Strong wind blew, throwing leaves in the air, and letting them float until they landed with a soft thudding sound. Little by little, vultures soared higher, flapping their wings and surging toward the tip of the wall in circles, and clenching their beaks tightly, preventing the skin from falling, yet drops of blood dripped in the air as the skin shook slightly under the speeding wind.
The drops of blood dripped down, falling from the top of the wall, crashing onto the ground, and splashing dust into the air.
Boots raised, crashing on the ground and moving out of the city and onto the land outside the wall, and troding toward the cart and pushing it sideways, preventing it from blocking those joining the city and paving a three-man path.
'What in the world did this?' Gray's thoughts screamed, spotting the bodies scattered on the ground and moving toward them one after another, checking their faces and chests to see if they had any sign of life left in them.
Lily stayed behind, leaning on the wall and clutching her palms to her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes.
Gray knelt, crashing his knees on the blood-stained ground as he spotted a chest badge with a name, 'Joe,' written boldly on it. He stretched his right hand, piercing the sand and pulling both the badge and the sand beneath it above. The sand dripped from his palms and sprayed in the air as he opened his palms and focused on the name.
…
Speeding wind brushed against the side mirror of the van, moving almost at the speed of wind, rumbling on the jagged stones and broken tree branches on the road, and tilting sideways. Leaves floated in the air wherever the van passed, spiraling and falling in slow motion.
"I'm really tired, man. Drive fast so I can rest beside that slave of mine," Denis said, sitting calmly at the driver's side and pulling the tiny skin stuck under his fingernail.
He brushed his fingers across the covered blades of the huge sword sitting calmly on the dashboard and grinned, closing his eyes and stretching himself in the chair.
For thirty minutes, they drove, moving past trees of different sizes and colors, driving over reptiles, and halting at the front of a wall covered in bush.
"Tell your men to prepare. Our next attack will be more intense than this, since they now know what we can do," Denis said, swinging the door handle and pushing it open, and stepping down, crawling under the slightly raised space under the wall, and vanishing into a green land.
Kang swung the handle of the door and stepped out, then moved toward the back, opened the locks, and alerted the ten men dressed in thick black suits and wearing white masks to alight from the cart.
The afternoon rays, which were once bold and golden, thinned into softer rays that slanted through the canopy of the trees and turned the leaves into amber and green. One after another, shadows stretched across the ground beneath the trees, merging like dark ink spreading through water. Dust drifted lazily in the fading beams and flowed like tiny fire spirits.
The playful chirps of the birds quieted, getting replaced by the distant hoots and soft rustling sounds. Squirrels dashed, scrambling along the branches as they moved toward their hollows. Deer stepped softly from between the trees, tilting their heads and moving forward.
The hushed wind turned lighter and colder as it brushed through the leaves, plucking the weak ones and sending them floating in the air, while making the once-still leaves flutter and tremble as if touched by an unseen force that caught a black polythene bag in a sudden lift. It rose in a lazy flutter, twisting and folding into itself like a thin ghost learning how to dance.
It drifted above the trees and into the quiet road, spinning, flapping, and stretching as if struggling between flight and chaos. It skimmed past the shrubs and swayed around broken stones, its fragile body glimmering faintly in the dying sunlight and joining in with the birds soaring high above the clouds.
…
Wind swirled, spiraling above the then-bloodied ground and carrying dust in it and sending it forward toward the cart pushed at the side of the way, giving way for the new foreigners who were entering the city in a single queue. Broad-shouldered soldiers with sharp weapons on their backs and dressed in full war suits stood at the edges of the large door and at the bridge, directing the civilians and checking them before giving them access into the queue and the city.
Jin, the soldier holding the golden sickle, moved patrolling the queue and the carts, checking their belongings with his right hand and wrapping the left wildly around the handle of the sickle placed at his back.
"What's in that sack?" he said, letting the man with a dragon tattoo on his upper arm open the sack and pull out every object hidden in the sack and place them on the ground, before letting him join the queue. He moved, squeezing his dark-brown eyes and focusing on their faces as if they were suspected criminals.
'Why did I even leave my post to these new soldiers?' he thought, stopping and tilting his gaze at the polythene flying above and moving with the birds diving toward the canopies of the trees.
When he tilted his gaze back to the queue, he noticed two ladies with charming eyes looking at him and exchanging smiling glances, but brushed them off as he spotted a new van approaching the last van he had checked.
"Aww, how I wish he were my man."
"Haven't you stopped this act of yours?"
"I will stop when I reach my thirties, hihihi…"
"Then by then, you'll become a mother with no child like your sisters. Move forward, a lot of people are sneaking into the queue."
The ladies moved, stopping the old woman and her little girl from joining from the center without joining from the back.