Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  “Fucking Don Gasper…” Roxy said under her breath.

  “Please,” the technomancer said as he lifted his shackled wrists toward them.

  Sterling looked to the shackles. “Kid?”

  A vine quickly removed the shackles, including the cuffs, which were much thinner than the ones that they’d used on Roxy. Sterling was just about to step into the hallway when he felt something, a tremor that not only shook the ground, but seemed to echo within his chest.

  Sterling’s face went white.

  He turned to the Sunflower Kid, registering the shocked look on her face, and from there to Roxy, who knew exactly what the tremor had come from. Only the technomancer didn’t seem to know, Maron eager to escape.

  “It can’t be…” Sterling said.

  He felt the sensation again, almost as if a subwoofer had gone off deep inside his gut. Rather than say anything, the Sunflower Kid stepped past Sterling and turned to the outer wall, which she quickly brought down from the ground up, thick roots spreading and forming a walkway for them to pass beneath. They stepped out of the middle school, Sterling confirming what he had felt inside the makeshift jail.

  A towering Godwalker hovered in the sky above the military base, the black monolith blotting out the early morning sun, a mirage-like wave of light radiating all around it.

  Sterling casually lifted his hand and retrieved one of the cigarettes from his front pocket. He placed it in his mouth, summoned his lighter, and lit it. He took a long drag off the cancer stick as he looked up at the Godwalker, which was about a quarter-mile away from their current position.

  “Well?” Roxy asked, tensing with excitement, the air suddenly electric. “Are we going to do this?”

  Sterling exhaled a cloud of gray smoke. “Looks like it. Y’all ready to give this a shot?”

  .Chapter Eight.

  The swath of military base between Sterling and the Godwalker was wrought with battle, the Killbillies having breached the walls, the White Sands Militia fighting on several fronts. Looming over them was the alien monolith, the Godwalker, casting an ominous shadow over the combat. A few of the smarter bandits and militiamen had already started to retreat, but the majority continued to fight, dirt bikes and ATVs charging at one another amidst gunfire, people swinging blunt objects, a few mancers bringing down flames and shifting the earth. A terrible gust of wind blew past, telling Sterling that one of the sides had an aeromancer. That wasn’t to mention the Killbillies now in the sky like angry hornets, seemingly oblivious to the Godwalker.

  Still in her hospital gown, Roxy charged ahead. Sterling was aware that she was not running at her full pace; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to keep up with her. Several steps ahead now, the powerful woman collided with two militiamen aiming their weapons at some of the airborne Killbillies. She grabbed one of the men, who quickly dropped his firearm as she launched him into the air, the man flying at least a hundred feet away before smacking into a building. She punched the other one so hard in the face that her fist broke through his skull, Roxy pulling it back rapidly, blood and viscera following.

  She retrieved one of their automatic weapons just as Sterling reached her.

  “Glad to see you are your same old self,” he said as she quickly checked the automatic weapon. She slung the weapon over her shoulder and took the other man’s assault rifle as well, going through the same quick check. Dropping quickly, she found another magazine of ammunition on the guy she’d punched to death and sent it to her inventory list.

  “Ready when you are,” Roxy said, a look of utter excitement in her eyes, one that Sterling recognized intimately.

  “You got any spare clothing?”

  “My hospital gown isn’t sexy enough?” she asked.

  “It may be easier considering you’re barefoot.”

  “Turn around.”

  “I’ve seen you naked before,” Sterling said as the Sunflower Kid reached them, Maron the technomancer not far behind. He had a bewildered look on his face, especially as he stared up at the Godwalker, the technomancer’s hands trembling.

  “Everyone turn around.” Sterling shifted his focus to the technomancer. “I hope you are ready to do this.”

  “Do what?” Maron asked as he ran his hand through his hair. To shield them, the biomancer brought up a wall made of thick plant construct, which also gave Roxy a little privacy as she swapped out her clothing.

  Sterling tipped his cigarette toward the sky. “We’re going to bring that thing down.”

  “I don’t think I can get much closer to it,” Maron said, one eye clenched shut.

  “Why’s that?”

  “My power; it allows me to communicate with electronic objects and there usually aren’t any. Have you ever had a fly buzzing in your ear? Imagine that amplified by a million. That’s what that Godwalker is like to me. The closer I get, the louder it gets.”

  “But you can control it, right?”

  “Control… that thing? I can control most electronics, yes, but not…” Maron shook his head. “It doesn’t speak the same language as human electronics, if that makes sense. It’s an alien language. I sort of understand the language, but I don’t speak it.”

  “Can you or can’t you?” Sterling asked, getting annoyed with the technomancer. “We ain’t here to pussyfoot around.”

  Maron glanced from Sterling to the Godwalker. “I… I might be able to do something,” he finally said. “At least I can try. Sure, I can try. But not too much closer.”

  The fight had intensified around them. One of the Killbillies stumbled toward Sterling with a pipe that had spikes grafted onto it. He made eye contact with the cowboy necromancer.

  Bam!

  The Killbilly hit the ground and dropped his weapon.

  A militiaman on a dirt bike came roaring past, and was quickly tossed off his bike by one of the Sunflower Kid’s plant tendrils, which then lopped the man’s head off.

  “Geez,” Maron said, witnessing how effortlessly Sterling and the Sunflower Kid killed.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Sterling told him as he finished his cigarette. “Besides, that ain’t going to be your role in our little operation.” He looked up at the Godwalker one more time and spat, an idea solidifying in his mind. “You need to get us inside that thing.”

  Maron looked at Sterling as if he were crazy. “Inside it?”

  Roxy stepped over to them. The woman was now in fatigues and combat boots, a tank top under her bulletproof vest. Her clothing looked custom, and Sterling assumed that a flectomancer had crafted it for her.

  “Let’s do this,” Sterling told the Sunflower Kid. “Get us closer to the Godwalker.” She quickly began creating the same plant-based platform that she had made for them earlier, when they had sailed to the outer wall of the former military base. Roxy stepped on, and once Maron took a look around, not exactly sure of what he should do, she grabbed him by the arm.

  “You really want to get inside that thing?”

  “It’s the only way,” Sterling told him as he hunkered down. Their perspective began to shift as the four were lifted higher into the sky by the Kid’s plant platform, bullets whizzing all around them. Sterling felt that tingle that he often felt with heights, but he ignored it. This was a chance to prove something to both himself and those he cared about. Everything else was just minor details.

  As they started to shift forward, Sterling kept his revolver at the ready just in case they were greeted by a flying combatant. There was too much chaos for him to really make out what was happening below, the Sunflower Kid’s construct now resembling the hull of a ship as it tore through the dirt and pavement, growing in size on its way toward the Godwalker. He kept an eye out for Don Gasper, expecting to see the bearded shaman zipping around, or perhaps raiding the base for some supplies, but never spotted him.

  No such luck, and soon, Sterling was distracted by a mancer flying in their direction, one clearly on the side of the White Sands Militia by the looks of his get-u
p. A spiraling gust of wind struck the side of the Sunflower Kid’s creation, but it held strong, and Sterling steadied his revolver on the incoming aeromancer. He was just about to fire when Roxy unleashed a burst of gunfire from her assault rifle, three quick shots striking the aeromancer in the forehead and the chest.

  “One mancer down,” she said with a hint of pleasure. Sterling was well aware that Roxy was a crack shot. She could shoot the wings off a butterfly at fifty yards away, and that was three years ago. There was no telling how much she had improved by this point.

  “It’s getting too loud,” Maron said, his hands over his ears. “Too loud! Please, stop this thing!” He was crouching now, his cheeks red, teeth grinding as he pressed his hands even harder against the sides of his head.

  Sterling glanced up to the Godwalker, which continued to hold court over the battle as if it were daring someone to do something. They were closer to it now, and once Maron started to scream, blood trickling down his cheeks from his ears, Sterling told the Sunflower Kid to stop.

  “This is as close as we can get,” he said, her creation now several stories tall and covered by the Godwalker’s shadow, a silent yet menacing observer. Sterling helped Maron to his feet. “You’ve got to get us inside,” he told the technomancer as he shook him by the shoulders. “Are you hearing me? This is you, this is your part. Maron!”

  “I don’t know if I can do it!” the technomancer cried.

  Sterling grabbed him by the front of his hospital robes. “You can do it! You can goddamn do it! Get us inside that son of a bitch!”

  “I’ll try… I’ll try!”

  Maron’s eyes came alive. Sterling was shocked to see that he no longer had pupils, trails of illuminated code tracing across his sclerae. He slowly backed away as the technomancer started to float, Maron’s arms hanging at his sides, fingers curled. Something about his face reminded Sterling of Don Gasper when he took a trance, the man no longer with them, his mind on another plane of existence. His jaw moved up and down, and as it did Sterling heard a scraping sound, metal on metal.

  The bottom portion of the Godwalker started to fold open. Sterling’s immediate thoughts were that the alien monolith was preparing to fire on the battle below, but there was something off about the way its panels were moving, something that told Sterling that this was happening against its will.

  “Are you ready to fly?” the Sunflower Kid asked suddenly, her armored hand coming around his bicep.

  Now it was Sterling’s turn to doubt himself. “Fly?”

  “Jump, and keep jumping.” she said as she lowered her hand to his. “I’ll help you.”

  “Are we doing this or what?” Roxy cried, her weapons in her arms, biceps bulging, hair beating in the wind. “I’m fucking ready!”

  Sterling spotted an opening at the base of the Godwalker, a bay door of sorts forced open by the technomancer.

  “That’s its power source,” Maron said, still in his trance-like state, his eyes still painted in code.

  “What about him?” Sterling asked the Sunflower Kid. “We can’t just leave him out here!”

  “He will be lowered to the ground and protected once we get in.”

  “Hurry… Hurry!” Maron shouted, his entire body writhing, hovering just a few inches off the platform.

  The Sunflower Kid stepped to the edge of her creation, the parapet she’d constructed melting away. “We have to go.”

  Roxy pressed off the platform, and shot forward, flying faster than Sterling had seen a person fly before. The Sunflower Kid stepped off next, Sterling gripping her hand tightly. He expected the ground to rush to him, he expected to plummet to the battle below and die instantly, but he never fell.

  Instead, he did exactly what she had told him to do when they practiced the night before. Sterling imagined himself jumping, moving on an invisible path through the sky, his stomach twisting in knots, limbs tingling. He actually was moving forward through the air; he was actually doing it! To someone watching below it would have looked like she was flying and Sterling was struggling to ride an invisible stationary bike, but it worked, and ten heartbeats later, they reached Roxy. Sterling let go of the Sunflower Kid’s hand at the last moment, experiencing what it was like to fly on his own as he landed, his nerves firing in every direction.

  The bay door began to shut behind them.

  “I can’t believe…”

  “You did it!” the Sunflower Kid said.

  Roxy cracked a smile as well. “I forgot you were afraid of heights.”

  Sterling blinked a few times, orienting himself. “Maron said the power source is here…” He recognized the inside of the alien craft from his experience three years ago, one of a blackened metal that had a stone-like appeal to it, something akin to marble yet sharper. There was a hallway, and it was empty, a glow coming from another corridor.

  “That has to be it.” Roxy took off, Sterling’s legs still wobbly as he took his first step forward. Wishing he had time to smoke a cigarette, he steeled himself and moved on, the Sunflower Kid right behind him as they moved toward the glow.

  “Has to be the power supply,” he said, psyching himself up. “Let’s blow it to smithereens and get the hell out of here.”

  They came to the end of the hallway and turned toward a gleaming yellow energy. A shrill noise reached him, an alarm of sorts that sounded like an insect crawling through his ear canal. They entered into a room filled with what Sterling assumed were fuel cells, each suspended in vats of bubbly liquid, the cylinders four feet tall and three feet in diameter.

  “We need an exit,” Roxy said as she turned to one of the exterior walls. “Kid, get us an exit.”

  “There’s no organic life here,” she said. “Nothing for me to pull from. I guess I could use one of us, or my armor.”

  “There has to be something,” Sterling said, his thoughts racing ahead. “Don’t you have a fruit or something in your inventory list? I have some peppers…”

  “Peppers would work.”

  Part of Sterling wanted to laugh. Of course he would end up saving the day with his peppers, of course. But there was no time for musing over the fact. He equipped the rest of the Big Jims that he had taken off the Killbillies and set the crate on the ground. “Have at it.”

  “I only need one.”

  “In that case…” Sterling selected the biggest pepper of the bunch and handed it to the Sunflower Kid, returning the crate to his inventory list.

  “Peppers?” Roxy asked skeptically.

  “Don’t you worry about that. Let’s just figure out how to bring this goddamn thing down.”

  The whirring sound grew louder.

  Sterling knew they had been spotted; there was no way they hadn’t ended up on the Godwalker’s radar by this point. The Sunflower Kid took the pepper over to one of the walls and placed it on the ground, crouching before it. She stepped back and it began to enlarge, flattening like a red pancake as it painted up the wall. Her creation started burrowing, the sound akin to amplified sandpaper rubbing together.

  “Do we shoot it? Or do we just break the glass?” Roxy asked as she examined one the glowing yellow fuel cells.

  “I don’t know,” Sterling said. “I don’t want it to explode while we’re in here.”

  “We need to make a decision unless…” Roxy sent her two assault rifles to her inventory list. She approached one of the fuel cells, examined it, and wrapped her arms around it. She ripped it free from its dock and hoisted the alien technology over her shoulder, some of the yellow liquid inside the clear canister dripping onto the ground. “Make the hole larger than that,” she told the Sunflower Kid, Roxy sure not to get any of the liquid on her body. “And hurry. As fast as you can.”

  A dark look came over the Sunflower Kid’s face as she lowered her head, the hole expanding until it was ten feet in diameter. There was a hint of blue sky on the other end of it now, which began to grow as her creation broke free of the Godwalker’s exterior wall.

  “Go,
” Roxy told the biomancer. “Run out of that hole and fly as far away from here as you can. I’m going to blow this goddamn thing out of the sky, even if it kills me.”

  “Like hell you will. I’m staying with you,” Sterling said.

  Roxy simply nodded. The Sunflower Kid reached the end of the tunnel she had made just as the Godwalker lurched backward, sending the three in the opposite direction.

  Roxy exploded forward, and as she reached Sterling, she dropped the fuel cell, her arm going around his waist as he went for his revolver.

  He began firing at the yellow cylinder, everything warping all around him as Roxy grabbed the Sunflower Kid as well. The three of them catapulted out of the Godwalker just as a plume of silver fire burst through the space, the pewter flames igniting the air all around them as they rushed toward the ground.

  Sterling didn’t know where he was. Everything around him had a soft yellow glaze to it, and for a moment, he thought he was safe, that it had all been a harrowing dream. But then his eyes focused on the sky, where clumps of silver fire burned at odds with physics, the military base more or less a crater, smoldering bodies all around, the occasional explosion causing the earth to tremble. Sterling let out a deep breath and sat up, noticing then that his body was sticky, his epic fall cushioned by an enormous plant with skin soft like aloe. The plant hadn’t prevented him from being knocked out, and he was pretty sure he’d dislocated his shoulder in the process.

  With a grunt, Sterling popped his shoulder back into place, wincing at the pain. He then wiped some of the plant goop out of his eyes with his arm, his hand going to his waist to see if he still had his weapons. He located his sword, and he was just starting to look around for his revolver when he heard a voice.

  “I failed you…”

  Sterling looked left to see Don Gasper crouched before him, impaled on a spike that appeared as if it had been lifted from one of the blast barriers outside of the base.