A God of Many Tears (Hawker's Drift Book 4)

by Andy Monk

  “Not yet. Just got into town, heard they were putting survivors in the church, left Nicole and Cailyn there, then I came to find you.”

  “Me?”

  “For Amos. I owe him.”

  A heavy stone dropped into the bottom of her guts and kept falling. She put her coffee down. Turned out she hadn’t poured anywhere enough whiskey into it.

  “Is he…”

  “I dunno…” Sally shook her head, then shrugged, “…one of the other girls with us, her horse went down and she busted her leg real bad. The Scourge were chasing us. Ten or so riders. He told Nicole, Cailyn in me to keep riding. He stayed with Laura. Wouldn’t leave her to the Scourge.”

  The stone in her stomach hadn’t reached bottom yet.

  “Ten men? He had no chance…”

  “No, Sye and Dorry stayed with him. Still…”

  “Sye Hallows?”

  Sally nodded and took a tentative sip of her coffee. It should still have been hot enough to scald her lips, but she swallowed it without flinching.

  “Why did…” she shook the question away, Sally could fill in the blanks later “…you said he had a message for me?”

  “He said to say…” Sally raised her eyes, offered a small smile that looked somehow alien on her battered, weary face before returning her gaze to the coffee, “…that he loved you…”

  “Fuck…”

  The stone in her stomach finally hit bottom.

  *

  Sally recounted her story against the backdrop of cheers and applause from the square where the Mayor was still working the crowd.

  Part of her couldn’t help but wonder if they’d be quite so raucous if they’d been listening to Sally Lumiere’s story instead. The Scourge wasn’t just a particularly vicious collection of brigands. If what Amos had told Sally, plus what she’d seen and heard with her own eyes, were to be believed, then the Scourge was thousands strong and heading directly for Hawker’s Drift.

  It was going to take a lot more than the Mayor’s pithy rhetoric to deflect them.

  Mostly though, Amos’ message reverberated through her head, echoing like thunder rolling through the mountains.

  He loves you.

  What the hell did that mean?

  In her experience, Amos wasn’t a man prone to needless exaggeration.

  Perhaps. But if he’d meant it, why’d he leave town in the first place? And why not come back and tell her himself instead of asking a stranger to pass on his words. That was perhaps easier to answer.

  He didn’t expect to come back.

  Ten killers riding down on them and only Sye Hallows and some young ranch girl at his side.

  He was expecting to die.

  She thought of him, out there on the grass, riddled with bullets, sightlessly staring at the heavens as the buzzards and crows came to clean his bones.

  It took her awhile to realise both Sally and the crowd outside had fallen silent.

  Sally’s coffee was finished and she was looking across at her with heavy-lidded, red-rimmed eyes.

  “You should get some sleep,” she sat up and tried to look like she’d heard every word the girl had said. The ordeal she’d suffered merited someone at least paying attention to her. She’d said something about John and Cece and that they’d ridden off towards where Amos was facing down the Scourge. But the last few minutes were a blur, as if the fact Amos loved her was enough to make the rest of the world recede into the distance.

  She took a sip of her own drink and then sucked in a deep breath through her nose. She was surprised to find her coffee was cold, her nostrils were filled with snot and her cheeks were wet with tears.

  Her hand was still outstretched and entwined with Sally’s, who offered a small smile and a squeeze of the hand.

  Shouldn’t I be comforting her?

  It seemed more than a little self-indulgent for her to be the one crying, all things considered.

  “Sorry…” she wiped a hand across her face and blinked away her tears.

  “Amos went into a ranch being attacked by the Scourge on his own, killed half a dozen of the bastards and rescued Dorry Coll from being raped. Then he walked into a Scourge camp and gunned down the men keeping me and the others prisoner. He’s a tough bastard. He’ll be ok.”

  “The asshole fucking better be.”

  Before Sally could reply the door crashed open and Crackers Norveldt and Sniffy Smelts staggered in with Jez Cully slung between them. The big deputy was ashen and his left shoulder was dark with blood. Sam Shenan, the Mayor and Doc Rudi came next, followed by what seemed like half the town.

  “Get them out Royce!” Sam hollered at his deputy who’d been washed in on the tide. He flung his arms wide and started pushing people out of the Sheriff’s Office as a desk was swept clean and Cully laid out on it while Doc Rudi was hauling off his jacket.

  She pulled Sally up and they retreated to a corner of the room.

  The Mayor followed them.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The men we sent out to find the Scourge raiders…” the Mayor said through tight lips “… they found them.”

  “Where are the rest of the deputies?”

  “Being somewhat inconvenienced by a bullet, Mr Cully hasn’t been able to recount all of the details yet, but from what I understand, it appears I’ve suddenly got a lot of vacancies to fill…”

  “There were thirty men that rode out of town?”

  “And only one has come back…”

  The Mayor shook his head and moved to the desk where Doc Rudi was working on Cully. Molly cast her eye around the room, which consisted of men with grim expressions and worried eyes. Save for one black-clad figure in the far corner.

  Giselle was standing quietly on her own. It wasn’t clear whether at that precise moment she saw the past or the future, but the fleeting smile flickering over her face while everybody else’s attention was on the wounded deputy suggested she sure as hell couldn’t have been paying much attention to the present…

  The Lawyer

  The Mayor had cast him aside.

  Until he’d wanted him again, of course.

  Humiliated him and dismissed him in front of a gawping crowd; all his neighbours and clients, all the people whose lives he’d worked tirelessly to ensure run so smooth and tickety.

  Then when he’d needed him to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, along with the other important men in town, he’d sent for him. Summoned him even. Just so he could be wedged between Sam Shenan and Doc Rudi at the Mayor’s meeting to demonstrate the town’s solidarity in an hour of need.

  Where the fuck was he in your hour of need, eh Guy?

  Lorna’s smoke-scoured hissing in his ear was becoming so commonplace he didn’t even flinch anymore. He stood and stared at the Mayor’s shoulder blades as the great man addressed a sea of expectant faces.

  He had to confess, Lorna had a point. He was being tormented by his dead wife and needed help, yet the Mayor had cast him aside, for what? A few renegades had burnt out some farms. These things happened. The world was full of bad men; outlaws, desperados, bandits, renegades, call them what you will. The Broken Union was awash with them.

  He’d worked hard to ensure Hawker’s Drift was a town where the law still applied, because the law was the enemy of chaos. So much of the rest of what had once been the United States had fallen to ruin because that immutable fact had been forgotten. The law had fallen and chaos had risen from the smouldering rubble to replace it.

  He’d always known that and he had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Mayor for year after long year toiling to ensure law prevailed and chaos was kept at bay.

  Now the chaos had finally washed up on their shore. It was a sign, wasn’t it? That the men of violence and ignorance should finally arrive here the very moment that he, Guy Furnedge, the custodian of the law, the champion of order, had been cast aside by the man he had worked so tirelessly and selflessly for.

  He felt a tear bubble up and quic
kly blinked it away before anyone noticed. Given that the Mayor was blathering on about all they had built and achieved together anyone noticing his tear they might suppose it was a result of the Mayor’s oratory. Not that anyone was looking at him of course. No one ever really saw him, did they? He ran the damn town for these people and not a one of them even noticed him. He’d need to take his clothes off and dance a jig around the town’s gallows before the good people of Hawker’s Drift paid him a spit of heed.

  That’s because you’re nothing. Always have been. Always will be…

  He tried to focus on Molly, standing outside the Sheriff’s Office with one of the town deputies rather than on the taunts of his dead wife. She looked tired and fraught and, despite all the wrongs she’d done to him, he still wanted to take her in his arms and make the world better for her.

  And she knows you’re nothing too, she’d rather go to the whorehouse than share your bed…

  He looked away, Lorna’s words stinging him with their truth.

  The only reason Molly would ever see him again would be to come and collect on her blackmail threats. To be blackmailed by the love of your life. How more wretched and undeserved could his existence get?

  He stared at his feet awhile. The crowd were cheering and clapping something the Mayor had said. Their jaws flapping and their hands waving about in the soft evening light. It must be wonderful to be loved.

  After a few minutes he tried to steal another look at Molly, but she was gone and only the podgy bespectacled Deputy Royce was standing outside the Sheriff’s Office.

  Molly had clearly heard enough too.

  He glanced either side of him, the town dignitaries seemed as enraptured by the Mayor’s speech as the adoring faces spread out around the gallows did. Save for possibly Sam Shenan who was fidgeting enough to suggest he wanted to be somewhere else. He didn’t want to be here either. He didn’t want to listen to the Mayor’s rhetoric any more than he wanted to listen to Lorna’s gibbering taunts. He wanted to be home. He wanted Amy to be holding him and the whispers he heard in his ear to be her telling him she loved him.

  Whatever Lorna told him, he knew he was never going to hurt Amy…

  He took a discreet step backwards. As usual nobody paid him any heed. They carried on paying him no heed as he backed away from the knot of men around the Mayor, and no heed as he jumped from the gallows and hurried across Pioneer Square away from them.

  All the time he was trying to pay no heed to Lorna screeching in his ear about how much the Mayor and Molly and Amy and every other no-good sucker in Hawker’s Drift deserved to die…

  The Gunsmith

  Cece was getting more and more unsettled by the old woman’s words.

  The idea that a skinny and frail eighty-one-year-old could do what all the brains, money and technology available to The Facility couldn’t, and jump between Alternates at will, was something she was struggling to accept. The idea two versions of the same individual could exist in the same Alternate at the same time also challenged a few fundamentals as well.

  The idea the old bird wanted them to go and blow up what might be her only way of getting out of this world had her teetering on the edge.

  The suggestion they should do it because that’s what God wanted pushed her right over it.

  “Are you for fucking real?!”

  Amelia turned her eyes on the young woman and smiled, “Very much so my dear. You can pinch me if you wanna make sure?”

  “None of what you’re saying is possible,” Cece insisted.

  “Well, if you say so. Though perhaps if you two were to tell Amos where you come from and how you got here, he might think much the same thing,” her smile stretched to reveal teeth so white and perfect they had to be false “and he’d be wrong too.”

  “You all lost me a long time ago…” Amos’ mahogany eyes flicked between the three of them.

  “And I dear say,” she said, looking at the gunslinger, “if you told Cece and John about the things you can do, they’d be mighty unlikely to believe you.”

  Amos grew still, but didn’t say anything.

  “What shit can you do?” he asked, after everyone spent a few seconds staring at each other and listening to the breeze.

  “Trust me,” Amos growled, “she’s right. You wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, please do tell,” Cece took off her hat to push back her hair, “does it involve climbing down chimneys at Christmas? Because that’s about as likely as what-”

  “Let her finish,” he snapped.

  Cece glared at him, but settled for twisting her stare back in Amelia’s direction.

  “What is in the Mayor’s ranch?” he asked.

  “Evil,” Amelia said with a nod, “that is why God wants it destroyed.”

  “Well, that clears that up at least...” Cece muttered, slapping her hat back on.

  “Hmm… I don’t remembers you being so obstinate girl. Must be my memory going again, I guess. Anyway, you were heading to the ranch anyway. I’m not telling you to do anything different. I’m just telling you to take him with you,” she jerked her head towards Amos, “and have it in the back of your minds you’ll need to destroy the place you’ll find there.”

  “And what will we find there?” Cece insisted.

  “Can’t say.”

  “Why not?”

  “The world runs on rails, girl, if I tell you too much you might go and do something different to what needs to be done…”

  Cece managed to look bemused.

  “But…” he frowned, “…if you don’t want us to change what happens, why are you here at all? If you are the same Amelia as the one back in town, you know what happens as you’ve lived through it, so why tell us unless you want something different to happen to what you know does happen?”

  “Stop trying to be clever. You seen where that kinda behaviour gets you…”

  “Why-”

  “Why? Why? Why? It’s always the same with you smart folks. Always filling the world with questions! My oh My!” Amelia pushed a smile on her face, but he didn’t think it went anywhere near her eyes, “The important thing isn’t going to the ranch, you was going there anyways, and, to be honest, once you sees what’s there you won’t be having any doubts about the rightness of destroying it. The important thing is you takes him with you,” she jabbed a gnarled finger at Amos. She couldn’t straighten it, he noticed. Arthritis.

  “Why me?” Amos was doing a grand job of looking utterly confused.

  “Because they won’t get in without your… help…”

  “Whatever’s in that ranch I’m sure John and Cece can deal with it. I’m going back to town.”

  “Molly will still be there,” Amelia raised her chin and kept her eyes fixed on the gunslinger, “she ain’t come to no harm and she ain’t married Guy Furnedge neither. She’s waiting for you. And so am I.”

  He still didn’t entirely buy the idea that this was the same Amelia, all the math he’d ever seen said that simply couldn’t happen. The multiverse just wouldn’t allow it. But if she wasn’t the same Amelia, then she somehow knew a helluva lot about all of them. Maybe nobody had told the multiverse about the math…

  Amos shook his head, “I shouldn’t have left her in that town and ever since I turned around things have been holding me back, letting the Scourge get closer to Hawker’s Drift. I rescued both of them from the Scourge,” he nodded towards Sye and Dorry, “and fought another bunch of them off to save Laura and to let Sally and the others get away. I done my share. If God, or anyone else, wants the Mayor’s ranch dealt with, then I’m due some slack. I done my good deeds.”

  “Maybe so, Amos the Gunslinger, but it’s time for you to do a little more good. Trust me, once this is done you’ll be able to watch the Thin Rider disappear over the horizon forever. This ain’t just the key to destroying that evil, it’s the key to getting your life back.”

  John had no idea what she was talking about, but Amos clearly did as his whole body froze and his
eyes flared.

  Amelia ignored him and turned to John and Cece, “Why don’t you two run along and make ready. I need to have me a word or two with Amos alone.”

  Cece glanced at him and he shrugged. Personally, he’d like to get Amelia in a lab and spend the rest of her life running tests on her, but he doubted she was going to be terribly amenable to that idea, even if he still had a lab.

  After he’d climbed to his feet with Cece, Amelia stretched out her hands, “You two help me up now. I ain’t got long before I gotta go.”

  “So you just going to walk through a wormhole back to your world?” Cece demanded.

  Amelia brushed grass off her dress before looking up at Cece, “Uh-huh, though I might use different words to explain it and walk different roads to get there…”

  “Assuming you can do what you say you can, could you take me back to my world?”

  “Sorry, hun, I don’t knows that road.”

  “But-”

  “I only knows the roads I know and I can only walk them alone. God didn’t give me a map or a passenger seat,” Amelia reached over with her free hand and placed it on Cece’s, “Been lovely to see you, truly, you’re even more beautiful than I remember…”

  Cece looked like she wasn’t sure whether to blush or spit.

  “…but you need to get ready to move soon. It’s not good for any of us to loiter around here.”

  He put a hand on Cece’s elbow, she had that look she got when she was just brimming to burst with questions. It had been a long time since he’d seen that particular look. It reminded him of several worlds that didn’t exist anymore.

  “Goodbye, Amelia. I get the feeling we won’t be seeing each other again.”

  “We got different roads to walk… and mine is nearly done.”

  “Let’s go check the horses.”

  When Cece made no move to follow him, he tugged her sleeve.

  “Goodbye, Cece.”

  “Bye,” Cece snapped, spinning on her heels and marching towards the horses.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, not sure why he should be apologising on Cece’s behalf.

  Amelia shrugged thin, bony shoulders, “Girl’s got a lot to get that pretty head around. Why don’t you go make things right between you?”