The wind howled through the skeletal remains of Highway 75, a once-majestic artery now reduced to cracked asphalt and rusted steel girders. Kalen Voss hunched under the weight of his canvas backpack, the strap digging into his shoulder—worn thin by fifteen years of hauling survival gear across the Red Ash Wastes. The air reeked of acrid iron and decay, thick with crimson dust that clung to his skin like a second layer, seeping into the creases of his calloused hands and the frayed cuffs of his olive-drab jacket. This was the world he'd known since he was eight: a landscape of ash and bones, where the sun hung low and bloated, casting everything in a sickly, blood-red glow.
Inside his backpack, the last half-kilo of compressed biscuits clinked softly against the rusted M1911 pistol at his hip. Three days of rations. Three days to reach the Ninth Safe Zone, a smudge of gray on the horizon that promised walls, shelter, and—if the rumors were true—something resembling order. Three days to escape the endless cycle of hunger and fear that had defined his life since the Red Ash Catastrophe of 2042.
Kalen's fingers brushed the small Serbian medical emblem around his neck, its surface worn smooth by years of contact with his skin. Engraved in Cyrillic was the word "Здравље" (translated: "Health")—a gift from his mother, Elara, a UN medic who'd died saving a group of scavengers from a radiation wolf pack when he was eight. Her last words had been a whisper, barely audible over the snarls of the beasts: "Find the North Star Outpost. It has the meds. It has the truth." His father, Javier, a former Argentine farmhand with a knack for fixing broken things, had died six months later, sacrificing himself to hold off a sandworm so Kalen could escape with a caravan of survivors.
Fifteen years of grief had hardened Kalen into a ghost of a man—lean, wiry, with a face etched by wind and radiation, his eyes a sharp, vigilant amber that missed nothing. He'd learned to survive by his wits: to track by the position of the bloated red sun and the direction of the dust storms; to fashion a machete from a car spring heated over a campfire and sharpened on concrete; to start a fire with flint and dry grass even in the pouring rain; to kill without hesitation, because hesitation meant death. But he'd never lost the flicker of humanity his parents had instilled in him—a refusal to prey on the weak, a willingness to share his last bite of food with a stranger, a quiet rage at the injustice of a world that had stolen everything from him.
The shuffle of boots on gravel shattered the silence. Kalen froze, his hand drifting to the homemade machete strapped to his waist. The blade was a thing of brutal beauty: forged from a leaf spring he'd salvaged from a crashed pickup, its edge honed to a razor sharpness, the hilt wrapped in frayed leather to absorb sweat. He'd killed his first radiation wolf with it when he was twelve, and it had saved his life more times than he could count.
From behind the crumbling concrete pillars of an overpass emerged a dozen scavengers, their clothes tattered into rags that barely covered their emaciated bodies. Their faces were gaunt, their cheekbones protruding, their eyes wild with a hunger that had eroded all sense of decency. At their head stood a woman named May, her hair matted with red dust, her face scored with a jagged scar that ran from her forehead to her jaw. In her arms, she clutched a whimpering boy of no more than six, his cheeks sunken, his lips cracked and bleeding. The child's eyes were vacant, his small body trembling with cold and starvation.
"Please," May begged, her voice raw from years of breathing contaminated air. "My son hasn't eaten in two days. We just need a little—anything to keep him alive. I'll trade you anything. A knife. A canteen. My body. Just… please."
Kalen's jaw tightened. He'd seen this play out a hundred times in the Wastes. Use a child as bait, lower the mark's guard, then swarm. He'd been the mark once, when he was twelve, traveling with a caravan of orphans. A group of scavengers had used a baby as leverage, stealing their meager supplies and leaving three of the children to die of exposure. He'd lost a chunk of his left ear in that fight, a scar he carried as a reminder never to trust easily.
"Step aside," he said, his voice rough as sandpaper. "I don't have enough to share. Not if I want to reach the Safe Zone. I'm down to three days of rations myself."
May's eyes hardened. The wild, desperate look faded, replaced by a cold, calculating stare. She nodded to the two men flanking her—burly scavengers with missing teeth and makeshift clubs carved from tree branches. "Take it."
The scavengers lunged. A lanky man with a scar slicing his throat grabbed for Kalen's backpack, his fingers digging into the canvas. Kalen dodged, his body moving with the fluidity of a man who'd spent his life fighting for survival. He spun, his machete arcing through the air in a brutal horizontal slash that sliced through the man's forearm. Blood spurted onto the parched earth, thick and dark, but the man didn't even flinch. Hunger had numbed his pain, turning him into a mindless beast.
In the chaos, the child slipped from May's arms. Kalen saw it happen in slow motion: the boy's small hands scrabbling at the air, May's scream lost in the roar of the wind, the sickening thud as his body hit the ground thirty feet below the overpass. He closed his eyes for a split second, a surge of anger and grief washing over him. But when he opened them, he saw that none of the scavengers had glanced back. They just kept coming, their fingers clawing for the biscuits, their mouths open in snarls.
Something snapped in Kalen. Not the hot, reckless anger of a boy, but the cold, clinical rage of a man who'd seen too much suffering. He drew the M1911 from its holster, the metal biting into his palm. He had three bullets left—salvaged from a dead UG soldier he'd found in a foxhole a month earlier. He aimed for the burliest scavenger, a man with a beard matted with dust and dried blood, and pulled the trigger.
The shot echoed across the barrens, loud enough to scare off the distant caw of mutated crows. The man crumpled to the ground, a gaping hole in his chest, and the others scattered like roaches. May stared at Kalen for a long moment, her eyes filled with a mixture of hatred and despair, before turning and running into the dust.
Kalen stood there, his chest heaving, the gun still smoking in his hand. He stared at the child's body far below, his throat tight. He'd seen death before—more than any man should have to bear—but this felt different. This was a death caused by greed, by the cruelty of a world that had turned people into monsters. He touched the medical emblem around his neck, his fingers trembling.
"I'll find it, Mom," he whispered. "The North Star Outpost. I'll finish what you started. No more kids dying for a handful of biscuits. No more scavengers turning on each other just to survive. I promise."
He adjusted his backpack, brushing off a thick layer of red dust, and set off toward the Ninth Safe Zone. But as he walked, he noticed the air growing thicker, the dust swirling into small tornadoes that danced across the asphalt. He tasted something sharp on his tongue—fresh radiation, the kind that burned your throat and made your eyes water. A red dust storm was coming. Worse, he heard the low, guttural growl of radiation wolves, distant but closing fast.
Kalen broke into a jog, his boots crunching on the contaminated ground. The Safe Zone's walls loomed closer, but the storm's leading edge hit moments later, a wall of crimson that blotted out the sun. Visibility dropped to a meter, and the wind screamed like a thousand dying animals. He sprinted for the nearest shelter—a derelict gas station, its windows shattered, its pumps rusted into uselessness.
He barricaded the door with a metal shelf, his hands trembling as he stacked crates of expired soda and rusted cans of motor oil against it. The storm's fury shook the building, and outside, he heard the wolves howl—high-pitched, hungry, closing in. He grabbed a jerrycan of gasoline he'd scavenged from the trunk of a crashed truck, soaked a rag in it, and lit it with a spark from his flint. The flame flickered to life, casting a warm glow over the dark interior.
He threw the molotov cocktail through a broken window. The explosion lit up the storm, a bright orange fireball that momentarily cut through the crimson haze. He heard the wolves yelp as flames licked their flesh, their howls turning to whimpers. One collapsed, burning, while the other two fled into the darkness.
Kalen slid down the wall, exhausted, and pulled out one of the compressed biscuits. It was dry and tasteless, but it was food. He took a small bite, chewing slowly, and thought of his parents. He thought of the child who'd died. He thought of the Ninth Safe Zone, and whether it would be any different from the Wastes.
By dawn, the storm had passed, leaving the barrens coated in a thick layer of red dust. Kalen brushed it off his jacket and resumed his journey. As he walked, he passed the child's body, now covered in dust, and paused for a moment of silence. He pulled a small cross from his pocket—salvaged from an abandoned church—and placed it on the ground next to the boy.
"Rest easy," he said. "I'll make it count."
The Ninth Safe Zone loomed ahead, its concrete walls topped with barbed wire and UG flags fluttering weakly in the wind. Kalen's heart raced as he approached, a mixture of hope and dread washing over him. He didn't know what waited for him inside—corruption, danger, more suffering—but he knew it was better than the Wastes. It was his last chance to find his mother's outpost, to honor her memory, to make a difference.
As he walked toward the checkpoint, he tightened his grip on his machete. Whatever came next, he was ready. He'd survived fifteen years in the Wastes. He could survive anything.