You shake the papers off, heft your stick, and exit through the broken door. At least nothing decided to visit in the night, which is nice.
By daylight, the house you spent the night in proves to be a one-story log cabin roofed with rusty metal, standing in the end of a street on an incline above a small port...village, by Isandan standards, but you guess they would call it a town here. It's little more than a few streets of wooden houses converging on a pier, near which two massive brick buildings are located. From one of them, a railroad track emerges, snaking off further inland. Above you, the incline transitions into a wooded plateau.
The light you saw before is situated on the top of an airship mooring mast, which stands near the same brick building in which the rail track starts. You suppose the light must be autonomously powered somehow. You cannot hear the crying anymore - it has been replaced by the sounds of a shallow, rasping breath. It appears to be coming from the building near which the mast stands, even though that's a ways off - you shouldn't be able to hear it.
You make your way down the street carefully. The houses to either side of you are either ransacked or abandoned, their windows broken. Some are even burned to the ground. There is no movement and no sound except for the breathing, but the atmosphere is tense. Something about the lighting seems strange, but you can't quite put your finger on it.
Still, nothing accosts you, and you make your way to the gate of the brick building, or rather, what is left of it. The gate was a massive thing of rusty brown iron, at least four stories tall. It closed over the rail track, you suppose, but now it's blown inwards and torn to shreds. The train stands behind it, the track running the length of the building in a groove in the floor: you think it propped the gate up when it was destroyed, because the locomotive is also completely wrecked. The concrete floor of the building is littered with dried fish and splinters of wood.
The smell of fish is overwhelming, but beneath it you catch another smell: rot. There, at the far wall, a dozen men, women, and indefs lie in a bullet-riddled heap. The wall is stained with blood and pocked with holes. A bit to the side of them, you locate the one who breathes: a flaxen-haired young man in an unfamiliar uniform, slumped near the same wall. His limbs are bent at unnatural angles, and his shirt torn open, revealing a faintly glistening abstract tattoo on his chest. He appears to be unconscious.
Stick (wielded)
Work clothing (worn)
Lighter (almost full)
Isandan passport
Isandan military registry ticket (lieutenant of reserve)
Author
Topic: Wrecked Land [SG] (Read 11299 times)