No Guardian, I

Part 3

At midday, he found the first grave.

It has been two days since he left the City. He rode much slower now, trying to pick details in the surrounding landscape. Something, anything man-made. The highway, which was supposed to nearly bisect the wasteland, was nowhere in sight. Not for the first time, he considered the possibility that the map (or his understanding of it) has been wrong. He pointedly decided not to think of the highway as buried beneath metres of sand and ice. It made him feel a little better.

Then, this. A shallow hole in the ground, a bit wider on its western side, not as much excavated as exploded by a few closely-placed grenades by the looks of it, roughly the length of a human body and filled up with the packed grit that has been thrown up by the detonation. Something, placed on the bottom of the hole, prevented the sand from settling. It could have been a body. It could have been a box. Could even have been a line of boulders.

Jasker was spooked. He knew that the chances of finding signs of sentient life in a desert where even the Fallen had nothing to scavenge were abysmal. Was someone still around? Was he currently being watched through the cold glass of a sniper scope? He had no answers.

He also felt that this was quite symbolic. "Turn back, or face the consequences" - the wilderness seemed to tell him. Except, there would be no grave for him should he find his demise. His body would not as much decay as shrivel under the glare of a chilly sun, preserved from corruption until the wind-blown sand etched his bones and someone, eons later, accidentally crushed his skull underfoot.

Jas shook himself. Where did that vivid image come from? He wondered. The desert seemed to really get to him.

He returned to the Sparrow and gunned the engine. He wasn't likely to run out of fuel in the next century or so, but he checked the dial nonetheless. It gave him something else to think about. Something else than the sound of the wind working its way through the cavities of his sand-carved skull lying in a ravine next to a broken sparrow frame, skeletal hand extended toward a half-molten assault rifle...

With a snarl, he accelerated away from the wretched grave in the sand. He was now headed east.

The second grave appeared, it seemed, out of nowhere. He drove straight ahead, he knew, so this couldn't have been the same as before. Besides, this one was oriented differently - where the first lay east to west, with the western side a bit wider, this one pointed, if a grave could point, to the north.

It looked, like the first one, fresh - it did not appear as if the grit mound has been smoothed by the wind. There was also an elongated, three-jawed skull mounted on a pole at its southern end.

Jas shivered. He felt so very alone and scared, that his only desire was to fall on all fours, crawl in a burrow and whimper there incessantly at the skull in the corner while starlit shapes dance madly at the foot of the mountain where Kar-Tanas eternally offers his body and soul to... wait, who's Kar-Tanas?

Delusions. He was having induced delusions, since the Kar-Tanas name was something he was sure he never heard before. Jas frantically dashed back to the Sparrow, which he dismounted to get a closer look at the grave, and tore into a medkit. The injector, writhing like the endless coils of the Great Serpent, was attached to the lid of the box. Twelve ampoules, four colors organized in sets of three, akin to the three-bladed instruments of death that await anyone approaching the sacred places, sat beneath it. Jasker carefully picked a purple one, inserted it into the yawning pit of despair that was the injector's receptacle and pushed the nozzle into his neck.

Seven needles, as above, so below under the guidance of the wise, punched through his skin and delivered a full dose of antietheogens to his bloodstream. His mind cleared instantly. And then he saw the shapes on the sand.

He snatched the autorifle from its makeshift holster at the side of the saddle and fired wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs, blasting fountains of dust, ice and strange liquids.

Two and a half seconds past, the weapon clicked empty. The air smelled faintly of gunpowder, the smoke being quickly dispersed by the ever-blowing wind. The sand around Jas was churned and torn, and two creatures lay between him and the grave, almost dismembered by his frenzied barrage.

Vaguely humanoid in shape, with strong, wiry hands and disproportionally withered feet, the creatures looked gaunt and haggard. Scaly hides, of the same tan hues as the wasteland around, covered their bodies. Their eyeless, earless heads had a peculiar three-jawed construction. Jas realised that the pole had exactly such a skull mounted on it.

Was it a creature of the same kind that was buried here? Or was it a memento of what killed the grave's occupant, be it human or otherwise? There was only one way to know the truth, Jas knew.

With a small spade from the Sparrow toolkit, he began to dig at the northern end of the grave, as far away from the skull-pole and the two carcasses as he could. Just as he thought, the grave was not extremely deep. His spade hit something other than dirt in less than a minute.

It was a boot. An unmistakably human boot, with a maker's mark on the sole that Jasker could not recognize. The now open on one end grave did not smell, but in the cold April weather it did not mean anything. The ones who buried the body (obviously human) could be anywhere by now.

Except... Jas remembered riding past the first grave, from its wide end towards the narrow, west to east. What if?..

Sunset found him seventy-five kilometers north of the site of the second grave, in sight of a circle of vehicles formed around a bonfire.

***

++Caspian Wastes Bestiary, Entry 335/4++

++Official name: Sussuri Secreti++

++Guardian Colloquialisms: Whisperer of Secrets, Know-it-all, Gaunt, Wasteland Bastard++

++Origin: Unknown, presumed mutation

++Description: Gaunt, roughly man-sized creatures with eyeless three-jawed heads and withered hind legs. Front legs resemble human hands. Creatures feed on sentient brain-waves, growing content and healthy-looking when in presence of a sentient organic being. Usually seen in pairs. Victim usually does not see them, due to their uncanny ability to introduce directed delusions to the victim's consciousness. Generally, they follow the victim around as parasites, inducing delusions and hallucinations and feeding off the resulting brainwaves. When especially "hungry", they become predators and stimulate their victim with varying hallucinations/delusions until the victim's death by suicide or accident. In such cases, an area of two to three hundred meters in diameter becomes etheogenically active and may cause hallucinations/delusions such as the victim may have experienced before its death.

Sussuri secreti have been known to attach themselves to vehicles that the victim is driving or travelling by. Areas of infestation include, but are not limited to, Eastern Palmyra, Caspian Wastes, Gobi and Kalahari wastelands. Daily antietheogen injections are advised when traveling to these locations. ++

Note scribbled on the sides: The induced hallucinations/delusions are almost invariably of a prophetic sort, sometimes presaging events in the future or relating events long past in a symbolic form. Research of these creatures has not been completed. The Council Decision 5729908-17 Delta has seen to that.