Z3ke [last online: 2 days ago]
LoadingPleaseWait
Has Zeke posted anything new? I need my fix. I know two days offline isn’t exactly long in the grand scheme of things, but with the pace he’s been posting lately, the silence feels odd. Last I heard, he was leaving the Devro base with the Black Teeth convoy breathing down his neck.
CaffeinatedSchmuck
No on the posting. I do agree with you on the update pacing. For the past week it felt like we were getting new stuff every few hours. He’d drop three or four shorter posts in a row or we’d have to wait a bit and we’d get a huge update. Everything was happening so fast I started getting used to checking the thread whenever I picked up my phone. Now that the updates have petered off it all feels unnatural.
MoronicMnemonic
I’ve been hitting refresh an embarrassing number of times today. I’m reading on my phone and I fear I’ve worn a groove on my screen from constantly pulling down to reload.
Zinj-the-Great
Hey, new reader here. I finally caught up yesterday and I’m sorry for asking this but I don’t know what’s the normal around here. Does Zeke have a set posting schedule he follows? Or does just just update whenever he feels like it?
PaperSnakes
Ew.
LoadingPleaseWait
Hey Paper, at least Zinj isn’t asking something he could answer with the search bar. Yo Zinj, one of the gimmicks of Zeke’s story is that he is writing everything in real-time. When things are slow, the updates start to slow because there isn’t anything to say and nothing interesting is happening.
When things go batshit insane…the updates also slow because he is spending all his focus on not dying and he can’t exactly pull out his Tech Slate to tell us what is happening.
I was telling my partner this the other day, and he thinks there’s another reason for Zeke’s slow updating. If said that if he were Zeke and he’d just done something spectacularly stupid, he wouldn’t want to update right away because of how the forum would react.
We’re all Monday morning quarterbacking the decisions that Zeke makes. He usually knows when we’re going to jump on something that he did. I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to get his bearings before opening a thread filled with people saying “well, I would have done…”
The downside of this fic is that whenever Zeke gets sent into a disaster that we all warned him was coming, he disappears for a few days. It’s normal.
AnywayHeresWonderwall
| the updates also slow because he is spending all his focus on not dying |
Last we saw he was heading into what was shaping up to be a running convoy battle. If he went radio silent, there’s a decent chance it’s because he’s fighting instead of typing. I’d be more worried if he found some way to live-blog an active firefight. That would be stretching my suspension of disbelief a little too much.
NorthXNorthWest
Zinj, this argument has already played out a dozen times on the forum. Zeke accidentally trapped himself with his own premise.
It probably seemed like a really good idea at the time. I could imagine him saying “wouldn’t it be cool if the main character could only speak through the forum?” It’s a great idea until you realize you’ve also committed yourself to telling every major battle and update through forum posts written by someone actively participating in them.
The poor idjit probably didn’t think that through. He’ll come back in another day or two with something like “sorry about that. I was busy not dying.” Then he’ll casually sum up the last 48 hours and tell us all how he managed to squeak out a win.
N7Vanguard
What’s the longest he’s ever disappeared for?
StoryLeech
It depends. At the beginning of the story there was a stretch where he literally couldn’t post because he didn’t have access to the forum. When he was first escaping the Glens, he didn’t have a Tech Slate. He couldn’t sign onto the forum and ask for guidance.
I think it took something like 8 or 9 days before we heard from him while he was making his way through The MIZ. It took that long because Zeke was being Zeke and he got caught up in a bunch of shenanigans.
Then there was the time Binary tried to get him killed and Zeke got hissy with the forum and decided we could all sit in timeout. That was a more self-imposed exile on his part.
Thankfully, none of us have pissed him off lately by either walking him into a deathtrap or complaining about hotel prices in The MIZ. I don’t think it’ll be too long before he updates. Taking two days where his character participates in an active military retreat is pretty normal.
MushroomCleric
Don’t worry. I’m not worried. There’s no reason to panic. Zeke’ll be back and he’ll bring a story about narrowly escaping the clutches of the Black Teeth.
Like Story said, the timeline makes sense. He posted when they were starting their evacuation and he’s been busy dealing with all that. Next time he shows up he’ll tell us about the convoy riding through the Deadlands, the Black Teeth in pursuit, a big battle, and something will happen.
Zeke will be back any day now.
MushroomCleric
…
Any day now.
Interrogator404
Do we just wait?
Elterrible00
Yep. He’s busy. When he gets somewhere safe enough to sit down and write, he’ll update us.
(BTW, this is me fully embracing the ARG aspect of Zeke’s story. It’s obvious that he’s sitting at his computer right now, struggling with the next chapter. He’s probably checking the grammar and spelling, making sure everything is internally consistent, and making sure he didn’t accidentally forget to post someone’s name. The worst-case scenario for him is that his laptop died and took all his notes with it and he’s desperately trying to remember facts and story beats and plot twists he came up with two months ago.)
NullSigil
That last part was a little specific El. Did that happen to you? And where’s your Patreon plug?
Elterrible00
I was advised by my therapist not to dwell on your first question. As for the Patreon, if I tried to tell everyone they could support me by going to my Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/elterrible00 then Grave would probably have me kicked for another 24 hours.
GravemindLegacy (MOD)
Elterrible00, you have been warned multiple times about advertising your Patreon on this forum. You are now prohibited from posting for the next 48 hours.
JimothyTheBarber
HA. Every time. He can’t help himself. You’d think getting banned a half a dozen times would have eventually taught him something.
Mchiavelli
Hey Interrogator, the best thing you can do for your mental health is checking out the other fics that have spun out from Zeke’s story. That’s what I do while waiting for updates.
SixtySix
Yes!!! Presperosity - who you all might know for the fic about the Eight Day Thunder - just posted a Zeke x Blooming Witch fic where she decides to follow Zeke around The MIZ. It’s AMAZING!!!
Kelasgre
|a Zeke x Blooming Witch fic |
How much do you think the story would have changed if she had gone with Z3ke?
I remember that when I wanted to write a fanfic about that, I came to the conclusion that she would most likely have been the one to end up teaching Z3ke her magic (maybe even the possibility of a class), and that they would have accidentally ended up becoming the equivalent of a mafia in The MIZ or something like that, haha (because it’s certain that the scary lady would be a great counterbalance to Z3ke’s heroic nonsense and would never let anyone lay a finger on him, not to mention the whole part where she’d probably come to consider him a friend over time.)
InnerMarrow
Ugh. Do yourself a favor Interrogator and DON’T check out the fics. They are either harem romances or just pure garbage. Save your reading for when Zeke comes back.
Denty
You just need to read peak fictions [LINK] [LINK]
There was the Zeke/Corva song fic which I heard was actually very well written but with the character tags I haven’t touched them. The mods however, need to be stricter at separating NSFW works.
***
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Okay, I’m back. This update might get a little squirrely or it might cut off in the middle. I’m all shaky and tired and my eyes are droopy. I’ve slept a grand total of two hours over the past few days and so I might accidentally cut this update off.
Whenever I close my eyes I can imagine the sounds of the convoy and the feel of the jeep bouncing underneath me. When I’m awake I’m glancing over my shoulder to check for encroaching armies. All told, I’m exhausted and don’t know if I’ll be able to get through this. I might just start rambling.
Whatever. This is what happened. The last I posted we’d finally managed to pack everything up and pour out of the base and hit the road. The cars and jeeps and trucks of the convoy took off and we were soon captured by a dust cloud that cut visibility all around us and we were racing to god knows where.
Jackie was our driver and I saw her fighting with herself during the first few hours. She kept wanting to squeeze more speed out of the jeep, but whenever she’d shift towards an opening or look like she was getting ready to pass someone, she’d look around and then grimace.
She was doing her best to follow Castellan’s advice - passed through me - about staying in the middle of the convoy and trying not to stick out too much. He said it was the safest spot in this whole retreat.
Neither of us was thinking it was a good idea. I really wanted to scream at her to just floor it and leave the Pale Regiment behind. I could see the argument play itself out on her face every few minutes. Drive faster and leave everyone behind, or stay with the convoy and hope safety came from numbers instead of speed?
There were some proper military transports in our convoy. They’d been built for rough terrain and had no problem keeping up with everyone when the road opened up. But the other trucks and cars and vehicles the Pale Regiment managed to get up and running weren’t all that great.
There were old cargo trucks that were groaning under the weight of ammo boxes, civilian pickups with wounded soldiers crammed into the truck beds, and vans loaded up with gas cans and medical supplies and spare tires and a shit ton of other military equipment.
It was like the Pale Regiment was desperate that nothing be left behind in the base to be picked over by scavengers. The problem was that all that weight was traveling with us and it was slowing us down.
That wasn’t the only thing slowing us down. Before we left, Haynes had handed out radios to everybody so we could communicate. I heard his voice come over the line, all crackly and static, and he was warning people to stay together because that was the best defense. All the vehicles had a place in the convoy. The wounded were in the center, the faster vehicles had drifted to the outside, and the best defended ones were in the back.
It might have been a good idea on paper, but it started falling apart as soon as we left the base. Haynes and Vicks had organized the convoy as well as anyone, but organization only goes so far. The problem was that most of the people driving the trucks weren’t soldiers. They were mechanics and radio operators and cooks and medics and everyone else whose job was keeping a military base running instead of driving away from an army.
In old war movies and tv shows, they would have been called POGs. People other than grunts. They weren’t trained to fight a retreat while the boogeymen of the Deadlands were chasing after them.
You could see, in real-time, their nerves getting the better of them. Nobody wanted to be the last vehicle in the convoy and nobody wanted to see what would happen to them when the Black Teeth finally caught up. Some of the drivers pushed their vehicles as hard as they could, bouncing across the rough ground and praying the suspension would hold together. Others slowed whenever the terrain got rough because they were worried about the wounded soldiers in the back or they were worried about tipping over and rolling their trucks and then being left to fend for themselves.
Little by little, the convoy began to stretch. What had started as a single organized column slowly turned into a long chain of uneven gaps as faster vehicles pulled ahead and the slower ones fell back. I could see it all happening from my spot at the back of the jeep, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
I hated jeep combat. Strolling through the Deadlands while getting ambushed by monsters? That was fine. I could understand that. Sneaking through the Under-MIZ while gangs tried to hunt me? Not my favorite but I could do it. Getting shot at while sitting in the back of an open jeep, bouncing over every rock the Deadlands wants to throw in our way? That’s a hard pass from me.
Jackie’s hands were welded to the steering wheel and she was doing everything she could to keep us in the middle of the convoy. She worked the steering wheel, eased onto the accelerator, and tapped the breaks and made dozens of other tiny adjustments that kept us planted square in the middle of the Pale Regiment vehicles.
The middle of the convoy was where the Pale Regiment had concentrated the protection, surrounding the slower supply trucks and vehicles carrying wounded soldiers with as many armed escorts as they could. If the Black Teeth were going to catch up with us - and that was looking more and more likely by the minute 0 it was the safest place we could be.
That didn’t stop me from looking over my shoulder every chance I got. Elnor and the two Pale Regiment soldiers were doing the same thing, trying to find out how safe we were and where the Black Teeth were, but we couldn’t see much because of all the sand in the air.
Every truck ahead of us kicked another wave of dirt into the air. The next vehicle swallowed it, added another cloud of its own, and then the wind picked everything up and rolled it together into an enormous brown wall that surrounded the whole convoy from every direction and cut our visibility down to zero.
It was a struggle just seeing the truck in front of us, let alone looking back to see the Black Teeth. Except…they were making their own dust cloud.
It rose above the horizon like a second storm, broad enough that I couldn’t begin to guess how many vehicles were hiding beneath it. There was a small strip of empty Deadlands separating our cloud from theirs, and I found myself staring at that empty stretch more than anything else.
The gap had originally looked comfortable. It wasn’t huge, but it was enough that we had some breathing room. Then I looked a few minutes later and that small strip of space had gotten a little bit narrower.
It wasn’t some dramatic Hollywood moment where the Black Teeth had suddenly doubled their speed and came screaming at us. It was slower than that. The distance was shrinking as both convoys raced across the Deadlands and it soon became impossible to ignore exactly what that meant.
Jackie checked the rearview mirror and watched the horizon for a second before turning back to the road. She tightened her hands around the steering wheel and frowned and pressed down on the gas a little harder.
“They’re getting a hell of a lot closer than I hoped,” she muttered. “These trucks need to find another gear.”
None of us answered her because we all knew that the trucks were doing everything they could. They’d been overloaded with ammo and medical supplies and everything else the Pale Regiment had dragged out of Devro. Wishing the trucks were faster wasn’t going to change the fact that Haynes and Vicks thought it was smart to haul half a military base across the desert.
I looked behind us again because I couldn’t help myself, and that’s when I noticed the second plume of dust behind us. It wasn’t as large as the Black Teeth’s cloud, and it wasn’t following directly behind us. Instead, it was almost running parallel to our retreat. It was close enough to keep pace but it was far enough away that it looked like it was trying to cut across our retreat instead of simply chasing us.
I’d read everyone’s comments. You all spent a bunch of time arguing about who had attacked the Pale Regiment base and somebody finally threw out a name and it clicked the moment I read it. The Alderman. Yea. You all were right.
I read the name and his face popped up in my mind and it was the same guy who’d been standing outside the base, monologuing about me minding my own business. It was the same asshole I’d run into back at Riley’s shop in The MIZ. It was the guy who’d been trying to intimidate me and Riley before the neighborhood people had chased him off.
Despite the fact that I’ve got a name to go with, I still don’t understand why he’s so obsessed with me. I get why the Black Teeth are chasing after us. I helped start a riot in the Chapel Pit, I killed a few of their people, and more than that, what you all told me is that they’re crazy enough that they don’t really need an excuse to hunt people.
But what the hell had I done to the Alderman? How long ago was all that back in The MIZ? Was it weeks? Months? Honestly, I’ve completely lost track of time because every disaster I face seems to blur into the next. I’d completely forgotten about the guy. He was just some dude I’d met back when I first got to The MIZ.
So, whatever I’d done, why hadn’t he just let it go? If I can’t remember it, it must mean that it wasn’t too bad. Spending all that time and effort to chase after me kinda seems a little ridiculous.
I was still trying to figure out what I’d done to piss him off when the radio held by one of the Pale Regiment soldiers crackled to life. Static filled the jeep before Haynes’ voice came through.
“Tighten the convoy. Rearguard, hold your spacing. Scouts move to the flanks. Keep those trucks moving. I don’t care how slow they are, don’t fall behind.”
It only took a few more minutes before the first vehicles from the Black Teeth hit us. Motorcycles came pouring through the dust cloud without any warning, their engines screaming in a high pitch as they skimmed over the ground. Right behind them were dune runners that were covered in spikes and chains and skulls, and they bounced across the Deadlands and danced over the terrain.
Bursts of gunfire cut through the sand. I didn’t know who was shooting at whom because the dust was swallowing everything. It was short, controlled bursts that echoed up and down the convoy, followed by return fire.
The motorcycles darted in close to the trucks and sprayed rounds at them and then they disappeared before the Pale Regiment soldiers could land a hit. A few seconds later they popped up from the opposite direction, took another swipe at us, and then vanished again.
The radio crackled to life and I heard Haynes shouting orders. He was screaming at drivers who screamed back at him. Everyone was talking over each other, yelling about the motorcycles as Haynes tried to keep everything from unraveling.
I glanced back and watched as several Pale Regiment vehicles deliberately peeled away from the convoy. The drivers swung them out wide to act as a wall between the Black Teeth and the slower transports.
These were the opening rounds of the battle and it reminded me of a wolf pack testing a herd of deer. They were nipping at our tails and darting in and out of our formation. It was a moving battlefield with nobody slowing down or stopping and everyone was peeling off and weaving between one another while guns fired and dust was kicked up.
Jeeps crossed in front of trucks while motorcycles threaded through the gaps. I saw one motorcycle rider get sideswiped and the bike jerked and then it cartwheeled and a Pale Regiment truck ran over it. There was a thump-thump as the Black Teeth rider fell under the wheels of the truck and the truck just kept going.
Vehicles constantly accelerated and weaved around debris and disappeared into curtains of billowing sand. One second two vehicles would be shooting at each other and the next they were hundreds of feet apart and replaced by two different vehicles.
I was caught up in the chaos of the battle even though nobody was shooting at us. My heart was pounding in my throat and every crack of gunfire had me ducking down, but no one was interested in our little jeep.
Jackie was looking at the mirror and she adjusted a few things and we settled back into the formation. She occasionally had us drifting in front of a nearby truck and occasionally had us moving back a little bit. She made sure to keep at least two vehicles between us and the motorcycles and dune buggies nipping at our heels.
I heard the roar of an engine and the burst of automatic fire. I twisted in my seat just in time to catch a glimpse of one of the Black Teeth dune runners fishtailing after a Pale Regiment rifle stitched rounds into its windshield.
The driver overcorrected and the vehicle spun sideways and surfed across the sand before a wheel dug into the ground and the whole thing flipped end over end and became nothing more than a large plume of sand.
One of the Pale Regiment cargo trucks lurched violently and Jackie weaved around them as its front tire exploded. It slid sideways and bounced and rolled into a ditch that I swear wasn’t there before. Crates burst loose from the back as the truck slammed onto its side and I had just enough time to see a few masked faces start scrambling out through the dust before we were past them.
The dust swallowed up the truck and, for an awful moment, I knew the choice that the convoy around us was making. Should they stop? Should they keep going? I was able to see the nearest Pale Regiment driver. He was in a truck and there were three soldiers in the back, shooting on anyone getting close. The driver’s mask kept the emotions off his face, but I could imagine that he was gritting his teeth and arguing with himself and he was just about to spin his steering wheel and turn around to go back for the truck when Haynes’ voice once again roared over the radio.
“Keep moving! Nobody stops! I repeat, nobody stops! Keep the convoy moving!”
The hesitation that was there disappeared and I saw the driver accelerate and soon enough none of us in the convoy were thinking about the truck that had been wiped out and the soldiers who were left without transportation because the Black Teeth were attacking again.
I ducked at the sound of the gunfire and reached into my dimensional storage space and pulled out my guitar. It probably wouldn’t help much. I was wedged into the back of the jeep with two soldiers next to me and I didn’t have room to maneuver. Maybe I could wrestle myself free if I tried, but it was awkward and cramped and if I stood up to get free there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t fall out of the jeep and be left behind.
Still, I wondered if I should start playing. My music had done something back when we’d been running from the Chapel Pit. When we’d been escaping, I’d played for Jackie and it let her push the jeep harder than she should have been able to. I still didn’t completely understand why it happened, other than “magic”, but it had worked. Maybe it could work again.
I just had no clue what “it” actually was. Should I try and play so I could inspire Jackie? Should I try to calm everyone down? Perk everyone up? Would the soldiers fight better if I somehow boosted their morale? What if I picked the wrong song and it had the exact opposite effect of what I wanted?
I thought back to all the discussions y’all have been having on this forum. A bunch of you have sent me pdfs of songs to learn and theories about what the Rockstar class is capable of and page after page of ideas about music and its power. Unfortunately, all you guys sent me were theories. I hadn’t had a chance to test any of them yet.
If I tried playing I Can See Clearly Now, would that somehow push the sand away from the convoy? Would it improve visibility and allow us to race through the dangerous terrain much faster than earlier? Would it do absolutely nothing except annoy everyone in the jeep because it would make me look like I was serenading Jackie in the middle of a rolling gunfight?
I know you’re all going to bitch me out about the fact that I haven’t been experimenting with my music, and if I were you guys I’d be right there along with you. I should be experimenting. I should be figuring out what different songs do instead of accidentally stumbling into new abilities. But when would I be able to do that? When did I have the time?
Over the last few days I’d been kidnapped, beaten, shot at, stood in the middle of a riot, chased into the Janus Storm, had to fend off a Second Fracture, dealt with the aftereffects of the House of Seasons dying, dragged into Pale Regiment bullshit, and now I was riding through the Deadlands while TWO separate armies were trying to kill me, one of which was led by an asshole who wanted to kill me for…reasons.
At no point during all that had somebody given me an afternoon free so I could just sit somewhere quietly and test out what my skills could do.
The opening rounds of the convoy fight lasted for another twenty or thirty minutes but then the Black Teeth started advancing on us. I saw a motorcycle scream past one side of the convoy while a pair of dune runners darted in from another vehicle. They were aimed at a truck that instinctively swerved away from the incoming fire and started drifting further and further away from the rest of the Pale Regiment.
Once it was a couple car lengths away, the Black Teeth pounds. They hit the truck from three different directions and poured fire into it. Another truck near us tried to fight its way over but, by that time, the Black Teeth had already peeled away in search of their next victim.
It was horrifying because of how practiced it was. You all said that the Black Teeth were experts in this type of warfare, but reading that and seeing it are two completely different things.
Jackie saw what they were doing almost immediately. The convoy started bunching up behind one of the slower cargo trucks, trying to act as a sort of wall from the Black Teeth. She gritted her teeth, checked the mirrors, and looked for an opening she could exploit.
“Hang on,” she warned us before stomping on the gas. The jeep lurched forward and bounced over broken ground and cut across the desert which let us slip around another transport. We squeezed between two trucks with barely any room and soon we were racing alongside the convoy again.
That bought us a few seconds but everyone in the jeep besides Jackie looked like they were gonna vomit. I wanted to scream at her to not do it again, but…she was gonna.
The two soldiers with us twisted around in their seats and fired into the dust whenever they caught so much as a glimpse of movement from the motorcycles. I couldn’t see what they were shooting at but I was glad they were there because it was keeping the Black Teeth from seeing us as a viable target.
Spent brass littered the floor of the jeep and the sharp smell of gunpowder mixed with the dirt and everything tasted nasty and metallic. Elnor was firing. He was in the passenger seat and was the calm center of our group. He reloaded magazines for the rifles and passed them back to the soldiers, his movements were so smooth and mechanical that I wondered how many times he’d done this before.
“Bike. Two o’clock.”
One of the soldiers swung his rifle to the right and opened fire.
“Reload.”
The empty magazine was already out of the rifle before Elnor had another one in the soldier’s hands.
“Dune runner. Left side.”
The second soldier leaned out and fired a controlled burst through a gap in the dust before dropping down in his seat as rounds snapped over our heads.
Somewhere during the running gunfight I started realizing that the ground underneath us was changing. The endless dirt and broken scrublands of the Deadlands slowly started to give way to something else. Rusted pipelines started appearing beside the road and I noticed collapsed heaps of metal that disappeared beneath the sand.
The roads changed, concrete replacing dirt, and the jeep started gaining on the rest of the convoy. I wanted to shout and clap Jackie on the shoulder and say that we were finally free because we obviously hit ground where we could start speeding up, but thankfully I didn’t. If I had, everyone in the jeep would have looked at me like I was a complete idiot.
The pavement of the roads had been abandoned for so long that huge sections buckled upwards or collapsed into sinkholes. Cracks spread all throughout the road so everything looked like spiderwebs with weeds and dead brush and entire dunes forcing their way up through the asphalt.
These roads were so much worse than the open desert. At least in the Deadlands you could weave your way around obstacles. Out here, the road decided where you went. Old industrial service roads branched off in every direction. I saw a few disappear into abandoned warehouses and some just stretched on for miles and some stopped dead maybe thirty feet from our jeep.
We were soon passing intersections, forcing the drivers to make split-second decisions about which routes were still passable and which ones would end in a dead end buried beneath decades of neglect, allowing the Black Teeth to catch up with us and carve us to pieces.
Once again, Castellan was right. We were in the Dead Corridor. And the world was closing in around us.
Back in the open Deadlands, I could look in almost any direction and see for miles. Now, enormous industrial buildings rose up out of the sand like the skeletons of dead giants. Their walls had buckled in and their windows were shattered and they were being slowly inexorably swallowed by sand.
Our escape route was feeling tighter and more claustrophobic by the minute. The sand didn’t help. You’d think, being out of the open Deadlands, the wind and dust would have let up. But it didn’t. Instead of blowing all around us, the sand swirled between the old buildings and wrapped everything up in brown so our visibility dropped even further.
Jackie had to tap the breaks and slow so she didn’t smash into one of the trucks on either side of us. We were driving through a mass graveyard of buildings, and I couldn’t help but curse at Haynes and Vicks and Castellan and all the rest of you for thinking this was a good idea.
The Black Teeth seemed energized by the changing terrain. Their vehicles flowed through the maze of abandoned roads without hesitation. I saw a few dart down side streets and disappear behind ruined factories, and I couldn’t help but think that we were about to be ambushed from every direction imaginable.
The gunfire from the Black Teeth gradually started to fade away. The constant cracks of rifles that had been following us for the last dozen miles slowly started to lessen as we pushed deeper into the Dead Corridor.
I turned back around just in time to see two of the largest Pale Regiment trucks slow down. At first I thought something had gone wrong. Maybe they’d got caught up on a sandbar or they broke a wheel or their suspension had finally given way. But then I noticed the soldiers climbing into firing positions along the side of the road, their rifles pointed back the way we’d come.
Haynes had sacrificed them. Those Pale Regiment soldiers had volunteered to stay behind. The two trucks eased behind the convoy and we pulled away from them and within another minute they’d become little more than silhouettes in the dust. They were taking up a position between the retreating convoy and the Black Teeth.
They were going to be the rearguard, meant to buy us all a little time to pick our way through the Dead Corridor and get to safety. Maybe I should have been thankful or ashamed that we couldn’t do anything for them or…I don’t know. Somber? But at that moment, all I could think was “oh, thank god it wasn’t us.”
The radio crackled again and Haynes’ voice cut through the static.
“Keep moving. Don’t stop for isolated contact. I repeat, do not stop. Rearguard elements will cover the withdrawal. Every vehicle continues through the corridor.”
Jackie didn’t need much more than that. We kept slowly inching our way up through the convoy, once again trying to put ourselves in the middle. We’d lost a bunch of trucks trying to escape from the Black Teeth, so the middle of the convoy was a bit further ahead from where it started.
The Dead Corridor closed around us with every passing mile. Roads split apart and forced us to snake our way through abandoned industrial yards. I looked out at the endless rows of abandoned factories, shattered loading docks, and cracked industrial roads disappearing into the distance and couldn’t help but think of what came next.
There was a part of me that didn’t want to be here. I thought about telling Jackie to just pick a road and go and maybe we could lose everyone in the maze of abandoned warehouses. We could hide out somewhere, find some place that was hidden from everyone else and just hang out there for the next few days and let the Pale Regiment and Black Teeth and mercenaries duke it out.
Thousands of people had driven into the Dead Corridor. It was filled with Pale Regiment and Black Teeth and mercenaries and a single jeep that didn’t belong to either side. And that fucking terrified me. I had absolutely no idea what was waiting around the next corridor and had no idea if we would be able to reach the reinforcements that Haynes and Vicks thought were coming.