by Kris Holt
'This is strictly business,' I said.
'You should never mix business and pleasure. It never ends well.' He laughed maniacally as he wrenched one of the broken barriers and hurled it at me. It missed – barely – and splashed into the water behind me.
I backed off, and then backed off some more, 'cause he was going to keep on coming and there was no way to dodge on this tiny platform. Growing increasingly frustrated, I looked around for a weapon. One good blow with something heavy would incapacitate him. But I saw nothing.
Desperate now, I ran from the gangway to the island on the other side. Too late, I realised the water level dropped away beneath there. I was in a bind. The only way back was the way I had come, and the sneering Di Vio wasn't about to let me past. Inbetween the moments of intermittent light, he crept closer without ever seeming to move, more apparition than man, more shade than flesh.
With nowhere else to go, I hurdled the wall that went down to the water. At the split second I jumped, DiVio's fist crashed into the wall underneath me. I went straight down into ice cold water and half a ton of concrete crashed down around me. I swam through the darkness, lost in the confusion, until I finally broke surface, my muscles numb. Above me, a vaguely human-shaped silhouette flickered in and out of my consciousness.
My foggy brain registered what was happening just a little too late. Di Vio yelled another stream of abuse at me and punched the wall on the other side. A further chunk of concrete the size of a barrel hit me full in the chest, breaking ribs on both sides and dragging me down beneath the surface.
I hit the bottom and stuck fast. The space inside my chest was constricted, and there wasn't much there to begin with. So much pain, so much anger to have got myself to this point. So few answers, so little reward. A tiny part of my brain was thinking that maybe it was better this way. Cleaner somehow.
No-one had told my arms and my legs, and they were thrashing and kicking, trying to free themselves. This was instinct, nothing more. A natural desire to break free from anything that held me down. I tipped myself to one side, though it was agony to do, and the weight of the concrete dropped away. Now it was just me. I looked through the water and saw, all around me, a thousand miles of scrubland, adventure and freedom waiting. In the distance, the walls of the canyons towered over my blistered hometown.
Cut free from my roots, in this new world, I could fly. Half-believing, I scaled the canyon wall and lifted myself to freedom.
The moment when I came out of the water and landed chest first on the walkway opposite Di Vio might have been the worst of my life. I was frozen solid and on fire all at once. I hurt like a fat guy had been using me as a trampoline. Worse still, Di Vio was screaming at me like a wounded animal. Guttural, bestial, terrifying. Now I saw what Jensen had meant. His damaged mind was ten times more messed up than his face.
As I took whole, precious seconds to stand upright, he rounded the corner at the end of the walkway and charged at me, rhino-style. I saw him coming a long way off, with a head of steam like a Mack truck, but there was nowhere for me to go. The water beckoned once more, but I had nothing left in my tank. If I went in there again, I wouldn't be coming out.
I tried to prep myself, to tackle DiVio as he ran, but I might as well as well have tried to stop a landslide. The force of his body slam threw me up against the cavern wall. It took all my remaining strength to stay standing. DiVio grabbed my chin with his left hand, and pointed the piston at my face. He sneered, this evil fucker, this rabid genius, sneered like a man who got the drop. It's a face I've seen a hundred times on someone who swung the lead or shot someone else in the back. It's a face I'll never make. There's losing a fight – something I've done a lot – and there's losing a fight – something I don't do, ever.
'Sad,' Di Vio said triumphantly, shocking me with a sudden chilling return to lucidity. 'But that's evolution for you. Winners and losers. Only the most adaptable survive. Only those willing to fight.'
I was angry then, real fucking angry, 'cos he was talking like some street-corner slugger who takes a couple of hits and thinks that'll make him a champion. He might have come prepared to face a laser and a taser, but Nate Di Vio wasn't a streetfighter. He might have been a brilliant man, but there were some skills he'd never learned, and he was firmly in my territory now.
There was a lesson in there somewhere. It ain't always about me. But sometimes, it is.
'There's fighting,' I said, 'and there's fighting dirty.' With that, I summoned up all the lessons I'd learned at the Waylon Boggs Prepatory School for Wayward Gentlemen, and kicked Nate Di Vio in the crotch with all the strength I had left.
Di Vio groaned and curved into a v-shape. I grabbed his wrist and fell away as the piston engaged, edged metal slamming into the rock a centimetre from my head. The boulders fractured with the impact. An immense crack climbed up the wall and into the ceiling. I fell to my knees and crawled, underneath Di Vio, past him, away. There was this deep, deep, terrible rumbling, like the earth itself was choking on bile, and when I looked back, I saw a weak, trembling man, stuck fast, with his fist burrowed deep into the cavern wall.
'Help me,' he said.
A hundred tons of rock came crashing down from the broken ceiling directly onto Di Vio, rendering all further actions moot.
I should have had a one-liner saved up for this moment, I thought as I lay curled up and shivering on the platform. But I didn't. Instead, I spat up the blood in my mouth and I stayed where I was lying for a long, long time.
Epilogue – Grand Destiny
Springtime brings the rain in desert country, and in the last few weeks, the Sands have seen rain like they've never seen before. I know this, 'cause I was one of the few people that were outside when they began.
Gregor said that much of the water on the surface had condensed at the time of the perihelion, but now as the sun slips back into frozen space, things have cooled. Everything that goes up must come down, and water is no exception.
We were worried at first because all that rain had to go somewhere, and if too much leaked down into the caves, it could have drowned everyone like rats. But the old tunnels did their job, draining away the flow, and the reservoir below filled to the point of overflowing. There was, after all, water enough for everyone.
Most people were itching to get back to the surface, but Gregor thrived in the caves and he built hisself a workshop. To survive for the weeks we'd been stuck below the ground, some people had taken to eating lichen off the rocks. In no time at all, Gregor was creating recipes and testing it for nutritional content. He's shown little interest in returning home, and often warns Phoenix and me all about the dangers of lingering solar radiation, but we figure that people gotta live before they die, and that's that.
Di Vio's people had bought animals, fertilizer and seeds so that they were ready for when civilization regrowth could begin. Outside, the torrential rains had created new water courses, new delta lands. Building materials were hard to come by, but people were ready to return to Hole Town to scavenge what they could. We woke up to a whole new world.
Heat had caused fire, and most everything in the town itself had burned. But one thing at least had survived – the skeleton of the Burning Man, scarred blacker than night, that giant, twisted face visible in the distance as we emerged from our burrows. Phoenix wanted to pull the Burning Man down and turn him back into a cross, but I told him there were other, more important things to do first. He, and many of the others, want to go straight back and rebuild the town. I'm sure that somewhere out there, by dint of circumstance or of good fortune, there'll be other people who've survived the perihelion. I mean to find them.
But first. We still have the hovertrikes that Di Vio's men had been using beneath the mountains, and a couple of them still have enough of a charge to get us north to the Oasis and back. Mama Smokes, Mar and Rat take one, and Phoenix and me take the other. I lock my arms around his waist for the duration of the journey, just as he does to me in his sleep at nigh
t.
When we arrive, the trikes pull up to the high wall that I'd seen protruding from the dunes when I returned here before. A large amount of sand has built up on one side, forming a slope. An empty arch leads through to the pathway beyond. The stones of the arch are blackened, as if by flames.
'There used to be a door there,' Mar says, looking through the gap. 'And a garden.'
I remember the ring of trees that I saw here. The perihelion has destroyed them all. When we walk through the arch, it's clear that everything in the garden has been burned away to ankle height and then sodden by the rain. In the distance, the vegetation around the water has been scorched in the same way. The water level in the oasis itself is much lower than it was before, darker, more silty. Only when we get close and Mar moves aside some of the blackened stalks do we see the new, tiny, precious green shoots emerging.
'Life finds a way,' I say.
Shortly after, Mama Smokes walks with us around the other side of the wall where a stone path leads through the sand. There's a small enclosure out on its own, with half a dozen raised patches of earth, each marked with a cairn of stones.
'This is where we remember her,' Mama Smokes says.
The rightmost one; the most recent. I touch the top stone, which threatens to crumble under my touch, and then for a moment there's just me and the wind and the world. When I turn, I half expect everything I know to have fallen away, but there are just the others and their stoic, earnest faces.
Mar and Rat busy themselves collecting stones to build a new cairn for sisters lost, and one lost sister in particular. When the cairn is complete, they place Cass's knife upon it.
While they're busy, Phoenix and I stay at the spot Mama Smokes pointed out earlier. The old soldier puts a hand on Phoenix's shoulder. 'Your mama was fierce. Fierce and courageous, but there was something that was eating her up inside. She was fast – faster on the draw than anyone I've ever seen, before or since. But she couldn't outrun the demons in her head.'
A little time passes; the wind brings with it slight hints of something like music, but as the ear strains for them, they're gone just as quickly. I'm just wandering, letting the details pass me by, until Phoenix slowly removes his pistol from his pocket and places it gently next to her cairn.
'Hello, mom,' he says.
I walk away a little while, wanting to give him his space, and as I walk, the hints of the tune I'd heard earlier grow stronger until I look around and the world has taken on an unlikely shape. Phoenix is still there, staring at me uncertainly from the end of a corridor of sand, but everything else has pinched itself in at the sides, like the ends of a bow.
'You'd be right to say that this isn't a normal occurrence,' a smooth, cultured Southern voice says. When I turn I can see the speaker, dressed in a pressed shirt and waistcoat and seated against all laws of probability in front of a grand piano in a perfectly-rounded dip in the sand.
Phoenix's eyes are focused on me, but they pass across the space and his brow darkens. When it comes to danger, that boy has fine perception. They're the kind of finely-tuned instincts that keep him alive out in the Sands.
'Technically, it's not just his instincts that are keeping him alive,' the Piano Man says, reading my mind.
'What do you mean?'
'There's something more...ineffable than that watching over him. What that is, I just couldn't say.'
There's a lot I could say in this moment, but I can sense the world straining around this little ripple in reality, threatening to do something that won't end well. So I stay safe with my question.
'Can he see you?'
The Piano Man turns round warily in his seat to look at Phoenix, never once slowing down or missing a note as he plays.
'No,' he says. 'But he suspects something is amiss. Like you were thinking, he has instincts sensitive to danger.'
I want to ask him how he knows what I was thinking, but there's a bigger question, and I ask that.
'You're Death, right? It's obvious that's what you are. Are you here for me?' As I ask, he turns around to look at Phoenix once more. 'You're not here for him.' This isn't a question, in any shape or form.
He considers this and continues to play, and all the time I'm standing there, I can feel the world stretching out beneath me like it's made of rubber. This is not a good feeling.
'I'm not Death, Miss Clemence. I'm just a man, albeit one with a very specialist skillset and a very, very important job to do.'
'What's your job?'
'Some of us have a way of bending the world around us,' he says, ignoring the question. 'And when circumstances dictate, your young man is one of those too. Of course, you should never go and have children with him. There's all sorts of potential for cosmic reality issues...but even as I say it, I'm seeing that that's not a problem.'
It is a problem, because I'm leaving soon and I haven't told Phoenix my plans yet. It's a problem because he might want to come with me when I don't want him to, and it's a problem because he might not want to come with me, and I kind of want him to want to come, even if I don't want him to come.
So yeah. There's that.
I still care for him. He's still my best friend, and I'm not sure yet which way is going to hurt us both the least. 'So anyway,' I say.
'So anyway,' the Piano Man smirks.
The stretching continues. I wonder how long the world will bear the strain. I wonder if it's my fault that it's stretching, and if someone will blame me if it snaps.
'This business...you being here...' I say. 'This is all linked to him coming back from the dead, isn't it? He has some kind of grand destiny or something.'
Piano Man looks amused. 'Grand destiny? Little lady, he already did his part ensuring that his town survived the apocalypse. How much more grand does it get than that?'
'Oh. Well, if his destiny is all played out, why are you here?'
'Phoenix has some quiet times ahead for now,' Piano Man says, and his eyes begin to sparkle. 'But you, Jayci Clemence...your story is just about to begin.'