It was hot and still. The overcast did nothing to cut the heat of the sun. All it did was dim the colors of the world, making the undead, with their leathery-gray skin and ragged, dingy clothes, look even more monochromatic. The trip through the desert had dried them out. Lips were pulled away from long teeth, eyes shrunken, bone structure telegraphing through the thin flesh. The fat ones in life had become as dry-skinned as all the rest, but the fat formed liquefying sacks around their waists, their thighs, and the upper parts of their arms. These dangled and swung like the infected udders of cows, leaking serum. The weight of this putrefying flesh dragged the loose skin in folds from their necks, their heads, giving them something of the look of droop-eyed hounds, their mouths pulled down in a caricature of a frown. The ones that had been slender in life were now angular stick insects, skeletons bound in hide, moving with difficulty as their tendons shrank and stiffened. Around six-thirty, once the light was full, a bulky figure in the Hawkstone camouflage stepped out of the terminal.
