They followed Samuel as he climbed to the top of the hill where the stone statue stood. Samuel stopped when he arrived at the top. He was not looking at the statue but beyond it. Theodore scrambled up the rest of the hill to the top. He stopped when he arrived as well, and Trident and Melinda stopped when they stood by his side.

The rain was coming down hard on the hilltop. The upper reaches of the mountain disappeared behind the heavy rain drops. The orange dust was least intrusive when it rained. Theodore lowered the scarf that was wrapped around his mouth to let the rain drip into his mouth. The water was cold. The ground was still covered by snow, which was slowly turning to slush from the heavy rain.

Beyond the stone guard there were tents set up in the clearing. Sitting around the tents were more old men guardsmen in various poses, along with old women caught in the middle of doing various tasks. They were not moving, frozen in the same stone-like material as the guard at the top of the hilltop. It looked like the guards and the old women had turned to stone in the middle of setting up the tents. There was enough light peering through the clouds to see the different forms. Theodore turned and looked to the guard standing next to him. He touched the skin and it felt hard but slightly rubbery. There was a slight give to the material.

Theodore leaned over to peer closely at the skin. He could see the individual pores and stubble on the guard’s chin. The stubble was the same stone-like material as the rest of his body. Theodore pushed the body slightly and it did not move. It must have been very heavy to remain standing on the windy hilltop.

“This is the strangest thing I have ever seen,” Trident said.

“What happened to the children?” Melinda asked. She had not spent much time looking at the guards, but had peered beyond the guards and the old women statues to the tents where there should have been the fifty children she had seen hiking up the mountain with what she figured were these guards during the previous day. Melinda started to run over the hilltop and down into the tent area. The rest followed a few feet behind her. She peeked inside the tent and came back with a worried look on her face.

“There is nobody here,” she said. She began to walk around the tent looking for evidence that the children were ever here. “There are not enough tents for the rest of the children. What did they do with them?”

“Calm down,” Samuel said. “We do not know what this camp is or if these are even the guards and old women that you saw the other day. For all we know this is some monument built to guardsmen, or perhaps an art project or something. We have no idea what happened here.”

Theodore walked to the nearest tent and peered inside. They had been in the middle of fastening the pegs of the tent when whatever happened occurred. The bottom right flap of the tent blew freely in the wind. The rain had drenched the remaining parts of the camp. The items in the camp had not changed. They were still made of the same materials as expected. The tent was canvas and the wood they had gathered to try to build a fire in the rainy night was wood. Only the stuff that the old women or guardsmen were holding had turned to the stone material. Anything that was not touching a person had not changed or been changed.

It had grown darker since they stood in the tent. The clouds looked heavier, and a chill rose in the air.

“We should keep moving,” Trident said, looking around her a bit worried. “I do not like this. There is something not right about this area.”

Theodore agreed. The area around the guards felt wrong. It felt electric, as if a deep shock was building somewhere near by, the type that shocked you when you rubbed too much wool. There was a heaviness in the air that went beyond the thickening rain. The heaviness felt like the air was being sucked from the area and replaced by a thick dark smoke. Theodore breathed in heavily and could not find enough oxygen. Whatever it was, it felt very wrong.

“It feels dangerous here,” Theodore said. “We should leave.”

Melinda was still running around the camp looking for signs of the other children. A flash of lightening went off in the distance, and a rumble of thunder followed. The ground became saturated with the rain being sucked into the snow so it sucked at their poorly shod feet with every step. A cold wind blew over the frozen camp.

Melinda stopped moving and they all stood still in the sudden silence. The rain had stopped and there was a sound in the wind that replaced the rain. It was a low whistling sound that seemed to move across the camp from one side to the other side. Nobody moved or said anything. The whistling grew stronger as it continued to play across the camp.

Samuel had enough and began to trek through the camp, stomping over the tent and grabbing Melinda by the arm to pull her away from her frantic search.

“Let’s get out of here,” Samuel said. Nobody wanted to argue, and Trident and Theodore followed Samuel and Melinda to the backside of the camp that led to the path out of the suddenly still camp.

As they left the camp, the sound ended, and with the sound ending, the rain started at full force as if the brief respite was caused by the whistling in the camp. The passed a final guardsman some ways down the path. He stood leaning against a polearm with a box held in the crook of his left arm. He was in the middle of bending down to either put the box down or finish picking it up when he was frozen.

Theodore reached over and touched the skin of the guardsman. He corrected his original appraisal: it was not rubbery so much as gel feeling. He could push and it would give to a certain point, at which point he would reach a middle part that was incredibly hard to touch as if the outside skin was surrounding a rock or heavy stone on the inside. Maybe it was a statue built in memory of someone. It was then that he saw one of the guardsman’s eyes twitch. He jumped backwards and gave off a small scream.

Samuel rushed over to see what Theodore had seen. Theodore held his arm up and pointed at the eye of the guardsman which still twitched. There was movement near the blank eyeball as if was trying to turn and look at them. Samuel took one look and grabbed Theodore by the arm, and for the second time pulled someone away from the camp area.

They left the camp behind them not discussing what they had seen. Clearly whatever it was had not been a statue. There had been something living inside of the guardsmen, and probably the rest of the statues.

They did not stop running for fifteen minutes. It was difficult going as the slush had filled with water forming small lakes in their path. Nobody complained as they continued working their way down the path. Since the peek where the first guardsmen stood, they had lost a few hundred feet. The mountain top still loomed above them and as they worked their way down, it reappeared in the misty rain. Barely any orange dust was visible anymore in the rain. The ground, which before had been an orange slushy color, had turned more gray and white in the dark; it lost its orange sheen. It was strange to see something that was not orange. It took Theodore some time to realize what seemed strange about the ground: without the orange color he almost did not recognize it as part of the world he had known.

They slowed at the end of fifteen minutes, all of them except Samuel panting for breath. Even Samuel, who always seemed tireless, leaned over slightly and waited for the rest to catch their breath.

“Do you notice something different?” Theodore asked once he was able to speak again.

Trident looked around before nodding her head.

“The orange dust,” Theodore explained. “There is very little of it around. The higher we go, the less dust there is in the air.”

“I thought something was different,” Melinda said. Out of all of them, she looked the most tired. Her illness during the travels had worsened, and with the rain and the fast pace they were forced to keep, she looked exhausted as if she was about to drop at any moment. “Do we see any signs of the children passing through this pass?”

“Why are you so worried about them?” Trident asked. “Most of them never did anything but exert their authority over us. They were not the younger children; these were the older children that always tried to make our lives miserable.”

“We would have been with the next group that they sent up the mountain,” Melinda said. “That was our fate that we escaped from. We have to see if there is anything we could do to help them.”

Samuel was looking around the path, crouching down to examine the snowy ground. “Not much here,” he said. “Although I might not know what to look for in tracking. We never did work on those skills in the tent city.”

Melinda nodded and did not respond.

“We should make camp for the evening,” Theodore said. “Whatever that thing was back in the camp, we will need a bit of rest before we can put more distance between it and us.”

The rest agreed. There was a tree band a few minutes away from the path. They set up their small rickety camp, broke out the last of their soggy, dried biscuits, and set about their evening routines. They all huddled together in their meager blankets and tried to sleep. They kept their eyes closed as long as they could, but each of them could not sleep. Their head was filled with stone guardsmen and old women, doing work in their stone form. Theodore dreamed of these figures roasting children; Melinda dreamed that they had dropped the children over the side of the mountain. Samuel’s dream was the worst: he dreamed that the children had somehow merged with the old women and the guardsmen, fused into their bodies to create the stone statues.

They woke later than they had planned. The rain had stopped during the night and the cold had returned. The wet ground had frozen sometime during the night, and they had to shake the ice off their clothing before they got started. They drank what water they could find, and made their way back to the path. The sky was blue, bluer than they have ever seen it. The orange dust, which they had thought had lightened because of the rain, was not much in evidence. There was some orange dust hovering close to the ground, but the higher they went into the mountains, the less dust there was. It was a strange sight to look up into a sky they had rarely seen and realize that it was a blue color, and not the dirty orange they always saw it as.

They packed their wet clothing into their bags and prepared to continue their trek through the mountains. They wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the last camp. In the strange brightness of the morning, they were beginning to doubt some of the things they had seen the previous day. Perhaps there were no statues of people in that camp. Perhaps it really was just a monument of sorts. People did not turn to stone in their world. At least not the world they had known in their tents.

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