by Kris Holt
Ignore the pain, keep moving forward and you might just live.
'Which way?'
Jayci was flying beneath the clouds and her voice came out as a furious whisper. She was pulling me along like a steer dragging a plough, but she didn't have muscles for me and Gregor both. A liability in a spot this tight, Gregor blundered into the back of a farm girl, sending her sprawling.
'Which way, goddamnit?'
This time she did shout to make herself heard over the apologies and the anger, and her words dragged me along better than she could have done with strength alone. My mind was torn between Jensen, whose hand I was expecting to land on my shoulder any second, lawman-style, and the blonde girl who I'd seen once and spoken not one word to, and yet shared...something.
'Godsake Phoenix, help me out here!'
'Duck low,' I said, and she let go of my sleeve and glared at me when she realised I was back with her. Gun in hand, I was myself again. 'Aim back the way we came in. That's where the crowds are. We can hide there.'
Bowed forward, like a tree in the wind, we were able to sneak past one of Di Vio's patrols in the confusion. Turning away from the flow, I looked around for Jensen, but he was lost somewhere behind us. Anyway, even if I could see him, there'd be too many people for me to take a pop at him. You're gonna shoot at the Devil, you don't wanna miss.
We bore left, jostled through crowds of people who bitched at the way we shoved them aside and then went dead quiet when they saw the guns in our hands. We were doing okay until the mouth of the canyon came into sight. There was a high pitched whistle behind us, someone raising the alarm, and instantly four more of Di Vio's armed militia spread out as a band across the exit. The residents of Hole Town filtered through the gaps, suspicious but unsure what had changed.
Jayci inclined her head towards me. 'Any bright ideas?'
I looked down at my gun. 'No good ones. I've got a few shots, but if we start a fight in this crowd, innocent people are going to die.'
'We should run,' Gregor said, stumbling around behind us.
'There's troops to the front and Di Vio's bodyguards coming up behind.'
'Pressure,' Gregor replied.
'What?' Jayci said.
'Pressure. The sum total of the kinetic energies of a substance contained within a vessel.'
'This needs to go somewhere quickly,' I warned. The soldiers at the mouth of the canyon hadn't seen us yet, but they were radioed up, walking our way, and you can be sure that they knew what they were looking for.
'When you apply pressure to an object, it transfers momentum,' Gregor explained. 'The pressure inside the vessel seeks to normalise with the external pressure through the most direct route possible.'
'What are you saying?'
'If we can't go forward or back, we go sideways.'
'Side passages? Even if there were any, they're only going to lead away from the city out into the desert.'
Gregor shrugged. 'I'm an ideas man. This is what I have.'
I could hear Jensen bellowing orders over the crowd. 'Any idea is better than none. We find a passage, escape first. We can double back into town later on.'
Jayci made for the far wall; Gregor and I went near. I could hear him burbling, see the backlit sweat dripping off him as we moved in opposite directions. I was the only one that went against the flow of people, squeezing my way along the walls. It was slow, and all I could see was row after row of vacant eyes coming towards me. Padre Reyes had never told me what hell looked like, but I'm willing to bet it was like that crowd, foreign and forceful, marching on forever.
Every step took three steps worth of effort to fight for, and I'd reached a spot that looked half-promising when one of the grey jackets rolled up alongside me.
'Captain Jensen,' he yelled over his shoulder, 'I've got one of them here!'
He got one for sure, full in the face, and he dropped like wet sand. As he went down, there was an explosion in the distance that tore a chunk of the rock out of the canyon wall next to my head, and then the world went crazy, all screaming and yelling and falling. I popped a candy jack and turned away towards Gregor, hopping over, past or through the people in the way. I was done with home town solidarity now.
I'd covered half the distance when I heard Jayci calling both of us.
'Here! Over here!'
I elbowed someone aside and saw the girl ducking next to a lip in the rock. The surface above it was solid, something I confirmed when I slapped my palm into it.
'This is no good!'
Gregor appeared to my left, and then there was another crack and a whine as a rifle round soared past my right shoulder and gouged the wall, leaving an opening that looked like a staring eye.
'Down! In!' Jayci tore the bag off Gregor's back and slapped him so hard on the shoulder that she knocked him to his knees. His chunky ass disappeared into an unseen cleft beneath the lip and only then did I understand.
Jayci threw the bag to me, and then she was gone too, following the big man and his bright idea. I took one last look behind before I followed. Jensen's scarred face tore through the screaming crowd, and then he saw me and sneered. Each of us could have taken a shot at the other, but neither of us did.
'You keep on running, boy. You're doing me proud. If you go in there and bury yourself, it saves me a job.'
I was all out of pithy comebacks. For all I knew, the space under that rock might be fifteen feet deep, and then soon I'd becoming out backwards, trussed up like a turkey at Thanksgiving. Better to save my words for when I had some way to back them up. I gritted my teeth and followed the others.
Ten seconds into perfect darkness and sound ceased to have any meaning. The outside died away and the space filled with my own echo, disorienting me. There was just my breath and my knees shuffling urgently through the dust, splayed fingers reaching out to avoid holes or unpleasant surprises. When I called for Jayci and for Gregor, the closeness of the walls deadened my voice so much that I could barely hear it myself. I knew they had to be still going forward because I hadn't run into the back of them, but I could no longer tell whether I was headed in a straight line. In no time at all, my shoulders were pressing on the walls, and I got the sensation that I was digging my own grave. Still, there was no way to go back, or I would have been doing that for certain.
Eventually the rock loosened around me, and then opened outright into empty space. My fingers pressed through the rough sand, touching crevices and spars. The skin on my palms was already grazed from the progress I was making. Keep moving, keep moving forward.
Ignore the pain, and you might just live.
Panic growing in my heart, I leaned into the night and the air began to get cooler, like I was coming into a wider passage or getting close to water. If I overreached in my flight, I might tip over a ledge and find myself drowning in an underground pool. What kind of hero drowns in a desert? Not one who's going to be remembered, or one who'd want to be.
The cool breeze grew suddenly in strength, and then, like that fever dream from earlier, the light bled in from the edges and formed a silent glowing dot in the distance. I knew it couldn't be daylight, because darkness had already fallen, but I had no idea what else it could be. I headed towards it, and at the same time it seemed like it headed towards me. When the two of us met, the glare enveloped me, like I got swallowed by a frozen sun, and then I was falling through clouds, through empty space, through a blazing void, finally landing in a sand dune at the bottom of an immense bowl-shaped depression in the Sands.
I sat upright, brushed off my cassock and turned to see a familiar face. Impeccably dressed in the same white shirt and long coat as before, Piano Man sat before his keyboard and spread his fingers across the keys. Without pausing for the merest second, he raised an eyebrow and grinned at me.
'Ah, Phoenix. Welcome back!'
Chapter 22 – Piano Man (Reprise)
Now that he had my attention, Piano Man led with 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' once more.
'I met
a guy with just one eye and fartin' was his humour, he smelled as bad as Satan's dad and sounded like a tuba!' He spent the next whole minute laughing while I kissed ground and ached.
Just another crazy day in the Sands. A headlong flight into limbo that ended up with me trapped in an underground tunnel and falling through space until I landed once more on the other side of reality. I began to wonder if I was suffering a reaction to the Candy Jacks. You weren't supposed to take so many back-to-back. Or maybe just lately, I'd had one too many blows to the head. Perhaps Waylon Boggs had caught me clean a while ago and everything since had just been a fever dream. Somehow, another kick to my crotch seemed preferable to another discussion with a lunatic.
Piano Man nodded down towards my cassock and the cross hanging round my neck on its string of beads. 'I see you've taken another step closer to the Almighty. All considered, I find that a curious decision when you're trying everything you can to avoid meeting Him in person.'
'I'm sure He understands my position,' I replied cheerfully. 'Everything in good time.'
'A good time is the one thing you definitely don't have in your future.'
'Oh yeah, more tales from the crystal 8-ball. That's just what I need right now.'
He glanced at me as he played. 'You know, you'd think with everything that's happened so far, you might actually be inclined to trust me a bit. Instead, you come barging in here, dressed up all holy and shooting your mouth off like a dumbass. I can't help thinking I deserve better. If it weren't for me, you'd have died in Bennett Brown's farmhouse.'
Somehow, the passage of time had blurred that memory and I couldn't recall where my mind was when I'd fired through that curtain. For all I could say, I might have made my own mind up what to do, and I couldn't be sure that anything we'd discussed before had played a part in that decision.
'When you're done with your State of the Union...'
He glared. 'Oh, don't go thinking you're funny, now.'
'What you deserve, what I deserve. Ain't none of that stuff matters,' I said. 'We all get what we get, and we all get the same in the end. Everyone gotta die. It's just about the when and where.'
'What you don't seem to realize is that when and where are malleable concepts.'
'Them's big words,' I said, laying back down on the warm sand and staring up at the yellow sky above. Wisps of cloud moved around slowly, hinting at a wind somewhere up in the heavens that could descend at any time. The air was warm, and there were worse places a man could lie than where he fell. I kind of felt like if I stayed perfectly still, time itself would stop and day here might never turn to night.
Piano Man picked out a slow, careful melody and carried on playing through feel even when he looked around again. 'Seems to me like maybe you're suffering some kind of existential crisis. That's okay, I get it. This desert here is a weird place. It plays with the mind, and you've been under a lot of stress lately.'
'They done away with us,' I said.
'No more bounty hunters, huh.'
'Gregor thinks the world is heating up. He thinks that soon, it's gonna lead to catastrophe.'
'That's tough, for sure.'
'And I'm still no closer,' I said, closing my eyes and spreading my arms, 'to finding out what happened to my mom.'
Piano Man's tune quickened briefly and then stopped abruptly.
'Am I dreaming?' I asked.
Five more seconds passed peacefully, and then my world exploded in pain. I sat bolt upright, wincing and curling in on myself, my hands closing around the fist-sized rock that had hit me full in the stomach.
'What the fuck?!'
Piano Man's glowing tip jar was resting next to the piano on a neat cairn of stones. It balanced improbably above a gap in the pile that was exactly the size of the rock I was holding. The man himself was staring at me, his coal-black pupils shrinking and expanding furiously within his glowing white irises.
'Phoenix, get your tired, lily-livered, liberal ass out of the dirt and start acting like a man. Your town has fallen to the Yankees, your loved ones are in danger and you're staring at the sky like it's made of goddamn treacle. Now, I can handle you taking a moment when things get tough, but the minute you start making sand angels and talking about dreams, then we gotta have words. You get me?'
'Fuck you.' I pitched the rock back at him. He ducked at just the right moment for it to pass over his head and came back up with that same stupid, ugly lunatic grin that I knew from before.
'There we go, that's the boy! There's that fire. Now, you save that, you're gonna need it. You got a real battle coming up.'
'A battle with Jensen?'
'Damn straight.' Piano Man thumped at the ivories, portending apocalypse. 'And time, as they say, is of the essence. After you came here, your friends headed back home to pack up. They're waiting for you there right now. You're on the clock though, because Jensen's coming for you all and he's in no mood for reconciliation. He knows that the Bounty Hunters are the only ones that can stop his boss.'
I pressed down on my bruised belly and looked around desperately at the empty landscape. 'Then maybe you should stop wasting my time and get me back there?'
Piano Man raised a finger. Predictably, the harmony of the tune was unaffected, just sustained briefly with one hand. 'In two shakes of a mule's tail. First, there's more you need to know. The blonde girl from the meet at the the canyon. You remember her, right?'
'Yeah.'
'All that lovely golden hair, framing that soft, beautiful face and them big blue eyes. You wouldn't forget that, would you?'
'I guess.'
'She's your sister.'
'What?'
'You heard me, and you know what I mean. You had an instant connection. Now, I'm sure that you're gonna have all sorts of interesting family stories to catch up on round the campfire, but when you next meet, you won't have time. You're gonna have to persuade your sister - her and all her friends - to take you back to Hole Town straightaway. You're gonna have to sneak in under cover of darkness and pick up those other two idiots of yours. Storm's a-comin', and there ain't no way they're getting out of town on their own.'
I felt that sinking feeling again, the one I was getting far too familiar with. I couldn't even begin to process anything about my having a sister, and whether that was true or not, it was all going south if it rested on her friends. Somehow, I didn't see Pink Hair taking my side in an argument anytime soon.
'Her friends,' I said. 'What if they won't listen to me?'
Piano Man plinked dexterously away at the keys. 'This is a dangerous road, Phoenix, and the only way you're gonna keep things on the straight and narrow is if you take them along with you. You need their skills, see. One chance to persuade 'em is all you're gonna get, so best dial that rustic charm up to eleven.'
I didn't understand what he meant, but above me, I could see the clouds being sucked into the middle of the sky and the hairs on my arms were standing up. I was about to go center stage, and there wasn't going to be a second chance to get this right.
Piano Man began to build his tune into a crescendo. 'Don't you delay now, not even an hour. Everything is finely balanced right this second, but it'll tip on the tiniest things. Use your better judgement, and use it quick.'
'Gotcha,' I said, not all sure that I did.
When Piano Man turned again, his face had become pallid, the skin stretched tightly across his skull. The fullness of his eyes could be seen, and they rolled in his head like billiard balls. 'Pressure, Phoenix. You remember your friend talking about that, right?'
'Yeah.'
'Here's another example of it in action. When you're faced with a choice between left and right, choose straight ahead.'
'That's it?' I said. 'That's your warning?'
As I watched, I realized that it wasn't that Piano Man's skin was stretching across his frame so much as the frame itself was expanding, his skeleton growing through his flesh. His lips stretched back across broken teeth, until he was grinning without t
rying to do so. The wind became a high-pitched whine and whirled down upon us.
'One more thing. You remembered to bring money, right? Everyone has to pay the toll. You know what happens to people who don't pay the toll.'
He laughed maniacally as I frantically searched my bag for the coin case I'd found out in the wastes. As I struggled to open it with my sweaty hands, his bulging face abruptly split in two, showering me with blood. I sat there dumb, staring down at my dripping hands. He continued to laugh, a fat, hungry tongue lolling beneath the ruined bone, beckoning at me.