by Andy Monk
Dorry Coll was a smart kid, so he answered her with a snore. A few minutes later he was asleep for real.
*
He awoke with a start, staring up at the stars in momentary disorientation, which was odd as there was nothing unusual in waking beneath a naked sky.
Molly…
He shook the thought away. Molly wasn’t here. He’d run away from her to kill Stodder Hope. He’d spent one night in her arms, one night kissing her, one night doing as much to a woman as his broken body allowed and now it was waking under the stars that seemed odd and wrong.
Fuck.
As Molly would say. Probably repeatedly.
He sat up and blinked. Remembering he wasn’t alone. Remembering the men he’d slaughtered and hearing the dry contented chuckle of the Thin Rider in the night-whispers of the surrounding grass.
Then he heard Dorry’s faint wet snores.
She was curled up on her bedroll, still cradling her rifle.
He should be annoyed, someone needed to be awake with the land awash with Scourge raiding parties, but he found he couldn’t be. The girl needed sleep more than he did.
He found his own rifle and pulled himself to his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his back and joints. He made a slow circle of their makeshift camp, checked the horses, stared out to the black horizons beneath the wash of stars and felt for the souls of bad men shimmering in the darkness.
Despite his intention to set off before dawn he let Dorry sleep and the east was flushing to pink when she finally awoke. She peered at him through half closed eyes but didn’t say anything. He gave her a couple of dried biscuits for breakfast, they were just about digestible if you swallowed enough water with them.
“Take it no one tried to kill us during the night?” she finally muttered after forcing the last mouthful down with water and a grimace.
“All quiet,” he could have balled her for falling asleep, but he kept it to himself. His fault for trusting a grief-stricken kid who'd almost been gang-raped and had then had to bury her grandfather after he blew his brains out to keep watch.
There was a reason he usually travelled alone.
They saddled up and rode with the rising sun to their backs, the daylight revealing more columns of smoke, but this time to the west. The Scourge raiding parties were in front of them now.
Another group of riders pushed them further north before midday, again they showed no interest in coming over and saying hello. An hour later they came across a smaller group heading east. This time Amos stopped and watched them, Dorry coming alongside to peer across the grass with him.
There were only four riders in this group, but there were another five on foot behind them. He blew out his cheeks. The figures on foot had ropes around their necks and were scurrying to keep up with the horsemen who held the other end of their tethers.
“Prisoners?” Dorry whispered the question, though there was no one around to hear her bar birds and insects.
“Slaves…” he spat, “…or at least they are now.”
“Are they all women?”
They were too far away to be sure, but he thought so and gave a curt nod.
“The Scourge need strong girls…”
“Huh?”
“Something Henderson said when they were… before you showed up. Said if I could please em they’d let me live…” her voice had a hollow sound to it that pulled his eyes away from the distant figures, “…the Scourge needs strong girls…”
“God help them…”
“Why wait for God, couldn’t we…?”
“No,” he pulled Silver further towards the north to give the Scourge a wide berth, he didn’t think they’d be chasing after them given their slaves, but he wanted them gone from his sight as quickly as possible.
“Why not?” Dorry pressed, anger simmering beneath her words “there’s only four of them.”
“And’s there’s only two of us.”
“Ten of the bastards attacked my ranch, they’re all dead now.”
“They didn’t see me coming, this group will. Even if they don’t fancy a fight, they’ll just kill the girls so they can get away.”
Dorry kept her gelding beside him as they rode away. She didn’t say any more on the subject, though she’d said enough to worm into his head. He wished there was something he could do, but he couldn’t. He’d rescued one girl from the Scourge, he’d done a little good, now he needed to get back to Molly and Amelia.
He didn’t look back and Dorry didn’t say anything more, but he could feel her eyes boring into his back all the same. As were the Thin Rider’s, accompanied by a slow shaking of the head, though his disapproval had nothing to do with a desire to do the right thing.
He was just hungry for more souls…
The Widow
Molly walked the short distance from the Sheriff’s Office to the Mayor’s Residence trying not to think about Amos. She enjoyed no more success than she’d had since the gunslinger left.
She’d known there’d been something else troubling him. Had it been this man Hope? If it was, then he clearly meant more to him than she did. She tried being angry with Amos. To feel hurt and let down and betrayed, if for no other reason than to distract her from the fear building with every stride she took towards the looming edifice of the Residence. But she couldn’t.
It was damned unusual because she generally had little trouble getting angry at pretty much anything when it suited her, but the overriding feeling whenever she thought about the quiet, brooding gunslinger was one of loss.
She missed him.
She’d lost count of the times men had run out on her. Run from her tongue and her temper, run to another woman or a card table, run from debts or lawmen or people who’d wanted to harm them. And she’d reacted to them with anything from fury to indifference and most of the things she could put a name to in between. But she’d never felt quite like this.
Her reluctant feet came to a halt before the Residence’s front door and she pushed Amos from her mind.
This is crazy.
Amos had done a deal with a demon to keep her out of the whorehouse. Blackmailing Guy Furnedge for the money suddenly seemed an even better idea than it had before. Maybe she’d go and see him later, his money would be useful in getting her and Amelia out of town. Whatever Amos had said about the dangers out on the grass, there was no way she was staying here if she got the debt lifted and could cross the town limits again.
But to do that she had to see the Mayor first.
She took a deep breath and rang the bell, promising herself faithfully this time she wouldn’t end up screaming abuse on the doorstep.
She was about to ring the bell again when the door slowly swung open and the Mayor’s flunky appeared, peering down his sharp, elongated nose at her.
“Mrs McCrea, what an unexpected pleasure…”
“I need to see the Mayor.”
“I’m afraid he’s very busy.”
“I really need to see the…” she just about resisted the urge to add a colourful adjective “…Mayor. Please?”
“Well… if you’d care to come in I’ll see if he can fit you in. Though you may have to wait for a while.”
“I’m happy to wait, but I’ll do it over there…” she jerked a thumb towards the gallows in the middle of Pioneer Square. There was no way she was stepping into the Mayor’s lair again.
“That would be most irregular…”
“Just tell him,” she snapped, “he’ll want to see me.”
“Very well. I shall tell him, but he may be some time… and with your delightfully fair complexion, waiting in the hot sun isn’t advisable.”
“I could do with a bit more colour,” she restrained her language if not her glare.
The flunky gave a little nod and a perfunctory smile before slamming the door in her face.
“Asshole…” she sighed, at least keeping her cussing to a whisper this time.
She turned on her heels and strode towards th
e square, wondering how long it would take her to convince herself he wasn’t going to show and head home. She’d barely crossed the Residence’s neat lawn when she noticed the figure standing in front of the gallows.
It was the Mayor, resting both hands before him on a parasol…
*
“Mrs McCrea!” the Mayor beamed as she approached him, “what a surprise to bump into you on this splendid sunny day.”
He snapped the parasol, which was pink and frilly, open and held it out.
“It doesn’t suit you,” she said, coming to a halt.
“Please,” he insisted when she made no move to take it, “I’d hate to see you burn…”
The sun was blistering on the shadowless square, though it still wasn’t hot enough to dispel the chill creeping through her limbs. Few men could pull off looking sinister whilst holding a pink and frilly parasol, but the Mayor managed it with some aplomb.
They stood in silence. Normally she’d be confident she could stare coldly for longer than any man would be prepared to hold a pink frilly parasol, but her gaze quickly wavered and she accepted it with a curt nod.
The Mayor, after all, wasn’t really a man.
“You’re welcome,” he beamed, “I must say pink may not suit me, but it does look surprisingly fetching on you.”
“Let’s get to business,” she wondered how much damage she could inflict with a parasol if the need arose.
“Business?” The Mayor raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow.
“Your Promissory Note. I’ve come to collect on it.”
“Oh, you were looking for me? What a happy coincidence I happened to be here.”
“Isn’t it. The note?”
“The note? Ah yes, you must mean the one I gave your friend Amos.”
She nodded and thrust it at him, “The terms have been met. Is your offer still good?”
He plucked the envelope from her hand, pulled out the note and read it, when he was done he carefully folded it and put it back inside the envelope.
“Has Amos left town?”
“Yes.”
“Permanently?”
“Yes…”
“Then we have a deal!”
Molly blinked.
“Is that it?”
“Of course! I am a man of my word, my dear. A deal is always a deal with me. Lots of people in this town could tell you that...”
“There’s no catch?”
“Why would there be?”
“Because you’re an oily sonofabitch.”
The Mayor chuckled, “Well, as you put it that way, there are a couple of small provisos…”
Her heart sank, though she wasn’t entirely surprised. She twisted the parasol back and forth and waited for the bad news.
“Firstly, stop blackmailing poor Guy, the fellow has suffered enough already, secondly, stop poking your nose into my business and, finally, forget about all the things you and your chums think they’ve found out about me.”
She swallowed, her mouth suddenly sawdust-dry, but before she could insist she didn’t know what he was talking about, the Mayor lifted a finger and waggled it under her nose.
“No lies, please. They don’t work with me. My little eye really does see everything, in this town anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” The finger grew still, which made her only slightly less inclined to try and bite it off.
“Why go to all this trouble? Why don’t you just pour the contents of one of your black bottles down my throat and make me do whatever you want, like you do with everybody else?”
The Mayor dropped his finger and regarded her, his eye growing still. She expected his denials to swiftly follow. But they didn’t.
“Because it doesn’t work with everyone. With most people, it works perfectly, with some, very few, it doesn’t. You’re one. Your friend Amos is another.”
She wasn’t sure what answer she’d expected, she rarely thought more than one question in advance after all, but this wasn’t it. Before she could think of what else to ask the Mayor’s finger was up in the air again.
“I mean you no harm Molly. You are safe here. Safer than you would be most any place else. You have to trust me.”
“Trust you? After all you’ve done, what I know you’ve done?” she spluttered, before adding, “And you’re a fucking demon!”
“A demon?” he cocked his head to one side, “What a curious way of putting it, where did you get that word from?”
“Amos… a guy from the carney called you that…” the words tumbled from her lips before she could stop herself.
“From the carney…”
“They’re like you, aren’t they?”
“A few of them.”
“What are you?”
“Do you want to know Molly, really?”
She nodded, not sure whether she did or not.
“I’m many things. The darkness in the light, the shadow in the flame, the dream that never dies, the desire that binds. I’m the gardener cutting through the weeds choking the needs. I’m all things to all men. And women, of course…” he looked up at the sky and put his hands behind the back of his neck, “You know, I’m telling you more than I have any other soul. Well, save for the ones whose memories I’ve erased. If I told you it all, would you be more inclined to stay or go, I wonder?”
“I can’t think of anything you’d say that could make me want to stay here, knowing what I know.”
“And I can’t make you unknow anything, sadly. Well…” he lowered his gaze back to her “…other than permanently, of course.”
“Why don’t you kill me then?”
“Because you’re special, Molly.”
“Awww, shucks…”
“Really you are. More specifically the children you could bear for my town…”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t have children.”
“That’s not entirely true. That’s the thing Molly, people think there are so few children born now because most women are barren. That isn’t the case at all. The Reaping Plague that ripped through this world had an unfortunate side-effect on fertility, reducing the chances of pregnancy drastically for most women, but not universally. Everybody, more or less, is still fertile, but only in certain genetic combinations. Each child that is born now is due entirely to the right man and woman mating. Most women can still give birth, but only from a man of a type that matches her. The odds vary, but for you, they are about five hundred to one. In other words, you’d need to have sex with five hundred men, on average, to find one who would have a chance of impregnating you.”
She thought she probably looked as blank as she’d ever looked in her life. And blank was a look she’d had a helluva lot of practice with.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
The Mayor smiled, “To put it simply, most men would not be able to father a child with you. But there are a few who can. As it happens, there is only one in this town who could deliver the goods for you.
“Who?”
“Guy Furnedge…”
The Songbird
No Signal Detected.
No Connection Enabled.
Cece stared at the alternating messages on the screen. Insistent and unrelenting. She’d checked her insertion point first, a small irregular fissure in a yard behind Pioneer Square. She’d told herself it didn’t mean anything. The wormhole was a minor one that would only occasionally align.
As soon as the livery opened she’d taken a horse and ridden out onto the grass to check the fissure littered prairies surrounding Hawker’s Drift, cracks in the fabric of reality like a sheet of glass a feckless child had hurled a stone at.
No Signal Detected.
No Connection Enabled.
She sat listening to the wind, bleary eyes fixed on the screen of the little handheld device resting in her lap. Nothing changed on the screen after she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, though the words were less blurry when they weren’t bei
ng refracted through her tears.
No Signal Detected.
No Connection Enabled.
She understood the words well enough, knew what they meant, however much she willed them to change.
No.
Way.
Home.
Quayle hadn’t been lying. The beacons were gone. The signal she needed to lock onto to pull her through the fissure and along the wormhole back to her world was silent. They were dead. The man she loved had destroyed them.
The man she had once loved, she corrected herself.
This John, the one here, the one who sold guns, John X Smith, wasn’t her John at all.
Time changed people, inevitably. The experiences they had, the things people did to them, the subtle shifting of beliefs and values everybody underwent had had fifty years to alter the man she’d last kissed on a wave caressed moonlit beach. The man who’d winked at her in the transit room in The Facility before she’d turned away and walked through, dressed in dowdy nineteenth century clothes and carrying a canvas bag, to cross rivers of shifting time and countless realities to come to this place and explore another world in the name of science and humanity’s ceaseless curiosity.
He wasn’t her John anymore. He wasn’t Quayle. He was a monster.
You planted a fucking bomb?
In fact, he’d planted a lot of fucking bombs and destroyed the entire Facility, arguably the greatest achievement in human history, the greatest depository of knowledge ever created. And infected all the data they’d gathered. Everything.
Life is priceless.
That had been one of the things he’d always said. He’d said it on the very day she’d met him, in the lecture hall during her induction. Life is Priceless.
He wasn’t a perfect man. She’d known that. He was a man with a reputation, a man women gravitated to. Too much arrogance, too much pride, too certain of himself. But she had fallen in love with him, because beneath it all he’d been a good man. Passionate and honest and blisteringly intelligent.
Life is priceless…
He’d believed that. Their work had shown it too. Through the myriad of worlds they’d discovered and been able to explore, of the countless other Earth’s that existed in the multiverse most were dead and barren and the few boasting life usually offered nothing more than microbes in a rockpool. Life was rare. Life was precious. It had to be cherished and protected and respected. Above everything else. Life was priceless.