by Capps, Chris
"A deal's a deal, Mr. Still!" he called out, "I'd get moving, though. I doped him up pretty fair, free of charge. He's not going to sleep tonight, but he'll be a little more paranoid than usual."
I wasn't dressed as a gentleman anymore, so thanking him didn't seem appropriate now. I took the reigns and hoisted myself onto the back of the creature, guiding both Atuses to the side to reach the drop room.
Atus the man, and two attendants attached a tube to the hydration spout in the horse's neck and checked the pressure of the water bags, giving me a thumbs up.
Atus the horse was twitching its head from side to side, chewing the air and his own lip in anticipation, hot breath streaming from his nose in twin gusts.
Deep within the creature something rattled, and I noticed as it looked back at me that I could see a lot of white in its eyes - more than was normal. Chains were attached to the saddle hooks, and with a hydraulic whir we were lifted from the steel plate we had been standing on.
"How much dope did you give this creature?" I called out as the floor dilated beneath me, filling the room with light reflected from the shadow-ground beneath the city.
"What does it matter?" Atus the man said, "free of charge!"
The cables and chains lowered us down through the opening beneath the city. The last thing I saw as I looked up from the sudden silence of our descent was the horse dealer staring out at us with the cherry on his cigar shining as red as the rest of him. With wind blowing, flapping the rim of my hat, I looked down at the ground closing in on us. I swear that horse, silently anticipating the touch of ground beneath its hooves, started running before we even touched the ground.
With one swift movement I slapped the saddle catch and the hooks released the chains above us, dropping us the last few inches to the ground, which the horse Atus started tearing across with the might of a locomotive.
As I rode, my eyes cast out across the great gulf between us and our destination. Whatever was out there beyond the horizon, nothing would stand in our way. The two of us were moving as one inevitable force, closing in, even in these first few moments, on our destiny. And if the thing we were after proved too far to reach, I would welcome the sun bleaching my bones.
With the city's legs pulverizing the ground all around us we ran, easily outpacing the behemoth. I chanced a look backward, as was my custom on those lonesome cartography missions, back toward home. Over several minutes, the city diminished in size before we reached the first hill.
Atus had already proven himself an incredible racer in this first stretch, and he would have been an excellent adversary for any of the great racing horses I had read about in my younger days in the twice annual ground derby.
He ran straight as a bullet down the barrel of a gun until we reached the hills, and then he strode up them with ease, as if he had shifted the whole of the Earth around his own personal gravity. We reached the peak and I saw the rest of the landscape we still had yet to travel.
We hadn't slowed, even when the sun started touching the mountains in the west. Up ahead there was a small hamlet. I could see patchwork houses and the patchwork families within, staring out windows as tiny blips in the distance. If they suspected I was from the city, I wouldn't be surprised.
Generally I had experienced very little of the civilizations outside, merely noting where they were for my maps. And this would be no exception in that regard. Pulling the reigns and pushing on Atus' left flank with my heel, we did a wide arc to the right, avoiding even the longest range rifles they were likely to have.
The wasteland hamlets are not a matter of mystery. Those who have visited one often tell the same tragic stories as those who have visited a hundred. Starvation, disease, warring gangs, and of course the constant subjugation by cities such as mine.
Ripper dogs were still a problem in this region as well, having rebounded from a group that had once worked to wipe them out nearly four decades prior. I hadn't seen any, wouldn't likely see any at the speed I was traveling. They were cunning hunters, unable to feel natural emotions like fear, intent only on devouring everything that crossed their paths. But they were also clever predators, like foxes. They wouldn't chase us now. They would wait until we stopped.
With the landscape whipping beneath me at this incredible rate I found it difficult to feel a part of it all. It changed so quickly that I felt an odd lack of attachment to any single object that we passed. A broken tree here, a burned house there, a family of skeletons arranged on a broken sofa, these became more images in a book as I flipped its pages without care. Each one soon forgotten as we passed by. Except for one.
As we soared across the sands I came across a man, possibly in his early twenties. He had a tool in his hand, a crook's spade. It was a common enough tool for farmers, and it had a reputation as a weapon among bandits during the frequent times of drought. It was a look he had in his eye that moved my hand to my pistol - a hunger unknown where I came from.
He stared, and as I watched him pass beside me, carried by the moving land Atus was tearing through, time seemed to slow. He leaned heavily on the spade, mouth chewing a blade of grass he must have been saving all morning.
It wasn't just a hunger for the food I had packed, but for all of it. He had dreamed of adventure, I realized, dreamed of the rich rewards afforded to those of us who were offered them. In that instant I saw his history, having laid awake with ripper dog howls, staring at the stars and imagining what it would be like to live anywhere. To live.
As I passed, I raised a hand and his face softened into an idle smile.
The sun was setting deep into the horizon now, turning the Earth a shade of deep brick red. Atus wasn't showing any signs of slowing down, so I kept him moving. I thought about the fallen star, the feel of the paperslave's throat in my hands, and my blossom Tyche. We rode the whole night without stopping.
And then there was dawn. With the lids hanging low in my eyes I scanned the landscape that came with the first light. It was the same, the same it had been all night and the day prior.
Featureless, unchanging.
My attention was divided, distracted as I reached down to take a drink from the waterbags hanging in front of me. As I tasted hot plastic flavored water trickling from the rubber tube clenched between my teeth - that's when it happened.
It was a zipping sensation, a thump and a crack I noticed only after the hot lead passed through my leg. I looked down to see the ground no longer moving.
The way I remember it, Atus didn't fall right away. He stopped, letting one final snort pass from his twin barreled nostrils as if he was sharing the punch-line of some great and unspoken joke. In that snorting second I looked down and saw the waterbag in front of my left knee spattered with the all too familiar red explosive stain. My leg had a hole in it, but I didn't feel pain right away. Not until the horse fell to its left and pinned my shattered shin beneath it.
And then I screamed.
As we fell I must have heard the crackle of the rifle shot catch up to us, but I don't actually remember hearing it. I was breathing hard in a thin cloud of dust that had risen all around our fallen bodies. All I remember is wiping muddy perspiration from my eyes as my hand tried to rip the pistol from between me and the wrinkled dirt beneath. The gun was slippery, bathed in a pool slowly emerging from the gap where my leg and the horse were bound by gravity. My vision was leaving, my breath was quickening, and my thoughts became a singular scream.
Escape.
I ripped back across the cracked clay-like dirt, clawing my wet hands back, leaving thick red handprints in wide spiraling arcs around me. I couldn't get leverage, couldn't move my leg back. Pain was shooting in irregular patterns up into the rest of me, eclipsing abrasions and cuts all along my left side. I even kicked with my good leg, trying to spur the creature to action. But Atus wasn't moving.
Time passed, and I realized I could do nothing to stop the bleeding in my leg. I don't remember prying the pistol from my hip, but I do remember being surprised
to see it in my hand some time later.
"That was a shot for the campfire!" an excited young girl's voice said as she bounded up to where I lay, "Must've been clear through the heart!"
"Freezy Breezy!" an older man's voice called from the sun-blind distance, "Get back here, honeymuffin. I only shot the horse."
Shakily I raised the pistol at the shadowed silhouette still approaching, and saw the girl's face. She had a casual smile, one that didn't match the fact that I had just pulled the hammer back on the seven shooter pointed at her face.
"Mister I know the look of a man who wants to shoot a young girl, and you ain't got it," she said in a vexingly singsong tone, gently reaching across and taking the blood slick pistol out of my hand without effort. In the world I was in, between life and death, between consciousness and sleep, I saw her turn holding the dripping pistol above her head and shouting, "Pa! He had a gun on him!"
There was silence for a few moments more as the man started moving near us,
"Well that's nice for him, but we ain't thieves. You best give it back."
The girl, Freezy Breezy, looked at me holding the pistol loosely in her hand. After an additional moment's consideration she leaned down and handed it back with something not entirely unlike concern on her face.
"You okay, Riderman?" she said.
Speech was beyond me as pain raced up and down the whole of my body, each breath reminding me of my injury with an unfamiliar clicking sensation between two splinters of bone running into one another. I leaned back and dropped the pistol onto my chest. Soon I had the barrel of a rifle pressed against my forehead. It was hot, still burning from the shot that had fired out of it moments before.
"Just lay still there for a minute while I think this thing through. We ain't gonna hurt you more. We come for the horse."
"Lotta blood, Pa," Freezy Breezy said as she jabbed a pole under the horse near my leg, "Some of it might be his. I don't know much about fixing a broken leg."
I think it was when they first tried to lever the horse up off the ground that I blacked out. Darkness swallowed me easily, like a midnight tornado. I don't know if I dreamed. It must have been only a few seconds later that I woke up, grasping at the loose sleeve of a blouse in my hand and crying out as a sickening click reached my ears.
"Ask your sisters how they're coming along. I'm done with you," I heard Pa say from further down, hovering above the pain in my left leg. My head dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, and I could see the girl run off out of sight. Pa continued, "Why a sensible man such as yourself would be riding a horse to the Dustlands when there's hungry folk about I never will understand. Hunger does strange things."
"Who are you?" I asked between quick breaths shooting in and out in time with the jabs of pain.
"Jester Breezy," the man said extending a wet and sticky hand. Realizing it was unclean, slick with my own blood, he rubbed it on his pant leg, "Good thing you were out. I just set your shin and got some corn-still on it. It might get infected, but out here with a bum leg that's the least of your worries."
He wrapped thick cotton strips across the wound in an odd pattern. After a few wraps he added a pair of thin iron poles, ridged and elastic like rebar, placing them carefully on either side of what was apparently a compound fracture. I'd suffered fractures before in the waste, but never alone. The first time I had been carried back on a wagon by my companions.
"Ripper dogs," he said, shaking his head as he tightened the bandage into his odd intricate pattern, "They smell man blood pretty fair. I feel awful about all this, but you know the old rule. Kids gotta eat. I hope it gives you some comfort to know that horse is gonna keep us alive for a couple good weeks. You too. Try to move your leg."
I strained, but couldn't.
"See that?" he said smiling with unparalleled satisfaction, "Real good work. Okay, let me help you up and I've got a crutch for you."
"You shot my horse," I said finally as he helped me up onto my one good leg.
"Horse was alive, not yours. Now it's dead, finally in man's domain. I laid claim to that meat before it hit the ground. That's my law."
He handed me a wooden pole intersected at the end with another smaller piece of wood, wrapped in musky cotton rags. I took it, placing it under my arm and hobbled once, nearly falling over as the iron bars in my leg tapped the wooden support. Reacting to the wince I gave out, Jester slapped me on the back,
"There you go, good as new. We've got to unload this horse and get what dry goods we can in town. You're coming with us."
I slept most of the way there in the back of a wagon pulled by Jester and his six daughters, trying to keep my leg from moving in the jostling rickety wagon. Finally I gave up, resting my head back on Atus' cooling body, his hooves hanging and bouncing stiffly over the wagon's side. Flies crawled over us both, invading nostrils and tickling lips. I dreamed not an image, not a sound, but a thought.
A simple thought ran through my brain over and over. I was laying my head on Atus' cold and dead body, and he somehow knew something that I didn't. It must have been nearly half a day's worth of sleep, covering myself from the sun with my coat and hat, and dreaming that one delirious thought.
This dead horse knows something that I don't.
When we reached the town Jester had been talking about, I pulled my hat down from my face and leaned my head over to look up ahead of us. It wasn't as small as the first hamlet I had crossed, made up of nearly thirty ramshackle earthen huts topped with rusted metal and grey dry grass. At the front of the town, guarding the opening of a three foot high adobe fence, a man and a woman with rifles around their shoulders held out dirty hands and the wagon came to a stop.
The shorter of the two, the man rounded the back and stared in at me. He was clean shaven, bald with a straw cap woven tightly around his head. He ripped the coat covering me down and saw the pistol in my hand.
"This man's been shot," he called up to the other, "Looks mean."
"He ain't gonna do well unless we get him out of the sun," Jester called out rushing back. His hand quickly retrieved the coat and covered me up again with a chuckle, "He won't shoot you, don't worry."
With the ringing of a bell the cart moved across the threshold of the wall and into the village. Excited noise followed us as I leaned up to take in my surroundings. An old woman with thick arms in a long apron hurried along the cart ignoring me, but feeling one of Atus' legs and calling up to the front,
"How old?"
"Half a day," Jester said, "What are you offering?"
"I got lots of shacks. Room and board for up to eight people per pound smoked."
I rolled the coat around me, wrapping the collar around my shoulders and jabbing my arms weakly into each sleeve,
"You know anything about broken legs or bullet holes?" Jester called back to the elderly woman. She eyed me suspiciously, then looked back at the horse's leg.
"Sure do," she said, "Three pounds smoked."
"Meet us at the well in a minute," Jester said, straining as the ground hit a rough patch.
The town square was arranged around a large well with barbed wire and a small group of men surrounding it. They laughed between themselves as the youngest tried to throw a pebble down a small rut that had been traced in the dust, each nodding and clapping with what was an apparently impressive toss. As they noticed us, they quickly started ringing another bell attached to a pole.
"Alright, folks!" Jester said hopping up onto a small cement block, adopting the charismatic tone of a salesman, "Gather round here, no pushing. Enough for everybody here. Those of you who've traded with me before know my method. Let's make a deal."
"Where'd you get it?" an older man from the crowd called out, his skeletal face glaring suspiciously up at flies buzzing around us.
"Shot it myself," Jester said, not missing a beat, "This morning Riderman here was taking it across the sand toward the hills up North. Mad as a midwife he is, so I took the horse out from under him and saved his lif
e. In payment I took the horse here to sell to you here today."
A gentle chorus of chuckles rose from the crowd along with a few clapping hands. Jester had won the crowd easily. Soon he was breaking out his rifle, holding it above his head and bragging about headwinds and shooting with an eye-scope full of sunlight.
"Like a flea on a light bulb he was," Jester said to the delight of the mass gathering around us, "Racing up Hell's ass like a man condemned."
More gap toothed laughter from the crowd - those that had seen a light bulb. They were interested now, a few of them reaching out and staring. One of the older men leaned his head deep in at the cart with hungry tranquil pools of cataracts dancing above a weathered graveyard of teeth. I felt a hand on my shoulder,
"Best get moving," the girl Freezy said helping me up, "Folks make a hole. Riderman needs a cool cot. He'll confirm all of Pa's story when he's well."
We passed through a part in the small crowd, moving to where the old woman was staring beyond us wringing her hands,
"Flank cuts. That was the deal," she said, "Smoked."
"You'll get it," Breezy said as I limped past, "Just give him a spot off the ground. And take a look at that leg if'n you got the talent. It's all messed up. I'll be there in a bit with your pay. You got a bucket?"
The old woman, who's name I learned was Anna, lived in a modest adobe and concrete hut like the others in this town. Inside there wasn't much. The cot I was laid on was a single piece, built into the wall and covered by thin wooden planks. Rolled over a nearby line were several fleece blankets. At the head of the cot was a soft net basket, which I learned served as a hammock to support the head in lieu of a pillow. The old woman, Anna, explained it with two words: damned fleas. And then she left the room.