Mugs wasn’t entirely ecstatic to hear the soft patter of rain creep up on the roof of their dilapidated hideout but he was not moronic enough to believe the situation wasn’t par for the job to begin with. Through a hole in the rusted sheet-metal wall he could see distant lightning crack erratically at the sky, a quiet, moody thunder resonating softly. The sky had quickly been taken by grey clouds, swallowing the sun and along with it any hope of warmth for the next dozen or so hours. He sighed to himself, content with the chill in the air and frustrated beyond measure by the deluge of idiocy from his companions.

“Why is it always the sodding rain?” Tommy moaned.

It wasn’t always the rain, Mugs wanted to tell him. Sometimes it was dust storms or tornados. Sometimes it was unbearably dry heat or the cold that leeched the life away. Sometimes it wasn’t the weather, but rather a bullet, a hail of bullets, a battle, a gut wound dying in some nameless pile of rubble. It was an unforgiving land, he wanted to remind him. And it was because of those damnable stims and their sorcery.

“Ay, Thomas, quit your complainin’,” Jim whispered hoarsely, as though someone on the outside were to eavesdrop. “Don’t make the job any easier, now does it?”
“Oh, bug off.” There was the sound of muttering and the clank of a musket against Jim’s absurd metal-braced breastplate. That dumb noisy thing was going to get the boy’s throat slit one of these days. “Where’s the rosy twit when you need ‘em? Get a fire goin’ to defrost my prick.”

“There’ll be no fire,” Mugs threw over his shoulder, staring grimly at the changing weather. He held his binoculars at his side, content that there were no unexpected surprises on the road beyond.

“Oi, why not, bossman?”

“’Cause that’s how ya get a blade through your back.” Jim’s voice broke above a whisper for a moment. “Gots to be prepared, ya do. That’s why I’m wearing two pairs of my warmest boot socks.”

“No one cares a tit about your sister’s knittin’ gifts!”

“Quiet, both of you.” Mugs turned from his relatively comfortable position against the hole to face the bickering men. Jim was hunched stiffly on a wooden crate, Thomas sitting with his back against it, arse on the dirt floor and gripping a musket that pointed wavering at the ceiling. It was difficult to see in the cramped space with the lack of sunlight but Mugs could just make the outline of one of the native men sleeping in a corner. He had been like that four hours, content on a straw mat he had brought with the group. They called him Kate, the rest of the men unable to annunciate his real name and uncaring to make an effort towards it. Mugs felt a twinge of guilt at that once. There was a certain absolution of disrespect to disregarding another man’s given name. Kate never paid any mind to it, and neither did Mugs after the native man brought a civilian woman back to camp the first time three weeks past, kicking and screaming and stumbling along with him, his hand buried in a fistful of her hair. She screamed some more in his personal tent but was silent sometime after the rest had eaten and put out the fire. Mugs had been walking to his cot in the pitch blackness of the night when he heard Kate open the flap of the tent and drag something heavy down towards the river. “Everyone’s got their demons,” Thomas muttered the next time he brought back another one. After that, everyone just tried to ignore it.

“Where’s Shin?” Mugs asked his men.