16 – Sunset
Andy and Omar took a different route toward the city than they’d been using to transfer goods and people from Grace Refuge. Where they normally angled a bit south, this ti they went almost due west, and it wasn’t long before they were seeing unfamiliar sights. The first of which was a pile of tangled, mangled trailers—forr hos for the people atop squite sa.
“Gotta be three or four different trailers in that ss,” Omar observed.
Andy ran his gaze over the long trail of soiled insulation, twisted aluminum, and broken plastic. Everything was muddy, and half the refuse was already sprouting weeds—grass, tumbleweeds, and the shoots of plants Andy couldn’t identify yet. “Yeah. ss is right.”
Sothing large shifted beneath a pile of moldering plywood and linoleum, and Andy stepped back, lowering his spear. He looked at Omar, who’d lifted his shield, and the stocky man shrugged. They stared at the pile of refuse for a few more seconds, but when it didn’t move again, they decided to skirt it and continue on their way.
Andy practiced his tracking as they walked, noting the prints of so javelina, one of which had to be the size of a pony, and, a bit later, so canine prints that he supposed were from coyotes, but, again, they were too big for comfort. He saw horse tracks, big cat tracks, and perhaps most worryingly, human tracks. None were obviously heading toward the sa, but that only made Andy wonder where those people had gone.
As they ca upon the outskirts of the city, walking through the lightly industrialized areas where junkyards, vacant lots, rusting warehouses, and small clusters of hos dotted the landscape, Andy began to see how profoundly the storm had impacted things.
The flooding had washed out many of the roads, and where they weren’t washed out, they were almost universally covered with patches of silt and dirt. Weeds sprouted from everything—blacktop, driveways, roofs, even overturned cars. It was like the desert was closing in, reclaiming lands that were held far more tenuously by humans than they’d thought.
“Not really a desert anymore,” Omar muttered, and Andy looked at him.
“Did you read my mind?”
“Huh? No, just thinking about how green everything is and how the soil, even the stuff on the roads, is almost moist. We’ve been getting a lot of rain and the moisture isn’t drying up as quickly as it used to.”
Andy nodded at first, but then he shook his head. “We shouldn’t be so sure. Things could change tomorrow or next month. Let’s get through a year or two of the apocalypse before we start declaring the desert gone.”
Omar looked at him sideways, grinning. “Look at you getting all wise.”
“Heh. Don’t tell anyone.”
Sothing moved, rattling a weed-choked chain-link fence down the street, and Andy froze, lifting his spear as he stared. Omar took a few steps to the side, putting so distance between them—a wise tactic, Andy supposed, if one were worried about explosions or bombs or fireballs. He took a step forward and to his left, and then the fence rattled again, and sothing surged underneath it, uprooting one of the fence posts and flipping a dilapidated truck onto its side.
“Get ready!” Omar yelled, thumping his shield with his mace. Andy felt a soft heat on his neck and cheek, and it seed the afternoon shadows fell away from the roadway. He glanced at Omar, and, sure enough, his mace was glowing with a pale-yellow nimbus. Before he could say anything, the ground bucked under his feet, and the roadway ten yards before them cracked.
“It’s under the street!” Andy shouted, backing up, spear before him. Not for the first ti, he wished he could stay in his Brimstone Stalker class all the ti. He supposed soday he would—unless he found sothing better—but for the ti being, he just had to trust in the plan to farm up so levels, abilities, and Improvent Points from other classes. Still, he couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be to lay down a smoke cloud right about then.
With a grinding clatter, the road broke apart, dark earth roiled out of the ground, and, riding on that wave ca two long, twitching antennae, followed by a flat, reddish-brown head, black eyes, and wide, scissoring mandibles. The insect’s head was the size of Omar’s shield, and the thing’s body kept coming—segnt after segnt, leg after leg. It was a giant centipede, and it scuttled over the roadway, charging toward Andy with a hissing, clacking sound.
Andy planted his feet and watched, his perception and mind fast enough to track its movents, fast enough to predict them. He watched it wriggle toward him, saw it rearing up to strike, and stepped forward, driving his spearpoint into one corner of its wide-open jaws. The blade drove ho; the insect shrieked, reared back, and then its mandibles snapped closed. They didn’t cut through the hardwood spear haft, but the abrupt clamping force almost pulled the weapon from Andy’s hands.
He stumbled forward, the wounded centipede rose up on so of its rear legs, lifting him off the ground as he struggled not to lose his weapon, and then, like a wrecking ball, Omar smashed into the monster’s side, shield-first. His heavy, iron-banded shield crunched two of the insect’s legs, cracked a section of its carapace, and knocked it off balance.
Andy gripped his spear and bore down, hauling back as the bug fell. The blade ripped free, trailing a splash of yellow-green gore, and then he dove forward, stabbing the underside of the centipede as it tried to right itself. The carapace there was more like leather than a hard shell, and his blade dug deeply again. He circled to his left, withdrawing the spear and stabbing again and again.
anwhile, Omar attacked from the other end, smashing his mace into the enormous insect’s tail section, crushing one segnt after another, rendering twitching legs the size of Andy’s arms broken and useless. The monster tried several tis to right itself and go on the offensive, but Andy would drive into it with his spear, knocking it off balance or, if he was pushed back, Omar would deliver another chitin-crushing shield bash.
Before long the battle was over, and the two fighters stood, heaving for breath, over their twitching, mortally wounded foe. “Son of a bitch,” Omar gasped, wiping his brow with his sleeve. “That thing didn’t want to die!”
“I know!” Andy looked around, suddenly aware of the silence after the clamor of their combat.
***Congratulations, Andy! You’ve slain a wondering hostile ruins denizen. For your efforts, you’ve gained experience toward your next level in the Lancer class.***
Andy wiped the ssage aside. “Didn’t even level.”
“I did—twice.” Omar grinned at him, shrugging. “Got an Improvent Point but no new abilities. I’m gonna throw another point into my new ability. Did you feel it?”
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“The light? Yeah. What was it?”
“It’s called Bolster the Spirit.” He shrugged. “Supposed to make people less scared and resist ‘mind effects,’ whatever those are.”
“Cool.” Andy gave his spear a good looking over, ensuring it hadn’t been damaged by the monstrous insect’s thrashing. Finding the damage to be superficial, he looked at Omar and said, “I was going to say things like fear, but you said it makes people ‘less scared,’ so there must be other mindeffects—makes you wonder…”
“Yeah, sure does.”
“I an,” Andy continued. “If you think about video gas, what other kinds of things affect soone’s mind? I guess anger, right? But what about love or—”
“Oh shit!” Omar nodded. “Like if a rmaid tried to lure you into the waves!”
Andy grinned. “Yeah, sothing like that.” He glanced at the large, still-twitching corpse, and the instincts honed by his rank three Butcher’s Insight spoke to him. “I should harvest this,” he said, sending his spear into his storage ring and drawing forth his butchering knife.
“A giant bug?”
“Well, the chitin will be useful at least, and the mandibles.” Andy got to work, carving off the centipede’s armored plates. So were leathery, so were hard as glass, and Andy instinctively knew they were all useful. He cut out the pincers, and after dragging the corpse out straight, oozing and mostly bare of natural armor, he sliced into its torso, carving out fist-sized yellow organs that oozed fluid that reeked of sulfur. “Not even sure what these are, but I’m pretty sure Madi will find them interesting. Maybe Violet, too.”
Omar only glanced at him briefly before turning away. He’d moved upwind as soon as Andy made his first incision into the giant insect’s torso. “Nothing coming our way, still. Gonna be dark in a couple of hours, though.”
Andy wiped his knife off and sent it back into storage. As his spear appeared in his hand, he stretched his long legs into a ground-devouring pace, clapping Omar on his shoulder as he passed him by. “Let’s move, then.”
They continued on, passing defunct shopping centers, weed-choked suburban neighborhoods, and hundreds of abandoned vehicles. All along the way, Andy tried to wrap his head around the lack of people. So much so that he blurted out the question, “How many people lived here?”
“In Tucson?” Omar shrugged. “Maybe half a million.”
“It’s a ghosttown, man.”
The other man nodded, looking around, left to right. “Think about it—half the people turned into monsters. If everyone got into fights, that ans half died or ran away. I an, that happened every ti they got into a fight. How many days would that last? How many days would you hang around if you were surrounded by monsters?”
“Well, then, where the hell are the monsters?”
“We just killed one…” Omar trailed off, staring at a Walmart with a city bus—upside down—smashed through the front wall. It looked like sothing had thrown the bus, but maybe it had just been the storm. “Maybe we really don’t want to be out after dark.”
“I dunno,” Andy countered, “maybe we should be looking in these stores. So of them have pharmacies in them.”
“Yeah,” Omar agreed. “Camping supplies and stuff like that, too.”
“Let’s handle the quest first—check in with this other community. Hopefully, they’ll be friendly.”
“Hopefully.” Omar’s tone made it clear he had his doubts.
As they progressed, one block after another, the eerie, still silence gave way to distant shrieks, roars, and occasional drumming sounds. When the street they were following crested a long, sloping rise, Andy could look down, past the sprawling suburbs and retail zones, into Tucson’s downtown, miles away. His breath caught in his chest.
The sun was a fat orange-red globe behind the broken skyline, giving the view a movie-poster vibe, but it was all too real. Tucson didn’t have a massive downtown—a handful of buildings that could be described as skyscrapers and then another dozen shorter ones. One of the taller buildings was a naked iron and cent skeleton, black against the setting sun. One of the taller, mirror-windowed buildings was visibly scarred—broken windows in massive clusters up and down its sides. Several others were truncated and blackened, like the burned-out skyscraper.
“Jesucristo,” Omar muttered, pointing.
Andy didn’t need to follow his finger—he saw. Sothing massive was flying down from the smoldering sunset sky, swooping in from the north. It was the size of a small airplane, but it had wings that flapped, and it banked on the wind, gliding down toward the crumbling downtown skyline.
“Is it a bird?” Omar asked.
“Hard to tell against the sun. Looked more like a bird than what I imagined a dragon would look like, though.”
Omar nodded. “Yeah, no long tail.”
“Has to be as big as a bus.”
“Bigger.” Omar took a step, slapping Andy’s shoulder. “Well, I vote we don’t go downtown.”
Andy hurried to keep pace. “I’m good with that plan.”
They turned north on a street called Conestoga, as per Lydia’s suggestion. As the shadows lengthened and the orange in the sky spread from the sun’s dying rays, they passed by cars and trucks overtaken by nature, walking along fences that separated residential areas from the traffic.
Andy looked at the dark houses, many with smashed windows and doors, lawns so overgrown that it was often hard to even see the walls—only peaked roofs or chimneys giving a clue as to where the house sat. “So fast,” he muttered, amazed at how quickly the vegetation had taken over.
“Yeah,” Omar agreed. “Was thinking the sa thing.”
“It’s gotta be the storm—the mana. Things are growing like crazy.”
Coyotes brayed not too far away, yipping and howling. It was the kind of sound a person’s primal nature reacted to. Andy had the urge to seek shelter, but his brain knew better. His brain knew that if coyotes were brave enough to be noisy like that, it probably ant there wasn’t sothing worse close by.
They turned left on Fort Lowell, then, a short distance further on, they turned north again on lpone Way. “This leads past the high school,” Omar said. “You really think that’s where they are?”
“It’s the right area on my map.” Andy shrugged. “One way to find out.”
“You good with it getting dark?” Omar’s lupine eyes glinted in the fading light.
Andy thought for a mont, then nodded. “If they’re not there, we’ll go into a gas station or sothing, and you can watch while I switch classes.”
They kept walking, but they didn’t make it half a mile before they saw their destination ahead. The sky was still light enough to illuminate the street ahead, cleared of dead vehicles and, a couple of blocks distant, a barricade of yellow school buses. Lanterns glowed in the blockade, and beyond it, Andy could see the large, rectangular structures of the high school. Shadowy figures moved along the rooflines, and he could see lights in so of the windows.
“I wonder if—” Omar started to say, but then sothing tingled at the nape of Andy’s neck, and he interrupted his friend, spinning, spear out. In his old life, he’d never know it if soone were watching him or sneaking up on him, but in this new reality, after the many life or death encounters he’d had, after creeping for days through vermin-infested tunnels and dieval streets, he’d grown far more attuned to the instincts of survival.
“Holy shit,” a man said, slipping out of the shadows of an overgrown hedge. “You spotted ?” He was tall and thin, and he carried a sizeable compound bow—a fancy hunting one with an attached quiver holding five arrows.
Andy was very aware of the fact that the man didn’t have his fingers on the bowstring. He seed almost relaxed—too relaxed—and it made Andy think he probably had allies nearby. “We’re not looking for a fight,” he said.
Omar had pivoted at the sound of the man’s voice, and he had his shield up, peering over it with his glinting yellow-gold eyes. “Andy…” he muttered, turning left and right, studying the deep shadows on either side of the road.
“Well, you’re in our territory,” the man said. “I’d hope you’re not looking for trouble. I’m Kent. You?”
“Andy.”
“And your wolf-eyed buddy?”
“Omar,” Omar grunted.
“He’s not a werewolf or anything,” Andy said, chuckling nervously as Omar gave him a sideways glance.
“Well, he’s sothing, but that’s all right. We’ve got all kinds in Tanque Verde. That’s our settlent na, by the way—not just the high school.”
“Jesus, Kent,” another man’s voice said, this ti behind Andy. He turned to see a stocky fellow clambering out of a Jeep that had been pushed off the road. “Why don’t you tell them where we keep the chickens and how many guards we have?”
“Relax, Rusty.” Kent stepped forward, smiling at Andy and gesturing toward the other man. “That’s Rusty.” He stopped a few feet from the tip of Andy’s spear, but he didn’t so much as glance at the weapon. “Rusty knows I’ve got an eye for trouble, so I’m not sure why he’s putting on a show. He knows I wouldn’t be talking to you if I thought you were a problem.”
“You’ve got an eye for it?” Omar asked, shifting so his shield faced both n to so degree.
“Yep. Sunset Sentinel—that’s my class. I have a few talents that are pretty darn handy when it cos to eting strangers. So? How about it, Andy and Omar? Want to tell what brings you round to our neck of the woods?”
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