#rottenash

YOULLNEVER CATCH ME ALIVE  COP

@rotten-ash

The market was in a large courtyard in some dry and arid town of tan stone buildings and hot dusty air. The vendors were arranged in a square around the perimeter of the courtyard, some had tents, some had stands draped in tapestry, and some simply had their goods laid out on rugs.  Vell hadn’t mentioned where exactly he’d taken them, but it was clearly in the dessert. The merchants murmured among themselves when they spotted Vell, they knew who he was and being the center of attention stoked the flames of his ego. They were the most important customers here and everyone knew it. 

  “Hey, have you seen-- oh jesus fuck!”   That’s another goddamn corpse! One that was standing up and, for a second, had looked like it was moving and alive ( a trick of the light, or maybe he’d hit his head too hard in that plane crash, who knew) - the real horror comes when it does move. When it turns its’ rotten head and looks at him with wide eyes set in concaved and withered sockets. Okay. Okay, shit’s getting really crazy now. Lynn wasn’t here, so he didn’t need to be either - and the sooner he was away, the better.  The camera-man stumbles back, his feet tangling with one another in the process and sending him to the floor. His glasses clatter to the floor and he lets out a distressed moan as the world is diminished to undefined blurs. Okay. Fuck. Fuck. He could still get out of this.   Blake doesn’t focus on looking to see what the corpse is doing - he’s going to scramble around uselessly in the dirt, fingers searching out glasses nearby her feet, one glass lens having popped out of the frame. 

 Rain fell from Above often. The sky was a bloody ocean, what else could anyone expect? It wasn’t a surprise to anyone to feel cold drizzle against their features, or see the odd fish breach whatever force kept the ocean floating and hurl itself to its’ death on the dark stone Below. It wasn’t odd for debris to fall through sometimes too - some people claimed to have seen a shipwreck tumbling from the sky, ruined in the Surface and finding it’s resting place in the Sunken Cities.   But Tobias had never seen a person fall from the sky.  He’s not sure if she survived the fall; even from his perch on the roof of the grey-stone clock-tower ( and wasn’t she lucky that she didn’t tumble over the edge of that?), the Ocean Above was hundreds and hundreds of feet above. The stone tiles of the roof cracked under the impact of the falling stranger, and for a second Tobias was convinced that she’d go straight through it. But no. Her body simply smacked against the roof and stayed there, motionless. No rise and fall of a breathing chest -- and so pockets that were ripe for picking. If he could get past the ocean debris tangled in with her. The carcerat edged forward over the tiles, careful to not step on any of the cracked ones. He’d get as close as he could, reaching over and attempting to pull lose a shred of soaked clothing and sea-weed to see what sort of stranger fell through Oceans. And to check if they were the sort of strangers to carry something valuable with them: people on odd journeys often did.