1-5

Braith heard a wet, hacking cough to her right, and a bird twittered nearby.  She yawned, and noticed a disgusting, slightly fishy taste in her mouth.  Overwhelmed with annoyance and revulsion, she sat up and opened her bleary eyes to the grey light in the early morning of the forest.  She spotted a large canteen on a rock, just across the clearing, and labored unsteadily to her feet.  Her eyes were hardly open, and she shivered under the glaze of dew that had fallen upon her in the night.  She stumbled towards the canteen in the harsh grey dawn, a thin breeze stirring her long hair.  Her feet were tender on the sharp pine needles, and she tripped over stones in the earth.  She yawned once more – a powerful movement that nearly toppled her unsteady form.  She leaned back against the large rock with a sigh, listening to the snores as she gulped water.  Perhaps she would wake the others; it was very nearly sunrise.  

In the grey dawn, she turned to approach the fire once more, but immediately tripped and fell on her face.  Grumbling softly to herself about scraped elbows, she sat up with yet a third yawn and groped at the pine needles for the cold thing that had caught her ankle, then lifted a thick, clattering chain.  She frowned.  What the --?  Amblin, no.  Very slowly, she raised her bright blue eyes to the large rock with the canteen lying on it.  Ropes lay scattered about its base, the pine needles before it disturbed.  

“No --!” she croaked, stirring the camp to life at her back.  As Sol sat up, rubbing his eyes, and Rob rolled onto his back with a yawn, a bitter laugh rang across the clearing.  Braith was fully alert, now, as her eyes flicked to the dark figure well overhead, stretched comfortably atop a large boulder near the tree line.  Her hand darted to the empty holster at her hip – she remembered her pistol to be in the pine needles where she had slept – so instead leapt to her feet.  

He laid casually, hands linked behind his neck, dark eyes watching her with amusement.  He wore his long black trench coat once more, as well as his knife and his glinting pistols, resting upon his hips.  She heard a gasp at her back and knew that Bill had just awoken to the same icy, unsavory sensation that now filled her own belly.  The man laughed again at the shocked faces that gaped at him and said contemptuously, his clear voice hanging in the cool, misty clearing, “You people didn’t even check my pockets!”  Braith’s mouth fell open.  You will never know how lucky you are that I don’t have my gun.