under its punctured paw. He looked down at it momentarily, like he was inspecting a piece of trodden-upon dirt.

"Pressure and time, boys," he said as he turned back to the soldiers. "Believe in them. Slap a label like 'faith' on them if you like, but believe in them. They'll serve you better than God will nowadays. They're how we'll win back the earth from creatures like this."

Someone pushed through the crowd towards Jespar, his breathing only coming in short, raspy bursts. He felt soft hands grab him and wrap a lab coat around his newly formed wound.

"What the Hell's wrong with you!" Nicole screamed at the marked man. "Are you alright, baby? Sshsh, it's ok. There. It's ok; it's me. It's me."

He had started squirming away from her touch, unsure even where he was anymore. Everything around him spun and twisted in a haze of burnt chrome and burning eyes. This feeling coming from his paw surged through his whole body, even as his brain tried frantically to calm him down.

He suddenly felt himself bundled up in Nicole's arms, his eyes gently starting to close.

"I don't want you coming near Jespar again, you hear me?" he heard Nicole's voice echo in the depths of his fading consciousness. "When Father hears about this, he'll restrict your access to the medical labs. Your cards are marked, you fucking psycho."

At this, the marked one said nothing but simply nodded, accepting both the edict and insult with the patience of a trained hunter, swallowing the anger of his prey, and planning for the right moment to strike.

Pressure and time.

Before he ushered the boys out of the room, he turned back to Jespar, and even in the fading world of his agony, Jespar heard that voice. It was a voice he'd never forget.

"That's pain you're feeling right now, dog," the marked one said. "You'll get used to it."

...

Meatballs.

Jespar's nose woke him before his other sensory organs returned to the physical realm. His three hundred million olfactory receptors were the greatest tools in his biological arsenal, and yet, no. It couldn't be.

Why would his nose lie to him?

He cautiously lifted the lid of his left eye and bore witness to the impossible.

Lying in front of him, smoke wafting from their juicy, plump, red-brown orifice, was a mound of steaming meatballs, their sauce having seeped into the dusty duvet he lay upon.

Not the best presentation, but I've had worse, he thought.

He momentarily considered that this could be a trap sprung by one of his "brethren." Then he just as instantly dispelled the thought. If he was to die a meatball-related death, so be it. He couldn't argue with his stomach anymore.

He bit down on one with enough force to slice through a rattlesnake, and, by God, it was real. It was real, or it was the best damn hallucination ever conceived.

He wolfed them down like a possessed beast, sending spittle and sauce flying across the room that, from the corners of his eyes, looked like a kid"s bedroom.

Then he saw the girl sitting on the carpet looking at him with that damned intense stare like she was trying to read his mind.

"Chief!" he cried, spitting fragments of saliva-coated meat as he kept chewing. "Either I'm dead, or you're a bloody wizard."

He resumed tucking into his meal, his tongue exploring every inch of the sauce-streaked bed.

"I have never seen a creature attack its food," Rain-Born mused aloud. "Even the Canyon Stalkers share their prey."

"Oh!" he belched and nosed one tiny, half-chewed morsel off the bed towards her. "You want a bite?"

She looked at the saliva-coated brown ball, dripping with beads of sauce and with a single hair poking out of its center, and waved him away.

"More for me," he chuckled through more chewing. "Where'd this treasure come from?"

She proudly held aloft the tin depicting his favorite dish that looked like it had been severed open with a buzzsaw.

"As you slept, I descended from the roof of this place and found myself in a series of catacombs, separated by stairways and dotted with various rectangular portals. Within each, I found homes not unlike those in what you called the Suburb but much smaller and more compact. Some of them contained nothing but scraps and the odd but harmless creature scuttling around. But one of them held these small metal cylinders. I assumed them to be labeled with their contents and hacked several open to ascertain what a "meatball" was. I observed the instructions on the cylinder"s panel and, at the mention of heat and time, assumed these were the necessary guidelines to prepare the meal."

He looked at her blankly, licking his lips.

She frowned. "You said you like them. So I made them for you."

Through his laughter, he sputtered, "There! Was it so hard to say that?" Then at a grumble from his abdomen, the sudden realization took him. "Uh, Rain-Born – have you heard of the ancient concept of the "sell-by-date"?

A puzzled stare answered his question.

"Ugh, never mind," he said. "I'll take it, thanks. But how"d you even get them open?"

Rain-Born brandished her serrated blade, decorated with the dried blood of man and beast alike. "It took time and application of much force. But eventually, the cage for this meal relented."

Jespar licked up the final meatball and swallowed it whole. "Pressure and time, eh?"

"What?"

"Nothing," he replied. "So, this is an apartment block then?" he asked as he looked around at the damp, decaying walls, rusted toy cars, and planes that poked out from sheets of torn paper – probably homework. "Charming," he said.

Rain-Born rose and gestured to the window, which displayed the onset of the night: a pale-blooded moon gazed over the abandoned city lost in the desert. There was movement out there – wings flapping in the cold that suddenly seeped into Jespar's bones, shadows flitting across the night sky and arcing down to assault their unsuspecting prey that hid amidst the rocks and ruins of a forgotten civilization. Now and then, an animalistic shriek pierced the night sky – the tell-tale sign of another soul lost to the city of the dead.

"We should explore this interior for now," Rain-Born cautioned, holding tightly to her bone knife. "There may be more supplies that can be used in this tomb. For both the rest of the way and the journey home."

Jespar whistled as he shared her view at the window, standing on his hind legs to prospect the torn streets and buildings. "A night date in the Dead City. You already bought me dinner, girl. And now you're taking me apartment hunting? A guy could get used to this.

She rolled her eyes at him and led the way outside.

...

Each hallway was precisely as she'd described it. Though he knew the description of this place as a tomb wasn't quite right, he acknowledged that it was an apt enough analogy: each stairway led only to blown-out doors that opened into dust-caked rooms containing relics of the past. Rain-Born focused on raiding the cupboards and poking under beds and other furniture to find whatever she could. She seemed far less interested in the posters and contraptions of the dwellings than she had been when she had inspected the house in the suburb.

He watched her as she ravaged each home like a primal warrior intent on nothing but plunder. She swiped through cobweb-ridden tables and broke apart chairs for firewood. She ransacked dustbins, closets, and even children's toyboxes, picking up more canned goods without regard for their condition, only pausing now and then to consider family portraits, strewn DVDs, and old decorations. In one apartment, she found a Christmas tree in a hidden closet and looked upon it with trepidation, arming herself against its lambent green spikes and thorny decorative pieces. Only once Jespar explained the tradition of Christmas to her did she come to at least some understanding and left the old remnant of long-forgotten joy in its cage.

"Now I see why you first looked upon me as such a stranger," she told Jespar. "Your people had such traditions as we of the Hanakh do – with meanings so detached from our own that they seem so unknowable to me. How could the children of the Old World truly believe in this large man who flew into their houses while they slumbered, garbed in red, and bearing presents for good behavior? He sounds more like a sinister invader of homes than a merry man."

"Yeah," Jespar nodded. "But then, you believe in a big deer that runs with people up in the sky. You telling me a fat old man running down chimneys is any weirder?"

She considered him as she ravaged another cupboard.

"Your point is taken."

You gave up easy there, Chief, Jespar thought, observing her tearing into a can of tinned pears. That ain't like you.

He followed her outside to the next room and saw her suddenly fall to grip the stairway's railing.

"Woah!"

He ran up to her and pawed her leg. "Hey, you ok?"

"I am fine," she said, her face slightly more flushed than he remembered. "Let us press on."

He watched her walk over to him and continue downstairs. By his count, they were on the fifth floor, almost done.

Chief, are you stressed? You? He thought, but he immediately realized his naivety. She wasn't some kind of machine. She was a human, and at that, she was what, like sixteen? Sure, she was born of The Deadlands, but that didn't change the fact that she was still basically a kid.

He realized his failures every second he walked in this above-ground world. All he had been told about was the evils of this place. All he ever heard about was how nothing up here was pure or good.

He smirked at his inadequacy. He'd given up on "winning back the Earth" long ago. Truthfully, he never even cared much for the world as it had been or the people that had populated it. There'd been a time when he'd have been content to watch them all burn.

But never had he considered that there might be anyone in this new reality worth saving.

You were made for this world, Rain-Born, he mused as he followed after her. But how long can you really go on like this?