Chapter 3: BANG (Part 1)

The yellow sheet vanished, leaving Milo to stare at bare air.

Shortly after, the black wall faded and the roar softened to a hiss and died. Where the tornado had been, a dead town lay beneath a dishwater sky, with one boy at its center.

Milo blinked and flexed the ankle.

"Ouch!"

So. Alive.

Schizophrenic too, maybe.

For proof that all of this just happened he had one sprained ankle, except it was earned in the run, not the encounter. And, of course, a yellow sheet he couldn’t exactly show around.

Notices were supposed to be white and smooth, with neat ink. His looked as though someone had left it balled up in a coat pocket for years.

But first things first: out of the middle of the wreckage.

The street had disappeared under bodies and shredded roofs.

He swept the field with his gaze five times, finding the crossroads on the last one. Them, the crater where the tree had stood, and finally the old road between the ruins.

Each step on the bad ankle sent a sting up his shin.

Very alive.

Milo managed ten steps before accepting a limp, and another twenty before wondering why Layla had not started shouting at him yet.

He checked the spot where the two figures had waited. Empty.

Were they... dead?

His next steps came quicker at the thought, ankle be damned.

If the storm had widened on its way out, if it had reached the two of them... The picture painted itself: a pink-haired body in the ash, Milo crouched beside it, checking for salvage out of habit.

She would have the little water flask inside her left coat panel, its cork wrapped in pink thread so she could find it in the dark.

Having passed yet another corpse, he looked up from the ash to check the edges of the devastation again.

At last, two small shapes emerged over the flat ground beyond the ash, pink hair on the left one, dimmer colors hurrying a few strides behind.

Runners. Cowards, though he was glad to be calling them that instead of corpses. Back now to pick over whatever was left of him.

Milo raised an arm and waved like this was a scheduled pickup.

A couple of steps in, his boot hooked on something solid.

Just as he thought the collapses were done for the day, the bad ankle folded.

"Shit!"

Pain radiated all the way up to his hip.

Milo staggered sideways, muttered a second shit, and looked down for the culprit.

His boot had snagged on the edge of a plank. What lay underneath it made him regret every vulgarism at once.

Something gold showed where the wood had lifted.

A dull gleam of it, forearm-long, shaped like a pistol.

He dropped, knees in the ash, no thought spared for the ankle, and got the thing up out of the dust with both hands.

Years of ash, and here it was: heavy, cool even in gloved hands, his, the kind of find nobody called Ashpicking.

The same creased yellow paper snapped open beside him. Ink lines formed one by one with a dry scritch-scritch!

[ Grade: Crude ]

[ Name: Wooden Pistol ]

[ Type: Arms ]

[ Longevity: Minute ]

[ Mercies: None ]

[ Litany: Unavailable ]

[ Description: A wooden pistol with limited longevity but efficient shots. ] 𓂃🖋

Aha.

A wooden pistol. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He rolled it over in his gloves.

The wood was, in fairness, very golden. Handsome lacquer, not a pinprick anywhere in the grain. Its only flaw was being firewood with a trigger.

A stupid Crudepiece. The bottom rung of the whole ladder, the trash an Ashpicker dug up a few times in a good year and sold for soup.

Milo stayed on his knees anyway, thumb tracing the lacquer.

"Come to think of it," he said to the empty field, "I’ve never handled a gun."

He tossed it from one hand to the other, feeling out the balance.

After that, he fitted it into a proper grip.

BANG!

The pistol kicked. Milo flinched back on his knees.

Ten paces away, a dead man’s shoulder jerked. The report echoed over the empty ruins while Milo stared at the body, both hands clamped around the weapon.

He limped over to inspect the damage, but the ball had gone too deep to see. A bruised hole leaked two dark drops down skin gone gray.

Efficient shots, yeah.

Milo straightened up, ears going warm.

Oh. Right.

Layla and Henry had made it to the edge of the field and no farther. Toes to the ash line, both of them, right where the grass gave out. The storm was over, the clouds had settled into one seamless gray, and that line might as well have been a fence.

So he covered the distance himself, pistol dangling from one hand.

"You’re fine?" The instructor looked ready to grab him and check personally, but stopped at the grass line. "Nothing broken? You’re fine?"

"I’m fine."

Layla exhaled and bent over her knees.

"How?" She came back up wet-eyed and furious about it. "How are you fine? That thing closed over you."

"I got to the eye of the storm. It was a tornado. The middle’s calm." Milo shrugged. "You wait it out, it moves on."

"Was there a Host?" Henry’s voice dropped low.

Milo gave a small laugh, though his pulse quickened. "Well, I’m here, aren’t I?"

After the laugh came a cough. Reaching for his mouth tipped him sideways, pain wringing a grunt behind his teeth.

Henry staggered a step back. "Don’t move. Are you sure you’re alright?"

"Of course I’m alright—"

The sentence started at full volume and finished as a whisper.

In a field where the dead wood came speckled red, he’d coughed. Plague-red, if his luck ran true.

Back in the Eye, he’d asked the paper if he was dead, if he could wish to be. Nothing about the red-speckled wood. Now, when his lungs itched... where was the damn thing?

Say the word Plague out loud and he knew where it ended: a locked ward, and a bill for every night spent in it.

"I’ve been in a tornado. Anyone would cough."

"Didn’t you shout Plague?" Layla cut in. "Right before the wall came down, you shouted Plague."

Henry looked down at the ash on his sleeve.

"No." Milo pronounced the next word carefully, like the problem was her hearing. "I shouted plaque."

"What plaque?"

"I didn’t read it." He gestured at the field, which was mostly walls, all of them lying down. "But there was a plaque. On a wall."

Henry brushed his sleeve, smearing the gray film deeper into the cloth.

The instructor went pale as he realized that Layla’s pink coils were powdered with the same ash.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "BANG (Part 2: Finale)" ... ⤵︎ [!]