by Neely Dobbs
CHAPTER 16: Cronul
The compound sweltered in summer’s afternoon heat. Its rows of two-story rectangular barracks had peeling paint overlaid with a layer of powdery gray dust. Spaced evenly between the buildings' outside perimeters, were carefully tended dirt walkways bordered with rows of carefully white-washed stones. The collection of structures was totally surrounded by a wire-mesh fence twice a man’s height. Outside this fence, and on all sides for a considerable distance, were fields where the refugees of the compound tended growing crops during the daylight hours.
Had one of the brighter refugees been able to view the compound from a great height, he would have immediately deduced one fact: these fields and the compound they surrounded were a totally isolated and autonomous region, completely different— and seemingly detached— from all the remaining areas. Within that unique region, except for the barracks and their small fields, the area was a vast wilderness, marked by only one rarely traveled road. That narrow dirt lane ambled across the wilderness to finally terminate, far from one very remote corner field, at a huge stone-walled enclosure.
* * *
Hoga smiled.
