Coming of Bashmak.

The sound of soil overturned by a shoe.
"Vodka." she said, her voice steady and reverberating into the wilted foliage.
She contorted herself onto her back, swaying her rifle towards the general area of the sound to fire a potshot. A mask concealing an unshaven and steely face that was perhaps almost visible from beneath it greeted her.

"Tritiak. I need to relieve myself."
He slid the owlish face of his respirator aside.
"Hold it."
"Do you have food?"
"No."
"I need a cigarette."
Tritiak produced a single slim bar from his hand, pressed it between his lips, and lit it, a sulfur smell drifting from his struck match.
"You don't."

Bashmak nestled herself more comfortably into the brush and set her rifle until it was stable.
"Using a rifle so close," the man stated. "No sidearm?"
She smiled the wry smile of someone who knew what they were doing.
"If I am doing my job well, I have no need for one," she said. "They will not know I am here. I have given it to Pushkin."

Tritiak regarded it flatly before kneeling, folding his hands around her midsection, unfastening straps of her body suit. She went still with a cold indignity.
"Lift your arms."
She did. He lifted the vague safety of the Kevlar off her and gave her a frighteningly thin substitute - a mere duster coat.
"What is this?" she demanded.
"You don't need any protection if you do your job right. Pushkin has to be seen."
"This is stupid. My vest is not so much a commodity as a gun."
"We do not have bread, Bashmak. Feeding you is compromise for us."
She reserved herself grimly, peering out her scope.

The stillness was broken as Tritiak stood to leave.
And then, nothing.
The pulse in her ears, the coolness in the air, a full bladder was all that was left.
A cloak with a firearm.

From what might of been what was left of what once was a farm, a stirring.

The world looks different out the scope of a rifle. The tunnel vision, like a spotlight, has a way of making things, of making people, more significant.
The gnarled face of a Flesh, like yellowed fat, peered with a sort of sniffling cowardice from between a long-dead grain field.

"Pre-used?" from what little feeling was in Tritiak's voice, one could feel the skilled withholding of some vicious emotion that would have otherwise burst from his face like a Blowout, taking the squashed dough of Drobyev's pudgy face and the rest of the building in vengeance for his wasted efforts.
He said it again as if he were processing blasphemy.
"What do you mean? They are in boxes. These have not been used."
Drobyev looked towards his superior, then rubbed his pastry face uneasily.
"Tritiak, you used them yourselves. I was there."

His snowed glare peered from the dark sockets of his face.
"Were we to let you die, Drobyev? Is that business?"
The buyer, a man of military build and stern voice, set his deduction:
"Half."
Drobyev nodded in agreement. "Half."
The men were at the crates and their numbers were more than enough to dispatch a loose cartel of tourists peddling firearms.
Face sunken and forced onto the terms of his buyers, he threw a pistol that he'd been explaining the intricacies of before he gave a brazen exhalation and nodded. "Half."

Bashmak's face was damp with sweat and bruises had begun to set where the Radiation accumulated from a rest in Pripyat. Drobyev sauntered to her side in a fashion that almost deserved ridicule, his wide frame and prominent girth rocking to and fro.
"Drink," he said. "For health."
He poured her a glass. And another. And another.

The room tilted and sunk like the price of Tritiak's hard-acquired arsenal.
Bits of drunken cheering and the orange blur of men gathered about a fire.
The unfamiliar sink of a bed and a tired soreness in her eyes.

Drobyev had begun to undress himself, his generous stomach spilled from beneath his bodysuit as he lowered himself over the craven, purple figure of the girl. He intended to keep her warm.

She crawled away, but he braced her and carried her back with a grotesque emulation of compassion for what he was about to do. With a guttural moan of approval, he pressed forwards.

Dazed, she held up the firearm in her limp grip - ill-gotten from her crawl from the room.
Drobyev laughed, questioning her intentions with his piggish features.
She felt the heavy pull of the trigger give way to an abrupt plume of sound.

The Flesh made a squeal, a macabre imitation of the noise a man might make when shot.
It's thick skull partially erupted - broken, cracked, but still quite together, as Drobyev's had been.

Pushkin hurried from his cover - Bashmak's suit bounced oddly as it tried to accommodate the man's size. He knelt and began to chop the beast's malformed limbs with his knife.

At the time, it had been Tritiak who had handled the dead beast.
His stubbled face broke into a slight smile as he took the remainder of his fee from Drobyev's pockets.
Staring at the drunken nudity of The Leftover, he offered a slight sentiment in his words.
"I had never liked him."

Tritiak's hands, that time, returned clothes to her, rather than relocated them as they had today.