by Andy Monk
The front door was open and her screams must have been rolling down the street, but nobody had come to check. Amelia and Ruthie would tell people what was happening too. Two hysterical girls running down the street should attract some bloody attention. Even in this fucking town. Someone would come soon. She just had to keep out of Blane’s grasp long enough to still be alive when they got here.
She grabbed the foot of the balustrade and kept kicking back at Blane, but he was slowly climbing up her body, one hand pushing up inside her skirt, wet clammy fingers clawing at her skin.
Gripping both hands around the balustrade she heaved herself forward, her arms burning in protest at dragging both herself and Blane across the floor. She didn’t need to go far, just a few inches and she could get the gun.
Blane was jabbering behind her, his screams of rage getting louder as he worked his way up her body. Her skirts being forced up as he did so.
“Coming to get you Missy! Coming to get you!”
She pulled again. Was she close enough? She had to be, Blane would be at her throat again in moments and she wouldn’t be getting away from him a second time.
“Got business to do to you! Real juicy business!”
She let go of the balustrade and stretched for the gun, her fingers closing around the grip as Blane spun her onto her back. His face was a bloody mess, she’d not so much broken his nose as flattened it. Blood streamed down his face and poured off his chin, his mouth was open and the blood mixed with drool to stain his teeth dark red. His eyes were wide and the light burning behind them was a hellish mix of madness and hatred.
He had a knife in his right hand which was slick with blood from the chunk she’d bitten out of his wrist. He was pulling it back to slash across her face.
She didn’t know why he hadn’t stabbed her in the back. Perhaps he wanted to see the fear in her eyes when he killed her. If he was, he was going to be real disappointed.
That was when she shot him.
*
“A few bumps and bruises, but you’ll be fine,” Doctor Rudi smiled at her and stood up, “most of the blood isn’t yours.”
I could have told you that…
The Doctor nodded, looked over at Sam Shenan and nodded again before letting himself out.
She looked at the Sheriff once Rudi had left the room. He wasn’t smiling.
“Is there any chance you believe me?” she asked.
He gave a little snort then eased himself into a chair next to her.
“I always knew there was something wrong with that asshole.”
“You’re not going to hang me, are you?”
Now he did smile, a little, “No Molly, it was self-defence. We ain’t gonna hang you for that, besides…” he glanced at the blood in the hallway “…as the fucker ain’t dead yet, it wouldn’t be murder anyway.”
“Tom always said I couldn’t hit a barn door at more than five paces…” she sighed “…turns out he was being charitable about my shooting after all.”
Her fingers slid over her cheek, she could still feel the splatters of Blane’s blood on her skin. She’d managed to pull off quite a sharpshooting trick by putting a bullet in his face and not killing him.
The whole moment was a blur; the roar and retort of the gun, the stink of gunpowder, the smoke burning her eyes, the blood spray, Blane screaming and falling backwards clutching his face, the knife he had been about to slash her open with clattering to the floor.
She assumed either the fucker had nothing much in his head to damage anyway or, more plausibly, the bullet hadn’t gone through his brain at all and had just blown out his cheek or jaw.
Either way, he’d staggered down the short corridor, bouncing off the walls and into the kitchen. She’d fired another wild shot but had only managed to blow a chunk out of the ceiling. By the time she’d collected together what she had left in the way of wits and followed him he was gone.
There was a gate at the bottom of the yard opening onto a junk-filled passage between the streets. She hadn’t been keen to follow him any further and had returned to the house to wait for help to arrive.
“You have any idea why he was here?”
“Said he was looking for Kate, but he didn’t say why. I don’t think it was to pass the time of day… I think… I think he came to kill her.”
“You know where Kate is? Emily and Ash too for that matter?”
She shook her head.
“And why were you here?”
“Just... a social call.”
Sam glanced at the door, one of his men was out on the street asking if anybody had seen anything, otherwise they were alone in the house. He dropped his voice anyway.
“About the little black bottles?”
She stared at him, clutched her still shaking hands together and nodded.
“Hadn’t seen Ash for a bit. Or any of the others. I was worried.”
“The Mayor say anything to you when you went to see him?”
She sighed, “He knows we know…”
“And me?”
“Dunno, but I wouldn’t bet against it.”
Sam snorted a laugh, “Hell, I wanted to retire anyway…”
“Not sure that’s an option. He told me his black candy didn’t work on me… the rest of you, I guess, it does.”
Footsteps in the hall pulled their eyes towards the door and a moment later one of Shenan’s deputies came through. He had wildly tangled grey hair that appeared never to have been inconvenienced by soap or a comb.
“No one saw anything boss… not many people at home at the moment, think most folk are in the square now.”
“Thanks Crackers, take Royce and swing by Blane’s lodgings and see if he’s shown up there.”
“And if he is?”
“Put him in a cell or put him in a box. I don’t much care which.”
The deputy nodded and hurried off.
“Sam…” Molly said, once the deputy was out of earshot, “…Blane told me he killed Tom.”
“Shit…”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find the sonofabitch and see what he’s got to say for himself.”
“You think he killed Tom on a whim?”
“Did he say why?”
“No… and I was too busy getting throttled to ask,” she grimaced and touched her throat. She was going to be sporting a lovely purple necklace for a while.
Sam stood up and held out his hand, “Come on Molly, best get you to the Office.”
“I thought you weren’t charging me with anything?”
“I’m not. Any other day I’d put some men outside your house to protect you till we find Blane, but everybody bar Crackers, Royce and me are out on the grass and the rest of the town are getting themselves whipped up about these raiders, so, you’ll be safer there for now.”
“Busy day, huh?”
“Tell me about it, I’ve got enough to deal with without one of my men going insane.”
“I don’t think it was sudden. I think he’s been mad for a long time, just something happened to make him lose control.”
“Any idea what?”
She pulled herself to her feet, “I don’t want to even imagine. But if somebody pushed him over the edge I sure hope you can find him before he gets to them…”
The Gunsmith
“Lot of smoke over there…”
Cece had twisted in her saddle to stare towards the eastern horizon, shielding her eyes against the afternoon glare as she spoke.
“Just burning grass, they do it sometimes.”
“Why?”
“How should I know,” he growled, “do I look like a farmer?”
She pulled her eyes away from the grey smeared sky to the east and shot him one that suggested she didn’t think he looked like a farmer at all. He did, however, look like a murdering piece of shit.
How many years did I wait...?
“This isn’t a good idea,” he ventured again, later.
“You sa
id before.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Not sitting here waiting to die when there might be another way home.”
“Cece… there is no home anymore.”
“There was when I left.”
And if you somehow found your way back, you can watch it fall apart just like I did.
He bit his tongue. What was the point? It was easier for her to believe he’d destroyed The Facility because he’d gone mad or bad or probably both. Easier than accepting the alternative. Their civilization was collapsing and it threatened to take a lot more than one world down with it.
Mad or bad or probably both, she had still wanted his help. He wasn’t sure whether that meant there was still some part of her prepared to trust him or that she was just really, really desperate.
Trapped alone in a world that had never left the nineteenth century, in a remote town run by a monster with her only way home destroyed by an old man who a few weeks ago (to her) had been a young man she’d loved.
Yeah. She was fucking desperate.
They were heading north from town and each step their horses took added to his sense of unease.
“We need to know what’s in there,” Cece had insisted, when he’d first scoffed at her suggestion.
“I don’t need to know,” he’d corrected her.
“The man I knew would have been in there within a week of getting here.”
He’d chewed his bottom lip and kept it firmly pressed against the top one.
He’d given her plenty of time to come off the boil before following her downstairs. She’d been sitting in the dark amongst the detritus of his kitchen. He’d lit a lantern without asking. Upstairs he took a little juice from his priceless fusion egg to run a few lights so he could pretend he was a civilised man, but downstairs he stuck to oil and candles so as not to scare the natives.
“There’s so much resonance around that place. We know the Mayor doesn’t come from this world. So he comes from somewhere else. Maybe he has a controlled portal…”
“Or maybe he just fell down a rabbit hole, like Amelia did?”
“He didn’t come from an alternate Earth, you know that, right?”
He’d gone back to worrying his bottom lip again.
When he hadn’t replied, she’d leant forward, the carnage of the kitchen table making her nose wrinkle as she did so, “He isn’t human. Not human on this Earth, not Human on any other. He’s a Something Else…”
They’d been hints of Something Else even back when Cece had been at The Facility, strange patterns and harmonics in the resonance, peculiar radiation signatures on some of the dead alternates, a few scattered ruins and artefacts that didn’t seem to fit human scale. Whispers and echoes in the winds of Space/Time.
They’d been more after she’d gone, but never anything definitive. Never anything that couldn’t be scoffed at or written off as the product of overactive imaginations and the tendency for the human mind to join the random dots in the chaos to make pictures that aren’t really there. The Something Else became a nameless bogeyman, a ghost story to recite over a late-night drink. Not something to report to your Section Chief or to ever, ever appear in a funding request.
“There’s no proof of that.”
Cece had smiled and shaken her head, “Always the sceptic.”
“He isn’t from this world, but that doesn’t mean he’s Something Else. More likely he’s from an alternate where human evolution took a different path, or, even more likely, developed sufficient bio-engineering tech to alter him so he can produce some mind-altering secretion.”
“So he’s a weapon? Something from an alternate we haven’t found yet.” She’d looked at him, “You must have found a lot more in the years after I went down the rabbit hole?”
“Yeah. We did. But no Alternate like that. No Something Else either.”
“Whatever he is. The answer is on that ranch. And if he has got a portal of some kind, we might be able to get home.”
We.
He hadn’t commented. Instead, he’d pursed his lips and tried to think of a way of explaining why they should keep as far away from the Mayor as they could. He’d lived here for a long time and he’d always done his level best to keep his distance from the Mayor; not for any defined reason, it was just there had always been a wrongness about him and a sense that his was a business it didn’t pay to stick your nose into. He was a monster that was real, after all.
We…
“Ok… let’s take a look…”
*
“Why’d you change your name?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you John X Smith? John Quayle isn’t going to mean anything to anyone here.”
He shrugged, “Just felt nervous about it. Having my name known, in case they managed to come after me.”
“Really?” She cast him a look. In the shade beneath her hat, Cece’s eyes didn’t look like they were in a buying mood.
A sigh followed the shrug, but he didn’t elaborate. It was hard to articulate that he’d dropped the name because he was ashamed of it. Of what he’d done, what he’d become, what he’d helped to create and what he’d had to destroy. A new world, a new start, a new man… it had all called for a new name.
“Did it take you a long time to think it up?”
“Not my most blinding moment of originality,” he conceded.
She snorted, “For such a brilliant man you never were much good at thinking up names. Who calls their dog Rover?”
He chuckled, he hadn’t thought of that mutt in decades, a raggy-coated stray who’d adopted him in his second year at Harvard.
It felt good to laugh, but by the time he glanced across, her face had melted back to blankness and her eyes had returned to the horizon.
I didn’t have a choice…
He almost said it again. She hadn’t listened before. Not really. Was she ready to listen now. Would she ever be?
The numbers are never wrong…
He’d studied the numbers for years, working and recalculating and refining. Pushing them till he could only see the world through the tinted glass of complex equations and esoteric formulae. The numbers were never wrong, but they hadn’t believed them, no matter how hard he’d tried to explain it to them. But of course, it wasn’t about getting the powers that be to understand.
They hadn’t wanted to understand.
They had a world dying around their ears, dying because their predecessors had been as willfully blind as they were now being, but before them they had a gateway to countless other worlds. Other possibilities, other realms and other empires.
They didn’t want to hear about resonance instabilities and widening fractures and spiralling chronal anomalies. They wanted to load the wagons and move home. They wanted to save their world with the riches of other worlds. They wanted a clean slate to start over and to hell with the consequences.
The numbers are never wrong.
He looked at Cece out of the corner of his eye. As beautiful as she ever was, but not the same as he remembered. The set of her jaw, her distant expression, the hurt and the pain and the incomprehension. All so visible. All so new. They were numbers too and no matter how he pushed them the answer always came out the same. She’d never understand, she’d never forgive, she’d never be the woman he’d loved, any more than he could be the man she’d loved.
How many years had he spent staring at the few pictures he had of them together? Staring at his younger self, standing next to the most beautiful girl in the world, smile wide, eyes twinkling, no idea of the man he’d become. The terrible choice he’d had to make. And Cece, looking much the same as she did now, save for her hair was shorter and spikier before she’d been groomed to fit into this world.
And yet, she was totally different. Not a picture, not a video file, not a memory. Not the girl he’d dreamed of for so long. Not the fairy tale princess who would wake to find the man she’d loved had moved on fifty years while she’d been frozen in time, b
ut would love him all the same.
Now she was real and she was next to him again, but nothing was how it was, how it should be or even how it could be.
Instabilities. Fractures. Anomalies.
The numbers are never wrong.
He closed his eyes and they rode on in silence.
*
“Someone’s in a hurry.”
Cece’s words jerked his mind from his thoughts. She was looking to the north-east where he could make out three riders cutting across the grass and riding hard.
They were still a distance from the Mayor’s ranch and hadn’t seen anyone since they’d left town. He squinted against the sunlight, but the riders were just dark specks on a gold-green sea.
“Mayor’s men?”
“Not men,” Cece replied, “all women and riding like they’ve got the devil on their tails.”
“Perhaps they’ve got the Mayor behind them then.”
She glanced at him, “Sorry?”
“Mr Wizzle. He thinks the Mayor is the Devil.”
“Another possibility.”
“C’mon…”
“Why not? We don’t know everything.”
“Since when did you start believing crap like that?”
Cece’s attention returned to the three riders. They were just dots to him, but her augmented eyesight was far superior to his even when he’d been a young man.
“Best to keep an open mind. Absolute certainties can be dangerous…”
Her words hung in the air, her rebuke catching in his throat and he bit down his response. Anything he said would just be salting her wounds.
The road, as such, cut due north towards the Mayor’s ranch and the three riders would intersect it ahead of them. He turned his attention briefly to the east where hazy columns of smoke were still rising. Did they really look like grass fires? He wasn’t so sure anymore.
He twisted in the saddle and checked the road behind them. Nothing was moving save the long grass rustling in the breeze on either side of it and a couple of crows.
He popped the catch on the rifle scabbard hanging from his saddle.
“Trouble?” she asked, eyes moving from him to the rifle and back again.
“Dunno.”
Cece reined her horse in and he followed suit. Cocking her head to one side she leant forward in her saddle, listening. He couldn’t hear anything bar the hiss of wind on grass, but her hearing, like her eyesight, was a lot better than his.