Chapter Twenty-Eight - Walking Along at the Speed of Snails

"Walking is... boring," Crystal declared.

"It's not so bad," Alice said.

They were walking along a road. To the right was forests and swampy hillsides. There were a few rivers that came close to the road, and even some little tributaries forced into culverts that the road was built over.

To their left was a constant flow of industrial buildings. Factories, yards with old machines and containers, and a few office buildings and the like. Most of these had walls between them and the road, though there were gates that opened onto the street, of course. There was no sidewalk. This wasn't a space for people to travel on foot over, but rather a purely industrial area. The vehicles they found parked and abandoned on the road were all semi-trailers, little transport vans, and in one memorable occasion a permanently-aflame food truck.

Alice glanced around herself, then paused. Something was... off. She turned her head, stretched out her senses, but couldn't tell what was going on.

"You've noticed it?" Koschei asked.

Crystal looked over to Alice and Koschei. "Are you talking about the weird reflections? They look harmless."

"Reflections?" Alice asked.

Crystal nodded and pointed to some puddles on the road. Puddles which didn't make sense, now that Alice thought about them. It was a warm enough morning, the sun was up, and there hadn't been any rain that she could remember in the last day.

Looking at one of the puddles revealed a reflection of a building, warped and a little distorted, as any reflection on a street-side puddle would be. Only there was no building like that. There were others nearby, but the one in the puddle was wrong.

"They show reflections of other things," Koschei said. "They're harmless."

Another anomaly. They'd been crossing a few of these every hour. Some were barely noticeable. A field of flowers that grew, wilted, and died within the span of an hour only to repeat. There was an anomaly that Koschei called a 'flicker.' It had objects appearing in front of them. Always things that were pressed into the ground.

Crystal said that it reminded her of bad video games, the way that a piece of cardboard would just suddenly appear on the ground ahead, or some clothes would flicker into place on a clothesline.

Harmless, but definitely strange.

Koschei had made them pause earlier when they reached an area that made all the hairs on her and Crystal's head rise. It had reminded her of a space where lightning was about to strike, and it did, eventually.

They moved around the area and as they did, they could see lightning coming down from a clear sky in extremely slow motion, each individual electric finger questing towards the ground while branching out and out.

It had left her feeling staticy and strange, like wearing cheap pantyhose over her entire body.

She didn't share that feeling with Crystal, because she just knew that the other magical girl would laugh at it.

"It feels like there aren't as many anomalies anymore," Crystal said. She was walking with her arms folded behind her head, not a care in the world.

"We're out of the Zone," Koschei said. "More or less."

"More or less?" Alice asked. She, for one, had paid attention to his earlier explanation about the Zone and its limits and how they were basically skimming along the edge.

"The Zone doesn't have hard walls," he replied. "And every storm changes its shape. But there are places that remain, and this road is one of them, and it is always just outside of the Zone itself. The monsters of the Zone aren't confined to it, but they are born within it."

"Are they territorial?" Alice asked. They hadn't run into any monsters yet. Plenty of strange phenomena, but nothing that she'd label as monstrous.

"They can be," was all he said on the matter. Koschei wasn't the best at giving tours, though he was proving to be a competent-enough guide that she felt like she could overlook his people-skills.

They continued for another few hours, walking at a slow but steady pace, only pausing when they had to navigate around or through an anomaly. Lunch came, and that was their first big pause. They stopped by a freight measuring station with a large government building attached to it.

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Koschei jimmied the lock, then let them in. There was a lobby, there were restrooms to the side, and most importantly of all, there was a breakroom that looked like it was used pretty regularly.

He admitted that it was a frequent-enough stop for those in the know. Somehow, the taps still had water and while the lights didn't work, the microwave did and the cupboards were always stocked with what was apparently an infinite supply of ramen noodles.

They had warm-enough noodles sitting around a round table on uncomfortably little benches with only the light from a thin window to eat by. Then they were off again without even trying to mask that they'd been here except to close the door properly and make sure it was locked again. The next Stalker that came around could figure it out on their own.

Noon slowly, ever so slowly, turned to evening, and Koschei pointed to a spot far ahead of them. It was only visible because of its height over the hills. "That's where we're going," he said.

Crystal squinted ahead. "Isn't that the sign for a gas station?" she asked.

"It is," he replied. "It's where the road turns leading up to the camp, it's--" Koschei cut himself off as a distant gunshot echoed over the hills. Then there was the staccato sound of an automatic gun being fired. It was punctuated by a small boom.

"Sounds like we're not the only ones here," Alice said. She stretched her senses out ahead and felt a group of five... no, six, one of them was dying. They were all varying levels of terrified, but not of each other.

There was something else out there too, a shadow whose form she couldn't quite grasp. It was threatening the others, a menace, the monster they were all joined together in fighting.

"I think they need our help," Alice said.

Koschei slung his rifle from his shoulder and pointed to a hill that would overlook the gas station. "From there," he said before taking off at a surprisingly fast run.

"Huh, he can really move when he wants to," Crystal said. "What do we do?"

"What do you want to do?" Alice asked.

"Well, people are in trouble, and we're magical girls," Crystal pointed out. She smiled, dimples on full display. "I think we should do what we always do!"

Alice nodded once. That had been their job before and she couldn't see why it wouldn't be their job still. They raced after Koschei, then leapt ahead of him, landing on the apex of the hill where a few large stones were jutting out of the hillside and giving them a great view of the surrounding area. The trees also served to hide them a little, keeping them in some amount of shade as they looked down onto a large gas station.

It was one of those designed for trucks to stop at. Six rows or fuel pumps covered by angled roof slates. A few trucks were parked off to the side all lined up in a row to create a sort of wall between the station and the road. There was a next on the roof for the station as well, a plywood roof, some sandbag walls, enough to keep a marksman secure.

There was a man there now, fumbling with the bolt of an old rifle that he shot downwards.

On the ground there were five more people, though one of them had more blood out of their body than in. They were using a wall of scrap cars and piled-on bags of sand and dirt as cover from some large shadowy monster.

"That thing's not cute at all," Crystal said.

The monster was like a bear, but it lacked any fur. It had wild eyes and a tail that whipped to the left and right, smacking aside small pieces of scrap. Bloodied claws showed how that one man had gone down.

Another stepped up onto the scrap wall and aimed a shotgun down. It roared and the bear-like creature was pushed back. It fell, a gaping wound on its front. It seemed dead, but a moment later the wound closed and the monster returned to where it had been, as if it and it alone were slowly being rewound.

"Oh, it's a time monster," Crystal said.

Koschei ran up next to them at last and took in the scene at a glance. "Shit," was his diagnosis.

"We should be able to take care of it," Alice said.

"It'll return," Koschei said. "Your only hope is to give it what it wants or run."

"I'm sure there are more options than just that," Alice said.

She could think of a few.

***