The Origin
The Soldier Who Survived When His Unit Didn't
Rex Dunn served eight years in Corporate Strike Teams. He was good at the work in the way that people who survive by being good at dangerous things are good at them: without pride, without sentiment, with a precise and functional understanding of what keeps people breathing.
His unit was fourteen people. He remembered their names in the order he learned them: Perris, Okafor, Singh, Demi, Volkov, Tran, Adeyemi, Liu, Carson, Bashir, Yee, Nakamura, Reeves, and himself. He was the fifteenth name, the one he didn’t need to remember because it was always there.
The Bio-Synth incursion at the Calder Processing Plant happened without warning. Mycelion’s spore clusters were a tactical weapon the Corporate had no data on because Corporate intelligence had classified Bio-Synth as “experimental, non-combat capability.” This assessment was wrong. Rex knows exactly how wrong it was because he was the only one of fifteen people who made it out of the Calder plant. He made it out because he was the first one through the door and the last one in his unit to go down, and because the spores reached him last.
He walked for three days through the eastern waste zone. The shrapnel wound in his left side had been treated with his own field kit. He was running a fever. He was going in the general direction of “away from Calder” without a specific destination because specific destinations require a reason to arrive somewhere and he didn’t have one anymore.
He found Junktown-7 at dawn on the fourth day, on the edge of consciousness. He knows what he saw first: a water tower. He knows what he heard second: someone running toward him. He doesn’t know what he said when Kara Voss reached him. She told him later it was just the names. All fourteen of them, in order.
