Vintage Memories

Chapter Twenty-Nine (Part Two) "Changing; It Rests"

It was Sunday— Sinday as he and Cherri joked on better days not besmirched by quarreling —when he had learned of this new territory. When he approached the border, walled off in temporary construction site fencing, it was late Thursday afternoon. He had called off his work shift for this, and now began to wonder if he made the right choice.

He was left nonplussed by the bare-bones blueprint of what would soon be a booming town. It looked haunting. The wooden skeletons of buildings loomed above him with an unwelcoming leer. Dust flared with every strike of a hammer or thrust of a shovel, tickling his nose and the back of his throat.

This controlled chaos and the fear of garnering all attention kept him still, hesitant to step past the property line. The northern side of the city was an area he rarely trekked. He felt out of place amongst the affluent and influential.

But he bottled these anxieties down each time he set off in quest of Allen. A little discomfort was worth the chance of finding him.

Demons scurried about the incomplete streets, working with a focused, fearful nature, as if they had been cowed into overtime. Anthony weaved between them, careful not to bump into any laborers and start a scuffle.

"On your right!"

Anthony heard it coming up quickly behind him, and took an overcompensating step to the left to make room. A burly, dragon-like demon passed him without slowing or diverting, two hulking bags of who-knew-what draped over his slouching, lamellate shoulders.

Anthony suddenly sensed another presence behind him and weaved out of the way of a brick-layer; feline-like, with a brick trowel raised threateningly in his orange-furred hand like a knife.

"Watch where you're going, you putz!" the layer snarled.

Anthony looked down and realized he had stepped too far and inadvertently knocked a brick from its line. He hurried on, throwing an insincere apology over his shoulder.

"Asshole..."

There was a peculiar air of normalcy about this partial town. It guided him through the streets with a pleasant nudge. Insight hit him at all angles, like how he anticipated an alley to come up on his right a block before he passed it; or how, as he spotted an empty veranda and the wooden framework of its soon-to-be building, he had a strong inclination that it was destined to be a café. The lithic steps leading to the building beside it caught his attention too; he suddenly wished to sit upon them and drift away into stories.

He wanted to explore that questionable-but-likable sensation and the town that stirred it, but Cherri's warnings pealed in his mind.

"I heard the guy in charge is a real maniac... and doesn't take kindly to strangers wandering around his area."

He was terrified, so much so, he wasn't even ashamed of it. His four arms came up and encircled him as he carried onward. He had never come face-to-face with an overlord before, and had only stories to serve as proxy experience.

These kinds of records were not ones he kept up-to-date on. The politics and bureaucratic bullshit of Hell snagged none of his interest. But in the days leading up to this, Cherri had relayed to him accounts of this demon razing territories that ruled for centuries to the ground, as if they were made of popsicle sticks and cotton balls. Few who landed on this entity's bad side lived to warn others against it. She tried to shake the resolve out of him.

He remained steadfast, but cagey. An internal gauge, one he finely tuned through years of walking the streets, told him he best keep his bluetalk to a minimum. This overlord didn't seem like the type who was easily swayed with charm.