Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

Someone scorched words into the blacktop of this car park. Don’t know what all of them mean, don’t know what they used, but it went deep and left the surfaces glassy.

Cease, ye chariots
End thy noxious vapours
Quiet thy steely clamour
Still the wheels at last.
Cease! Ye chariots
Let cracks claim thy ways
For blooms to rise anew.
Cease, ye rolling cages
Release us all
To live.

My Da told me about them, as his Ma told him. Nobody knows when the words were cut. Elda Harold says it was during the oil wars, when great armies fought to save the us from the same things that powered them. Biddy Mac says it was written by a witch as a curse upon the chariots, but Da says she’s a witch too, and is just talking up her myth.
Sylvan says it musta been near the end, because thems what owned this place would’ve had the letters filled in, which makes sense to me.
“Danny, can we go? I’m bored.”
“Hush you, Mikey. Danny’s thinking.”
I grin at Mike and Annie.
“Not long now. Just wait.”
They go back to playful bickering. I look about. This place is huge. So big I can’t see our planting beds and water traps from here. Scurry Jo says there are two other groups settled around the edges of this place, and the remains of a fourth camp at the northernmost end. She worries about what made them quit. I think if it was a pack, we would’ve been attacked by now.
Da says the packs are dying out. They turn on each other too much. Bo Blades agrees, and he should know – he used to run with one before it froze out two winters back.
Winter is the worst time. This all started in winter, the really bad one, back when dead great-great-great-grandma was a kid. There were winter storms like never before or since, the sun threw something big at us – I still don’t understand that. It set off or woke up – I’m not clear about that, either – Supremp, which was something really bad that lived in lots of places in the sky. Sorta like a pack gone rogue up there?
Anyway, all of that made things down here change. Come to think about it, must’ve happened soon after these words got cut. Now there’s a thing. Maybe Biddy and her curse ain’t too far off after all.
“What’s that?”
I look up. It’s right on sundown, and the thing Mike is pointing at is what I brought them to see. Just the once, because there ain’t nothing like a first time.
Against the darkening sky above, something flickers. Closer to us than the clouds, but high off the ground, the flickers become shaking black and white blocks. Then, with a grey flash, it appears. Mike screams. Annie gasps.
Great round ears atop a big-eyed head, with baggy pants held up over a pot belly by chequered braces. Skinny legs fade from view before showing feet or reaching the ground. Struck me as menacing first time I saw it. Still does. There are coloured flashes circling it’s waist. Ma said those used to be words, but they done wore out. I’m not so sure.
Moments later, it fades away until next year.
“Why was that?”
I look down at Annie.
“We’ll never know. Not to worry, because it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Mike pulls on my trouser leg.
“Don’t like rat in the sky. We go now.”
Thinking about chariots and rats, I take the kids home.