Settlement

Strawhecker led them through an alpaca field. Crias newborn stumbling on bandy legs, sagskinned and wet, bleating for milk. Around the perimeter were basecamp shanties. Slave hovels hung with rotten curtains, fungal cots, hay beds. Smell of sweet sweat, group sex. Beer stood in the doorway. A llama licking itself on the floor. Tables strewn with antique farm implements. Docking shears and horse hoots. Corn flail. Seed broadcaster. Iron fromards. Wimples and dibbers. An oak handled gore snud. Scythes in a cradle on the wall. 

He took up a beadle hammer and sounded the beams of the shack. The wood wet and swollen, wrapped in yellow blossoms, mushroom spouts, initials scratched in the windowsill filled with moss, the letters rustling green. 

In the other room something was breathing in a pile of straw. A blanket alive with shining lice. Beer poked the lump with the hammer handle. The mass jerked and whined. It had too many limbs. He went back outside. A rubblestone lighthouse in the distance, the lens sweeping across the field, the flanks of grazing animals. The grass flared and went dark, flared and went dark. Beer picked his way toward the light.