[4] The Ghost Town

[Piper Juunanagou]

For the first time in a while, Piper Juunanagou felt alive. Beads of sweat rolled down from the crown of her head. She could literally feel her blood pumping with each thunderous beat of her heart. Pure, raw adrenaline coursed through her body, eliciting a euphoria leagues above that of any narcotic she had used in the past.

Unfortunately for Piper, however, nothing comes without a price…

“What have I done?” Kaden muttered as the woman dragged him away from the corpse of his unintentional victim and toward the momentary safety of a nearby alley. All the time she tugged and pulled the young courier, he continued to repeat the question and shake like a terrified child.

When they finally crossed over into the cramped corridor, Piper managed to trip backwards over a large chunk of debris. With a grunt, she slammed painfully onto her backside, inadvertently dragging the mortified Kaden down with her. The man smacked the ground just a few inches in front of the woman and then fell backwards onto her. The young courier was still shaking—his despondent gaze was still locked on the hand he’d use to inadvertently strike down the duo’s would-be assailant.

“It’ll be all right,” Piper mumbled as she tried to think of a means to console the man without making things horribly awkward for the two of them. After a couple of seconds, the redhead put her arms around the young man’s chest and simply held him. As he was right now, Kaden reminded Piper of herself at several of her lower points in life—broken and dejected. For that reason alone, she couldn’t help but feel like she had some stock in his current dilemma.

“I killed a man,” the blonde youth whispered. The wavering tone of his voice made Piper wonder how close he was to actually crying over his accidental murder of the thug. “I spent all that time lecturing Orion, and then I went and made myself a hypocrite,” he added as his head drooped forward.

“It was an accident,” Piper replied as she took one of her hands and ran it through the man’s hair. “It wasn’t like you ripped his entrails out with your hands or tortured him for a few hours.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I shouldn’t have acted so haphazardly,” Kaden muttered quietly. “If I would have taken just another second or two to line up the shot…” he added, trailing off as he let out a shallow sigh.

“If you hadn’t of acted as quickly as you did then that thug would have killed me,” Piper spoke softly as she peered toward the road that lay a few yards before them. In the background, she could still hear the slowly encroaching chorus of energy guns. The medic wondered for a second whether or not Orion was still alive out there somewhere, and once that second was up, she forgot about the savage altogether. “You saved my life, Kaden,” she whispered as she gave the despondent man another light hug.

“That doesn’t—,” before the man could finish, Piper put a hand over his mouth.

“I think I heard something,” the redhead whispered after leaning forward so her mouth was next to his ear. Not even a second later, a silver blur zipped past the pair of ‘hunters.’ Both of them felt the warm air of the rocket-propelled grenade, but neither was quick enough to move away from the explosion that followed.

With a deafening bang, the building directly to the duo’s left exploded—its side wall literally ripped to pieces by the might of the blast. As Piper and Kaden scrambled to their feet, they were caught by the wave of force that rippled out from the explosion. Like a pair of children’s toys, the twosome was plucked off the dirt and sent careening toward the brick wall of a nearby building.

Piper let out a shriek, but before she faced the fate of a fly against a windshield, her body erupted into a cloud of light particles. A split-second later, she materialized back into existence within the interior of the building, and like the misfortune that it was, her momentum carried her all the way into a bookcase. A few yards away, Kaden hit the floor and tumbled all the way into the far wall. Aside from the tumble, the courier seemed all right, which meant his reflexes must have been keen enough to clear his path through the brick.

“Are you okay, Kaden?” Piper yelled over as she clenched her teeth and ripped herself free of the broken bookcase. As she pulled away from the piece of furniture, she felt shards of sundered wood rip through her relatively thin clothing and into her skin. Not wanting to lose face in front of an already dejected Kaden, the woman swallowed down the screams. Fortunately it wasn’t that hard…it seemed a history of masochism was at least good for something. After gaining her composure, Piper sprinted over to the courier, who finally started to stir.

“Yea,” Kaden shot back quietly as he rose off the ground. The tameness of his voice and the lack of a vibrant smile on his face was a clear an indicator as any that the man was still grappling with himself over the recent events.

“We need to move quickly,” Piper spoke as she extended a hand toward the lethargic man. “I promise to let you beat yourself up about what happened all you want once we get out of this hellhole,” she said with what she intended as a form of jovial sarcasm. After a moment or two of nothing, Kaden reached out and took the redhead’s outstretched hand.

“Excellent,” Piper said warmly as the two began toward the back of the dark, decaying structure.