Lost Atlanta! …It’s horrible.
I’ve never seen a ruin as pitilessly bare as Lost Atlanta. Never. It had all the terrible purity and horror of a skull caught in its final death rictus. Even the air felt dead. Then again, it was.
It’s not that I haven’t seen ruins. The East Coast has a fraction of the population it once had, even in the Second Republic and the Kentucky Free State. My own Kingdom of Virginia is a land of empty towns and fallen ruins. But there’s still life in plenty to be found. Trees, grasses, bamboo, the animals that feed on those things, the animals that feed on those — there’s plenty of creatures that breathed a huge sigh of relief when their human neighbors went away, leaving behind all those lovely abandoned buildings to den in.
That wasn’t true here. The former lawns and planter pots now only grew hard, rocky clay, with a brown crust that must have once been grass or trees. There were a few surviving shrubs, mostly under some of the covered walkways. But even then they didn’t really survive. They were just… shriveled and shrunken, so dry that leaves and even branches puffed into nothingness if you breathed on them. Nothing was alive, except us. Even the cracks in the ground revealed no crabgrass or moss.
But there were bones, though. Bones I recognized, from the riverbank and the earlier fight. And far too many of them.