Long Delayed Echo (epilogue)

epilogue:

Private airship Magpie was seen by a few farmers in a rapid descent towards the pasturelands.

She crashed into a grazing field, shattering into fragments of wood, metal, fabric and burning hydrogen. One figure in a waistcoat, goggles, green trousers, and a flat cap was tossed like a broken doll and rolled several times till it  came to a stop, neck broken along with many other bones, no longer breathing, no longer living.

The other figure somehow landed in a muddy spring. Bruised, bleeding from a gun wound to the shoulder, with a filthy uniform, Captain John Spires looked about. This area should have been a shopping complex if he recognized the surrounding terrain. Strange.

But he’d have to get used to strange, now. He hid the body of himself in a the pond he’d nearly landed in the middle of, weighed down with a few salt-lick blocks he’d found. By the time he’d found people  further south on the road he was bleeding badly and could only say “Need hospital.” till he collapsed before them.