There was nothing to be said once the echo of the gunshot had dissipated across the sunken city. Having repeated itself four times after the initial shot, each bang quieter than the last as the sound waves bounced off of water and glass and brick, the echoes served as reminders to Leeam - with each gunshot, the next is quieter, and quieter, and quieter until eventually, he thought, the last gunshot would be so quiet - so remote and so lonely - that there would be none left to hear it, and so the last gun will have been fired by the last hand, and the last life will leave in the same fashion as the rest.

"You don't suppose he saw us, do you?" asked Leeam, glazing his eyes over the tops of buildings that fought through the water's surface. To him it was paradoxical, listening to the waves while looking at towers of office blocks and residential flats - it was something that he'd never become accustomed to, and his nightmares sometimes became as simple as the sound of ripples breaking against what should have been a sandy beach.

In the direction they had just came from - west - was the city, stretching out for a mile or two ahead of them. The water here had not risen high enough to bar access around the ruins of civilisation and, when the water was clear enough, the ground could be seen a few metres below the water's surface - cars, street lamps, handbags, buses, bodies, and bones. The water had swallowed that, and it was still after the rest. To the north and south were a few hundred metres of marshes with varying depths of water - unpredictable by any means; in some places the water would be shallow enough to stand a coin in, where as in others it was deep enough to fully submerge a small house. As was the trend, Leeam found, on the outskirts of towns and cities - grass hills where the water was soaked up to form swamp-like areas of wasteland, a no-mans-land between the wilderness and what was left of the city.

Leeam regarded Lutwig with a raise of the eyebrows, tucking has hands underneath the straps of his backpack to keep them from getting cold. He briefly toyed with the idea of returning to the flats: "A gun, Lutwig," he argued. "Can you imagine how useful such a thing would be? I can barely kill a rabbit with this thing." by which he meant his air rifle. But, eventually, he realised that it would not be a safe action to make, going up against a man with murderous capabilities.

And to the East, away from the city, lay the wilderness - the snow, the plains, the tropics, the forests, the fields empty and desolate, and the roads narrow and overgrown. To travel in that direction is so take a step into the darkness and plunging yourself into the unknown where death was met with gritted teeth and a solitary sigh of sadness. Survival was not possible for longer than a few months in the wilderness for there is a certain predicate of the modern man that requires him to be sheltered abundantly - leaves cannot keep out the cold and a fire cannot keep in the heat. To spend time and effort constructing some sort of living for yourself in the bush is to confine yourself to that area, which can only spell death. With sea levels rising and bloodgangs wandering the best odds for survival is not to shelter for extended periods of time, but instead to travel. In this case, the only direction of travel that seemed possible for Lutwig and his companion was into the heart of the wasteland before them

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Footprints followed as the two apocalyptic pilgrims traveled the plain of a world without rule. Behind them the sunken city lay, a few miles away by now and out of sight. Their surroundings had been replaced by a sloped forest - to their right the ground inclined every so slightly to a peak a hundred or so metres away, and to their left a valley gathered water. Bare trees that thought it was winter stood in packs around them like hungry wolves, watching them. A road, no wider than a man is tall, navigated the slopes and passed them only a little ways down the hill, cutting through the trees in its twisted journey.

The road concealed itself behind the hill they were traversing with slow pace. Leeam was going to speak - he had had something on his mind recently that wouldn't stop gnawing in his head - when the faint rumble of a vehicle could be heard on the road ahead. It was moving towards them, and if Leeam and Lutwig did not move the vehicle's occupants would only have to cast their eyes up the slope as they drove past to see two black against white figures staring back.

"Do you hear that?" asked Leeam as if necessary.