Earlier:
"I saw it with my own eyes! Without a map, you couldn't guess there was ever a town..."
The door to the town's main general store closed with a cheery jingle, chopping off the shop assistant's bragging. Robert J. Wilison smiled in pleasure as the idle chatter stopped. He much preferred hearing the bustle of an ordinary autumn afternoon in Forrester's Crossing. The slap of his leather boots on the paving stones was accompanied by the sawing of a carpenter finishing up the day's final project, and the incessant background rattle of chains around geared wheels. These were occasionally punctuated by a distant shout, the knocking of expanding or contracting metal, or the hissing whisper of escaping steam.
Wilison turned off the main street after passing the milliner's shop, and descended the slope of Gwabegar Lane, taking care on the red gravel surface. He reached the meeting point at the end of the lane a few minutes early. The sounds of the town had blended into a dull murmur, leaving him alone with nothing to do but reflect, and worry. Given the ongoing harvest, his current responsibility for the safety of the town, and his family - especially his wife's delicate condition, and his eldest daughter's injury - he had no shortage of worries.
The crunch of approaching leather boots came as a welcome distraction. Wilison looked back up the hill and immediately recognised Tomas Friche's distinctive combination of floppy grey hat and damaged poorly-fitting brown leather coat. While the newcomer approached, he checked his pocket watch. "Good evening to you, Friche," he said, once the taller man was within conversational range. "I see that you are early."
Friche barely let Wilison finish speaking before rattling off his response. "Er, yes. I am. Early, I mean. I know you don't like it, Wilison. Being late, I mean." The man began to unconsciously fidget with a button on one of the many pockets of his olive-dyed cotton trousers.
Wilison shook his head sharply. "What I dislike is people wasting daylight, regardless of whether they do that by being early or late."
Friche's eyebrows rose and his brow creased. "But... You..."
"Addison hired a new assistant," Wilison said, hoping that would be enough to explain why he was uncharacteristically early.
"At the store? What has that got to do with... Oh, a shorter wait than you expected. Of course. Yes, that makes sense. Except... you do not have any bags. Right, you were putting in an order. Winter supplies... and I suspect something special, for the upcoming festivities?" Friche finished with an excited grin.
"Indeed."
"I was in there this morning, picking up more pencils. Hardly any wait at all. Much better than it used to be," Friche said with a relaxed smile.
Wilison was less enthusiastic about the change. "Perhaps. Except now that there are two assistants, they stand around chatting whenever there's no one to serve." Hiring more people was all very well and good, but only if their labour was actually necessary.
"Yes, the new fellow, Lonnie, he ran supplies across The Gap for a few weeks before taking this job. Can you imagine? The Gap!"
"I heard."
Friche carried on, indifferent to Wilison's impatience. "Awful, isn't it? It's really gone! Nearton's Bend, completely gone. Not a trace. Not even a stone." He ran a finger down the burn scar on his right cheek, staring into the distance.
Wilison quickly altered his expression from annoyed to sympathetic. "You are still here. You and hundreds of other survivors."
"Here, yes, and in other towns. But not in our home. And... and we did nothing... We just ran."
Wilison searched for some words of encouragement. He could not allow any man in his patrol to continue in such self doubt. "We all know that fighting was futile, Friche. Anyone who tried is dead. Better to live on, share your memories of what was, and contribute however you can. As you are doing right now. And speaking of the Town Patrol, where is Shenks? I thought he was working with you in the railway warehouse today, no?”
That set Friche off again. “No, I mean yes, I mean there was a change in plans. No, not a change in plans, but, you see, a water pipe sprung a leak and the repair crew was short handed. We didn't need him so badly in the warehouse, and the pay for emergency repairs is better, for fellows like Shenks who are good at that sort of thing. So that's what he did. Joined the repair crew, I mean. But I did check on him during my lunch break and reminded him to be on time for patrol.”
"Calm down, man. I keep telling you to use fewer words, not faster words." Wilison had to resist the urge to throw an intimidating glance the taller man's way. While he did not mind that he could intimidate Friche as easily as most men, it was often frustratingly counter-productive. Instead, Wilison withdrew his pocket-watch from his right trouser pocket again. “Shenks has little more than a minute in which to be on time. In the meantime, how does this fine afternoon find you?” He'd adjusted the watch only a month before, so it should still be within a second of the main town clock.
Friche glanced towards the setting sun. “Yes. It is a fine afternoon. I am fine too. Your wife and children, are they well?”
Wilison was relieved that the pointless small talk had helped to calm the skittish man. A patrol was no place to be nervous over nothing. “Most of my boys are bringing in the corn. The good lady is as would be expected, and the older girls are doing a fine job of running the household. All the children are properly behaved, and are healthy,” he said. “The sole exception is my eldest daughter, who is suffering a mild fever, despite her exemplary behaviour.”
Friche's eyes widened. “A fever? How bad is it?”
“It is lingering longer than I would like. I hope to appeal to the clerics... but there has never been an ailment my wife's chicken soup could not cure. She will be on the mend in time, Maker willing.” Wilison barely managed to keep his tone level. He was not nearly so certain as he was willing to admit.
"You can be certain of that," Friche assured him. "She is a devout daughter of a devout man."
“That she is," Wilison said, without doubt. A hint of a smile graced his lips, but only for a moment. "Alas, we cannot always be certain our devotion is enough."
"We can only hope that it is. Your eldest daughter, that is Chastity, right?”
"No, Charity. Chastity is my third daughter."
"Oh, I am sorry. Charity first, and your second daughter is... Why am I thinking 'Cup'?"
"Her name is Chalice."
"Ah!"
Further conversation was cut off by the hurried arrival of Lu Shenks. The man was not on foot like Friche and Wilison. Instead, he rode an incredibly dirty bicycle. “Sorry I'm late!” he said through a thick layer of partially dried mud. He dismounted a few metres from the other men, narrowly avoiding showering them with flecks of mud. "Hey, Tom." He held the bike with his left hand and used two fingers of his right to make the patrol's scissors gesture.
"Hey, Lu," Tomas Friche said, responding to the greeting with the same gesture.
Instead of gesturing, Wilison gave the young man an intimidating glance, though not his strongest. Over many years of practice, he'd become quite adept at controlling the strength of his glances. “You had a few seconds to spare. It is a shame you did not have enough time to clean yourself better.”
"I'll say!" Shenks agreed heartily. "We'd better move out before I catch my death of cold," he said, shivering in the wind, yet flashing an irrepressible grin.
"Yes. Tonight's patrol is a basic sweep of the perimeter. Time for us to move, Bonsai Patrol." Wilison began to walk to the very end of the lane, at which point it transitioned from a gravel road to a dirt track. The other men followed, as he knew they would.
"We have not forgotten the schedule," Shenks said, sounding slightly offended at the implication. He was cycling a reasonable distance behind the other two men, as his ride's wheels had more mud to dispense.
"You remembered your weapon too, and kept it clean," Friche said over his shoulder. "How did you get such a demon-cursed amount of mud on yourself and your bike?"
"I will have you know I've never forgotten my weapon," Shenks said, patting the miniature crossbow at his side with his right hand. The action of steering the bicycle had left his hands mostly free of dirt. "That was Greene, not me." Wilison knew from experience that Shenks was only pretending to be offended this time.
"We know. You have this same conversation every other week," Wilison said, cutting off the two friends before they could annoy him any further. "I would still like to know how you became so filthy, Shenks. And how fixing the pipeline took near to the entire day!"
"That is quite a long story. Though I am sure we will have time to get through the whole thing," Shenks said as the group turned right at a T intersection. They began walking south, leaving an assortment of homes and small stores a little way to the east. To the west lay an empty and flat expanse of scraggly grass and scattered small rocks and ancient tree stumps. After about two hundred metres of fire-break, the woods began.
"I am sure we will," Friche said. "Just be sure not to dawdle too much. I want to get home before nightfall. I am sure we all do. There is precious little moon tonight."
"Me, dawdle? I'm the one following the two of you. I could outpace either of you, even if the very demons were on your heels."
"There is no need to sound so smug about it," Wilison said. "The entire reason one of us is on a bicycle is to make certain he is able to escape and give the town a detailed warning if we are attacked. The signal horns are not..."
Shenks' reply sounded legitimately offended "Again, I have not forgotten our operating principles. What do you take me for, Wilison? I know how serious this is."
After being interrupted, Wilison's reply was more heated than it should have been. "You say that, but you have not experienced an attack for yourself."
"Neither have you. And you are not Friche's drinking buddy, so you have not heard half the stories I have."
"No, much to my relief," Wilison said, belatedly realising how needlessly unkind that was. "I have read the official reports, however." Even the detached, clinical account of the fall of Nearton's Bend had been a harrowing read.
"Everyone has read those. And I'll have you know they don't even begin to capture the full horror of an attack," Shenks said. He was not serious often, but there was no mistaking it when he really meant something.
"They really do not," Friche put in. "But that is not their purpose."
The refugee's uncharacteristic brevity prompted Wilison to put an end to the squabble. "Quite so," he said, stopping briefly to peer into the distant woods through his binoculars. "Nothing moving but the birds. Now stop dwelling on the horror of demon attacks and focus on keeping the town secure, Shenks. If you get yourself worked up you are likely to lose your head when the time comes, and ride directly into a ditch."
"It's funny you should say that," Shenks said, thankfully picking up on the humour in Wilison's final statement. "You see, what happened with the pipeline repairs is that the foreman decided we needed a bigger..."
A grinding sound interrupted both Shenks's sentence and his forward motion. The cause was his bicycle chain, which slipped off the rear gear wheel and rubbed directly on the red painted iron frame. "Sorry fellows, the mud's a bit problematic. I'll catch up in a moment."
Despite his assurance, both Wilison and Friche stopped immediately. "You know the rules as well as I do," Wilison said. "We never split the patrol in regular circumstances. A slipped bicycle chain is a regular circumstance."
"At this rate, we will be caught outside after nightfall thanks to that Maker-forgotten contraption," Friche muttered. And the moon will not be out until much later. Not that there will be much moon."
"Got it!" Shenks announced after only a few seconds. "Easy off, easy on."
Friche sighed. Wilison said nothing.
Shenks seemed to take that as a sign to continue. "You know, I have long thought that it seems rather pointless to patrol before nightfall. We are not going to see any nightwalkers during the day."
"We are not going to see them at night either, Lu. Because it is dark," Friche said, rolling his eyes at his friend's denseness.
"And neither of you will see anything if you continue your yammering. I strongly recommend you both keep your mouths shut for a time, and make sure nothing is lurking in the woods."
Shenks followed Wilison's order, for almost an entire minute. "If you are so worried about the woods, why don't we patrol on the other side of..."
"That is the responsibility of Conif Patrol. Now, maintain silence, unless you see something."
Shenks wisely kept his mouth shut for over fifteen minutes. By that point, the patrol had reached the far end of the town, turned west, and crossed the main road where it entered Forrester's Crossing from the south. There they passed one of the town's two famous mechanised signs, standing four metres high and made of bronze and thick glass stained green and gold. Much of the text had stood as it was for over a century, and parts of it were updated daily. At present, it proudly read:
Welcome to Forrester's Crossing Population: 19,153 Days since the last Railway Incident: 39,859
"I intend for us to take a short break on the railway bridge," Wilison said, as he usually said. "It has a fine view of the road. Shenks, wait on this side, so we cannot all be trapped on the bridge together."
"Understood," Shenks said, stopping just short of the wooden ramp. The bridge consisted of two such ramps parallel to the railway tracks, one on either side, with a wooden platform connecting them. There were multiple bridges throughout Forrester's Crossing, but this was the southernmost one. "Though I think that's taking precautions too far. Trap us on the bridge, really?"
"If both ends are blocked, there's no escape aside from breaking our legs leaping onto the rails," Wilison said. The sides of the bridge were blocked by a chest-high wire mesh fence. It was more to prevent accidents than anything malicious, as no one raised in The Way of Purity should dare harm the railway intentionally. It was not The Pure that concerned Wilison, however. "It is also possible for something to destroy the bridge while we are on it. We must keep the patrol group close, but not too close," he said as he began walking up the ramp. The argument was almost as familiar as the bridge itself.
"Then how can I tell you what happened to the pipeline? You didn't think of that, Wilison."
"I am quite sure he did," Friche said over his shoulder as he followed Wilison up the ramp.
"Hey! You all wanted to hear the story earlier."
Wilison turned back to face Shenks. "I said I wanted to know what happened. I did not say I wished to hear you tell one of your stories."
"Cheer up, Lu. You can tell me all about it in the tavern tomorrow. How about a steaming mug of Mother McDonald's best cider, on me?"
"I'll hold you to that, Tom," Shenks said, as he started tinkering with his bicycle. It seemed that he'd moved on from the chain and was fiddling with the brakes.
"Enough chatter." Wilison took a long look through his binoculars. "Everything seems normal enough. A load of fresh timber is ready for dispatch up to Deepbloom. Engine LEML-1212 is pushing three fully laden wagons from the loading yard across to the main outbound line. They're passing over the inbound line right now." The outbound line was mostly downhill, leading to the south and then turning east at Nearton's Bend until it reached the coastal town of Nesquay. Or rather, it used to.
Shenks produced a stiff brush from his toolbelt and began to scrub various moving parts of his bicycle. "Just as they do multiple times every week, Maker willing," he muttered as he worked. "It's hardly worth mentioning."
Wilison swept the railyard with his binoculars again, and spotted something out of place. An unusual figure was standing on the next footbridge, which passed over the rails just beyond the crossover track. "Who is tha..."
The question was cut off by a surprised yelp emanating from the yard's signalling tower.