the floor. As the stick-up man crashed downward, Grant fell upon him, slapping away the hand holding the pistol and driving his other hand down to hit the man’s face with its heel. The gunman was knocked senseless, his head slamming against the wooden floors with a loud, hollow echo.
“Everyone okay?” Grant asked as he pulled himself away from the final stick-up artist.
Around the church hall, the timid locals began to rise once more, smiling tentatively as they saw that Grant, Kane and Brigid had disabled all of their would-be robbers. And, spontaneously, a ripple of applause broke out among the people in that church as they showed their gratitude to their saviors.
However, hidden among the shadows near the church doorway, one woman didn’t applaud. Instead, her tanned face betrayed no emotion as she watched the scene with flashing dark eyes from beneath the hood of her jacket, her faithful dog waiting at her side.
Despite the disguising nature of the loose, ragged clothes she wore, it was clear that she was a tall woman, with a slender build and an economic lightness of movement. Her face was tanned with an olive complexion, with eyes the color of rich chocolate. The woman reached up with the long fingers of her slender hand, brushing a few rogue wisps of her dark hair back under the hood, pulling the front of the hood itself down lower, the better to mask her face.
As the crowd continued to congratulate the three Cerberus warriors, the woman turned and pushed her way past the milling crowd and out of the church hall, the dog obediently trotting along at her heels. The dog was some strange mongrel, with coarse, wiry fur and the look of a coyote about it. Its eyes were exceptionally pale, washed out to a blue so faint as to be almost white.
The woman stopped at the bottom of the stone steps that led to the church hall, gazing back over her shoulder for a moment to ensure that the Cerberus people weren’t following her. But no, they hadn’t spotted her among the crowds, had no reason to suspect she might be here. She had come seeking food, like the other residents of the shattered ville of Hope, but she hadn’t expected to bump into familiar faces like theirs. Her name was Rosalia, and she had met with the Cerberus rebels once before.
Rosalia had been here six weeks ago, when the earthquake had rumbled through the ground and the towering tidal wave had pummeled the beachfront. She had been a bodyguard then, in the employ of a local brigand called Tom Carnack, whose operation stretched into the Californian desert. Her position had put her at odds with the objectives of the Cerberus personnel, and she had clashed with Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with another operative called Domi, whose skin was an eerie white the color of bone.
Carnack had been killed during the encounter with Cerberus, and his operation all but destroyed. Now a few splinter factions of Carnack’s group remained, squabbling among themselves and with no clear leader emerging. And so Rosalia found herself once again out on her own, struggling to survive.
With no employer and no place to call home, Rosalia had found herself back in Hope, accompanied by the strange mongrel dog. What remained of the shanty dwellings had been reduced to a claustrophobic rabbit’s warren, which suited Rosalia fine. She could hide here, another refugee among the population of strangers until she was ready to move on. There was the nunnery, of course, just over the border, where she had been trained. Rosalia knew that she would always be welcome there if nowhere else.
Right now, however, she required rations and clean water, but she felt instinctively that revealing herself to Kane and his team would be foolhardy. Their business had not ended well. Better, then, that they thought her dead and dismissed her from their overly moralistic minds.
Rosalia hurried on, making her way from the church doors before ducking into a side street, the faithful mutt keeping pace with her. Rosalia had found the dog six weeks ago, while she had been wandering the Californian desert following the destruction of Carnack’s base, and the two had become companions on the road. Not given to sentimentality, Rosalia had elected not to give the hound a name, merely calling it “Dog” or “Mutt” or “Belly-on-legs.” The dog didn’t seem to care, happy to have human company, sharing its warmth with Rosalia wherever she slept. The dog itself was a strange, nervous animal, inquisitive but slightly wary around strangers, often hiding behind Rosalia as they walked the streets. That nervousness served her well, for it meant the hound would wake at the slightest noise or movement and would bark at any shadow it didn’t recognize. On more than one occasion, the dog’s sudden barking had woken Rosalia and saved her from being robbed or attacked while she slept in one of the empty, ramshackle buildings that remained dotted around the fishing ville.
Dog whined, and Rosalia peered down at it. Like herself, Dog could feel the gnawing in its belly as hunger threatened to consume it. It wouldn’t do to go hungry simply because of the Cerberus Magistrates and their interruption of her daily routine. If she didn’t eat, she would become weak, and once that happened Rosalia would become a slave to circumstance, or she would never eat again and simply lie down in the street to die as she had seen others do.
There, she said in her mind as she looked back up the street, her predatory instincts rising. Exiting the church, a young couple made their way down the stone steps, going slowly so that their child could keep pace with them. The child was a toddler, and the mother held its hand as it slowly navigated the hard steps to the street. Rosalia’s eyes were on the male’s bag, small but full of rations and two bottles of purified water. The young woman cheered as the child clambered down the final step, and it looked up at her and laughed. They were simple folks, Rosalia recognized, naive and lacking street smarts. Ville folk turned refugee with the destruction of Beausoleil or Snakefishville, most probably. Educated to be idiots.
And if the child starved because of her actions?
Better the child than me, Rosalia reasoned.
Beneath the waxing moon, the couple turned into the side street where Rosalia waited by the wall, hidden in the shadows of the brickwork. She was about to step forward, planning merely to brush past them and take the bag before bolting in the manner of a common street thief, when she saw movement at the far end of the narrow street. Two tough-looking youths had followed the couple and their child, clearly harboring the same idea as Rosalia. She saw the glint of metal catch the moonlight as one of the young men unsheathed a switchblade, and the whisper of a smile crossed her perfect lips. It was a bored smile, the kind that came when one could finally sense a break in the tedium. This would be Rosalia’s break from tedium.
One of the young punks began laughing, a sinister, braying sound that echoed off the walls of the enclosed street. It was meant to terrify, and the young couple walked faster, glancing over their shoulders as they rushed down the street. Then the two punks began to sprint, rushing along the street and surrounding the young couple in an instant, like a pack of wild dogs, howling and laughing as they did so, the animalistic noises echoing off the walls. Two more young thugs had appeared from the far end of the alleyway, and another stepped out of a doorway on the far side from Rosalia’s own hiding place, where he had been waiting just out of sight, a bend in the alley hiding her from him.
“Got something we want, Mr. Man,” one of the punks announced, pointing to the modest bag of rations he had acquired from the church.
“Keep away,” the man spit, reaching for his woman’s elbow and urging her onward.
The five-strong gang paced around the young couple, hemming them in and laughing among themselves. Another knife appeared in one punk’s hand, and Rosalia noted how weedy he looked, the arm that held the knife little more than skin pulled over bone.
“We went to eat, but they didn’t feed us enough,” the leering leader of the punks explained, his tone mocking. “We want more.”
Ironically, Rosalia could well believe that. These punks looked
