If he'd been a kinder man, Wolfwood would have asked. What horrible thing happened to get Stampede so torn up like this? How long had he been out here in the sands on his own -- on foot, apparently? How old was he, for his hair to be dark like a dead plant, and did that mean the same thing for a plant that was able to walk around as it did for the ones who lived their whole lives in their bulbs? How long since he'd had somebody looking after him?

But he wasn't a kind man. All his kindness and compassion had been bled out on an operating table by his man's brother, or a version of him, anyway.

"That wasn't me." The words come out every bit as harshly as he intended them. The planet's empty of human life as far as the eye can see except for a never-ending flood of Vash the Stampedes, and they all wanted to tell him who he was. He was getting sick of it. "I never had a bike, you're thinkin' of somebody else."

With the car dead, and neither of them knowing how to fix it, that meant he was on foot again, didn't it? Fuck. It would take him days to walk to December from here, and more than a day to go back the way he'd come, tail tucked between his legs. Neither option sounded promising, but only one sounded survivable.

He was never going to hear the end of this from Blondie, was he?