Ain't Talkin'

Roche slept little that night. The world turned onward. Roche watched the stars breath awake and then blink out many hours later. Markus fitted and started in his sleep for a while, but overall slept well, curled by the fire.

When the bits of morning dew on the dust sparkled alive with the first glimpse rays of orange sunlight, Roche stood and went to the horse, patting her on the neck.

“Mornin’ girl. Ready?”

The walker took a fistful of the stuff Jex had given him for the horse to eat and fed it to her from a gloved hand. Markus started up, shaking a little at first with the cold of the morning and then rolling to his knees and stretching.

“C’mon, kid. We got a full day’s walk ahead. Happens we meet someone on the road we can figure out what day it is.”

“You always lose this much time when you walk through the white?”

“Usually. Only problem is you never know just how much time you lose. Sort of the hazard guess that goes along with walkin’. You might save yourself some time, and then sometimes it’s the only way. But sometimes you lose ten times the time you thought you’d saved. For all we know it’s already happened and the Corp has loosed those things on Terra 1 from Terra 2 and the plane’s been ransacked.”

“I don’t think that’s the case.” Markus replied after looking all around and surveying the dead landscape. New dawn or not, the was only so much that sunlight could do to soften wreckage, craters, dust and debris from the old world.

“Maybe not. But we won’t know until we move along. S’go.”

And they left camp, moving northwards still with the dawn sun on their right shoulders to the sounds of footsteps, denim, gunbelts, hooves and slithering dust.