You Look Like Shit

"There's something deeply wrong about encountering a bright red kayak in hell—it's too cheerful, too ordinary, too much a reminder that somewhere else people are having normal Saturdays."

"Beatrix?"

The surprise in my voice was unmistakable as I spotted her—an almost surreal figure against the backdrop of the barren landscape, barefoot and laboriously dragging a bright red kayak. The incongruity of the scene struck me like a slap. This woman in a torn dress, bleeding from visible wounds, hauling a recreational watercraft through the dust of an alien world.

The kayak's hull scraped against the ground, leaving a shallow furrow in its wake. The sound was wrong somehow—too ordinary, too Earth-like, for a place where shadow panthers hunted and Portal pirates stalked and dogs died in the darkness. It was the kind of sound that belonged to lakeside holidays and family weekends, not to this nightmare we were all stumbling through.

As Beatrix halted and turned towards me, a multitude of questions raced through my mind, each vying for precedence. Yet as I approached her, the urgency to understand her intentions with the kayak dissipated, replaced by a concern that cut deeper. The visible gashes marking her arms and legs, the torn fabric of her red dress—each told a story of ordeal, of survival against odds that I could only begin to imagine.

The cuts were angry, ragged things. Not clean slices but tears, as if something with claws had raked across her skin. Blood had dried in dark streaks down her calves, mixing with the ever-present dust to form a grim patina. Her feet were bare, caked with the same reddish-brown grime that coated everything in this place. She looked like she'd crawled through hell—which, I supposed, she probably had.

"You look like shit."

The words escaped me before I could temper them with the tact the situation warranted. It was an observation made without malice, yet it hung between us, a blunt acknowledgment of the trials she had evidently endured. I winced internally at my own gracelessness—Claire would have been appalled at my lack of diplomacy. Even in our worst arguments, she'd always maintained that there was a right way and a wrong way to speak to people, and I had just demonstrated the wrong way with spectacular efficiency.

"Like you look any better," Beatrix countered, her retort sharp yet softened by a half-smile that quickly morphed into a stern pout.

Her resilience, even in the face of apparent exhaustion and injury, was both startling and admirable. She had a point, of course. I was still shirtless, my skin crusted with Kain's dried blood and a night's worth of accumulated grime. We were quite the pair—two battered survivors comparing war wounds in a desert that shouldn't exist.

"Here, let me take that," I offered, reaching for the kayak.

Beatrix's acquiescence, silent and without resistance, spoke volumes of her current state. The kayak was lighter than I expected—fibreglass or some similar material—but awkward to manoeuvre, its bulk shifting unpredictably as I tried to find a comfortable grip. As we made our way back towards the camp, the myriad questions that had been swirling in my mind began to crystallise, each demanding attention.

"Luke brought you in?" I asked, grasping for some understanding of how Beatrix had come to be here, in such a state, with such an unlikely companion as a kayak. Yet even as I voiced it, I recognised the redundancy of the question—Luke had been with us when Beatrix screamed, had disappeared afterward. The pieces should have connected more easily than they did, but my mind felt sluggish, weighed down by exhaustion and grief.

"No."

Beatrix's response was succinct. One syllable that shut down that line of inquiry completely.

We walked in silence for several minutes, the kayak's hull scraping a monotonous rhythm against the dusty ground. I tried to formulate another question, something more useful, something that might actually yield information rather than monosyllables.

"From Cody?" I ventured after the silence had stretched long enough to become uncomfortable. Cody. Another name Luke had mentioned, another piece of a puzzle I couldn't quite see the edges of.

"No."

Beatrix's response was terse, her lack of enthusiasm doing little to quell the storm of curiosity within me. Two questions, two dead ends. I was making excellent progress.

"Oh... then who?"

The words slipped out, driven by an insatiable need for answers despite the mental plea to cease my inquiries. The introduction of shadow panthers, a Chewbathian Hunter, Portal pirates, and now the veiled mention of additional Guardians had left me grappling with a reality far removed from anything I had ever known. A week ago, I had been a businessman in Broken Hill, worried about spreadsheets and client meetings and a marriage that was slowly suffocating us both. Now I was standing in an alien dimension, trying to make sense of a world that refused to follow any rules I understood.

I don't understand how any of this is possible. None of this makes any...

"What do you know about Cody?"

Beatrix's question cut through my internal monologue, redirecting the conversation with an agility that left me momentarily off balance. She had that look I recognised from boardroom negotiations—the look of someone who preferred to ask questions rather than answer them. I'd used that tactic myself often enough to recognise it when it was turned against me.

"Nothing, really," I admitted. "Luke mentioned the name when Joel arrived, but I haven't..."

"Joel? Jamie's son, Joel?" Beatrix interjected, surprise and recognition sharpening her voice.

"Yeah. You knew?" I asked, surprised that Luke would have told Beatrix that Jamie had a son before he had told me. But then, what did I know about Luke's relationships with anyone? He had disappeared for years, built a life I knew nothing about, surrounded himself with people and secrets I was only now beginning to glimpse. My own brother had become a stranger, and I was only now discovering how much I'd missed.

"Joel is here?" Beatrix asked, and something in her tone made me slow my pace. "I thought Luke wasn't going to bring him here."

That stopped me. Luke hadn't been going to bring Joel here. That implied a plan, a decision, a deliberate choice not to involve the boy. And yet here Joel was—throat slashed, resurrected from apparent death, wandering around our camp like a ghost refusing to stay buried.

"He didn't. Apparently," I responded, my mind racing to connect the dots between Joel's unexpected presence and the events that had led to our current predicament. "We think he came down the river."

The explanation sounded absurd even as I said it. A dying boy had somehow floated down a river and washed up at our camp. It was the sort of thing that would have made me question someone's sanity a week ago. Now it was just another impossible thing that had apparently happened—another entry in the growing catalogue of events that defied everything I thought I knew about how the world worked.

"Did Luke say what happened to him?" Beatrix asked, genuine concern etched into her features.

"He told us about the blood and the truck, but Glenda stitched his throat and he seems to be making a remarkable recovery."

My words felt hollow, an oversimplified summary of events that had shaken the very foundation of our camp. A boy who should have been dead, his throat opened and bleeding, now walking around and talking as if he had merely survived a nasty fall. The miracle of it should have filled me with hope. Instead, it just added to the mounting sense that nothing in this place followed rules I could understand or predict.

"Glenda? And Joel's alive?" The questions tumbled out from Beatrix, her face cycling through expressions—disbelief, relief, confusion—all compressed into a few seconds.

"Yeah," I said. "And Glenda is the camp's doctor."

"Can I see him?"

"I'm sure you'll see him soon enough."

The silence that enveloped us again as we continued our trek back to camp was heavy, filled with unspoken questions and fears. My pace slowed, the weight of reality pressing down on me as the dread of what awaited us at camp began to overshadow all else. The kayak felt heavier now, as if absorbing the gravity of our circumstances. Each step brought us closer to a truth I wasn't sure either of us was ready to face.

"A... a shadow panther?" The question erupted from me, a desperate attempt to grasp the threads of understanding that seemed to slip further away with each passing moment.

"Huh?" Beatrix looked at me, confusion flickering across her features.

"Your dress and cuts. Were they from a shadow panther?"

The words felt clumsy, inadequate to describe the complexity of the horrors we faced. I gestured vaguely at her wounds, at the torn red fabric that had once been a dress but now resembled something salvaged from a crime scene.

Beatrix's blank stare was unsettling, sending a chill through me that was more than just the cold air of the desert morning. Her eyes went distant, unfocused, as if the question had triggered something she wasn't ready to access. I watched her retreat somewhere inside herself, somewhere I couldn't follow.

Was Luke wrong? Had something else attacked Beatrix? A Portal pirate maybe? Like the one that killed...

The thought trailed off, too painful, too laden with implications to fully explore. Duke's death was still fresh, still raw, still waiting to ambush me every time I let my guard down.

"A panther-like creature?" I pressed, desperate for clarity.

"Yeah," Beatrix admitted softly, the confirmation offering little comfort or understanding.

"It was you who screamed last night, wasn't it?"

The question hung between us, heavy with implications. That scream in the darkness. That sound of pure terror that had preceded everything—the running, the fear, the discovery of what lurked in the night.

"I guess," Beatrix said, her nonchalant shrug belying the depth of trauma such an encounter must have entailed.

I recognised the deflection for what it was—the same kind of emotional armour I had been constructing since arriving in this place. Don't feel it. Don't examine it. Keep moving. It was the only way to survive when every moment threatened to overwhelm you with horror and grief and the impossible weight of everything you'd lost.

As tears threatened to overwhelm me, I wiped them away, attempting to regain some semblance of composure. The grief was bleeding through my defences, finding cracks I hadn't known existed. Duke. The shadow panthers. The Portal pirate. Joel's throat. All of it pressing against the walls I'd built, demanding to be felt.

"Everything okay here?" Beatrix asked, her gaze sharp and scanning my face. She could see something there—some shadow of the horrors that awaited her.

I sighed, the weight of everything pressing down on my shoulders.

There's no point in hiding it.

"We had an incident here last..."

My voice trailed off, the words hanging unfinished. How do you summarise a night of terror, death, and revelation? How do you compress shadow panthers and Portal pirates and Duke's corpse into a single sentence? How do you warn someone that the world they're walking into has fundamentally changed, that nothing will ever be the same?

Beatrix's reaction to the scene that unfolded as we crested the final hill was immediate—her gasp, a sharp intake of breath that mirrored my own sense of shock and despair when I had first seen what awaited us.

Luke passed us without a word, his eyes alight with a tempest of fury and grief. He moved as if driven by a force beyond his control, a man on the brink, consumed by tumultuous emotions that threatened to tear him apart from the inside. His face was a mask of pain barely contained, his stride the purposeful march of someone fleeing something they couldn't outrun. He didn't look at us. Didn't acknowledge our presence. Just kept moving, as if stopping meant drowning.

The pain etched in Luke's eyes was a mirror to my own, a reflection of the shared agony that bound us in this moment. I knew then that there was nothing to be done, no words of comfort or gestures of support that could ease the burden of his sorrow. He had seen Duke. He had faced the reality of it. And now he was running—not toward anything, but away from a grief too large to hold.

The decision to let him go, to not chase after him or attempt to intervene, was one borne of understanding—a recognition of the depth of his grief and the need to process it in his own way. Some wounds required solitude. Some pain demanded space. I had learned that much from my own marriage, from the countless times Claire and I had needed distance to survive each other.

"Where's Jamie?" Beatrix's question pulled me back from the edge of my own reflections, her voice tinged with urgency. Her hand tugged at my arm, a physical plea for answers. She knew Jamie. She cared about Jamie. And she needed to find him.

"Probably still by the river behind the tents," I responded, the softness of my voice belying the turmoil within.

It was the last place I had seen Jamie, a solitary figure consumed by his own vigil, a silent guardian to the memory of what had been lost. Duke's body would be there. Jamie would be there. And Beatrix was about to walk into that devastation unprepared.

I should have warned her. Should have told her what she would find. But the words wouldn't come—blocked by my own grief, my own exhaustion, my own inability to face the reality one more time. Saying it out loud would make it real again, would force me to acknowledge what I had been trying so hard not to feel.

As Beatrix continued on, her determination to confront the reality that awaited us undimmed, I found myself rooted to the spot, unable to accompany her further. My feet simply refused to carry me toward that river, toward Jamie's grief, toward Duke's body lying still and cold in the morning light.

The kayak sat beside me, bright red and absurdly cheerful against the dust and grief that surrounded everything else. A recreational vessel in a world that offered no recreation. A reminder of Earth, of normality, of everything we had lost and might never find again.