The thing about the town called Peace was that nobody could bear to stay long enough to cause any hassle. Thus it kept its name and reputation for being utterly conflict-free since before the Vanishing, which was more than most other places could say, especially with resources becoming harder to come by.
It wasn't that there was nothing natural to eat, it was just that nobody trusted the fine layer of possibly-but-not-definitely radioactive dust that eventually covered everything. Thing grown indoors were considered the safest non-canned food but there's only so many cans of beans a person can eat before the dust suddenly becomes appealing.
Travelling was utterly out of the question, everywhere outside of the island went dark during the Vanishing and the radios got no replies on any channel. Most days people kept inside, away from the windows and doorways, just huddles together pretending that the sunset meant they were one day closer to having a safe place to stay for the night.
It was the noise that drove so many of the potential residents away, the way the wind formed half-words from half-lived people torn away too soon. It was unsettling when a voice drifted slowly towards you,chattering on about how it used to sit exactly where you are and that's where the dust stoppered its lungs for good. It might not mean to be so worrying, that's just all it remembers. Then again it might just want its space back.
The dead outnumber the living in Peace nine hundred and four to one, at the last calculation based on the number of bodies that could fit into a burial pit, how many there were and how many tiny lights could be seen across the city at night from individual campfires.
Voices and dust aside, Peace was one of the more affected areas on the island, something about the fallout scattering organic material all over the place and the rain washing it into the porous concrete that now literally breathed at night. It wasn't noticeable in every building but it was always there in the way the floors were always too warm for stone, too damp for the desert-dry weather, too squishy and flexible to be anything but the vague fleshy interior of something more than a building but less than a being. They didn't seem to be fully conscious yet, not enough to do anything at least but the threat that they could kept a great many people as far from Peace as they could.
Whatever organic dust was in the buildings was different to the vaguely yellow dust that made your skin tear like wet tissue. It had gotten into just as much as the organic dust but didn't affect the non-organic things, same as the organic dust couldn't affect living things. There was some kind of balance forming, an equilibrium between new life being made and old life being unmade.
As one person succumbed to the vaguely yellow dust, an old rusted bicycle began to move its pedals for the first time in forty years. Some reckoned that the living objects were just full of the dead while others declared them the future and tried to teach them everything humans had already discovered. The living objects never cared, they just continued their random movements and constant breathing as if that was all there was for them to do.
It wasn't that there was nothing natural to eat, it was just that nobody trusted the fine layer of possibly-but-not-definitely radioactive dust that eventually covered everything. Thing grown indoors were considered the safest non-canned food but there's only so many cans of beans a person can eat before the dust suddenly becomes appealing.
Travelling was utterly out of the question, everywhere outside of the island went dark during the Vanishing and the radios got no replies on any channel. Most days people kept inside, away from the windows and doorways, just huddles together pretending that the sunset meant they were one day closer to having a safe place to stay for the night.
It was the noise that drove so many of the potential residents away, the way the wind formed half-words from half-lived people torn away too soon. It was unsettling when a voice drifted slowly towards you,chattering on about how it used to sit exactly where you are and that's where the dust stoppered its lungs for good. It might not mean to be so worrying, that's just all it remembers. Then again it might just want its space back.
The dead outnumber the living in Peace nine hundred and four to one, at the last calculation based on the number of bodies that could fit into a burial pit, how many there were and how many tiny lights could be seen across the city at night from individual campfires.
Voices and dust aside, Peace was one of the more affected areas on the island, something about the fallout scattering organic material all over the place and the rain washing it into the porous concrete that now literally breathed at night. It wasn't noticeable in every building but it was always there in the way the floors were always too warm for stone, too damp for the desert-dry weather, too squishy and flexible to be anything but the vague fleshy interior of something more than a building but less than a being. They didn't seem to be fully conscious yet, not enough to do anything at least but the threat that they could kept a great many people as far from Peace as they could.
Whatever organic dust was in the buildings was different to the vaguely yellow dust that made your skin tear like wet tissue. It had gotten into just as much as the organic dust but didn't affect the non-organic things, same as the organic dust couldn't affect living things. There was some kind of balance forming, an equilibrium between new life being made and old life being unmade.
As one person succumbed to the vaguely yellow dust, an old rusted bicycle began to move its pedals for the first time in forty years. Some reckoned that the living objects were just full of the dead while others declared them the future and tried to teach them everything humans had already discovered. The living objects never cared, they just continued their random movements and constant breathing as if that was all there was for them to do.
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