COMPLETE! The Wasteland. A woman screams in the night. Spotlights flash on a pile of dust in the desolate patch of land that lay just beyond the tall crosses that picket the boundary of Encampment R-34. A group of curious students leave their bunkho...
MELL'S NOTES BOOK September 14, 2245 Entry #5 - Handwritten
My conscience is telling me not to write about what I found. If someone ever reads this, they will split Bryne and I. Especially with the way they treated the wanderer out there today. I must talk about this first. I don't know how much light I have before everyone wakes, so I'm not going to mention anything about Edie's condition worsening, or about Felicity's argument with Paisley last week that left my old classmate with a black eye. I'm just going to get right to it. To the discovery.
As I wrote last time, Bryne and I had been separated for a while. Although we were both pinned with General Task, we had not yet been able to work side by side. Not until the project meant for us had been approved. We were right. They're expanding the encampment. It's been over a month since I last wrote because every night I go to sleep I'm more tired than the last. We have excess energy to burn, they say, and the expansion process takes a long time.
Every day we plant the crosses that we built the night before. Then we make new fencing and mend the old. My hands are covered in small cuts from handling the razor wire, making it hard to write. General Ireath believes it will take years before we fully achieve our goal, which is much larger than we ever grasped. Almost two miles from our encampment, on the opposite end of the valley, is the remains of a former encampment. Number R-13. The hill dividing us is tall enough that none of the inhabitants of R-34 knew that we were so close to a ghost town. Except for the Scavers, that is. When Bryne and I were first led over Valley Hill by General Ireath, we couldn't believe our eyes. According to the oldest members on the Elder Council, R-13 had fallen to destruction more than fifty years ago and was now completely overrun by nature. The crosses are fallen and in pieces. The fences are torn open like a gaping wound. And the buildings are half-destroyed. Vegetation has taken over where human life had dispersed, almost completely covering the paths between the ruined buildings.
It took a few weeks for us to move our temporary fence close enough that we could safely wrap the first of fifteen buildings in a picket boundary. It was dangerous work because there was nothing to protect us from the infected. General Ireath told us not to explore the ruins, and to be concerned with the construction of the boundary, but since Bryne and I were left alone most of the time, we decided to break with procedure. We knew it was wrong to go against our job-head, but what we discovered made it worth the risk.
This afternoon, we searched the decrepit courtyard of R-13 in search of anything remarkable. It's twice the size of Townsquare. Really, their entire encampment is twice the size of ours. It's difficult to know what the buildings had been used for, since it's all been thoroughly picked over. There's still some rusted-out junk hiding between the weeds, but nothing we wanted to bring back to R-34. Feeling adventurous, Bryne climbed to the second story of the largest structure.
"Is she coming?" he asked, while shimmying along the broken wall of one building to reach the windows of the next.
"No," I assured. "I just thought I saw something at the top of Valley Hill. Keep going. If I see her, we have at least fifteen minutes to get back to the pickets."
Bryne nodded, recalling why we had moved faster this morning. We made sure our work was finished, so they could never know that we took a break to explore the ancient encampment. He quickened his pace to reach the window. I didn't need any assistance getting to the second floor, myself, but I took Bryne's hand and allowed him to pull me up.
This was the fourth building we had searched. The other three were empty, except for some scraps of metal, drawings on the walls, and splatter that looked eerily similar to the floors of Hospital House on the day Edie was brought in with that gunshot wound. Death had happened there. Based on what we saw, it was a lot of death. Those who lived at Encampment R-13 did not move on peacefully to the Neverdowns. But this building was the largest and most difficult to enter, so we were looking forward to searching its contents.
It was as dark as Lightless Night in there until we freed the windows. Seems like the Encampers had barricaded themselves in that building. Bryne thinks it was their last stand against the infected. I wish I knew what made the infected so scary, or even how they were infected. We've never gotten any answers. If our friends knew what we had done, they'd have thought we were foolish for investigating the building without knowing what even makes us different than the infected. Bryne and I have no idea what distinguishes them from us, we just knew not to interact with anyone outside the encampment walls. Looking back, it was stupid to search that building unaccompanied, even if it was obvious that no one was living at R-13.
General Ireath made it clear that the Scavers had cleaned out the buildings of anything useful ages ago, but Bryne and I needed this. We needed something important we could connect on. And, although we didn't want to say it out loud, there was no telling when we'd get the chance to be alone again, or to ever step a foot past the encampment walls. I realize now how scary it is out there without the protection of the boundary crosses. I don't think I could survive in the wasteland. Not alone. I am still curious, though. Especially after seeing the man out beyond the desolate patch this afternoon. I'll get to him later.
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