As the sun slipped above the horizon, it swallowed in a deep orange glow a silent hellscape of barren streets and piles of rubble. The spilt remnants of buildings bled into each other all over the ground; a sprawling mess of bricks and rebar and concrete tiles. A train tunnel that had once ferried Union supplies through the rough mountains now swelled with rubble. Beside it, another remained hollow, uncollpased. Around the tunnels, a settlement of sorts had been constructed hastily out of on-hand materials. A lean-to hut roofed with a rusted sheet of metal swayed. Two posts stuck into the sand, between them strung a wire upon which chimes of junk-reddened tin cans and old milk bottles-clinked and clacked at the gentle cooing of the morning breeze. No one stood to reignite the dying embers of the cinder-block circled fireplace in the center of the camp.
Bulletholes, smoking, cut in concise pairs on the concrete wall next to the lean-to, which towered above, creating a valley path through which the trains once travelled. Above the valley, a bridge had once connected its two sides, but its pillar had been struck by a derailed razor train upon the explosion, and so both the bridge and the train lay on their side on the sandy ground below. Where a section of the bridge had fallen, the cockpit of the train deformed, bent around the incredible weight. Just in front of what remained of the car, the meager figure of a man stood, his firearm stuck forward in his gloved hands, aimed carefully at the settlement some thirty feet before him.
He wore the tattered vest of the Metropolice Force, a thick, bulky piece of protective wear that bore a series of rips that exposed its kevlar underneath; in fact, he carried the whole of an MPF unit's uniform, all ruined by a recent history of wear. Time had torn the majority of the left pantleg off, revealing a skinny and bruised leg that fed into a muddy boot. The sand, as it hovered with faint wisps of wind, stuck to a thick red wound on the flank of the knee, coating it painfully. Miniscule shards of glass clung to the rim of the faceplate's eyeholes. Beneath them, visible in the absence of the tinted lenses, a stare that stabbed through the wind and dust, through the streams of smoke that drifted from his gunbarrel.
There he had seen something standing there, a woman, perhaps, and it was pawing playfully at the chimes to entertain itself. A vacuous gaze glared into the chimes as beads of sweat rolling down the clammy skin of the man's pale, scarred cheek. He hoped with all the fibers of his being that this apparition would will itself to return, but he instead was forced to stand, alone, with the barrel of his pistol pointed outwards, to no such end. Were it not for the unrelenting drive of his churning stomach, he would have remained there until he wasted away, awaiting the arrival of the woman's ghost. Yet the stomach sounded, growled in opposition to his mounting starvation. In a moment, the gun found itself at the man's hip, and he slipped into the blackness of the train tunnel, sinking out of the rays of orange sunlight until he was no longer visible.
Each slow footstep upon the fallow-rusted traintracks resounded through the length of the arched tunnel, spitting itself round and round to manifest a noise almost spectral in nature; it boomed and ebbed, filling the silence. That glorious path upon which he so carefully treaded would guide him far beyond the hell that shrieked behind him. It would lead him from the broken ruins of City Fourteen. As his steps fell into the darkness, he could not help but to recall the explosion weeks ago. It would be an impossible task to cast all that from memory: and it began with an earth-shattering quake that rushed from the nexus, which uprooted whole buildings, casting them forth into the air like limp concrete ragdolls.