Cracks opened up in the garage door and started rapidly spreading as the tank plowed through it. It scattered shrapnel around a rough cut out silhouette as it drove inside. The noise made a bear grunt from the inside, in a corner of the room. It was laying down, hunched over an old gray bathtub. It’s big head looked over at the tank before returning to stubbornly try and squeeze its head into the tub, occasionally being able to gnaw on the slab of meat that someone had thrown in there.

  Ivan carefully maneuvered the tank further inside to where a few men sat circled around a table with cards in their hands. A man with a white scraggly mustache and beard turned around.

  “Tchevo blyat?” An unlit cigarette fell from the lips of the elderly man and landed on the floor.

  “Ivan? Ivan. Can’t you just kick the door in like a normal person?” The man shook his head and slapped down the cards he was holding onto the table.

  “Abo!” Ivan exclaimed as he burst out of the drivers hatch.

  The elderly man gestured for Ivan to turn off the engine. He dodged back into the tank and turned the key in the ignition. The thrumming engine decreased in intensity until it was once again silenced. The noise of the geiger counter once again became audible, however it had a very quiet ambient crackling indicating next to no radiation in this place. The low volume static coming from the Doc’s radio was still going strong without interruption.

  “You plowed a hole in the door of the only intact house we’ve located within 300 square miles.”

  Doc opened a hatch and climbed down to the floor. He held a gas mask in his hand. As Doc looked around he saw the men in ski masks from earlier carry in a generator and started it up on the floor half a meter away from the tank. Two of the men in ski masks retreated back to the truck for the fridge while the third began to hook up various power cords to an extension that was hooked up to the generator.

  “By the way, who is he?” The elderly man asked as he stumbled back and sat down in his chair.

  “Ah, da da. That is Doktor.” Ivan looked back and forth, gesturing between the two. “And this is Abotur. I call him Abo. In that corner, the sensitive bear? That’s Misha. Is alcoholic. Abo has been trying to get it to stop. Those over there are.. eh, comrades.”

  The men nodded in Doc’s direction before continuing their game. Abo picked up his cards again.

  “Da. We in dire need of materials for repairs,” Ivan pointed out and jumped down from the tank with a wrench in his hand.

  “Bleh!” Abo yelled and then stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  A woman entered the room and began clearing a table with the butt of a rifle and stacked up a range of different types of rods of armor plate steel at that very moment. On her way out of the room, she yanked out the unlit cigarette in Abo’s mouth and left the room.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll quit smoking,” Abo said, opened a beer bottle, took himself a healthy swig and placed it down next to him on the floor.

  Doc put on the gas mask and felt the tension shoot through him. He couldn’t help but feel uneasy, they needed to hurry. He didn’t have time to rest, he was sleep deprived enough that doing so would make him fall asleep. Doc steadied his posture and clamped his hands around the hose of a compressor, aiming the nozzle, blasting away the uranium dust from the cracked indentations in the side armor. Doc gave a tired tug to the hose hooked to the mobile compressor next to the generator.

  “Igor, grab a crate and help that man. The sooner they are done, the sooner they’ll leave“ Abotur said as he looked over at the man with the ski mask standing in front of the fridge.

  Igor closed the fridge door behind him and shoved an empty crate below where Doc were working. Feeling extremely heavy resistance, Doc shifted his stance and kicked the side armor.

  “Schisse! Tank, stop fighting it.” Doc blurted out as he gave the tank another kick.

  With the second kick, the uranium fragments and dust came loose. Doc breathed out a tired breath and focused on going over the damage, going over the indentations and holes in the side armor. Doc tilted his head, his gaze went over the surface of the tank. If the outside hole was a neat circle, then he would need to use some of the rods of armour plate steel. Simply stick it in the hole, hammer it tight with the wrench and weld it in place.

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  He bent down and lifted a plasma torch. Turning it on, following the plan in his head.

  “Abo, where is she? We were supposed to regroup here,” Ivan asked.

  Doc knew It wouldn’t be anything beyond a stopgap measure, but as long as it prevented him getting shot, he wouldn’t complain.

  “She?” Doc turned off the plasma torch and looked up for a brief moment.

  Being met with silence, Doc shrugged and focused back on the surface of the tank. Lighting it anew.

  “She’s already left, Ivan. Brought three elite teams to scale the cliff instead of going through the Fubar Pass,” Abotur responded.

  Due to the time constraints he would never have time to grind it smooth and paint it over however. So the end result, despite being functional would look like as if they built it from scrap. The bear shuffled near the table, sniffed the beer bottle and clamped its teeth on to the opening. It drank from it with a head raising motion.

  “No, Misha. No.” Abo slapped the bears nose and snatched back his bottle. The bear grunted and retreated back to it’s tub with the meat and Abo wiped off the top of the bottle with his shirt.

  With the most troublesome areas taken care of, Doc shifted his focus to the area around the treads. Despite modular sections in the side armor wasn’t something you’d typically see on a T-55 tank, it was one of the few Doc’s modifications that had helped them somewhat. He was surprised at the result of their conflict. These types of slugs would on an ancient tank like this go in on one end and go out on the other. However, these slugs managed to only puncture through the side armor and damaged the treads. Doc wasn't sure if the sub contractors of the enemy were cheating them with inferior quality ammo or if they had the devil's luck.

  Doc raised the side armor back into place and welded it in place. He quickly unbolted the damaged panels as Ivan climbed up and retrieved the backup treads. It was a pretty taxing effort. Ivan had to physically get the pin out of the old track and lug the 25kg piece of track around to get it into place and then slam the pin back into the new piece. Ivan gave it a final kick, slapped it two times. With that done, Doc quickly bolted in the replacement panels. The repair was done, it wasn’t pretty, but functionally done.

  Ivan got into the tank once more, Vodko spun the crank and the tank roared once more back into life as Ivan turned the key. After widening the hole they entered through, Doc swerved around the trailer and punched in the pin at the back of the tank. After installing a heavy duty sprinkler system connected to the trailer, Doc once more landed on the inside, back in the loader portion of the turret. The turret hatch clanked shut and Ivan pressed down the gas.

  * * *

  A woman with long flowing brown hair and a pair of cold blue eyes pushed herself up past the edge of the steep cliff and brought up the targeting brackets on her sniper rifle's screen, adjusting the focus and aim of her external camera. Her sights settled over the chest of a guard. There was sound, there was recoil, and the chest erupted as a heavy discarding sabot round liquefied his lungs and reduced his heart to bloody vapor. She motioned for her men to take out the other guards around the area around the anomaly detection facility. She did some more scanning as she hung there in her harness. A noise made her swing her scope downwards into the snaking pathway that was the Fubar pass. It was unlikely she'd spot anything before the Garrison did, but even so.

  Not long after she spotted a smoke cloud ripping apart the ground and the near rhythmic drumming of projectiles hitting rock from the automated sentry turrets. A red cloud blossomed out, which appeared to be reacting with the steadily expanding ion storm. Just as the storm reacted with the rust that was pushed out of the heavy duty sprinkler system, so too did the material disrupt their targeting systems of the automated turrets as the T-55 tank careened down the twisting pathway with a trailer bolted to the back of the tank that skipped behind it like a flat rock thrown into a lake. It barely avoided scraping by the rubble of previous vehicles who failed to pass through the area as the tank swerved around tight corners and pulled it along.

  A hatch flew open as the tank bounced off the hill. A short man with a gas mask manned the coaxial .50 caliber machine gun and almost mechanically destroyed any automated turret that started to regain its function despite the high concentration of iron dust and unnaturally dense levels of ion storms surging through the tight rocky terrain. The rocky path did not continue in a straight line. It went at a diagonal at points, there were ramps, small hills and it even went up and back down. Framed by protruding rocks and steep cliffs, with the passage decorated by numerous wreckages of past attempts to cross, it was understandable why the nickname of Fubar Pass had stuck. The passage truly was fucked up beyond all recognition.

  The tank flew over a small hill and the short man ducked inside once more. The hatch clanked shut and the tank accelerated. The tank bounced over the ground while a tiny worm was making its way across the road. The tank landed on the downward slope and it stormed down the path. The tank’s mad dash down the slope concluded by skipping over a vehicle that had been eroded into a ramp. The tank was pulled into the air by its momentum. The tank spun to the right 180 degrees into the air and opened fire while still in mid-air. All the sounds in the area died out, drowned out by sound similar to lightning. The power of the recoil jolted the red hot cannon into the air.

  “That crazy driving, must be my Ivan,” the brown haired woman said as a warm smile stretched on her face.

  The woman adjusted her sights further down the path and noticed the target, demonstrating a point blank hit with a searing hole drilled into the turret and the rest of the tank lit ablaze.

  “-and that aim, be it skill or luck, that must be Vodko.”