Patastrophe

Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, BMV 1068: II. Air

I turned off the phone and stuffed it into my pocket before walking away off to the new folk, the new destination. I hiked along the obvious trails of trucks, the marks left which their tyres had left off going on around all the ruins around, forming something of a keypoint for me and a couple other people, which included this grumpy old lady. I'd been travelling for about two hours and had stopped to rest near a messy camp of equally messy shelters made of dull metal and crumbling concrete. I didn't see her coming from anywhere but I did hear her mumbling to herself: "This, not this, not this, huh, this, not bad," and so on as I approached her. I couldn't see her face, just her back with a once-red jacket now light brown with the dust it had gathered over her shoulders. I cleared my throat just as she threw away a small but heavy pistol at my feet. She turned around – I could see her face now, a face kept tight by what seemed sheer determination, dark slits of eyes and a very prominent tatoo that had lost its shape to the deformed skin, the yellow circle of a sun now resembling compressed metal and the darkened green plant being nothing more than a long line over her left cheek with a couple leaves on either side.

"Yeah? I may be old but the .45 ain't, girl." the old lady stared right into and through me. I looked away.

"Don't worry, I'm chill."

Running out of words at the wrong time can kill you.

"Fine. Don't even even think to consider these yours." she nodded at the boddies around.

"Not really my thing anyway." She turned around and kneeled back next to the body she was looting. I noticed that the old guy had the same tatoo as her and pointed it out.

"Just a pretender, I betcha," she threw away a compass.

"Pretender?" I asked. "Blue Sky was popular back in the days, y'know," she glanced at me. "betcha don't, no?" she walked over flipped the body around and pulled away his jacket. "Not really." I kneeled down and picked up the pistol she had discarded. It was heavier than most things, probably large caliber, but I couldn't recognize it. Ever since people have started to reforge, our teacher would say, it's not as easy. I pushed away the memory of her sleeping face with a hole through it. I put the pistol into one of the pockets my jacket had. "Wait, so you were in Blue Sky?" I asked as I remembered Boomer's texts. "Eh, yeah," the lady stood up and brushed away the dust on her grey pants. "used to be quite the heat back then." she kicked the dead guys in the face. His head flung to the other side. "Until these pretenders came in."

"Oh yeah?"

"Turns out you don't trust people that much." I grabbed my flask and took a sip of water.

"Feels bad."

"Not as much. I probably was the one who killed this guy's," she kicked the man's face again, harder now. "friends or somethin'. Feels better with revenge." the long rifle slung across her back looked scarier now.

"Gotta go now." I muttered.

"Bye." she looked into one of the shelters, and I turned my back to leave.

Over the course of the rest of the day, I managed to walk just about 20 kilometers – about 10 of that left to arrive at Boomer's mark. I lay down a thick piece of nylon stuffed with some kind of foam on the ground as a matress and laid my jacket as a blanket – I'd forgotten the real one back at the camp. I looked around at the panorama of mostly rocky ground peppered with discarded buildings and many pieces of plastic chipped or thrown away. After pulling out my phone, I noticed that the battery was running low and almost slapped myself for forgetting the extra pack of batteries – I won't and can't bore you with the details, but it's just another phone battery connected to a circuit and some way to charge it (usually panels are the best). I moved my hand through the backpack and was quite so relieved by finding it, then just as much the opposite upon realizing that it wasn't charged up enough. I decided to put the phone away till tomorrow, and left the extra pack in the open for it to charge.