[i][b]Marange, Nyundo[/b][/i] Lydia Benson veritably sighed in her decanted roobios as she politely emancipated her taken limb from her hostess’ grasp. Otherwise and unpleasantly alone, she perambulated desultorily through Makemba’s wake and into the adjacent almost-kitchen. Therein, her nostrils irritably twitched. Refuge was taken in her mug’s floral vapors. While the warmth of fresh-baked bread and simmered soup were pleasant, if not prosaic, undertones of rubbish and rotten vegetables tortured her olfaction. Waste belonged outside in a bin, but in the grandiose metropolitan tomb fate decreed she occupy, it, unable to escape, morphed into a quintessence of rot and lingered in the stale air. [i]“Mmm,”[/i] Lydia demurred on a question posed by Makemba. Something about being hungry, she surmised. A scullery tour was far from her preconception of a tolerable itinerary, much less an extended stay. Besides, though Marange’s novelty, if not its deficient accommodations, impressed her, neither it nor her thus far narrow view of it were the subject of thousands of her dollars. In as tactful terms as possible, she alluded to that vexatious conundrum and soon gleaned her charity all but perished with Phalaborwa. In spite of such a cruel pronouncement, Lydia was delighted to discover the village’s refugees were at that very moment received into Marange and beneficiaries of able care. [i]“Well, that is assuredly auspicious!”[/i] Lydia ejaculated, her elation accentuated by a double tap of her pearl-enamaled nails, painted to match her attire, on her borrowed earthenware mug; [i]“Of course, you must guide me to them post-haste.”[/i] Although reticent to accede to Lydia’s request, Makemba’s objections were whelmed by a swift current of ripostes and assurances. What piqued Makemba’s curiosity was Lydia’s attestation of being a doctor—although artfully omitted was that the focus of her doctorate was in human genetics, not medicine. It was a brisk, brief, and quiet walk to the hangar cavern. Around them, chemiluminescent fungus and crystals illumined the way, their shadows softly diffused along the moss-draped walls. On the way, Makemba informed Lydia that Marange’s medics, guided by doctor Omari, cared for the distraught of Phalaborwa and assured Lydia that they were in good hands. Just as they turned the final corner toward their destination, the tunnel ominously collapsed behind them and chaos jarred their senses. [i][b]“Mungu atuokoe! Tafadhali nisaidie!”[/b][/i] reverberated throughout, half cried, half howled—spat venomously from the contorted mouths of its victims. Lydia’s mascara-laden eyelashes mechanically fluttered in disbelief. A women squatted on the cold stone floor above a pool of urine, babes clutched so firmly to each breast they surely could not breathe, and wailed as mellifluously as a deranged succubus. Everywhere, men and women in uniform, expressions stricken with cowardice, rushed the tunnels and clawed their fingers to grisly stumps in their futile efforts to dislodge the debris and escape an unseen yet terrible fate. And, as Lydia’s vision panned and her thoughts whorled, her focus intuitively latched on to a bald man whose distended frame blocked the entrance of a medical hut. On all fours and with khakis pushed to his ankles, he spasmodically thrust his hips into a writhing mass pinned beneath him. The tension of his taut sweat-lathered glutes was palpable, but only when his pate tilted back and his lips ceased to muffle his victim’s screams, still constricted by the stethoscope coiled around their throat, did the act morph into horrific clarity. A boy, all too young, supine, penetrated, and sullied in the flow of his hematic egesta. [i]“The savage negro,”[/i] she whispered, then felt a slap across her face. Her hand half-lifted to shelter her bruised cheek as she turned toward Makemba when, suddenly, she could not recall what transpired. Only the pain lingered. Again, her face was struck. Again, the memory faded. Like a dumb cow, she gaped at her assailant and struggled to process an agony for which there was no antecedent. Everything felt fragmented, blurry. The rouge-caked palm, elegiac shrieks, smothered babes, sanguine stench, the doctor’s vast leathery piston soiled and gritty, and the boy—oh god, have mercy on that poor prolapsed boy! Eventually, Lydia collapsed to the floor, her occipital bone cracked, jaw dislocated, and left ear deafened. [center]. . .[/center] Alarmed at the sudden quakes and Ayanda’s collapse, Ndakala instinctively reached out to aid her. He was, however, too late; a crown of crimson-tipped lavender spines erupted around the quavering pool in which she drowned and pricked his wrist. Immediately he recoiled from the intense pain and cradled his wounded limb, the ugly gash already prolific with viscous yellow bile. As tears deformed his vision and tormented howls reverberated from his mouth, he saw his arm grotesquely transform. It was fantastical, akin to a continuation of his prior and lurid hypnagogic state where he thought he saw a vision of his family’s ancestral village destroyed by gargantuan gorillas. [i]“Ndakala, no!”[/i] Kheithiwe, too late, implored, then covered his face with his hands and heaved. Rapidly Ndakala’s limb, slick with pus, morphed and decayed. Aghast, he watched transfixed as his digits fell from the stump of his hand onto the kaleidoscopic moss where they liquefied as fetid pools. Meanwhile, a bloated black lattice writhed up along his forearm. Through his screams, he gagged at the stench. His limb no longer resembled an arm, but a noxious black morel that attracted swarms of gnats with its foulness. The parade of horrors intensified as Kheithiwe, unable to contain his revulsion, retched and vomited out a piebald flesh-egg. It landed on the venomous spines and, even as it grew into an ersatz copy of its progenitor, it likewise transformed to a fungal canvas that unleashed spores into the gathered cloud of winged insects. Naked flesh rotted before their very eyes, covered in a translucent choleric film, limbs, trunk, neck, and genitals engorged into a polyp-bestrewn mycological hellscape. Acute pain lanced through Ndakala’s arm, just above the elbow. His shock refocused, he glanced at his bloody stump and realized Kheithiwi, in that vital act of dismemberment, likely salvaged what remained of his life. [i]“Quick,”[/i] Kheithwie commanded, his composure restored and a torn bit of cloth pressed over his mouth and nose, [i]“we must leave this place—there is nothing we can do for her now.”[/i] Trance-like, Ndakala felt himself stand, grasp Kheithiwe by the shoulder with his remaining hand, flee, then shortly thereafter darkness possessed him. [center]. . .[/center] [i][b]Saudade, Glasslands – former Tunis[/b][/i] As it lumbered out of the wreckage of the airport terminal and lunged with feline grace to the precipice of a vast concrete i-beam that jutted precipitously skyward, Reaex cycled its sensors and stress-tested its integument. Steam emanated from slits exposed by the angled scales that were normally pressed flat against its body. Gradually, its internals rejected the impregnated microbial invasion and integrity was completely restored. Then, as it lounged on its apex and basked its solar-receptive exterior in the hot midday sun, it took the time to survey the city. [i]“Къде сега да отида?”[/i] Reax pondered, its words carried on the wind like tinkling chimes. A dilapidated sprawl transitioned from ultraviolet to true color, was overlain by a heat map, and further overlain by magnetic fields. The various layers were beautiful, although what they exposed was tragic. Even before the wave, this was a place of death. Afterward, it was a salted blight where all save the hardiest structures were submerged in sodden marshes of oil-slick liquefied pavement. Bemused as to the world it found itself in, for clearly this was not Fortis, Reaex peered south along the eroded coast and, for a brief moment, faintly observed an avian form just before it dipped beneath the fractured skyline. Immediately, Reaex plunged from its perch and sprinted like a truck-size jaguar through the crumbled edifices of a once grand empire and onward toward the detected glint of metallic wings. Four kilometers through a maze of anticlines, synclines, rifts, and debris, it came across a seaweed-cloaked sign that read Cité de la Culture. A spire pierced the courtyard of a structure that tried, yet failed, to embrace the monolith. And there, barely concealed behind the spire, was a heat signature. From a run to a prowl, Reaex’s movements became deliberate and silent as it ascended the tiers of concrete stairs in order to gain a height advantage on whatever lurked nearby. With hushed grace, it sprung atop the structure that unified the four distinct blades of the spire. Then, it peered down at a Val’gasra ravager. Although a strong heat signature emanated from the flesh horror, it was all biochemical. Nothing, Reaex assessed, it could digest. In spite of its care to remain undetected, Reaex was noticed by the creature; no doubt by pure happenstance. A stare-down ensued. Just as the ravager appeared, to Reaex, a lump of useless biomass, so, too, did Reaex seem to the ravager so much twisted metal. That each carried a heat signature meant little, for rot produced as much. It wasn’t until the ravager’s vocalization that Reaex was sure it was even alive. [i]“Vora gusk ga-ttusk!”[/i] bellowed the monstrosity, a phrase Reaex proved unable to translate in spite of the presence of a universal translator embedded in its neural-cohesive bramble. After a moment longer, the ravager meandered off through the busted double doors and into the depths of the facility. Yet another moment passed, this one of contemplation, then Reaex inwardly decided [i]уви, просто тъпо животно[/i], jumped off the platform, and raced toward its former destination which, as it so happened, was one and the same as the Cathedral of Saint Vincent de Paul—just in time to behold Nuberu crash through the rotted wooden confessional amongst a splinter of shattered pew upheaven by the avian menaces. Yet those wings, those delicious ferrous wings, practically made Reaex salivate palladium-nitrogen compound.