Bloodfire

“But how do you know for sure?” the boy demanded, a touch of fear in his young voice. Ever since Zero City, and then the cliffs of the Marshal Islands, he had been developing a hatred of high places.

“No elevator feel in gut,” Jak stated. “Remember how feel in redoubt when go fast? Not here.”

Dean frowned as he concentrated inside himself, then nodded as he eased the tension from his face.

“Gotcha,” he said, exhaling deeply. “Right. No problem.”

Turning slowly to recce the roof, Ryan paused and pulled out his SIG-Sauer. “Who the hell is that?” he demanded, pointing at a pair of legs sticking out from behind the brick kiosk of the rooftop stairwell entrance.

Drawing weapons, the companions advanced fast, then holstered their blasters when they saw the face of the person. The skin was dried like jerky, eyes gone and lips pulled back in a rictus of death. Yet the clothing was in good shape: leather shoes without holes in the soles, pants and shirt, and a shiny wrist chron along with a gold wedding ring.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mildred said, crouching alongside the desiccated being. The flesh was wizened and now dark brown in color from sheer age, the original race of the person hidden by the passing on the long decades. The clothes appeared to be casual, but with matching stripes on the sides and cuffs. Some kind of a uniform, but not the police or firefighters. Maybe a paramedic? There was a tool belt with a cell phone and an electronic clipboard and some weird pliers that were vaguely familiar to the physician. Then she saw a plastic name tag pinned to the shirt, the photo and card inside the clear material was easily readable as the day it had been issued.

“It’s a cable repair man,” Mildred said, for some reason a shaky laugh bubbling up from inside. Of all the people to find from the lost world it would have to be a damn cable TV guy. Then she looked again at the photo ID.

“Excuse me, cable TV woman,” Mildred corrected, then addressed to the corpse. “Sorry.”

“Somebody important?” Dean asked, inspecting the wrist chron. But the timepiece was digital, the powerful long-life batteries inert for a century.

“Depends on your priorities,” the stocky woman replied, standing. “She was a television technician.”

“Woman?” Jak asked, wrinkling his brow. “Hard to tell.”

Mildred shrugged. “Everything shrinks with age.”

“Dark night, there’s more,” J.B called out. “Hundreds, thousands of them!”

Standing at the cornice of the building, one boot resting on the low ledge, J.B. was using the telescope to scan the metropolis below.

“The streets are littered with people,” he announced. “They’re behind the steering wheels of the cars, and trucks, in the shops. They’re everywhere.”

“The entire population of a preDark city,” Ryan said aloud, rubbing his jaw. “As well preserved as the city itself.”

This was something horribly new to him. He had seen death a thousand times, and killed that many in battle. But this was beyond imagination. The sheer scope of the death toll was unnerving, staggering. A hundred thousand corpses? A million? There was no way to tell. He had known since childhood that billions died in skydark, but to now see them laid out on the ground all around like autumn leaves brought the volume of the destruction alive in his heart. What kind of madmen had brought about this level of destruction to their own people, their own world?

“Gaia rest their souls,” Krysty said softly, spreading her arms as if to embrace the entire city.

“Amen,” Doc said, then added some phrase in Latin, which Mildred repeated solemnly.

Staying resolute, the rest of the companions said nothing. They were also affected by the city of the dead, but refused to be rattled.

“Well, this certainly caused the stink,” J.B. said, rubbing his nose, trying to change the dark mood.

“When the salt dome cracked, it released the graveyard fumes of a million corpses, stored for a hundred years.”

“I’m surprised we survived,” Mildred agreed grimly. “The methane levels alone should have killed us.”

“The irregular cracking of the dome must have forced most of the dead air skyward, channeling it away from us,” J.B. suggested. Explosions of any kind were home turf to the Armorer.

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