bonus!
DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cal

"You can't mean that?" 

Cal was having trouble with his cigar, his matches soggy from the rain, and this shit wasn't helping. Cal had said as much. 

"You're not helping," Ares said. 

"That's my line," the end of his cigar lowed, but wouldn't catch, "and since when did you become the goddamn expert, anyway? That girl hates my guts, and no way she wants to see me first thing when she wakes up."

"Yeah well, that's what you get for killing her...Dad." Ares looked more sullen than usual, sallow and tired. 

"That was the job," Cal spoke between puffs, "he was a traitor."

"You don't know that."

"Well, yes, but it was the boss man who ordered me to do it. Fatius worked for THEM Ares. The goddamn squids."

"Saura doesn't believe that," Ares was defiant as always, but Cal sort of admired that, "she says you got played."

"No she says I LET myself get played, like, on purpose," he took a drink of gin, and grimaced, "she thinks I WANTED to kill him."

"Didn't you?"

"I wasn't given the option to say no," he glared at Ares, "you are well aware of how it works."

"Do enlighten," Ares said. 

"He had proof. The boss man showed me. Fatius gave them the coordinates to Gaia." There was an uncomfortable pause. 

"What?" Cal ha honestly hoped he would never have to tell him...

"It was Fatius," he said leaping to his feet in frustration, "the boss man showed me, documentation, footage, memories..."

"They might have been doctored," Ares puzzled. 

"No way, why the hell would the boss have any reason to do that?" He knew from the look on Ares gave he agreed. 

"Fatius was working for them, all along," he found himself before the chair and sat back down, cupping his hands around his face, "Gaia. He was responsible." It was years ago now, but Cal could still see the mutated faces shriveling into statuesque agony. Every night when he closed his eyes. 

Gaia was the Mother Earth, and that for some reason was the name they have their fort haven, out in the wilderness of what was once some part of the United Mexo-American Nation, far from rapers and squids alike. It was a place where they had been safe, for years and years before he had ever even heard of it, where nom's and 75ers could live without fear of the mutations and the mutants and their masters. Gaia was where they would set the stage for the rebellion of humankind, was being the operative word. There was no way of knowing how many they had lost that terrible day, hundreds, maybe more, all he knew was ten of them made it out of Gaia alive, and he was one of them. Maybe there were more survivors, but somehow he doubted it. The squids were relentless in their persistence, never stopping, never sleeping, and never giving up. They had run for every moment of every day since they left Gaia, that was until they got here. Ares stared in disbelief. 

"But why?"

"I didn't bother to ask," when I blew his cerebellum out of his head and all over his pillow, "but he was working for them years ago. He was groomed to be their spy."

"He was a nom, like us," Ares said. 

"Which is exactly how they used him," Cal sat up, "we wouldn't believe that one of us could be one of them. It never even crossed our minds."

"Why?"

"I already told you I don't know," Cal replied. 

"No, why didn't we see it? Why didn't Saura see it?" Cal gave him a look, "he wasn't her real father Cal," Ares continued. 

"Yeah but," Cal took another drink, "you try telling her that."

"God. What a horrible day that was..." Ares reminisced. 

"Let’s not go there," Cal said. He could see their eyeballs boiling in his mind. He was already there again. The screams of terror filled the once calm night air. The smoke and blood and fluids, the stench of the end. 

Gaia was taken in literally minutes. Cal had been shaving, which he always seemed to do at the worst moment when he heard the first blast. It knocked the razor right out of his hand, giving him the deep gash that would lead to a massive scar, and threw him against the wall. Then another blast, and another, and another. He had raced to his weapons, raced out the door, out into the night, into the very mouth of hell. A squid battalion, brainwashed human slaves supported by the ever increasing cloud of greenish blue smoke, upon them without the slightest inkling of their impending doom. The 75ers were already mutating, dancing like puppets in the flames of an utter inferno. The blasts had been small tactical nukes, used to take out small groups or large clusters. They fell with increasing frequency as the waking nightmare soldiered on into morning. Somehow he had found the other nine, Boss man, Gaius, Niko, Puck, Saura, Elena, Fatius, Gemini, Ares, and of course, himself. Somehow they had all survived, the last of the nom's. They marched out into the desert, like a pack of wild dogs, searching for meat amongst the rubble and ruin. They made it to Dawson, a formerly large trade center now abandoned after the war, and not yet absorbed by the squids. In Dawson the real war pains set in, the mistrust and greed and survival mechanisms set up shop in their minds and the group began to splinter apart at its seams. Each one of them wondered, aloud and silently, how the squids had found them and that quickly turned into whom. Who had given them to the sword? Everyone had their own theories, but most believed it was a member of their group. That's when the boss had come to him. 

"It was Fatius," Cal remembered being ambivalent at first, but when boss man trotted out the evidence, courtesy of a computer that he had salvaged from Gaia, Cal could refute him no more. Boss man told Cal he needed to get rid of Fatius, and Cal told him Saura would never allow that. Boss man said it wasn't about her, that she would just have to live with it. 

"We can't tell them why, Calvin," Boss man had told him, "it will destroy them. It has to be clean and quiet. An easy task for you." Easy. Of course it would never be easy. Of course it would be neither clean nor quiet. Of course Saura would see. 

"Father!" Her scream had crept up on him that day, as he stood over Fatius' bullet riddled corpse. "Cal?!?!? Why? WHY?" He had pushed past her, leaving her behind with the body, tears in his eyes. He could hear her weeping late into the night. Six had left them by the next morning, counting Fatius. Only Ares, Puck, Boss man and Cal remained. They found Niko days later, miraculously alive, though very near to death. The five had been together ever since.  

"You have to talk about it someday," Ares prodded. He never quite knew when to give it up. 

"Look, what happened at Gaia stays there with all the dead," Cal was angry, his temper rising with his voice, "I thought we agreed on that when we escaped that hellhole. Gaia is a memory I'd soon forget."

"And that makes you weak," Ares breathed.

"No, this makes me weak," he gestured at Ares, "this nostalgic bullshit. When the squids came, I became a different man. Maybe not a better one, but a different one."

"And when they came to Gaia, you became a dead man," Ares just couldn't let it go. 

"A living dead man, yes," Cal took another swig, the gin burning through the pain and emptiness like a knife in warm flesh, "the answer is still no."

"You're our last hope," Ares said. 

"Ha," Cal snorted, "Ares, we ran out of hope a long, long time ago."