Prelude to Rust

[Zadown]

Red defeated looking clouds sailed over Pízlywk, low and brooding. Ambient light from the sky struck through them and turned into blood-smeared lances. These spotlights illuminated the constant mist of rust hanging over the iron ground, they sweeped past the ruins of the skyscrapers, raced over the graveyard of the tanks, hit a few rare reflecting surfaces to create bright crimson stars and, lastly, showed motion down there on the ground, here and there.

 

One of those moving specks paused and turned his gaze up, cocked his head as if listening to something. Distant thunder of artillery fire. Hollow whistling of explosive rounds cutting through air, far enough. Faint sounds of small arms fire, single shots getting drowed by the occassional machine gun or assault rifle on burst fire. All usual, all as it should be and had been for ever .. but there was something odd, some sound his ears had registered that was out of the ordinary. Jacob Vladonov turned to look towards the battle, saw some far-away explosions but paid no attention to such mundane sight and turned to continue his walk. And then he heard the doomsday whistle, the sound of destiny roaring towards him from the sky - the sound old men talked about in bars, the sound they said that would mean at the very best loss of a limb, a trip to death's edge. He turned his gaze skyward again, too slowly, but still he thought he could see it, a metallic glint hanging suspended in the air for a frozen moment before it dived down.

 

Ground heaved, rose up to hit him with a hammer blow. He reached towards his backpack, hand moving an inch - a reflex, too slow, all he had time to think. Then ... the trembling hand moved another inch, another breath taken and second lived, and in a complete daze he drew forth his pack of cards, looked around half-sitting on the rusty ground. World was still in one piece. Everything was as it had been five seconds before: the forlorn clouds sailing on the sky, eternal war going on in the zone, errant shafts of light running around the desolate town. Except there was a dud artillery round embedded in the ground a few meters behind him.

 

"That was too close, it really was", muttered him and held tightly to his deck of cards. With a carefree gesture that seemed to ill fit this grey-clad man, he drew a card and threw it away for the wind to carry away. Wind took this mission seriously lifting the card up and away, far higher than the light breeze there was should've been able to, towards the red clouds sailing high above the ground. It twisted and turned, and just before it vanished in the clouds, the girl brandishing two swords in the picture seemed to grin under her blindfold - behind her artillery shells started to fall from blue sky, covering the horizont of the card with deluge of explosions.