The first glimpse

Manny is the first to make it out of the ravine. The slope is muddy and steep, damaged by the bus's rapid, uncontrolled descent, but he climbs it with little apparent difficulty. Looking back into the ravine he can see that some of the passengers are still inside the bus, whilst others are apparently examining at the wreckage. At the top of the slope, Manny is alone for a moment.

Once out of the ravine and back onto the road. He is able to survey the surroundings through the rain, the flashes of lightening searing the scene across his vision. The only sign of shelter visible for miles around is a stark black mansion looming on a ridge overlooking the road, about half a mile away. Patches of fog cling to the mounds of the surrounding terrain, wellling up from sink holes and craters across his field of view. Manny had not seen the mansion from the bus before the crash. Perhaps it's dark colour kept it hidden behind the aged glass of the bus's windows.

Walking back to the nearest town they passed through, or ahead to wherever the bus was going, is a matter of thirty or fourty miles, injured, in the dark, over bad roads, in a thunderstorm.

Manny looks at the mansion with a sense of foreboding. He knows there should be something to fear from such buildings, and he knows he should ask himself why he didn't see the house from the road, but since the accident at the circus Manny doesn't trust his own senses and he has risked sleeping in enough strange places recently that the sinister aspect of the mansion does not deter him.

Manny searches the road for any sign of what the bus might have hit. It is made difficult by the rain, but there is no sign that the bus hit any kind of animal large enough to cause it to crash. There is no mangled corpse of a deer, or cow anywhere to be seen on the road.

In fact, the surrounding countryside seems devoid of the signs of animal life. There are no fences that would indicate farmland, nor any copses or woods nearby. The countryside looks blasted and barren, as if the damage left by the war - the explosions, the soliders, and the machines that rolled over this land - was never allowed to properly heal. The land is like a picked scab.

What is visible on the road are streaks of rubber where the driver must have tried in vain to apply the breaks. Manny also notices a number of gouges and scratches on the road surface, where something sharp and heavy has been dragged across it. Possibly several times. The scratches lead off in the direction of the ravine.

Manny shouts back down to the other passengers in the ravine.

"Hey, you people. There's a house up here... shelter."

Down in the ravine, close to the bus. Kurt hears Manny's shout and thinks "...And maybe that's where the people who made the bus crash live." He pats his coat pocket to make sure the Luger is still there.


Giving up on his investigation of the clearly unworkable coach Roland collects his bags and climbs up to the top of ravine. The bags weigh him down slightly, but he also makes the climb with little difficulty.

"Say, this is a pretty atmospheric looking place!"

He claps Manny on the back in a friendly gesture.

"Looks like maybe we're all gonna be traveling buddies for longer than we thought. Name's Roland, Roland Drew."

He turns away from the mansion across the fields and extends a hand to Manny. Manny shakes Roland's hand and says,

"Roland Drew? Just like the actor. We should head out of the storm."

Manny shouts down to the others that he intends to enter the house.

Richard, his examination of the coach generating more questions than answers, sighs and wearily trudges to retrieve his belongings. He looks bemused at the sight of the gentleman scribbling in a journal or some such, but puts it down to the stress of the situation. He spends a moment clambering in the back of the coach, trying to locate any objects that fell from his bag during the crash, before awkwardly climbing back out and into the ravine.

He stops before the slope, looking up at the two figures who have successfully climbed out of the ditch, then turns to the two men who remain in the ravine, raising his voice slightly so that he might be heard against the weather.

"Gentlemen, they say there's a mansion not far from here, we ought to get out of this ditch soon and make our way to shelter".

With that he starts to make his way up the embankment. The slope is muddy underfoot, and getting worse with the rainfall, yet Richard manages to keep a sure footing and push himself up towards the top of the ridge where he is able to join the waiting Roland and Manny. During his climb, he notices that most of the clothing he had re-stuffed into his bags from the floor of the bus is soaked and probably ruined. When he reaches the top. He too is presented with the sight of the dark mansion, about half a mile away across the blasted landscape.

Richard stops worrying about a ruined sweater as he sees the mansion looming oppressively in the distant darkness. He tries to shield his eyes from the driving rain in order to focus, a chill suddenly coursing through his bones as the lightning briefly illuminates the surroundings. "It's probably just the weather making it look so ghastly" he says to himself, although even he had to scoff at the weak attempt at self-deception.

A particularly icy cold droplet of rain drips down the back of his collar, causing him to shake his head and shiver, before he starts looking around the floor. Whilst picking up a mud-splattered dress shirt, he turns to the two men on the top of the slope.

"Say, Sirs, would you please help me fashion some sort of rope from these clothes? There are still folk down in the ditch, and that slope is getting more treacherous with every passing minute."