THE BUG EATERS

Jazael’s dead eyes gazed lifelessly at the boy’s ruptured skull. The old man’s eyes were wide open, and his inner eyebrows were frozen upwards with a mixture of shock and sadness. His last moments had been spent drowning in horror, the gravity of the tragic situation pulling his consciousness into the dark as he bled out.

“I can’t believe it,” Tulio said, walking up to Faina as she collapsed into the asphalt next to Jazael.

“I can. We picked a fight where we shouldn’t have. We got all these people killed including our friend,” she replied with tears streaming down her face.

“It’s, yeah, it’s awful. I’m sorry it turned out this way. You know, I always thought of the old man as invincible. You get that, right? He always seemed too stubborn to die. It never even crossed my mind that some stupid kid could be the end of him,” he exhaled.

Sadness and anger tinged his eyes and voice, but it seemed muted. Jazael had been Tulio’s friend for a long time, and they had gone on a lot of scavenging runs together, but Tulio was no stranger to bereavement. He had lost friends and family before this and was already used to pushing through the grief and just getting on with life. As for the other three lives that had been lost, Tulio would do his best to ignore them entirely.

He left Faina and went over to the downed mech. There, he started rooting through a rucksack that was dropped there by the other group of scavengers, spilling its contents onto the ground before angrily tossing the bag aside when he didn’t find what he was looking for. He then climbed onto the mech and stuck his hand into a messily punctured hatch on the side. Faina moved to where she could watch him, but stayed close to Jazael.

“Damn,” Tulio shouted over to her, “the power core is already gone, of course! Those guys who shot at us didn’t have it and it’s not in the power hatch either. I should have known! It’s like you said, nobody’s going to leave behind something that valuable. Whichever mech pilot messed up this one must have stopped to grab its core.

Aside from the mech, this wasn’t even a big fight. Crumb was just exaggerating like always. This isn’t going to be worth losing a companion. I mean, nothing could be, but I had at least hoped for us to have a sliver of good luck today. This is bullshit.”

He climbed off the mech and went about collecting fallen weapons with frantic haste, throwing himself fully into the job. In addition to the fresh bodies from their own firefight, he discovered a few dead DNA and KA soldiers. Some of them were a mess of red holes and spilled guts, as though they had been torn to shreds by a mech’s HMGs. Tulio took their radios, their knives, and their patches. He also got a watch off of one of them. It was an old model with obvious signs of wear and tear, but its luxury Cygnet branding was recognizable even at a distance.

“Hey, come on! Aren’t you going to help?” he called over to Faina.

She was still sitting silently alongside Jazael and the boy. While Tulio had been scavenging the ruined battlefield, she had removed the boy’s cloak and placed it over his mangled face. Some of his blood was on her clothes.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” replied Faina, but the wind drowned out her words.

“What was that?”

“I said I don’t want to do this anymore!” she yelled it this time.

Tulio stopped scavenging for a moment. He put down his bag and walked over to her. He looked confused.

“Don’t want to do what anymore, Faina?” he asked in the softest voice he was capable of, which was still too stern to be considered calming in a moment like this.

“I don’t want to keep scavenging! I don’t want to loot corpses, mechs, or anything else! I don’t want to be here! I don’t want to compete with people who are struggling just as much as us! I don’t want to spend my life hauling rucksacks through the desert and watching my friends die! I’m so fucking sick of it all. It’s all for nothing. It all hurts so much and it’s always for nothing.”

“Well,” Tulio drew in his breath and thought carefully about what to say to her. “We should talk about this when we get back to Lamplight. It’s hard to lose someone you care about, I cared about him too, and I know this kind of life takes its toll, but for now you should just make sure we bag up as much of this stuff as possible. I promise we’ll get some real downtime as soon as we’re home.”

“It’s not just ‘someone I care about’, it’s Jazael! He was my friend for so long– your friend for so long! He’s always been with me in this, he even taught me most of what I know about surviving this lifestyle, and now he’s gone.” she said angrily as she stood up and began to lift Jazael’s body.

“Come on, you know he meant a lot to me, but I can’t deal with this right now. It’s not the time or place. We have to gather the scrap and get out of here. Put the body down.”

“You’re always so callous.”

“I…” Tulio looked genuinely hurt as he struggled to find the right words to say. “I don’t mean to be, I just have to be.”

“And what does that even mean, Tulio?”

“Jazael would want us to make money,” he said, with a flicker of hesitation. “It’s the way of the world, right? We’re going to need a lot of money if we’re ever going to leave Daybreak. You hate this way of life? You want to get out? You’ve got to go through hell, first.”

“And where would we even go? If we got out? You know we never made a realistic plan. It was always a pipe dream,” Faina said as she started to lift Jazael again.

“Vitaria, maybe? We’ll talk about it in Lamplight and work out the specifics then. Please just leave the body alone already,” Tulio’s brows twitched. He was getting increasingly agitated as he spoke.

“I want to bury him,” Faina responded bluntly.

“That’s… I mean, there’s no time for that. We can’t bury people out here. Even the DNA didn’t bury their dead. It’s not safe for us to be around this wreck any longer than we have to be. More scavengers could show up at any moment and assume from the bodies that we’re hostile. We only have time for the haul.”

“I don’t care about the haul!” Faina said through sobs. “I just don’t want to leave our friend out here. He deserves a proper send-off by the people who cared about him. Is a bag of guns and scrap metal worth more than that to you?”

“Then I’ll fucking keep all the credits for myself, how about that?” he shouted with a voice that boomed across the desert. “You think I like doing this shit? You think I’m happy that he’s dead? You’re being hysterical! Not thinking straight! Of course I’m not happy about any of this, but we need the money, Faina! We don’t have a choice about it. This isn’t just what we do, it’s the only thing we can do.”

“Then what are we living for?” replied Faina, quietly, feeling utterly broken.

No more arguments were exchanged. That was their limit. Faina was too upset to argue with Tulio, and he was too upset to argue with her. Anything else would cause an escalation that neither of them wanted.

He called out her name a few times as she dragged Jazael through the sand and away from the battlefield, but it didn’t seem like he could think of anything else to say. As Faina got further away, he went back to searching for objects of value to add to his rucksack. Eventually, Faina crossed over a hill and the two could no longer see each other.

After walking for a while through the desert, Faina stopped at the base of the mountains and laid Jazael down. She was a fair distance away from the skirmish now, and Tulio probably was too if he had been genuine when emphasizing the time pressure they were under. Hopefully he was okay, she thought as she sat down for a few minutes of rest.

While resting there, she examined Jazael’s energy knife. It had a very simple but menacing design. The handle was gray with curved finger grooves that were studded to provide extra grip, the blade was black with a sharp, pale blue edge, and the guard too was black. Beneath the guard was a hidden trigger that Faina knew would ignite the edge of the blade with plasma energy. This energy would allow it to cut into more or less anything that wasn’t also charged with that same energy, and that was what made the knife so incredibly valuable. She put it back into its sheath, which she then took from Jazael and attached to her own belt.

Once she had gathered enough energy and willpower, she buried him in a shallow and sandy grave. She then gathered up stones and piled them up on his place of rest one by one. Jazael had never been religious, and she had never been religious either, but she felt an urge to say a prayer for him anyway.

In the end, she couldn’t remember the words to one, so she just spent a while reminiscing about their time together.

It was Jazael who had taught her a lot of the survival tricks that now seemed like common sense. When she first started out as a scavenger after running away from a refugee camp, not many people were willing to take her seriously. She got awful deals on scrap and found it hard to partner up with anyone. Jazael was kind and, despite his grouchiness, he taught her what she needed to do in order to start earning respect around Lamplight. He had introduced her to Tulio, to Crumb, to Lazyday Hostel, and to a myriad of other useful contacts. His influence would stay with her forever, no matter what she did next.

It would have been nice to have made it out of Daybreak alongside him, she lamented. Jazael had been pushing sixty, but weathering hardship for so long had made him seem even older than that. Not a single day of his life had been lived outside of the shadow of war. He had been tired of the fighting, tired of this country, and he had deserved something better. All Faina could do for him now was to remember him fondly.

Jazael was entombed beneath the cliffs, those prison wardens who would watch over him until the end of everything.