The guard station was empty and abandoned, but there were no bodies, which was a good sign. The door had also been properly shut, indicating purposeful abandonment rather than fungal plague.
That had been one of the horror stories they were told early on in their military training. Whole cities taken over by fungi, turned into mindless mushroom food, bodies alive but also dead, rotting where they stood.
Always wash your hands, don’t breathe in strange spores, if you don’t trust the situation, get out.
Brickwrath did not trust this situation, but he had found a mask, a first aid kit and some thick gloves in the back of the guard station, so he was ready for anything.
He left the donkey in a small garden near the station, and with one last pat, headed out.
The first things he checked were a few houses in the outer ring. Closed up, locked and deserted. Strange. If it was a plague then it was a very neat one, if it was conscription then there should still be somebody about. Maybe they’d all just… Upped and moved? Water poisoning over the winter causing a mass exodus?
The city was comprised of three rings, and he was getting nothing from the first, so he moved further inwards. The next guard station yielded no clues, in much the same condition as the first, and the houses were all locked up, shutters tightly closed.
Having found nothing here either, he moved up onto the Greenways, or tried to at least. Despite the cold weather they were already starting to get overgrown. The root bridges between the first and second ring already almost impassible.
Give them a few months, and the weight of the growth would cause the whole lot to collapse. Within ten years the whole city would be reclaimed by the jungles. It wasn't a great loss architecturally, Brickwrath thought sniffily, but what a nuisance. Maybe the growth would improve it.
Climbing up onto the roof of a rare three-story building, he took a moment to take in the vista of the city and surrounding fields. Trying to spot movement, but seeing nothing other than a few stray cats and birds.
Climbing back down, he sighed. Time to check out the centre.
-
The gates leading to the market area were locked and barred, and he spent almost an hour walking the empty streets to the next one, only to find that that one was locked too.
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He peered through the bars for a minute, and then climbed back up onto the greenways.
He wasn't surprised to find that the few root bridges to the final ring had been hacked away, he had noticed it from below, but the remains had been cleared from the streets either by people or weather. The bridges weren’t small structures, normally paved with dirt and stones, and wide enough for two people to pass, so the fact they’d been completely removed... Somebody had done this on purpose.
With a start, Brickwrath realised that at some point he had taken out his machete and that he was holding it like a sword. Sighing at his own foolishness, he sheathed it again, pulling his mask down to around his neck. Whatever had happened, here, he didn’t think it was plague, and even if it was, it was weeks dead by now.
His choices were to either scale the wall somehow or to try and break through the gates. He had a tiny talent for Change, but nothing for Grow or Rot, so that wasn’t going to work, even if the gates weren’t made of a corrosion-resistant material, which they would have been if he'd been designing them.
He made one last attempt at communication, shouting through the metal gates to see if anyone responded, but the only response was a flock of pigeons emerging violently from a nearby rooftop. He stood and listened for a while, as his voice echoed off the walls, the cooing of startled pigeons in the distance.
He eyed up the walls. The vines had been stripped away from the walls, the houses and shops all boarded up.
No. Fuck this, whatever was in there, he didn’t want to bother it. Whatever was going on here he wanted out, right now. There should have been people around the farms outside, that should have been his first sign to turn around.
As he should have done at the start, he turned around, heading back towards the donkey at a brisk trot, refusing to let himself break into a full run.
He would go home, wash like he’d never washed before, and then head south to the big city. They’d know what to do, he wasn’t touching this any further, and he was getting out of here before whatever was going on caught up with him.
-
He left the cart right there, in the middle of the road. He took what travel rations he could fit in his pockets and threw the oilcloth over it before he left. It was a winter's worth of work lost, but he had no plans to return for it.
Jogging along the road, the donkey by his side, he considered that he was getting too old for this. He had never been a front-line soldier, but the army had kept him fit. The last decade of wandering had slowly eroded that away. He could ride the donkey short distances, but he was heavy and it wasn’t good for the animal.
Drawing in deep breaths and trying to ignore his cramping muscles, he carried on. This was going to be a long journey.
-
After a couple of hours, he slowed down and took a break, leaning against the donkey and physically unable to jog anymore. He was past the edge of the abandoned farms now, back into the forest. Everything seemed strangely muted, but that could have just been all the blood pounding in his ears.
He took the next few hours to alternately jog and walk next to the donkey. Checking out small farms as he passed. All of them were deserted, and he saw nobody on the road. Had something passed over and just stolen all the people, leaving his isolated cabin alone, out of sheer luck?
He hoped his home was still there.