It’s back! OK, it never went away. I’m just working on it again.
We made Deadman’s Crossing by nightfall, screaming or not. And I, for one, wasn’t ready to do that run again in a hurry. The living should not walk among the ghosts.
It wasn’t the things on the Ghost Road itself. Those were like golems, or a river. They were doing what they were doing, and if you did something dangerous around them they’d just let you die and not care. There was nothing personal about them, or what they’d do to you if you didn’t mind your step.
The human ghosts were the problem. There were a few abandoned towns on one side or the other of the Ghost Road, and those were creepy enough; all that valuable salvage, being left to rot where it stood because nobody had dared go get it. We’ve picked the bones of the Old Americans pretty clean by now, which just makes the places that we won’t loot stand out. But, again, you could see that.
But there were two places on the Ghost Road where it went through an Old American town, and in both cases Ilbrin insisted that we were not to stop, not to stop, and above all: not to stop. “There’s nobody left in those towns to save,” he said. “You hear a voice calling out for help, that’s either a lie or they deserve to be there. Either way, just keep on going. And stay on the fucking Ghost Road.”