There goes the neighborhood
Day seven on UV-5 was a lot like days one through six had been. Cold. Not much to eat. In the trenches, where the snow didn't get and the wind didn't drag, there was plant life-- enough to live on.
The wind got up under his warm wraps and froze his scalp right down. Disadvantage of his normal... hygenic nature. Yeah. No hair meant nobody could grab you in a fight, but no hair meant he was losing heat. His scavenged clothing was only doing so much.
He'd survived a week, he could survive as long as he needed to here. Years. Years of being left alone. The idea was sweet.
Just so long as he didn't do anything stupid.
He was climbing an ice-ridge when his boot slipped, a foothold he coulda sworn was there disappeared under him and he fell back-- didn't scream, just thought, resignedly, shit. He hit the slope beneath-- too slick and smooth to grab a handhold, and started rolling-
Then there was a sharp crack sound, the feeling of impact-- he hit something wooden and rolled right through.
And now he was someplace warm.
And bright.
Ow.
He lay on what felt like carpet for a minute with his eyes shut, making sure that there was no-one else in the room. There wasn't-- it smelled like dust and disuse. Cleaning products. Nothing smelled alive, nobody'd been here in a while. Okay.
He rolled over (yeah; under his hands, this was definitely carpet) and got unsteadily to his feet. A room... a bed. Two beds, same cover. A hotel? An old fashioned one. A real old fashioned one, all of this wood and organic fiber must've cost a fortune-- either that, or he was somewhere real rural. He figured it out quick enough-- the switch on the wall controlled the overhead. He flipped it off--all that excess light went away, and it felt like such a relief. He dragged the goggles off his face, looking around.
Just... a room. How the fuck'd he gotten here from UV-5?
There were slivers of light through the curtains, and he looked out into a planet-side evening. The glass was cool to the touch, but not UV-frozen.
Fine. He'd adapt. Get to the bottom of this later. A quick raid showed that although the room was uninhabited, there were clothes left all through the drawers-- his size. Denim workpants. White shirts... cotton? Real cotton? It smelled that way. His size, was the strange thing. They all fit, and he slid out of his layers and layers and slid into the new clothes. And even better... a few pairs of old-fashioned glasses, dark tint. He slid them over his eyes; they didn't block all the light the goggles did, but to their advantage, they didn't make him look like a prison escapee.
He approved. The mirror showed him someone that could almost blend with a civilian population.
He wasn't sure what'd brought him here-- fuck, maybe he was lying in some gorge on UV-5 bleeding out, hallucinating as he died.
Whatever.
When he stepped to the front desk, the hallucination idea got a little more weight.
"Name?" asked the dead-eyed woman at the desk.
He lied straight to her face; slapped on a big, innocent smile and said: "William Johns."
And then--
Then she said he'd had a room reserved, he could go right ahead.
Who was paying for it?
Chillingsworth. Set it up months ago.
Now that was amusing. And the dead-eye woman gave him keys and sent him right back to the room he'd fallen into.
All those clothes. Good clothes. That space...
Nice.
And he stepped out into the evening with a dead man's name and a dead woman's money and he just smiled because sometimes life got good.