Chapter 06  Kings Contrivance
(difficulty recommendation: Easy)

Narrator: As you approach the town of your childhood, it is somehow different.  Smaller.  More worn-down.  Then a bark from your companion snaps you back to focus.  Theres something wrong.  There are no people hustling through the streets.  No workhands toiling at the train platform, the pony express, or the oil derrick.  The town is silent.  There are no hymns wafting from the church, no honky tonk melodies or clinking glasses tumbling out of the saloon.  Only the sound of sand in the wind, scouring the wooden boardwalk and scratching at the sides of buildings.  

How long have you been away?!

From the main street, you count three new graves in the churchyard.  There is no sign of the towns inhabitants, yet lamps still burn here and there.   It is as if humanity simply vanished, some days ago.  

Only one building shows any sign of recent usage.  The door of the drugstore, at the far end of main street, creaks slowly in the wind.  And you can just make out footprints in the dust, leading to the back store room.