Quoted By:
You stand between the rapidly destabilizing shack and the concrete hatch of your bunker, hearing lights scrapes of scrap metal along the stone as the quickly approaching winds make their way across the barren wastes. The conditions out here worsen, somehow, by the minute as the warbled mass of light you used to know as the sun attempts to beat through swathes of quickly darkening fog, light greens quickly sinking into darker hues as dusk is on its way.
The smoke from the plane certainly doesn’t help, you almost subconsciously avoid it, your survival trained mind instead focusing on your myriad of plans, the exact timing of the dismantling process for the panels, the logistics of elaborate war torn scrap positioning in an attempt to make natural looking cover, anything to avoid the fattening black cloud flowing forth from your old shed. Even through the damp spore pocked cloth draped about your face the tendrils of the plane’s smoke gnaw at you, too thick, you’ll head into the shed in just a moment. You have to.
Sauntering away from that smoldering wreck with as much urgency as you can muster in this low visibility you begin to up your pace, hustling across the barren earth as jostling breezes escalate into howling winds. Wreckages groan and light objects are toppled and strewn across the planes, dust is kicked up, and kicked up some more, it’s nearly as suffocating as the smoke. Clouds of dirt and grime kick past your visor at rapid pace as you kneel at the foot of your solar panel arrays, gloved hands intricately weaving between wires and tools and screws, loosening and pulling at various fixtures. Taking it down piece by piece.
You didn’t even realize you were doing it until the first panel lied in front of you, it’s your second nature. A process so ingrained you weren’t even aware, you’re barely cognizant of it as one panel becomes two which becomes three and as it continues and blurs past your eyes through the picking up waves of rolling dirt you only stop at what you deem to be out of place sounds amidst the stampede. Muffled footsteps, thuds, bending and cracking of floors, it has to be. You swear that you can hear it. Grinds of metal too heavy to be strewn by the dust cloud and its fierce winds, it’s that fucking gunman it has to be.
You can picture an ideal vantage point, several of them, taking your pick as you do. its as if you were looking down on yourself now through the glass of a scope. You feel the weight of the gun, the indomitable force of the scope sighting you in and your body laying directly in the center of the line of fire. Your mind digs into the mental image as you work at your last panel with a tightness in your chest.
