Bambi flicked her crusted ear to dislodge a speckling of flies drawn to the blood. That the faun was close to complete nervous exhaustion would be clear to any who observed her trembling flanks, the glaze in her large, liquid-dark eyes.<br/><br/>The air strike was in full force. Plumes of filthy water and algae mixed with the shrapnel of half-rotten timbers and dying trees had exploded all around the small group for the past four mud-sucking miles. In a hoverjet streaking over Greentown, Gordon Frank was screaming obscenities into a micro-com.<br/><br/>Francie's was gone. Well, outwardly-- you don't run the sleaziest dive in the south for all those years and not have a contingency plan. Or a water-tight bunker, right underneath you. Right now, Francie's entire staff of wenches and ruffians, a few customers too drunk to flee and the hardy old dame herself were knocking back a rare and stupidly expensive bottle of single malt Scotch while One-Eyed Ralph, the local moonshine manufacturer, played a mournful tune on his papa's old harmonica. Somebody'd be along sooner or later to dig them all out from under the fallen upper floors. And if not.. well, they'd all die smiling.<br/><br/>Unknown to the GenMod fugitives, they were less than two miles from the outskirting borders of Area #144, which from the outside looked like any one of a dozen research facilities built out here in The Pits over the past century in attempts to monitor the alarming wane of organic life. That the building was a complex so vast as to resemble a scale-model city itself, not even the poor creatures roaming its sealed-off and myriad levels could know. Except for one or two...<br/><br/>Bambi could smell burning in the air, and suffering. And though her body shook with terror, her stomach ached, her throat burned with the taste of death, the soft whispers remained to soothe her and draw her tiredly on, across the quicksand bogs and peat pits, through waist-high pools of chemical poison, onward and onward. They were louder now. Much louder. They told her things, sad things, crazy things-- but the loudest voice of all told her not to worry, not to be afraid, and that she would soon be safe in Mother's arms. And though she'd never known a mother of her own, Bambi for the first time in perhaps a year tilted her soft lips into a genuine smile.<br/><br/>