S10E04 "Ruins"

[headquarters]

Lady and gentlemen, thanks for the nice weekend at the seashore of the souf - my eyes sting with tears when I think of how long it is until next baadhuset.

I am suggesting to plan next session already to fix a date for the next fix.

September is horrible for me with the hunt, theNG service etc. Two weeks go that month and no sessions are possible at all for me.

October is better - here are the weekends:

week 40 dates 3-5

week 41 dates 10-12

week 42 dates 17-19

week 43 dates 24-26

week 44 : friday 31th to sunday 2 nov.

which is better ?

I ask for the GP to host and who will def. join

[headquarters]

anybody got dates??

[headquarters]

Somewhere north of San Rafael, CA 20th August 2020 0300hrs + 17 C*

Ruins. Dust. As far as the eye could see, which wasn't very far given the time of night - the ruins of a vast suburbia. The ruins of malls and shops and offices. All covered in a fine, grey, powdered dust that kicked up with every gust of wind. With every step. It covered the debris, smoothing it over some places, concealing. It built up in small dunes behind walls and ruins where the wind deposited it. Small heaps rounded the corners and jagged shards of rubble and burnt concrete. Huge swathes of land had almost no dust. Some were covered in it. But mostly it seemed to have been sprinkled liberally on by the high altitude winds. No pattern to it would seem. But for one thing - it was everywhere here. In evey crack and nook. Under things and on top of them. Dust whirled around in the air on the smallest flow or air. It was all over.

The soldiers of the SSAB looked at eacother warily as they donned masks and respirators. Nobody knew what the stuff was. It could be the ashes of a nuked city somewhere in Asia. It could be the fallout from a big wildfire churned up by wether and deposited here. It could kill you in a few days if inhaled. It could be nothing. But surely it sprinkled over the mood of the men and soon all talk seemed a little grayer too, and the watchful eyes of the pickets where constantly irritated by small specks of something that seemed to move in the distance. Small specks on the lenses of goggles and gas masks. Soon a pale sun would shine down upon the ruin and the dust.

[headquarters]

Somewhere north of San Rafael, CA 20th August 2020 0300hrs + 17 C*

Slowly prodding through the dusty ruins got the men thinking. Some of them had lived on the move in ruins like this for a long time.

Sneaking around in ruins, ever stalking through overgrown gardens and parks or stealing around in abandoned buildings - a man could move like that for days or weeks.Sifting through debris.

Keeping hidden, and hardly not seeing other people if he wanted to and had the skills. Scrounging for supplies living in the scruff as it was called.

Often two men, seeing each other moving carefully around in the ruins, would studiously avoid giving away any sign that they had indeed seen each other.

Both feeling the awkwardness of meeting a new person after months or years of solitary wandering. Both knowing the risk of making contact with the other one.

The other.Who might think he was being set up for ambush. Who might think that now that the other knew he was there, and both were aware of the fact - would feel he had no choice but to strike first. To guard his life and his supplies - lest he be tracked to his camp and slain in his sleep.

But for all the keeping alone and hiding he would never be truly alone. Hundreds of people were there all the time. Everywhere.

The Dead.

They were laying in the grass and he walked among the heaps of unbleached bones and rags everywhere. They were reclining in the car-seats of a thousand rusty wrecks with their hollow eye sockets staring and craniums with tufts of hair in the breeze and feral, bared teeth grinning.

They sat and on chairs, lay in beds , crouched hidden in closets and were splayed across the bathroom floors of most every house and edifice you could get in to.

They lay alongside the roads and highways. Some were hanging from wire or ropes on beams or from windows. Choosing the end themselves, sooner rather than later maybe.

And some with no choice at all - strung up, nailed to walls, backbound and hooded with a bag over the head, face down in the ditches. And in back alleys. And in the basements of projects. Some - naked and bloated and decomposing in a culvert or under a bridge.

Some a decade old. Some mere days.

Some floated in the streams and ponds and rivers. Tangled in the reeds maybe. Tugging at the anchorage with the wind and the current. Or gently swirling along in the current. On their way to the final resting place.

They were there as often as not whenever he would camp for the night. Or open a trunk, a door or gather firewood. Making camp in the dark of night, a man might wake up to find he had slept next to a skeletal companion a few feet away. Happened all the time.

There had once been 100 000 000 buffalo on the great American Plains.

Most all were hunted and killed within the space of 20 years. It took the myriad bone gatherers who lived from trading in bone another two decades to pick clear the bone littered plains from that 100 000 000.

There had once been 300 000 000 people living there. Noone were gathering their bones at all this time .But for the crows and the coyotes and the vermin.

These bones would lay on the plains, in the cities and everywhere else for ever.

Making sure that there always was company. The Dead.

[General Pain]

I like it monsieur HQ - shall we go 4ward with OKT dates - and get on with it?

[headquarters]

Saturday from noon til whenever - interrupted only by lovley meals of game and catch!