Eye Patch barely looked at him. Instead, I felt his gaze on me, Kimmy, and Asha.
“Fine,” Eye Patch said after a moment. “Market’s open. You trading in feathers today?”
John frowned briefly in confusion, but quickly forced his expression back to neutral. “Not today.”
I felt a shudder go through Asha beside me. I glanced at her, and her eyes betrayed a deep-seated fear that I’d never seen from her before. My pulse quickened.
“Alright. Head in, then, but leave your bikes here.”
John hesitated. “They’ll be gone in seconds.”
Eye Patch shrugged. “Yeah, probably. Not my problem, man.”
“I’ll stay here and keep watch,” Kimmy cut in.
“You sure—?” John looked conflicted.
Kimmy nodded. “It’s fine.”
Reluctantly, we left our bikes with Kimmy and entered the village, but not before Eye Patch gave me an unabashed once-over, a lewd smile on his face. I tried not to shiver. John stepped between us, guiding me forward with a hand on the small of my back and shooting the doorman a death glare. Asha stuck to my other side, and we followed a dirt path from the entrance towards the centre of the village.
The village itself was nothing more than collection of crumbling Old World structures. Some of them were only cement foundations, hastily supplemented with poorly constructed wood walls, mud bricks, and straw roofs. They looked like a decent wind would blow them all over. The most intact house, at the end of the path, still sported a massive hole in the side, which had been covered over with a partially shredded plastic tarp.
Worse, though, were the apparent residents. Two children played beside a stream that ran the length of the settlement, where the water reeked so horribly of sewage that my eyes watered. A young woman with deep lines of exhaustion on her face looked on, soaking her legs in the water. To my horror, they were covered in open, bleeding sores. Meanwhile, a painfully thin older man hunched over the stream tofill a waterskin, the corpse-like pallor of his complexion slicked with sweat.
“The water is polluted,” John muttered, seeing my wide eyes.
I tried to school my expression into indifference but barely managed it. Amongst the patchwork of human misery that surrounded us, there were more men like Eye Patch at the entrance—men who looked relatively healthy and fed, all sporting the same strange feather tattoo. They exuded an air of menace, shooting us unfriendly looks as we passed, and I tried not to meet their eyes.
“This is what I was told the Wasteland was like,” I said in a hushed voice. “I expected it to be bad after what you said, but…”
“This is normal,” Asha said sharply, keeping her voice low to avoid being overheard. “I don’t know where you’ve been all this time, butthisis the real world. And it’s every bit as shitty as they told us.”
John shot her a look of disapproval. “I don’t know where you’ve been, but this is not normal for me. No one where I’m from lives like this, and even the nearest trading post is leagues better than this.”
Asha shrugged. “I’ll believe it when I see it, Farm Boy.”
He rolled his eyes, but wisely didn’t take the bait.
“Who are these people?” I asked, nodding at the men scattered throughout the settlement. “Gang members?”
“That’s a good guess,” John answered gravely. “Not the Skulls, though. Someone else has moved in since last time.”
“The Guardians,” Asha said, surprising me again. “The feathers are their trademark.”
“How do you know?” I asked, and she glared at me.
“I heard of them when I lived in the city,” she replied, looking away.
John raised an eyebrow but said, “Let’s just get what we need and get out of here.”
He led the way to the end of the path, where there was a small market square with a variety of stalls. The largest three booths stood in the centre and took up the majority of the space. Each was labelled with a crude drawing: one of a carrot, another of a gun, and a final picture of a circle, square, and triangle. The carrot and gun seemed self-explanatory, but I couldn’t decipher the meaning of the last one.
“Everything else,” John said wryly when I asked.
“Wouldn’t it be clearer to just…write them?”
“Sure would,” he replied. “But you’re assuming anyone here can read.”
