Carrion Crew

10

The Drifter had made it's mark on the landscape, tattooing the earth with wide, black swirls. They weren't noticeable if you weren't looking for them. Ash could easily imagine someone mistaking the lines for skid marks or scorches from the war, especially between the main carrion fields and the point where the Allied reserves caught up with the CINA retreat. The land there had already been thoroughly scarred by the fighting, making the trail somewhat difficult to follow. After that, the Drifter's path looped back around and headed south-west.

“Any idea where it's going, yet?” Twist yawned and stretched the sleep out of his arms.

“No,” Ash said. “And I kind of wish the radio wasn't attached to the CTS. I'm sure we would have heard some news about the Drifter by now. Should have thought about that.”

“Maybe,” Twist said. “But maybe not. News travels faster west than east.”

“And faster south than north,” Ash said. 

No one knew why, but it was true. Well, someone probably knew, but nobody else cared enough to ask around for that particular explanation. 

“Think we'll get all the way to the Pacific?”

“Hopefully not,” Ash said. “But right now I'm just hoping we pass a depot or some caravaners. I'm starving.”

Twist nodded. “We should see one sooner than later. This seems like a pretty well groomed stretch of highway.”

The road was lined with large chunks of broken concrete and the skeletons of a few old, abandoned cars. Brown smears of what used to be foliage stained the road, while eager new plants aggressively widened the cracks of the broken pavement. This well groomed highway seemed more of a suggestion to Ash than a designated road.

“Is this the road that leads to Hospital City?” She looked for familiar signs, but the world changed so quickly and it had been a long time since she had traveled north.

“Yes,” Twist said with grim certainty.

His tone made Ash wonder what history Twist had with Hospital City. She had known him since they were kids and didn't think he had many significant experiences that did not include her. In fact, their only visit to that high-walled fortress had been a pleasant vacation from the struggle of scavenging. She and Twist had talked about moving there when they got older, and it had been a shared dream until they learned about how cities had certain expectations of its citizenry. Not laws precisely, but requirements you had to meet to be accepted. The people there looked down on you if you failed to meet these standards. It sounded harder than the rules for surviving outside of a city.

Everywhere had rules though, some written and some not. Life was a matter of figuring out the rules you liked, those you didn't mind, those you hated, then finding a place that best fit your preferences. There was always some compromise unless you wanted to be bitter at the world, like how Kourtney was turning out to be, or if you'd like to be an inconsiderate ass like Ink. But Ink's road is the short and bloody kind that only the stupidest people take. No matter how you decided to deal with it, the world was made of rules. 

It didn't even bother Ash when the rules got broken a little, because there was a sense of order to that as well. Ink broke the rules about stealing from friends, but he replaced them with a new set, understandable though unsavory, and there were other rules about how Ink would be dealt with once he broke the first set. That was tolerable. It made sense. 

But the Drifter – that was a separate thing altogether. Its existence broke rules, and the way it consumed the salvage broke more, and then again by its conspicuous nature. Things shouldn't be able to do what it did, and by changing the nature of the world, all sorts of rules Ash had previously taken for granted were called into question, and she had no way to deal with the change.

Through that confusion, Twist's grim reply began to make sense. Yes, the road leads to Hospital City. No, I don't know what it means if that's where the Drifter is going.