| December's Foggy Freeze?
A field afire.
Twisted, smoldering- or in some cases outright flaming- wreckage littered the entire area. Here, a crater, there, a mass of half-molten, half-rusted metal. Over there, a series of frighteningly scorched, blasted spots in the deserted land, sandy rock blasted half to glass. It looked like a battlefield.
Probably had been.
Before that, it had been an oil field. Aging, giant derricks sat and pumped even now in some places. But not many. No, not many at all. Most of the wells, pumped nearly dry, burned now with a dire ferocity, painting the sky overhead a thick, greasy black with smog. Pits of flame in which sat pillars of flame and smoke, combusting ceaselessly, violently.
It had been a scar on the land, now it was rent wide. Slivers and shards of steel and stone marked two separate arcs- one in shining, glittery silver nearly two hundred feet long. The other rendered an unfathomably two-hundred-yard cone into a forest of tiny stone needles, a deathtrap on which a panicked animal could easily shred itself to death before understanding.
And then there was the -unclean- spot. A trail of seared ground, dirt and sand and rock in runny shapes that looked half-melted, ending in a foul stain on the ground. This one was not scorched, not dug, not afire. Just... stained. A deep, nearly blackish-red. The eye would veer away from it, deny its wrongness. Its somehow tangible putrescence, despite the total lack of an odor (except for the near-ubiquitous smoggy oppressiveness of an oil fire). But then, it was on the end of a line. The streak of incompletely-glassed ground was straight, terminating in that almost-triangular point of wrongness.....
....but pointing at what? |