The Desolate Guardians Read Online Free PDF Page B

soon burst into flames directly.
The fires began dancing along the floor of the trench between them,
coalescing into balls of white-hot energy that seemed to move along
without source or pattern. Dozens of flames began floating along
and above the trench, hovering around certain objects and seeking
out fuel…
    After only a few minutes, I had the oddest
sense that they were alive. Each ball or pillar of flame moved from
object to object, touching and investigating with little tendrils
of orange and white. If they were alive, could they be reasoned
with? Perhaps they'd -
    One ball of flame suddenly struck out,
lancing a dead body through the heart with a blindingly fast spear
of fire. It receded slowly, only withdrawing when it was satisfied
of something. Perhaps the corpse had been too wet to burn, or maybe
it'd thought the body a threat somehow… images of those charred
bodies came to mind, immediately revealing what happened to those
the flames considered a threat.
    The stream went black, but I could still hear
noise.
    My subject's vitals were low, rather than
high, and I could guess why: he was lying still, eyes closed,
trying not to move, breathe, or attract any attention to
himself.
    Thinking about it, I had only one conclusion
- the camera was in his eyes! That was an odd choice of location,
but it certainly explained why his stream was still on through all
this. He probably had no way to turn it off.
    Forty-three minutes passed before he decided
to open his eyes again. By then, the flames were gone. He breathed
a sigh of relief and looked up, noting an oncoming purple blade of
sky. "We have some time before the next one."
    Across the trench, the woman sat up abruptly.
"Those flames. They were alive?"
    The camera moved up and down as he
nodded.
    "I need to talk to them. How long until they
come back?"
    He laughed, confused. "Um, talk to them?" He
threw a hand up at one of his charred comrades. "I came here with
fifty thousand other guys. This is what happened when they tried to
talk to them."
    She came over and sat down next to him.
"Fifty thousand men? How many are left?"
    He said nothing at first, but I could see a
slight misting at the bottom of the camera. "There's a Russian guy
maybe two klicks northeast of here. He came here with a hundred
thousand, so he's pretty well stocked. I can't speak Russian,
though." He tilted his view down toward grey mud. "There's a Yngtak
lady a bit west. I don't know anything about her, though, and she
doesn't speak either of our languages. I see her in the distance
sometimes."
    Yngtak? What the hell was Yngtak? The thought
struck me: why was I just sitting here watching and wondering? I
had the entire network at my fingertips. I could look things
up … if I was careful. Yngtak… Yngtak… no results on this
network. Was she from another reality?
    "So it's just you?" the woman asked. "You're
the only one left out of fifty thousand men?"
    He said nothing.
    "What happened here?" she asked, changing
tack. "What happened to the sky?"
    "Nothing happened to the sky," he countered.
"All those skies are just fine. We just happen to've got royally
screwed here. It didn't work, obviously."
    "What didn't work?"
    He slowly looked up at her, and the camera's
view narrowed slightly. "Aren't you from Command?"
    It was her turn to say nothing.
    He stood abruptly. " How did you get here?
Who are you? "
    "You haven't heard back in over a year,
right?" she countered.
    The view shifted down for a moment, then back
up. "I just thought… if I held out long enough… they'd come… and
then there you were…"
    She regarded him with that same conflicted
expression I'd seen her use on the corpses. "I'm sorry. I don't
know anything that might help you, but I've met others still
surviving. You're not alone."
    The view went black as he closed his eyes
again. I wasn't sure, but I thought I heard a single slow intake of
breath.
    "Can you tell me what happened here?" she
asked again.
    He kept his eyes closed as