/jp/ - Otaku Culture

When you look at it, it looks like any other piece of land. The sun
shines on it like on any other part of the earth. And it's as though nothing
had particularly changed in it. Like everything was the way it was thirty
years ago. My father, rest his soul, could look at it and not notice
anything out of place at all. Except maybe he'd ask why the plant's
smokestack was still. Was there a strike or something? yellow ore piled up
in cone-shaped mounds, blast furnaces gleaming in the sun, rails, rails, and
more rails, a locomotive with flatcars on the rails. In other words, an
industry town. Only there were no people. Neither living nor dead. You could
see the garage, too: a long gray intestine, its doors wide open. The trucks
were parked on the paved lot next to it. He was right about the trucks--his
brains were functioning God forbid you should stick your head between two
trucks. You have to sidle around them. There's a crack in the asphalt, if it
hasn't been overgrown with bramble yet. Forty yards. Where was he counting
from? Oh, probably from the last pylon. He's right, it wouldn't be further
than that from there. Those egghead scientists were making progress. They've
got the road hung all the way to the dump, and cleverly hung at that!
There's that ditch where Slimy ended up, just two yards from their road.
Knuckles had told Slimy: stay as far away from the ditches as you can, jerk,
or there won't be anything to bury. When I looked down into the water, there
was nothing. This is the way it is with the Zone: if you come back with
swag--it's a miracle; if you come back alive--it's a success; if the patrol
bullets miss you--it's a stroke of luck. And as for anything else --that's
fate.