>>5864351You glance out the window again. You could still swear that there were things out of the corner of your vision, only ever seen in periphery when you looked left and right. They danced around the freshly turned soil at the base of each buoy, where the support rods had been driven into the earth.
“Hey, Errat?” You tilt your head at it. “Who actually sets <span class="mu-i">up</span> these-”
Something briefly brushes the hull of Cad's vehicle, and then flits back towards the horizon with incredible, luminous speed.
A sound like a high-pitched, distant <span class="mu-i">drone</span> sounds. The voice of a thousand spinning motors joining together into a chorus, rather than an ear-splitting screech. Something <span class="mu-i">pulses</span> through the air, hitting your whole body like you've been thrown to the ground and making every lumen on the dashboard glow painfully bright for a brief instant.
And then they all go out.
The stablights of Cad's truck in front of you go out as well, and you don't even have to look back to see that Liv's have also gone, as the line of reflectors stretching into the horizon vanish in an instant, plunging you and Errat into complete, total blackness. You barely have time to process that before you <span class="mu-i">lurch</span> forward in your seat. The engine lets out a lone whine, sputtering and making an odd grinding noise as if it was choking, Errat turning the wheel in surprise as the power cuts and the two of you glide to a stop.
Without light, you can only hope that you don't accidentally collide with Cad, or Liv into you. You feel the entire truck rolling to the left as Errat pulls over to avoid hitting one of the buoys in the blackness.
A faint shuffle comes to your left, and you hear the slight leather slip as Errat pulls the vox unit free from above. There's a click as he depresses the contact, but there's no characteristic <span class="mu-i">hiss</span> of static, no confirmation click. “Cad? Cad!” He calls into the unit, then letting go. “Great. Okay, you wait here- actually, no, maybe you should make sure Liv is-”
Your hand find his shoulder, and you surprise yourself with how tightly you're gripping his arm. “Errat. Do you hear that?”
There was a... you can't call it anything else but a <span class="mu-i">rumbling</span>. It was like the road noise you heard when moving, but the two of you were no longer moving. And it was getting loud. Far louder than the convoy had ever been on it's own.
>"...you need to get the truck started.">"Think we can get out and run?">"We need to talk to Cad, right now.">"Get your gun.">[Write-In] 