Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  “Yesterday’s stew? Consider it a done deal. I’ll have the biggest bowl you got of that, a side of tortillas if you got it. Go ahead and mix some of these peppers in with mine,” he said as he equipped a few of the jalmundo peppers. The waitress took the peppers from him and glanced at Raylan.

  “Sure, I’ll have the same. We’ll get something proper tonight for dinner,” the flectomancer said.

  Once she was gone, Sterling jumped right back into the conversation. “Like I was saying, there’s someone else I want to add to my team.”

  “The team that consists of only one person at the moment, right?” Raylan asked.

  Sterling laughed. “You ain’t wrong there. But I got plans, and I’m pretty sure that native I told you about, Paco, will probably join up if his granny lets him. So I got a solimancer in the wings, and I’m going to have a biomancer, then there’s Roxy, and once I figure out where Zephyr is, I’ll try to get her to join as well.”

  “Zephyr? I may have some information on that particular young lady…”

  “Good, I want to hear it. But before we do that, I want you to know, man-to-man, Raylan Mossberg, that I need you on my team. We need you. We will need you. I need you.”

  The flectomancer raised an eyebrow of doubt.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You’re the best there is in the entire state. Hell, all of America, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to need someone like you if we’re going to take out them Godwalkers.”

  “You know I despise the Godwalkers as much as you do, Sterling,” Raylan said after a long pause, “but you can’t just take them out. If you destroy one, there will be another. You should already be aware of this, considering your past. You’re playing with fire.”

  “You’re confusing me with Sierra,” Sterling joked. “And honestly, that’s another reason I’ve come to you. You know more about practically everything going on in the state. People come from all across the Southwest for tech. You hear things, you know things. That’s well and good. Now if I was a betting man, and I am at times, I would bet that you knew what to do to take down more than one Godwalker. At the very least, I’d bet that you had a theory or two.”

  “Are you referring to the terminal?”

  “See?” Sterling said as he threw up his arms, nearly hitting the beer out of the waitress’s hand as she reapproached the table. “I don’t even know what a terminal is, so you’ve already told me more than I knew before I rode my happy ass all the way up here.”

  The waitress heard his statement, giggled quietly to herself, and stepped away after placing a cup of oily-looking coffee on the table for Raylan.

  “You do realize why you failed last time, right?” Raylan asked. “There’s a key piece to the puzzle that you are missing.”

  “You mean a technomancer?”

  “Actually, yes, that was the piece I was referring to. How did you know?”

  “Say what you want about Don Gasper, but he ain’t nobody’s fool. He already told me that I needed one of them folks. And regarding the technomancer? Problem solved. There is also one being held with Roxy. I probably should have mentioned that as well.”

  “You never were clear to me about what happened last time. I know that you and the others took down a smaller one, but what about the larger one?”

  “That’s a story for another day, and it doesn’t pertain to what I’m asking right now. It’s not as crazy of a story as you would think, but there’s a reason that… There’s a reason that things happened the way they did.” Sterling took a sip from his beer, his eyebrows lifting in surprise. “Hot damn, you have something to do with this?” he asked, impressed that the beer was actually cold.

  “What do you think?”

  “I swear to something, amigo, you really are a genius.”

  “I try. As I’m sure you’re aware, if you are going to put a team together, you need the right people. I’m not opposed to anyone you’ve already listed, but you’re missing a key mancer, one that could change everything, and possibly for the better. Who knows if this technomancer is really there in the White Sands desert? But trust me when I say that you’re going to need one, especially if you plan to do anything to these Godwalkers.”

  Sterling ran his hand along his beard stubble. “Like I told you, that’s in the works. I just need to get the Sunflower Kid first, then everything else will fall into place.”

  Raylan looked down at his coffee, staring at the surface of the liquid for a moment. Finally, he nodded. “I need to think about all this, so don’t get your hopes up. I like where I’m at in my life, and no offense to you, I just don’t know if this is something you can pull off. We’re talking about Godwalkers here, floating alien monoliths that are the size of skyscrapers. I don’t know if any man or woman could pull it off. But if you did attempt it, you would need a technomancer, and you would need to start with a terminal, the nearest one being in Utah, last I heard.”

  “Where at in Utah?”

  “I’ve heard the Moab Desert, and Monument Valley.”

  Sterling smirked. “Why do I got the feeling I’m not going to like it in Utah?”

  “You said whatever it takes.”

  “You ain’t wrong,” Sterling said as he took another sip of his cold beer, savoring it. “Need to get me a travel guide. And I might need to get me some warmer clothing, too. But I got to start with the Kid. I’m sure you already deduced this, but I need you to invent me something that can stop a telemancer. My plan is to break into that little cultist den of iniquity, grab the Kid, then head south to Alamogordo, which as you know, ain’t far from the White Sands desert, where the militia is holding Roxy. Once we have her and this technomancer, if they are indeed there, I’ll come back this way. You said you knew something about Zephyr, what’s that?”

  “She’s in Albuquerque.”

  “Goddammit,” Sterling said. “I was hoping to avoid that hellhole.”

  Raylan laughed. “You aren’t the only person I’ve heard say that.”

  “In that case, I’m going to put her on the back burner, after I take care of the obligations I already have. There’s something else related to ol’ Duke City,” Sterling said, his eyebrows starting to narrow as he thought of the letter that Ram had left him. “Have you ever heard of a cryomancer named Ram? Goes around wearing all white, trying to intimidate people?”

  “Ram the bounty hunter?”

  “Unless there is someone else that fits that description, then yeah, the bounty hunter.”

  He slowly nodded. “I’m well aware of the man. I made weapons for a group that was trying to kill him. Unfortunately, they all failed. I have been waiting for Ram to come to Madrid to see about the guy who would make weapons for his would-be killers, but he hasn’t shown up yet. From what they told me, Ram was in Albuquerque when the Reset happened, in a federal prison for manslaughter charges. His first reaction once it happened was to kill everyone who was still alive in the jail. But he didn’t leave after that.”

  “What do you mean he didn’t leave?”

  “He stayed in the jail and searched through all the archives until he found the papers on his past, his charges and appeals. Ram knows who he is, and knows what he once was, is what I’m trying to say here. He has left a trail of bodies across northern New Mexico, and the men who were planning to take him down claimed that he was approaching Level 90.”

  “Hot damn.”

  “He’s also lost his mind and believes he’s a god, that each bounty he takes is a stepping stone to the power that he will eventually wield. Ram is dangerous, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to recruit him, if that’s what you’re planning.”

  “Recruit him?” Sterling asked. “You got me all wrong here. I ain’t trying to recruit him, I’m trying to kill the son of a bitch before he kills me.”

  Raylan took a long sip from his coffee, his eyes suddenly wide. “That… makes more sense.”

  “And I ain’t scared of him neither,” Sterling told the flectomancer. “Just i
n case you thought I was worried.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that Ram is relentless in his pursuit to become a god. He’s not an enemy anyone would want to have.”

  “And that’s why I need him dead. The Killbillies hired him. He had a message for me out there on I-25, left a man in a block of ice with the piece of paper in his mouth that told me to meet him in the Old Town neighborhood of Albuquerque.”

  “And I’m guessing you didn’t…”

  “No, I came here instead. Here’s how I see it: if Ram is going to try to kill me just for the glory of it, I ain’t going to make it easy for him. Hell, one could argue I may have a death wish, but I ain’t going to ride on up to Old Town and say, ‘Here I am, fella, hand-delivered on a silver platter.’ I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, I know exactly when I was born now.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, not exactly. But at least I got a lead.” Sterling equipped his wallet and placed it on the table. “There’s a bit more to my crucifixion story I was telling you earlier. Basically, I was captured by the Killbillies and their glorious leader, Commodore Bones, had this wallet. Tried to hold it over me, carried on a stick style.”

  Raylan opened the wallet and took a look at Sterling’s old driver’s license. He then looked in one of the folds to find the picture. “And you believe this is your family?” the mustached man asked as he turned the picture over.

  “Well like I said, I was in Las Cruces, so I stopped by that address and found an old insurance card in the vehicle out front. Had my name on it, and the name of, well, you’ll see.” Sterling equipped the insurance card and showed it to Raylan. He had been meaning to fold it and put it in the wallet to keep both pieces together, which he planned to do after Raylan gave them both back to him.

  “You had a wife named Isabella,” he said as he examined the document.

  “Apparently so. But that’s all I got. No more leads.”

  “Well, this may be a bit of a stretch, but this insurance company is out of Albuquerque,” Raylan said as he tapped on the insignia at the bottom of the page.

  “How do you know that?” Sterling asked as he looked at the insurance card again. Sure enough, there was a small address printed beneath the insignia. “Well, I’ll be damned. See, that’s why I need you, right?”

  “To figure out things you should have already uncovered? I haven’t agreed to join you yet,” Raylan reminded him.

  “I’m just saying, you see it, right?”

  Their food came, and Sterling sent his items back to his list. He rubbed his hands together. “That was faster than I thought it would be,” he said as he smiled up at the young waitress.

  “Sierra helped out.”

  “That pyromancer…” he mumbled once the waitress left, Sterling returning his focus to Raylan. “Well, you and I have plenty of time to catch up on all the little details, but the most important thing, right now anyway, is getting the Sunflower Kid. I can follow up on this address when I go to Albuquerque looking to recruit Zephyr in the future. I suppose I’ll have to add looking for Ram to that little trip as well. The last thing I need is another enemy trying to hunt me down.”

  “Agreed, especially one like Ram,” Raylan said. “And don’t forget the technomancer. In fact, maybe I’ll add that as an official requirement for me joining. Get a technomancer, and you can consider me part of the team.”

  “A requirement, huh?” Sterling asked as he took the first bite of his chili, which was piping hot. “Another thing to add to the to-do list, I suppose.”

  “It’s always something,” Raylan said.

  Sterling laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  One cold beer became two, and two became four, and four became six, Sterling eventually setting up shop on the porch of Madrid’s only restaurant while Raylan tinkered away at his workshop. It had been so long since he’d had an actual cold beer, and Sterling planned to enjoy each and every drop.

  Lunch came around, the young waitress named Jennifer bringing him tamales and beans, rice with bits of blue corn in it, Sterling going for Christmas when it came to peppers. After yet another beer, Sterling summoned his New Mexico travel guide and flipped through the dogeared pages to the loose sheets at the back with his clippings of pepper facts. He found a particular page talking about the words chosen for the New Mexico territory seal—Crescit Eundo—Latin for “it grows as it goes.”

  While munching on his tamales, and as the afternoon pressed on, he read about the man tasked with creating the seal, William Ritch. Ritch had lifted the two words from an ancient Roman text called de Rerum Natura, which meant On the Nature of Things, a book penned in the first century by a Roman philosopher named Lucretius. The book had apparently taken the Roman world by storm because of the way it described natural phenomena like weather patterns and disease as being caused by nature, not the Gods.

  “Bucking the system, weren’t you, Lucretius?” Sterling mumbled to himself as the waitress came back around. He tapped on his beer; he could tell for a moment that she was going to tell him that he’d had too much. Sterling would hear none of it. “Keep them coming,” he told her as he returned to his text, to another paragraph about this Roman philosopher named Lucretius.

  Lucretius believed that all human beings were comprised of indivisible particles, that these atoms reacted to each other, and things happened because of their interactions. The Latin phrase itself—Crescit Eundo—came from one of his explanations on lightning. The philosopher told his readers that they no longer needed to be worried about Gods like Zeus, that lightning came from the clouds and that their creation could be described by the interaction of atoms. A bolt of lightning grows as it goes, in his words, or Crescit Eundo, and as it turned out, the two words would later become the New Mexico state motto.

  Another thought came to Sterling.

  The two Latin words on the New Mexico state seal weren’t all that different from what the Skeleton Man, the Hopi god of death, had told the people after they came up from the underworld in search of a new place to live: Now if you are willing to live here that way too, with me and share this life, why come, you are welcome.

  Did a landscape contain a motto, and was it something baked into a creation myth? Even if their conceptions were centuries apart, even further if you tried to work it out into miles, the two phrases still carried with them a description of the landscape itself, without mentioning a single grain of sand. Could they really be related across space and time like that?

  Sterling finished his meal and shifted his chair so he could kick his legs up on the railing. Respectfully, of course. He made sure that it was fine before he did so, the cowboy necromancer once again buried in his travel guide, his book of sketchings and desert haiku also on the table, a spark of inspiration coming on. The day had warmed up, and while Madrid was quiet, a few people moved about, one or two of the men tipping their hats at him as they passed. He liked the town. It was peaceful, quiet aside from the sounds from Raylan’s workshop, the occasional gust of wind whistling through the tightly packed street.

  He was feeling good, happy to enjoy the day off while Raylan tinkered. If anyone had earned a day off, it was Sterling, especially after what he had been through since he made that fateful decision to leave Truth or Consequences and head south to find Don Gasper.

  “Look at you, sitting there like you own the place with your journal and your travel guide, acting like you’re some kind of scholar,” Sierra the pyromancer said as she stepped out of the restaurant. The dark-haired woman wore an apron, a few stains splattered across the front.

  “Food wasn’t half bad,” Sterling told her as he kept his feet up on the railing and sent his travel guide and book of desert haiku back to his inventory list. He equipped his papers and his tobacco, and began rolling up a cigarette. “We could talk about your usage of peppers, though, if you’re so obliged.”

  “I’m not the chef.” Sierra cross her arms over her chest and gazed out over the town, to the tawny hi
lls beyond. “I’m just here to warm it up quickly and help out with other tasks. Now that the fires are going, and they got everything they need, I’m pretty much done for the day.”

  “Well, in that case, pull yourself up a seat, and grab a beer. You can refill mine, too,” he told her.

  “You are working up quite the tab there.”

  “If I don’t got the turquoise and silver to cover it, I’m sure Raylan does,” Sterling told her with a grin. He ashed his cigarette in a clay ashtray that had clearly been crafted by the natives.

  “You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” Sierra asked, not looking at him.

  “Not particularly; I think you got me confused with the other necromancer that comes through here.”

  “What other necromancer?”

  “The one you’re confusing me with,” he told her, the alcohol slurring his words just a hair. It had been a while since he’d drunk like this, but it wasn’t something he was completely opposed to doing, especially if Kip came calling back in T or C.

  “What were you reading about anyway?”

  “Crescit Eundo,” Sterling said with a wave of his hand. “Heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “It translates to: it goes as it grows; shit, I mean it grows as it goes. That’s it.”

  “Doesn’t sound exactly like Spanish.”

  “That’s because it ain’t,” Sterling told her. “It’s Latin. It’s on the New Mexico state seal.”

  “There ain’t no more New Mexico. It’s just people in what used to be a state trying to survive another day.”

  “I can’t argue with that logic,” Sterling told her as he nodded toward the chair on the other side of the table. “How about you try to survive another day by sitting up here with me, drinking, telling me your story, and seeing if we can’t live ‘til tomorrow?”

  “That’s it? You’re just going to come to town and drink all day while Raylan works on whatever you want him to make?”

  “Ain’t that what most people do when they come here?”

  Sierra slowly nodded, a strand of her black hair falling into her face now. She swept it behind her ear, and when she wasn’t satisfied with that, she let her hair down and retied the ponytail. “I guess I could join you,” she said as she removed her apron.