Here's the first bit of a new story I'm starting.
The idea kind of just came to me in a rush, and I'm suspending all other ongoing projects to work on it.
Also, I'm graduating this week, so I'll have plenty of time to write now.
I'll be posting the first "link" soon, it should be done this weekend, and maybe tomorrow.
Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Prologue
Sylvia dug her feet into the sand, trying to push herself up far enough under the burning sheet of metal that she wouldn’t be seen. The air was on fire. The sky was scorched, soot-black and snowing bits of gray ash that collected here and there in powdery drifts. Her broken right arm still clutched the grip of a ruined revolver, but she couldn’t force her hand to open. The arm was numb. Her mouth tasted like blood.
Amid the screams and wrenching crackle of metal burning for miles down the track behind her, Sylvia could hear the footsteps of searchers outside of her hidey-hole. She held her breath and counted the seconds. Foreign voices, male. The screech of something dying. Ice cold mountain wind howling through the shattered remnants of railcar. A pair of booted feet moved into view.
Her terrified mind drank in every detail, stretched every rotten second into an hour. The boots were made of thick, brown leather, well-worn and streaked black and grey from the accumulating ash. Woven cotton thongs interlaced up their fronts, crisscrossing at hard angles up through iron eyelets polished silver from constant friction. Riveted steel plates hung like dragon scales on spats above the boots, and, beneath them, heavy, red uniform pants. The owner of the boots turned his feet to face her.
The world seemed so quiet. She could feel the sting of every cold, raspy breath, could hear it vibrating through her chest. Her numb, broken arm began to shake, rattling the bent barrel of the revolver against the ground. Sylvia grabbed her wrist with her good hand and pulled hard. Pins and needles became daggers and spears in the bad arm, razors blades against her frail nerves that made her mind sway. Another rasping breath. Another. Another. The boots don’t move.
Sylvia blinks back tears of helpless frustration. Just do it you bastard, God damn you, just do it. Her nose was running, but she didn’t notice. How was it so quiet? A gloved hand, tooled to match the boots, reached down and wrapped its fingers around the edge of the bit of metal shielding. Sylvia’s body tensed. Her mind went black. The hand pulled her shelter up and away from her. She screamed and tried to swing the revolver around to bear, but her dumb arm ignored the command.
One of the boots flew forward in an arc, connecting with her jaw and sending her sprawling. She came to with it pressing down hard on her bad arm, and watched as the gloved hand pried the gun from her fingers and tossed it aside. Somebody grabbed her by the back of her neck, his grip nearly encircling her throat, and she was pulled to her feet. A single, gruff command and a sharp jab to her lower back.
“Walk.”
Sylvia nodded and complied. Her eyes wandered. Red-cloaked figures moved like phantoms through the white, steaming mists of the smoldering wreckage. They picked through the ruins, noiselessly going about their work as the night winds and the wounded survivors screamed around them. The railcar had derailed in the saddle between two mountains, and now lay bundled up and twisted over itself like a section of discarded intestine. Her captor moved her past a stack of bodies, all in white uniforms. The Imperium escort detail that had been sent along with the railcar.
Sylvia’s escort led her to the end of a line of other prisoners, some too wounded even to kneel, and forced her down beside them. She looked down the row, catching the frightened eyes of a few people she knew. Some of them cried, and others just stared out into the wreckage, waiting for what they knew was coming.
“No… please, no,” begged some pitiful voice from the other side of the line. Sylvia looked down to see Berthold, the assistant quartermaster, being drug away. “No, no!” She felt the entire line flinch when the gunshot rang out, quieting Berthold. A woman in the line began to cry.
A rough hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet, and Sylvia found herself muttering the same, pitiful pleas. God she wanted to die with some dignity, but her legs gave out beneath her and she was dragged the rest of the way by her scalp and dropped before another pair of boots. She sobbed, curling around her wounded arm and not bothering to wipe the mess of tears, snot and soot from her face. The hand in her hair forced her to face forward.
“Hello,” the man before her said in Caanish, the language of the mid-westerners. He was a large, grey-haired man, with a dour, bored expression and the weatherworn face of a lifelong outdoorsman. His gaze was unavoidable, and she couldn’t break eye contact with him. “Do you speak a real language?” Sylvia hesitated, confused, and he waved a hand at the man holding her hair. He began dragging her away when she found her voice.
“Yes,” she said, her words cracking on the ice in her throat. “Yes!” She screamed the second time, and the grey-haired man held up a halting hand.
“I am Colonel Foucault, commander of first mountaineers, third regiment. Who are you?” With a nod of his head the hand in her hair released her, letting her fall on her butt. She had to swallow a few times before continuing.
“Sy-Sylvia Messerschmitt, sir, I—“ Sylvia swallowed again. Her left leg shook so bad it made her rock back and forth. “I am… I am the… Steam Trainer, a Steam Trainer, for the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union. I’m… a civilian sir, please, I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody wants to die, Sylvia Messerschmitt of the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union,” Foucault said. He gestured to the soldier behind her and, with a complicated series of hand gestures, to the row of prisoners. Tears streamed down her face as the soldiers began systematically executing the prisoners. “Thank your God that you are useful to me. You will see the sun rise today.” Sylvia sucked breath into her lungs, forcing herself to breathe through the tears.
“Thank you,” she said. A stream of blood began moving down the hill, cutting a path through the ash. Its tributaries grew with every gunshot, thickening the stream into a river that plunged, hot and steaming, ever westward. The soldier helped Sylvia to her feet, a bit more easily this time. “Thank you.”
