Then the door fell in.

"Won't be needing any TNT," Hurk said, but Dav was already pushing past him into the dark, fumbling for his torch.

"What can you see, Dav?"

"Nothing yet." There was a click as the torch came on, the old battery making the same wheezing sounds it always did. "Now I can see lots!" Dav wasn't a big fan of the dark. The dark hid roos, or sinkholes, or any number of things which, despite his height and strength, scared Hurk something wicked. But money was money, as Dav always said.

Hurk carefully pulled out his torch, a fragile red thing they'd dug out of a ruin. Bracing himself mentally, which wasn't that hard given that he was more tendon than brain, Hurk ducked down and stepped through the door.

There were two skeletons inside.

One was at desk under a filthy glass window. The other was in a corner, most of its skull gone. Next to the ventilated skeleton was a rusty L-shaped piece of metal, once a gun, but now more like a rock. Both of the skeletons wore the same kind of clothes, being a faded blue jumpsuit. Dav was carefully inspecting the skeleton hunched over the desk, bending over and looking at the front of the jumpsuit.

"Us Army," Dav finally said. "These guys had the best stuff. Might be something useful down here after all, Hurk. Just be careful not to touch anything without my say so."

Hurk was always careful to only touch things in the waste with Dav's say so. On the first ramble they had gone on, he'd seen an undamaged piece of metal sticking out of the mud next to a river. Just before he'd got his hands on it, Dav had screamed and dived at Hurk's knees, barely able to shift the giant out of the way. No sooner had they both collapsed in the mud then the undamaged piece of metal had exploded. There was a tidy little hole, right where Hurk had been standing a bare moment ago.

"That's a mine," Dav had said.

"I don't think it's anyone's now, Dav," Hurk had replied and Dav had laughed and laughed all the way back to Treetown.

"What should I do?" Hurk asked.

"Have a look at the guy with half a face. See what he's holding on to."

The guy with half a face looked at Hurk with a solitary, empty eye socket. Hurk wondered what had killed him. He had a gun, couldn't he have fired it at whatever was coming? The gun wasn't any use to anyone anymore, not even the scrap dealers on Road Hill would pay for this. The rust alone would have been enough to throw lockjaw at whoever was dumb enough to pick it up. Hurk was dumb, he knew this, but he wasn't that dumb. That dumb is what killed his brother for playing in the old lake bed near their home. A gupper had swum up out of the sand and Hurk didn't have a brother anymore.