An August day, 2008
While watching The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
Hideyuki Kikuchi
Along for the Ride
chapter 1
I
Though the midday sunlight on this late autumn day was relatively tranquil for the Frontier as it colored the homes and people, the face of every last person staring at the stagecoach parked in the station lot showed the most horrible loathing. They didn’t even make such faces on seeing the evilest villain who was sure to hang. By way of example, it was like the look someone got when they saw a dead body. No, even more horrified—like seeing the living dead.
Though the black coach parked in the lot already had a team of six cyborg horses hitched to it and the folks in the office had finished selling tickets, the travelers were in no hurry to board the cramped vehicle, so they still sat in the break room in the station enjoying cigarettes, consulting maps, or bidding a farewell to the peace and safety of their daily lives.
A commotion rolled down the street. It carried a tinge of horror.
The sheriff’s office was only about thirty feet from the station, and beside it was a vacant lot that measured about twenty feet square, but when the door facing that lot opened, what was shoved outside was something all too common on the Frontier. Locked within the ten-foot-by-ten-foot iron cage was a young man dressed in a black servant’s outfit, and he was seated on an iron chair that was bolted to the floor.
As the people saw his face, the looks of loathing swiftly faded from their own. It was as if, for the first time in a thousand years, a gust of fresh air was pushing its way through a miasma. Anyone who was there with the spectators would’ve just sighed and accepted the inevitability of the change. The face of the young captive was that beautiful.
“He’s Duke Sinister’s valet.”
“His name’s Dorleac.”
“Can you imagine devoting yourself to the Nobility body and soul for more than a decade when you’ve got a face like that?”
The station quickly became the spot for townspeople to swap information.
“For whatever reason,” one woman began, “he was wandering around outside the castle when a security patrol passed by two days back and nabbed him—but aren’t they supposed to execute any human who’s been with the Nobility that long, whether they’ve been bitten or not?”
“It’s like this, lady: since there hasn’t been a servant of the Nobility who could walk in broad daylight for decades, they got orders directly from the government in the Capital that they really wanted to examine him, and that they were to have him transported.”
“Oh, that lucky bastard,” the woman remarked.
“Sure is good looking, though, ain’t he? You think maybe the muckety-mucks in the Capital used the cameras in their surveillance satellites to sneak a look at his face?”
“Damn near sure of it. You’re right on the button. But I don’t care how much anyone goes on about him being able to walk in the light of day; he’s a servant of the Nobility. No telling what kind of dark power he might have. That goes with the territory for the sheriff and her deputies, but it’s a real headache for the other passengers. They’ll be risking their lives on this trip. A real ride into hell.”
Laughter continued for a little while, but then it stopped as if cut short. A black cage, gleaming in the sunlight, had just passed right in front of the gossip swappers. The cage had small wheels attached to the bottom, and it was pushed by a pair of sheriff’s deputies. The sheriff went ahead of the cage, entering the station building—the office of the stagecoach company. When the employees glimpsed her face and the sheriff’s badge pinned to her ample chest, their expressions were a sight to see. The sheriff was a beautiful woman with brunette hair spilling from her wide-brimmed hat.
“Well, Louise—I mean, Sheriff, we’ve got the coach all ready to go,” said the man in a suit and bow tie from behind his desk, rising and extending his hand to shake. He was the manager.
“No other passengers but us, right, Mr. Platt?” Sheriff Louise said rather insistently.
The manager shifted his eyes and replied, “I’m sorry, but there are three customers who positively insisted on going.”
“Did I or did I not absolutely forbid you from selling any tickets?!” the sheriff snarled, the corners of her eyes rising angrily. Their trip was going to take about a week, during which they would be risking not only their lives but their very souls. They were truly journeying into death.
“Yes, I know you did,” the manager replied, “but consider our situation. The trail from here to the airfield runs right through Duke Sinister’s domain. Do you think that fiend’s just going to sit idly by and let his servant be whisked away right under his nose? Even if you were to return this Dorleac person to him now, we wouldn’t be able to run our coaches until his anger subsided. How long do you reckon that’ll be? A month? Six? A year? No, let’s say half a century at the very least—for fifty years we’ll be shit out of luck. This is a serious impediment to travel. And, it’s safe to say, a fatal blow to our business. At this point, we need every last passenger we can get. Hell, we’d sell tickets to monsters, or even the duke himself. The fare to the Capital for ten people puts this company in the black for a month.”
The manager’s expression and tone were part of a technique he’d mastered during two straight decades running an office for the stagecoach company. Over the last twenty years, everyone who’d ever heard a similar explanation had envisioned the company’s imminent bankruptcy, as well as the employees and their families taking their own lives in the aftermath.
The sheriff let out a single sigh and said, “You’ve explained the situation to your customers, I take it?”
“Of course. And even knowing the danger that awaits, they’re all okay with it. I find their courage exemplary.”
“I think you’re less interested in courage than revenue,” the sheriff remarked. After drawing a breath, she continued, “Give me some background on them.”
Out of the corner of her eye she glanced over at the lounge. If she could always get this information on short notice, there’d be no need to worry about trouble. Perhaps the sheriff had a hunch about how things would go, because she’d asked the coach service manager to check people’s identities despite having told him not to let anyone else ride with them.
“This way,” the manager said, leading the sheriff to his private room at the end of the hall where he explained about the passengers.
Claire Scherzen (twenty-seven years old, saloon girl)
Harman Briggs (fifty-one years old, blacksmith)
JJ (thirty-six years old, Hunter of Nobility)
The manager continued, “Added to that is the lunkhead you brought along.”
“Al Zemeckis—twenty-one years old, a farmer. And if I ever hear you call him a lunkhead again, there’ll be hell to pay. Plus there’s me and my two deputies—so, a total of seven, right?”
“And what business brought you to our stagecoach company, Sheriff?” the manager ventured.
Suddenly reminded, Louise corrected herself, saying, “Eight, including Dorleac.”
“Our coach, the Belvedere, normally seats twenty, and with the additional fold-down seating can accommodate up to thirty. Yes, you’d be hard pressed to find such a comfortable ride these days.”
“That’s great to hear—now, could you let everybody onboard?”
The manager looked at the clock on the wall, then compared that to the time on his pocket watch before nodding. “Two minutes and four seconds’ difference—and I don’t know which of them is correct. Well, then, you’d best let everyone know.”
Without a backward glance at the employee hollering, “Everybody, the coach is heading out!” the sheriff left the office.
Looking over at the stagecoach, Louise found two of her deputies looking back at her, apparently having finished loading the cage onboard. The passengers filed between the two men as they boarded the coach. The saloon girl, the bl
acksmith, the Hunter—but the fourth one halted and gave the sheriff a look as if he were trying to read her mood.
In a heavy flannel shirt and jeans, the man wore a leather vest in typical farmer fashion. Though his shirt was wrinkled, it’d been well laundered and ironed. He probably had a woman looking out for him. The repeating rifle he carried in his right hand was unusual for a lawman. An ordinary handgun was about a thousand dalas, a bolt-action rifle two thousand, and a repeater more than five thousand. Considering that living expenses out on the Frontier were said to average about a thousand dalas a month, it was a rather extravagant weapon for a farmer to have. Given the age of the rifle, it’d probably been purchased quite some time ago for keeping monsters in line.
“What should I do?” the man asked in the tone of a lost traveler.
You’re really not cut out for this work, Al, Louise thought to herself. I know your situation, but you never should’ve taken this job.
“Work with us,” the sheriff replied. “You’ve got to follow my orders to the letter, Al, but everything else I’m leaving to your judgment as a deputy. Raise your right hand.”
“Sure.”
The farmer raised a heavy right hand, and the sheriff followed suit, saying, “Al Zemeckis, do you swear to discharge your duties as a deputy of the town of Happy Gringo’s sheriff’s department, western Frontier district, until discharged from that position?”
No matter how many times Louise did this, she never could get used to the ceremony, but she couldn’t very well let him onto the coach without deputizing him and releasing him from personal liability.
“I do,” the farmer replied, his tone and expression equally serious.
“Good. Climb onboard. For the time being, it’s your job to watch our friend the valet.”
Following Al, the sheriff was just about to plant a foot on the coach steps when she turned and looked. In addition to the station manager and his staff, nearly a dozen townspeople were staring at her. The looks they gave the stagecoach and its passengers were doleful ones.
Though the sheriff had made no announcements, the speed with which rumors spread in a rustic town was frightening. Someone had been apprehended near a Noble’s castle—with that much to go on, it’d take less than two days to learn who it was and what they’d been doing. No doubt the gossipers could clearly see the purpose of this journey, the hopes of Louise and her men, and a denouement quite at odds with those hopes.
When Louise turned right around, the manager alone made a stiff smile, but he ended up having the door slammed in his face.
Though stagecoach drivers were employees of the coach company, this time one after another had declined the job, so a sheriff’s deputy named Lantz who’d had some experience in that field ended up climbing into the driver’s seat. A coach employee on the sidewalk rang a tin bell and shouted, “Moving out!” With one crack of the whip, the cyborg horse-drawn coach rolled forward to the sound of creaking wheels. If not for a buffering device, the wheels of the coach would’ve left ruts in the ground three times as deep.
Even after the coach had faded from sight, those who’d seen it off showed no signs of moving on for the longest time. The sun was high and clouds dotted the blue sky that autumn day—and those people had just watched a stagecoach ride off to a terrible fate.
II
Seating in the coach consisted of five rows of forward-facing benches to either side of a narrow aisle, with each bench seating two passengers. To the aft were shelves for baggage and a space that could hold up to a thousand pounds of cargo—as this type of coach also doubled as a shipping service. Currently, that space was occupied by the prisoner and his iron cage. Al and a deputy named Belbo, the latter armed with a buckshot bow, were sitting on the floor to either side of the cage and well out of arm’s reach, while Louise was seated in the very last row. Immediately after boarding the coach, the sheriff and Belbo had donned sunglasses.
As the coach left town and was entering the surrounding farmlands, the sheriff stood up and called out for everyone’s attention. All seated separately, the three passengers twisted around for a look. They were in unison in their annoyed expressions. People on the Frontier had a fundamental dislike of authority, after all.
“My name is Louise Kirk, and I’m sheriff of Happy Gringo. Although you’re probably already aware of what I’m going to tell you, I must give you fair warning.”
Before she’d even finished speaking, all but Harman the blacksmith—who was in the second row from the back on the right-hand side—turned away in disgust.
“From here on out,” the sheriff continued, “we’re going to be crossing some extremely dangerous territory. Without a doubt, your lives will be in jeopardy. In such a situation, my three deputies and I will endeavor to do our best to keep all of you safe, but our real mission is transporting the prisoner locked up in back. If there’s any concern that rescuing you might jeopardize our mission, we’ll have no choice but to give the completion of our mission primary attention. We ask for your understanding in that regard.”
“Yeah, we know!” someone promptly responded. It was the saloon girl Claire Scherzen in the second row from the front on the right-hand side. Raising her right hand and the bottle of booze it gripped, she continued, “Normally, you’d die to keep the peace for us. But when the time rolls around, the job comes first—hell, every public official is the same way. Okay, okay. We’re used to it by now.”
“Another thing—” Louise said, putting strength into her stomach muscles. “In the course of dispatching our duty, there may be some need to restrict your actions. I hope you’ll understand.”
She was fully prepared for someone to jump down her throat over that.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding!” Claire exploded, and her reaction was natural enough.
Even Harman’s mouth went wide as he bellowed, “What exactly’s that supposed to mean? First you tell us you’ll leave us for dead if the situation calls for it, and now you’re asking for our help with your work? Hey, just because you’re wearing that badge, don’t go thinking that makes you Nobility or something!”
Louise’s interest was focused on the third passenger—the man seated in the middle row on the left-hand side. The Hunter. She’d never met him before. He elected to remain silent. That irritated Louise.
“The floor’s open for grievances,” she said to him. “Something eating you? I’d like to hear about it now.”
After the span of a breath, he replied in a gloomy tone, “Not particularly. I wasn’t counting on anyone else from the get-go. This is the Frontier.”
“You’re exactly right,” she said, and she was relieved to hear that.
Louise was relatively satisfied with the results. A war of words with drifters could easily escalate into an exchange of bullets or blades. Things had gone pretty well.
“At any rate, we’ve stated our position. We’d appreciate your cooperation,” said the sheriff.
“Like hell I’m helping you,” Claire replied spitefully.
All Harman did was spit loudly.
Louise, on the other hand, had a weight off her chest. If she did have to leave the two of them to fend for themselves, now it wouldn’t bother her conscience any. Besides, what she really needed to focus on was what was behind her.
The young man seated on the chair in the cage had a weary look on his face as it was turned toward the floor. Whatever had happened when he was with the Nobility, it seemed that slipping the yoke of fate had left him drained of both strength and will.
However, Louise turned to Al and said sternly, “I thought I gave you a pair of sunglasses yesterday. Put them on.”
“Oh, is it a problem that I haven’t got ’em on yet?” the young farmer asked, frantically reaching for the chest pocket of his shirt.
“They might not seem any different than us, but that’s no reason to underestimate a human who’s lived with the Nobility a long time,” Louise said firmly. “The Nobility took a liking to him. Such b
eing the case, it’d only be natural to want to reward him for his long and loyal service. In his case, that might’ve been by not feeding on him. But what if the reward was magic powers? What if he could pass right through the wall and escape if we took our eyes off him for a minute? We’ve had reports from the northern Frontier of cases where someone turned into mist or bats, just like the legends. Even if it wasn’t something as big as all that, even you must know what happens to people when they look into a Noble’s eyes. There are more cases than you could shake a stick at of people like that turning their own parents over to the Nobility so they could feed.”
“I see. Sorry ’bout that,” Al said, donning the protective charm with stiff, nervous motions.
But there was still someone else who should feel Louise’s wrath.
“Belbo,” she said, “you’re the one with seniority here! What are we supposed to do if you won’t even tell him the basics?”
“Hey, that one was just plain ol’ common sense. Why do I gotta hold his hand for everything?”
“And what’ll you say when he goes and gets possessed?”
The sturdy deputy fell silent.
“How about an answer?”
“Point taken, ma’am.”
If this gig didn’t pay so well and give me the right to push folks around, I’d quit here and now and kill you dead, bitch, before I skipped town, Belbo thought to himself venomously, but he saluted the woman. He thought about giving the shitty little dirt farmer a piece of his mind, but since the prospect of getting chewed out by the sheriff didn’t appeal to him, he decided to hold his tongue.
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