Everywhere were the signs of violent death and quick destruction. It didn't matter if the victim had been women, children, old, young, whatever - they'd been killed by one method or another.
The conquerers hadn't apparently even bothered to take anything. Or had they?
Ranma noticed the trail while scavenging some kind of hardware store. The battery or electric items seemed pretty useless, but there were plenty of hand tools made of nifty materials and a large knife was a good survival tool even if your punches could shatter concrete.
The trail had been made by a lot of those sword-armed thingies all wandering in a pack and going from building to building.
Curious, Ranma stowed another pack on a shoulder, picked up an empty pack and set out along that trail. Whatever these guys had been looking for, they'd made a mess in the search.
They'd gone over bodies here, so that meant these guys were dead when the sword-arms came by. The slaughter had been over when these guys gathered and started the search?
Ranma finally found where the trail had bypassed a building in the shadow of that "splash" he'd seen earlier. The building bore scores of slash marks but hadn't been opened and the doors were wedged shut by the way the earth had rippled near the splash.
One wall was cracked up near the roof from where a piece of the splash had fallen down and hit the building.
Ranma checked it out, finally shrugged and started shoving his packs through before wriggling through it himself.
The inside was disappointing. Some kind of storehouse that held mechanical supplies and things he couldn't guess the function of.
While he was searching though, he noticed something he thought he could use. What looked like an old style of helmet with goggles that could be dropped into place. That sort of thing could be handy with dust storms and the like.
Ranma took it off the peg it was hanging from and tried it on, pleased at the fit. Even more pleased when he noticed the goggles seemed to increase the amount of light he could see. As dark as it got in this city, something like that could come in quite handy.
clik
Ranma immediately noticed the little puff of dust at the peg that had held the helmet. The peg moved?
After realizing that he hadn't blown up, Ranma pushed it the rest of the way up.
A panel of tools swung partway out and ground to a halt. Ranma looked in the blackness behind it, then wrenched the door the rest of the way open.
With the goggles over his eyes, Ranma could see inside the cubicle to a ladder leading down.
Checking his day planner and finding no pressing appointments, Ranma descended into the darkness under the city.
There was a bad moment about halfway down when he heard the door above him swing close and latch, but Ranma decided to continue down rather than panic.
At the bottom of the ladder he found his first intact body. Apparently someone had been climbing down, was dislodged by a tremor (evidenced by little pieces of wall and dust) and fallen. Since the ladder was maybe a hundred meters long, the person had either been stunned or knocked out and they'd just quietly decomposed. Though after fifty plus years it didn't smell as bad as it would have earlier.
The smell was still pretty bad as Ranma made his way through the near darkness, thankful for the way the goggles turned darkness into a green-tinted corridor that ramped slowly down further.
Which was when he got to a catwalk and discovered:
(Posted Sat, 13 Dec 2003 13:25)
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