Maria nodded.
“Watch this.” Sterling equipped Manchester’s bones. He lifted his hand and his skeletal steed took shape, the bones clicking into place. Sterling then equipped his saddle, putting a wool blanket on before he placed it over Manchester’s back.
“This is your horse?” Maria asked as she took a step back, the color draining from her face.
“Don’t be afraid,” Sterling said as he placed his hand on Manchester’s bony muzzle. “He’s a good boy, ain’t you, Pingo?”
“His name is Pingo?”
“No, his name is Manchester. Pingo is a word I picked up from someone passing by Truth or Consequences. It means ‘favored horse.’ From what I can tell, people don’t use the word around here, but it sort of fits, at least to me. So it’s Manchester or Pingo. Hell, since he’s my only horse, by default he has to be my favorite.”
Sterling mounted up, ignoring a few of Maria’s relatives, who had stepped out of their various buildings to gawk at the cowboy necromancer and his skeletal steed.
“Yup,” Sterling said, and with that single word, he rode off, not wanting to see the look in Maria’s eyes as he left. He had met plenty of nice young ladies like her over the last five years, specifically in his more adventurous days, and he couldn’t blame her. Everyone was looking for a hero, and if they weren’t looking for that, someone who could take care of them would do. Man or woman, your chance for survival was much better in the desert if you had a companion by your side.
For a while, Sterling had Roxy, but that had fizzled out after what happened three years ago. And he was fairly certain it wouldn’t spark up again if and when he did rescue her. No way, no how. Whatever they once were wasn’t the reason he wanted to break her out of the militia’s jail in White Sands anyway. If there was one person dedicated to the mission that Sterling had set out on three years ago, one person who would see it to its end no matter how shitty things got, it was Roxy.
She was a badass then, and he could only imagine the sheer number of men it would take to bring her down now. This got him wondering, aside from the technomancer that Gasper claimed they had, what did the White Sands Militia have protecting their base? Would Sterling be able to bring down whatever it was, or was it something like sheer numbers that gave them their added strength?
By himself, this was debatable, but with the Sunflower Kid at his side, everything changed. Their powers worked well together, and there were points where Sterling wished he’d had the Kid’s ability rather than the power to animate the dead. Nothing like seeing the Kid lift a vine from the ground and kill someone long-distance, he thought. Plus, the Kid could create enormous plant constructs, similar to the one outside of the cultists’ compound.
Manchester picked up his pace, galloping at full speed toward the interstate.
“Hopefully, we’ll be riding with company in a few days,” Sterling told his bone horse as he made it to I-25, shifting north. He equipped his bag of tobacco and a paper and started working on a cigarette, Manchester instinctively slowing. Once the cigarette was squarely in Sterling’s mouth, he lit it, grabbed the reins, and hunkered down. “Vamos!” he shouted to his skeletal steed.
There came a point where Sterling knew he was going to have to branch off the highway. From the rumors he’d heard in T or C, there were several groups either partnered together or warring with one another in Albuquerque. “A real shitshow,” according to Kip, who had spoken to people that had passed through the city. These included the Barelas Glyphs, the Old Town Toros, the Kirtland Airmen, and the Alta Monte Homecidos.
This was why he, and anyone in their right mind, avoided Duke City, a nickname given to Albuquerque because the metropolis was named after the Duke of Albuquerque, a 17th-century Spanish nobleman. Leaving the highway would push Sterling into rough terrain, and it would possibly put him in direct contact with an amalgamation, but it would be easier than navigating Albuquerque. He would eventually come to Interstate 40, which he could follow until he got to Tijeras, and from there onto a road less trafficked, the Turquoise Trail to Madrid.
Anything to avoid Duke City.
He was an hour or so outside the Isleta Pueblo, and just starting to steer Manchester off the highway, when something in the road caught his attention. Sterling paused, not certain if he should investigate the enormous block of ice sitting in the middle of the highway, the block easily eight feet tall and eight feet deep. His instinct told him to leave it alone, but there was a person frozen into the surface of the ice, something in the person’s mouth, and it piqued his curiosity.
“Why do I get the feeling I’m going to regret this?” he mumbled to Manchester as he turned toward the giant block of ice. Sterling approached it cautiously, and once he was about thirty feet away, he hopped off his skeletal steed and cautiously made his way up to the structure, clearly conjured by a mancer. Frozen inside the block—his hands, and the tips of his face pressing out of the surface of the ice—was a man with a shocked look on his face, a piece of paper rolled up and sticking out of his mouth.
“Here we go,” Sterling said as he reached up to the man’s face and removed the piece of paper. He unrolled it to find a note written in scratchy handwriting that looked as if it had been penned by a madman.
Cowboy Nekromancur,
U R proberly wunderang why I left U this message. No cents in draweeng this out. Meet me in Duke City, Old Town. U and me got things we need to diskus.
-Ram
“You damn illiterate son of a bitch,” Sterling said as he turned the message around, seeing if there was anything written on the back. Once again, he looked up at the man frozen in ice, everything making sense now, even the bounty hunter’s white clothing in a way. Ram was a cryomancer, one of the Adapted, able to manipulate ice. It all made sense now, especially how he made the natives who had met him feel cold in some way. Sterling looked down at the block, noticing a puddle of water evaporating on the asphalt, the tips of his boot wet. He didn’t know how long the man had been frozen there on the highway, but the ice was thick enough that it could have been several hours, maybe even longer.
Sterling hated being taunted.
He knew that was what Ram was trying to do—the cryomancer was trying to psych Sterling out, to rile him up. But it wasn’t going to work this time. Sterling was just about to turn away and figure out what he should do next when the roar of engines met his ears. He had attracted attention, or more likely, the giant ice block had, which was the last thing Sterling wanted this close to Albuquerque.
After sending the message he received to his inventory list, Sterling went ahead and equipped his rolling papers and his dwindling supply of tobacco. As the engines grew louder, he rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Sterling was soon greeted by a group of men on dirt bikes, all of them in body armor and tank tops, loose cargo pants and combat boots, several with the letters ‘B-G’ tattooed in Old English on their faces and skulls.
The Barelas Glyphs.
“Howdy, boys,” Sterling said, cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth as he casually looked them over. There were seven gang members, their heads shaved, some with little mustaches and goatees.
“See?” one of them said to a small man on the best-looking dirt bike. “He wasn’t lying. The man in white wasn’t lying!”
“It’s José!” one of the men said as he stopped his dirt bike. The kickstand in place, he rushed over to the block of ice, the man’s arms tensing as he saw his frozen comrade.
“Did you say a man in white?” Sterling asked the group. “Because if you want to know who did this, I hate to tell you, but you already met him back in Albuquerque. I ain’t had nothing to do with this. And I don’t want nothing to do with you fellas.”
“No, you did this,” the leader of the gang said as he also turned off his bike. He used his heel to pop the kickstand out and stood, stone-like ridges starting to press out of his skin and rippling up his arms. A gaiamancer. “Fuck you, ese.”
“Now, I k
now y’all can’t be as dumb as you look,” Sterling said as he ashed his cigarette calmly. “You boys see my bone horse back there. Does that look like something a cryomancer could conjure up? And to add to that, do I look like the type of motherfucker going around freezing gangbangers in blocks of ice? If you’re thinking ‘hell no, you don’t; you look like a necromancer,’ you’d be right. I want you to think back to the man that told you about this here block of ice, the one wearing all white. If you controlled ice, and considered yourself some sort of renowned bounty hunter that loves to leave a favorable impression on folks, wouldn’t you be wearing all white? Sort of matches his demeanor, don’t it? I’m just thinking outside the box a bit here, fellas, using some of my detective skills, but it’s pretty clear to me what’s going on here.” Sterling motioned toward the block of ice, hoping that his Persuasion technique would help to some degree, even if he was being snarky. “And to add to that, if I could control ice, wouldn’t I have turned you boys into gangbanger popsicles by this point and been done with it?”
“We’re going to kill you,” said another gang member as he got off his bike, requisite B-G sprawled across the left side of his skull.
“Y’all want to see something cool?” Sterling asked as he glanced at the frozen corpse. “How’s about this? I’ll animate your buddy José here, and he can tell you himself that it was the man in white who did this to him, not me. Then you boys can get back on your little bikes and take your sorry asses back to Duke City and let me be on my way. Leave here with your lives. Imagine that, I’m actually giving you a chance. I don’t do it very often; you should take it.” Sterling placed his hand on his revolver. “Or, we do this the hard way.”
The ground shifted beneath him and he drew his weapon, firing it into the skull of the first gang member, viscera blowing out the back of his head. His cigarette still in his mouth, Sterling jumped to avoid a crag lifting out of the ground. Bam! He fired his weapon again, his bullet passing through another one of the men’s heads.
One of the gang members, a brute who had clearly put Stat Points galore into Fortitude and Strength, exploded toward Sterling, the cowboy necromancer inches away from being tackled. While he might have started the week out rusty, Sterling had his swagger back, and as the man passed, he lifted his revolver and fired a shot into the back of his head, taking another one down. Sterling whistled, and Manchester rushed forward, colliding with their parked dirt bikes and providing a much-needed distraction.
The lone mancer of the group continued forming stone armor along with a matching face enclosure, which was going to make him a lot harder to kill with a bullet. Since he’d already taken down three of them, Sterling figured he would save this one for last, his next focus being on one of the scrawnier of the gangbangers, who came at him with a chain wrapped around his muscled arm.
The man swung his chain and Sterling caught it, the tip of it whipping against his arm. He ignored the flash of pain as he yanked the man toward him, Sterling firing several shots through his body and a final one through the base of his skull.
He turned to the two men Manchester was distracting and took a quick puff from his cigarette to finish it. Sterling flicked the cigarette butt away and tackled one of the men, subsequently executing him with a single shot. Adrenaline rippling through him, he holstered his firearm and retrieved his sickle-sword through the breakaway scabbard that Raylan had designed. One power swipe later and the second-to-last gang member was seeing things from a different perspective, his head flying through the air in the opposite direction of his body as Sterling turned to the man with stone armor, his final opponent.
“I warned you boys,” Sterling said, blood dripping off the blade of his sword. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
His opponent said something to him, but his voice was now muffled by the stone mass covering his face. Even with all his weight, the gaiamancer moved relatively quickly. His assailant’s punches were easy to calculate and avoid, but the few attempts that Sterling made to bring him down, once with his sword and then with his own fists and feet, proved futile.
Sterling recalled his last fight with a gaiamancer, and how he had simply tired him out. It was clear that usage of a gaiamancer’s power drew on their Mana, and if he simply continued avoiding the man’s attacks, the thug would eventually lose juice. But Sterling didn’t know how much juice his opponent had, nor did he know if stone armor drew on Mana the same way as calling forth constructs.
An idea came to Sterling, one that he had recently tried for the first time.
Even though he knew it would hurt to do so, Sterling collided with the man, the two of them pressing back, the armored thug able to hold his ground as Sterling failed to bring him to the ground. He summoned his Mold Manipulation power, black and green mold creeping into the crevices of the man’s stone armor. The gangbanger slammed his fists down onto Sterling’s back, the pain blooming across his shoulders, Sterling losing his cowboy hat. He held on, suffering through two more heavy fists before the man started to gasp. His knees buckled and the two of them came down together.
His hands now on his chest, Sterling continued to press mold into the crevices of the stone armor, the mancer letting out a final gasp as he died.
“Goddamn, you’re a hard man to kill,” Sterling said once he was sure the man was dead.
He slowly got to his feet and retrieved his cowboy hat, the urge to ride to Albuquerque to deal with Ram flourishing within him, causing his fists to tense. But Sterling knew better. Ram was clearly trying to set a trap, trying to lure him out by provoking him, and subsequently putting him on a turf that he controlled.
Not only that, Sterling had more important things to deal with, such as reaching Madrid, meeting with Raylan, and getting help to stop the telemancer’s influence so he could rescue the Sunflower Kid. That, and he still needed to get down to White Sands to meet up with Don Gasper and rescue Roxy and the rumored technomancer.
“Nah,” Sterling said as he looked up at the block of ice. “You can wait for me in Albuquerque for all I care,” he told the frozen man as if he were Ram. “If anyone is going to be calling the shots here, pendejo, it’s going to be me. I’ve got plenty of time left to kill you dead.”
Sterling equipped one of his jugs of water and took a big swig from it. He also ate a few peppers, which would tide him over for the time being. After rolling up a cigarette and lighting it, Sterling approached Manchester and mounted up.
He headed to the east, back on the path he had already planned out for himself. He was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to make it to Madrid by nightfall, but he’d be there first thing in the morning and that was good enough for the time being. As he rode away from the highway, he took a quick look at his stats:
You have received 2,890 XP!
Name: Sterling Monedero
Race: Human
Mancer Class: Necromancer
Class Ranking: Bone Sculptor
Level: 60
Fortitude: 117
Strength: 35
Resolve: 152
Mana: 134/159
Current Armor Rating: 28
XP: 310,364
XP to Next Level:3,560
Stat Points Available: 0
Technique Points Available: 1
It wouldn’t be much longer until he got his next level.
“Not too bad,” he mumbled. “Raylan, here I come.”
.Chapter Seven.
Sterling rode the rest of the day, still salty about the message that Ram had left him. It took every iota of self-control for him not to turn Manchester around and head to Albuquerque. Ram was looking for a fight, and if Sterling hadn’t set out on this journey with a mission in mind, a task that was already hard enough to see to its completion, he would have gone to give him that fight, even if he knew it was likely a trap.
Any invitation like that has got to be some sort of ambush, Sterling thought, ignoring the heat of the setting sun, the aches he was feeling in his lower back from
riding all day, the desolate terrain—all of it. He wasn’t far from Tijeras, where he would likely set up camp for the night before finishing the final leg of his journey to Madrid.
Another thirty minutes of riding and he saw a sign that read Route 66, Sterling noticing that it ran parallel to the highway, separated by russet swaths of dry earth peppered with various shrubs, none of it edible. The sun had fully set by this point, the sky a shade of mulberry with an orange rim tracing over the mountains on the horizon. He was glad that he usually kept jerky and peppers in his list, but wished he had picked up something more solid to eat back at the Tiwa trading post. But he had been so distracted by Maria earlier…
Sterling shook his head.
That wasn’t what he was out here for, and it certainly wasn’t why he had left his pepper farm in Truth or Consequences. Maria was a nice young lady though, one that was part of a community a lot closer-knit than the locals and drunks that made up the city of T or C. It would be good for Sterling to become part of something like that, but he knew in the end that it wasn’t for him. It may have looked appealing from the outside, but there would come a point where he wanted to go off on his own, do his own thing, be his own bad self.
And he didn’t want to put Maria through that; aside from the fact that he didn’t want their relationship to be defined by how he had saved her, he didn’t want to put anyone through that. Cowboy chivalry was alive and well; even though it should have died with the rest of the population on that fateful day five years ago when Godwalkers appeared in the sky, most of the world’s population killed in a bloody instant, he still had scruples.
It wasn’t the first time Sterling had tried to relive what had happened moments after the Reset. He’d gone through his recollection of the event multiple times in various states of mind. All he could remember was that he had been sitting at a bar in Las Cruces, everyone around him suddenly dead. The bartender, who had just finished pouring up a beer for him, was slumped over, viscera floating in Sterling’s beer. Gruesome. Frightened, he stumbled out of the bar, tried to get in the nearest vehicle he could find that had the door open, failed to start it, and in his delirious rush to figure out what was happening, Sterling ended up falling out of the car and somehow hitting his head in the process.
Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk Page 29