Gallows Humour

The Season of the Witch

Finally, the damn village. It had been pathetically close to the car they'd made their bed. It was useless to spend energy grouching about it now, but they grouched anyway. On principal.

They passed a front lawn dotted with old graves. A season's worth of soft new wildflowers thrived over the mounds, soon they would overgrow the rocks True had placed as headstones. The village stood empty, a shell of a ghost town overrun with poplar saplings and a rampant raspberry bush. Its residents dead or gone and its remnants all looted in the earlier days. It didn't even have a name anymore. Some dumbass had robbed the town sign long before True had come along, and the place was too tiny to have a pinpoint on any map True had scoured. Although they knew generally where it would be based on bigger towns to the north and the east, so this place worked as a half decent map marker.

Nott that they would admit it out loud, but they liked the place. They liked the quiet, the isolation. Nobody bothered to stop for long because everybody knew the village, like every other small town, village, hamlet, et cetera, had been cleaned out. Nobody bothered, except True, who stopped to bury a few more ex-residents whenever they passed through.

Not this time.

There, something to grouch about. They didn't have time to stop and dig muddy holes for a couple rotting corpses because the infernal Red Faction was trying to end the world. They hoofed a hunk of broken curb. Radio skittered out of the way of the formidable concrete missile.

"Don't get in the way," they grumbled, marching past it down the center road that had one been the village's main access, shopping district, and town square all in one. Tall elms spread wide branches over the roads, saplings filled the spaces between the older trees. The pollen irritated True's allergies, but on the east end of the village a house sat back from the road, with a yard dominated by a pine tree that suffocated the encroaching wildflowers under a thick blanket of pine needles, and when it rained the air felt fresher under its branches. True couldn't really smell the pine, but they pretended the could in those rare moments.

Like the graves, the pine house would have to wait for another day. They could only afford one stop in the village.

A gas station full of rust and broken window glass was losing the battle against local flora. Grass pushed cracks through the tile floor and a chokecherry tree swarmed the west wall of the squat, square building. True argued with a tangle of determined grass for access through the front door.

"I'll light you on fire," they threatened between sneezes. Out of the corner of their eye, Radio twitched and slinked off to do whatever it did when it wasn't hovering. They should have called it Whiitigo for all the skulking it did. Wiping their nose and accompanying hole, they wedged their way into the gas station and trampled a path all around the empty shelves.

The contents of erupted milk cartons coated the insides of the glass door refrigerators. Someone had been very careful to shut each door, trapping the colony of rot inside. Turning from that disaster, they kicked around under the front counter until they scrounged up a map. The paper was soft with age, grime yellowed the edges and faded the ink. But it was legible. Swiping off the counter with a crash, they flattened the map over it. Now, how were they getting to Vancouver.

That far west was out of their usual territory. They needed a way through the mountains, preferably a straight shot but they would settle for a winding highway if they had to. Their sense of direction was decent, but they weren't keen on getting lost in the great Canadian Rockies, what with all the great Canadian angry bears and the great Canadian miserable weather.

A swish and scrunch pulled their attention to the door. They reached for their shove. If Linc or his goonies showed face in this village, True swore they would mash their noses in. Was it too much to ask for one put stop where something didn't go catastrophically wrong?