Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  The environment calmed his nerves, and Sterling puffed on a cigarette as they came to the intersection at a town called Moriarty, a trading post not far off the highway. Normally, he would have stopped, but he was anxious to get to his destination and get some rest before his early-morning assault. With this in mind, Sterling continued onward, eventually reaching an abandoned village known as Macintosh, then a small community that was once the town of Estancia. From there it was desert plains and abandoned farmhouses, the blue sky towering overhead as the landscape flattened out, Sterling feeling like he was riding on the moon once the soil turned off-white, dust swirling off jagged rock formations.

  There was nothing much between his current position and Mountainair, just the barren earth and a few shrubs that decided to try to make it in the desert. But it was mighty fine riding, the air nice and clean, Sterling feeling the heat but not paying any mind to it. Clouds appeared overhead, cooling the ground and the asphalt of the highway for a moment, an easterly wind kicking up grains of sand, enough that Sterling had to duck his head.

  He pushed on, eventually coming to Mountainair, ignoring a few locals who tried to wave him down and warn him about the Culto Demente Sagrado up ahead. There was still a pretty good ride between the town and the ruins, yellow rock all around him as the landscape began to lift from the parched soil of what would later be flatlands and reform into mountains dotted with trees and shrubs brave enough to go weeks upon weeks without water.

  Sterling felt akin to the flora of the region, how tough it was, how it attempted to survive no matter what. It goes as it grows, grows as it goes, he thought.

  He knew he was nearing the cultists’ compound when he saw the towering cactus formation on the horizon. Heading into the mountains, Sterling eventually found a bluff that would give him a view of the cult’s domain. He was still about a mile away from it, Sterling not wanting to be spotted if they had any kind of patrols.

  He got down from Manchester, his legs a bit wobbly at first. This quickly went away and Sterling soon sat on the edge of the bluff, his feet dangling off as he rolled another cigarette. “Yup,” he said as he lit the cancer stick, keeping it between his teeth for a moment as he equipped his book of desert haiku. He smoked and read some of his past haiku, shaded in one of his sketches, then went back to the desert haiku and stopped at one about the Reset he’d written two years ago.

  Godwalkers appeared

  Yellow sun infinite dusk

  Memories long gone

  There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t wish he could have his past memories, but at least Sterling had new ones, and the view he was currently presented with—mauve mountains on a patchy horizon, an enormous cactus structure in the distance, a carrot sandstone landscape crossed by sedimentary veins—was one worth memorializing.

  Soon, he’d be joined by the Sunflower Kid, he was sure of it. And then they would finally make it to White Sands.

  Sleep came easy for the cowboy necromancer. After flipping through his travel guide, and looking at some of the pages he had torn out of a book on peppers, the sun started to set. Sterling ate a bit of the food that Sierra had given him, smoked another couple cigarettes, took a shot of tequila, and laid his head to rest.

  He had no problem sleeping out in the wild, his wool blanket over his body, his upper back and shoulders pressed against a large rock that he was using as a pillow, chin tucked forward, cowboy hat covering his eyes and protecting Sterling from the telemancer, even if he was out of range.

  “Mister… Skeleton Man…”

  He stirred, not sure where the voice had come from. He had been dreaming of the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival, of walking through the fairgrounds near Petroglyph National Monument, balloons swelling all around him as fires ignited, beautiful colors coming to life.

  “Mister… Skeleton Man…”

  “Wha—?” Sterling blinked his eyes open to find someone crouching before him, his immediate reaction being to go for his revolver.

  “Don’t shoot!” the voice said, the man’s features obscured by the moon behind him.

  “P-Paco?” Sterling asked, recognizing the native youth’s voice and putting his weapon away. “Damn, son, you are going to get yourself killed sneaking up on me like that. I almost shot your ass.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” Paco said as he extended his hand to Sterling, helping him sit up fully. Paco pulled his hand away as he noticed a strange sensation in grabbing Sterling’s gloved hand.

  “What can I say? Abuela was right.” Sterling removed the leather glove and showed Paco his skeletal fingers, accented by the moonlight. “Yup, it ain’t that great considering it’s my dominant hand, but it’s what I got at the moment.”

  “What happened to your arm?”

  “The man in all white cut it off. So I had to get me a new one. But don’t you worry none—I’m going to get it fixed once I get the Sunflower Kid. At least that’s the plan, anyway.”

  “Is it your dominant arm?”

  “I just said it was. Anyhow, feels normal enough by this point,” Sterling said as he curled his skeletal digits into a fist. “But I’m guessing there are a number of things I ain’t going to like doing with a hand like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Sterling settled his gaze on Paco. “I’ll let you think about that on your own time. Now, what the hell are you doing all the way out here?”

  “Waiting for you,” Paco said stoically. “Been out here for two days now.”

  “I would say I was flattered if I didn’t think you were going against Abuela’s wishes by being here. Did she tell you it was okay to leave your tribe? And don’t try lying to me, unless you want to get slapped by a skeletal hand,” Sterling said, offering Paco a grin.

  He hesitated.

  “Go on, be honest. Did she say it was okay to come all the way out here?”

  “No,” Paco finally admitted. “I wanted to help you.”

  “You got your own people to look after; you don’t need to look after me. Hell, I can barely look after myself,” he said, once again showing Paco his skeletal hand. Sterling equipped his bag of tobacco and his rolling papers, and proceeded to roll up a cigarette.

  “You seem to have full usage of it.”

  “Begrudgingly,” Sterling said as he placed the cigarette on the corner of his lip. He slipped his skeletal hand back into his black glove, and went for his lighter. “But I’m serious about you being out here. What I’m about to do…” Sterling shook his head. He knew there would be blood once he got into the cult’s compound. Judging by the way the sky looked, he assumed it was around four in the morning. Sterling quickly checked his stats to see that they had reset for the day:

  Name: Sterling Monedero

  Race: Human

  Mancer Class: Necromancer

  Class Ranking: Bone Sculptor

  Level: 60

  Fortitude: 117

  Strength: 35

  Resolve: 152

  Mana: 154/159

  Current Armor Rating: 28

  XP: 310,364

  XP to Next Level:3,560

  Stat Points Available: 0

  Technique Points Available: 1

  One of the things that he planned to do once he made his way back up to Madrid, likely before going after Ram in Albuquerque, was to see if Raylan couldn’t upgrade his armor rating. He had a feeling the flectomancer would have a few tricks up his sleeve to give Sterling a little more defense. If he was going to Duke City, he would certainly need it. And that wasn’t taking into account that he would also be trying to find his former teammate, Zephyr, while he was in a city practically razed to the ground by gang warfare.

  “I want to help,” Paco said again.

  “You already told me that. If you want to help, go back to your pueblo,” Sterling said. “You saw what happened to my arm; the people I play around with take shit seriously. I’m talking life or death here. Down there is a telemancer,” he said, nodding to the cactu
s-clad fortress in the distance. “You can’t get much closer than this anyway. How would you go about helping?”

  “You’re going to rescue the Sunflower Kid, and eventually you’ll be coming back in some direction, right? If you come in this direction, I can help once you are out of the telemancer’s range, you know, if someone is chasing you.”

  “If someone is chasing me… You know, you may be onto something.” Sterling was a man of his word, and he didn’t like that he was going against the promise he’d made to Abuela. But maybe there was some flexibility here. “How’s this? I’ll go to the compound solo and head back this way because I need to go south anyhow, but you ain’t coming with me on that trip down to Alamogordo. You still need to get permission from your people. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help out in some way. Here’s how we play this: you help me ward off any enemies that may try to chase me out of there. It’ll be good practice for you, and maybe you’ll even get a level. Then you hide out and make it back to your tribe, get permission, see if you can’t level up even more, and I will swing by on my way back up toward Albuquerque. Promise.”

  “You’re going to go to Albuquerque?”

  “After I head south, sure, that’s the plan. There are several things I need to take care of there, including killing the pinche hijo de puta who did this to me,” Sterling said, tilting his cigarette toward his skeletal arm. “What do you say? That a good enough deal for you? Hell, who knows, you may even see some action tonight. If I do things right, maybe not, but it’s probably better that way. Whatever is cooped up in that compound over there is all sorts of crazy, or else they wouldn’t be named the Culto Demente Sagrado. But like they often say about crazy: it takes one to know one.” Sterling winked at Paco. “You ready to get your feet wet, or what?”

  .Chapter Ten.

  Sterling made Paco promise several times to stay behind, to not come after him no matter what happened, no matter what he heard or saw. He even ended up threatening the Hopi native, telling him he would shoot him in the legs and conjure whatever he could find around the area to hold him back. He said all this with a smile on his face, Sterling not quite meaning the words coming out of his mouth. He liked Paco; the kid’s determination and the grit he exhibited in waiting for two days for Sterling to show up impressed him. But he had promised Abuela that he wouldn’t let Paco get involved, and until he had her approval, he was going to make good on that promise.

  Sterling’s Cover of Night technique was currently at Level 2; he was going to rely on this, his Sneak Proficiency and Assassination technique, as well as his Mold Manipulation ability, to break himself into the compound. From there, his focus would shift to locating the Sunflower Kid and getting the hell out of Dodge, Sterling assuming he was going to have to put down a few cultists along the way.

  Good riddance, he thought as he rode Manchester toward the compound. I need me a level anyway.

  He didn’t know if he was going to be able to squeeze out nearly four thousand XP at the compound, but if he could pull it off, he would certainly try, and if there were other mancers holed up in there alongside the telemancer running the place, the woman who called herself Jesus, it would make it much easier for Sterling to move up to Level 61.

  What you need is a charm that increases XP, Sterling thought. Something that is like the dream catcher you have, with its ten percent Mana boost.

  As he grew closer to the compound, he thought of the six charms he currently wore. There was the rattlesnake tail that hung from his belt loop that granted him an additional Stat Point per five levels gained. He would get that once he reached Level 65, conveniently enough. Then there was the leather bracelet that granted him an additional Technique Point per level gained, the topaz necklace that he lifted off the female Killbilly that gave him a bonus Resolve point; the arrowhead made out of rattlesnake skin necklace, ultra rare, which gave him eight Technique Points per level gained; and his newest piece, his amber ring with the scorpion tail inside which he wore on his necklace, which gave him a Class Proficiency bonus per three levels gained. This wouldn’t kick in until he hit Level 63, which couldn’t come soon enough.

  Sterling chuckled. If he kept this up, collecting charms like he was as of late, he was going to have a lot of flair by the time he rolled into Albuquerque, and apparently Utah from there, where the Godwalkers’ terminal was located, at least according to what Raylan had heard. But he had more pertinent things to do before he started his journey north, one of those things being the wall of cactus he was slowly approaching. And he still didn’t know what a terminal was.

  “Things to be determined…” he said under his breath.

  There was no telemancer in his head regurgitating Bible quotes, rattling on about Eden. His hat now prevented that, courtesy of Raylan’s clever crafting. It was pretty clear as he approached the compound that there was an actual main entrance, several guards out front, the men wearing robes and holding shotguns. But Sterling had a different idea for how he would get inside, and with this in mind, he kept to the dark pockets of the terrain which were provided by trees that surrounded the Abó ruins, where he eventually abandoned Manchester.

  “I whistle for you, you come running, Pingo,” he told his skeletal steed.

  Sterling had been looking in his travel guide at a picture of the ruins before dozing off earlier. The place looked like an abandoned castle, at least according to the picture, the adobe walls the color of tortillas that had been cooked just a bit too long. Hard to imagine that sixteen hundred people lived in the compound back in the seventeenth century, the puebloans mostly agriculturalists, clear in the flat stretch of land surrounding the structure. But that was history for you. It was generally more impressive than it looked upon first glance.

  Sterling was glad that there was cloud cover above. As he made his way across what was once farmland, he paid close attention to the moonlight breaking through the clouds, which illuminated strips of the terrain. This saw Sterling moving in a zigzag pattern, the wind picking up, his black duster lifting off his legs, the temperature dropping a few degrees. He pressed on, eventually coming to the wall made out of cactus.

  Sterling looked up at it, in awe of what the Sunflower Kid had created. The Kid has leveled up over the last three years, he thought, that’s for dang sure.

  In a scenario like this, Sterling would normally look for dead bodies to animate, but he hadn’t sensed anything on his way over from the place he had left Paco, which led him to believe that they buried people inside the compound, or perhaps on the other side. It would be helpful to call upon a few animates to bring their unique form of terror and chaos to the equation, but he could always improvise with a fresh kill.

  Sterling placed his left hand against the surface of the cactus, ignoring its thorns. Mold began to spread out from the palm of his hand. Sterling figured it was going to take more Mana than normal to cut himself a big enough hole to get into the cultists’ compound. He kept at it, his head bent forward now as the mold began to spread rhizomatically away from his fingertips, the putrid smell reaching his nostrils.

  Sterling unsheathed his sickle-sword and pressed it into the flesh of the cactus, easily cleaving away the mold he had created. He kept at it, alternating between conjuring mold and using the sword until he had a tunnel going, one about four feet high. It was another ten minutes before he was finally able to break through to the other side, Sterling estimating the cactus wall was easily six feet deep.

  A warm gust of muggy air hit his face, and Sterling took a moment to register that there was something different about this air, something that he wasn’t used to. Humidity? he thought as he sheathed his weapon and pressed his hand on his cowboy hat, pushing fully through to the other side of the cactus wall. Water dripped from the leaves above, birdsong met his ears, and the temperature was at least thirty degrees hotter than it had been outside the compound.

  Sterling was in the middle of a jungle.

  Getting weirder, he thought as he slowly crep
t forward, his black duster already in his inventory list. Feeling the heat, sweat on his brow, Sterling rolled up his sleeves and pressed on. Movement to his left caught his attention, Sterling stepping back just in time to avoid colliding with a pack of gazelle much larger than any gazelle he’d ever seen before, not quite the size of horses, but definitely the size of donkeys. The opening they made in the foliage allowed Sterling to see ahead for just a moment. He was only twenty feet or so away from a building, a lantern shining near it affixed to a pole and casting a butterscotch glow over the area.

  Sterling crept forward through the jungle, his revolver at the ready. The cowboy necromancer focused on the sounds around him, listening for footsteps. He finally heard one, but it didn’t have the crunch he would have expected from the jungle; no, it was a foot on a wooden plank, a deck of sorts. He moved just a bit closer to the light and spotted a man, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Sterling sent his revolver back into its holster and retrieved his sickle-sword. He moved on the cultist immediately, his hand going around his mouth as he brought his blade across his throat, blood spritzing from the wound as he lowered him. Like a savage animal, Sterling dragged the cultist back into the foliage. Once he was sure the man was dead, he animated him, instructing the zombie to stay behind. Sterling crept back toward the spot where he had slain the man and placed his hand on the cultist’s rifle, sending it to his inventory list.

  He was impressed by the structure he saw next. The compound was built using the ancient ruins as a template, some of the walls made of stone that had been joined up with adobe brickwork from hundreds of years ago. As Sterling took in the structure, he couldn’t help but wonder where the Sunflower Kid was. The main building was several stories high, and he had a notion to head toward the top, but something told him that was where Jesus the telemancer was, a hunch of sorts. As much as he would have liked a fight, Sterling hoped to avoid her. If he could get out of the Culto Demente Sagrado’s sizable compound without drawing attention to himself, it would be much better in the long run.