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Walking the Dust

4: Dead Cities

"Grandpa says people used to live there," said the kid as I sat down next to him. He couldn't have been more than seven years old. "Grandpa says he used to go hunting for metal, and fight the bad people for it."

He was talking about the Precity five miles to the East. We were about a couple hundred miles out of Waters Meet, still making our way to Newbegin, and had made a short stop in a small desert town called, of all things, Sanctuary.

All I can say is, the town's founders must have had a great sense of humour. The place was right in the swathe of hilly sandbowl that covers most of the land immediately East of Newbegin. There wasn't even a river. They brought all their water up from a well.

But the well had run dry.

So they joined our caravan. Forty of them, give or take. Apparently they used to be double that size, but since their water disappeared a lot of them—mostly the old, the very young and the just plain weak—had died. None of the people left alive had any experience walking the dust. They knew there were cities a couple hundred miles in either direction, but not how to find them.

So they just stayed there and waited for someone to come rescue them. We were the closest thing they got.

Makes you wonder what kind of idiot builds a town in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest town more than two week's walk away. Apart from the precity, of course.

We saw it first in daylight, as we crested a ridge. It was half-buried, like most of them are, under tons of sand and debris. From our vantage point huge decapitated buildings smiled up at us, gappy grins of broken stone teeth yellowed by the desert sun. There would have been roads leading in and out of it, once, but they were long vanished. Suffocated under the weight of the land.

It reminded me of the story the Sun-Singer had told, about the metal boxes man lived in before the Big Wet, and I shivered.

We camped high on a mesa that night, sheltered under an outcrop. But I couldn't sleep knowing the Precity was within sight. I got up, wrapped a blanket round my shoulders against the night cold and walked out onto the rocktop. Turned out I wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep. This kid, one of the Sanctuary travellers, was sitting up there, staring East at the Precity.

We sat together and watched dozens of small fires burning in the Precity, pinpricks of light in the darkness. I shivered again and pulled my blanket tighter.

"Are you cold?" Asked the kid. It was cold as a Sand-Eater's tit out there, and he was barefoot.

"No," I lied, "Precities just creep me out. All that death and disease."

He looked at me like our ages were reversed. "You shouldn't be afraid, silly. Only bad people lived in the Precity when God killed it. He warned all the good people to move away, so they'd be safe. Grandpa said so."

"Sounds like your grandpa's got a lot of stories to tell. Is he here?"

"No," said the kid. "He went to meet God before you got here."

I'd suspected for a while, but that sealed it. Now I knew why these people lived out here in the middle of nowhere. Why grandpa thought he could wander in and out of a Precity without concern that he'd get sick or eaten by Dwellers like anyone with an ounce of sense.

These folk were Cross Chains worshippers, an old cult that claims to be pre-Big Wet. They say they're the 'chosen people', that their god is watching over them and protects them against the heathens—which is pretty much everyone else.

I'd met them before, normally as small cults living inside the big cities, worshipping in secret to avoid arrest. Sounded to me like Sanctuary's founders said fuck that, and went out to find a place where no-one would bother them. I couldn't blame them, but they really should have kept going till they found some kind of surface water source. Wells dry up all the damn time, and anyone more experienced at living in the wasteland would have known that. Then again, anyone more experienced would have got the fuck out as soon as the water dried up.

The kid fell ill a couple days later, first with a fever, then muscle spasms. It wasn't the pale sickness, so he stayed with us, but no-one knew what it was and he died a day out from Newbegin.

I always wondered if his grandpa was waiting for him when he went to meet his god.