The Wanderers [Old Version]

Chapter 4: Confronted

Rain's POV

"How did they find us!?" I stood next to the burning hovercraft, crashed onto the roof of the building that my friends were on. Turns out, I'm a horrible pilot.

Draco stood, bending over, hands on his knees trying to catch his breath, "I...don't...know. Ah. They must've...found some sign..of us. We didn't cover our tracks good enough."

Nico shook his head, "No, we covered our tracks. We didn't even walk on the road. Those lights that were hovering around the buildings last night must've been them."
"But why wait 'til morning to attack us? Why not just blast us away right then and there?"
"It was dark. They probably couldn't see us that good so they waited for sun up. Bad move on their part."

Clara, who was normally quiet, spoke up, "Well who gives a crap why they chose to attack in the morning. We're all still alive. That's what matters. Now how do we get out of here? There's three burning hovercrafts in an abandoned city. The smoke will attract attention, and we couldn't have gotten that far. I'm sure a guard on the Lightstone wall could see the smoke."

Petra nodded, "She's right. We gotta keep moving. It's barely sun up, so we have a long day ahead of us. Maybe we can scavenge in the smaller buildings, we if we can find any food."

Food? It's been almost 600 years since whatever happened ended the Old World. Any food would have picked clean in the first few decades of our time. No way we would find food out here.

Draco led the way down the building. Most of the floors had been destroyed by the hovercrafts rockets. It seemed like it was an Old World bank or something of the sorts.

As we reached the street level, we were once again greeted by the awful smell. Chunks of debris had fallen from the buildings and hovercrafts, and now lined the streets in flames and smoke.

It was more humid on the street level too, the air around us was suffocating. We walked through the old city for about ten minutes until we came to block in the road. A huge Old World aircraft and crashed into a building and made it collapse over the street.

Nico walked up to it and looked around for a while, then whistled, "Wow. This is old. The metal on this craft is rusty and fallin' apart. This thing has been here forever. And it doesn't look like we'll be able to go this way either. No where to climb, the debris is too high. Lets just go around, we'll go this way." He pointed down a long street with lots of Old World cars still on it. It led east.

We walked down this street, and met what was making the awful smell. Bodies. All these cars, hundreds, had dead bodies in them, rotting away and decaying. The cars weren't even crashed, it looked like they all just suddenly stopped and everyone inside died without warning.

After a while, less bodies were in the cars, but more on the streets and sidewalks. It looked like these people had tried to escape from whatever happened. The bodies were also more decayed than the others. Most were little more than bone.

Clara stopped and held her knees, throwing up. I stopped and waited with her as she vomited on the street. I didn't blame her, this was sick. Hundreds of dead bodies, everywhere. No graves. No funerals. Nothing. Just left out here to rot.

We continued walking until we found a hole in the ground. Not just any hole either. A hole to size of a city block, wiped out most of the buildings around the blast radius and everything near was vaporized.

My head began to feel fuzzy as we walked around the gigantic hole. The hole went down maybe 20 feet and in the middle, laid an old fading, green chunk of metal.

Petra was looking around at the buildings, most were completely split in half. "What happened? What could do something like this?"
"A rocket?"
"No. Rockets aren't this powerful. We're more advanced than the Old World was and our rockets don't do this much damage. This was something else."

As we walked, I noticed that along the walls that still stood, the shadows of people remained. Their final pose forever burned into the cold concrete that now acted as their tomb. This was sick. The Old World was a cruel and unusual place.

The awful smell finally started to fade when we came to a more open part of the city. This area was mostly small homes and shops, a large dry canal or river separated the tower area, from the homes. A few bridges made crossing the gap easy, although we still had to climb over a few cars that hasn't been so lucky as to cross the bridge.

This small neighborhood was greener than the wasteland that we had walked through to get here. Several trees still stood tall and overgrowth covered most of the buildings. A few birds fluttered out of the knee high bushes as we walked through them. We were probably the first humans that an animal outside the wall had seen in years. These poor birds probably didn't even know what we were.

The houses in this neighborhood were small and cheap looking, even by Lightstone standards. One house on the corner to my right had a yellow pipe-type thing above ground that had water dripping from it. It was broken in half, the top domed part sat in the middle of the street, surrounded by water. Moss and algae grew near and on the water. As we walked past it, these little green, slimy things hopped out and croaked at us.

Only a few bodies were in the streets in this neighborhood, but bullet holes and rocket impact points were everywhere.

One house to our left looked surprisingly intact. Draco turned his attention towards it, "What's with that house? Why is it so nice?"
Nico ran forward, "Who cares? Lets check it out!"

As we walked into the house, we were met by horror. All of the furniture was pushed to the walls and the carpet was soaked with blood. Not necessarily straight out of the wound, but not quite dried up yet. I'd say it was here about a week.

On the walls was random things written.

'Drugs???'
'Fix'
'Fire'
'Ice!!'
'Mega mann'
'Violetta'
'kween'
'wurship'
'^ stare$'

Nico was reading them when we heard a thud upstairs. "What was that?" He crouched down and pulled out his switchblade. He moved slowly up the stairs, I followed right behind him with the plasma pistol out. Draco stayed downstairs with Petra and Clara.

We walked up to the door and listened, I could clearly hear two men talking.

"Where's Alize?"
"Beats me. You know that whore. She's probably off, getting some drugs from some guy who'll regret it next time he takes a piss."
"Ha. Yeah. Probably. Speakin' o' which, I heard Chef got some Mega. Wanna go check it out?"
"Some Mega? Psh. You bet your ass I wanna check it out."

The doorknob turned and two men stepped forward, they were startled that we were there but quickly lunged at us. One had a metal baseball bat, the other had a long machete.

Nico lunged at the one with the machete and the two of them wrestled around on the ground. I tried to shoot the one with the bat, but he swung it and hit the side of my head, hard. I fell backwards, headfirst down the stairs and hit the wall. I felt blood pouring from my temple. My vision was blurry and I looked up to see the man with his bat ready to smash my skull in, smiling above me.