Rocks, Crags, Limbs, and Sand

His trusted new leg of iron irksomely plodded its way forward. Clunk. Clunk. Each of Aspen’s second steps echo dully through the empty cityscape. Before the bleeding had stopped, they were accompanied by a low squelching sound and drip-dropping. Even though the New human body produced blood tirelessly, this human never seemed to gain any colour on his cheeks. It appeared as if he was half empty at all times, like that of a scrunched up juice-packet.

“Juice…” Aspen mumbles through dry lips to himself. The word had resurfaced, delayed, from the depths of his memory. He falls quiet again. A skeleton suddenly lay at his feet. Through the eye-sockets, you could tell that the brain was still inside. Aspen coolly peers down into them. And he wondered, if it tickled when maggots and roaches skittered across your brain like that. And how it must more than tickle to have them gnaw on your neurones, which would grow back in time for the pests to advance any deeper. He admires the sadistic cycle in contemplating silence.

“Did you really mean to end up in this state?” Aspen asks the skeleton. It doesn’t reply due to a lack of vocal cords.

“…” Aspen steps over it. The clunking continues. Ruins of housing complexes and the occasional accumulation of humans pass him by for a couple of hundred metres before he enters open plains. Now inoperative phone-lines run by his side in their stead. He leaves the moaning remains of a city behind. With all the time in the world under an unchanging sky, minutes quickly turn into hours on these fields. And with legs that know nothing else than exhaustion at this point, they never tire of walking. A powerful gust of wind whips a sea of sand across the plains. Aspen’s hair flies wildly as it passes him. He was walking on a treadmill of rocks, crags, and sand, rocks, crags, and sand. Rocks, crags, limbs, and sand. The occasional arm waving at him from the sidelines broke the repetitive cycle. Rocks, crags, limbs, heads, bones, organs, blood, and sand. He was getting closer now. Civilisation would be too flattering of a word, nothing quite so grand was awaiting him past the gore-littered fence. Aspen stops in front of a lone signpost creaking in the wind. There was a degree of creativity at play here, with fingers having replaced the directional arrows. They looked fresh. His gaze strays off to more “decorations” of similar macabre fashion further up ahead. Even with the risk of murder eliminated, contact with other humans is still best avoided. Meetings seldom ever yield positive outcomes, and there are certainly fates worse than death. Besides, there isn’t much else to do anymore than sabotage your neighbour. He peers up with a hand over his eyes, shielding them from the sun. Orange silhouettes of razed skyscrapers danced to the heat in the distance. On the path over there, the grotesqueries only accumulated.

“They eat them.”

Aspen glances over to his right. A small, bony old human, its gender unclear, sits cross-legged with a fluttering sarong over its head as a hood. He had mistaken them for just another living corpse.

“They eat them, you know,” the wrinkly human repeats.

“There are people over there?” Aspen asks, nodding to the distant ruins. The old one looks at him in silence with its dry lips stuck in a grin, as if their very skeleton shaped their face like that.

“Even though humans don’t need to eat anymore,” they continue.

"Have you seen them eat people?" Aspen tries again.

"Even though human meat makes you sick," they mumble absentmindedly, eyes glossed.

“…”

Guessing further conversation won’t serve any use, Aspen resumes his clumsy trot. He can feel the small human stare after him, still smiling. On the road leading into the abandoned megalopolis, the faint white of lane dividers appear ever so often, and Aspen makes a conscious effort to walk in the exact middle as to step on them when they do. Leading him, into the city of supposed cannibals.