Tres Muertos

"Nothing says 'not a threat' quite like lying face-down on a rock while a battle rages around you. They didn't even bother pointing a weapon at me. Efficient, really."

Time passed differently when you couldn't move.

Minutes stretched into hours. Hours collapsed into moments. I lay there on the cold stone floor of the overhang, staring at the rough ceiling above me, and felt the world contract to the simple rhythm of my own breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

The only movement I could still control. The only proof I was still alive.

I tried not to think about Nelson. About whether he'd come back. About what it would mean if he didn't. The thoughts came anyway, circling through my mind like vultures waiting for something to die.

He's going to leave you. You know he is. You've always known.

I pushed the thought away. Focused on breathing. On the feel of stone against my back. On the pale light filtering through the entrance of the overhang, marking the passage of time in subtle shifts of shadow and brightness.

In. Out. In. Out.

I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough for the light to change. Long enough for my body to settle into its new reality, the panic of the first hour fading into something duller, more sustainable. Long enough for me to start wondering, seriously, what I would do if Nelson never returned.

Die, the answer came. You'll lie here until you die of thirst or starvation or exposure. Or until something finds you and decides you look like food.

The thought should have terrified me. Instead, it just felt... distant. Abstract. Like something happening to someone else, in a story I was only half-paying attention to.

Is this what giving up feels like?

I didn't know. Had never given up on anything in my life, not really. Even when things were hard—even when the bills piled up and the shifts got longer and the future seemed like nothing but more of the same grinding difficulty—I'd always kept going. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time.

But I couldn't put one foot in front of the other anymore. Couldn't take the next step, because my legs had decided they were done taking steps. And without that—without the simple, physical act of moving forward—I didn't know what was left.

Mum would know, I thought. Mum always knows.

But Mum wasn't here. And I was beginning to accept that she never would be again.

The sound of footsteps snapped me back to the present.

Soft. Careful. Coming from somewhere outside the overhang, growing closer with each passing second. I turned my head toward the entrance, my heart suddenly pounding, my breath catching in my throat.

Nelson.

It had to be. No one else knew I was here. No one else would be coming to this particular spot at this particular time.

Unless someone followed us. Unless something found our trail.

The thought sent ice through my veins. I tried to push myself up—instinct, stupid instinct, as if I could somehow defend myself if something hostile came through that entrance. My arms trembled with the effort. My legs remained dead, useless, anchoring me to the ground.

A shadow fell across the entrance.

Nelson stepped through.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding. "You came back."

He didn't respond immediately. Crossed to where I lay and crouched beside me, his movements quick and efficient. There was something different about him, I noticed. A tension in his shoulders. A sharpness in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

"We have a problem," he said.

"Another one?"

"We're not alone out here."

I felt the ripples of emotion spread through me—the fear, the confusion, the desperate need to understand what he meant.

"What do you mean? What did you see?"

"Tracks." He was already moving, gathering the few supplies he'd left in the overhang, stuffing them into his rucksack with hurried motions. "Fresh ones. Multiple sets."

"People?"

"People. At least half a dozen, maybe more." He paused, his hands stilling for just a moment. "Moving in formation. Organised. Hunting."

Hunting.

The word conjured images I didn't want to examine. Predators stalking prey. Wolves circling a wounded animal. The patient, methodical approach of those who knew their target couldn't escape.

"What do we do?"

Nelson looked at me. At my useless legs. At the helpless sprawl of my body against the stone floor. I saw the calculation happening behind his eyes—the same cold mathematics he'd applied earlier, now updated with new variables.

"We can't run," he said. It wasn't a question. "And we can't hide—not well enough, not with you unable to move."

"So we fight?"

"I fight." He drew his knife—that blade I'd seen him clean so many times, the one that had probably ended more lives than I wanted to think about. "You stay quiet and try not to draw attention."

"Nelson—"

"This isn't a discussion." His voice was hard. Final. "If they find us, I'll deal with them. If I can't deal with them..." He shrugged, the gesture almost casual. "Then it won't matter what either of us does."

He moved to the entrance of the overhang and crouched there, his body positioned so he could see out without being easily seen. The knife glinted in the light, held loose and ready in his right hand.

And we waited.

The silence was the worst part.

Not complete silence—there was wind, the soft whisper of it across stone. But human silence. The absence of footsteps, of voices, of any sign that the people Nelson had tracked were coming closer.

Maybe they'd changed direction. Maybe they were heading somewhere else entirely. Maybe Nelson had been wrong about them hunting us, and they were just travellers passing through, minding their own business.

And maybe the Shadow Panthers are really just oversized housecats, I thought bitterly. Maybe this whole thing is just a bad dream and you'll wake up in your bed in Glenorchy any second now.

I lay there, barely breathing, my eyes fixed on Nelson's silhouette at the entrance. He hadn't moved since taking his position—hadn't shifted, hadn't adjusted, hadn't done anything that might give away our location. He was like a statue carved from the same stone as the overhang itself, perfectly still, perfectly patient.

How long can he stay like that? I wondered. How long until—

Nelson's head turned. Just slightly. A few degrees to the left, tracking something I couldn't see.

My heart stopped.

Or it felt like it stopped. Everything in me went cold and still, frozen by the sudden certainty that something was wrong. Something had changed. Something was—

"Get behind the rocks," Nelson said quietly. "Now."

"I can't—"

"Crawl. Drag yourself. I don't care how. Just get out of view of the entrance."

The urgency in his voice bypassed my conscious mind entirely. I was moving before I'd decided to move, rolling onto my stomach, planting my forearms against the stone, pulling myself with everything I had. The movement was awkward, painful, agonisingly slow—but I was moving, dragging my dead legs behind me like bags of sand, putting distance between myself and the entrance view with each desperate effort.

I'd made it perhaps two metres when they appeared.

The first one came from above.

A shape dropping from the rocks overhead, landing in front of the overhang with a soft thud that spoke of practice, of training. I saw it in fragments—pale skin, dark clothing, a face I couldn't read—before Nelson was moving.

He was fast. Faster than I'd expected, faster than anyone his size should have been able to move. The knife in his hand became a blur of motion, slashing at the figure before it had fully straightened from its landing.

The blade caught flesh. I heard it—that particular sound of metal meeting meat, wet and terrible. The figure stumbled backward, clutching at its arm, and dark blood began to seep between its fingers.

But there were more.

They came from everywhere at once. From behind boulders, from gaps in the rocks, from positions of concealment I would never have noticed in a thousand years of looking. One moment the terrain around our overhang was empty, and the next it was swarming with figures, all of them converging on the entrance where Nelson stood.

He didn't retreat. Didn't try to fall back to a more defensible position. He stepped forward instead, moving to meet them, his knife weaving patterns in the air that I couldn't follow.

The first one to reach him was a man—tall, lean, pale-skinned like the others. He had a weapon of his own, something curved and vicious-looking, and he swung it at Nelson's head with the kind of speed that spoke of years of training.

Nelson ducked under the blow. His knife came up in the same motion, driving into the man's side, sliding between ribs with an ease that turned my stomach. The man made a sound—not a scream, exactly, more like a grunt of surprise—and then he was falling, his weapon clattering against the stones, his hands clutching at the wound that was already spilling his life onto the ground.

He killed him, I thought, the words distant and strange. He actually killed him.

But there was no time to process it. Another figure was already attacking, and another after that. Nelson became a blur of motion—blocking, striking, dodging—his body moving in patterns that seemed impossible, that defied the physics I thought I understood.

He was good. That much was clear. Maybe the best I'd ever seen, though my only frame of reference was action films and the occasional pub brawl I'd witnessed on social media. He moved like fighting was what he'd been built for, like violence was his native language, like every attack was already planned and every counter already executed before his opponents had finished deciding what to do.

But there were too many of them.

I watched it happen from my position behind the rocks—watched the mathematics of the fight shift, the overwhelming numbers beginning to tell. For every attacker Nelson dropped, two more took their place. For every wound he inflicted, he took one in return—a cut on his arm, a gash across his cheek, a blow to his ribs that made him stagger.

He was losing. Slowly, inevitably, he was losing.

One of the pale figures broke away from the group surrounding Nelson. Turned toward the overhang. Toward me.

No.

The word formed in my mind but never reached my lips. I was already moving—or trying to move, my arms scrabbling against the stone, my useless legs dragging behind me as I tried to put more distance between myself and the approaching threat.

It wasn't enough. Of course it wasn't. I'd managed perhaps half a metre before the figure reached me, looking down at my pathetic attempts to escape with an expression that might have been contempt or might have been pity.

"Cet-uno marche pas!" he called out. A man's voice, clipped and sharp. "Il rampa... mira, il rampa!"

Laughter. Someone laughed—a sharp, ugly sound that echoed off the rocks around us.

I stopped crawling. There was no point. No hope. I just lay there, face pressed against the cold stone, and listened to the sounds of the fight continuing behind me.

The crash of bodies. The grunt of effort. The wet sound of blades finding flesh.

And then, suddenly, silence.

"Bastez!"

The voice cut through the chaos like a blade through paper. Male. Cold. Carrying an authority that expected—and received—instant obedience.

I turned my head, my cheek scraping against the stone, and saw Nelson.

He was on his knees. Three of the pale figures held him down—one gripping each arm, a third with a blade pressed against his throat. His face was a mask of blood from a cut above his eye, and his breathing was ragged, harsh, the sound of a man who'd pushed himself to his absolute limit and found it wasn't enough.

But he was alive. Somehow, impossibly, he was still alive.

Bodies lay around him. Three that I could see, maybe more hidden by the rocks. The ground was dark with blood—theirs, his, impossible to tell whose was whose in the chaos of the scene.

He took three of them with him, I thought, and despite everything—despite the terror and the helplessness and the certainty that my own death was moments away—I felt something like respect flicker through me.

The man who'd spoken stepped into view.

He was older than the others—or at least, he carried himself like someone older, someone accustomed to command. His hair was cropped close to his skull, iron-grey rather than the darker shades of his companions. His face was hard, weathered, marked by scars that spoke of a life that included regular violence.

He looked at the bodies on the ground. At Nelson, kneeling in their midst, held down by his people. At the blood soaking into the stone.

"Tres muertos." His voice was flat. Controlled. But I could hear something beneath it—something that might have been grief, or might have been fury. "Tres de mi gente. Pour qué?"

I caught the number—tres, three—and the word muertos. Dead. Three dead. The rest was tone and fury and the way his hands clenched at his sides.

Nelson didn't answer. His jaw was set, his eyes fixed on something in the middle distance, refusing to meet his gaze.

The man's hand moved. Fast—too fast to track. The sound of the slap echoed off the rocks, sharp and shocking in the sudden silence.

"Je t'ai posé une question, Pirata."

Pirata.

The word hung in the air between them, loaded with meaning I didn't fully understand. But I understood enough. They knew what Nelson was. Knew what he represented. And whatever history existed between their kind and his, it wasn't friendly.

"Je me défendais," Nelson replied, his voice rough but steady. "Vos gens ont attaqué les premiers."

French. He was speaking French—or something close to it. The realisation hit me like cold water. Nelson spoke their language.

"Tu es sur notre territoire." The man's voice was ice. "Tu n'as pas le droit d'être ici. Pas le droit de te défendre contre ceux qui protègent ce qui est à eux."

I couldn't follow the words, but I understood his meaning well enough from the contempt in his voice, the rigid set of his shoulders. You don't belong here.

He turned away from Nelson, scanning the area around the overhang. His gaze passed over me—a brief flicker of attention, cataloguing my presence, dismissing me as a threat—before returning to Nelson.

"Où sont les otros?"

"Quels autres?" Nelson's response was immediate. Flat.

Another slap. Harder this time. I saw Nelson's head snap to the side, saw fresh blood well from a split lip.

"Ne joue pas avec moi, Pirata. Los tuyos voyagent en paires. Où est ton compañero?"

I caught fragments. Paires—pairs. Compañero—companion, partner. He was asking about others. About whether Nelson was alone.

Nelson laughed. The sound was ugly, bitter, completely without humour.

"Tu le regardes."

The man's eyes moved to me. Settled on me with a weight that felt physical. I lay there, frozen, unable to look away from that cold, assessing stare.

"Ça?" He gestured toward me with undisguised contempt. "Ça, c'est ton compañero?"

"Oui."

"Il peut même pas estar de pie."

"Non," Nelson agreed. "Il peut pas. Mais c'est quand même mon partner."

I wanted to protest. Wanted to scream that I wasn't his partner, wasn't his anything, was just a hostage he'd dragged across the wasteland for reasons he'd never bothered to explain. But the memory of that slap—the casual brutality of it, the absolute certainty that the man would do worse to me without a moment's hesitation—kept my mouth firmly shut.

The man studied me for a long moment. I could see him making calculations, drawing conclusions, fitting me into whatever framework he used to understand the world.

"Amenez-les tous les deux," he said finally. "Le Pirata marche. L'autre..." He shrugged, the gesture dismissive. "Portez-le si vous devez. Traînez-le sinon."

He turned and began walking—heading deeper into the foothills, toward the mountains that loomed on the horizon.

"Bougez-les. Nous avons un long chemin, et je veux être à la maison avant la nuit."

Maison. Home. That word I recognised.

The word echoed in my mind as they began to drag me forward—my legs trailing uselessly behind me, my arms screaming against the bonds that held them.

Where is home for people like this? What kind of place produces people like that, who move like that, who fight like that?

I didn't know. Wasn't sure I wanted to know.