08/02/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.

Moving along!

At least the library wasn’t downtown. New Brunswick itself had been fairly savaged by the Demon Cow incident, to the point where entire blocks had been vaporized. Morgan was headed to one of the satellite campuses; supposedly, the damage hadn’t been too bad, out there. Then again, thought Morgan, that kind of statement begs the question: says who? He had never realized just how ubiquitous orienteering micro-drones had been until the first time he tried navigating cross-country without them. The results had been distressingly embarrassing, although Morgan did know enough to recognize just what a compass did.

Getting across the Raritan was fun. The Causeway avoided the university, or possibly the other way around, and the Route 18 bridge had been blown up back when people still thought cars would be a viable military resource. In the end, Morgan took the Route 18 route anyway, going from chunk of tumbled roadway bridge to chunk to ford the river.

He found it surprisingly easy going; the path looked a lot more formidable from up high than it did on the ground. There were even spots where somebody had come in with a crowbar to make a path through the wreckage. Smuggler’s path? thought Morgan. But what’s there to smuggle? He dismissed the thought and kept going.

Scrambling up on the other side, the highway didn’t look too bad, aside from the usual overgrown woods to the side and abandoned cars. Half-burnt, in this case, it looked like a small fire had swept through here a few years back. Or perhaps even longer; there was what appeared to be some kind of military checkpoint. Judging from the various scorches and craters in the ground, the soldiers were watching out for troublemakers — and found some. No scattered bones, though, thought Morgan. Guess the soldiers won that one.