by Kris Holt
'Give them the money or shoot them,' Di Vio said. 'I don't care which. Just get it done before we die of old age.'
Jensen smiled unpleasantly. 'You heard the man. Let's take a little walk!'
His men fell in behind us and began looting the crate that Bennett and his brothers had filled before we arrived. Jensen and a couple of his underlings rolled along behind us and instructed us to walk out toward the ridge that Jayci had been using as cover when she'd been sharpshooting earlier.
Jayci sighed. 'There goes my plan to rule the Sands.'
'Yeah, well, I'm just concerned that we get out of this alive.'
She gave me a small smile, and her eyes were luminous. 'Something'll come along. Something always does.'
'I guess I want something a bit more certain than that,' I said.
'Oh, come on. What are you now, Mr Man-With-A-Plan? Let it flow, boy. Have a little faith!' I was about to argue with her about how I was the religious one and could tell her some things about faith, but she slipped her hand into mind as we were walking, and suddenly, with her warmth, all words escaped me.
I was only a little disappointed when I noticed her holding Gregor's hand on the other side.
Still, a little is something.
Jensen was slow-riding a massive Goldwing over the firm sand, Betsy strapped over his back. His boys were carrying the T-shaped pistols I'd seen in town before. They were piloting trikes built for three, with all of the heavy inertia you got with those things. Before we reached the ridge, the sun started to peer over the horizon. I popped a candy jack and glanced back at the girl. Jayci's face was set now, going to that place where you needed the focus, where focus was all that there was.
'Got one of those for me?' she whispered. I placed one on the tip of her tongue, brushed my fingers over her cracked lips. Wondered if she noticed. Wondered if she cared.
When we reached the ridge, Jensen turned his bike around. In the distance, the rest of his boss's cavalcade was already moving on in the direction of Hole Town. We'd been dust motes in Di Vio's universe, brushed away with the same sort of casual disregard.
What I hadn't expected was for Jensen to hand over a pouch that was weighed down with enough chits to damn near double my weight.
'What's this?' I said.
'Payment for the guns we're taking. Mr Di Vio said payment or shoot you. I'm assuming you prefer this arrangement to the alternative?'
'Damn right,' Jayci said, taking the pouch out of my hands with practised ease and slipping it under her coat.
'Is Bennett still alive?' Jensen said.
'He is, and one of his brothers. We tied 'em up in the house. The others got a little crazy.'
He nodded. 'That'll happen. We'll take them into town with us, find somewhere to drop them off. My boys here will take you north, as far as you want to go. I suggest out of the Sands altogether. A man'll make a better fortune up where things are still civilised.'
'And what's to stop your boys shooting us and stealing our chits the minute you turn your back?'
'You tell me, son. Are you really as good as you think you are?' Jensen grinned, just one more tear in a face already shredded. The faces of his underlings were mostly hidden by cloth, but they didn't exactly look like moral souls.
'What are you planning when you get to Hole Town?' I asked. In this poor world, a man shouldn't get too sentimental about the place he lives but Hole Town, with Preacher Man and the Fallen Cross and memories of my mom, well, it was everything I knew, and the thought of that falling to a hostile army bothered me more than the thought that I was shortly going to die.
Jensen said, 'We have a proposition for them that they can't refuse. Don't worry, the sun will be rising here for a while yet. And if you take my advice, you'll be taking shelter from it before it does. From the looks of things, it's gonna be a long, hot day.'
He roared off, throwing up a thin dust trail that soon faded into the wider cloud that travelled around Di Vio's convoy. I felt sweat dripping down my arms. As he disappeared into the yellow void, I thought to myself, hot is right.
'Phoenix,' Jayci said.
When I looked around, Jensen's men were pointing their pistols at me. All considered, it was a good time for the candy jack to kick in. The sun was up for real now, and like the girl said, something always comes along.
Chapter 18 – A Dim Bulb Brightens
It was going to be a long, hot day.
Assuming that is, we survived the dawn.
There wasn't even time for a prayer. Jayci had their number; girl had been paying attention all the way, and her candy jack stole a march on my own. Jensen's first man took a jaw-breaking punch full on, and the second got a knee in the crotch. He must have had some steel in his breeches, because he was still upright when Gregor came roaring in like a steam train and flattened him out with a body slam.
I walked over to Broken Jaw and pulled him upright. Maybe he should have stayed down, played dead, but he had some fight left too. In a flash, I had a palm in my face and a finger in my eye, and all I could do was hold onto his other wrist so the all-important barrel of his automatic pistol didn't swing my way.
'Gregor!' I called. Our engineer was still flailing at the man he was sitting on. 'Little help?'
Jayci looked around for a moment, and then relaxed. 'Oh, it's okay, you're doin' fine.'
I punched my new friend twice, but he was a chigger and there was no way he was letting go.
'He's...more persistent than I was banking on,' I called.
Jayci recovered her hat and stood up at a leisurely pace. 'Hang in there. You ain't dead yet.'
The pistol lurched, gaining an inch and losing it again. Sweaty fingers pressed down on sweaty fingers, and the barrel discharged into air.
'Seriously now,' I said. Broken Jaw had a height advantage, and was starting to climb up my shoulder.
'Be there in five.' Jayci stopped to brush sand out of her bust.
Enough of this shit. I kicked the legs out from under Broken Jaw and flipped him over onto the sand with the same movement. The gun spiralled away, and with it, any hope that he had of winning the fight. He offered his palms in surrender, which was a nice touch, and meant that I knocked him out with one punch rather than making a morning of it.
There was a moment to catch breath, make some peace. When Jayci's impish smile appeared in my field of vision, she looked impeccably groomed for someone who'd spent a night fighting bads in the desert.
'We done here?' she asked.
'Yeah, no thanks to you.'
'Now what?' Gregor said.
Jayci rolled down her top the tiniest fraction of an inch for my benefit, which was enough that I could see the chit pouch resting against her breast. 'Now nothing,' she said with a wink in my direction. 'We're rich. We have a ride. We don't need anything else now.'
'Cool your jets. We might have money and a ride, but our freaky friends are riding to Hole Town to do who knows what.'
Jayci wasn't listening. She spun between Gregor and I, dancing to music in her head.
'Jayci,' I said.
'First,' the girl whispered, to nobody in particular, 'I'm going to get me a whole new wardrobe. Something with actual lace, something that looks pretty. And then I'm going to have a bath. I'm gonna buy enough water that I can sink completely under the surface.'
'Jayci.'
'And then...a custom set of wheels. And a rifle the length of two men. I won't even need to be in the same county when I'm taking bads down.'
'Jayci,' Gregor said. She spun round to face him.
'Hmm?'
'What are we going to do?'
'Well,' she replied, 'you heard that asshole. Go north, he said, where it's civilised. Travel out of these Sands. There's enough money here to live on for years. Maybe forever, who knows? Either way, it's a new adventure.'
'That doesn't help us with the big problem,' Gregor said, scratching his shoulders with his big, beefy arms.
Girl rolled her eyes. 'Which i
s what?'
'The heat. It's getting hotter, every day. The perihelion's coming.'
'All the more reason for us not to stand here all day and argue.'
I was getting a bit pissed just now. The two of them were talking like I wasn't there.
'You're both missing the real problem,' I said. The two of them turned to me like they were noticing me for the first time.
'What,' I said, 'are we going to do about Hole Town?'
'The place is a rat-hole,' Jayci said. 'That's probably where the name comes from. Why do you even care?'
'Uh, my mother? You forget about her?'
Jayci shifted her hat down low on her brow so she could stare at me without the rising sun blinding her. 'Someone needs to forget about her, I reckon.'
'Says you.'
'She's gone! Ten years gone. To an oasis in the North. Get that? The North!'
'Nice try,' I said. 'But I know the oasis is a myth, remember.'
'Are you so sure?' Jayci said. Her voice was like velvet, and for a moment, I remembered what Orie Boggs had said. Cleft Rock, a hundred miles out...
'There's an easy way to sort this,' Gregor said. 'We vote which way to go.'
'What?' Jayci practically screeched. 'What in hell kind of shit are you talking? This ain't no goddamn democracy.'
Gregor looked genuinely hurt. 'I thought we were a posse. That we'd stick together.'
'Are you serious?' Jayci paced, throwing up sand as she did so. 'You actually want to go after a man with an army at his disposal?'
'It's my town,' I said. 'I'm not going to let him just shoot the place up.'
'He has. An army.'
'You heard me. My vote is back.'
Jayci tipped her chin upwards and looked at the sky. 'Fuck. Fuck. Okay. I vote north. Gregor. It's up to you.'
Gregor looked like a man who'd been asked to drown a puppy. He took ages over the decision, and by the time he opened his mouth, I could feel the sun burning the back of my neck.
'Back.'
'Fuck!' Jayci kicked a curtain of sand that fell across Gregor's arm and half-turned back, but rather than respond, he shrank away.
'I'm sorry, Jayci.'
'Why the fuck? Why would you even want to go back? Are you looking for a fight with Di Vio? Is this some macho male bullshit that I have to end here and now?'
Gregor shook his head. 'This isn't about a fight. The perihelion is real. No, don't argue. I know what I've seen. Now, Nate Di Vio runs the Silver Sea. He spends his whole life looking at the sun, right? If I can see that there's a problem, believe me, he's seen it too. He has more money than any man could spend. He could live a palatial life north of the Sands, but instead he's here. That says something to me.'
Jayci shook her head. 'I don't care why he's here and I don't care about your damn perihelion! With the money we have here, we could buy enough water-'
'Water,' Gregor said, staring into the middle distance.
'What now?'
'It's the water,' Gregor said.
'He can buy all the water he wants!'
'Right now he can. But when the world is dying, no-one will trade water for money. At that point, his resources are useless. He needs supplies and he needs somewhere to hide, out of the light, to wait it out until the perihelion subsides.'
'Like the cave network where Hole Town stores its water,' I said. Gregor nodded.
For the first time, Jayci glanced at me and I saw something like doubt in her eyes. Jensen had said that they were going to make Hole Town an offer that they couldn't refuse. If Gregor was right, it was an offer that would cost them everything.
We had nothing to add, and Gregor knew it. He dragged the unconscious soldiers into shade and then set off in the direction of the trikes. 'I'll bring the transport round.'
When he'd moved out of earshot, Jayci glared at me. 'I'm carrying enough money right now to live comfortably for the rest of my natural life, or entirely too comfortably for six extremely entertaining months. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't leave you two here to deal with your own damn problems.'
'Your love for Gregor? Your love for me?' If it was possible, her expression grew even more sour. 'For real. If Gregor is right, we have to stop Nate Di Vio before he takes control of Hole Town. This could be the end of the world we're talking about. First Thessalonians. The goddamn Bible! If this shit is really happening, we want to be on that ride!'
Jayci reached up and took my face in her hands. 'My sweet, dumb friend, the world is not gonna come to an end. But the minute that Captain Jensen or one of his army of the righteous sees you, he's gonna send you back to God via the direct route.'
'Not,' I said, 'if I see him first.'
'So basically I have to come along to save you from yourself.'
'It's what you do best,' I said. I swear she nearly smiled.
I patted Jayci's shoulders and she let go of my cheeks just as Gregor rolled up on the trike. Jayci loosened her top, adjusted her hat and I could see the sweat beading on her brow.
'Let's get out of the sun,' she said.
It was set to be a long, hot day indeed. And it was getting longer and hotter all the time.
Chapter 19 – Two Idiots Under God
By the time we rolled back into the settlement, people were waking up to another day in Hole Town. Another day of yelling, praying, smoking, cursing, fighting, mooching, panhandling and generally adding color to what the desert already put there.
In the worker districts, sad-faced boys with dark eyes and dark skin huddled together in hacienda doorways. Workers sweated as they shifted boxes of brown fruit and copper ore. Gangmasters patrolled the corners of their neighborhoods, faces inscrutable, flashing subtle hand signals to one another. Beaded curtains appeared in bordello archways, moving with the hot breeze to reveal cool darkness behind. Trike couriers and carts rolled through the dirt. As the sky grew ever more yellow and shadows got shorter, vendors appeared with hot braziers. It was bird meat on the skillet, powered by gas from the manure. What was left over was sold to dustbowl farmers like Orie Boggs, who carted it out to the fields to eke what little they could get from the soil.
What you're probably getting from a city powered by chicken shit is the smell. It got everywhere, in your clothes, your hair, your food. After a while you noticed it only when it wasn't there, and that was your cue to ask yourself if you'd wandered too far from home.
Above it all like a promise of salvation waiting, the Fallen Cross stood at the end of the canyon. As it had been throughout my living memory, the end of the staff and the edge of the crossbar were both resting in the dust. A carrion bird was perched on the tip.
I hadn't been gone no more than a few hours and I was missing the place already.
'I should go back home,' Gregor said. 'I want to rest, top up my water and check my instruments.'
'Can you pick a few bits up for me when you're there, please?' Jayci gave him a list and then turned to me. 'I'm going down the station to check out how things are going down there. You want to come with?'
'Sure thing.'
When we got to the station, the generator that had been set up to light up the scene at night had gone, but the tape sealing off the area remained. At best, passers-by cocked an eye to the shattered building and moved on quickly. It was easy to see why. Under the looming verandah where I'd faced down a gunman only a handful of hours ago, a pair of men in sunglasses and loose grey jackets were guarding the premises. Sitting across from one another, each had an automatic rifle set across his chest in a three-point sling.
'This ain't looking like good news,' Jayci said.
'I'm not seeing any military uniforms.'
'Reckon the real soldiers got called back to guard the water. Would you look at the gee-tar straps them boys got on? When I was little, I used my MawMaw's garter belt for that.'
'They're big guns.'
'MawMaw was a big girl.'
Gregor turned up a few minutes later with fresh water supplies and a canva
s bag. Jayci reached into it and pulled a few things out. First was a white sheet, which she folded into triangles within triangles before wrapping it carefully around her scalp and chin.
'Help me get my hair inside this thing.'
I folded up her braids, stacking them under the sheet until only her face could be seen. 'Why do you even grow your hair this long, anyhow?'