Echo City Read Free

hear.
    Eventually it came to a stop among the bones and rocks and hot sands, sinking slowly onto its side and then its back, turning its head so that it could look across the desert at the low hills. They had drawn much closer, it thought, especially in the past few hours when it had been walking with the sun sinking to its right. It felt a sense of accomplishment and hoped its maker was pleased.
    Its movements ceased, its eyes grew pale and dry, and its limited awareness of surroundings and purpose drifted away like dust on the breeze. Its only thought as things grew dark was that it had done its very best.
    Hearing was the last to go, and the sound that accompanied it down into death was something tearing, and something wet.
       The thing emerged from the giant corpse. It had been made with hooked claws and toes with which to rip, and it tore its way out through the weakened flesh. It had also been formed with a sharp ridge running down its forehead to the bridge of its nose, and it used this to saw and snap at the thick ribs that encircled its host’s upper half. As it emerged, a bloody violent birth, it also ate and drank. The meat was warm and the blood thick, and strength coursed through its body.
    Free of its confines, it remained there for a while as it grew accustomed to its surroundings. It had filled itself with its mother’s flesh and blood, but already it could feel this desert’s rot.
    Its maker had warned it of this. Time was passing, the desert was exerting its poisonous influence, and it knew it had far to go.
    Standing naked beneath the sinking sun, it looked to the sky and felt a sense of release that it could not accurately identify or understand. It had little to do with being away from the body now lying beneath and around it, because it thought of that only as meat. It had nothing to do with being able to stretch its arms and flex its clawed fingers at the glittering points of light. Looking back across the desert, marking the bloody prints stretching off into the dusk, it saw a smudge of light low on the horizon. Freedom, release … it thought it had something to do with leaving whatever that light represented.
    Yet it knew that its destination lay in the opposite direction. It gathered folds of leather around its naked body, filled rough pockets with handfuls of meat from the thing that had birthed it, and started walking.
       Daylight came, and night once more, and when it saw the sunrise for the second time it realized that there were no longer bones. The last set of remains it had passed had beenwrapped in several layers of thick leather, a chain-mail body shell, and something that resembled the chitinous outer layers of a beetle. The mummified corpse had been lying with its right hand stretched out and finger pointing southward, as if indicating the place it wanted to be. Its mouth had been wide, and it had carried three obsidian teeth. On the corpse’s skin, the creature had made out the dark smears of strange markings, and it wondered what that meant.
    It had memories of something called Echo City, but they were very old, and they belonged somewhere else. It did not consider the strangeness of carrying such old memories when it had been born for only two days. It had a maker, and that maker’s voice was the sole loud, clear thing in its fresh mind.
Walk
, that voice said,
avoid dangers, look south, and travel as far as you can
. It spoke in suggestions rather than words. The creature obeyed.
    Though nothing lived in the desert, there were dangers. Around noon of that third day, it entered an area where great holes breathed dark fumes of gas and nightmare. Drawing in these fumes for the first time, the thing fell to its knees as its immature brain was racked with onslaughts of images dredged from some past it did not know. It saw faces and death, madness and war, and the release of an appalling disease that made it open its eyes again to look down upon its own body. It could not see