by North, Geoff
Lawson returned from the fire, carrying a stick still burning on one end. He lowered it to the howler’s face after lighting another cigarette. “Their eyes are burned out at birth to help ‘em develop their other senses. Helps ‘em become better hunters.”
Willem began to vomit.
Lawson rested a big hand on Cobe’s shoulder. “Take yer brother back to the fire and get him settled. I’ll drag this thing a ways off.”
“Our Ma…our Pa…they’re still dead ‘cause of you.”
“Yeah. Still. What’s yer point?”
Cobe had nothing more to say. He watched the lawman drag the howler into the dark by its ankle. He helped his gagging brother the other way towards the flames.
Willem sat and drank more of the warm water. “Not so sure I wanna keep running from Burn,” he gasped. “Maybe it would be better if we took our chances with Lode. I don’t think I can do this.”
“We don’t have a choice no more. The lawman’s got us and we gotta do what he says and go where he goes.”
“We don’t got to,” Willem whispered as he wiped strings of puke from his chin. “We can run back once he’s sleeping. We could bash his head in with a rock.”
Another howl sounded in the night.
Lawson appeared out of the shadows, his revolver drawn once again. “More out there,” he whispered. He ran to Dust and pulled his rifle free from a holster that was strapped to the ugly horse’s side. “I’d think twice before beating my head in with a rock. You’re lucky you made it this far on yer own. Turning back now, without me, would be a tragic thing.”
He returned to the fire and dropped the revolver in Willem’s lap. Willem gasped at the cold weight resting between his legs.
“Either pick it up and start defending yourself, or hand it to yer brother and keep yer mouth shut.”
Cobe reached down and made the choice for him. He lifted the massive gun in both hands and pointed the barrel end out into the dark.
Lawson was on one knee, his rifle aimed in the same direction. “You’re gonna shoot the ground twelve feet in front of you. Lift the barrel up and keep a good grip. Move yer face to the side. Wouldn’t want it to kick back and bust yer nose.”
Cobe had a thousand more questions. He didn’t get the chance to ask one. Something big and white was moving towards them. It started to make a high-pitched crying sound. Cobe clenched his eyes shut and turned his head. He pulled the trigger.
Cobe’s ears were buzzing. Something or someone was yelling at him. He pulled the trigger again. A big hand gripped his wrist and forced the gun down.
“Quit shooting!” Lawson yelled. “It ain’t no howler.”
The gun fell from his fingers, and the lawman slipped it into the holster at his side. The air smelled funny and Cobe’s ears were still ringing.
A man emerged out of the dark, crawling along on his knees. His hands were held high above his head. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
The lawman chuckled. It sounded like glass being crushed deep in his chest. “How many times you got to be told in one day, Trot? Pull up yer gawdamn pants.”
Chapter 7
2099
2,655 meters underground
253 kilometers northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba
Lothair was thinking about a boy named Samuel he had frozen in 1944. He pictured the fat ten-year-old’s buttocks sliced and frying in a skillet, the grease bubbling and popping away in a mix of minced onions and garlic. Lothair had imagined eating the boy’s rear-end for two years straight. Lothair never slept. He never thirsted for water, but his stomach continued to rumble, like a distant storm on the horizon that never moved. The gnawing hunger never went away.
Lothair wasn’t insane. The freezing process had worked. Something inside his body had changed. He reasoned a foreign agent had been introduced into his DNA sometime during the period he first went under to the moment he awoke twenty-nine years ago. Some brilliant mind—or a team of brilliant minds—had discovered the method to bring a frozen human being back to life. They may have even cracked the cancer code, and started replacing old, diseased hearts with new, four-chambered mechanical organs.
If so, it didn’t answer the question of why Lothair was still lying in his freeze tube. If he could awake into blackness and think of eating children for decades on end, then surely the tumor in his brain was no longer an issue.
Something rumbled, and Lothair felt the cylinder tremble. That wasn’t his stomach. A minute later, he felt the sensation again—the cushioned bed formatted to the underside of his cylinder vibrated.
An incident has occurred above.
It would give himself something else to think about for the next few years besides eating children. The clock continued to click away in his brain. Twenty-eight years, ten months, two weeks, three days, fourteen minutes, and thirty-one seconds.
Thirty-two…
Thirty-three…
Thirty-four…
Chapter 8
Willem glanced back over his shoulder more than once as they headed west. The forested hills were still there but fading fast. Behind those hills, and another full day’s walk, was Burn—the town he’d been born and raised in. Until yesterday morning, Willem had never ventured more than a quarter-mile from the safety of its walls.
“I’d keep my eyes trained ahead if I were you,” Cobe suggested. “The lawman says we ain’t going back to Burn any time soon.”
“Just taking a few last looks,” Willem answered, “in case we don’t ever go back.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’ll be back...someday.”
Ahead of the boys, Lawson rode Dust. The big horse ambled along, kicking up dirt for them to chew on. Trot sat awkwardly behind the lawman, his arms clutched around Lawson’s waist. Willem shook his head. “Not much worth looking at ahead, unless you like staring at Trot’s dirty old ass crack.”
Cobe smiled. “Last night, I thought we were done for. The lawman fed us and kept us safe. Lucky for us, he decided to keep heading west.” He still didn’t like, or particularly trust, the lawman, but facts were facts.
“But why? Why would Burn’s only law-keeper up and leave? What’s to stop him from killing us all, brutal-like, and headin’ back? Trot? You think that braindumb’s gonna rescue us?”
Lawson’s reply made the one-armed boy jump. “I could’ve let the howler eat you and yer brother. I could’ve shot you while you slept. I could tell Dust to kick yer head in right now, and leave you to rot. There’s a thousand easy ways to kill a little shit like you. So why don’t you quit thinkin’ what a treacherous, mean, son of a bitch I am and keep yer mouth shut.”
Willem looked to his brother and Cobe shrugged.
Trot cleared his throat and changed the subject. “No one saw me leave Burn. I snuck out of town right after you rode out.” He twisted around on Dust’s rump and grinned at the boys. “I followed the horse tracks. I can track real good!”
“Why did you leave Burn?” Lawson rumbled. “You heard what Lode said. Yer stupidity makes you one of the safest folks in town.”
“Sick of being teased. Sick of people slapping and kicking me. I got pride too, you know…not much, but I got some.”
“Pride will get you killed. Being stupid ain’t such a bad thing.”
“Just got sick of it is all,” Trot muttered.
They rode and walked for another hour. They hadn’t seen the sun, but it was wicked hot. The clouds, still heavy and gray, had a way of trapping the heat close to the ground. The land was pretty much the same blasted scape Cobe and Willem were used to seeing, growing up in Burn. Cobe kicked at the dirt in frustration. Where had he hoped to go? What would they have found on their own?
As if sensing his thoughts, Lawson brought Dust to a stop and climbed down. He handed his leather water canteen to Cobe and helped Trot down next. “You had the right idea,” he said to Cobe, as the boy handed the container off to his brother, “leavin’ Burn like you did. The folks there, and in Rudd, have no clue w
hat things are like further west, once you get past them first set of hills.” He settled against a big rock and beat the dust from his hat against one leg. “There’s other towns…some bigger than Burn…most smaller. Things are worse there. They don’t even got a river to plant crops by. Whatever they can seed grows on spit and hope.”
Cobe sat in the dirt and Willem joined him. The boys remained silent and listened to the lawman tell them what the world was like. Trot stroked Dust’s coarse hair, watching and listening as well.
“There’s what you might call ‘remnants’ of an older town beyond them other shit holes. No one lives there anymore, but something tells me you could. It ain’t like the old days, when freaks and howlers claimed everything. This town is so old it ain’t got a name no more. But it was big at one time—maybe bigger than all the land between Burn and Rudd put together.”
Willem made a noise of disbelief with his lips that sounded like a fart.
“Ain’t no town that big,” Cobe said. “There never was that many people in the whole world that could’ve filled it.”
Lawson shrugged. “Not so sure about that. You put all the people, howlers, and rollers in one place at the same time. Who knows, maybe it would’ve been enough.”
“Howlers and rollers ain’t people,” Willem said. “They don’t live together.”
“Not anymore. But from what I’ve seen, I get the impression howlers and rollers—and all them other freaks you kids don’t know nothin’ about—may have been more like us. I suspect we all lived together in these bigger towns. They were called cities back then.”
“Sitties?” Trot left Dust and shuffled to stand in front of the lawman. His one hand was twisted about his belt-rope, tugging up, perhaps, a little too hard. The other hand was scratching his sweaty forehead. “Did no one work? Is sitting all they did?”
“Spelled different. Not the same meaning.”
Trot looked more confused than ever.
“Never mind.” Lawson pushed away from his rock and scooped Willem up in one smooth move. He placed the squirming boy on Dust’s back and turned to Cobe. “We best keep moving. That’ll be tough, however, if the two of you drop from exhaustion. Get on up behind yer brother. ‘Ol Dust’ll do the rest.”
Cobe had never sat atop any animal in his life. Willem was white and frozen stiff—too terrified to slip off the horse even if he wanted. “Reckon I’ll just keep using my feet.”
“Suit yerself.” Lawson smacked Dust’s backend lightly and the one-eyed horse started moving west again. Lawson walked a few feet behind. Trot trotted to catch up and fell in a few paces behind the lawman.
“Ain’t you going to sit up there with him?” Cobe called out. Lawson remained silent. Cobe watched his brother sitting on the horse—his back stiff and leaning forward. His one hand was buried in black mane, hanging on for dear life. After a few moments, Cobe swore under his breath and set after them. “You’ll have to help me up,” he said.
The lawman made a snorting noise and held his hand out—palm up and three feet from the ground—next to his horse. Cobe gave him a wondering look. “Use my hand like a step and hoist yerself up.”
Cobe swung up behind his brother easily enough. He was tempted to jump right back down and drag Willem with him when he felt the strength of the beast under him. The thing was a mass of moving muscle and warm flesh. Lawson grinned up at him. It looked as if he was a hundred feet below Cobe, instead of a mere two or three. The fear lessened with his urge to kick Lawson’s teeth out and wipe the smile from the man’s face.
“You’ll get used to Dust in a minute or two, both of you,” he said, lightly smacking the belly between Willem and Cobe’s legs. “Just try not acting fidgety and such. He don’t care for nervous riders.”
Willem spoke without taking his eyes off the horse’s mane. “Easy for you to say.”
Cobe wrapped his arms around his brother’s waist and dug the sides of his heels into Dust as gently as he could, until he felt somewhat sure he wasn’t going to slide off. He started breathing again.
The clouds continued to swim low over their heads the rest of the afternoon. They rotated in deep, gray pockets, kicking up dust devils the slow travelers had to either side-skirt or work straight through. They came across a stream of running water in the basin of a low valley, but Lawson said it wasn’t safe to drink from. Cobe wasn’t sure he would’ve touched it, even if the lawman had deemed it safe. The water from the river next to Burn always looked brownish-gray, but this slow-trickle had a purple hint to it. Fortunately, there were still three heavy hide flasks filled with water, strapped over Dust’s back. Cobe rubbed one with his heel and felt comforted; they wouldn’t go thirsty for some time.
But how long would sometime be?
They made camp at the edge of a rocky cliff as the sun bled into the west. Lawson said there would be no fire that night. Trot was watching some distant activity down on the flat northern plains. Willem sat next to him, his skinny legs dangling precariously over the cliff’s edge. “Whatcha lookin’ at?”
Trot tugged nervously on his rope belt and settled in closer to the boy. “Them black spots down there. You see them moving back and forth?”
Willem squinted and tried to focus his vision in the gathering gloom. He saw them—little black dots blowing across the gray earth, some moving in packs, others moving in pairs, and some speeding off alone in different directions. It reminded him of a game he had seen the men of Burn play in the dirt streets, tossing little round stones back and forth. The game was called murbles. “They people?”
“People don’t move that fast,” Trot answered.
Willem called his brother over. Lawson joined them and warned the smaller boy to keep his voice down. “Why you think I’m not allowin’ any fire tonight?” He pointed with his chin towards the black dots moving in the north. “Rollers got good eyesight…their sense of smell ain’t that bad either.”
Trot shuttered. “Rollers? Those little black things are rollers?”
“Yeah, them little black things are rollers. They ain’t that little close up though. We’re a good two miles from ‘em…should be safe for the night, so long as we keep the noise and movement down.”
Trot crawled away from the cliff on all fours, back towards the snoozing Dust. Cobe and Willem joined him a few minutes later when the gathering dusk made it too difficult to observe the creatures any longer.
“Maybe I should’ve stayed put in Burn,” Trot said. “I was teased and bullied, but my life was never in any danger.” He thought about Lode and remembered the sting of his sword blade on his buttocks. “Well, not in any real danger.”
Lawson returned to them, chewing on a blade of dead grass instead of smoking one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. “Then why the hell did you follow me out here?”
“You asked me that this morning.”
“Then give me a better answer.”
Trot didn’t respond right away. He tried to recall a time when he was happy living in Burn. His jerking walk and simple mind had always made him a target for ridicule. His parents—Trot could no longer remember what they looked like—had died from some disease when he was a child. He couldn’t picture their faces, but he still had nightmares of the horrible red sores that covered their bodies, the bleeding clusters of pustules spreading out from their armpits and down from their ears. Some folks told Trot the sickness that had taken his parents affected him as well. They said it was what made him dumb. Trot couldn’t ever remember being smart, so he took their word for it. He had listened to and obeyed every word the folks in Burn had said in the thirty or so years following—all the good that did him. No one had taken him in. No one fed him when he was a little boy after his parents died. Trot had managed on his own, eating scraps, drinking from puddles that tasted more like piss than water, and sleeping in whatever dry bit of back alley he could find.
He looked up at Lawson and smiled his big, toothy grin. “You say hello to me sometimes. You tip that nice hat at me a
nd ask me how my day is. No one else does that.”
Lawson shook his head. “Fuck. Had I known being cordial meant I’d have to babysit you someday, I probably wouldn’t have given you the time of day.” He lay down on the dirt, away from the other three, and went to sleep.
The rollers were gone the next morning. Trot took up residence again behind Lawson on Dust’s back. Cobe and Willem picked their way along a stony trail, behind the horse riders, that led down into the northern plains.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to stick to the cliffs up top?” Cobe asked.
“Safer maybe, but a hell of a lot longer,” Lawson called back.
“Longer to where?”
“Big Hole.”
Big Hole. What the hell does that mean? The lawman seemed more grim than usual this morning, so Cobe dropped the subject. They ventured further out into the flat land. Willem—afraid the rollers might reappear—asked if he could ride atop Dust, said he hadn’t slept well, that he was still tired. Cobe knew well-enough what was going on inside his brother’s head, and figured Lawson suspected the same. The lawman grunted, slipped off the horse’s back, and set Willem in his place.
“There’s another river running west about four miles north of here.” Lawson rolled a cigarette as he walked and talked. “It ain’t fit to drink from either, but we can follow it all the way to where we’re headed. Rollers tend to stay clear of water, so we should be safer once we get there.”
They came upon the first set of roller tracks. Cobe placed his foot in a depression of cracked dirt where a large knuckled hand had settled. He could have stood in it with both feet and still had plenty of room. The ground was hard, the imprint over an inch deep. The thing was damn big, Cobe realized. A lot bigger than they had appeared last night from a couple miles away.