“‘Fifteen minutes after dark,’ he said. Then I was to fetch you.”

“Well, I’m here now.” Mugs scratched his tangled brown hair. “I’ll go get him. Caught a bad feelin’ with the rain. Stand watch while I drag him back, got it?”

Shin bowed his head.

The land was a bland, splotchy mess of broken down, rusted metal fixtures, road lamps that had been uprooted and discarded, broken timbers and iron rivets that had been destroyed, scavenged, littered about, patches of pale green grass growing in impossible places, independent territories of life struggling in a lifeless place. A dangerous place. And cutting straight through it was a road that very few crossed. It was a three kilometer stretch of tense walking that connected New Edo to civilian territories, most notably Irontown, the independent industrial powerhouse of war-torn Japan. The next best alternative to this stretch of road was a week’s worth of travel south and around this Wasteland. To many it was worth the extra six days: Spark storms and pockets of toxic gasses plagued this Wasteland, not to mention the bands of warring clans that rode through on horseback slicing at any flesh that did not bear the mark of their tribe. There were many supernatural horrors tied to the Wastelands. Many of them were unconfirmed, more were outright lies, but some were true. Mugs had seen one or two himself, and he never wished it on his soul again.
After five or so minutes of walking and dodging debris, Mugs topped the small hill, his boots crunching the dried dead grass sticking from parched earth. Even as the rain began to pick up the air felt as ominously dry and dead as the land. Mugs lifted a waterproofed hood over his head and scanned the area around him. Where the hell was that kid?

It was then that Mugs noticed the stick. A long, worn walking stick had been driven into the ground, its surface smoothed by just a few days’ worth of use. It was short, crude and bent, and by design should have hardly been of any use but he remembered the day that the kid had picked it off the dirt for some ungodly reason and declared it his own. He remembered because Kate had almost gouged his eyes out with it after he had tripped the dangerous man swinging the damn thing about. Right now it was speared in the dirt and as Mugs approached it he noticed a piece of torn parchment had been stuck on the end. Scribbled in clumsy pencil strokes were two arrows pointed like the hands of a clock, one marked with an X and the other with a perpendicular line, each designated a number. Mugs recognized it immediately, an amateur attempt at a geo marker. He twisted the paper until the X arrow pointed back at their hideout and looked in the direction of the other arrow. By the numbers, somewhere within five hundred paces out in the rain was the spot the idiot kid had decided to scamper off to for his little lines of poetry. Out in that direction the rubble and debris gave way to an eerie, flat field of nothingness for as far as he could see. Mugs sighed. If it was anyone else he would have let ‘em be, but for the kid he knew he had to make a sodding exception.

The rain was still falling softly, though in the five minutes that Mugs marched into the distance it picked up slowly and had become a steady pouring. There was no significant landmark to walk to and no stars in the sky to navigate by. Mugs was about to turn back when out of the corner of his eye he spotted an irregularity in the dead field. It was a small object about a hundred meters off to the right. It didn’t seem like much but it was more than he had seen on his walk so he set out for it. As he drew closer he realized it was an old, fat tree stump. He cracked a smile. If the kid had wanted a place to sit and watch the damn nonexistent sunset, this was it. The smile faded quickly: if this was where he chose, he was nowhere to be found.