It was dark, and the train tracks stretched from horizon to horizon. A tunnel of trees, with square patches of farmland slicing the plains into neat little packages. The tracks trembled beneath my feet with distant echoes, but the train had passed long ago. For a long time I waited there, listening to cicadas fill the air with their unending hymn, the moonlight painting everything in shades of blue, silver, and black.
And then I found myself running. Making my feet light, settling into a six-clawed gallop, I ate up the terrain for miles and miles. At first it was on the train tracks, sending my own vibrations through the steel rails like raindrops on a metal roof. Then I took a sharp right on an unnamed country road, dust flying in my wake. Fireflies danced in the air around me, a tunnel of stars through which I warped space and time.
I vaulted a tractor, heading down the same dusty roads, cutting a swath through the moonlight with the artificial sunbeams of its headlights. It swerved when I flew overhead, but didn't crash. Good.
After an unknowable time—the moon had dipped overhead, but still shone on the dusty paths barely worthy of being called streets—I found myself on a battlefield. Craters, overgrown with untended tall grasses, their rough edges smoothed over like world war one trenches. Long streaks torn into the ground, ending in rusted farm equipment, long discarded and left to decay, not worth the salvage. Shattered husks of storage sheds, left hollow and peeled open like tin flowers. And a church, burned and ruined, gaping holes where walls had been, the steeple leaning precariously, bell cracked and tilted, pulled by gravity that would eventually claim its prize.
Bricks crumbled underfoot as I slowed, carefully making my way inside. The splinters of polished wood that might have been floors or pews made soft noises as I stepped over and through them, like sand through an hourglass, or waves on a distant shore. A few pieces of glass stained the moonlight from the large window beneath the steeple, but none of that was important.
One wall was a bit less worn than the others, relatively untouched. Plain brick, laid before the church expanded around it, a remnant of growth still left over, essential but forgotten. Teenagers had been here somewhat recently, judging from the cigarette butts, discarded and broken beer bottles, and the torn condom half-buried under moth-eaten, stained sleeping bags. The traces of their passage were faint, sharp smells that couldn't quite overwhelm the burned, rain-soaked wood, the scent of rot and mold, the still-living rats that bunkered in the walls, scurrying to safety at my footsteps.
One brick in the wall was loose, although it appeared no different than any of the others.
Behind it was a small, cloth-wrapped bundle, soaked in dark ichor. It reeked. This close, the scent that had drawn me across miles of featureless countryside was nearly overwhelming, a beacon to my senses. It was me. My blood, old but pungent. It tasted like victory, like triumph, like dreams.
Inside the bundle, carefully unwrapped, was a note. Handwritten, spidery and awkward, speaking to me from another time, another place. Inside the note, a small piece of plastic, metal and solder. A flash drive. A gift, containing unknown treasures. One that would take more than I had on me to uncover.
I looked around, then, as though seeing the ruined church for the first time.
Took in the wreckage, the regrowth. The monument to conflicts past and present.
Leaving the cloth behind, I took a few steps away, took in deep breaths through my nostril slits. Tasted the air. Tried to remember the position of the moon. Nothing smelled familiar, and the moon had moved, so…
I had no idea where I was. Or where I was going.
Which meant that all paths were equally valid.
I chose a direction and started running.