The Killing Zone

by David

A pair of dingy drylanders traverse the Dust to seek passage to a better life on the coast. Being starved, exhausted, and attacked on top of it all, they team up with the sole survivor of escapees from a bandit camp who is also a drylander and just happens to have passage on a cargo ship heading for a newly established island settlement--and two extra spots are open. Traversing the Dust, surviving the city, and sailing the ocean, the three persistent drylanders arrive to find a prosperous and bountiful settlement already working the land and processing its rewards. Everything seems to have worked out until people start dying and suspicion turns a happy village into a mass of paranoid, shifty-eyed people wondering which one of the other is capable of murder. Perhaps that's what happens when you build your town near the Killing Zone.