Ghost Towns by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781644703281
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Scene Eleven

Laney didn’t like to call up the old memories. Buried was a good place for them. She was always surprised that she hadn’t been buried with them.

Sometimes, they bubbled to the surface, and she had to deal with them.

Like now.

Tracks. Evidence of humans walking around, and not just large animals. Not like bears. They had a specific spoor, as did most things.

Lots of worlds out there that had been terraformed in some distant past, but nobody really knew when. Or by whom, but there had been an apocalyptic interlude along the way that made the bloody Lorastir revolution of her youth look like a picnic softball game by comparison.

Laney moved up next to Captain Sladek and knelt. Boot marks. Modern. Cheap, because they’d hired a cobbler to resole their boots, but hired an amateur. Or a drunk. Asymmetric, not as a fashion statement. Smooth, though.

She studied the print.

The soil around here was usually damp, but it felt like the dry season on this world. Or at least this part. Not fresh, which was really her first worry.

Someone had walked here after enough rain that the roadway itself had gotten a little slushy. Stepped just so and sank enough to leave a mark, but only the one, before getting back onto the hardpan.

Then the sun had come out and everything had dried in place.

Little weathering, so less than a few months, depending on climate conditions she didn’t know. Older than a week.

She looked up at the anxious faces.

“Recent, but not that recent,” she pronounced. “Maybe a month.”

She watched the Captain’s face go through the usual calculations you got with someone in charge. Weighing odds and options.

Laney had never been an officer, except on paper. To give her a uniform she could wear when the brass insisted on it because seeing someone in civilian attire inside their headquarters offended them.

Bright, shiny peacocks, the lot of them. Noisy and annoying.

Laney had kept such visits as rare and short as possible.

But she knew commanders. Tessa Sladek-Barton was a good one.

“Do we know how many people there are?” she asked. “Or were?”

Laney looked down. One male, from the size. Tall but not that heavy. Walking that direction.

Laney rose and moved forward slowly, eyes down but the pistol she’d brought with her in hand now, though she couldn’t remember drawing it.

Some things got to be automatic after a while. Like those old memories and old skills that wouldn’t stay buried.

She supposed that her nightmares would again be especially vivid for a while.

Fool had been walking on damp ground. And staying off to one side, right along the verge with the grass, which made no sense.

Unless the roadway was packed so well that it turned into a lake in the rainy season.

Laney could see folks not taking the time to trench, gravel, sand, and slope a roadway properly for drainage. Took a lot of work. And you tended to make your roads straight when you did it that way.

Cattle trail.

“One person on this trail,” Laney said. She couldn’t help it that her voice fell to a whisper.

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