Vicesimus Nonus Gradus

Woe am I, the wanderer of that steaming country. Steaming with the phantoms of the masses, steaming with the victory of war. Woe am I, who art alone, and who travel that desolate land in search of they who would offer a scrap of their dog meat in trade of tales from the steaming land where tales are made and shared no more.

Then on a red day, when the bleeding sunlight purged forth from the black clouds like blood from the cracks in a scab, I chanced upon they the People of Ancient Huetter where Theft is a Crime Never Wrought. What devilish drive led me out to that portion of our forefathers’ now-accursed land I shall not ever know nor understand. Their rarity, the curiosity of their home, it is the envy of all the Survived. An envy the Survived hold dormant, for it is uninspired, for they yet know not that the People exist. And they are still not known, except to the woeful bloodied and muddied pages of this journal, for they have stapled my lips to secrecy with regards to their station in life.

Drab are the walls, and parched are the pigments of their former colorful luster, of course. But sound is the structure of their homes, and clasped together yet are the boards of their walls! On the Day of Quaking, we woe Survivors believed that not a single support of the bygone Earth should be left upright, but that all should be eviscerated or knocked away by the blasts. Truthfully, it is not so. Rightly too, the reader supposes, that the People have rebuilt their homes. Yea, yea, this they have. But their new homes are of a different architecture, a new architecture informed by their new, undead culture and the demands of a barren, unending prairie. But here, among these fortresses are homes of the times before, untouched indeed by the Quaking!

Let me dawdle no more on architecture and report, privately of course per our sacred agreement with the People, on the true curiosity of these People. In the center of their town—which is yet paved! Oh, the wretched pave of the ancient roads I thought mine eyes would never meet again—lays a car with paint long stripped by the Quaking and the Elements which followed, with rubber long decayed and blown by wind away from its wheels, with glass long busted apart and scattered for miles in that steaming land, in such wretched disrepair as to be quite possibly mistaken for an ancient and strange bear trap of the most inhumane kind.

Yet e’ry day a man as old as the land itself, it would seem, and as wrinkled as a water’s surface which has but just received a boulder unto itself, sets himself upon a folding chair with rusted legs and rusted joints, rusted like those of his body, and observes the careful keeping of the car that its condition may not be rendered worse. If such a frame were to exist in the steaming land, out of the bounds of merry Huetter, confidently I report that many an animal would kindly nest within its ancient make. Yet no such animal has ever bedded, not so much as an insect, would dare enter the car under the clouded and blind eye of the man whose age is unknown to all.

When the woeful I confronted the old man, I begged of him an answer; “for what reason do you set yourself upon that rusted chair in defense of this ancient frame?”

He has told me never more than this, that at one time far before the Elements washed it surely away, there was a sticker on the paint of the frame of the car which read “This is Not an Abandoned Car.”

Color me stunned as you will, and I assure you your image is not saturated enough.

Recognize as well that on e’ry fifth day, the People would gather themselves like clockwork around the car, and sing into the sky. The keeper of the car, on these fifth days, would stand rather than sit on his chair. When their singing was o’er, a new person on each fifth day would speak for some time, from the sun’s forty-fifth to its sixtieth degree, then all would recite an incantation and depart, ne’er to return save for the next fifth day. Scared I was to e’r inquire as to these fifth days, and observe them from quite far away only e’er would I, so that woeful I could not hear the strange mutterings which they set forth around the car.

Yea, that car, set in the highest and flattest part of their Sanctuary in the steaming land, was well-afforded the attention of that man on the four days twixt the fifths and by the whole of the People on the fifth.

Save for these oddities, the functioning of those People were quite as one would expect in the wake of the Quaking, for any man and woman who need survive in the steaming land. A number of them collect water from the river, from the burning rain, and they are the ones who set their stores to the filter. Others often meet outside in the brown grass and compete with the sticks which stand in for swords, or swing their empty firearms to and fro like one would in the ancient wars. Ne’er did I hear a round disperse from those clay-stained barrels, for I believe they are too valuable in the steaming land to be put to waste, otherwise they live in fear that upon the first shot their rusted barrels would expire violently and kill him or her who pulled the fire-stick by its own self-destruction. 

On the fortieth-and-third day after my introduction to the People, lo! The car was gone, disappeared from the eyes of all forever and ever. Ne’er did we find tracks, or ancient tools which would enable locomotion of that frame, nor any other indication of the frame’s resurrection to car-hood of the ancient age. Yet gone it was! Curious was my woeful self to see what might happen on that fortieth-and-sixth day (for this would be the next fifth). Woeful I was surprised at the dispassion the People felt at the disappearance of their idol, their blesser of the crops and their filterer of the waters. Yet on that fortieth-and-sixth day they did gather, the man with unknown age among them, and recited their rituals as I have previously detailed within these stained pages. And ne’er was a tear shed for the car, and it seemed to be removed from memory as easily as a paperclip from a stack of papers. This I, my woeful I, should know, for these pages on which I write are held together by none other than a paperclip foraged from the steaming land, the land of mourning and undead souls, which roam eternally searching for the eviscerated remains of their blasted bodies, unable even to settle for their shadows of deaths which have themselves long been scratched away by the elements of unmerciful nature itself.