Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  “And Jimmy?” he asked, referring to Penelope’s husband.

  “Asleep, thanks to your weed.”

  “Heh, well, we’re going to get going then. Thanks again for letting us stay; we had a good time. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been up and down this state, and it’s rare to encounter the kind hospitality y’all got going around in Carrizozo. Give my regards to everyone else.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” Penelope said. “Good luck in your journeys. And fill up your water before you leave. Room is just by the stairwell, fresh water.”

  Sterling thanked her again and stepped back into the courtyard, where he motioned for the Sunflower Kid to follow him. They filled up the water jugs they had in their inventory lists. From there, Sterling pressed out of the small gate that shielded the courtyard from the main thoroughfare and made his way across the street to the trading post, clear in how the windows were barred up to prevent looting. He knocked and let himself in. Sterling and the Sunflower Kid found Gouyen behind a display case.

  “A blonde now, huh?” the Apache woman said to the Sunflower Kid, who simply nodded in response.

  There were all sorts of items in the shop, the space much more confining than it should have been with its vaulted ceilings. Gouyen had collected a lot over the last five years, everything from portraits of western settings to furniture, taxidermy, household items from appliances to bedroom pieces, even a few scalps by the looks of it. It was a lot to take in, the musty smell of the space infiltrating his senses.

  “Dang,” Sterling said as he turned to the woman. “You weren’t playing around when you put this place together.”

  “It’s a bit cluttered,” she said, “but I’ll get it cleaned up one day.”

  “I could help you,” the Sunflower Kid offered.

  “No, I like everything where it is. You said you were looking for something unique, something ultra rare.”

  “Ultra rare or epic would be nice,” Sterling said, referring to the charm classification system.

  “In that case, this is the best I got, maybe even the best this side of Texas.” Gouyen procured a small bracelet strung up on a string of leather, the beads made of bone and carved into tiny skulls.

  Sterling approached it and looked down at the piece. “Do you mind?” he asked, indicating that he would like to touch it to see what it did.

  “By all means.”

  He placed his finger on the bracelet.

  Item: Carved Bone Bracelet

  Item Type: Epic

  Description: Thirty percent XP boost per kill.

  “Thirty percent…” Sterling mumbled.

  “Ever seen anything like it?”

  “No, ma’am, but I don’t think a couple peppers and running some bandits out of town is a fair exchange for something like this. If I’m being honest with you, and maybe I shouldn’t be,” Sterling said with a chuckle, “I think this is worth a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Them three weren’t just any bandits. One of them was my son.”

  “Pardon?” Sterling asked, his eyes darting left and right as he made sure he wasn’t about to be ambushed. The Sunflower Kid approached again, her hands behind her back as she turned to Gouyen.

  “I’m the one that killed them,” the Kid admitted.

  “I really don’t care which one of you killed them, you did us all a favor,” the woman said. “My son has been terrorizing this town for the last couple years. He has killed at least six people, not to mention the dozen or so that have died at the hands of his two accomplices. What I’m trying to say here is you did everyone a favor, not just me. I would have killed him myself if he had come around. The Reset changed him.”

  “Did that to a lot of folks,” Sterling said.

  Gouyen nodded. “So no hard feelings. You did the town a favor, and the town is my family now.”

  “Either way, I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry for your loss, and…” He shook his head. “It’s just that kind of world, ain’t it?”

  “Sadly, yes. But things will smooth out for a while until the next group comes around. I want you to take this bracelet…”

  “No, ma’am, I can’t do that,” Sterling started to tell her. “Not in good conscience. I believe we can work something out, though.” He equipped his satchel of turquoise and silver. He then retrieved the two automatic weapons and the pistol he had picked up off the highway bandits. He did so one at a time, making sure there weren’t any rounds in the chamber, Sterling popping out their magazines as he placed them on the counter. “How does this look?”

  “Take the silver and turquoise back; I got plenty. Weapons will be useful.”

  “You know what, I got me another weapon too,” Sterling said as he equipped the handgun with the silver grip that he had taken off Commodore Bones. He showed it to the Apache woman. “Been meaning to get rid of this one.”

  Gouyen examined the handgun and ran her finger along something that had been etched into the silver. “This one belongs to somebody important, doesn’t it?”

  “Everything in this little store you have here once belonged to someone important,” Sterling said as he motioned toward the room with his thumb.

  “I’ll take these guns, but I can’t take this one,” she said. “This is plenty.”

  “Suit yourself,” Sterling said as he sent the Commodore’s handgun back to his inventory list. I can’t seem to get rid of this goddamn thing, he thought. Once they agreed upon a fair amount of silver and turquoise, Sterling insisting she take some, he placed the bracelet on his left wrist.

  Bonus: Thirty Percent XP Boost Per Kill!

  “I thank you kindly,” Sterling said to Gouyen. “And…”

  “No need for another apology. Like I said, you did the town a favor. Good luck out there, and keep your head down.”

  “We’re going to try, ain’t that right?” he asked the Sunflower Kid.

  “We’ll see,” she said as she stepped toward the door.

  Sterling and the Sunflower Kid stood outside of Carrizozo next to their mounts, Sterling looking at the map that detailed the southeast corner of the state. He estimated they were about fifty-five miles away from Alamogordo, with just a few towns between here and there, including Oscuro, Three Rivers, Tularosa, Alamorosa, and La Luz. It was strange to think there was a forest less than thirty or forty miles away from the White Sands desert, but that was New Mexico, especially the Tularosa Basin, an unpredictable landscape if there ever was one.

  “You need a name for it, your pronghorn,” Sterling told the Sunflower Kid as he returned his travel guide to his inventory list and equipped his bag of tobacco and his rolling papers.

  “His name is Watermelon,” she said without skipping a beat.

  “Watermelon, huh?” Sterling lit his cigarette. “Surely by now you’ve come across a watermelon seed in the last three years.”

  “Still trying,” she said as they started south.

  “I suppose we all have that side quest that we will one day complete, sort of like trying to figure out some information about my family.”

  “I will find watermelon seeds one day.”

  While it seemed that she could conjure any fruit or vegetable she wanted, the Sunflower Kid had to have had physical access to it at least once in the past. From that point forward, she could simply grow it out of the ground, or out of any plant she conjured. If she hadn’t had access to it, she wasn’t able to replicate the plant. It was one of the only limitations of her power, albeit a very minor one.

  The Sunflower Kid had a proper donkey saddle now, something she had picked up in Gouyen’s shop, rather than the makeshift one she had made out of dried cactus. As they traveled along the highway, she kept her hands on the saddle horn, occasionally transferring them to the pronghorn’s horns which had grown back just a bit further so she could hold them like the handlebars of a classic motorcycle. Most people rode dirt bikes due to their all-terrain capabilities, but Sterling had heard a real motorcycle or two putter thro
ugh Truth or Consequences from time to time, someone looking to show off and subsequently getting robbed.

  Best to keep a low profile, thought the man riding a bone horse next to a biomancer on a pronghorn named Watermelon.

  Route 54 heading south cut through a mountain range that would have connected the Apache Mescalero Rez with the White Sands desert, which was once a national park. Sterling assumed from points on his map that the White Sands Militia was holed up at the Holloman Air Force Base, which was probably one reason they had milspec gear and how they were able to expand through the region. He wondered how far they had made it. Considering there weren’t many large cities between Alamogordo and the Texas border, there was a chance that their influence stretched all the way down to El Paso, east to Carlsbad and possibly beyond. This meant they likely had outposts as well, and taking out their headquarters in search of Roxy and the technomancer, and perhaps razing it to the ground, would either produce a power grab or a mad scramble to find out who had carved the heart from the beast.

  But Sterling and his companions would be out of the area by the time that happened.

  As they rode on, he thought of what he had learned back in Las Cruces from Don Gasper, that the militia had a technomancer, and how Raylan had agreed to join Sterling’s cause if he could bring him this particular member of the Adapted. He didn’t know how long the militia had held onto the mancer; Sterling was banking on the fact that the person had been held hostage for long enough that they would join any cause. He really didn’t want to have to convince someone, and it wasn’t within his nature to force someone to join him, especially with what he hoped to do.

  “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” he said, not sure where the quote came from.

  Sterling and the Sunflower Kid would reach Alamogordo well before noon, and then he would proceed to find out where the old shaman was shacked up. It usually wasn’t difficult to find Don Gasper, but if there really were evil enchanters after him, it had a chance of throwing a wrench in their plans. Sterling remembered the woman named Magdalena and how she had behaved at the shaman festival, how he had claimed that she was his lover, and how he had done something to one of her fellow enchanters to incite her anger.

  “Sort of a weird question here, but have you heard about stealing someone’s heart, turning it into a bead, and putting it on a rosary?” he asked the Sunflower Kid.

  “That doesn’t sound possible. Is this something Don Gasper suggested that he did?”

  “Bingo. Like I told you, he’s meeting us in Alamogordo, and he has his own business going on there. He claims he’s being attacked by these enchanters, maleficiadores, as he calls them. One of them is also his lover, but they’re having a bit of a quarrel. I saw her in Las Cruces, live and in the nude, if you must ask.”

  “I don’t know what to make of Don Gasper or what you just told me,” the Sunflower Kid said.

  “I know, I know, but he was there with us back in Las Cruces; you know him just as well as I do.”

  The group that Sterling had later put together to take on the Godwalkers had actually started with the Sunflower Kid and Don Gasper. Sterling and the Sunflower Kid first encountered each other in the abandoned suburb, and after joining up, they met Don Gasper, who always operated on the fringes of what Sterling was hoping to do.

  If a necromancer and a biomancer walking down the street was a strange sight to behold, the added company of a shirtless and shoeless shaman hyped up on peyote buttons and whatever other hallucinogens he could get his hands on really brought them some attention when they first hooked up in Las Cruces. They always could have gone another route; rather than start traveling around, Don Gasper eventually branching off once he got caught up in a wave of hallucinogens, they could have instilled some order in the city early on and taken over. They could have owned Las Cruces by now, but that was never in the cards for Sterling, who had a general distaste for crowds and the people that wanted to control them.

  “Well?” Sterling asked after he waited for the Sunflower Kid to respond.

  “That was a long time ago. Lately, or at least until I was taken by the cult, I was more focused on learning about the before people, how they lived, their systems of government. Zephyr and I were able to get some pretty decent books in Albuquerque. I still have some in my inventory list, the best ones. Science and nature, philosophy, biographies.”

  “Have you ever played around with how much you can actually put in an inventory list?”

  “The space available is tied to a person’s Mana. Even regular folks have Mana, and they can improve it if they level up. That’s how they learn to fly, although it takes a good amount of Mana to do so.”

  “Is that how?” Sterling asked. “I thought it was a technique, that they used Technique Points to learn to fly, you know, something like that. Speaking of which, shit, I’ve got to assign the Technique Points I received yesterday on our way out of Mountainair. Damn near forgot, I’ve been so distracted with distracting myself. Guess I’ll see to that later tonight.”

  The Sunflower Kid nodded. “The ability to fly is based on a person’s Mana, a way to exploit it. You could do it yourself, if you wanted. Have you ever tried jumping and just staying in the air?”

  “Hell no,” Sterling told her. “I ain’t no hummingbird.”

  “You mean in the last five years you’ve never tried to fly?” she asked, not able to hide the skepticism in her voice.

  “No, ma’am, I sure have not. But I’ve fallen plenty of times,” Sterling said, recalling the recent incident with the gaiamancer in T or C, and later the Killbilly woman who dropped him from about seventy feet up. “To be honest with you, I don’t think that’s common knowledge that people can just fly. If it were, we’d be seeing more people in the air. That, or you’ve got to be at a higher level to be able to do so, and have plenty of Mana. Maybe that’s why normal folk don’t really do it. Most of them ain’t out killing people and leveling up like bandits, or like Don Gasper for that matter, who can fly. Seen it myself.”

  “You would never have to fall again if you learned how to fly.”

  “Point taken.”

  “The best way I can describe it is jumping, and then just staying in the air. It does drain your Mana rather rapidly, though. And I think you’re right about higher levels being necessary.”

  “I mean, I ain’t doubting you over here,” Sterling told her as they neared a billboard with the advertising removed, a phrase painted across it that read NDN CUNTRY. “Would you look at that?” Sterling asked as he tipped his chin to the billboard.

  “Indian country.”

  “Sure, that’s what it says,” he told her. “Anyhow, I swear I learn something new about the system that has been forced upon us every couple days or so. You’d think by now I would have figured it out, but I wasn’t much of a gamer in my previous life, at least from what I can tell. I mean, I know enough about it to know that it’s like a game, some kind of sick game if you ask me, but that don’t mean I like playing it.”

  “I’m fascinated by the system myself,” she said. “With the powers that we have been given, the better we understand them, the stronger we can become.”

  “Shee-it, I don’t disagree. But I really wish someone would figure it out, put it down in a manual or something, you know, get the nuts and bolts of it. Maybe a flectomancer. Make it real easy to read so I could mull it over next time I’m offered a hot bath. Hell, maybe I’d write a desert haiku about it. I’ve already written some about the Reset, but I’m talking about the system itself.”

  “The better we understand the world we have been forced to live in, the better we can exploit it,” the Sunflower Kid said, a dark look coming across her face.

  “I’ve got to be honest, Kid, that don’t really sound like you, not the Sunflower Kid I knew five years ago.”

  “A lot has changed; you said it yourself.”

  “You ain’t wrong, but be careful with philosophies like that. That’s the kind of t
hinking that gets us assholes like the Killbillies, or any of the gangs in Duke City. Hell, I’m sure the leader of the White Sands Militia probably feels the same way. Me? I most want to be left the hell alone; I don’t want to pay no taxes to a bunch of criminals; and I don’t want to be poked, prodded, and shot at by goddamn alien monoliths, that’s for sure. I guess that makes me a simple man, but I’ll take a simple man over a Machiavellian son of a bitch any day.”

  A smirk crossed the Sunflower Kid’s face. “Point taken.”

  Their journey to Alamogordo was uneventful, no sudden bandit encounters along the road, the small towns they ended up passing through either abandoned or appearing so. The day was starting to warm up, the skies cerulean blue, wispy lace clouds stretching across the Aether. The first indication that they had reached Alamogordo was a large sign near the city limits, the letters bolted down to the ground, each painted yellow and in various states of erosion, a couple of cacti poking out between the letters.

  Alamogordo seemed to exist for the sole purpose of hosting tourists that once visited White Sands National Park, which was about twenty miles away. The town was built along both sides of Route 54, the hotels and restaurants deserted now, Sterling not able to tell if any outside force had taken command of Alamogordo. He didn’t see the telltale asshattery of the Killbillies, their ATVs, disgruntled hombres standing around in yellow bandannas, many with wraparound sunglasses looking like professional wrestling rejects. He also didn’t see a sign of the White Sands Militia, no barrier erected along the road, no helmeted soldier boys outfitted in fatigues and carrying firearms. Had the turf war not reached the town? Was that even possible considering its proximity to White Sands and the Air Force Base where Sterling assumed the militia was located?

  “Something is off,” he said as he ashed his cigarette. “You feeling that?”

  “It’s quiet,” was all the Sunflower Kid said.

  Before heading deeper into town, Sterling sent his skeletal steed to his inventory list; the Sunflower Kid remained on Watermelon.