The journey back to Cinder Town, which had once been a grueling, sweat-drenched trek, was now reduced to the gentle pressure of a foot on a pedal and the grumbling complaint of a four-cylinder engine. The morning sun, a pale, watchful coin in the vast, bleached vault of the sky, painted the cracked earth in long, distorted shadows. Michael drove at a steady thirty kilometers per hour, a pace dictated not by the Wuling's capabilities, but by the loping, ground-eating stride of the creature jogging alongside. Zach the Ogre moved with a surprising, rhythmic grace, his massive feet kicking up puffs of dust, seemingly untroubled by the distance. The van, with its shattered windshield framing the wilderness like a cracked painting, felt like a fragile bubble of anachronistic technology adrift in a sea of primal dust.
They were within sight of the town's jagged silhouette, perhaps half a mile out, when Michael's foot instinctively pressed the brake. The van shuddered to a halt. There, etched against the monochrome expanse, was a tableau of pure, distilled wasteland existence—a sight he'd only heard described in John's and Old Gimpy's stories. Scavengers.
It was a family unit, a triad of survival. They moved with the slow, painful deliberation of insects crossing a hotplate, clustered around a single, monstrously overloaded conveyance. It had once been a supermarket trolley, a relic of a world of plenty. Now, its original wheels had been replaced with larger, knobbly tires scavenged from a child's bicycle and a garden cart, creating a wobbly, mutant hybrid. It was a rolling mountain of despair, piled high with the worthless treasures of the dead world: bundled rags that might have been clothing, a nest of twisted wire, a clutch of plastic bottles in varying shades of brown, a dented pot blackened by countless fires. Perched atop it all, wrapped in a scrap of mildewed canvas, was a single, precious can of something unidentifiable.
But it was the people, not their possessions, that held Michael's gaze. They were shrouded head-to-knee in thick, coarse fabric the color of dust and old engine oil. It was a practical armor against the dual tyrannies of the wasteland: the searing, ultraviolet fury of the day and the bone-deep chill of the night. Only their eyes—wide, wary, and sunken in shadowed sockets—and the ragged ends of their trousers were visible. The tallest of the three, presumably the man, pushed the groaning cart. A slightly shorter figure, the woman, walked beside him, one hand steadying the precarious load. And between them, clinging to the cart's frame, was a small, wraith-like shape. A child. A girl, Michael guessed, though it was hard to tell. She couldn't have been more than ten, if the stunted growth of this place was any measure.
It was her eyes that caught him. In a landscape where every glance seemed hardened by hunger, calculation, or fear, hers were different. They were a startling, clear grey, like rain-washed pebbles. They held a watchful curiosity not yet completely extinguished by hardship, a lingering trace of something soft in a world of edges. That glimpse of unspoiled awareness, in a child of the wastes, struck Michael with a force that was both poignant and unsettling. It felt precious, and terribly fragile.
On an impulse that felt both magnanimous and naive, he brought the van to a full stop and leaned out of the empty window frame, the morning air warm on his face. He meant only to hail them, to ask a few harmless questions—where were they from? Had they found anything of note? Did the child need water? A clumsy attempt at connection, a tourist's curiosity.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. The man moved with the speed of a startled viper, yanking the small girl behind him with one hand while the other flew to his back. He came up with a weapon—a crude, powerful-looking bow fashioned from a leaf spring and strung with what looked like braided wire. An arrow, its tip a sharpened nail, was nocked and drawn in a single, fluid motion aimed directly at Michael's face. The woman, without a sound, snatched up a long, wicked-looking spear—two lengths of rebar welded together, one end ground to a vicious point—and leveled it, her stance widening into a fighter's crouch.
But it was their eyes, now fully visible and fixed on him, that froze the friendly words in Michael's throat. There was no humanity in those stares, only the feral, cornered glitter of animals who have learned, through brutal repetition, that anything new is a threat, and any threat must be met with lethal force. The man's arms, visible where his robe fell back, were corded with stringy muscle but pitifully thin. The woman looked as though a strong gust might snap her. Yet, the promise in their weapons, in their desperate, unified stance, was absolute. Michael's scalp prickled. Blimey, he thought, a cold trickle of fear running down his spine. I just wanted to chat.
Salvation, of a sort, came thundering up from behind. Zach, finally catching up, skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. He took in the scene—his Master, leaning from the strange metal beast, confronted by armed vermin—and a roar of pure, outraged authority erupted from his chest, a sound that seemed to shake the very air.
"FILTH! WRETCHED BOTTOM-FEEDERS! DO YOU HAVE ANY CONCEPT OF WHO GRACES YOU WITH HIS PRESENCE? KNEEL! KNEEL BEFORE HARRY POTTER MICHAEL, THE SOVEREIGN OF CINDER TOWN, LORD OF THE ASHES!"
The effect was cataclysmic. The scavengers didn't just kneel; they collapsed, as if their bones had turned to water. They prostrated themselves in the dust, their weapons falling from nerveless fingers, their bodies trembling violently. The feral defiance was gone, replaced by a terror so complete it was humiliating to witness. The little girl' clear grey eyes were screwed shut, her face pressed into the dirt.
Michael's brief impulse toward friendly discourse withered and died. The gulf between his world and theirs, between a man who drove a van and gave away snacks and people for whom a can of food was a life's triumph, yawned before him, vast and unbridgeable. The scene felt obscene. The power he wielded here, however accidentally acquired, was too crude, too absolute. The cheerful fantasy of being the 'cool lord' who mingled with the common folk evaporated, leaving a sour taste in his mouth.
"Enough, Zach," he said, his voice flat. "Let's go."
He turned the key, the engine coughing back to life. As he began to ease the clutch out, his eye fell on the half-empty box of 'Wei-You' Spicy Strips on the passenger seat. Another impulse, this one tinged with guilt and a futile desire to leave something other than fear in his wake. He snatched a packet—noting absently the characters for 'Málà,' Extra Spicy—and tossed it out the window. It landed in the dust a few feet from the huddled family.
"For the child," he called out, the words feeling hollow and performative even to himself. "A gift. Don't waste it." Then he pressed the accelerator, leaving the three scavengers and their pitiful cart shrinking in his fractured rearview mirror.
The packet lay in the ochre dirt like a fallen jewel. Richard, the scavenger, stared at it, his mind struggling to process the last five minutes. The roaring metal creature. The ogre—a real, stories-by-the-fire ogre. The title—'Harry Potter Michael'—that meant nothing and everything. And now this. A gift. For his Annie.
Richard was, by the harsh metrics of the wastes, an old man at nearly thirty. A quarter-elf, his heritage granted him little but a marginally longer lifespan and ears that came to a slight, pointless point under his matted hair. It did not grant him beauty, or magic, or an affinity with the poisoned land. It just meant he'd had more time to be hungry, more time to be afraid. He was a professional scavenger, a connoisseur of ruins. He knew the value of things found in the ghost-shells of the old world. And this… this was a treasure.
The packaging was intact, the plastic seal unbroken. No tell-tale bulge of gas, no leak of mysterious fluids. This was pre-Collapse food, preserved by some ancient, miraculous art. In any town, a trader would give ten, maybe fifteen bottle caps for this. Or clean water. So much water. He remembered finding a packet of 'hot dogs' over a year ago, the salty, greasy bliss of it shared over three days. This was like that, but better. The script was strange, blocky, unlike the flowing script sometimes found in old books. It made it seem even more potent, more magical.
Cautiously, he scrabbled forward, snatched the packet, and tucked it deep inside his robes, against his thudding heart. To eat it now was madness. Its value was in what it could be traded for—dried grubs, hardened cakes of seed-meal, a week of security. He felt a fierce, protective pride in his own prudence.
A tug at his sleeve. His wife, Lyn, her eyes wide in the shadow of her hood, gestured minutely towards their daughter. Annie had turned her face away, but the rapid, unconscious movement of her tongue over cracked lips was a silent shout. She was hungry. Not just for calories, but for the ideaof the treat, for the break in the grey monotony of survival.
A wave of emotion—love, profound weariness, and a crushing sense of failure—washed over Richard. His daughter, with her too-clever eyes, had never asked for anything, had never complained. She deserved more than this endless, grinding walk towards death. The careful trader in his mind argued fiercely, but the father's heart, worn thin but not yet broken, won.
With hands that trembled slightly, he pulled the precious packet back out. He'd give her a taste. Just a taste. He found the seam, pinched, and ripped. The smell that burst forth was alien and incredibly complex—sweet, savory, smoky, and underneath it all, a sharp, tantalizing pungency that made his saliva glands ache. He peered in. Glossy, reddish strips, glistening with oil and specks of red. He carefully extracted one, its texture strangely fibrous.
"Here, my Annie," he said, his voice rough. "A taste of something wonderful."
But Annie, her grey eyes solemn, shook her head and gently pushed his hand back. "We share, Papa. You first. You work the hardest."
The words undid him. Pride and love swelled, momentarily eclipsing the ever-present fear. He nodded, a lump in his throat. "Just a bite, then. The rest for you and your mother."
He brought the strip to his lips and took a small, cautious bite.
The initial sensation was a confusing burst of salt, sugar, and a strange, savory flavor that danced on his tongue. Then it hit. Fire. Not the warmth of cooked meat, but a sharp, stinging, utterly alien heat that exploded across his palate, raced over his gums, and shot straight up into his sinuses. It was pain, but a bright, shocking, chemical pain he had no reference for. His eyes flew wide, then streamed with tears. His throat constricted. The world dissolved into a sensation of being peppered with invisible, burning needles.
He spat the half-chewed mess into the dust, gasping, clutching at his throat. Panic, colder and sharper than the strange fire in his mouth, seized him. Poison! It had to be! The stories were true—the powerful ones, the lords and the magic-men, they were all cruel. They gave with one hand and killed with the other. A gift for the child? A slow, agonizing death for the whole family!
"Poison!" he rasped, the word a raw scrape, his horrified gaze flying from the innocuous-looking packet to the distant, retreating speck of the metal wagon. "Lyn! Don't touch it! The great lord… he's poisoned us!"