I wasn't safe.
The first needle tore through my shoulder, tugging me off balance and sending waves of warmth through my arm and chest. I toppled backwards out of the cab, landing cushioned by Daryl's massive corpse.
"Twang!" Connor's voice cracked. I had never heard it laced with so much pain. "You done killed my brothers!"
Another needle tore through the truck, punching a hole next to my head. I rolled to the side just as another dozen needles perforated the truck.
I wanted to tell him it wasn't me, but giving away my location seemed like a bad idea at the time.
There was more gunfire, but sharper, louder this time. Connor swore then fired Nellie a few more times. I circled around the back of the truck, backing away from the fire, when I saw smoke rising from my coat. I'd feel the burns in the morning, but pain-damping had kept me going.
There were three of them. Black-clad figures, barely visible even with my full-spectrum scan. One was tearing apart concrete and glass with a pulse pistol. Waves of force pounded Connor's cover. The two others tried to move, but Connor brushed them back with a couple well-placed shots. It looked like the genius had managed to pin them against a wall behind cover. A fourth figure lay still on the ground.
Just beyond them was the ruined building where I’d stashed my Mustang.
I fingered the grip on my Colt and thought about trading up to a fancier weapon. The Colt was the least fancy piece of tech on the entire field. Still, it had a heft that somehow felt reassuring, so I kept it out.
"Connor," I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could. No need to shout. I stood and walked with measured pace. "Connor, these men are your employers. They're here to pay the bounty."
Connor stopped and leveled Nellie at my head.
"Connor, I didn't kill your brothers. You know that. I'm a man of honor—"
"That's bullshit, Twang," Connor said. His whole body tensed. I flinched, but the needle didn't come.
"Gentlemen," I addressed the three remaining shadows. One of them silently moved behind a shrub. "Mr. Roth and I would like to collect that bounty now."
Connor's jaw dropped open then shut again. Anger faded from his glowing orange eyes. He nodded. My gamble was paying off. Apparently greed trumped love of family.
One of the shadows spoke. "Where's the quarry."
I took a step forward. "She's here," I said.
He whispered something to the guy next to him, who then approached me. His eyes flickered blue as he scanned me. "Tough job, huh? Not just another day at the office, was it?" There was a hint of amusement in his voice.
"How many others did you have working this job?" I asked.
The man approaching me stopped. I could see his trigger finger tense on the sleek pistol he carried. It bore the golden G, just like mine.
"Connor," I said. "You ought to get together with this guy and talk shop sometime. You tactical geniuses are all friends, right?"
"Just give us the girl," said the shadow closest to me.
I didn't move. "You send bounty hunters out to flush the girl, knowing full well they got no chance against her." I smiled. "But stressing her out triggers an implanted program that tells her to come here, a place where her fancy sensors can't detect you until it's too late."
Silence drifted in the gentle wind.
Lena couldn't sense them coming because no signal could enter or leave the bunker under that library. It was shielded.
"Shit," I said. "Hetty."
The closest shadow swung his weapon up, but I drew faster. The Colt thundered one shot, slamming square into the shadow's chest.
He staggered but fired anyway.
He missed. I fired again, slamming two more shots into his skull. He stumbled backward, but didn't go down.
I dropped the Colt, drawing two pulse pistols.
A dozen belches of plasma sunk into the man's chest in rapid succession. As he dropped, I stepped forward, continuing to fire, sending blue-hot force at the man who had done all the talking.
Connor had already tagged him with the needler, but the shadow still fought. One pulse fried the end off of his weapon. The next took the top off of his skull. He slumped to the ground.
There was a roar of explosive flame, and the blue-glow light of two enormous headlights flooded the field. The Mustang was rising slowly. I flipped my sensors off and saw Lena in the seat. Connor raised an arm to shield his eyes.
Suzy swung sharply to the left, revealing the final shadow's hiding spot just as he pulled the trigger. A bullet whizzed by my ear, and I dropped to the ground for cover behind the rubble of the library wall.
Hetty's voice rang in my head. "Stand up, Winston," she said. "They'll let you go, even though you've made a mess of this job."
I shook my head. "No," I said.
Another bullet tore through the air above me. I holstered my pistols and drew the shotgun. I rolled to the right, staying behind the low wall.
I took a breath. Those shadows were Goodwin's men. I fingered the golden G on my shotgun. These were Goodwin's guns. All of them. How did I end up here with only Goodwin's guns hunting a bounty for Goodwin's thugs?
A bullet slammed into the wall, spraying dust into my eyes. I blinked and tried to clear my vision. It was no use. I heard the needler going off. Connor was on the attack.
I stood, eyes closed. I heard needles slam into whatever cover the last shadow had fallen behind. I fired at it with the shotgun, all barrels.
Then there was silence.
My eyes cleared. Connor was approaching, the needler raised in my direction.
"You killed my brothers," he said flatly.
I slung the shotgun back over my shoulder and started walking to the car. It hovered a meter up and was drifting slowly in my direction.
"Killed 'em." Connor tried to step in my way, but I brushed past him. "Where the hell you going, Doc?"
When I got to the car I turned to face Connor. I nodded to the gun in his hands. "You take good care of her, you hear?"
He narrowed his eyes at me then looked down at the needler. He nodded.
"Goodwin's given us all a raw deal," I said. "Sorry about your brothers. It wasn't my intention."
Connor's jaw hardened.
"You'd best disappear for a spell."
He nodded and stowed the weapon. I felt a pang of loss. I had loved that weapon.
Yet I didn’t remember ever having fired it. I searched my memory for any time I had ever used the thing, but it just wasn't there. Every time I tried to recall a hunt, the memory flitted away, like a mirage disappearing when you look straight at it. My knees felt weak. I grabbed the edge of the car and hauled myself up and in.
Collapsing onto the floor, I looked up at Lena. She smiled down at me, reached down to touch my forehead.
Blackness swallowed everything.
The law is nothing in the Republic of Texas. Less government means weak laws and even weaker enforcement. That's how the people like it. Government's got no place in the matters of its people. Sometimes it's up to the strong to protect the weak.
Sometimes it's up to the weak to protect the strong.
I woke.
My breath fogged in the cold. The sky grew pink with the hazy light of morning. Moving hurt, but not moving hurt too. I thought about dulling the pain, but I didn't. It was time for me to face it—all of it. Lena stood a few meters away, facing the brightening sky. The car idled quietly at her side.
"You were always nice to me," she said in a voice so quiet I barely picked it up.
I sat up, despite the pain. Of everything that had happened, my toe hurt the worst. One lousy toenail—or lack thereof—rang out and drown the noise of dozens of other pains. Wincing, I pulled off my boot and poked at the ugly mess of my foot.
"All the stuff you did didn't matter," she said. "All that tech you made, I always dreamed you were making it just for me. Just 'cause you loved me."
"Lena," I said. "I don't know—"
"No." She turned
to face me, and her tears glistened in the morning light. "No, you don't know anything. Not anymore." Her slender arms hugged her body hard.
I shook my head and started working on putting my boot back on. "What did I do anyway?"
"You don't wanna know."
"Sure I do."
"No," she said. Her eyes got serious. "You don't. I tried to bring it back in that warehouse, but you fought. I thought I'd give you back the memories that Mr. Goodwin must have took—"
"Instead you left me with big holes and an affinity for blacking out."
She nodded.
A long moment passed. Finally, I set my jaw. "Try it again."
Our eyes met and she stepped forward.
The voice in my head spoke up. "Winston," said Hetty. "Winston, you'd best put a stop to this."
"Quiet."
Lena took my hand in hers. A tingle of electricity pulsed where our skin touched. My mind sharpened.
"Winston," Hetty continued. "Winston, she's up to no good."
My head hurt.
"Lena," I said. She looked up at me. "Can you silence Hetty?"
Lena shook her head.
"Turn her down a bit?"
"So much neural work... Upgrades on top of upgrades..." She closed her eyes and continued in her softest voice. "I can turn it down a bit."
The pink sky brightened, and the warm sun lit the eastern horizon.
"Do it," I said.
There was a jolt in my brain. The urge to resist washed over me, but I forced it back. I remembered it all. I had worked at Goodwin, invented neurotech that would change the world. I had made a fortune running experiments—terrible experiments. Music was the key. When the twang of a guitar inspired me to invent a neural nanomachine that could manipulate emotions, they started calling me Doc Twang. At an early age, I was a legend in the industry.
I remembered the horrors I did to rats and monkeys—and to the little girl. The girl, who Goodwin himself had ordered enhanced. Mr. Goodwin himself had trusted me with his most deadly creation. The girl with all the latest tech. The girl raised from a baby as the greatest assassin to ever live. The girl who could disappear without bending light and was stronger than anyone had any right to be.
The guilt fell heavy on my chest. Guilt and pain and injury mixed and crushed me. Fat tears rolled down my cheeks.
Far away, I heard Lena's voice. "I'll stop," she said. "It's hurting you."
It was all I could manage to shake my head.
Memories continued to flood in. A day had come when my worth to the company was no more. My love of the girl had grown so that I refused to work on her. They must have seen it coming, but I got her out. I loved her like a daughter. She was everything to me. The feelings flooded back. She got out. But I didn't.
I now remembered how they rewrote my mind. They took my memories, made new ones. They made a handler for me, Hetty, who was programmed to keep me on task.
They rewrote my love for the girl, redirecting it to Nellie and Suzy. Things. They thought those things could replace the girl.
A noise started in the back of my throat. It was a gurgling, choking noise at first, but then it bubbled over into loud sobs. Finally, I found I was wailing in my grief.
Then, it stopped.
Lena's sobs reached me through a haze of confusion. "You want me to take it away?" she asked. "I can make it go away, take away the memories and the pain. It'll leave you a little less than you were, but you'll be able to move on. We'll be able to move on."
Tears blurred my vision. It hurt. Everything hurt.
"No," I said. "I want to keep it all." Light touched my eyes again. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on us with its fiery grin. My tears stopped. "I need it all."
"Winston, look!" Lena’s grin looked too big for her face. Her eyes sparkled with joy. "There they are!"
We drifted in Suzy a hundred meters above the dry wilderness of West Texas. The landscape was dotted with stout, black windmills. At first I didn't see anything special, and I was trying to figure out why Lena cared about the humming windmills when we'd already passed about a million of them.
Then I saw them. Horses. Real, live horses running across the rolling hills. Dozens of them.
They were beautiful.
There was freedom out there, far from Austin and far from the corporations that ran the world. My spirit lifted at the sight of those wonderful beasts. The horses ran, flowing through the sea of mills. They were free.
I put a hand on Lena's shoulder, and she looked up at me.
Sometimes it's up to the strong to help the weak. Sometimes the weak help the strong. I don't know which of us was which, but together we found something I never thought we'd find in the wasted wilderness of Texas.
Out there, we were human. We were human and free.
A Note from the Author:
Grit and Grace is a companion piece to my novel Justice in an Age of Metal and Men. The books share a broken world where Texas is independent and civilization is in retreat.
J.D. rejects the idea that technology solves all problems. He’s the sheriff and he does everything he can to keep justice in and around Dead Oak. J.D. struggles to solve the murder of a rancher, but when he uncovers a conspiracy he needs to decide how deep he wants to go looking for justice. He’s a stubborn man, but it seems the more he digs the deeper he gets.
Justice in an Age of Metal and Men is available on Amazon.
-Anthony W. Eichenlaub
http://eichenblog.org
Grit and Grace: A Metal and Men Novella (Metal and Men Series Book 1) Page 4