Chaos’s Game
Book 1
by Alexey Svadvkovsky
Prologue
The Junkyard
It was raining. The thick, dark
yellow drops hissed as they hit the massive metal containers littering the
landscape — huge, rusty tanks, and old, rotten drum barrels. Whenever it
rained, all living creatures retreated, sheltering under whatever they could to
escape the toxic droplets. The splashing when the rain hit the ground was
enough to burn through the flesh to the bone, creating a long-lasting wound.
The vapors from the poison dumped upon the earth from the heavens wafted upward
from the ground, emitting a greenish-yellow fog that made it impossible to make
out anything more than five steps away.
An enormous young rat sat in its nest
desperately gnawing on scraps of plastic lying about. The raindrops drummed on
the box that served as its nest, and the rat was smart enough to know that it
would be some time before she’d be able to forage for sustenance. First, the
rain must stop and then, the earth must dry and the toxic fumes evaporate.
Thus, when she saw through the fumes the figure of the man in the rain, she sat
up and tensed, hoping for an opportunity to attack him.
As it was, though, the toxicity of
the environment shielded the man more reliably than any armor. He made his way
between the huge containers and around the heaps of junk. There was no doubt a
time when those one could see usable items in the junk piles, but year after
year of acid rain had rendered everything into amorphous rubbish. The grotesque
piles resembled hillocks, except rather than rock and stone, they comprised hunks
of plastic, metal, and the devil only knew what else was in there. That might
be a mountain of broken chairs, atop of which teetered something that might
have been a throne, or had it been a toilet? Next came a forest of rebar and
piping embedded in crumbling concrete. Rusty bars protruded any which way from
dreary gray slabs. The man glanced at a bundle of faded purple cables, and
quickened his pace. He still had a long way to go.
