by North, Geoff
But there was one bigger and stronger than the lawman.
The people of Burn fell away as Lode made his way through the crowd. Those that didn’t move fast enough were thrown or kicked and, worse yet, threatened by the three-foot blade held in his rock-hard fist. He stopped below the struggling Elward and looked up. Lode wore no clothing, save for a loincloth and leather boots he’d made from the hide of a roller. Some claimed he’d killed the beast with his bare hands. The rest of his eight-foot tall frame was covered in red tattoos depicting countless slaughters in neighboring villages he’d either taken part in as a child or led as an adult. And there was a lot of body to cover. Lode was one of those rare giants, with brains to match his abnormally large physique. He was a writhing mass of muscle, over four feet wide at the shoulders, and standing on legs that looked more like tree trunks. His rusted sword could cut a man in two—the people of Burn had seen it done—but it appeared more like a knife in his hand. He reached up and jabbed at Elward’s feet with its tip.
“How long, Elward?” the giant asked. Elward had made it all the way to the end of the branch. His eyes were forced shut again as sweat trickled in. “How long will you struggle?”
Elward made no reply. He’d begun to pull the loose end of the rope—the end not tied around his straining neck—up towards him. To do this he had to first wrap one arm around the branch. The hard bark bit and tore at the skin on his inner forearm; the sweat and blood made him slip further. After a full minute of agonizing struggle, he felt the frayed end in his fingers. He looped it over the branch and started tying the knot.
“Make sure it’s good and tight,” Lode said. The giant reached up with his blade again and hacked off one of the man’s big toes. Elward screamed but his arm remained locked around the tree branch. “That’s just a taste of what will come if the knot isn’t tied well.” There were murmurs and uncomfortable chuckles from the crowd. They went silent as the blood dropped down and spattered across the giant’s bald skull and landed in his open mouth. Lode’s mouth opened wider and he swallowed. “It’s sour, Elward. Tastes like drink and guilt. It reminds me of your wife’s blood.”
Elward spoke for the first time. “Fr-Freeda swung. Her knot was strong and when she dropped, she swung. There was no cutting.”
Lode wiped the blood from his head and smeared it across his thick chest. “That is true. But after she was taken down, I had a little taste. You understand, I’m sure…I had to know.”
“You’re vile, Lode. The village hates you.”
“Is that why Freeda wanted to become town leader? Because I’m vile? Is that why you defended her and spoke out against me while she swung? Have I not kept Burn safe? Have our numbers not grown since I became Town Leader?”
Elward’s arm finally gave out. The knot was complete and he dropped two feet. His hands held the rope and burned as he gripped. “We c-could be so much more. We don’t have to keep killing and f-fearing.”
“Aaahhh…yes, there we have it. Fear.” Lode nodded and looked over the crowd. “And what is it we fear, people?”
They remained quiet as their leader waited for an answer. The boy that had stepped on the rope finally spoke out in a soft voice. “The diff-rint ones…Them what have shortcomins and abnamilties.”
Lode nodded his head and smiled. He had no teeth, only gray gums. “Yes. Shortcomings and abnormalities. That’s it exactly.”
“The ab…abnormalities will pass in time,” Elward sputtered out. His hands were beginning to slip.
Lode sunk the blade’s tip into the bottom of the struggling man’s foot until he scrambled back up another few inches. “That’s the kind of talk that put Freeda up there. She read too many of those old books. You read any good books lately, Elward?”
“There are no books left….You’ve seen to that.”
“And I’ll hang and cut and burn every sinning fucker that brings any back into town. I’ll gut anyone that even thinks of learning to read.” To press his point, Lode leapt up and sliced the remaining four toes off Elward’s bloody foot. They bounced off the dirt and rolled to a stop haphazardly, like sausage ends flung from a pan.
Trot stepped into the clearing and shook his fists at Lode. “Stop hurting him! He ain’t done nothin’ bad!” He fell silent, and fear clenched his throat before he could say more. His outburst could mean only one thing. As soon as Elward swung, Trot would be next. The terror was so great, he could no longer breathe. There would be no trial. Trot would hang for this. Or, he would be cut to pieces where he stood.
Lode’s eyes narrowed, the red tattoo—of a woman being raped—on his skull furrowed in, and the big man grinned. The crowd began to laugh and Lode joined them.
“Pull up your pants,” the giant roared. “We came to witness a hanging, not to watch your junk blowing in the wind.”
Trot looked down at the fabric now gathered around his ankles. Of all the times to forget underpants. He gathered them up quickly and stumble-trotted a few steps towards Lode. “You…You’re not gonna kill Elward?” The good humor about him had given Trot a feeble sense of hope.
“Elward will hang, or Elward will be cut. I’m going to let you live though. You’re far too entertaining to let go to waste.” He met Trot the rest of the way and dragged him back to the tree. “Show us how you run.”
“What?”
“Run, you fat bastard. Run around the tree. Run until Elward himself drops from laughing. Show all the good people of Burn how you earned your name.”
“I…I don’t wanna run.” Trot started to cry. His hands dropped to his sides and the pants fell to the ground, forgotten once again. Lode slapped his bare buttocks with the flat of his blade, hard enough to make the man jump clear out of the cloth around his feet.
“Run!”
Trot moved. He circled the tree once at a fast, jerking walk. Lode hit his rear again, harder, and Trot began to run. His knees shot out to the sides comically and the crowd roared. But Trot wasn’t finding it funny. He bawled harder as he loped around a second and third time, his knees popping out and his dirty toes kicking the air.
And the lawman watched.
From his perch, Lawson watched them all—Trot trotting, the filthy residents of Burn leering and heckling, Lode licking the tip of his sword clean with a thick, diseased tongue, Elward losing his struggle with the rope—and more than that. He’d seen the two boys arrive half-an-hour before. He’d watched the older one lead his one-armed brother through the mass of jostling limbs to the circle’s inner line of murderous onlookers. Lawson had watched as they slowly worked their way back through the crowd again, towards the town outskirts, after Elward had started his climb out to the branch’s end.
It wasn’t a hard thing to do. Burn wasn’t that big. It was a ramshackle collection of a few dozen buildings organized in a somewhat circular fashion and surrounded by a centuries old twenty-foot high stone wall. The majority of Burn’s four-hundred residents lived in mud huts and tents pitched where there was room in the narrow, shit-caked, piss-puddle alleys. All those residents were gathered in the town center this morning, clustered about the one tree that had been ancient and dying before the town was established.
Lawson spotted the boys as they climbed to the roof of the tannery. He watched them jump from the roof to the rope ladder hanging down from the town’s outer wall. He watched the older boy help the younger boy up the ladder to the western watch point. He watched them disappear over the edge. He spotted them a minute later, running across the gray plains. At first, Lawson thought they might head north, along the banks of the dirty river, towards the town of Rudd, over twenty miles away. They continued west instead.
The lawman looked beyond the fleeing figures to the bleak, gray hills and the heavy gray clouds rolling in. His hand reached down to the revolver holstered at his side. He reconsidered and went for his rifle instead. The revolver packed a lot of wallop at close range, but accuracy was key here. He had to be sure.
Two shots fired out. Their heavy r
umble echoed off into the distance. Two plumes of dust rose into the air directly in front of Trot. He stopped running. Lode quit licking, and the town ceased laughing.
Lawson leaned out over the wooden parapet with a notable creak. All eyes were on the old lawman. “No more runnin’. We’re gathered here to see justice done, and nothin’ more.” His voice was deep and authoritative; the roughness of it sounded like words forced through a throat packed with dry gravel.
Trot was the first to move. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled for his pants a few feet away. He rolled onto his back and shoved both legs in at once, never tearing his gaze from the lawman’s wrinkled, leather-tough face. His eyes were as gray as the sky and filled with little forgiveness.
Lode was the first to speak. “Stay out of this, lawman. Your part in this is done.”
The rifle was placed back down on the floor by his odd-looking boots. He went slowly for the revolver again and held it above his head. The circle of people gasped and spread out some. “This here says my part is never done. Until the punishment has been seen through to its finish, I will keep a semblance of order to proceedins.”
Lode wiped a trickle of drying blood from his chin and considered. “You overstep your authority at times, lawman. If you weren’t so old, I’d be tempted to make an example of you as well.”
“If I wasn’t so gawdamn dangerous, you mean.” Lawson pointed the gun at Lode. “Ain’t no one else in Burn has the authority or right to carry one of these.”
“No one else in this town has a gun or brains enough to use one.’
“Includin’ you.”
The bit of Lode’s face that wasn’t covered with brutal tattoo went just as red. “I have this.” He waved the blade above his head. “And this!” He struck Trot with his mammoth-sized fist back into the dirt. Trot crawled away, tears of pain streaking down his round cheeks, his eyes never leaving the lawman.
A full minute of silence followed as the two hardened men regarded each other. Lawson put the gun away. “Get on with the hangin’.”
It didn’t take much longer. Elward was a shaking, dripping mess of blood and sweat. His left hand gave out first. He dropped another foot or two, the skin of his right hand slipped away with it. A second of life, a weak moan, and Elward dropped.
There was a jerk and the man’s mind exploded in white. He didn’t feel the knot give way, and he didn’t feel his ankles snap as they struck the ground.
Lode was on him in a flash of swinging silver. “Excellent! A hanging and a cutting.”
Fortunately, Elward wouldn’t feel that either.
Trot backed away, awkwardly, on his rear end, blubbering uncontrollably as the crowd pressed in. There were blades in their hands—knives, hatchets, spades, and pitchforks. Nothing as big as the sword Lode was putting to use, but just as deadly.
Lawson looked away from the carnage towards the west edge of town beyond the tannery. The dead man’s sons were running from Burn, out into the gray plains and bleak, gray hills yonder. He thumbed the revolver’s trigger by instinct.
Justice would be served.
Chapter 4
2070
2,655 meters underground
253 kilometers northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba
Lothair opened his eyes and saw black. He closed them…opened them again wide, and thought he may have gone blind. When would the gas take effect? Perhaps it already had. The deep freezing process would begin a minute after that. He counted the seconds. When he reached sixty, he started to wonder if he had already been frozen. Lothair wriggled his toes and clenched his hands into fists.
Not frozen.
He waited patiently for two more minutes. During this time, he recalled his final thoughts from…before. They were of the Jewish children—babes through teens—he’d experimented on during the forties. He had been feeling some form of guilt, and justified the emotion as regret. Regret about those who had thought of him as some kind of monster. They were wrong, and he was right. It was science. It was war.
Lothair no longer felt guilty. He felt no regret. He pictured Estay in his mind, and felt nothing.
Odd.
After five more minutes of silent contemplation, Lothair pulled his arm up from the side. Knuckles rubbed against cool metal, and he found the glass window six inches above his face. He thought he could barely make out the form of his fingers, or perhaps it was his mind placing fingers that he knew were there. Lothair tapped on the glass and felt the condensation of his breath.
He detested tight areas. Being enclosed in a space smaller than the inside of a coffin should’ve had him screaming by now. He remembered that sense of dread as the lid had been lowered into place, of how he held his breath and reassured the logical part of his mind that he wouldn’t have long to wait before sleep claimed him. But Lothair wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t in the least bit worried...about anything.
Very odd.
He pressed up on the glass. Hopeless, he thought. Even if he were half his age and twice his strength, there was no forcing the steel lid open unless the sealing locks had already been released. Lothair’s cylinders were designed to withstand any force, to pass the test of time.
Three hours later, Lothair started to think there may have been a major power malfunction on E Level. A day after that, he resigned himself to the possibility something catastrophic had occurred to the Dauphin installation. The clock inside his brain continued to count the minutes and seconds. He couldn’t turn it off. After four days, three hours, and eleven minutes, Lothair came to the conclusion he wasn’t going to die from dehydration. He wasn’t even thirsty. His stomach grumbled in hunger—the only other sound to listen to besides his steady breathing.
He imagined eating pails of ice-cream, plates of steaming lasagna and sliced pizza, roasted potatoes smothered in butter, grilled sirloin steak and mushrooms, a fat child’s juicy thigh, bowl after bowl of chocolate pudding—
A fat child’s juicy thigh?
Yes, he had pictured eating the flesh of a human being. Lothair’s mouth watered. He didn’t find the thought repulsive. He felt no shame, no horror. The only thing Lothair felt was hungry.
Better to feel something instead of nothing.
He was still starving for human flesh a month later.
Chapter 5
The hills weren’t real, Willem thought, as he trailed after his big brother. They had run, jogged, and walked in a straight line away from Burn, through the morning and most of the afternoon, but the hills appeared no closer than they had been all those long hours before.
Cobe turned and called back, “Why have you stopped? We have to keep moving.”
Willem dropped into the dirt instead. He was tired and his throat was parched. “How come the ground is all cracked?” His fingers ran along a break in the gray soil—almost a perfect circle around him.
His brother returned to him. “Because it ain’t rained for a long time.”
“How come there’s always clouds in the sky then? How come it don’t rain more?”
Cobe shrugged, and squatted down beside him. “Been that way always.”
“Not always. Sometimes it rains real hard and the drops hurt. I remember that one time when it burned my skin. That was the time the clouds came in, all cracking lightning and thunder. Then they turned green, and the twisters came.”
“You remember that?”
Willem nodded. “Course I remember. That’s when Daddy had to rebuild the house.” The boy fell silent as he recalled the events from that morning, not long after he’d learned to walk. His fingers went back to tracing the cracked earth. “The clouds are moving like that; been doing it all day.”
“Then we should keep going. Wouldn’t wanna be caught out in the open when the clouds turn green and the twisters come.”
Willem started after his brother again. A while later he was relieved to see the hills were getting closer. After a while longer, they came to a forest, and Willem hesitated once again.
�
�What is it this time?” Cobe asked.
“Don’t howlers live in the woods?”
“Howlers don’t have eyes. Why would they live in a forest where they’d keep running into trees?”
It was more sawn-off stumps than trees, at least in the beginning. The taller trees—those that had been allowed to grow—were set further up into the hills.
“Then maybe the rollers live here?”
“Rollers like to run fast. They need open ground to pick up speed.”
“Then how come we didn’t see none on the way here? You figure all the rollers are dead? You think the howlers done ‘em in?”
“A dozen howlers couldn’t bring down a roller.” Cobe had started picking his way through the stumps and deadfall, working a path open that his brother could follow.
“They probably sent the lawman after us…or worse.”
“You got nothing better to do than worry about what or who might kill us before the sun sets? If the lawman comes after us, I’ll kick his old ass back to Burn. And if Lode shows up, I’ll do the same to him…big, dumb, mutant fucker.”
Willem giggled. There were probably a million things his brother could do. Even with his gangly appearance taken into account, Cobe was strong and agile. He was smarter than any grownup Willem had ever known. But he couldn’t put any kind of hurt to the Lawman or Lode. Nobody could do that. But nobody could make Willem laugh like his big brother. Scared and thirsty as he was, Willem was grateful to be with him.
They climbed in silence until they made it to the hilltop. Willem looked back down over the way they’d come. “Is that Burn?”
Cobe mopped the sweat away from his forehead. It would be dark soon, and it would get cold. The clouds hadn’t let the sun through all day, and they continued to roll heavily into the east, towards the faint lines of smoke trailing up, into the evening. “That’s Burn.” He let his finger trail along the narrow strip of shit-brown river that curled north, where more smoke met the sky. From this distance, its source seemed a world away to the boys. “And that’s Rudd.”