Every world has its rules. Outsiders say the wasteland exists in a state of anarchy, but they are mistaken. Here, the rules are coarser and more fundamental than those of the wider world, but no less strict. Survival means learning to play a game that is unfair and unwinnable.

Jan had broken a rule: don’t steal from people more tooled up than you. He doubted he’d live to regret it.

A bell was ringing in the heart of the settlement. He could hear the cries of his pursuers and the barks of their hunting dogs. They were closing in. Jan halted his frantic run and cast his eyes up and down the ramshackle buildings lining the street, searching for somewhere to hide.

‘You, you, check down there!’ came the command. ‘Seb, Jonah, next street.’ It would be a matter of seconds before somebody rounded the corner.

Jan spotted a corrugated iron door, slightly ajar, and instantly made for it. He slipped inside just in time, carefully sliding the door shut. Just moments later he heard two pairs of footfalls; the sound of heavy steel-capped boots. Purposeful. Patient. He knew they’d find him eventually – there was plenty of daylight left. Jan cursed as they passed, then slumped despondently against the wall. He couldn’t hide for long.

Jan was a survivor; he’d always kept to the rules, but desperation had driven him this far. The hunger was a constant, rending pain that seemed to consume him from the inside. Jan’s options had narrowed until, on this final day, he had faced a stark choice between theft and starvation.

It was impossible to see anything in the gloom, but Jan could hear the dull whirr of working machinery. He closed his eyes, trying to focus. There had to be a way out.

He was no stranger to hardship. It was a marginal existence, scratching a living on the fringes of the hostile new ecosystem. He was a wastelander, rugged and tall, with the wiry physique of somebody overworked and underfed. He had no permanent home, nor intention of finding one, instead drifting between unregistered settlements and caravans, doing odd jobs in exchange for shelter and food. Hard times were common, but these last days had been the worst of all.

Jan stood and padded as softly as possible around the room. He found a length of chain and used it to secure the door, driving a metal bar through the loop and testing it a couple of times. It wouldn’t do for the soldiers to just walk in on him. He heard returning footfalls, realising a silent escape would be impossible.

Jan turned to equipping himself. Hesitantly, he cracked open one of the shutters, providing just enough light to work by. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that knifed into the room. At the far end of the space industrial machinery clustered, still hidden in shadow. Hundreds of tools lined the walls and lay scattered across every flat surface, plenty of which would be serviceable as improvised weapons, but useless in a gunfight. A row of dust-sheeted, blocky forms caught Jan’s eye. Curious, he walked over, removing a sheet. Relief surged through him.

Printers; mass manufactured, robust, reliable and stamped with stylised deltas, the Arco insignia. A ‘gift’ to ensure this settlement’s cooperation. Jan lifted up the panel on one of the machines. He was presented with stacks of punch cards, all imprinted with images of tools. He removed and discarded several, searching through the rows for anything useful. The item he needed flipped up, and Jan slotted the card into the printer and threw a switch. The machine would need a few minutes.

Jan forced himself to be calm and think – a weapon was useless without a way out. Escape through the barricaded entrance would be impossible. He walked around the room, searching for another exit. There was nothing obvious, but he spotted a ladder that led to the high ceiling and a closed hatch.

A fist hammered on the door.

‘Chase is up, wastelander.’ The commanding voice he’d heard earlier. Jan ignored it as he dashed back to the printer – the roof would have to do. He bound his hands in rags; the dotbow would still be hot when it was extruded.

‘We know you’re in there.’ Jan still didn’t respond. ‘Let’s make this quick and easy.’ The voice paused, waiting for a reply. The printer continued to hiss and whirr, the dotbow now poking from its open base.

‘What are you making in there, huh? A shovel? Don’t try anything, you’ll be digging your own grave. We’ve got the place surrounded, no way out.’

‘If you let me go, I’ll return what I’ve taken,’ Jan offered. He sighed at the thought; in what world would it be that easy? He was close now; the bow was complete, he just needed the last of the ammunition. As the bolts came off the printer he slotted them into the magazine, weighing the need for extra ammunition against the risk of waiting.

‘Let you go?’ The man laughed, and his soldiers followed suit. Then suddenly, deadly serious, he said – ‘You’ve stolen from me.’ The laughter stopped.

‘It was just a bit of food. I can work off the debt…’

‘No no no,’ the man chided. ‘That’s not how this works. I’m a man of principle. The way I see it, you take what is mine, I take what is yours,’ he explained.

‘I was desperate… I have nothing to give you,’ Jan replied. Let them think he was scared, some pathetic, stupid wastelander. He knew he was being toyed with. They’d be fetching a torch, grenades, not taking any chances. He heard the chink of a rifle bolt being drawn back.

‘Did I ask you to give to me? No. No, I said I’m gonna take. If you come out now I’ll only take your hand. Fair enough, yes?’

Jan put the voice out of his mind, raising the dotbow to shoulder level and testing its weight. The printer had extruded it fully drawn, its cabling and springs held back by hundreds of pounds of tension. More footsteps now; reinforcements. He guessed he had seconds. Jan hitched the pack of stolen food onto his other shoulder, taking a few deep breaths.

‘We’re coming in, friend,’ the voice outside said as Jan shifted towards the door. ‘Don’t make a fuss and we’ll settle this man-to-man.’

With a blast the door flew inward, sending a dazzling shaft of sunlight into the dim workshop. Jan glimpsed a pair of rifles and another figure, his hands held high, raising something compact and round. He reflexively loosed the dotbow, sending bolts through the figures with an almost inaudible whistle. The men collapsed with strangled rattles.

‘Get back-’ someone shouted, as Jan darted sideways. A moment later he heard the sharp detonation of the grenade the first figure had dropped. Perhaps there were screams; with the ringing in his ears, it was impossible to tell.

Jan ran towards the ladder, pulling himself up to the ceiling hatch with the dotbow and pack slapping against his back. The hatch burst open and he hauled himself onto the roof. His muscles seemed to fail half way through the lift and he collapsed onto the hot metal, gasping in exhaustion. He rolled over helplessly and the pack of food slipped off his shoulder and slid back down the opening, bouncing as it struck the warehouse floor.

‘You’ve got nowhere left to go-’ came the shout from the street below. That wasn’t quite true. Jan stood, glancing down forlornly at the lost food and then over the forest of closely packed metal roofs. He could make it out of the settlement.

Jan fled as more shouts echoed up from ground level, his ears still ringing from the grenade blast. The landscape was uneven and he stumbled, slamming a knee hard onto the corrugated iron. There were shouts as the guards tried to encircle him. Ignoring the pain, Jan made his way across the last roof, jumping to ground level. Behind, the clatter of boots was growing closer once again. He heard another voice, loud but distant.

‘You’re already dead. Doesn’t bother me if it’s an absence of food or an excess of lead that gets you.’

The firebreak stretched ahead of Jan; a hundred metres of ashen soil that separated the jungle from what passed for civilisation. Without hesitation, he sprinted towards the perimeter, kicking up clouds of dusty ash. Rifle shots zipped past Jan’s head when he reached the fifty meter mark. At twenty metres, he heard the distinct chatter of an Arco machine-rifle and felt numberless bullets fill the air. At ten metres, it seemed as though the atmosphere had thickened, and his legs were straining beyond exhaustion. Then he was within the relative safety of the jungle, as the gunfire attenuated in the distance.

The afternoon rains were almost due, Jan was sure. The jungle air was hot and oppressive, thick with moisture and a stench of rotting vegetation. Colossal purple-green mosses and grotesque whorls of tendrils choked the dying native vegetation all around him. Nobody from the settlement dared travel this far. He was safe from any threat the human world could offer.

Jan hacked at the creepers ahead, trying to clear the path a little before he stumbled into an open clearing. The tree he’d been searching for swam into focus. It was dead, uprooted by the false plants, already disappearing beneath the thickening undergrowth. Jan scowled; the scene was sadly familiar. There was no permanence here.

In its place the invaders clustered; fleshy and purple, their fanned crowns tilted at fixed angles like solar panels. They moved almost imperceptibly, fighting for sunlight. Others were still, tied down by parasitic creepers that bore false fruits; plump white bulbs that were scattered across the ground. And arranged amongst the fallen fruit were carcasses, fertilising the earth. Jan walked forward hesitantly and poked a lump with the tip of his boot. A rat, its stomach bloated by a fatal reaction, burst open releasing a foul-smelling gas.

Jan retched, turning away. Even the ground felt wrong – fleshy tendrils undulated, writhing just below the threshold of noticeability. His eyelids felt heavy. It would be so easy to give into the jungle’s suffocating caress. But he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

In time, Jan stumbled his way towards a stream. The mosses hadn’t quite clogged it up and a shoal of slender, double-spined ‘fish’ were swimming their way through the water, twinned tails beating together. In amongst them was the quick flash of a true fish, an edible fish. Unthinkingly, Jan whipped his dotbow out and pulled the trigger, releasing the weapon’s tightly wound clockwork. The bolt missed by inches. The fish darted away and vanished from sight. Jan groaned; real fish were so rare that he would have to wait a week before he caught a glimpse of another one. In a week, he might be dead.

Afternoon thunder rolled and in minutes, the clear sky was occluded by a uniform blanket of cloud that brought driving sheets of rain. Jan sought shelter underneath an overhang, reviewing his meagre set of possessions as a way of passing the time.

Besides the Dotbow and conspicuous lack of food, Jan had a tarpaulin, some rope, flints, a canteen and a decent knife. He reached into a pocket and found the photograph of Eva, feeling the familiar thumbed edges, the creases where it had been folded.

She’d always been curious about the false plants, wanting to know what it was that prevented false life and true life from coexisting. She was curious about everything but, as with nearly all the questions she’d asked, Jan had never known the answer. It was just how things were. False plants and true plants could grow next to each other but sooner or later an animal, false or true, would graze on something it couldn’t digest and die. Thus the hybrid jungles, almost empty of animals, spread.

A sudden splashing noise made Jan jump. He turned and saw that dozens of the fish were swimming frantically upstream. He glimpsed one misjudge its jump and end up stranded on the riverbank. With a whoop of delight he ran to it, grabbing the fish delicately with both hands before it had time to flop back into the river. Jan would have eaten it raw right at that moment were it not for a new and terrifying thought. The fish were clearly swimming away from something. He had barely managed two paces before the monstrosity tore itself out of the water.

It was the length of an anaconda, but bulkier and without bones or skeleton, with a plasticky hide that glistened a pale translucent white. Two tails splayed out in a y-shaped frame; they beat together to slide the creature along the ground. It had no visible eyes, just a cluster of dark spots at the tip of its head. The thing reared up and managed a series of guttural clicks and whoops from a ring of spiracles that lined its neck.

Jan froze on the spot with the limp fish still in one hand, limbs unresponsive. The creature, known to wastelanders as the Pitchfork, swayed for what seemed like an eon as though trying to decide whether he was prey.

Jan finally turned and ran from the riverside. The Pitchfork made its mind up and lunged upwards, flicking its tails between the branches to give chase, its maw straining hungrily. The dense undergrowth slapped at Jan as he sprinted, muscles burning with exhaustion. His foot caught on a densely-knotted root and twisted, driving him hard onto the thin soil.

The Pitchfork would be upon him in moments. Jan desperately felt for the dotbow, the panic rising. It had spun off into the undergrowth. The creature had briefly lost him, its head blindly scanning back and forth mere meters from where he lay. His hand hit against the solidity of the bow, only to drive it further away. He cursed, twisting to hack at the ensnaring roots with the knife. His foot free, Jan lunged again for the dotbow and grabbed it by the stock. The Pitchfork’s whistling roar was growing louder.

Jan shifted onto one knee, raising the dotbow and fumbling two more bolts into the slot over the stock. He sighted along the barrel, steadied for a moment and fired. Both shots hit home with soft thunks, spearing right through the head and taking away lumps of jelly-like tissue. The Pitchfork turned its wounded head on Jan and with a heaving convulsion sprayed stomach acid over him.

The acid caught him on the side of his face and body; burning where it touched his skin, mixing with the rain and running down his back. Outrunning the creature had felt like an option at first, but Jan could no longer put pressure on his injured ankle and the thing was upon him. The Pitchfork’s mouth dilated open, revealing ribs of muscle and plates of hardened tissue. He staggered back. It approached almost cautiously, knowing it had him. Then Jan remembered the fish still clutched in his left hand.

He tossed the fish at the Pitchfork which, following some ancient and suicidal reflex, gulped it down. The effect was almost instantaneous. It fell thrashing to the floor, bloated and frothing at the mouth. Jan flashed a grimace at the dying Pitchfork before stepping gingerly over its twitching body and back towards the river. It took a while for the Pitchfork’s nervous system to realise that it was dead.