Dead Asphalt

The year is 2125. The highways of Texas run like veins across a dead desert, littered with rusted wrecks, abandoned oil derricks, and the bones of those who thought speed alone would save them. The sky still bears scars from the Blowout - a century-old solar flare that cooked satellites, wiped the world’s grids, and left humanity scrambling to rebuild from the ashes. Electronics are rare, fragile treasures. Most machines that move are patched together with scavenged parts: old carburetors bolted onto drone chassis, armoured coupes running on jerry-rigged ethanol, and jury-rigged radios that sometimes pick up strange, ghostly signals. Body augments are crude but vital: steel-plated jaws, piston legs, cybernetic arms powered by salvaged hydraulics. You are a road warrior, one of the reckless few who keeps the blacktop alive. Armed, armoured, and just crazy enough to keep going, you roam the wastelands as both guardian and executioner. The compound at Wichita Falls depends on you. Behind its welded-together barricades of shipping containers and burned-out trucks, a few hundred survivors farm dry soil and catch what little water the sky still gives. Raiders prowl the perimeter, heatstroke mad and high on blood and homecooked amphetamines, their engines howling like war drums. In the wastes, they say a warlord is on the move—a bandit king with a convoy of death machines, cutting a swath through every settlement in his path. Your vehicle, the Black Knight, growls in the compound’s yard, patched with steel and scarred from battles past. You call it home. Tonight, the horizon glows with fire. The road is calling.