Buried Stars

CHAPTER FIVE: NOW, NOT YET

The next morning, much to our pleasure, we discovered that John had decided to splurge on getting a room with breakfast included. After quickly changing into our regular clothes, we walked to the positively regal-looking breakfast hall, filled with what looked like retirees from up north. Kenshaw was a popular place to settle down, despite the proximity to the border, mostly due to the fact that there were relatively few duststorms that passed over this region, and that there were already many bubblefolk that lived in the area. It wasn't hard to adjust to basin life if you could adjust basin life to you instead.

We ate breakfast rather uneventfully, and soon we enough we moved all our stuff back into the sedan and headed back on the road. At first it was all smooth sailing, until I discovered the military outpost at a large chain fence that marked the Border Line stretching seemingly endlessly into the distance. We were at the edge of the Dust Bowl.

I rolled the sedan in front of what looked similar to a toll booth, but bigger and more heavily armed. That's when I found out that border crossings weren't, well, "advisable" at the time due to "tensions". Showing my ID that marked me as a Terran, the guard only shrugged.

"Sorry, kid. Can't let anyone in or out. Only people on official business or with a certified tourist permit are allowed through."

"Oh, shit," I said, looking to the back where Fives and John were sitting, barely awake. "Uh, John? Apparently, you need some fancy-pants permit to leave Aresia. You happen to have one?"

"Uhhh," I heard from the back, before he handed me a wad of shells. "Just... bribe him. You know how, right?"

I grabbed the wad, realizing that the amount he had handed to me was more than half a year's rent, and hesitated a moment before handing it to the guard.

"This should be enough," I said, seeing the guard's eyes widening. "We cleared for exiting?"
The guard walked back inside his booth, and called out from the megaphone that we were cleared for passage, and let us through. John's seemingly bottomless bank account never ceased to amaze me. Neither did this nation's obsession with permits. A tourist permit? Really? Were they afraid of people trying to leave or something?

Back on the road, I tuned the radio, which thankfully reached out here, and settled in for a long, long drive.

The scenery was quite a bit different from the civilized zone. When you live in a bubble it's easy to consider the basin to be some rural, low-population zone. Compared to the Dust Bowl, though, the basin was practically jam-packed. Small homesteads dotted the sides of the road, with small greenhouses parked next to them. Towns were actual towns, no chain-stores or hotels. The roads were practically empty, with only the occasional caravan belching black smoke passing us by. And, oddly, there were absolutely zero cooling stations.

Around noon or so we finally saw something out on the horizon that made John and Fives come out of their lazy stupor. The sound of gunfire, though faint due to the thin atmosphere, was nonetheless unmistakable.

"What the hell is that?" exclaimed Fives. Luckily it seemed to be quite a ways off from the road we were driving on, but I still quietly grabbed my pistol out of the duffle bag to my right, placing it out of sight in a cupholder.

"Huh," said John, "seems to be the Aresian Army. A routine patrol and... Raiders?"

We hadn't expected to encounter these fabled fiends of the wasteland, yet what John was saying seemed to be true. The sound of gunfire subsided, replaced with what looked like a standoff between the signature bronze Aresian troops and some Raiders at a lone homestead. Parked next to the homestead were the signature Raider skeleton buggies: no windows, no door, no roof: just the frame, an engine and four wheels.