Episode 14 - The Shottie - Belle Starr, Confessions of an Ark Hunter

Belle Starr, Confessions of an Ark Hunter: Episode 14 - The Shottie

Belle Starr looked long and hard with narrowed blue diamond eyes at her green Challenger sitting at the top of the red gnarled and twisted tree not far from the highway south of the Mt. Tam area. Belle stood to her full six foot height as she shaded her eyes from the bright California sun. She stared upwards with a frown on her pretty freckled face, looking resplendent in her red, white and blue Liberty Trooper armor. She had swerved off the road to avoid hitting a rancher’s lost POW, a post-apocalyptic cross between a cow and a pig created by the botched alien terra-forming and the main food source in Paradise. Belle had landed at the top of the tree, relatively unhurt thanks to her EGO implant, and climbed down carefully to where she was now standing looking up at her vehicle.

Belle shook her blond tousled head slowly in disbelief at her bad luck. She was already known as the worst driver in the Bay Area, and she was sure that once word had gotten out about this escapade, it would solidify everyone’s opinion of her as that – at least, everyone who wasn’t already sure of that as a fact! At the very least, once she called her boyfriend Vo K’shaa to help her get the car down, she would be the subject of much mirth at the Bug ‘n Chug, so much so, she thought to herself, that they may have to rename it the Bug ‘n Chuckle. Not that the tall lanky Irathian with the lopsided grin would mean her any harm, for he dearly loved her and she him, but because it would just be too good a story to pass up telling his motor-head cronies there.

“Darn POW!” Muttered Belle, then suddenly she noticed a glint of metal at the base of the tree.

You could never be too careful in the Bay Area because dangers lurked around every corner, so she pulled her Demon Hunter pistol from its holster and approached the spot where the light reflected. This area in particular was known to be riddled with 99ers, half-man half-machine miners who were known to attack without provocation and who were tough as nails to kill. Belle had life threatening run-ins with them before, and knew them to be both dangerous and relentless, so she tried to avoid them when possible, but which was often not feasible in her job as an ark hunter, for they were often drawn to ark falls. Furthermore, she knew that both raiders and hell bugs were in the area, and that made it more likely that she would run into trouble the longer she lingered here.

At the base of the mutated redwood tree, Belle saw a rusted combat shotgun casually leaning against the tree’s trunk as if its owner had merely left it for a second with full intention to retrieve it later, although it had to have been there for over a score of years. Its barrel was so corroded that if someone perchance was able to fire it, it would surely disintegrate at that instance. The tree trunk had grown around the stock of the gun so that they were one for all intents and purposes.

Belle looked around almost expecting some soldier’s ghost to come claim their weapon, for this area was known to be the battleground of some intense fighting between the Earth Military Coalition and the alien Votan army during the Pale Wars. Smiling to herself at her temporary flight of fancy, Belle knelt down to get a closer look at the shottie. Belle could tell that is was of former EMC issue, so must have been carried by a human soldier at one time. She took off her armored glove and rubbed off the grime on the stock with her thin pale hand, noting the initials “B.B.” had been carved there.

“Great, it’s a BB gun!” Belle thought to herself as she smiled with pearly white teeth, knowing that probably only she would think that funny. Belle then wrinkled her pretty freckled nose as she pondered the question, “I do wonder how it got here?”

*****

Approximately twenty years earlier, EMC Master Sergeant Billy Barnes was running for his life with that very shotgun through that same area from a squad of Votan soldiers. He resisted the urge to curse vehemently as he was sweating profusely not only from the prolonged exertion but also because he was fevered from being too near the terra-forming bomb when the Votans had dropped it on San Francisco. In fact, he had been miles away from where it impacted, but was close enough for it to begin to change him from the inside out. The terra-forming technology of the aliens was insidious, in that it would slowly transform every living thing in its path into something else, although not always into things like those on their home worlds as they had intended. Billy could feel the painful twisting of his internal organs as he ran, not knowing the cause for it.

Billy was pretty sure he had lost the Votan soldiers in the grove of young redwood trees. As he turned the corner around a particularly large redwood, he came face-to-face with a young Irathian woman. When his frightened brown eyes met her amber ones, Billy’s trigger finger flexed in reaction to his surprise, firing the shottie’s lead load directly into the young girl’s abdomen. She could have been part of the Votan squad, but since she was neither armed nor uniformed, he didn’t think so. Furthermore, no other Votans came running to her aid, so Billy thought she was most likely one of the many refugees of all races running away from the San Francisco area after the terra-forming bomb went off.

Billy leaned his shotgun against the redwood’s trunk, kneeling down by the bleeding girl. He knew there was an EMC aid station by the Muir Dam. So he picked the girl up in both his arms and ran towards Muir Dam, also knowing the girl wouldn’t make it, but he had to try. In fact, neither of them did.

*****

Around twenty years later, Belle Starr was still contemplating how the shottie got there and what happened to its owner, when she was attacked from behind. She turned around just in time for another hatchet to bounce harmlessly off her Darkest Night energy shield only to be confronted by a lone mutant. As her wide blue eyes met his crazed red ones, she inadvertently copied a deed done a score of years previously.

With her level of equipment and experience, a lone mutant might be startling but was no longer a danger to Belle. Mutants with their deformed bodies and faces without noses were scary in looks, but usually were only a danger in packs, which is how they always traveled. It was surprising that this one was apparently alone, and she fired her Demon Hunter pistol in instinctive reflex. As the fire nanos ignited when the pistol’s ammunition hit point blank, the mutant caught fire, running around until it fell down in a flaming heap. The monster only yelled pitifully, “Miiiiii…” as it finally died at the same time the flames did.

Belle never liked taking a life, whether it be a deadly critter’s like a hell bug or a homicidal humanoid like this mutant, but it was a necessary evil to do so occasionally if you were to survive in Paradise. She didn’t particularly regret killing the mutant either, because if she hadn’t killed it, it would likely kill the next innocent it ran into who wasn’t as well prepared as herself, and she always felt that part of her responsibility in having an EGO implant was to protect innocents.

Belle looked down at the mutant’s dead body and sighed, then realized she had yet to call Vo for help as to her car caught in the tree. She thought briefly about leaving the car in the tree to save her embarrassment, and so some poor traveler can come upon it in the future and wonder, ”What the heck!” Instead, Belle took out her hailer and called Vo, beginning the short process of charming him into bringing a crew out to her to rescue her green Challenger from its wooden entrapment.

Belle did not look down again at the charred remains of the mutant, for if she did she might have noticed the dirty dog tags around it’s burned neck. She might then have noticed the writing indented on the tags, that read, “Bill T. Barnes, Master Sergeant, Army, Earth Military Coalition,” and finally understood what the initials “B.B.” stood for. Unfortunately, she never did, so she would never know the whole story about the old rusted shottie leaning against a mutated tree south of Mt. Tam and near the Muir Dam.

 

*This story was inspired by a recent true story of an old rusted Winchester rifle leaning against a tree deep in a national park forest found by a forest ranger off the beaten trail. A tip of the hat to Major Crapshot who encouraged me in the official Defiance Forums to write this story a couple of months ago, and his and Defiance Data’s patience while I did so!