Dead File: Road Warden

         It blew in with the rain, a thick and musty smell - of old earth and wet brick and leafy decay. Not for the first time, she inhaled and wondered - fleetingly, distantly - why no one else ever noticed it. Without fail, all-pervasive, it swept the plains and narrow forests, scoured the pocked swamps and haunted the burnt-out husks of ancient civilization. And yet, of all in their band, only she ever seemed to hesitate - as if something had reached out from a far place and touched her shoulder: listen, and be watchful.
         The frogs had started to croak their songs in the settling dusk when the smell came to her again, tangled itself first in her dark hair, and then wrapped itself about her. There she crouched, alert and uneasy, in the soft earth beside a thick oak at the outskirts of the wood and waited, while the musty scent pressed itself as close as any lover, and watched. Before her, where the woods broke away into scraggly thickets and lone-standing pines, the scrubland stretched for miles and miles unbroken, and through it snaked the highway - until it kissed the horizon and faded from view, a charcoal smear on yellow and gold. It might have been beautiful if not for that smell.
         Along that distant road, two stork-like figures walked. Their shadows cast long faces behind them, the sun dying before them, and flickered as insubstantially as any candle's flame: guttering and smoking and hazing in twilight. But the woman knew them, and for them was afraid: that smell brokered no argument. Things had gone wrong, somehow, terribly wrong - and still she hung back, crouched low in the woodlands and waited and watched: helpless, vulnerable, fearing. It had all gone too well; the two men on the distant road laughed as they walked - or so it seemed then to her, who could only see them jerk and move by the shift of their shadows on the hot asphalt as the sun sank further before them. She squinted, lifted a hand - leaned up a shoulder against the oak's craggy trunk and shaded her eyes, distantly registered the sink-suck of horseshoes in mud, and the sound of the man behind her:
         "So? How are Javis and Trent doing?" The man behind her shifted, lifted his own hand up to shade his eyes, then nodded approvingly at the figures as they walked the long, black line for the sun.