It's been a long time since the East saw a drought as bad as this. The trees droop, branches hung with shriveled leaves that crackle against each other in the hot wind. Dust covers the fields, piling up in drifts behind the failing windbreaks, as if the desert had come for a visit and decided to stay. The creek where the Elric brothers fished and hunted frogs and salamanders has baked into a cracked yellow ditch stinking of rotten eggs.
Al pauses to look down, his hunched shoulders miming a frown, but Ed pinches his nostrils shut and hurries on.
oOo
He fingers the telegram from Winry in his pocket. The cheap ink has blurred and run, but Ed's memorized the gist: Riesenbuhl needs help; come sort things out. He grimaces, wondering what she expects him and Al to do. A drought's not like a flood: it's easier to dam a river than irrigate a waste. Plus, it's unnerving to be called home by an emergency. Nothing's supposed to happen in Riesenbuhl -- that's practically its reason for being. Snorting, Ed pushes back his sweat-soaked bangs. Anyone who calls East City a ghost town after dark hasn't seen the real thing.
oOo
"Grave-robbing bastard man-machines! Abominations raping our land, eating our flesh ... !"
Ed catches a glimpse of the figure yelling on the ridge and grinds his teeth. Zeb Carter lost both legs falling drunk onto the railroad tracks four years ago. It didn't change him much, except to add all things mechanical to the list of abominations he excoriates in midbender, including his own prosthetics. If he's harassing Granny Pinako's patients again, Ed's going to kick his ass, cripple or no. "Is that Carter up there?" he asks Al.
"Can't be," Al responds.
"Why not?"
"He died last winter, remember?"
oOo
Ed reminds himself that he's seen bodies, dead humans and live chimeras, almost as mangled as this, but it doesn't help. The skull's shattered, unrecognizable; the limbs and torso shredded, muscle torn from bone. He turns his face into the stinging breeze to clear his head. Cougars haunt these hills -- a nuisance at lambing, mostly -- and the odd bear, but the slurred marks in the dirt around the corpse aren't pawprints.
"Brother," Al says, his voice unsteady, "this is recent. Maybe not even an hour -- "
As one, they look uphill to the Rockbell house, and leave the dead to rot.