Shadow Walker

The City

They reached the industrial doorstep of the city to the low, swelling rumble of thunder and a smell like hot bitumen and sawdust. Blind and disorientated, save for the glow of moonlight peeking through gaps in the cloud cover, they stumbled down streets that should've been alive with the scrape of metal, the clang and hiss of machinery and the murmur of Nocturnal workers' voices. Instead, they were filled with nothing but pre-emptive stillness, cut by the occasional skitter of dry leaves on bitumen. Dec didn't know which was worse. Stillness, or the gunfire and riots he'd been expecting.

The low-hanging fog thickened and dropped around them, obscuring landmarks and disorienting their course even further. As they drew closer to the railway tracks, they kept their eyes and ears trained for the headlights of an approaching train and walked in paranoia, until they made out the vague geometric shadows of the old town. Dec drew a sharp breath of relief. They were almost at their destination. Somewhere at the heart of those coarse sandstone buildings, was the central post office.

The low, swelling rumble came again, louder this time and accompanied by seismic vibrations beneath their feet. Dec barely had time to register that the sound wasn't thunder before Teegan dragged him from the train tracks and into an alcove between two sandstone buildings, just wide enough to be a kind of dead end alleyway. A mere breath later and a convoy of the largest vehicles Dec had ever seen turned onto the street, headlights as bright as a thousand suns after an eclipse, the grind of their track frames pluming dust and vibrating the earth. He could tell from their diplodocus outlines that they were excavators of some kind, converted into demolition vehicles by the crude attachment of heavy, bell-shaped wrecking balls to their long-necked frames. The excavators were followed by top heavy bulldozers interspersed between bobcats and backhoes with mud tyre tread blocks taller than him. Truck-after-truck, tractor-after-tractor rolled past until it seemed every warehouse in the general vicinity must've been emptied out. Dec shrunk further into the shadows. Whatever the construction vehicles had been incited to do, it certainly wasn't construction.