creekmando

HALF LIFE 2: Twenty-Eight Forty-Seven PROLOGUE At dawn, the light of the sun shone over the pale expanse of the coastline. The waves gently push themselves upon the shore before retreating, pushing pieces of driftwood and seaweed further up the shore.  Beyond the damp, auburn strips of sand where the water visits, there are stringy plants and animal feces strewn further up the shore. Embedded in the sand are reminders: umbrellas discolored by the seasons, plastic beach chairs, towels, and the steel carcasses of vehicles. In the sand, there is a half sunken radio whose top CD port is still open, the CD is a Micheal Jackson album, now distorted and scratched. The scent of death lies beyond the radio, where a body lie belly-up in the sun. All kind of detritivore and scavenger skitter to and from the bullet holes in the corpse's navy-blue Kevlar. Gloved fingertips hold the posture of firing a weapon stiffly, the light blue lenses of the corpse's mask now a dull brown. From the road, there is a man traversing the side of the highway by means of a bike. He's a grizzled looking man with a long beard, scarred fingers, and ratty gray hair tied in a ponytail. The man stops his bike, standing at the top of the beach, catching the scent of the body. He made no delay to set his bike aside and quietly make his way down the sand dunes to reach the body. The man's boots stopped just a foot away from the outstretched arm of the body, the man's eyes darted around the corpse's condition. After several moments of deliberation, the man positioned himself on his knees and reached for the mask of the corpse, placing his fingers around the gasmask filter it had and unscrewing it. The filter was forced haphazardly into the man's back pocket, whereafter he gently lifted the still legs of the corpse up, unclipping the straps to the corpse's leg pads, clipping them to himself.  Impressions of boots were all that remained of the man's presence once he had gone. And in time, the harsh winds of the coast would obscure them. And so, the pattern would repeat until the soiled vest of the corpse was taken by some scavenger which had not the knowledge or means to repair it. The arm pads which featured the insignia of the Sector Seventeen Overwatch would be taken by a young teenager who would live in to adulthood and come to tell his children that he killed an Overwatch soldier. That man would take the secret to his grave; it would take the intuition of a young girl to ponder if her great-great grandfather truly killed a Transhuman.