2 A.I. — AFTER IMPACT

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“Sergeant Hammer!” Lt. Davies screamed into the cacophony that was the familiar song of warfare.

Hammers’ head had been rocked by a grenade which detonated a little too close to the man’s inner ear. Now all he saw was a whirr of the action taking place on the street paired with a startling silence.

With the Lieutenants’ snapping finger, everything came back into focus and the surge of information brought the big staff sergeant to a shaking knee.

“Anybody home big guy?” The wiry officer asked, knocking on his helmet.

Hammer made the signal for ‘no comms’ with his finger. This battle helmet was dead.

He saw Davies about to order him to go and support the rest of the squad to finish this firefight, and then… he was picking up pieces of his brother's bodies and their bikes from all around him. From that distant battlefield his mind jumped back to the present and the similar scene laid out before him.

Everyone was dead, and for all he knew he might be joining them soon. A pool of crimson had leaked from his side where a long piece of metal had shot its way past the protective barrier of his rib cage. He thumbed at the wound and grimaced when he decided something was definitely punctured.

How the hell had everything gone sideways so fast? Looking down at the scattered meat that used to be one of his brothers, he knew how it had happened. He and Stick had let them run wild, and he didn’t have enough fucks left to give. They stepped on too many toes and finally stepped on the wrong one. They deserved this. He deserved this.

Hammer stood up clenching the open wound on his side and began to walk. It didn’t matter where, as long as it wasn’t here.

Hammer tried to tend his wounds as he went along.  When he didn’t die the first day, or the second, he decided that was a pretty good sign. Then after a week, he no longer thought about it.

This new world they all found themselves in was strange.  He was walking on dry earth, but it was just a pebble in this new arrangement of floating islands.  Each alone in a swirling vortex around it. The thing that had cracked them open like an egg and let the pieces circle around it like shit down a drain.

Some people said it looked like a tree. Someone else said they had talked to a pilot who swore the thing was a scale, maybe to come and pass judgment down for something they had done?

Hammers’ judgment had come and gone, and his punishment was going to be self-inflicted exile as soon as he could find a ship off of this rock.

He didn’t know who wiped out his crew, and he didn’t know if they knew what he looked like, but he wasn't going to stick around and wait for them to find him.