As I Walk These Broken Roads

by DMJ Aurini

  Wentworth shook his head, and a grin broke across his features, “Some do it for the money… I thought you’d say something like that. Let’s go tell the Mayor that we’re in.”

  Chapter 16

  Raxx piloted his pickup down the empty road. He kept it under firm control, making slight adjustments to the steering column as the potholes sped by. He kept his neck straight, staring intently as his ride ate up the ground, clutching an unlit cigarillo in his left hand. Wind blew in through his open window, whistling in his ears and rattling his piercings, as the truck churned up a cloud of dust behind it. The afternoon sun was behind them, and the grasses and telephone poles cast long shadows, flashing by on either side.

  Wentworth sat next to him, leaning back in the passenger seat. His right foot was up on the dashboard, his elbow on the door frame, and his hand tapped out a drumbeat on the vehicle’s roof. Looking over at Raxx he saw the reflection racing across his sunglasses. The deep yellow light from the sun accented the reds and browns of the dry land. He turned back to the road, still tapping his fingers to the music in his head, going over the briefing Captain O’Neil had given them before they left town.

  “Highwaymen are only to be expected,” she’d said, sitting in her office and tapping her fingers on the desk, “They don’t really concern us; we leave them to the caravan guards. It isn’t usually a problem. But this…” she chewed her lip, “This is something different. I’ve heard of raiders getting organized before, and becoming a problem for the cities, but that’s only happened in the south, along the Steeltown-Niagara corridor, or sometimes on the Oil Route – and, of course, the Badlands. But up here we don’t have enough trade going through for that - and the Mennites have even less… here, look this;”

  She carefully took a yellowed sheet of paper out of her desk and slid it across to them. “We think this is their leader.” It was a crude wanted poster; the man it depicted could have been anybody. Nonplussed, Wentworth read through the list of crimes at the bottom, trying to ignore the spelling errors. “The picture’s useless, I know – what do you expect from Ingersoll? All you can really tell is that he’s a big guy. But I’m not showing you this so that you can recognize him; I’m showing it to you so that you can get a sense of what kind of person we’re dealing with. Look – you two can read, right? – they call him Slayer. From that list at the bottom there, you can probably guess why. Ingersoll wanted him bad – for them that’s a large bounty.”

  She gave them a moment to go over it, leaning back in her chair. Wanted, she’d said, in the past tense. Wentworth nodded and she went on. “Now, this poster’s four years old. Our contact in Ingersoll, the town’s Miller, hasn’t heard anything about him since. As far as we know nobody had until last year, when the raids on the Mennite settlements started. The name Slayer kept popping up and the descriptions said he was a giant, just like the man in the poster there. But how some derelict goes from being a lone psycho to a gang leader, I’ve got no idea. If it’s the same guy, and it seems to be, then something’s going on – and if something’s going on, then it’s just one more reason I want him dead.”

  She cleared her throat, and threw back her shoulders. “Constable Stewart? Have you got that map ready?”

  “Yes, Captain.” Stewart came in. He was the man who’d been sitting at a desk outside her office when they’d arrived; her aide, probably. He wore the same uniform as her, minus the gold braids, and moved with an air of competence. Moving to the left of her desk, he strung the map up on a couple of clips hanging from the wall.

  “Excellent. Why don’t you explain to these two what you’ve done?”

  “Captain; alright, this is a map of Hope and the surrounding area. To the southwest here,” he made a sweeping gesture, “is where the Mennites farmstead. It is also where all the raids have taken place. Um, except for – well, except for the raid on Sergeant Dupont’s petroleum shipment, which is this dot up here.

  “For each raid I’ve got the date, number of raiders, vehicles used, and any other pertinent data listed next to it. Now some of them, you’ll see, are blank; that’s because we don’t have the information. Others I’ve put a question mark next to, showing that the information is suspect. But the dates and locations are pretty definite – you can count on those.

  “The blue circle, and the blue dots, represent the first six months of raiding. As you can see there were less of them, and they were more concentrated in the southwest. The red circle, and the accompanying red dots, represents the latest six months. The raiding is heavier, coming almost twice a week, and they have moved closer to Hope.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Raxx, “something’s bugging me – how has this been going on for so long already? Where I come from they would of got a bunch of guys together by the end of the first month. Why haven’t you done something before now?”

  The Captain and the Constable shared a look. “I was going to get to that,” said O’Neil. “As for why the Mennites haven’t done anything, I don’t know. In fact that’s part of the problem; if they were doing something, we wouldn’t need you. But as for why we haven’t done anything, it’s because we didn’t know any of this until late last spring.”

  She leaned forward, hands clasped, elbows on her desk. Her professional cool started to give way to the anger she showed whenever she spoke about the Mennites. “You see, they never told us about it.” She glared at the two of them. “The Mennites are insular, with no central authority. The closest they come to having actual towns is the hamlets they group in to buy and sell produce, or our manufactured goods. There’s no leader, no intercity communication, nothing. The first sign we had that anything was going on was when the spring’s first harvest was smaller than usual. I sent people to investigate, but it was worthless.”

  Stewart shook his head and spoke. “They wouldn’t talk to us. They’d admit to the raids once we started asking about them, but they wouldn’t volunteer the information. And even then they wouldn’t give us any details – the Elders just stonewalled us. We had to rely on the Hope merchants who traded with them.”

  “Yes… merchants,” said O’Neil. “All of that data there is from the merchants we interviewed. They’d picked up rumours while they were out there. Even the best of this information is second rate. We did what we could to corroborate the stories, and this,” she indicated Stewart’s map, “is all we could come up with. The good Constable here did the best he could, but as they say in Steeltown, ‘A worker’s only as good as his tools.’”

  She studied them. Wentworth met her gaze, distracted. Ideas were beginning to form in his head. “Can we borrow the map?”

  “It’s yours to keep. I managed to convince the Archivist that we needed it, that you needed the best tools we had to operate effectively – I don’t want there to be any excuses for failure. Be careful with it, though, you’re not getting another one. The old survey maps are valuable.”

  She grimaced, “I wish we had more to give you, but that’s it. Are there any other questions?”

  Raxx and Wentworth looked at each other. After a moment they looked back.

  “No, that should be good,” said Wentworth.

  “Glad to hear it. Now make certain that you do not give away the fact that you’re working for us – don’t even mention Hope, and in fact, you have one of those – a truck, don’t you? Well, try not to be too obvious about where you’re coming from. Travel out a bit, then move back in.”

  “All that driving will take some petroleum,” commented Raxx.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’re getting paid so well, then, isn’t it?”

  Wentworth looked at Raxx and shrugged. They got up to go, and Stewart rolled up the map for them.

  “One last thing,” said the Captain, halting them at the door, “Be careful out there. And don’t trust those Mennites. They only look out for their own.”

  Wentworth tucked the map under one arm. “Just like everybody else?” He turned to go, then had second thoughts. “Captain,
” he said, turning, “Just for the record – I take things seriously. Whether or not it’s my town.”

  It might have been a nod, the way she dipped her chin slightly, but they were already moving out the door.

  So they’d left his motorcycle behind to save on fuel, and allow them to talk on the move. All the excess supplies, heavy stuff like Raxx’s power converter and the extra fuel jerries, had been removed from the truck bed, stored in the locker they’d rented by Hope’s front gate. Raxx had gone through his pre-drive tune up, checking for anything that could have gone wrong after a week of sitting idle, while Wentworth pulled out his Datapad.

  He’d been trying to plot the survey map’s information onto his electronic satellite picture, but there was a snag; the grid system from the survey was nowhere in his database. Eventually he settled for approximating the locations, a slow and tedious process. It would have to do.

  Raxx slammed down the hood and got into the driver’s seat. “She’s good to go,” Wentworth was rolling up the map, he slid it into the passenger seat. “What are you up to?” asked Raxx, noticing the Datapad.

  “Got the data from this map punched in, now I’m running it through a hunter/seeker algorithm. It’ll give us an approximation of where this Slayer guy’s hiding out.” He tilted the Datapad so that Raxx could see it. “It’s taking into account all the roads, and the elevation, too…okay, here. We got it.” A splotchy pattern appeared on the screen. “That’s the estimated location.”

  “What, all of it?”

  “No, it’s probabilistic – the brighter the colour, the better the chance that they’ll be there. Make sense?”

  “I guess so,” he shifted the truck into gear and drove out the town gate, waving at the Constable guarding it. “So does that thing tell you where we’re going first?”

  “Well, there’s one of those townships O’Neil was talking about right next to the area of interest. How about we start there?”

  Raxx just nodded. Wentworth gave him directions, and they began circling around south like the Captain had suggested. The roads were in rough shape, but all of them were passable. Raxx pulled out a cigarillo, held it for a second, then asked, “So how do you know you can trust that thing thinking for ya? How do you know it’s not lying?”

  Wentworth closed his eyes. It was easy to forget at times that Raxx was like the rest of them. “I don’t know how to explain it. It just won’t. It might be wrong, but it won’t lie. Just… trust me on that.”

  After a moment Raxx nodded.

  The clouds had cleared, and the ride was smooth. The klicks ate away at the tension. Raxx’s cigarillo remained forgotten in his hand, and Wentworth started tapping out an old song on the vehicle’s roof. There’d be time enough for tension later.

  * * *

  The township appeared ahead of them as the truck crested a rise, the pitch of the engine’s hum dropping as Raxx let it idle in fifth. Wentworth’s limbs felt loose and ready as he lowered his foot to the floor.

  Raxx began downshifting, slowing the vehicle to a stop just past the first building. Leaving their longarms behind, the two men stepped out of the vehicle in unison, their doors slamming shut in quick succession. The disturbed dust from the trucks passage came from behind and flowed past as they surveyed the scene in front of them.

  There were about a dozen buildings on either side of the highway and no side streets. They were mostly constructed out of whitewashed wood, probably scavenged, but without the motley assembly found in most burgs. On the western edge of town, on the right, was a warehouse and across from it a windmill. Halfway down the street, on the north side, was the largest building in the area; a box structure with a barn roof and a small steeple with a bell. It opened onto the street by a pair of large double doors.

  There were a few people wandering about doing their shopping, and a couple of carriages drawn by oxen. The carriages were made of welded steel and wood with a traditional design, showing no sign of automotive parts in their construction. The Mennites were all dressed in black, the men sporting long beards and wide brimmed hats, with most of them women wearing a neckerchief tied over their heads. There were no children to be seen.

  Wentworth knew that the two of them stood out; even in a trade city, his own bearing combined with Raxx’s height and facial piercings made them hard to ignore; out here it was even worse. But the locals didn’t spare them a glance. It wasn’t politeness, though. The lack of curiosity felt baleful.

  “I think we’re being ignored,” he said.

  “Yeah, I get that too.”

  They strolled over to one of the open air stands. There was a selection of fruit and vegetables for sale. Wentworth took an apple, and Raxx picked up a green pepper, walking over to the counter to pay the proprietor. She was plump and well fed, with grey in her hair.

  “Good afternoon, young gents,” she said in a sing-song voice, “Come out all this way for a couple of Annie’s veggies? She’s not that famous is she?”

  Wentworth smiled and reached for his money-fold. “Well I have been told that this is where to find the juiciest greens around. And driving down these roads is thirsty work.”

  “Well in that case you won’t be disappointed! I hope these’ll cure what ails you.”

  “Say,” started Raxx, also putting on a friendly expression, “we’ve heard that there’s been some trouble in the area recently. Is it anything we ought to be worried about?”

  “Oh, there have been a few boys being boys, I’m sure you know all about that, but nothing to be concerned with, no.”

  “Really?” said Wentworth, doing his best to keep his tone light. “We heard that it’s been going as far as theft, and it’s getting worse. There’s really nothing for us to be worried about?”

  His prying caused her expression to freeze around the edges, though she maintained her cheerful façade. “Oh, well, ol’ Annie doesn’t get out much, gents. Might be, might be there’s been some trouble she hasn’t heard about. Best you be talking to Mr. Jenkins about what’s been happening in these here parts. He’s always been so keen about that sort of thing, you’ll most-like find him in the Church,” she indicated the barn-like building with a nod of her head. “So is that all then for you? In that case Annie has some work she must attend to.” She hurried off back into her shop, not waiting for their reply. The two of them wandered back to the truck and leaned against its grill as they ate.

  “This is going well,” said Wentworth.

  “Yeah. I think I’m getting an idea of why the Captain was so frustrated by these people.” He took a bite, chewed and swallowed, “So do you want to see what this Jenkins guy has to say? He sounds like one of the elders who stonewalled O’Neil. Maybe we can get something out of him.”

  “Guess so. Let’s go after we finish these.”

  They finished eating and walked over to the Church. For a moment Wentworth was at a loss. He knocked on the door, but the wood was too thick. His knuckles barely made a sound.

  “We just walk in,” provided Raxx noticing Wentworth’s confusion, “but you should probably remove your goggles, out of politeness.” He pulled the heavy door open and stepped in.

  Uncertain of the setting, Wentworth let Raxx take the lead. The interior was dim, the only light coming from narrow windows high up on the walls, and an array of candles at the far back. Immediately upon entering they were in an alcove used for hanging coats, and posting notices. An open archway led into the main room of the Church. Several rows of uncomfortable looking benches were on either side, and towards the back, in front of the candles, was a raised platform with a podium on it. Hanging on the back wall was a carving of a man nailed to a couple of wooden stakes. Wentworth vaguely recognized this as one of the gods of an old religion, and a shiver ran down his spine.

  Without wasting time rubbernecking Raxx led the way into the main room, Wentworth following in his wake. Dust motes floated motionlessly in the diffused light coming through the windows, and their footfalls made echoing reto
rts through the building’s silence. In the left corner at the back, standing by a small hallway, stood a figure wearing robes and holding a book. His dark hair was slicked back, and beard was sharp and neat. He looked up as they entered, eyes devoid of emotion.

  “Excuse me sir,” said Raxx, “Are you Father Jenkins?”

  “I am Mister Jenkins young man. I am father only to my own children. You seem to have the advantage over me; I do not recognize you as being one sired in our community. Might I ask your names?”

  “I apologize, Mr. Jenkins, no offence intended. My name is Raxx, this is my friend Wentworth,” he spoke quickly, with a staccato cadence, trying to get his point across quickly. “We were travelling through the area and heard rumours about some sort of trouble you’ve been having with local bandits. Annie at the fruit stand said we should speak to you if we wanted to know more about it. Have things been that bad?”

  Jenkins studied them for a moment. “You should have nothing to worry about, if all you are doing is travelling across the land we steward. Through God’s grace we prosper by healing this burnt soil, but the Lord also sends us trials. There is a group of sodomites which has come upon this land and who seek to destroy us. They shall not, though; it is but a trial to bear. They have targeted many outlying farms. They have sent many to grieve, and many to the joy of eternal life; yet they would have no interest in you. You are neither a farm, to be raided for its goods, nor are you one of the brethren, to be afflicted with such a trial. As long as you do not linger in our lands, as welcome as you may be by us, you will not suffer.”

  Raxx seemed to pay apt attention and nodded while he spoke, but Wentworth was coming to know him well enough to pick out the stress-line creasing his forehead. “Hm, but we heard they’ve been assaulting some of the people of some town north-east of here… Hope?”

  Jenkins shook his head in sorrow, “They do not understand their place, do not know how to steward the land, and they have no relationship with the Lord, and they have inserted themselves into the situation, by their own volition, and their own miscomprehension. They do not belong, but they are here nonetheless. In the situation, I say. Thusly do they suffer. It is not for us to question the Lord, but only to obey.”