by Andy Monk
“Why do you think the Adversary sent us here? As meagre a place as it is, the Realms of Heaven are filled with dead places where there would be nothing at all for us. No world to build and no tears to shed over it.”
The Mayor was silent for a while before he said, “Because he is cruel.”
“Some criticised his mercy.”
“There was no mercy. He gave us a means of escape. He gave us hope, a small one, but hope all the same. And hope is the cruellest punishment of them all…”
For once, Giselle had to agree with him.
The Gunsmith
His years may have accumulated slowly, but the more he looked at Cece the more keenly he felt their weight.
Not for the first time he wished he had brought more meds, but he hadn’t been able to get hold of anymore without arousing suspicion. The pills he had managed to bring had run out ten years ago and his body had aged at least twenty since.
All for what?
She couldn’t bear to even look at him now. Which was at least one thing they had in common.
“You destroyed it!”
Her words echoed in his mind as he lay in the darkness.
“Everything?”
“There was no choice, they wouldn’t listen. Cece, everything changed in the years after you left…”
He’d tried to explain, tried to make her understand why he’d done what he had.
“You planted a fucking bomb?”
Her eyes wide had been disbelieving, her skin, still pale from the black candy her augmentation had eventually overcome, bleeding to ashen white.
“You’re a pacifist, you refused to even touch a gun?”
He turned onto his side, the furrowed sheets stretched out towards the window, undulating shadows in the grey light of the small, long hours. Crumpled and empty.
How many nights had he lain awake in this bed and thought of Cece? Fighting to remember every tiny thing about her, every memory lost to the haze of the years feeling like a betrayal of some kind. How many nights had he recited what he’d say to her when she arrived? How he would explain what he’d done, convince her it had been the only choice left to him.
In the picture house of his mind he’d imagined her countless times, eventually she would always reach out and hold him and tell him he’d done the right thing. That she understood the sacrifices he’d made, for her, for them, for everything. That she would tell him that she loved him. Like she had all those decades ago when he had fallen for her in a way he never had with any woman before or since. Like she had when he’d been happy.
He’d been a playboy, a prodigy, wealthy beyond sense and reason. Women had never been difficult for him. He’d often wondered if they would have fallen as easily if he were a poor man. He’d found in Hawker’s Drift that, by and large, they did. It hadn’t proved the reassurance he’d once thought it would.
But Cece had been different, from the start. From the first time he’d seen her in the lecture hall with the latest intake of the bright and the brave who’d been recruited to go and explore other worlds.
She was beautiful, but it wasn’t that, though, admittedly, it helped. The way she’d talked captivated him and the way she thought entranced him. They became lovers very quickly. He lost his heart to her soon after.
Now she despised him.
You planted a fucking bomb?
She’d rocketed to her feet, her hand finding the side of the table as the sudden movement was more than her abused body could yet tolerate.
“I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice! How many people died John? How fucking many?”
He’d looked at his feet, unable to stand the tears welling in her eyes. He’d never imagined there would be tears. Silly of him, really.
“They all died… everybody. I killed them all,” he said, his voice quiet and bereft of emotion. He’d cried his tears decades before.
“But I don’t understand why?”
He’d explained it to her. If she’d come upstairs he could have shown her the numbers. He hadn’t brought enough meds to keep himself young, but he’d brought those damned numbers. He’d used up a fair portion of his years staring at them too, still torturing himself that, somehow, he’d made a mistake. Possibly the most terrible mistake in the history of humanity. The history of his humanity anyway.
But he hadn’t. In all the years he’d spent waiting for her, all the years of calculating and revising and refining the datasets he hadn’t. They still pointed to the same thing they had all those years before. Resolute and unbending. They pointed to catastrophe.
But Cece didn’t want to look at the numbers, she didn’t want to come upstairs. She didn’t even want to listen.
“The fissures were expanding, destabilising, the numbers showed-”
“Fuck the fucking numbers!” Cece had screamed in a passable imitation of Molly, “you bombed The Facility! You killed our friends, our colleagues...”
“This was thirty years after you left, you didn’t know-”
“It doesn’t fucking matter if I didn’t know them!”
Cece had tottered and gripped the table again. He’d reached out to help her, but she snatched her hand away. He’d let both his hands and eyes fall. Even in his worst days he’d never expected this to go quite so badly.
She’d sucked down air, he wasn’t sure if it was to calm herself or keep from passing out.
“So… you destroyed The Facility, destroyed the beacons because – in your divine wisdom - you deemed it necessary, but why wasn’t it all rebuilt? I know your ego is the size on an airship, but even you must admit The Facility was more than just John fucking Xavier fucking Quayle!”
He could tell she’d been hanging around Molly from her new-found fondness for the word fucking.
“I wiped the databanks and the backups. Sent a virus into the mainframe. Killed the AI. The bombs went off during the weekly update meeting. All the main players were there. I guess it was possible to put it back together… but they haven’t, I’ve been monitoring for beacons since I got here. Nothing. It’s gone.”
“You couldn’t have done that good a job?”
“No,” he’d sighed, “they could have figured it all out again in time. But that’s what they didn’t have enough of. The world was ending, order collapsing, the centre falling. They run out of time…”
That was when she'd run out on him.
All the years he had waited for her, waited to save her from whatever had befallen her here. And now she hated him. Perhaps if he’d gone to her straight away, before the Mayor had done whatever it was he’d done. If he hadn’t been so afraid. Maybe. But probably not.
She thought he was a madman. And a murderer. Maybe she was right. He’d thought the same himself over the long years since he’d arrived in Hawker’s Drift and set up a gun shop of all things.
He’d thought it a joke at first, a penance. A pacifist who sold weapons. He’d hated guns. Hated violence. Strange how things had worked out. A pacifist who’d killed a whole world.
He lay his hand upon the empty sheets next to him and wished Cece were there. He wished he hadn’t done the things he’d done. Hadn’t had to do the things he’d done. He could have lived a fine life. Instead, he’d helped find other worlds, other realities.
Others had taken his work, and their stupidity and greed, the stupidity and greed that had wrecked one world, had been unleashed upon them all. And it had been ripping reality to shreds. So he’d no choice, in the end, destroy one world or let the fools destroy them all.
He’d had no choice.
And for all the terrible things he’d done, the one he hated the most was the woman he loved, the only woman he had ever found it in his heart to love, now despised him.
He closed his eyes against the darkness.
The Gunslinger
They buried Joshua Coll next to his wife in the family graveyard beyond the ranch.
He’d offered to dig, but Dorry had shrugged him off
and insisted on doing it herself, her eyes still red and her voice hoarse. He’d stood over the old man’s sheet-wrapped corpse and watched the girl, wrapped in her own shroud of fury and grief, dig against a backcloth of swirling smoke from the burning barns.
They were surrounded by twenty or so wooden crosses, each one painted white with names and dates cut into them. The Coll family had been here a long time and they’d tended to the graves of those that had gone before with meticulous care. A white picket fence surrounded the graves, the grass was neatly cut back and flowers fringed the plot.
If he came back next year would the grass have consumed it all?
Dorry was the last of them. All those generations stretching back to the nineteenth century had bequeathed only her. All the blood, sweat and tears they had invested in this ranch, in this land. Toiling beneath these monumental skies to build a life and maintain it long enough to pass their blood and their land on to the next generation.
Now, thanks to time, the increasing scarcity of children and the Scourge, there was just Dorry.
Her shirt was soaked with sweat by the time she’d finished. He offered his hand to help her out of the grave, but he was grateful when she ignored it. Touching such rage would burn him.
Silently they lowered Joshua’s body into the ground together. When he was laid out at the bottom upon the black soil of his family’s land, Dorry stood panting, staring down at Joshua’s shrouded corpse. Blood had stained the sheets where the old man had put the gun to his head so she might have a chance to live, a chance to continue the family.
“You wanna say a few words?” he asked eventually.
“Sure…” she spat, eyes not wavering from the grave “… he was a stupid old fool. Rest in peace.”
She picked up the spade and tossed it at him before storming back towards the burning ranch.
*
He’d tried to stop her, but she been too fast for him to catch.
By the time he reached Joshua’s room she was at the foot of his bed; hands pressed to her mouth, the low pitiful moan of a small wounded animal escaping her fingers.
He’d had no idea the old man had intended to kill himself. Maybe the thought had been drowned by his pain and the churning emotions of what he and his granddaughter had endured at the hands of the Scourge. Maybe the idea had only come to him after he’d realised Dorry was not going to leave the ranch. Either way, the realisation she would likely be raped and killed because she refused to leave him had simply overwhelmed the old man.
So he’d taken a handgun and blown his brains out.
“Dorry…” he took a step into the room. He knew what she felt, not only because he could see it in the dark lightning flickering through the burning colours of her soul, but because he’d been here before. Mindless violence had swept into his life and washed away everything he’d loved too. Saying he knew how she felt wasn’t going to help though. Nothing was going to help.
Instead, he stepped around the girl and pulled the sheet over the old man’s head.
“Why?” She asked when he looked back.
“He was dying…”
“He wasn’t no quitter.”
“Not just from the bullet… he was sick.”
She stared at him, her hands falling to her side, then raising back up as she wrapped her arms around herself.
“He wasn’t no quitter…”
He moved to her side, unsure whether he should hold her or not. He decided not. He was just another strange man after all and the last thing she’d want was another strange man putting his hands on her today.
“We have to go,” he’d said instead.
He’d expected her to protest, she was a stubborn kid. The old man had known that, and he’d taken his own life to get her out of here and away from the Scourge, but, eventually she’d nodded.
“We bury him first, next to Grandma. With his family.”
So they had.
*
It was deep into the afternoon by the time they finally rode away from Coll Ranch. Dorry didn’t look back once. Her eyes were red from the tears she hadn’t let him see.
She’d refused to accept anything he’d taken from the Scourge, even the money. He kept half separate anyway, whatever she thought now she’d need it later. She’d collected a few things and taken one of her own horses, a rifle and a handgun and they’d ridden slowly west with Dun and White-Mane tethered to their saddles, the ranch slowly diminishing behind them until it was just another smear of smoke on the horizon marking the Scourge’s dark progress.
Dorry didn’t say a word, too lost in her grief to notice the world beyond, too numb to care about anything. An hour or so out from the ranch he saw riders to the south and immediately turned them north. Dorry didn’t question why and if she saw the distant figures galloping westwards, she didn’t show it.
The raiders, he assumed they were Scourge, stuck to their course, either not seeing them or not caring, and eventually they faded into the afternoon haze.
It was nearly sunset when Dorry finally spoke.
“You think they’re heading for town?”
He nodded and offered her a water skin. They’d stopped to let the horses rest a little, he’d set a cautious pace, but they still had plenty of dangerous miles ahead of them.
“Yeah…”
She stared at it for a bit as if she couldn’t quite remember what it was for, before accepting it and taking a sip or two.
“So why we going there then? How’s it safer?”
“We’re still ahead of the main body of the Scourge. These raiding parties won’t attack the town yet. They’re too small. There’s people there, people I need to get out.”
People I shouldn’t have left in the first place.
“People you love?”
He squinted at the horizon for the thousandth time.
“It’s complicated.”
Dorry handed him back the water skin.
“Hope you don’t end up having to bury em,” she shot at him before kicking her horse forward.
“Me too…” he whispered and followed on.
*
They’d ridden on into the night, slowing the horses to walking pace as the stars emerged into a sky darkening from indigo to black in time to a chorus of prairie songbirds. Something was burning to the south.
“The Raines’ Farm,” Dorry had said from behind him, the words flat and empty of any emotion.
Once the burning farm had faded into the night he called a halt. He hated losing more time after so long at Coll Ranch, but he hadn’t slept the previous night and didn’t want to blunder into trouble by nodding off in the saddle.
They hobbled the horses as best they could and hunkered down in the grass. He chewed some leathery beef and stared at the stars.
“You sleep,” she said finally, hunched over her rifle, the jerky he’d given her uneaten, “I won’t be able to.”
“I just need a few hours, then you try. I want to be moving before dawn.”
She nodded.
He knew he should try and talk to her. He’d heard it helped some people. Not that he’d ever felt the need to talk about his own pain, but Dorry wasn’t much like him. And he could see her suffering plainly enough throbbing in the darkness; restless furies tormenting her soul.
He closed his eyes.
“You killed seven men today…” she said a few minutes later, just as sleep had begun to claim him.
“Yeah,” he muttered, not opening his eyes.
“Slit three throats, shot four more.”
“What of it?”
You don’t seem much troubled.”
“They weren’t the kind worth losing sleep over.”
“The one guarding the horses, he wasn’t any older than me.”
“No... he wasn’t.”
“How’d you get close enough to slit his throat anyhow?”
“He was a lousy guard. He’d fallen asleep.”
Dorry shifted in the grass, “You killed him in
his sleep?”
“He didn’t suffer none.”
Amos remembered the boy’s startled struggles as he awoke to find his throat gushing blood. He’d considered pistol-whipping him and tying him up, but he didn’t want to lose the time with the rest of the raiders close by or risk him getting free and warning his comrades. He’d been walking into a building with nine killers to account for after all. Dark work rarely afforded second chances.
Still, he could remember the boy’s muffled gurgling and brief panicked struggling in his arms all the same. And he could remember the last thought that had gushed out of his mind too.
Should have listened to Dock!
He didn’t know who Dock was or what he’d tried to tell the boy. A moment later the kid’s bladder had opened, he’d grown still and no more thoughts followed.
Dorry lapsed back into silence long enough for both the memory to fade and sleep to creep up on him again.
“When you killed Henderson… you looked… sad? Well, sad and mad, but mainly sad.”
His head jerked back up.
“Men who don’t feel sad at taking another life…”
He’d killed a lot of men doing the Thin Rider’s dark work. Yeah, killing some had saddened him, especially to begin with, but before long soft things like guilt and conscience got picked away like a carcass in the desert till all that was left behind was hard and sun-bleached. It was inevitable when you started taking silver and gold and giving men lead in return.
However, he had felt a wave of unbearable sadness wash over him after killing the Scourge raiders, but it hadn’t been a sadness born of regret at taking their lives, even the dozing boy guarding the horses. The sadness had come from witnessing their rape of Dorry and the memories that had triggered of Megan’s death. Of the fact he’d been able to save this girl he didn’t know and yet hadn’t been able to do anything to save the woman he’d loved.
Nothing but stand and watch and listen to Severn jabbering and sniggering in his ear.
“It was more than that… there was something else.”