The Moon-Blotter

The boy ran, his breath heavy, the cool night wind blowing chilling his skin. He looked behind him, nothing. He slowed, breathing in and out, lungs burning. Then he heard crashing behind him, and he picked up his pace again. They were getting closer, and closer...

Five hours earlier...

The air whipped about him as his bike bounced over the dirt road, throwing up dirt. The moonlight softly illuminated his path as well as the fields around him, empty expanses of grass, the lonely dirt road winding through them. Every here and there would be vestiges of humanity, an old fencepost there, a crumbling stack of rocks that may have been a shed there. He knew these landmarks by heart - he had traversed this path many times, ever since his mother had let him make the journey from the village to the town. He felt like a man doing the five-mile trek, starting in the late-afternoon after helping Mr. Alberstead with his farming, and always coming home late at night, around 9 or 10. Recently, his mother had even considered letting him go with the scavengers, the men and women from the village who went to the wreckage to take parts back and sell them. The wreckage. The older kids played there often. It was the crashed husk of a great warship. His mother had told them that it was Oscdean, and that it was still dangerous. It had come down during the battle that lit up the night sky just a few miles away from the village, just one of many of the Great War that seemed to be tearing apart everything around the village but never actually touched the boring little collection of buildings. He hadn't even been able to watch the battle - he had been out, pedaling in the opposite direction to the town on his regular evening trip. He had missed it, and now he was missing the wreckage of that ship.

But he couldn't stay unhappy for long, not with the wind whipping past him. The bike ride always cheered him up, always made him happy - to be free of the village, to see a little of the outside world. The town always interested him, the hustle and bustle of life within Torby. The stadium there was the biggest building he had ever seen, but he knew from the pictures in the papers hung on windowframes in the shops that farther into the Doggerlands there was more - massive cities filled with skyscrapers. Their names came naturally to him - Oscdea, Almere, Novenae, Lorikeet. How he wished to see them, if only for a moment.