Farkas "Bulk" Bulkmeier's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Bulk walked away from the bunker with the kind of clarity that feels like drowning. He'd tracked the most dangerous lead of his career straight to its source and then let it walk. The feared bounty hunter who was supposed to bring justice to the wasteland had just broken his own code. But Skull wasn't running. Three days of tracking proved that. The Terror Bird kept circling back to a collapsed section of the old industrial zone where a gazebo stood in the ruins — weathered wood patched with copper sheets and tech salvage, amber lights glowing from hanging bulbs that shouldn't have power. Bulk found the bodies first: two raiders in military fatigues, picked clean to bone, positioned like warnings on either side of a broken wall. Deep claw marks scored the stone in vertical slashes, territorial and deliberate. This wasn't random hunting. Skull had claimed this place and was defending it the way something intelligent defends a home. The wrong approach would make Bulk the next skeleton decorating the perimeter. He needed to get inside that gazebo without triggering whatever instinct made Skull tear apart anyone who came too close. The Terror Bird was circling somewhere in the ruins, and Bulk had maybe one chance to reach whatever remained of his friend before those talons found him. He pulled Skull's jacket from his pack — the one he'd taken from the bunker — and draped it over the wall where the claw marks were deepest. Then he sat down with his back to the stone and waited. An hour passed before the mechanical footsteps approached. The Terror Bird stopped ten feet away, head tilted in that familiar way. Bulk didn't move. Didn't speak. The creature stepped closer, talons scraping concrete, and lowered its head to the jacket. For three seconds, something shifted in those glowing eyes — recognition, maybe, or the ghost of whatever Skull used to be. Then it turned and walked into the gazebo, leaving the entrance open. Bulk followed. Inside, the space was arranged like someone trying to remember how humans lived — a bench made from scrap metal, tools organized by size, a single light positioned where it would catch anyone entering. Skull stood in the center, Terror Bird body twitching between mechanical precision and something almost human. Bulk met those eyes and understood: his friend was still in there, trapped inside a machine that barely remembered how to be anything else. He couldn't hunt this. Couldn't call it justice. But he could stop pretending his reputation mattered more than the person who used to laugh so hard he fell off dumpsters. Bulk set down his weapon and sat on the bench. The most feared bounty hunter in the wasteland wasn't going to build his name on Skull's corpse. That particular hunt was over, even if it meant starting everything else from scratch.