by Brett P. S.
Chapter 3
Meager Scraps
Winston drew back and dabbed his forehead again. “I must say, Madame. For whom do you take me? Mr. Adamson owned no weapons of any sort, and even if he did, I certainly wouldn’t bestow them to a guest.”
Amala frowned. “That’s disappointing. He’s not very powerful for a God, then. Are there other dwellings such as this one?”
“Thousands, I think,” Winston replied. He paused, stroking his moustache with an aggravated expression. “Much of my knowledge seems to be missing on various subjects, but I haven’t received communication from any nearby for a time.”
Amala paused. “How much time?”
The old man paused, as if in thought for a time to seem less spirit and more human. She’d scarcely heard of any tools that could summon a sentient creature, let alone a respectably intelligent one. She watched as he thought and found her attention wandering around the refuge. She was beginning to question her intuition on her former assessment of the fear in lesser life forms that the crash would have caused. Part of it was the fact that she couldn’t keep a close eye on ruffling leaves or hear the snapping of twigs from inside soundproof walls.
Winston broke his state of pondering. “Mr. Adamson has not logged in for seven hundred years, six months and twenty-three days. I have a back log of communications for three days following his more recent login but nothing else.”
“So they all left?” Amala asked.
“I apologize, Madame,” Winston replied. “I do not possess the proper faculties for extrapolation. There is insufficient information.”
“I take back what I thought about you,” Amala said. “You’re useless, and I’m done here.”
Amala crawled back through the shattered doorway and rose up to climb through the broken window overhead. She reached up and winced back from a slicing pain. She crouched down and cradled her hand, realizing quickly that she’d cut her palm. She plucked out the glass shard and examined the wound. It wasn’t too deep, but she’d need to be careful. Too much exposure might lead to blood poisoning from the Miasma.
Still, a quick bolt back to the settlement wouldn’t be nearly enough to affect her health if she kept it well covered. She ripped off a piece of fabric from her left pants leg and wrapped it around the wound twice before tying it off. A bit of the yellow mist leaked in and stung her cut without mercy. She liked those pants, but at least she could use it as an excuse to procure some new clothes.
Amala climbed out and stood up high on the outer surface of the derelict dwelling. She’d have taken another step, but the winds that blew by her face smelled unusually fowl. She caught brief glimpses of movement through the shrubbery around the clearing, and it didn’t take much more for her instinct to kick in. Amala drew her knife in time to sway to the left and knock back an incoming spear thrown at her from across the ravine ahead. Wildlings, fowl creatures once human, but now transformed by the acidic miasma.
Thoughts raced through her head as the world slowed down to a halt and her life drew to a certain close. She had no idea how many of them there were and no time to count. She could run, but a swift team would catch her without much effort. Oh, she’d give them a chase all right, but normal people would eventually tire. The wildlings, they thrived off the miasma. It drove them mad but gave them a kind of strength she could never muster. Amala did what felt like the best possible course of action and jumped back inside the Old God’s dwelling.