Dust King - Peseo Waterfront
Dust blew out a long sigh, an wiped his forehead with a kerchief. He sat staring at the dockworkers absently for several moments, rubbing his chin, lost in thought. He sat up slowly, nodding his head back and forth. He cracked his knuckles and stretched his arms before beginning. "Alright, Alexis. I have a story.
"It was two years ago, during the wet season in Vempeethe. My crew, consisting of myself, another eight men, and a few sturdy oxen, generally make a run there before the rains set in, to deliver food, blankets, and some other supplies to help get the village through the wet season. Vempeethe gets a steady supply of food from some of the mushrooms they grow there, but its not enough to make up for the inability to forge the surface when the rains turn the jungle in that area into a complete bog.
"Our crew made it to Vempeethe easily. We generally run the route a few times per year, and the massive pythons that sometimes roam the region usually scare the raiders away. So we made it in good time, with no events, when the storms set in. Now, Vempeethe is in a large valley, and quite a lot of water pools there when it rains. This was the largest rainstorm I had seen in my entire life. The air felt more water than not. We ended up having to ride out the storm in the caves and mines with the locals.
"We ended up having to practically seal the cave entrances to keep the water out. My men and I worked day and night, setting up sandbags, making wood and earth barricades, and bailing out what we could to help the locals keep the city dry. The rain lessened after a few days, but was still coming down hard. It would have needed to stop raining entirely, and had a few days of sun after that, before we could hope to start moving, and even then, we would have been slogging through waist deep water, and shin deep mud. But luck wasn't on our side, and it kept raining. In the meantime, strange things started to occur."
Dust got quiet, and slowly sipped from his canteen. He stared out at the green-blue river absently, his mind clearly elsewhere. Jeremy worked silently, doing his best to muffle the noises he made as he continued to cook. He was listening intently, having never heard the tale before. The few other patrons at the nearby stools had also begun to listen in, abandoning their conversations, and occasionally whispering to each other in slight murmurs. Dust continued his tale.
"We took the time afterwards, in our brief moments of reprieve, to begin selling our wares. It became apparent, however, as we took inventory, that we had lost one of the ox in the rain as we had entered. It had gotten bogged down, stuck in the mud, and in the rush to safe ourselves, in the confusion and noise of our rush to get to Vempeethe, we had forgotten about it. It damned us.
"Vempeethe, as you know, is entirely underground. A common misconception is that they use torches for their light. They do not. They use lamps. They burn cleaner, provide better light, and arent nearly as cumbersome as wooden torches, which have to be chopped and carefully dried, seasoned and stored for the wet season, which is too much of a hassle. Instead, they simply use oil lamps, despite the expenses. Now, the ox was laden with supplies like all the others, although this one, younger, and on its first trip, was burdened with lighter goods. It had a few blankets and some trinkets we were selling, but it also carried one thing in particular, one thing that damned us. It carried many gallons of kerosene.
"Normally, other traders come and sell kerosene as well, sharing the burden of lighting Vempeethe with us, and keeping the lamps shining throughout the year. Unfortunately, these caravans never came. They were lost in the storm or turned back. The precious oil never came.
"The rain continued for two weeks. And for those two weeks, water continued to seep its way into Vempeethe, despite the city's best efforts. The lower mines were flooded, mining operations ground to a halt, and the lamps flickered out, one by one. The city grew in, hiding away from the dark and the water, huddled around the few fires they had, made from scrapping furniture, and breaking down whatever dry wood they could find, without destroying the wooden supports of the city's tunnel's and bridges.
"On the sixteenth day of the monsoon, as the bonfire began to flicker low, we began hearing screams. People started going missing. At first, we thought they simply fell in the dark, snapped their neck, drowned, or simply got lost. Searching though the cold dark, armed with poor, flickering flashlights, the men and I stumbled upon a body. Or, more accurately, the remains of a body.
"Half eaten, limbs torn from the sockets, intestines strewn about the macabre carnage carelessly, skull smashed open and brain nowhere to be found. Gods, we couldn't even tell what gender they used to be. It was horrifying. It was brutal. It was beyond animalistic.
"From the dark about us we hard shuffling, coming from multiple directions. Shortly after, as we began to look about frantically, we began to hear it, low at first, but rising in volume quickly. Laughter. This dark, maniacal laughter, coming from everywhere around us, echoing in the dark of the caves. I don't even know how to describe it properly. It wasn't human.
"We spent the next day, scrambling our way through the mines, running from... whatever these things were. We didn't know the way back, only that we needed to go up, and try to find the village from there. We lost the people one at a time. Sometimes, they went screaming into the black. Sometimes, they just disappeared. One put the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. When we finally found the low burning bonfire of the village, there were three of us left. The other two broke formation, rushing ahead to the village, leaving me with a flashlight and my ten millimeter. I tripped, stumbled, and fell, spawling out on the cold hard stone. The flashlight went spinning out of my grasp, but I managed my hold on the pistol.
"I found myself face to face with one of the monsters that had been tailing us, and stealing people. It was this hunched over creature, standing nearly seven feet even with the hunch. It walked on two legs, and resembled some sort of terrible, twisted man. It was covered head to toe in lean, black muscle, stark in contrast to the white bones that were visible beneath its sickly, translucent skin. I fired my gun until the clip was empty. I wounded it badly, and ran.
"There's something you have to keep in mind. My gun, this ten millimeter, pre-war handgun, the most reliable weapon I have ever had the fortune of wielding, is powerful. I've taken down everything from rampaging shadow bears with a round to the skull to rampaging river lizards with a shot straight through the shell with this gun. It was loaded with ten millimeter explosive rounds. I fired this gun thirteen times at point blank range. Thirteen times, until it was clicking empty. I dropped every round straight into that thing's chest. I didn't miss.
"It hit the ground heavily, but I could still hear it trying to give off a warped, damaged, laugh as it lay dying on the ground. The amount of damage that thing took and lived through was unreal.
"We recovered the kerosene the next day, gave it to them, and left there as quick as we could. That was the last time I went to Vempeethe. I've been doing runs to Tutuko now, mostly, and rarely Onac."
Dust smiled bitterly. "There are some things out there we can't begin to understand. I can't say I know too much about your father, but sometimes, we prefer not to share all our tales. You encounter things while travelling that you can only hope to survive, and when you do, you try to keep close to you. Just pray you never encounter one of those things." He paused, and kicked at one the his stool's legs with his heel. "I'm sorry. It probably wasn't the story you wanted to hear, but it was what came to mind."
