10-21-2021, 02:13 PM
The engine stuttered quiet and dropped them deeper into the soundscape whose edge they had been treading on the roadside, a full chorus of crickets and tree sighs and weird misplaced whistles in a canopy that blotted out the sky. There were people on this earth, maybe a lot of them, who dragged themselves out to places just like this, put up tents, and stayed to soak in the atmosphere or something. Near found the atmosphere alarming. Humanity invented cities for a reason. His heart longed for the ugly comfort of buzzing streetlights and the distant howl of police sirens.
He wrangled the wandering bits of his attention toward a suspiciously quiet Jude, and found him not asleep, dead, or miraculously disappeared but still there, alive, awake, and looking daggers at him. Butcher knives. At a loss for anything to say, he lifted arms, hands raised, in a puzzled gesture of “I don’t know and what the hell am I supposed to do about it?” as the cab door seemed to pitch a fit at being opened and then was shoved violently shut.
The driver, a short, solid-looking woman who was almost certainly older than Near but might have just lived harder, came back to pound the side of the truck bed twice with the side of her fist. “Little detour,” she offered. “Wanna hop on down from there?”
He wrangled the wandering bits of his attention toward a suspiciously quiet Jude, and found him not asleep, dead, or miraculously disappeared but still there, alive, awake, and looking daggers at him. Butcher knives. At a loss for anything to say, he lifted arms, hands raised, in a puzzled gesture of “I don’t know and what the hell am I supposed to do about it?” as the cab door seemed to pitch a fit at being opened and then was shoved violently shut.
The driver, a short, solid-looking woman who was almost certainly older than Near but might have just lived harder, came back to pound the side of the truck bed twice with the side of her fist. “Little detour,” she offered. “Wanna hop on down from there?”