Lunch was good. The Roller’s crew had packed a thermos of leftover soup from the previous night, and two cans of chicken. No one had thought to bring utensils. Like most of the crew, Eli was content to use one of his thinner knives to impale chunks of meat and then hope that he didn’t cut his tongue open. D.Q. drained the liquid in the cans out on the snow and tipped the pieces right into her mouth. These cans had been… canned in Nexus; he wasn’t sure about what he thought of their social practices, but if they were the only people making canned provisions, then there wasn’t much to consider. Necessary evils had always been a part of life. He had told himself something similar when he still felt the need to justify his actions. Even then, this chicken was damn good. 

They had been following the Missouri River for almost two hours now. Although the river itself was frozen over and covered with snow, like everything else out here, trees lined both sides of it. All he had to do was keep a parallel course with the trees and eventually he would come upon the Roller. This made for relaxing driving compared to when he was out in the open and battling the constant fear that he was drifting off-course. He’d seen that Pontius had a little clamp he could put on his wheel so that the vessel kept its heading. Such technology hadn’t made it to the Reapers yet. On second thought, the cult probably hadn’t made this sled, they were too busy collecting bodies and worshiping the Road. But what could they trade in exchange for a vehicle like this? 

For a time before they came up on the river, Eli hadn’t been able to see 30 feet in front of him. It wasn’t like there were going to be unexpected trees or large holes with this terrain, however, he still didn’t want to risk anything. His larger concern was running into another one of those things that he had thought he’d seen on the other side of the Road. “Thought” was the key-word there. He’d given D.Q. his best description, and she’d said that it was probably a Strider machine that he saw. And he had relaxed a little as he thought more about it. There had been so much snow in the air that he hadn’t been able to make out the fine details; it had looked like one darkly-colored mass running away from them. He wasn’t sure how he would feel if it had being going towards him. 

“How long do you think we got, Eli?” D.Q. asked out of the blue with a surprising amount of tenderness. They hadn’t spoken at all during this ride. She might have fallen asleep for a while.

“I don’t know, m’lady.” He said.

“Do you think it will be tonight?” She asked. She sounded like a child guessing.

“It’s about as likely as tomorrow night, or the night after.” 

“Is it going to happen?” Eli kept his eyes on the horizon.

“Are we going to die here?” A lot of signs pointed to that— as they had for all of the expeditions the he had been on. And not once had a truly felt that he was going to die.

“I don’t know, Denny…” He sighed.

“Do you want to?” He asked.

“It’s not like I want to live that much.” She said.

“I..” he trailed off. That was a marvelous blue sky he had seen. D.Q. rolled around and looked at him.

“You don’t want to go yet.” She said. He frowned and checked behind him. There was just gray and white. 

“We were just at the least hopeful place in the whole world… And I did go up here feeling ready to die… I was going to ask you to shoot me.” He clapped the wheel and tried to think of what to say.

“But I didn’t feel it then. And if I didn’t feel it there— on the Singing Road itself… then there might be a reason for it.” He realized. D.Q. flopped back to looking up at the sky.

“Boo!” She whined.

“You think you can redeem yourself?” She asked.

“Like you’ve tried.” Eli grumbled. That woke something in her that had been dead for a long time. She sat up and fully turned around.

“You think I threw myself away.” She said, accusingly.

“Regime is a tier above a brothel.” Eli quipped back.

“I know that you’ll never see me as anything but a dumb river-girl. But trust me when I tell you that I tried…” She blinked back tears. 

“After that night, I had nothing left. I was this nothing-person…” She paused.

“I tried to make myself someone— you know, to see if there was a thing I could do that game me…” She put her hands up in a defeated gesture.

“There was nothing in me anymore. I was like this salted stretch of land where nothing grows.” She looked at the land ahead of them.

“Once I knew that. Then I let myself go.” She folded her arms around her and looked despondently at the planes. 

“That’s more than I can say.” Eli said. Neither of them had much experience telling others why they were so empty.

“Shit, I knew I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life raising pigs with my adopted family, but— yell you what? I did care about this job. I asked for it, because I wanted to find the Hill-Beasts and… expose them.” Eli realized he had balled his hand into a fist, out of some long-dormant passion.

“I think I lost something along the way.  I got overconfident, and—”

“— you’re a real piece of shit now.” D.Q. snapped.

“I still have a job to do.” He said. That was sudden.

“You know what I said last night.” 

“That holding onto nothing is better than pretending to hold onto something? I remember. And I want you to shoot me if you think I’m lying.” He said. D.Q. grinned and reached into her jacket.

“I may not care too much about a lot of things anymore… but I want to get back this time. I made it to the Singing Road. Now help me get back. There was something I found here that… I need to get back.” Eli said. He also realized that he was leaning over on the console. 

“Hmm… you did get me out of that place. I guess this’ll make us even.” She said as she laid back on the cargo. 

Eli thought about why he had said that he wanted to make it back. He was onto considering if experience with Formers would make it easy for him to work for the Guild, when he saw the smoke.

“You see that too, right?” She asked him. Was she also doubting her sanity?

“Yeah. Something like that isn’t going to be a hallucination. You’ll hear shrieking when others don’t, maybe see some creatures and mutilations… but the Singing Road’s not going to waste its time projecting mundane things like smoke.” He said. There had to be a better name for the thing that was creating these affects. The Road itself was… just a road with a lot of wrecked cars on it. He liked the idea of a “presence” as the source of the phenomena, but what proof did he have of that?

As they neared the source of the smoke, D.Q. started sniffing. Eli smelled it too.

“That’s my fuel.” She said.

“And… are they cooking pork?” She asked.

“That’s human flesh burning— it’s very similar to a pig’s” He said. She was staring at him.

“I’ve talked with a few cannibals about this.” Eli clarified. Most of them had been surprisingly forthcoming about their experiences. 

“Are you going to be needing that fuel?” He asked, pointing at her backpack, which was sitting beside her. There was a compartment for the ammunition itself, and a circular container for a liquid. She tapped it.

“This one’s for cooling water. The fuel was just for the stove, or in case we might need a fire-wall— my squad had a surplus, so they gave it to me.” She said. Eli noticed a depression in the snow. The Roller’s wheel had flattened it out. He steered the sled into the miniature canyon. Ahead of them, he could see the vehicle parked. 

They had gone to the “Donut” site, which Warra told him contained the remains of a large Pre-Burnout convoy. Except for a handful of semi-trucks, the Roller towered above the other wrecks. Most of them were busses, with a several vans, and a few pick-up trucks. All of the windows that weren’t essential for the driver to see out of had been covered with metal sheets or what had once been wooden boards. And on top of several roof-hatches and in the backs of the pick-up trucks, he saw heavy weapons. All of them had been left uncovered, which meant that they would be unusable due to rusting. This was a shame, one of his old bosses had told him that there was no greater pleasure than discharging a .50 caliber MG. On the bright side, this meant that D.Q. still had the best armament. 

The vehicles had been arranged into a half-circle around the riverbank. This must have been how they arranged themselves when they wanted to stop for the night. There had been enough space between two of the cars for the Roller to drive into the formation and park there. However, no one had thought past that, as their vehicle would have to perform an impossibly tight turn, or punch through something to leave. The side of the Roller with the crew’s tent on it was facing him as Eli and D.Q. walked into the camp. There was a fire made of tree branches, and some fabrics burning in the middle of the site. Eli had some ideas on who those fabrics had come from. Before inspecting the fire, he checked one of the pick-up trucks with a gun on it. The truck bed was littered with rusted casings. He kept one for himself. Some people had these forged into shot-glasses. 

Splint was up and walking around the fire, and he saw Varly climbing out of the Roller’s main cabin. His note had specified items from his room; he might have opened the flood-gates for people to come and go as they pleased. 

“Who’s in that?” He asked about the fire. All of the recognizable features had been burned off of the body that he saw.

“Warra…” Splint said. He had practically given her a death-warrant with that note.

“…And Hugo.” That was a surprise.

“Did she kill him?” He asked. His plan had been for Warra to take down someone problematic, like Dedschik, or maybe Cone. Hugo had been a dependable neutral party. 

“He said that he’d sooner die than let an innocent woman like her be killed for something that she had no part in.” Splint muttered. Warra had been innocent. She herself had told him that their route was frequented by Reapers bringing up bodies. It was just a coincidence that they had run into one. 

“Was anyone else hurt?” He asked. Less people meant a lower chance of one of them turning. Eli could always finish someone off if they had a serious wound and say it was mercy.

“She started crying when Cone read that note and told us what to do. Said that you had tricked her or something. Hugo got in front of her… they got backed against one of the rails… And Pontius slammed the brakes. Cone went down and finished them.” Splint recounted.

“Cone? Didn’t expect that from him.” Eli said. 

“He was out of breath when he brought the bodies back up…. Said he never felt more alive.” Splint said. This was bad. Eli had thought that the pressure would be too much, and that Cone would end up jumping off of the Roller or something instead of letting a phenomena get him. And with Hugo out of the picture, he was now directly in charge of everyone else from his clan. With that kind of backing, he might even see himself as above the lead researcher.

“When did you guys arrive here?” He asked.

“We had to spend most of the afternoon digging the Roller out of the snow when Pontius stopped it. We’ve been here for little more than two hours.” Splint said. 

Eli looked at the ring of old cars that surrounded them. The sun was already going down, and it would take several hours to clear a path through any of the wrecks. There was no way that they could gain enough speed for the Roller’s plow to shove anything out of the way— that would end up with them sinking in the snow again. They would have to spend the night here. He had never heard of a full attack happening on the first night, there were normally just a few casualties. The second night was when people started to disappear or go insane. By the fourth, anyone left could start calling themselves “survivors of the Singing Road”. Eli wanted that status, desperately.