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to save them. Worrying about Ben and the young’uns. If they
were okay. If I was ever going to see ‘em again. If they were even
still alive. Sometimes the despair is so overwhelming that I don’t
want to take another step. Just wanna lay down, right where I’m
standing, let the vultures have at me. But I don’t. I keep moving.
I keep walking the flat, desolate lands. Sometimes I come across
the occasional husk of a settler’s ruin but I don’t bother to look
in them. They’re nuthin but skeletons already picked clean long ago
by scavengers. I ain’t seen another living soul.
    I stop only long enough to sleep,
praying to the gods for an evening of rest free from the night
terrors, but they come every night. Every night I see their faces,
hear their screams. Some nights the metal monsters in my dreams
have teeth and they eat up every soul in front of me, even Ben. I
hear their bones crunching from the metal jaws and I wake myself up
with my cries, my face wet with tears. I lay there shivering,
afraid, listening to the howling of a lone devil cat or wolfling
off in the distance, and sleep don’t come no more. So I
walk.
    It’s taking a toll on me, all the
walking. Yesterday I had to cut the tail offa my tunic, use it to
wrap my feet, they were cut up real bad. The wrappings helped
though, my feet ain’t hurting so bad today. And my head weren’t
hurting no more either, it had healed up real nice. Even the cut
had closed up, not even a scab. I always was a real fast
healer.
    I keep walking.
    Mid-morning, twelve days into the sand
lands. Least I suspect it’s been that long, I’m losing track I
think. This is my second day of traveling on no sleep. I made camp
last evening but just as I was settling down I heard a noise coming
from the other side of the boulder I was camped under. I snuck a
peek, real slow like so as not to make any sound. The moon had been
bright enough for me to make out a shadow, a shape about 10 or12
paces from where I was set up. Cain’t rightly say if it were human
or critter though it appeared to be walking on two legs, all
hunched over and shuffling it’s feet. My heart was beating so loud
I figured for sure the thing would of heard it, and it did pause
for a bit, but thankfully it moved on, heading gods only knew where
in the empty wastelands. I waited for a time, wanting to make sure
it was well gone before I packed up and moved out. I didn’t know if
it were a mutie or raider or such but I knew I didn’t want to run
into it. And I surely wasn’t sleeping any tonight. So I
walked….again. I walked ‘til the sun came up. Only then did I stop
to rest.
    The food I had brought with me is all
but gone and one of the water skins is bone dry. The other is half
empty, even with my rationing. I had come across watering holes
along the way but they had either been dried up or gone foul. I
keep checking the riverbed hoping for one of the flash floods of
water the old folk would talk about but it’s as dry as always, the
bottom of it nuthin but baked, cracked mud. Another story I no
longer believe in.
    I was going to have to hunt soon, I
think. It would slow me down some but I got to eat. I had seen the
occasional wild bird and crow, ain’t spotted any dirt dog but no
matter. I had left my snare wires back in Rivercross and dirt dog
was almost impossible to catch with an arrow. They never stuck
their heads out of their burrows long enough to get a good target
on them. No, food wasn’t going to be a problem, but water, that was
worrying me some.
    Day fifteen…high noon. The land I’m
walking on is changing. I’ve been noticing it for a day or so now.
The empty, hard baked ground I was used to seeing is turning to
scraggly grasslands and sloping hills way off in the hazy distance.
I can even see what I believe to be a tree line on the horizon. A
good sign. Where there are trees growing, there’s water. Just in
time too, I reckon the water I have left won’t last the day. I
stare at the