DT - You Did Good, Kid Pt. II

Part II: The Desert

It took him ten days to get out of that desert and to find the tiny town of Beatty off of the 95. The heat didn't bother him nearly as much as he thought it should. Hell, he'd worn his full gear for two days before he started really feeling the heat enough to warrant taking it off.

He was good enough with his survivor skills to get enough to eat and drink. He found that his emergency rations were enough for him for about four days. He couldn't recall ever being able to stretch out rations for such a long period of time, but he guessed that the heat simply stole his appetite.

Mark had a lot of time to think in that desert. All he had to do was keep on walking, so his mind was free to mull over the whole mess that was Olduvai. He thought about his squad mates. He hadn't really gotten to know them all that well. It was only his first mission after all.

That thought made him shiver suddenly, hearing Reaper scream something like that to Sarge as he bled out. He reached for his throat reflexively, working his throat as if to prove that yes, he was still alive and no, he didn't have a huge fucking hole in his throat.

How the hell did that happen? Last time he checked, people don't suddenly recover from shit like that. He mustn't have been watching where he was going because found himself hugging the ground and spitting dust from his mouth. His knees and palms smarted from where they'd been scrapped.

The Kid gingerly brushed the gravel and sand from his hands, expecting to feel a twinge of pain but surprised to find there was none. He held his hands up to his face, noting the tiny canyons in his hands had some blood in them, and lots of dirt, but there were no lacerations, no cuts, no scrapes of any kind. He pulled up his pant legs and saw that his knees were in a similar condition.

"What the hell?" An impossible idea formed in his mind. Admittedly, it wasn't as impossible as his revival in Olduvai, but it was still farfetched. Mark took out the switchblade from one of the pockets in his cargo pants and flipped out the blade.

He took a deep breath as he sliced through the sensitive skin of his palm. It hurt a lot less than he thought it would, but he was still quick to apply pressure to the wound by wrapping it in a bit of one of his sleeves that he had cut off. The throbbing sensation was gone almost as soon as he had wrapped his hand. Curious, he pulled off the cloth, wiping off the blood simultaneously.

"Holy shit!" There was no cut on his hand, not a scratch or a scar or a mark to show that he'd just sliced his own hand open. "Holy shit..."

Okay, so apparently sometime between being shot in the throat and passing out, he'd gained the miraculous ability of healing freakishly fast. It was impossible, and yet there it was, like something out of an X-Men comic. He may have been a little hysterical at that point, because all he could think of was that if he were an X-Man, he'd probably have a better codename than 'The Kid'.

He had to get walking. He had to get moving, get out of this desert and into civilization. This was obviously all just some messed up hallucination from the heat messing with his head. Mark's walk morphed into a light job, which became an all-out run.

The scenery whizzed past him and he thought it was funny. It was a huge-ass empty desert. Shouldn't it be going by slowly? He saw the faint markings of a crater or something on the horizon. Judging the distance (ten kilometres, give or take) and counting seconds in his head, he sprinted to the landmark. He was able to keep up his speed the whole way there, which took a grand total of ten minutes. He was hardly out of breath.

"What the fuck man?" He had been running a steady sixty kilometres an hour! Holy hell! "It must be heat stroke or something, messing with my sense of time..." He spent the rest of the day relaxing in the shadow of the crater, determined that all would be back to normal tomorrow when he wasn't having his brain fried by the heat.

That incident was two days into his trek, and he promptly dumped his extra gear, blaming it for his heat stroke or whatever the hell he thought was happening. By the fifth day, when his rations finally ran out, he'd started thinking maybe he wasn't crazy, or he hadn't fried his brain.

He started testing himself, really testing himself. Seeing how long he could run for how fast, how far he could see, how strong he was and, after nearly stepping into a rattlesnake hole, how fast his reflexes were.

It was insane! Mark was now superhuman, he had no better word for it. He was an impossibility, a person the likes of which were only fanciful stories for children.

Or just the kind of person UAC would like to sink their teeth into.

The Kid thought about his situation realistically. As far as he knew, he had been the only survivor of the Olduvai incident, on the brink of death. The only possible explanation he could give was that he'd been infected and had had a completely different reaction from the rest of the monsters. He had seen that the infection didn't spread indiscriminately, didn't affect people the same way.

If scientists got a hold of him, he would be stuck in a lab for the rest of his life, a test subject for them to rip into and push until he broke, one way or another. He couldn't do that, couldn't risk that happening.

With that in mind, he started fabricating another life for himself, another personality. He changed his outfit as much as possible, trying to get rid of anything that could link him to the government, UAC, or the RRTS. He spent the next five days perfecting it.

So by the time he reached Beatty, he was no longer Private Mark "The Kid" Dantalian. He was Bill Slaven, a university student from out of town who came to Nevada to see Vegas and go on a road trip, and had ended up getting completely lost.

There were questions, but five continuous days of preparation had allowed him to handle most of them with ease. He'd gotten a place to stay, some food, and new clothes for the time being.

Now what? he asked himself. </i>Now what do I do?</i>