| Walking Man
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His world was dust and dry brown scrub, a place of sand that moved across the road in gas-like swirls. The sky and sand had run together in his sight; all that remained, a blotch of tan and gritty scenery that blended into gray in parts.
His boots were nearing broken in. The ointment that had soothed his worn, cracked feet was almost gone, drunk up in thirsty slatherings by his aching skin. After squeezing the last of it from tube to foot, he carefully rolled up the tube and placed it in his pocket. His feet were almost healed. Would that lives were as easily mended.
Although never knowing where he was nor where he was going, the Walking Man was, now and finally, lost. Location unimportant; destination never fixed, even reason ambiguous and hazy. Now, however, even compulsion began to waver in the face of the miles upon kilometers upon leagues upon meters upon yards upon feet upon which he'd walked.
He stopped by the side of the deserted road. Sand swirled past. A tumbleweed, its stalks and frail nettles glowing slightly blue, rolled past him into the distance. It was moving in the opposite direction from the blowing sand. He didn't bother puzzling over it, but squinted towards the horizon in each cardinal direction save the one he'd come from.
Nothing.
He contemplated simply sitting down, but that seemed foolish. There were those he'd met who sat, but he did not want to join them. A glint caught his eye, far off, in the distance. It was silently moving across the horizon, angling towards him in a steady, dust-trailed progression of silver flashes.
He watched it, aware of its intentions to pass him by, and set himself firmly against the oncoming...what? He knew. We don't. A mile away now, perhaps. A klick. Meters.
With a silent SLAM, the silver arrowhead passed him heading in the direction he'd come from. The wind of its travel blasted him with sand and small bits of plant life, the roaring of disturbed atmosphere the only sound. He cried out in startled pain at the stinging, and turned his head to follow the object.
Kent's face grinned back at him for a frozen fractured flipswitch of a second's time, and in that moment passed his geas on. The Walking Man felt it settle about his chest as Kent sped off, his headlong rush now beholden only to himself. As was his wont, the Walking Man grinned, once, and adjusted the psychic fanny pack which the mirrored bicyclist had pitched to him, and turned away to face the desert in his errand of motion.
His right foot rose, fell. Sand whistled. The road slid by.
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