I think I have an addiction. Here's one everyone should get. Feel free to veto it.
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God had just held a cook-out and all of civilization had been the barbecue. New York was burning. Flames leapt and sprang from tower to tower. Thick smoke billowed inland, thin speckles of ash raining out from the black clouds above. Cars had been abandoned on the highway, forever locked in what had been the largest traffic jam he'd ever seen. He peered in through the window, and instantly wished he hadn't.________________________________
It was a woman. It had been a woman. In the summer heat, she'd begun to melt, her skin staining a sick mix purple, yellow and red all at once. The remains of a paper mask were still strapped to her face. Some cars were empty. Some were coffins. They died fast. The newspapers spoke of a flu. It took 19 days to kill 99% of the United State's population.
He wished he'd kept his helmet on. But it'd been three days since he left the city, and he wasn't sick yet.
19 miles to the next town. The cars tanks were empty. They'd idled dry. If he was lucky, he'd come across a gas station soon. Posthuman worlds had always been the worst. And this was the worst of the worst. This world had just dissolved. It had to be deliberate. At first, he'd wanted to find those responsible, to hunt them down and bring them to whatever remained of justice. It passed. 99-to-1 says whomever created it, died by it. It seemed somehow fair.
A body wore a sandwich-board. It'd once advertised Nozz-a-la Cola. Hastily scrawled on it where the words "The Drunkard I..." It trailed off in one long black smear leading to a sharpie still clutched in pruned fingers.
It chilled his blood. He pushed on, weaving through the eternal jam.
The good thing about posthuman worlds; food was easy to find. He raided what was left of the gas-station store for every non-perisheable he could find. There wasn't much, but he figured that people'd died too fast to take it all. There was still gasoline down in the tanks.
Pumping it up was a job in itself, but it'd make the journey down to Colorado a whole lot easier. He had to see her, her in his dreams.
He felt a shadow flow over him, chased by a chill wind. Someone had taken a dimmer-switch and turned down the sun. It was black, it was evil, it was a malignant cancer that almost made him sick. It was a darkness that clouded over his mage-sight and forced him to look up. A crow squawked and thumped into the air, disappearing around the back of a billboard advertising Takuro Spirit automobiles for $19,099. Drive away today!
A warning - it felt like a warning - had been slathered across it in crimson paint.
"Watch for the Walkin' dude,"
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?