Over the hour that he spent in complete silence, Beefcake looked as if he had processed the enormity of his recent actions, and the fate that awaited him past the Singing Road. First he had stared angrily at Eli, as a joke, and then as some way of blaming him. To be fair, if it hadn’t been for him, this may not have happened. Eli was the one who asked Cone about putting together a crew. Cone had then delegated that task to Hugo, who selected his five people. And if he hadn’t been brought out here, with the unspoken expectation that none of them would make it back, then perhaps he wouldn’t have allowed his lust to cloud his better judgment. If Eli hadn’t spoken up earlier, than they might not have branded him with a superheated metal bar. And if he hadn’t wanted someone to come down with him to investigate the wrecked sled, then there would still be a chance that he wouldn’t be going to the Road itself. 

Then he had cried for a few minutes. After those minutes he had chuckled, and settled into a humor as black as his curly hair.

“So if I really am going to die out here. Can you at least tell me what this is all about?” He asked.

“This expedition? I told you. I’m investigating phenomena.” Eli said.

“We both know that you haven’t told us everything. And I don’t have that much longer left, so it doesn’t really matter.” He smiled.

“How far back to you want to start?”

“We got time.”

“Well, Pre-Burnout scientists believed that approximately four-point-five billion years ago, meteors and other large chunks of rock combined to form the planet we—” Thankfully, Beefcake cut him off. 

“Fuck you.”

“Well, you know where we’re going.”

“The Singing Road.”

“It was a real place before the Burnout, same as Carson. ‘I-94.”

“Interstate. I know about ’em.” Beefcake said. He leaned back a bit. D.Q. had taken off her backpack so she could sit on it while she drove the sled. So long as he made sure not to raise his head enough to graze her cheeks, he was welcome lean against it. Eli only had a dead body in a bag for comfort. He also had to be mindful that he wasn’t slipping forward, or he would go right under his little baggage car. “Big roads. Big ass roads. Anywhere from two to four lanes wide. Hundreds of thousands of people on them each year.” Beefcake said. 

“Particularly during one year.”

“2030.”

“Why here? The fuck is up here?” Beefcake waved at the nothingness that surrounded them. D.Q. looked back for a moment and shrugged.

“You’re not wrong to think that. You would assume that everyone would be going towards population centers, or anywhere where they might think that there would still be law in order. But you must also consider what they were trying to get away from.”

“Chaos. The burning cities.”

“Not a lot to burn up here. You also need to understand that this was late in the winter of 2030, so the southern half of the country was already up in smoke. Anyone who still had a set of wheels was going to either Washington, or up to Canada.”

“And the further North you got, the easier it would be for you to stay away from…” Beefcake didn’t have to say it. They both knew about the horrors that took place at the hands of roving gangs during the early Burnout. 

“That’s the thought process of everyone who was on I-94. A lot of them had come up from the East, gone around Chicago when it went up, some might have tried to hang on the outskirts of Minneapolis— but we know what happened there— and the end result is millions of people on the I-94, trying to get up and West.”

“Why not just up?” Beefcake suggested.

“Ah yes, there were the 29 and 35, but Canadian artillery strikes had made them, and every other major highway, undriveable since the summer. And there’s no fucking way that anyone would try their luck on back-roads in the middle of nowhere.” 

“Easy prey for a half-decent sniper.”

“Strength in numbers, my friend.”

“So what happened? I asked you about the Singing Road, and you’re yapping about the plight of dead Americans on an interstate highway.” 

“You’re technically still an American.”

“I was born a Child of the Twain, and I joined the City Spring Triumvirate as a general laborer.” Beefcake recounted his heritage and clan affiliation.

“And you’ll die a nobody.” Eli reminded him.

“Like anyone’s going to take your corpse for a Formers.”

“Do you know about our precursors?”

“Bunch of college fuckers who saw the world was ending, and made some plans.”

“You’re skipping over a bunch there… and this honestly doesn’t have much to do with the Singing Road, so…” Eli trailed off. He could connect it back to the history of the Singing Road, but it’d be very clunky.

“What happened to them? Those millions of people.”

“You know U3C?”

“Unprecedented Civil Collapse…Council?” Beefcake guessed.

“Coordination.”

“Close enough. Those were the guys who pooled all of the railcars in Kansas.”

“And torpedoed who knows how many incoming vessels, and bombed the I-94.”

“Bombed? From airplanes?”

“Yup.”

“Got to hand it to them.”

“Their whole focus was on conserving resources.”
“And I guess that extends to dealing with anyone who might put a drain on them.” Beefcake said. Despite all of his fuckery, he was still rather intelligent.

“Most of the country’s still-mobile population— gone in one afternoon.” It was grim, very fucking grim. He knew that someone had come up with the idea, and been clapped on the back for its efficacy.

“So that’s how it became the Singing Road?” 

“Did you hear about the dreams that some of your friends were having?” Eli asked.

“We weren’t exactly on dream-sharing terms, they were a bit preoccupied with how a fuckin’ demon-owl clawed my dick off— speaking of, what does any of this history-lesson have to do with that?!” Beefcake asked. D.Q. looked back at him again.

“If we understood that connection, we wouldn’t be here right now. You asked me to go back to the earliest history of the Singing Road, and I went back there. Now we can get into your ‘demon-owls’ and how they came to be.” Eli said. Besides, this was making the time go by very quickly.

“Survivors, right? Anyone who survived the bombing would need a way to defend themselves, and they’d be twisted enough to put something like that together.” Beefcake said.

“It’s a good theory. And the earliest recorded ‘attacks’ came in as soon as my order had the personnel to keep a record of what was happening in this area. There were remote communities who said they were under siege from monsters, ships full of mutilated remains but no bodies, remote groups suffering from mania. The actual term ‘Singing Road’ came from some of these survivors who said that their attackers had come from it. However, all of these events just sounded like random attacks from different groups that were adept with psychological warfare and maybe putting some psychedelic drugs in the water supply. It was trippy, but not serious. All of that changed in the Year of Perfect Coverage. Do you know that?”
Beefcake thought about it for a moment. 

“It was late 40’s when the Guild was pouring everything into re-activating those buried fiber-optic cables. Before the clans moved in, they had perfect coverage and communication for everything in pretty substantial area.”

“Basically a thousand-mile strip of… ‘Perfect Coverage’. And that’s perfect coverage of all movements, large transactions, and attacks. They know who had bought what, and where their enemies were. But there were still ships that didn’t come in, and artisan colonies that went dark. And you know who the survivors said was behind all of those attacks?”

“The Singing Road.” Beefcake said. Eli still found it odd that this place was so readily treated as some kind of independent entity. 

“That’s when the Guild, clans, wardens, and just about everyone realized they had a problem on their hands.”

“They had something that was outside of their control.”

“Worse: It was largely unpredictable.”

“Is it?”

“Regardless of what it actually is, the Singing Road phenomena has some kind of motivation for doing these attacks. Some believe that it’s a form of divine vengeance against wrongdoers.”

“Pretty swift vengeance.” Beefcake pointed to his crotch.

“That ideology is also where the Reaper-cult comes from. Apart from dealing with corpses, they give aid to communities and lesser-clans who need it. Some people claim that the resources they provide were stolen during attacks— but it’d be nearly impossible to prove. Others think that it’s a form of economic manipulation.” By now, Eli was just reciting theory.

“Do you know anything?”

“There are people like Warra, and some elders with the Reapers who claim to have peacefully interacted with a non-human entity that was some kind of representative of the Singing Road. I’m starting to believe that.”

“That there’s something non-human?”
“That there’s something capable of making others think it’s a non-human. I mean, when Formers first contacted some rural villages off of the Northern coast of Russia— don’t ask me where that is— the people there immediately bowed down to them, like they were gods.” 

“Do you know anything else?” Eli grinned a little. It wasn’t like D.Q. hadn’t completely zoned out, or that Beefcake would live to tell anyone.

“I’m not the only Formers that they’ve sent up here. And even they’re afraid of what’s up here.”
“Ooh. Now we’re talking.”

“I know that you didn’t get to learn about everyone’s dreams, or visions, but have you at least heard about them?”

“Oh yes, big time. You see shit burning, and baby monsters.”

“Exactly. It’s always some variant of those two dreams. Either the original bombing, or some kind of fetal creature under a layer of snow. What if I told you that there’s a third dream that can happen?”

“What do you see?”

“There’s not a verbal record, because the victim chewed their tongue off, but we have the next best thing…” Eli flipped through the metal binder that he had asked to be packed. He passed it to Beefcake when he had the right page.

“Goddamn…” He said as he studied the art.

“Look at the date on that.” Eli had only checked for it this morning when he had woken up with no dreams.

“February 7th… 2059.”

“I was recruited in April of that year… All this time I was wondering why they sent me on these expeditions— like, what does the most powerful faction in the world want to do with rumors of swamp-monsters or cults in the remnants of New York City? And they made me write these super exact reports, keep a daily log of everything, notes on my crewmate’s behavior… Then they gave me this assignment. As you can see in there, they don’t say who the victim was, except that they chewed off their tongue.”

“There’s also some stuff that’s been blotted out. They really don’t like you.”

“They were grooming me. This whole time, they were grooming me to go up here.”

“Why do they want you to go ‘up here?”
“I’m an unchipped Formers, who they know can process and record information with similar accuracy to an agent who is chipped. I’d bet you that they’ve been sending in someone after me, to make sure I didn’t miss anything.” 

“But why did they go through all of this trouble to send someone who’s not chipped?”

“Because that might happen if I’m chipped.” Eli pointed to the binder.

“You discover your artistic ability?”

“That’s also a possibility. But do you see the blot at the top of the page to your left?” He asked. The text on the binder wasn’t blotted. They had blotted out a copy of the file, then photocopied it, then made the printer do an impression of the photocopy on metal. 

“Yeah?”
“Its the same format as the other briefs that they give me for my department. And my whole specialty is insanity.”

“This looks pretty insane to me.”

“So why blot out something from my own department?” He asked.

Beefcake shrugged.

“Because this was originally from another department.”

“What other department?”

“The only one I could think of, that would have something like that— which would also explain the level of detail that went into it for someone who was clearly fucked in the head— would be the Internal Specialty.”

“Internal?”

“Aberrations that occur within Formers itself. Bad things happen when chipped agents go insane… things that threaten our entire order. I don’t know too much, because it’s not my speciality, but I know they’re terrified of something like that happening again.” Eli had asked once. His superior had said there were less than twenty incidents in the order’s history, and less than two people know about all of them. 

“How long have you known this?” Beefcake asked.

“Known what? Why they chose me for this? I’ve always suspected that there was something unique about me, and the fact that I wasn’t chipped. I put it all together when Varly was talking to me about him getting chipped.”

“I fucking hate that guy. Did he have dreams as well?”

“He saw the unborn creatures.”

“So why didn’t the crazy Formers draw those?” Beefcake asked. He had a point. The monstrosity in the binder was completely unlike the other phenomena. 

“Chipped brains are unique. Whatever the phenomena uses to create those dreams: drugs, gradual hypnosis, it must have responded differently to their subconscious.”

“Do you think this is your last assignment?”

“I wouldn’t be opposed. They might chip me after this.” 

“If you get back, that is.” Beefcake smiled at him. Eli chuckled back. Maybe. If he made it back, they go over his notes during his vacation. This had never happened before, but if they wanted more, they could re-assign him. And considering how much they had already invested in him, they would keep doing that until there weren’t anymore questions left to ask about the Singing Road. There were no shortage of questions, he knew that. But had he found any answers yet?