UN VERS TY R D
Oct. 7th, 2014 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyForty-five miles from here, if the maps are right, is the center of Philadelphia. The scorpions are long since faded into the distance. The wreck of Wilmington isn't worth probing or pursuing. The Old Post Road runs through here, and while it's the kind of thing that attracts unsavory attention, it's the best guide they have; they'll follow it as far as they can.
Thing is.
The old raised-roads, the ones that raiders and wanderers and townsfolk alike build their sheet-metal fortresses on? Those don't stop anywhere. They bleed off long strips that run down to the ground and maybe, maybe into the edges of ruins, into other roads that run to places where there used to be more. The raised-roads go from one place to another and they don't slow down for anything, not unless time or the bombs or the black rains or something else tore them apart.
The Old Post Road's not like that. The people in Bel Air mentioned it first, and the people at Octorara Farm confirmed it. It ran from town to town once, and it ran into them and through them. People might live there now, or they might not, but they did live there before, is the thing. There's buildings snugged right up to its wreck in some places. In others there's open bald spots where there used to be something; no one seems to know what most of those are now. Probably they won't ever find out. Probably it doesn't matter.
But in some places, if you're following the Old Post Road and you look out over the bald spot with the skeletons of machines that might've been Vertibirds' cousins once, all picked bare and torn apart... if you look out over that and you think about it too much and you have to look away, you catch sight of other things. Not all pulled up close to the Post Road, but close enough to it to make you wonder.
And maybe you see a sign. Not a whole one, the black rains here were as corrosive and as poison as anywhere else in the days after the War and the signs're stripped half bare, but what isn't stripped on this one reads UN VERS TY R D.
It's not all that far out of your way. Maybe a quarter of a mile, tops. Why not mention it to the others? Pull off the road for a bit, see whether that stood for anything interesting once? The Brahmin could use a rest, after all. You'll be in Philadelphia tomorrow or the day after. A pause won't hurt.
It's Knight Conklin's job to get the Brahmin unloaded and cared for at the rest stop. It's Knight Kang's to scout the perimeter in the meantime. Kang's back before Conklin's finished pouring out the second head's water ration, and he's carrying a pretty fair-sized piece of sheet metal with him.
"It was on the ground in front of one of the buildings," he says, and flips it over; while most of the letters on it were even more badly eroded than the first, what's left legible reads
LANGSTON HUGHES
MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Jerald's the one who traces the L and the A in the grime covering the last word: library.
Philadelphia's going to have to wait. At least a little bit. Just while you find out if there's anything left.
Thing is.
The old raised-roads, the ones that raiders and wanderers and townsfolk alike build their sheet-metal fortresses on? Those don't stop anywhere. They bleed off long strips that run down to the ground and maybe, maybe into the edges of ruins, into other roads that run to places where there used to be more. The raised-roads go from one place to another and they don't slow down for anything, not unless time or the bombs or the black rains or something else tore them apart.
The Old Post Road's not like that. The people in Bel Air mentioned it first, and the people at Octorara Farm confirmed it. It ran from town to town once, and it ran into them and through them. People might live there now, or they might not, but they did live there before, is the thing. There's buildings snugged right up to its wreck in some places. In others there's open bald spots where there used to be something; no one seems to know what most of those are now. Probably they won't ever find out. Probably it doesn't matter.
But in some places, if you're following the Old Post Road and you look out over the bald spot with the skeletons of machines that might've been Vertibirds' cousins once, all picked bare and torn apart... if you look out over that and you think about it too much and you have to look away, you catch sight of other things. Not all pulled up close to the Post Road, but close enough to it to make you wonder.
And maybe you see a sign. Not a whole one, the black rains here were as corrosive and as poison as anywhere else in the days after the War and the signs're stripped half bare, but what isn't stripped on this one reads UN VERS TY R D.
It's not all that far out of your way. Maybe a quarter of a mile, tops. Why not mention it to the others? Pull off the road for a bit, see whether that stood for anything interesting once? The Brahmin could use a rest, after all. You'll be in Philadelphia tomorrow or the day after. A pause won't hurt.
It's Knight Conklin's job to get the Brahmin unloaded and cared for at the rest stop. It's Knight Kang's to scout the perimeter in the meantime. Kang's back before Conklin's finished pouring out the second head's water ration, and he's carrying a pretty fair-sized piece of sheet metal with him.
"It was on the ground in front of one of the buildings," he says, and flips it over; while most of the letters on it were even more badly eroded than the first, what's left legible reads
MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Jerald's the one who traces the L and the A in the grime covering the last word: library.
Philadelphia's going to have to wait. At least a little bit. Just while you find out if there's anything left.