27

Wastelands

Saber awoke, disgusted to find that there was a small army of tiny worm-looking things marching past his nose in perfect formation. He sat up quickly, brushing at his face. "Disgusting. This place is disgusting," he said aloud. He scratched as his face, frowning. It felt itchy and irritated, and his hands did a bit too. He looked down at them and curled his lip. So there were mosquitoes here too, or at least something like them. He had been bitten in the night on the skin that was exposed.

He was hungry. He'd not eaten the night before, wanting to hurry on through, and now he was hungry. He opened his pack, noting the whole side was covered now in mud, and took out a meal serving of jerky. It was unseasoned, which was good, because he could not drink much water. He did not need something that would make him thirsty.

After eating as much as he dared, as he was not sure what he could hunt here, he got up and moved on. The blanket was mud-soaked, and he was mostly so as well. He sighed, picked it up, and wrung it out before tying it onto the strap of his pack. No way would he put it back inside!

The boy tromped through the mud most of the day, stopping only to eat, and to drink a little when he absolutely had to. He was more exhausted traveling through this terrain than any others, as he constantly had to lift his feet free of sometimes knee high mud, although he was beginning to recognize what areas would be deep and avoid them. He constantly battled two other things besides the mud, and that was the bugs and the air itself. The flying bugs were everywhere, some looked vaguely familiar, and some were none that Saber knew.

He'd been dive bombed by the little creeps over a dozen times just by midmorning, and he was always swatting away clouds of the little gnat type things. And nearly every one of the little pests bit.

The air, now... As Saber walked, it got worse. He could taste the chemical in his mouth as he breathed, and he had to do so with both his nose and his mouth. The air was thick with humidity from the stagnant, gray-green pools. Saber hated the feel of the natural filters his people had developed when the cataclysm occurred to live with the changed atmosphere, but where he lived he had no need for him. Now, however, he did. It took him a minute to remember what muscle in his throat brought down the biological filter, but finally did, grimacing at the slight feeling of suffocation it induced. Immediately he could tell the one in his throat and the one in his nasal passages were working. The air he took into his lungs no longer burned, and did not taste like the cleaner his mother used to clean house.

Still it was not pleasant.

Here and there in this blasted, desolate, dead landscape, there were pools of water, and things swam in them. Things. That was the only thing Saber could think of to describe what he was seeing. Monstrous creatures with two heads, or with more eyes than needed that rolled around uselessly in their misshapen sockets. He saw things that almost could have been water insects, but were as big as rats, with matted, slime coated fur on their bodies.

He did not watch the water life too much.

By the end of that night, nothing changed. The terrain did not change at all, and he saw no end to it on the horizon. Nothing. he began to wonder how many days he would have to travel through this nightmarish place.

By the end of the next night, and then the next, he began to be very worried. The water in the canteen was gone, and he had started on the larger waterskin from the ice palace. The temperature increased as well, as he walked on. The landscaped changed not at all, but the heat increased. It was not natural. It was still winter, and it should not be that hot. Saber had had little choice after a while than to take off his jumpsuit and put his loincloth on, or else get dehydrated and sweat out all his water. His boots and suit dangled from his pack now as he trudged through the muck.

The ground itself was hot too, although not unbearably so, but going through the rancid mud barefoot was sickening.

On the morning of the fourth day, the land did change. He came to a section of huge valleys and mud-covered slopes that would not be easy to climb. There had been an earthquake there recently, causing upheaval of the land. Saber could see colonies of burrowing insects going in and out of the slopes and shuddered. Before he went through there, he would put his clothing back on, no matter how much it made him sweat.

And now he had mud in his clothes. Perfect. Donning his gloves so that he would not be grabbing bugs as he climbed, he sloshed through standing water two feet high, and mud another half a foot to get to the first slope.

Bracing himself, he began to climb.

It took the boy two hours just to get over that first rise. Every time he made progress, he would slip, sending mud and bugs and water cascading over his boots. When he finally made it over, he was panting, and wanting a drink very badly. But he did not dare take water. His waterskin was now only half full, and That water was now four days old.

At the top, he now saw at least four other slopes of this kind ahead, but before that, he saw something else in the next cliff face. This one was sheerer, but not as high, and there was something metal poking out of it! Despite his fatigue and his thirst, Saber was curious.

Sliding down the rise to splash in knee-high standing water, he walked up to it and touched it. It slid partway out of the soft mud, and he jumped back. Tugging on it, he got it to fall into the water, and spit hastily when it splashed into his face and mouth. Scowling and wiping his mouth, and thinking that although it tasted nasty and he would never drink it, it did wet his dry mouth.

Once the thing was freed, Saber choked at the smell of chemical that permeated even his throat filters. The thing was only about four feet wide and two tall...but the smell that Came from it! He waved the air away and got a closer look. There were some kind of colored threads that looked almost like hard, shiny cloth to him, but were actually wires. He saw a tiny, rectangular screen like in the cat fortress, that was blank. The whole thing was completely free of the strange rust that the Berbils were plagued by, although the little threads were cracked and crumbling. It looked very, very old. It was covered in layers of mud, but he cleared those away to look at unintelligible marking on the outside. It looked like writing, but not his language.

A closer examination told him that there were several little compartments inside, and he sniffed. He choked once more and backed away, a sudden flash of intuition and memory going through his mind. He struggled to recall what the unicorn guardians had told him of the cataclysm that had taken this world into its fourth phase, fought to remember what it looked like, and knew. He looked down at it, and he knew he looked at that weapon now.

Now feeling mixed respect, fear, and disgust, he wondered how so small a thing could kill a whole world. But then remembered the fumes that came from it. Not lethal, but unpleasant and strong. According to his immortal friends, it had happened thousands of years ago. For it to still be this strong, even after all this time, he could only imagine what damage it must have done when it first hit.

After a moment, the mental spell broke, and the child backed away quickly from it. He wanted nothing to do with such a horrible weapon. He could not fathom a people so evil that they could build such a thing. He did not know that his own race, during the first phase of earth, had tried. It had destroyed them.

Taking a deep breath, Saber began the second dune.

It took him until nightfall to get past the blasted area, and about that long to get the images of death and suffering out of his head. Sometimes his imagination was too good for his liking. The next day he used the last of his water; now he was down to luck and whatever deities that were. That night, when he sat down to dinner, he decided he would risk the water here. He had a few ideas on that. One thing he had learned in school was that boiling water got rid of the germs and bacteria. Another was that thick cloth made a good filter for mud and other things.

He had difficulty starting a fire. First, he had to find wood small enough for him to drag to the semi-solid ground he would camp on that night. Then he had to kick it until the insects vacated the wood. Then he had to start the blasted fire. And that was not easy. All the wood was damp and rotted. Finding sticks firm enough to rub together was in its own a challenge of great proportions. It took him an hour to build the fire.

Saber used the metal canteen and a stick to boil his water, and poured it through a cloth he had in his sack into the waterskin. This was a long, awkward process, and he burned himself several times, but as he let the water cool then tried a sip, he hoped it worked. It tasted nasty but it did not feel like it would make him sick. He hoped it would not.

That night he got a bit of a stomachache but he did not become overly ill. He had found a solution to his problem.

Saber spent a little over two weeks in this hellish land. And he found that as he moved away from the horrible weapon, that it began to get cooler. The thing had permanently damaged the land here. It had caused the nightmarish mutations he had seen in the waters, and made the air hot, and the ground spoiled. He would be glad to leave it.

Little happened in that time, after he found the gas weapon. Only one thing of mild interest was a strewn out debris field of half buried stone and metal. The only thing he had been able to make out was the half buried head of what could have been a stone giant, a fearful thing that looked like a gargoyle that some people in his village used to decorate their houses or as talismanic protection against evil. He did not know that there had once been a great fortress here, and the lands had all but retaken the ruins.

He did, however, that he disliked the creepy buried ruins very much when he stepped on a stone under the water and twisted his ankle. Now he had a sprained ankle to worry about on top of everything else. He would have to limp.

But finally, finally as he made his way through the mud and the muck, he began to see change., In the distance, he saw more trees, and a rise in the land far to the left, indicating hills, instead of this endless, flat, ruined plain. A day at the most, even slowed by his hurt ankle. Finally, he would be out of this horrible place.

Filthy, caked with mud and scum, and having been drinking boiled swamp water for a few days, he started off as fast as he could go.

Part 28: Convergence

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