Brave New World

3 years after the Second Coming

The air is warm as the sun rises over the horizon, shining light over the ruined city that was once St. Louis, Missouri. but now, its just part of the New World.

The City, once covered in concrete and steel, now covered in rust and growth, stands silent as the dawn breaks the darkness. after a few seconds, though, the songs of birds filled the air, as the wind blows violently. A storm had passed through, and the wind was what was left of the titanic maelstrom.

Somewhere near the edge of the city, next to the now raging Mississippi River, fed monsters. surrounding a corpse, eaten to such an extant that it was impossible to decide what the creature was in life, were three Troodon, their wiry arms hidden inside their black feathers, as they pecked pieces of the carcass of and swallowed them whole.

A figure, hidden behind a pile of rubble, throws a rock at the shy maniraptorians, which reacted by sprinting away at full speed, letting out a primeval screech as they ran. The man, head hidden under his hood. walked up to the carcass, examined it, cut a chunk of the flesh off, made a fire, and began to cook the unknown meat.

Rusted, damaged, and overgrown with glossy black vines, the bulk of concrete and steel that had until three years ago been called the McKinley Bridge arced magnificently over the rolling gray waters of the Mississippi. Now, of course, it was not the McKinley Bridge, only a bridge, and one of the precious few such monuments in the late St. Louis left standing by the strange events that had heralded a drastic turning of the age. Its spiderweb trusses loomed like the arcing backs of some grand but forgotten creature whose corpse had fallen long ago in just such a fortunate place as to provide safe passage from one bank of the mighty river to the other.

Well, maybe not safe passage.

A stocky figure, robes and hair whipping about her in the screaming wind, clung at a distressing height to a beam, looking rather like a tattered black flag. This was Sister Jane Rudolph, and she was a snap decision away from tearing the silver cross from her neck and tossing it to the dark waters below. Perhaps the rest of her would follow...

If Sister Rudolph could have thought clearly against the screaming, whirling terror in her head, she might have regretted setting out East for that legendary haven of a city, Redfort, which was supposed to have been the one safe place left in this part of the country, where humanity had gathered in force and built the walls of its last defense against the terrors of the wild that nature had unleashed against them. Perhaps she might also have regretted not turning back sooner that she did, after an encounter with a starved old man had revealed that the "Redfort" was a fantasy concocted by a gang of highwaymen who thought it a clever way to attract survivors - and the loot they carried - to their corner of the new American wilderness. But what Sister Rudolph would have regretted most of all was her decision to try and cross a mile-long bridge while the night was still shrouded in pre-dawn darkness. A pack of sharp-clawed something-or-others had been nesting in a smashed old semi and didn't take kindly to the intrusion upon their territory. What kind of dinosaur had the little hopping things been? Sister Rudolph didn't know. Right now, taxonomy was the last thing on her mind; she could still hear the scrabble of claws on concrete, see their snapping mouths and almost comical pigeon-like hopping as she scrambled higher and higher up the steel truss. Whatever the things were, Sister Rudolph was just glad they couldn't climb.

That had been 45 minutes ago, but it felt like she had been up there in the sky for days.

Sister Rudolph risked another wide-eyed glance down below her, not daring to free a clenched white hand from the cold steel to brush her hair from her face or hold her robes out of the way. It was a miracle one of the things hadn't caught the trailing black train of her habit and pulled her off the truss like a cat yanking a mouse by its tail... But now the dinosaurs, if that's what these creatures really were, were nowhere to be found. Sister Rudolph hadn't glimpsed anything moving in the morning light, or heard any rasping craws, for what seemed like hours, but she wasn't convinced. These things were smart, and Sister Rudolph knew they were waiting down there, somewhere, for the cat to fall out of the tree.

And so, in the face of certain death, Sister Rudolph had taken her cross in hand and was ready to renounce all faith, that inexplicable force that had kept her moving for three years while demons walked the earth. But then she saw something that froze the blasphemy on her lips.

Not so far away, on what must have been the far bank of the Mississippi, piercing the gray morning fog, twinkled a sharp yellow light. Sister Rudolph looked at that bright speck with much the same expression as she did when she caught her first sight of the great lizards three years ago. What kind of guiding star was this, sent to Earth in her hour of need? What else could it be but fire, that most powerful gift from God to Man? Sister Rudolph's mind cleared as quickly as she blinked. There was a fire on the bank, and that meant other people. The fight was not over after all; she would not die today!

With a supreme effort of will, Sister Rudolph tore her eyes from her twinkling star and, shivering and shuffling and waving in the wind, crawled her way up the rest of the arc of the great steel truss, reached the top, and started down on the other side. She had been poised on the second of three such humps, and, with many an invigorating glance to that fire on the approaching shore, Sister Rudolph braved the groaning metal behemoth and her terror of heights until she had set two feet on the concrete at the terminal end of the bridge, wavered slightly at the shock of solid ground, and broke into a mad, drunken dash until the hulking, overgrown shapes of long-abandoned cars lay far behind her. Luckily, the pack of sharp-clawed something-or-others had either lost track of her in the glare of dawn or lost interest in the pursuit, and Sister Rudolph did not die between the eastern and western banks of the Mississippi River.

~~~

It was another half hour or so before Sister Rudolph thought she should be approaching the fire soon, based on where she had last caught a glimpse of it, flickering bravely through the dense undergrowth that had swallowed St. Louis (and so many other cities) whole. Another ten minutes of fruitless tramping through thick mud almost convinced Sister Rudolph that the fire had never really existed. Then the smell hit her. The delectable, unmistakable odor of cooked meat wafted forth on a warm wind. Sister Rudolph could not help but smiling. In the intensity of her crisis on the bridge, she had not realized how awfully hungry she was!

But, of course, the fire could just as easily belong to bandits as to friendly travelers. Sister Rudolph tread as lightly as possible, but it was difficult to disguise the crackling of branches and fallen leaves. A few more steps and - there, through a lapse in the vegetation, the fire! She could hear it crackling. She could smell the food...

Well, Sister Rudolph thought, stomach gurgling, if my faith was saved today, I guess I should put it to good use, huh? Here goes nothing... And she took those few more deliberate steps until she emerged from the undergrowth and into that ring of light and warmth that had guided her down from yet another Hell on this new Earth.

Psyche was all alone.

It would seem as if a war completely destroyed humanity, no, it was nature. Nature came back to strike. While she would agree that humanity was destroying the earth and its natural resources, they didn't deserve to be all murdered. She thought she was the only one left. She was really hungry, she was holding a old shotgun, which was ready to kill animals for fresh meat.

Her stomach growled, and she was extremely thirsty. She realized that she had leftover meat in her pockets. She grabbed it and got some sticks, making a fire. She was so hungry..She had to.

She began to cook the food. The food smelt delicious. Psyche waited for the food to get at a good temperature.

The hooded man looked up, hearing something move through the brush in front of him, and stops moving entirely. It was another human, something he hadn't seen for at least a year. He was tempted to grab his knife, but didn't. You don't greet people by taking out a knife, He thought, his hand halfway into his pocket, before sliding back out with nothing. The man cleared his throat, and said "Hello." His voice was soft, yet somehow rough at the same time. "You look hungry. Do you want some food?" The boy asked very nonchalantly, holding a wooden stake over the fire, to which the large slab of meat hung, fat bubbling off as it cooked over the small fire.

[[Happeh burf day Heron ]]

Sister Rudolph gave a slight start, as at first she hadn't seen anyone sitting around the fire. A trick of the eyes had blended the tall, hooded figure into the background. Sister Rudolph couldn't hold back a frown at his voice; he sounded young, too young to be alone in the place that Earth had become.

"Hey," she managed in a dry rasp. Sister Rudolph coughed. "Hey. Yes, yes, I'd love something to eat. Had a hell of a morning."

Did this man, or boy, or whatever he was have any weapons? Sister Rudolph eyed him carefully. It was difficult to tell what kind of person that cloak concealed. She cast her eyes upon the opposite riverbank, looking for signs of other people... Perhaps he had accomplices, and the other, older ones had gone out to hunt or gather food or rob survivors blind as he stayed behind at the camp. Sister Rudolph did not dare sit down, and only stood by, watching fat drip from the meat and sizzle into the coals. The warmth was only too welcome on this chilly morning.

"Yes, that's very, very generous of you. I guess it's just you out here, then? You got a name or anything?"

Her eyes snapped to a point somewhere farther along the bank, where Sister Rudolph had thought she'd seen a flicker of light. Maybe it was just a figment of her imagination, or the reflection of the rising sun against a surviving pane of glass, but... Sister Rudolph's blood thumped quickly through her ears, and she subtly shifted one arm back. In her small pack, Sister Rudolph didn't carry much but food (which she had almost eaten her way through), water, and a few rusty old tools, but she knew as well as anyone the importance of a good knife in the wilderness and had stuck one in an accessible leather sheathe.

The boy spoke, "My name is Henry, nice to meet you." he pulled out his knife and cut a piece of the meat off the stake, and handed it to the woman. as he did so, something rustled in a nearby bush, letting out a few reptilian chirps. Henry gets up, grabs a small rock, and throws it at whatever extinct creature was in the bush. What ever the animal was ran off, chirping as it went. "Ignore that. probably just a Sinny." Henry said as he sat back down. Henry had made a large number of names for the new beasts he finds. Sinnies were his nickname for the compsognathid Sinosauropteryx.

Henry looked over at the woman, and noticed her silver cross. "are you a woman of faith? I had faith once." he asked.

_-_-_-_

By Psyche's fire, out of the brush slunk a few Sinnies, chirping and hissing at each other.

Psyche took a step back, staring at the Sinnies and then begins to run away. Not until she bumps into Henry. In which she hesitates and apologizes.

"Oh..S-Sorry..Wait, are you another person?.." Asked Psyche, her face was filled with bruises and her arms were covered in recently made stabs. Her hair was a Indigo color and it was long. Her eyes were a ocean blue, she was thin and looked like she was about to starve to death.

"Mm. I'm Jane." Sister Rudolph couldn't help but tense up as Henry took out his knife, but after a pause she snatched up the meat and tore into it. It was good; so good she almost gagged. Drops of hot juice trickled down her hands as she bit off another chunk, stretching it out with her teeth before it snapped away.

Henry's question caught her off guard, while she was still chewing. Sister Rudolph frowned and took another bite. Well, there was little point in asking why Henry'd lost his faith. Or... was there?

Demons walked the Earth, and brought in their wake such a fall of civilization as no one had known in all of human history. To Sister Rudolph, her very existence in such a hell was a reason to be thankful, and her faith kept her alive as much as meat and water did. But in her time as a minister (briefly in the convent, and much more extensive in the wild), Sister Rudolph had learned that sometimes the biggest things in life hardly matter. A person is small and personal, and is struck by smaller and more personal things than man-eating lizards. Still frowning, she peered at Henry as if her eyes could pierce his hood and see what kind of man (or boy) was beneath it.

But before she could address his question there was a crashing through the undergrowth and a third figure stepped into the little clearing by the river.

"Land sakes alive," Sister Rudolph whispered, for in the flickering firelight the creature appeared beaten, scarred, and misshapen. At first she thought the girl might be bleeding from her arms. Her breakfast forgotten, Sister Rudolph hopped to her feet and rushed over.

"Child! Are you well, you look like you've been run through a combine... Are you hungry? There's plenty to eat, come and sit down! There's... I have gauze in my bag, I think, if you're hurt..."

She widened her eyes at Henry, as if to ask, Do you know this girl?

Henry shrugged his shoulders, having zero idea who this woman was. "Why such a rush?" Henry asked the indigo-haired girl, and where the heck do you find hair dye these days?"

"I'm Psyche, and i found this hair dye in a old building. Also..Things were chasing me, i didn't know what they were but they were growling when i was cooking food.." Said the young women.

"I'm starving though, and don't worry. I'm fine, these cuts are minor.." Psyche sighed.

"I just feel like i'm some stupid kid in a old city that is hopeless. I've seen others before..They didn't like me and they said i wasn't useful for anything, so they kicked me out."

"I...I just don't know what to do..I don't know where to go.."

"Oh, hon." Sister Rudolph sidestepped back to the fire, holding one arm out to usher the long-haired girl along. "Don't you worry about where you're going, right now you're gonna sit and eat. I swear, you're so skinny you'd slip down a drain."

She took out her own knife and applied it to the meat on the spit. With a sideways smile at Henry, Sister Rudolph impaled a sizable chunk and offered the handle to Psyche. "What'd you say your name was now? Vikki? Well, all that talk about stupid and useless is a load of nonsense. You just get that in your belly."

Sister Rudolph searched the ground for a log or a rock or something to sit on, found nothing, and plopped herself down on her folded knees with a grumble. "And you, too, Harry, or what was your name? You look just's starved, or you would if you'd take that robe off and let me get a look at you. Vikki, this is Harry. I'm Jane. You'll be safe with us."

Of course, Sister Rudolph didn't know that for sure. In fact, she couldn't swear that this strange, scarred, purple-haired creature wasn't playing them both for a fool; Sister Rudolph had seen that act before, and not just in the hell of the last three years, either. You'd pity a person, you'd weep at their story, you'd give them your coat, then you'd wake up the next morning robbed to your shoes. She might even be a part of this cloaked boy's troupe. It could all be one nasty trap.

Well, whether the girl was acting or not, she clearly needed to eat. Sister Rudolph rummaged through her bag. "I've got some dried fruits in here still. They're musty but they'll do. We'll have us a little feast. Won't that be nice! Just us three little misfits here, just met eachother, and now we're sittin' down for breakfast."

Sister Rudolph looked up at her two new companions, beaming at each in turn. It was a pretty morning, if a bit cold. It was the sort of morning that made Sister Rudolph wonder if things might work out after all. She looked down at her cross and folded her hands. "Harry here's not a man of faith, Vikki, so he won't say grace with me. Ain't that right, Harry? And you're excused, too, because if you don't get some food in your this second I think you'll keel right over, bless your heart. But y'all won't mind if I say a few words, now that we have us a proper meal goin'." One hour ago she had been ready to die; Sister Rudolph smiled and closed her eyes. She certainly had a lot to be thankful for.

Suddenly, behind Psyche, three sinnies burst from the bush, and run off the same way they came. "Were you seriously running from sinnies? they're more timid than mice!" laughed Henry as the tiny orange and white dinosaurs ran off.

"I'm short-sighted! I thought they were a dangerous type of dinosaur.. Don't mock me!" Psyche cried.

"I just want to live.. Yet you make fun of me.."

Psyche took the piece of meat and began to eat it, while looking at Sister Rudolph. "Thank you.." Psyche thanked. "That's what i mean, people mock me for trying to survive.. I'm just a stupid kid that should die.."

"What? I'm just saying that something that small can't hurt people, save for the rhamphs." Henry chuckled, taking a bite from his piece of meat, "But they don't nest inland. the only things to worry about out near the river are the crocs, dimes, dilos, and the occasional spino from down south." He warned.

"That's alright, child, that's alright," Sister Rudolph said with a frown. What could she say to a girl who wanted to die? Especially if she might get her wish?

"You know... Uh, you know a lot about these, err, things, I guess," she said, turning to Henry. It didn't feel right to call them dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were colorful little pictures, their roaring and teeth confined to the pages of picture books. These were animals, real animals, quick and wild and sometimes monstrous. "I guess you've been out here on your own for a while, huh? Well, would you mind if... Vikki and I, here, tagged along with you for a bit? I dunno about her, but I'hain't got nowhere to go." Sister Rudolph sighed with a smile.

"Where y'all two from, anyway? And where ya headed? I aim to get back to Kansas, check on my folks. But I guess I'll go wherever the Lord takes me, he he he."

"I wouldn't mind. I'm heading to California. thought it might be an America-only problem." Henry said as he got up from his , "We might wanna move out. this meat will bring things up from the river and all around. take a few pieces for the road, and then we'll move out."

Meanwhile, at Psyche's now put out fire, a few sinnies pick morsels off the piece of meat she had cooking. a screech that sounds like a hawk screech mixed with alligator growls scares the tiny dinosaurs off.

Sister Rudolph's head shot up. She threw what food scraps she could into her pack and hastily threw it over her shoulder. "Harry, did you hear... What kind of... What was that?"

"Sounds like a Dilo. they follow smaller things to find food. probably followed those sinnies," Henry informed, beginning to walk away, "And even if it found food, it won't feed 'em all."

"So where are we going now?" Psyche asked. "I wanna stay with you.." Psyche begins to follow Henry, wondering where they are going.

"Somewhere away from here," Henry said, picking up his pace, "Unless you wanna be dilo chow.", as a reptilian head, long toothy snout, with two blood red crests, rises from the bushes next to the campfire.

"Yeah, I'm for stickin' together, too," Sister Rudolph remarked - casting a worried glance over her shoulder - as she plodded after her new companions. The morning mist was beginning to rise off the Mississippi river, and when she listened closely, she could hear birds calling in the distance. Well, she hoped they were birds.

So here they were, a savvy boy trekking across the country - for God knew how long - to escape the dinosaurs he'd studied so much, a mysterious girl who appeared from nowhere and seemed to have nowhere to go, and her, Sister Rudolph, heading home after a long, long time away. Sister Rudolph said a prayer under her breath and put on a smile, for it was looking to be a beautiful day.

Despite the dinosaurs that might be following them, that is, or the possibility that this was still some kind of elaborate trap. Well, no day's perfect.

Henry looked back as he walked away, and was slightly scared by what he saw. Around the piece of cooking meat stood three giant reptiles stood, inspecting the now burning meat. One of the dilos, the largest, kicked the meat off the ramshackle rack that held it in place over the fire, letting the meat roll right to the smaller, duller pair of what seemed to be juvenile dilos. The three dinosaurs then began to fill their faces with the charred flesh. Henry gagged, before saying "Let's pick up the pace. Might be another one."

"Uhh... Yeah." Sister Rudolph hiked her torn habit up to her knees and fell into step behind Henry and Psyche. Sister Rudolph was fit, but her short legs worked against her in the thick undergrowth, and she was soon panting heavily. "Those things... Gonna... Come after us, Harry? When they finished eatin, I mean." She realized with a pang that she hadn't gotten her knife back from Psyche. "Y'all wouldn't... Have any... Weapons now, wouldja?"

"Baby dilos sleep after they eat. I doubt they'll come." Replied Henry, "but now that we're deeper into the city, I'm not completely sure what we'll come across." He explained as he continued to trek into the city, still slightly dark as the sun rises.

Sister Rudolph frowned. "What, you got yourself... huff a hideout here, huff... or somethin?" She didn't like this one bit. The kid, though young and a little skinny, had survived this world for three years. Either he got by through what he knew about the dinosaurs... or he had help. Help that might hop out of the bushes and beat a couple of travelers, rob them blind, and leave them to die.

But then again, Sister Rudolph didn't have a whole lot of options.