Ten months after the black swan event designated BSE-001
The dark bare jagged fingers of long-dead trees hang over the old road; a heavy fog swirls over the pavement, cracked by years of untenanted exposure to the never-ending march of harsh seasons. The cold woods are silent except for the occasional hollow clack of branches in the wind and, gradually, a slow, steady, rhythmic clopping.
From the fog emerges a figure, cloaked, hooded, seated atop a pale horse. The figure is well aware of the symbolism, the implications for all those who might see him, but is also aware of the limitations imposed upon him by circumstance; there were simply no other horses available. Not that it matters a whole lot — he hasn’t seen another living soul for days.
For consistency’s sake, though, the horse’s name is Death.
The man beneath the cloak is Paolo, an inspector condottiere, and, generally speaking, Paolo is a decent fellow. He only offers his services to authorities who don’t abuse their populaces very much, and avoids jobs that are overt resource grabs or massacres-in-the-making. Admittedly, this limits his income somewhat, but it helps him sleep at night. Most of the time.
Paolo pulls a paper map out from a hidden pocket and inspects it: he should be able to hear the river by now. He cups a hand around his ear, but there’s still nothing. He sighs. These days, he thinks, shaking his head, these days.
The reason for the silence is soon apparent, though — two turns in the road bring him around a sizable hill, which must have been blocking all noise, because the river is there, loud and clear, and visible, too. Paolo shivers, chilled just by looking at the white swirls in its black waters. He wonders if it’s run clean yet, if there’s enough distance and time from all the upstream pollution from what’s left of the city.
The road turns and runs alongside the river. The bank drops away sharply, a distance of about twenty feet down to the water. His horse is sure-footed and no suicidal idiot, but he nudges the beast to the far side of the road just to be safe. Who knows what might be lurking in the waters. Probably nothing. But you never can be too careful, especially these days.
A road sign catches his eye: “Riverside 2.” Paolo slips his gas mask on and checks the seals.
He sees the first houses around ten minutes later. No lights or smoke or signs of life of any kind, not that that’s a surprise; the outskirts are always the first to be abandoned.
Mist swirls through the trees. Death stops near one of the houses and won’t go on.
“Something wrong, girl?” Paolo asks quietly.
There’s no wind, but when he looks at a nearby pine tree, its needles are shaking ever so slightly. Paolo dismounts and leads Death to the house’s open and empty garage. In the gloom, he looks out the rear window. Just barely visible through the trees and fog he can see what looks like a walking skeleton, if the skeleton were glowing neon and shaped like a dinosaur.
“It’s just passing by,” Paolo whispers, more to reassure himself than anything else. “Shouldn’t have been able to pick up our scent.”
The ground shakes as the terrible apparition thunders past, still a hundred feet away. But it passes by, going back the way Paolo has come from, and if it senses the human or the horse, it doesn’t give them a second thought.
When the ground is still again, the pair exits the garage and Paolo mounts up again. A few more empty houses, a few more side roads, then a gas station slash convenience store, just as empty as everything else.
Before long, Paolo begins to pass larger buildings. A high school, complete with a football field. A church. An old strip plaza, the signs on the storefronts faded and broken — this place was falling apart long before the event.
Close to the center of town, things look a bit tidier — no debris on the streets, aside from a few stray piles of what looks like course grey dirt; a few of the houses have received paint jobs in the past decade; some of the buildings look as though they might still be active businesses.
The only problem, of course, is that there’s no people.
There’s no signs of fighting, either human or otherwise — no bullet casings, no broken-down doors, no fresh scorch marks from saurian rail guns or some other unknown power.
Did everyone just up and leave? It’s always a possibility, especially when a community is this isolated — with the cities gone, supply chains were disrupted, and far-flung places like Riverside would feel that the most keenly. But Paolo quickly finds an unlocked car with a fully-charged battery. He’d take it if he didn’t have Death, but living systems are easier to maintain than mechanical ones these days anyway.
The more he looks, the more of these cars he finds.
“I don’t think they left,” he mutters to Death.
Death bends her head down to sniff something on the ground. Paolo wonders where to start.
He bunches up his cloak to reveal a smallish box on his belt. He flicks a switch on it, and it emits shrill feedback for a second before it calibrates itself. “Hello,” he says, and the mini amplifier sends his voice echoing between the buildings. “Residents of Riverside, I’m here to check in on you. If there’s anyone here, I’d love to talk. We’re all worried about you.”
No response, not that he’d expected one.
First things first. He pulls a jury-rigged spectrometer from one of Death’s saddlebags and engages it. No anomalous readings — if something happened, it’s been at least days. He notes the presence of a couple of AER devices set up in front of homes, but not enough to have induced a superliminal decision, even in a town this small. Paolo puts his device away.
As he strolls the streets and peers through windows, he repeats his call, but he feels unease rising within him. Though he’s heard stories of things like this before, he’s had the good fortune to never encounter it until now.
Slowly, tiny details about the scene aggregate in Paolo’s mind. He moves back to Death and pulls a large rubber object out of one of the saddlebags: a gas mask fit for a horse. He knows she hates it, but he also supposes she’d rather be alive than dead. He strokes her neck once the mask is secured and promises her an extra apple later.
His foot brushes against one of the piles on the ground, and he squats down to inspect it. It’s what Death had been sniffing and, by the looks of it, munching: a pile of oatmeal. Strange — he hasn’t noticed any oats, wild or cultivated. They could have been traded, he supposes, but… still strange.
After trying a few doors, he finds one unlocked and opens it and steps inside. He announces himself over his amplifier again, but is greeted with only stillness. It’s not a terribly large house; it appears to be home to a small family — maybe a husband and wife and a young child. He searches it fairly thoroughly. He finds only one odd thing: both beds contain a large pile of oats.
The next unlocked house yields the same thing. It’s vacant, despite all signs to the contrary, and there are piles of oats in the bed.
Paolo pushes through one locked door after another and finds more oats.
At a loss, he returns to Death and pulls a device with a large screen from its thigh holster. He shakes his head and turns it on, and it scans for heat signatures. He uses it as little as possible, as its battery life isn’t what it could be, and it’s not very reliable, often failing to distinguish between mice and men. Certainly no good for picking up the biggest threats out here, given their body temperature.
It seems to be working now, however: only Paolo and Death appear at the center of its display, a single warm blob in the middle of… cold.
“Hmm,” Paolo says, deactivating and holstering the scanner. “Well,” he says to Death, “I can think of two possibilities here.”
She swings her big head toward him and blinks slowly.
“Either everyone bought a whole bunch of oats and left them where they’d normally be — maybe as an offering or a good luck charm or something — and then left straightaway. Wouldn’t be the weirdest ritual we’ve heard of. Or.” Paolo twists his mouth, finding it hard to make the conclusion leave his lips. “Or else,” he says at last, “everyone turned into oatmeal.”
Death snorts from within her gas mask.
“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” says Paolo. “But I really don’t feel the need to stick around and make sure way or another right now.”
He climbs back up onto Death’s back and they set off towards the bridge, to cross over the river and investigate three more strangely silent towns before returning to what passes for civilization these days.
As he rides out of town, Paolo glimpses another neon shape, this one standing on the riverbank down at the far end of town, perhaps fishing. As he shakes his head, he pulls out his map and a pencil and strikes a line through the town name. In its place he writes, Oatside.
Hello hello!
Welcome back to the interstice! It’s good to be back, and it’s great to have you along. I hope you’re buckled in, because this is just the beginning of a very strange story with very badly photoshopped pictures!
This season picks up in the same world we left off in, and while this first episode is set a little bit in the future, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything, and we’ll be back in the present soon enough. Expect things like cyborg mothman; conspiracies unveiled; special vitamins; product launches; scholarly papers; interdimensional reptilians; statistical analyses; and (more) neon dinosaurs with rail guns. If that’s not your thing, there will also be things like character development and philosophical discussion and political drama.
I hope you enjoyed Paolo and Death’s story, and I’d be absolutely delighted if you passed it on. I’m writing to have fun and I’d love to have as many people having fun with me as I can.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, and please don’t turn into oats.
:: Jaer
Welcome back! New episode leaves me hanging and wanting more sooner than later. Hope you and fam have a wonderful Thanksgiving.