Chapter 311: Survivors


    "I ain''t ever even been on an airne!" Becky shouted, wide-eyed and grinning at Mason as they flew through the sky. Their birdmen ''pilots'' carried them with stony faces, eyes locked on the jungle canopy as they searched for the battle site.


    A few burly soldiers were able to carry Seamus, Becky and Phuong by themselves (the guy who got Becky must have won some kind of wager). But it took two each to carry Mason and Carl, and three to carry Streak. The wolf asionally howled and wiggled until Mason calmed him down.


    "Do you want to fall?" he hissed. "Stay still and stop whining. We''re almost there."


    He had no idea if they were almost there, which the wolf probably knew no matter what he said. He was also somewhere between Becky and Streak on the experience of flying.


    Knowing the son of a bitch birdman could just drop him a few hundred feet wasn''t great for his natural distrust. But it <em>was</em>a pretty amazing view. And he also knew he''d survive the fall.


    From the air, the true nature of thendscape became apparent—the aftereffects of ''the doom'' made more clear. Outside the city''s junglendscape, the whole world looked like a desert. In every direction Mason saw lifeless sand stretching past the elevated horizon.


    "Is it all like that?" he said to the soldiers carrying him. "Is there anything out there but desert?"


    "There is," said one. "Far to the north there''s a small forest still struggling to survive. There are some few rivers, and life along the coasts."


    A forest to the north.


    Mason wondered if that was the great forest in his ‘own’ time. Something about it brought him a sense of hope. Even now when it seemed the world was on the brink of destruction, it had healed. Life had returned and covered the world again.


    On the other hand, it was also a warning: things could always turn.


    Something like ''the doom'' could return and wipe out nearly everything and everyone, just as ''roboGod'' had done to the human race. For most people maybe it would have brought mncholy, sadness, or loss. Mason just got angry.


    "What a waste," he muttered, staring out at it all. "What a useless, stupid waste."


    The soldier looked at him strangely.


    "The doom cleansed our world, Champion,” he said. “But we remain. One day we will cover thisnd, and give praise to Nephus for his favor."


    Mason didn''t have the urge or the stomach to argue. ‘Chosen’nds and ‘chosen’ people weren''t exactly new to any earthling paying attention.


    That a man or a birdman could somehow be pleased that nearly the whole world was wiped out didn''t shock him. But it didn''t make him happy, either. It was all ''fake'', all a story made by roboGod. Except with such power it made even its stories ''real''.


    <em>By what right</em>, he wondered, and certainly not for the first time. <em>This fucking thing.</em><em>By what right does it y with all our lives.</em>


    Mason still couldn''t make any sense of this new world and this new version of himself. How sometimes, like even now, watching the world from the sky, or in the arms of his girls, or fighting for his life—he felt more alive in a few moments then he had in a lifetime on earth.


    But at what cost? To the world, and to him.


    No one had been given a say. No one had been given a vote to decide if everything should change. For that reason alone, Mason felt a responsibility to make it right. To settle the ount of man if ever he had the power.


    For the Nimitzs. For Becky''s kin. For everyone else who vanished or died to suit some synthetic alien’s whim.


    It was another weight on Mason''s shoulders, and one day he''d make it right. He swore it for the thousandth time, then tried to put it from his mind. First he had to survive and grow and learn. He had a dead dragon to kill.


    "There," gestured the soldier carrying Becky, a kind of rope harness attaching the cowgirl easily to his body. "Do you see it, sir?"


    "I see it." The silent captain carrying Mason gestured and the flying troop started to descend. "Are you ready, Champion?"


    Mason took a breath and nodded, and the group lowered towards a hill and rocky outcropping poking out from the endless trees.


    * * *


    Bones. A field of bones.


    Mason and the others thanked the soldiers, who nodded and nced around the battle site like it may corrupt their lungs just to breathe the air.


    They took off again one by one, moving back to slowly circle in the sky until signaled. Only the stoic captain stayed, turning to Mason with a strange expression, as if he was reluctant to speak.


    "You will find a pit just to the south," he said. "My father told me of it...of a ce where the dead were buried in a mass grave. That is where I would begin. I will watch for your signal."


    Mason nodded and lifted his bag of shovels. The soldiers had not offered to stay and help dig, which was ostensibly to keep them safe and ready to carry the yers out.


    But Mason believed the men just didn''t want to spend a second longer than necessary in this ce. He couldn''t tell if that was a good or bad sign.


    "Alright," he said, tossing shovels to the yers. "You heard the man. Let''s walk to this pit, and start digging.


    The yers all got to it in silence, a somber, dangerous, and vaguely creepy feeling running throughout the ce. Despite being a jungle it wasn''t filled with the sounds of life.


    It was eerily quiet, tomb-like. <em>Unholy</em>.


    Mason felt ufortable despite the ''natural'' setting, and suspected some kind of magic permeated the ground itself. Even the nt life seemed...distant, less than sentient to his druidic senses. As if were it asleep, or at least dazed.


    Streak didn''t notice, and had apparently found wolf heaven. He practically skipped through the brush, digging and growling, tossing dirt as he searched like a pig for truffles. He came up with maybe a femur in his jaw, head raised like he''d just dunked on the home team.


    "Probably good they didn''t see you chewing on their ancestors," Mason said. "Now put that down and help us dig. But don''t..."


    Streak sprayed dirt in Mason''s direction. When he looked up to see if he''d made his point, Mason tossed a rock at him.


    They dug for maybe an hour. The ground was rtively soft, so even Seamus managed to move a fair amount of dirt. Mason felt a bit like a human-machine digging hybrid.


    For a little while he lost himself in the mindless, simple task, finding a great deal of mental relief in the act. Then he looked up and realized he''d basically cleared a five by five foot hole so deep he couldn''t see out.


    "Hey, uh, kid?" he heard Carl shout and hopped out with a single, vertical jump.


    "Find something?"


    He looked over to see Carl and Alex by a long line of half unburied corpses, and walked over to take a look. He wasn''t surprised at the set up, considering it was a battlefield, and since the captain told him they''d piled the bodies. But his feet slowed as he stared at the skeletons.


    Some of them were too small.


    Most had almost identical injuries to their skulls, like they''d been ritually ughtered. Or executed. Mason uncovered more and more, feeling a sudden kind of manic need to understand, to see the reality of what he was dealing with.


    The corpses seemed endless.


    There were many soldiers, too, or at least people who had clearly died in battle. But at least half the number were smaller—women, and children, the same pattern of injuries to their skulls or spines.


    This hadn''t just been a battle. It had been a massacre. No wonder the birdmen hadn''t wanted to return.


    As the victors, it seemed inevitable that the ‘Nephi’ had been the ones doing the massacring. How and why there were so many children Mason had no idea. But it was other animalistic people like them—a sister people not far away. Mason wondered if the Nephi had wiped them out entirely.


    "What does it mean?" Carl asked, kneeling beside Mason and gently covering the skeleton of a child with dirt. "Does it change anything?"


    "No," Mason said, gritting his teeth. "So the survivors aren''t saints. What the hell else is new. We aren''t here to judge, just save them. Keep digging. I''m going to try and go deeper. Alex if you have any kind of ''detection'', maybe with your affinity? I have things with druid powers, but since this is maybe ''unholy'' and since your Divine, maybe you can..."


    The ground shook, and Mason summoned his bow. The yers came together into a circr formation, turning out to watch the trees without him saying a word. Streak dropped histest bone and growled, turning back and forth and not seeming to know where to look.


    But it soon became clear.


    Clumps of dirt and bone erupted from the ground near Mason''s site. Something white and covered in filth emerged with unnatural, jerky motions.


    Mason loosed a Power Shot before the thing was clear.


    The arrow cracked and maybe broke a piece of bone. But the creature just kepting.


    "Don''t wait," Mason called, "attack!"


    Seamus started loosing fiery missiles, and Mason shot several more fire arrows before closing with his swords. Phuong sted with his symbols, and Carl went forward with a wary expression, finally slicing his dagger straight through a bone before leaping back as dust or something sprayed back at him.


    "Ow," he said, brushing it away, a little steam rising from his skin.


    Apparently just <em>hurting</em>the thing was dangerous.


    The bones rose and rose until limbs and wings and a serpentine head emerged and stared down at the yers with glowing, purple eyes.


    For a moment everyone froze and stared, lost in the dark horror, the size, the might.


    Mason activated Hunter''s Mark, then charged for its chest.


    <hr>