Bulk kicked open the warehouse door and stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. The place smelled like rust and old smoke. Three months of tracking down petty thieves hadn't built him a reputation. He needed something bigger. He needed a base where people would come looking for him, where his name would mean something. He walked the perimeter, boots crunching on broken glass. The brick walls were solid despite the weathering. The second floor had good sightlines to the street below. In the back corner, he found what he was looking for — a heavy wooden desk still bolted to the floor. He set down his pack and pulled out the small zord figurine wrapped in cloth. Skull had kept it on his dashboard, called it his co-pilot. Bulk placed it on the desk facing the door. Outside, he found a rusted metal panel and three cans of scavenged paint. His hand moved quickly, layering colors across the brick facade. The warthog took shape — bright and wild, tusks curved like warnings. He stepped back and wiped paint from his fingers. Anyone passing would see it now. Anyone looking for muscle or favors or justice would know where to find him. Bulk locked the door behind him and pocketed the key. The building was his now. The wasteland had a new player, and tomorrow the first clients would come looking. He could almost hear Skull laughing at the paint job, telling him it looked like a kindergarten project. But Skull would've understood. This was how you built something from nothing. This was how you made a name stick.

Three clients had come through the warehouse doors in six weeks. One wanted him to find a stolen water filter. One wanted protection from bandits who turned out to be kids throwing rocks. The third spat on his floor and called him a Ranger sellout. Bulk sat at the desk and stared at the warthog on the wall outside through the grimy window. The rusted bench outside caught movement. Someone sat down on it, stayed there for ten minutes, then stood and walked away. An hour later they came back. This time they stayed. Bulk watched the figure through the window — yellow jacket, hands tucked in pockets. He knew that jacket. He'd seen it on the overpass six weeks ago when he'd almost said the thing he couldn't take back. The bench creaked as Aisha stood and walked toward the door. She came in without knocking, carrying a leather journal under one arm. Bulk stayed at the desk. The chunk of pink concrete he'd pulled from the overpass sat next to Skull's figurine — he'd told himself it was good salvage, but he knew better. Aisha set the journal on the desk between them. It was open to a page covered in her handwriting. "I wrote down everything I was afraid to say that night," she said. "Figured if you could almost tell me, I should finish what I started." She pushed it toward him. "Your turn." Bulk looked at the page. Her words were right there — grief, survivor's guilt, the weight of the suit. Everything he'd been carrying alone was already written in someone else's hand. He could walk away like he did on the overpass. He could keep Skull locked inside where it was safe. But she'd come back after six weeks and put her pain on paper first. He picked up the pen she'd left on the journal and wrote one sentence: "Skull died while I was still wearing the suit." His hand shook. Aisha read it and nodded once. She didn't try to fix it or fill the silence. She just sat down on the floor next to the desk and waited. Bulk wrote another sentence. Then another. The warehouse stayed quiet except for the scratch of pen on paper.

Bulk had been tracking the raider for three days through the dead zones east of the warehouse. The man had stolen medical supplies from a settlement — one of the few jobs that actually felt like justice instead of babysitting. The trail led to a collapsed overpass where twisted rebar jutted from concrete like broken bones. The raider's tracks disappeared at the base of something that shouldn't exist. The old MMPR headquarters rose from the wasteland like a tombstone, its clock tower cracked but still standing. Bulk had heard rumors the place was picked clean years ago, but massive footprints circled the entrance — three-toed, deep enough to hold rainwater. He knelt beside one and measured it against his forearm. Too big for any animal he knew. Bright feathers were scattered near the doorway, colors that hurt to look at in the gray wasteland. The raider had gone inside. Bulk's hand moved to his sidearm as he followed. The interior smelled like copper and rot. Bulk's boots crunched on broken glass as he moved through what used to be the command center. The raider's pack sat abandoned near a console, medical supplies spilling across the floor. No body. No blood. Just the pack and a trail of those same massive prints leading deeper into the building. Bulk followed them down a corridor to a reinforced door hanging off its hinges. Inside, the walls were covered in claw marks — deliberate, methodical. Not random destruction. Someone had been trying to communicate. At the far end of the room, scratched into the metal with savage precision, were four letters: BULK. His breath caught. Only one person called him that before it became his hunting name. Only one person knew what it meant before the Fallout. The footprints led to a ventilation shaft torn open from the inside, too small for whatever made those tracks now but just right for a man. Bulk pulled one of the bright feathers from where it was wedged in the torn metal. His hands shook the same way they had when he'd written about Skull's death in Aisha's journal. But Skull was dead. Bulk had watched him die while still wearing the purple suit. This was something else — something that knew his name and wanted him to follow. He pocketed the feather and stepped back from the shaft. The raider was gone, the medical supplies recovered. The job was done. But the question scratching at the back of his mind wouldn't let him leave: what if he'd been wrong about who died that day?

Bulk left the headquarters and kept searching. The feather burned in his pocket like a question he couldn't ignore. He moved through the wasteland following the massive prints, tracking them east through dead zones where nothing grew. The trail ended at a bunker half-buried in cracked earth. Something massive stood guard at the entrance — a creature built like a nightmare fusion of bird and machine. Metallic feathers caught the dying light, glowing eyes tracked his approach. The thing was twelve feet tall with talons that gouged deep parallel marks into the stones surrounding the entrance. Each stone bore the same deliberate claw pattern, marking territory the way an animal claims its kill. Bulk recognized the shape immediately — a Terror Bird, the kind of zord that shouldn't exist anymore. But this one moved, breathed, watched him with an intelligence that made his skin crawl. Bulk raised his hands slowly and stepped past the creature. It didn't stop him. Inside the bunker, the air tasted stale and wrong. A jacket hung on a rusted pipe near the back wall — black leather, ripped to hell, with a skull emblem painted across the front. Bulk's chest went tight. Skull had worn that jacket the day before the Fallout, back when they'd laughed about stupid pranks and self-cleaning suits. He picked it up with shaking hands. The leather was warm, recently worn. Not a relic. Evidence. The Terror Bird stepped into the doorway behind him, blocking the exit. Up close, Bulk could see where metal met flesh, where mutation had twisted something human into this mechanical horror. The creature tilted its head the exact way Skull used to when he was about to crack a joke. Bulk's throat closed. He'd spent years hunting wasteland predators, building a reputation on taking down monsters. But this wasn't a monster he could hunt. This was his best friend wearing a body that belonged in a scrapyard. The jacket slipped from his hands. He couldn't enforce justice on the only person who'd ever really known him. His entire purpose — the feared bounty hunter, the man who brought order to chaos — meant nothing when the target was Skull. Bulk stepped back toward the entrance, and the Terror Bird moved aside to let him pass.

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.