In a ragged robe of sack cloth cinched with barbed wire, the man last known as Raymond Kidd trod barefoot on a broad road of cracked earth. Ashes rose in puffs and swirls and small explosions from the burnt-flat blackened fields on either side of the road, propelled by a fitful wind that came out of the ground as well as from the copper-colored sky. For no reason that he could discern, the gusts were freezing at his back yet fiery in his face. Every breath seared his lungs. His eyes were dry as raisins.

Where he had come from, where he was going, he had no idea. All he had was a sickening apprehension of irretrievable loss.

From time to time emaciated figures, naked with drum-tight grey skin, crawled from the smoldering ditches and stumbled toward him, arms extended, begging, beseeching, only to be incinerated before they could reach him by pinpoint flames like blowtorches that came out of nowhere. Suddenly giant coaches would materialize and lumber over him, drawn by nothing and driven by no one, with great creaking wheels whose spokes were more grey people bound in sheaves and bleeding at the eyes, nose and mouth, suffering silently, wearing expressions of unspeakable horror.

His own cries of I have come, I have come for you were snatched from his dessicated lips, vacuumed away and smothered by the very air itself. Yet he continued to cry out, all along that hellish road, with all the anguish of a parent for his missing children.

(to be continued)