Chapter Three - Dead Car Picnic

There were perhaps some two hundred cars abandoned along the highway, though Alice imagined there were more in the distance that they just couldn't see.

The cars were stopped as though they had been caught in a traffic jam, then abandoned. Several of them were parked alongside the road, or on the curb. But those weren't proof that the road was still being used. That proof came in the way that traffic had been moved.

Cars were pushed to the side, some of them violently, without much care about damaging them. A whole lane was cleared out in the centre.

Crystal skipped over to the cleared space, then looked down the road to the left and right. "This was covered in gravel," she said.

"Looks like it," Alice agreed. She kicked a loose rock aside. The road had a fairly even layer of fresh.…ish gravel across it. It spilled out to the sides, as if whomever had placed it didn't care about anything except the central lane. "This kind of makes sense. If you want to keep the road functional, you need to do maintenance."

"Is covering a lane in gravel maintenance?" Crystal asked doubtfully.

"The rest of the road is cracked, plants are making it through the asphalt, and there are potholes you could swim in. I think that this is a cheap way of making the road passable." The gravel wasn't very thick in places, and she could see the road beneath. It looked like it was mostly pressed into the potholes, but some were growing pretty deep anyway.

Crystal looked up and down the road. "Well, if anyone's travelling along here, they're not going fast, that's for sure."

Alice agreed. She moved over to some of the nearest cars and looked within. It seemed as though the steering columns had been messed with, and with a slight shove, she managed to make a small sedan roll forwards a little and further away from the open lane.

Someone had broken into the cars, put them in neutral, then shoved them aside. For every car along the road.

That was a pretty monumental effort. "There's still civilisation around, at least," Alice said.

"How do you figure that?" Crystal asked. It wasn't confrontational, just curious.

"Because uncivilised people wouldn't care about roads."

They continued down the road, heading in the same direction as before. Soon, they crossed beneath an underpass, and they both found themselves wandering a little. Someone had set up a small camp under the protection of the roadway above. A few ratty tents, some campers parked in a rough circle around a fifty-five gallon drum that had been cut in half to serve as a firepit.

The camp was unoccupied, but they explored it anyway, wandering around and poking their heads into the campers and tents.

"It mostly just stinks," Crystal reported as she returned from poking at one of the crumpled tents with a pole made out of what looked like ruby.

"It's more signs of life," Alice said. There were a few tins of fish tossed in a refuse pile just next to the overpass, where the stink wouldn't hit the camp so hard. Judging by the flies, the food had only been tossed a few weeks ago. Alice's greatest discovery was a small battery-powered radio tossed onto the trash heap. "I wish we had a way to make electricity."

"Why?" Crystal asked. She looked ready to move on, so Alice caught up with her and started walking as well.

"Because I'd like to have a radio. I think radio's the last thing to fail, as far as communication systems go."

"Oh. I can make one," Crystal said easily.

Alice blinked, then looked her friend up and down. "You can?"

Crystal smiled, somewhat shyly. "When I first became a magical girl, I thought my powers were... I don't know. Less than useful? Anyway, one of the first things I did was Google 'cool stuff to do with crystals.' I basically memorized the Wikipedia page, and there's a whole thing about radios."

"Radios?" Alice asked. There was a vague memory tickling at her, something about boy scout radios, but it was faint.

"Yeah!" Crystal said. She pressed her hands together, then spread them apart. There was a small crystalline slate between her palms, one which she pinched then raised up. "You need... something like this, and then something like that, and then an antenna..."

As Crystal spoke, she added small components to her little device. It looked like a very basic circuit made of thin crystalline filaments.

Stolen novel; please report.

"The tricky part is using crystals that don't conduct and some that do. Then there's the actual thing to adjust the signal you're receiving, so you only hear one, uh, band? Yeah, one band at a time. Like a radio station." Crystal moved over to the nearest car, then placed her radio onto it. "The loudspeaker's... not very loud, either."

Crystal created a small speaker. It looked almost like a flower, a cup with a small plate on the inside, sensitive enough that it vibrated slightly and produced a faint hiss. Then the magical girl gently moved a small lever along a spun piece of crystal and the hissing changed in pitch. It took a moment, but soon it did start to sound like a radio.

An ancient one, like Alice had once heard at her grandparent's place. Crystal continued to adjust things until there was a moment where the hissing was replaced by a few notes of something more than random static.

"Oh, I think I got something," Crystal said. She adjusted the radio some more, being more careful and minute with her changes until the tiny speaker started to blurt out some proper noise.

"-si-Cola, the smoothest drink in the wastes!" Crystal and Alice both blinked as they listened to the whisper from the speaker. The ads continued to roll. Toothpaste, canned meats, a kind of rugged car. Even a catchy jingle and song about the most reliable rifle for hunters everywhere.

"These are in Russian, right?" Crystal asked.

"I think so, yeah," Alice said. She could understand every language, but that didn't mean she knew which language she was understanding at the moment. But the voices on the radio did sound Russian.

"Let me fiddle with this," Crystal muttered. "Might be catching an all-ads channel."

"It's a good sign," Alice said. "It means that there's a radio transmitting somewhere, which means power."

"Yeah," Crystal agreed. She made a small mark on the radio, for the channel they were on, then adjusted it some more. Soon enough she picked up another.

"-Is the Iron Voice, bringing you the news from the zone."

"Oh, got one," Crystal said with a little cheer. The voice was feminine, but rough. The voice of a serious woman who had smoked her share.

"Black sea raiders have made their way from the coast, hitting some settlements deeper in. If you can hear us in that region, be prepared for trouble. A convoy from Lithuania was delayed by this morning's time storm. If you were expecting a delivery, then expect to be disappointed. The convoy reports safe, it will be arriving tomorrow afternoon. More anomalies along the west wall. A hunter reports that his dog turned into a puppy near sector forty-four. It could always be worse. We will be having a moment of silence for the Sage, whose time finally came. May it be like a swan's down, old man."

"I have no idea what she's talking about," Crystal said.

"We're just missing a lot of context," Alice said. "It might come. We should keep moving. Can you work the radio at the same time?"

"Hmm, yeah, I think so. The antenna will be pretty short, so..." she pulled the little radio off the hood of the car, and the signal immediately worsened. Alice could still make out one word in five. Crystal started to fiddle with it, and soon that turned into one word in three. It was better than nothing.

They continued on their walk, accompanied by the radio which eventually slipped into playing folksy music with fits and starts. Alice tried to piece together what she'd learned from the report.

The fact that there was a report at all was telling all on its own.

Soon they came upon a spot with more cars. They were bumper-to-bumper, even though they'd been pushed aside, and then they started finding cars that had rammed into each other.

The cause was obvious, once they got to it.

Another anomaly. This one with a car halfway into it. It looked as if the front of the car had flickered into its own rear, then stopped hard. The car behind it had rammed into the first, and the one behind that one into the second.

The accident was old enough that anything... organic had been picked away, and any corpses had been curried, but it looked violent.

"They didn't know," Crystal said. "It's like the time thing just appeared out of nowhere."

"Looks like that, yeah," Alice said.

***