Hurk looked back at the bomb. Sure seemed like a bomb. It was long and thin like a bamboo shoot, but a whole lot bigger. Hurk reckoned that not even he could get his arms around the whole thing. Its tip was painted with black and red stripes and it had words on it.

"Can you read that?"

"Fine," grumbled Dav, carefully extracting his hand from the skeletons empty ribs with nothing but a tarnished brass ring to show for it.

Dav took decidedly less time than Hurk to figure out what was in the big room beyond the glass, his short arms twitching slowly as he silently figured out the value-to-danger ratio he had just invented. His mouth moved, but no noise came out and his eyes darted up and down the bomb like it was moving, only Hurk could see it wasn't moving. Hadn't moved in a long time.

The silence of the room began to surround Hurk.

"Reckon it's worth something?" he asked, knowing it was but just trying desperately to get some kind of talk going. He didn't like it when Dav was quiet, it was too much like being alone. Dav said nothing, his brain ticking over dollar signs and explosions, weighing them up and wondering if it was worth trying to bust through the glass and get to the bomb. It had US ARMY written on the side, so it had probably belonged to these guys. They wouldn't be needing it anymore.

Hurk tried to keep his mind busy. When he got lonely like this he got scared and when he got scared he froze up. Once it had taken Dav a whole afternoon to get him moving again after he was sure he'd seen a ghost in a busted up ruin. Dav had told him about there being no ghosts and how they all got blowed up when the bombs got sent around. By noon, he was walking along, not scared of ghosts or anything else.

Dav elbowed Hurk out of the way, which consisted of him leaning on the side of Hurk's knee until he shifted. "Go check the rest of this place. Might be another one of these windows with a bomb on the other side."

There was another desk on the opposite side of the room, but without any window. Hurk's torch cut out for a second and he let out a whimper, before the battery reconnected with the fuses and the darkness collapsed. A stone rattled against the doorway. Hurk looked at Dav, but he hadn't noticed. Probably not worth noticing, Hurk told himself. Still, he unclipped the latch on his holster, just in case it was a roo come for a sniff around.

Roos had to be one of Hurk's least favourite things. They smelled bad and bit hard. By themselves they were easy enough to scare off, especially for Hurk, who was scarily large for normal folk, let alone for the dog-sized rodents in the wastes. They'd only seen a couple dozen while they were digging, but that was more than Hurk cared for. They had shot off ten bucks worth of shells on the first night alone, leaving at least three roos sprayed over the rocks.