Shoot the Moon

This is another Naomi Quinn story in the Fallen Earth setting.

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The moon hung high in the sky, bright contrast to the bruised black sky. Tonight was a favorite of travelers, scavengers, and lovers alike; a full moon. It shone so bright that few of the stars had the penetrating force of presence to show beside it. Orion stood defiant to the moons radiant glow, keeping watch over the night skies. A light, continual breeze carried through the moonlit night teasing settled dust and guiding loose leaves.

Normally Naomi would be sitting in her camp by now, leaning back against whatever she’d found as a back rest, and getting ready to call it a night. Then again, normally she’d have her pack, too. However, the higher powers, if there were any, saw fit to have a small band of highwaymen catch her between settlements and unawares. While fortune favored her enough to only take a stone to the head and not a bullet, it didn’t favor her quite enough to let her keep her bag. For that, Naomi was displeased. Her pack held her journal, her journal held her life. It also held her rations.

For this reason she lay on her stomach in the sparse, tall grass near the top of a hill overlooking a small valley. A tall tree with sprawling branches clawed at the sky above her, bare branches raised in askance to the night sky. The color of the wood suggested that it was dead, but she was never much of a plant person. Plus with the way everything had been mutated, she wasn’t going to so much as guess as to what made sense anymore. As far as she knew, the tree might decide to eat her for dishonoring its pack or something. How was she to know? It wasn’t like she was a Vista.

Her bag lay at the base of a far hill, some fifty yards off. The dwindling campfire was little more than a speck in the cleavage of the two hills. Somewhere in the distance the echo of gunfire struggled to flee from its origins. Naomi drew her rifle and settled in, adjusting her hat to shade the end of the scope from the moonlight. As she sighted in the camp, its attendants came to life.

The crack of the distant gunfire awoke one of the men in the small camp, who sat up suddenly with a snort and a rusty revolver. His bald head reflected the moonlight, illuminating the scar that ran from the top of his right eye all the way over the top of his head. As fearsome as the scar made him, the walrus mustache he had detracted from it rather significantly. He had it oiled up so the stiff black hairs shone more than his head leaving the rest of him to look dull and mundane in comparison. Like the others, his clothes tended toward the cloth covered with random bits of whatever they could find category. The man lying beside the bald man had a soup can on his shoulder.

The bald man stood with a grumble, holstering his revolver in a cumbersome looking shoulder harness and wandered off out of camp. Naomi didn’t need to follow him to know what he was doing. The other two men were sound asleep. By the looks of it, they’d drank enough spirits to sleep through the second Fall. After scanning the two sleepers, she found the bald man again and trailed him until he crawled back in his bedding.

She stood, holstering her lever action rifle over her shoulder and brushed the dust off her clothes. Her dark brown duster had done a brilliant job keeping her white cotton shirt with the lightly dipping neckline free from travel’s grit, although lying in the dirt had somewhat been counter-intuitive to that cause. Her dark brown gun belt, a Glock 17 Redux accompanying each hip, secured her dark gray cargos. Flicking her blonde ponytail back over her shoulder and giving her hat a tug, Naomi made her way down the hill as nice and quietly.

The smell of spilt spirits and unwashed men clung to the camp like a plague, threatening to leech into anything that lingered too long within its cloud. She made her way into the camp silently, one of her strengths paying off and definitely not for the first time. The high possibility of bloodshed if she made one wrong move kept her highly attentive and careful. While she could hold her own if necessary, fighting wasn’t one of her strengths. She was a people person, not a dead people person.

It was times like these that Naomi wished she’d stayed with the Techs that originally found her a little longer. Maybe then they’d have taught her how to see in the dark like some of them seemed to. Silently she thanked the moon for choosing tonight of all nights to be so bright as she rooted through the camp in search of her bag. A nagging sense of déjà vu tickled the back of her head, but she pushed it off for now. Now just wasn’t the time for one of her dreams.

Finally, she found it. They hadn’t broken the lock she’d put on her bag yet and for all the effort they put into doing so, they hadn’t broken down and torn into the very fine leather that made it up. Someone would have to be very desperate to tear into such a fine bag, which naturally was one of the reasons she originally procured it. The Lightbearer it had originally belonged to was probably very annoyed at having lost it. Naomi hefted the bag and tossed a strap over her shoulder before turning to leave, slowly inching her way back out of the camp.

Just as she reached the edge of the camp an ember in the fire popped, the soft explosion as loud as a herd of stampeding cattle in the silence. The bald man sat up again quickly, rusty revolver in hand and sleep obfuscating the intruder briefly. Quickly evaluating her options, Naomi broke from the slow crawl of stealth and burst into a full sprint up the hill towards the tree. At first the bald man just stared, blinking his eyes in bewilderment before the gravity of the situation settled in his head.

The revolver belched fire as the bullet tore into the earth just in front of Naomi, the bark of the weapon startling the other two of the camp’s occupants awake. A second shot erupted from the rusty weapon, a small gout of dirt exploding near her once more. Small shocks of electricity rippled down her legs as she dug in for more speed, the left over nanites about her body setting to work on her muscles.

She tore away from the camp, up the hill towards the tree. The fifty yards that took her so long to sneak along shot by in a flash as gunshots rang out behind her from a variety of weapons. They may’ve used a stone to take her from the saddle earlier that day but apparently the highwaymen didn’t think too fondly of thieves. Just as she reached the tree at the top of the hill, silhouetted by the moon directly behind her, one of the bullets tore into the meat of her bicep. It was a lucky shot for both parties, all things considered.

With adrenaline pumping and blood flowing, the impact of the bullet did little else than emphasize the point that it was time to be gone. Just past the tree her horse stood waiting patiently in the moonlight. The reins were tied loosely to an unearthed root so that they could just be tugged free on a moment’s notice. It paid to be prepared. Grabbing the reins as she reached her horse, she launched herself up into the saddle, spun the creature around, and shot off in the opposite direction from the highwaymen. She’d have to see to her arm soon, but she wanted to get a little distance first. Then it was time for her journal.