“You understand what I’m telling you? You can’t relax. If you relax, you die.” Frank keeps his hands on Adam’s shoulders. His grip is steel. “The ground will come up at you. It comes up like a cur and it snaps its teeth. But here’s the deal: when it comes, there’s only one thing for you to do. Roll, Adam. Pull in your shoulder and roll when you hit the dirt.”
—
He opens his eyes and sees a blurred pair of blackened jeans ending in a pair of ravaged leather boots. The world is turned upside down and the boots are at the top of his vision against a sky of dirt and the legs trail downwards to a shapeless body and a blue abyss below. The sun lies up beyond his chin. Blood drips from his mouth into his eye and the world turns as he swings. Every bone in him aches. Every muscle burns. His head throbs and his feet are numb.
Uneasy and uncertain, he waits for the world to right itself. But no such thing comes to pass.
He strains his neck, looks up at skeleton branches and listens to the creak of rope. He groans and turns his head. His eyes and mind try to adjust to a flipped world.
Nate!
Stripped to his underwear, Nate is being held up by a man in a disheveled coat, while another hunched figure lashes a rope to his ankles. They throw him loose and Nate makes an audible grunt when his back hits the ground. Then he’s whipped upside down and hauled feetfirst into the air, the rope acting as a pulley over the bony limb of a dead tree.
Nate swings from his ankles. His arms, above his head, point towards the ground, flailing like a marionette. His eyes are shut. His face is bloody. His pale body bright with sweat.
Fear seizes Adam. Fear and guilt and anger, all at once.
I was too confident. Too relaxed!
Should’ve listened to Frank’s echo. Should’ve listened to my gut.
He knows he should have expected the wire. He should have seen it coming. He could have avoided the fall—he could have—if he had been more careful, more aware. But he didn’t see it coming. He wasn’t thinking. And now…
Adam struggles in his bonds. He’s still dressed in his riding suit, but his arms are crossed, tied at the wrists, fastened at the small of his back. The pain is excruciating.
He blinks and studies the boots in his vision. A second pair swings into view. Then a third. Shadows fall on the ground. Adam sees the clean domes of three heads.
He knows to whom these shadows belong.
Bandits.
His head fills with blood and his heart fills with dread.
They live deep in the backcountry, up in the Sawtooth Hills, with their scattered goat herds. Adam has heard stories. About their miserable, violent lives. How they have nothing to lose. Nothing to fear. And, when Riders pass, how they descend for the take.
They take more than things. They take dignity. They rip it away.
Bandits usually stay clear of Colonel property, for fear of reprisal attacks, but the Blackwater Trail tempts them from the shadows and Sky-Base turns a blind eye.
There are three of them, standing insolent and slit-eyed before their dangling captives. They chew betel nut and stare at their prey. The sound of their breathing is obscene. They say nothing and they watch.
Adam listens hard for the drone of airship rotors. He hears none. No sound of bykes either.
He swings and feels his head begin to bloat. He blinks the blood away, but it continues to drip, and drip, and drip.
“Please,” he manages to croak. His voice is a dry, foreign thing.
He hears one of them expectorate. A wad of red spittle flies and hits the dirt in a small and grotesque explosion of sand. Adam considers the bloodlike splodge and feels the fight seep out of him. He has nothing left.
Dead before the sun sets.
—
He loses track of time. He swings and swings, in a weird state of semiconsciousness. Now he is asleep. Now he is awake. Now he drifts, somewhere in the middle. There are moments in this dream state when he’s lucid and he sees things with clarity.
He knows he must act soon.
Nate swings into sight and panic grips Adam. He struggles but it’s futile. His wrists are fastened so tight behind his back there is no way to dislodge a hand from the rope.
Back and forth he swings in the wind.
No hope in hell.
Adam looks to the upside-down hills and he’s certain he sees the flare of a telescope lens. Watchers. Doing what they do best. Watching.
“Nate,” Adam whispers.
Nate groans. He coughs, blinks open his eyes and sees Adam. “Can’t feel my legs,” he says in a rasping voice.
“Me either.”
“No…I mean…” His voice rises in panic. “I CAN’T FEEL ’EM! They…they’re a bunch a savages….” Nate begins an incoherent babbling. Snot streams from his nose.
“Shh, Nate. We’re okay. It’s gonna be fine.”
“I AIN’T OKAY!” he screams, his face turning purple.
“Listen, I know we’re in bad shape, but I’ll figure a way. They haven’t spoken yet and—”
“They never speak. YOU SACK OF DIRTY BASTARDS! YOU SAVAGES…” Nate’s words are lost in a slurred frenzy. He sobs and coughs and spits blood.
Adam waits until the only sound is Nate’s whimper and the creak of rope.
“Your pa ever tell you how to handle bandits?”
Nate makes a snorting sound—more a cough than a snort. “Nobody handles a bandit.”
Adam grinds his teeth in frustration.
Nate swings desperately. “Where the hell are they?”
“Tending to their fire, I think.”
“Are we gonna die, Adam?” Nate’s voice fades to a whisper.
Adam doesn’t answer.
—
The men come afoot to them. The ominous sound of their breathing sends a bolt of fear shooting through Adam. He struggles in his knots of rope and he yells out at them in a hoarse voice.
“I’VE GOT MONEY!” he lies.
They say nothing.
Adam swings and blinks and tries to focus. A bandit stands right in front of Nate with something half concealed in his hand. Nate’s knife.
“NOT LIKE THIS!” Adam bawls. “PLEASE!”
A mournful sound comes from Nate—a choking, sobbing sound.
“Let him go,” Adam begs, in a quieter voice.
The bandit has a thin, starved face. A scar for a mouth. Taut lips. Cold, hard eyes. Small. Close together. He glances at Adam, swivels back to Nate.
“Adam,” Nate blubbers. His voice is a feeble, broken thing. Light as air. Made of dust.
“It’s okay, Nate. We’re not gonna die. We’re talkin to ’em. They understand.”
The bandits say nothing and their silence is terrifying.
Adam creaks on his rope and sweat falls from him. “Please. He’s just a kid.”
Silence.
“Why? Why’re you doin this?”
But he knows the answer, even as he asks.
Because they can. Because life is brutal. Because somewhere along the line one of their brothers was probably killed and this is their retribution, meted out against defenseless Riders.
“I don’t believe this is what you want. There’s gotta be another way….Listen to me, I’m beggin you.”
But his pleas go unanswered. Then his worst fear comes true.
The bandit thrusts his fist forward, into Nate. A sharp, upward blow.
Nate grunts, jerks back and swings. Adam screws his eyes shut and holds his breath. He waits for the Blackness to come. Waits for it to slide over him. But there are no certainties. No patterns. One thing doesn’t follow the other. He stays awake.
He’s about to cry out, one final time, when a dull knocking sound carries to him. A clean sound—like a bat hitting a hard ball. Adam flicks his eyes open. A bandit grunts and, with a loud crash, pitches face-first into the dirt. Then a second later a muffled crack echoes through the hills. In quick succession, both remaining bandits fall. Each fall is preceded by the same knocki
ng sound, then a grunt, and they come crashing down. From the hills two more distinct staccato sounds.
Crack! Crack!
And silence.
Adam finally falls into Blackness.
The first thing he hears is the snapping of a fire. The next, a low murmuring of wind and the sound of something flapping. The cold is in his bones and he aches head to foot.
He opens his eyes and sees blurred shapes against a blue-black twilight. He breathes and his breath plumes in the chill. He raises himself onto his elbows and his head pounds and throbs. A wind whips the silver heatkeeper wrapped round him.
Before him sits a figure, hunched at a fire, stoking red embers with a stick.
Adam coughs and struggles up into a sitting position. “Frank?” The figure turns to him and a pair of yellow eyes burn through the gloom. “You!”
Kane looks at him. “That’s right. Me.”
Sparks whirl upwards and the flames saw back and forth.
Adam feels a familiar uneasiness. He glances at a shape lying motionless a few yards from the fire, covered to the head in a heatkeeper. A pair of small feet with pitch-black socks poke out of the bottom. A pale, freckled cheek lies exposed at the top end.
He stands and limps to the unmoving shape of Nate. He looks down on him, hands crossed at the chest, pinning the heatkeeper to his shoulders.
“Nate?”
Nate groans and rolls over. He doesn’t speak.
“How bad is he?” Adam says, feeling a wave of guilt and relief. He’s alive at least.
“It’s not good.”
“What do we do?”
“We?”
Adam regards the fire. He feels Kane’s eyes on him.
“We leave him,” Kane says.
Adam shakes his head. “We’re not leaving him.”
“So how do you reckon we take him and his byke?”
Adam massages his wrists. They ache to the bone. Even in the half-dark he can see the spiraling rope indentations and the livid blue bruises.
He looks at Kane, in the shadows. “What happened?”
“Use your imagination.”
“Are they…”
“They won’t be coming around. Put it that way.”
Adam looks at his watch.
“Relax,” Kane says. “Nobody’s riding this late. I reckon they’re doin a head count at Camp One and figuring us dead.”
Adam looks at him. “What are you doin back with the stragglers?”
Kane’s eyes blaze from the dark shadows, as though the fire is burning inside him rather than reflected there. “Biding my time. Gotta know when to make your move. Lucky for you, I guess.”
“I guess.”
Adam hobbles to the fire and loses himself in the trickery of the flames. He holds out his hands to warm them and looks at the red weals on his wrists. He feels tight and twisted, as if his entire body has been wrung out like a washcloth.
He stoops for a burnt stick and stirs the embers. “It was you who cut us down.”
Kane says nothing. Adam looks at him. The features of his face are buried in complete shadow. All he can see is the gleam of yellow eyes and a flash of teeth.
“They steal anything?” he asks.
“You mean like your byke?” Kane points to three bykes parked on their stands, side by side, throwing strange shadows with the sawing flames.
Adam’s Longthorn. Kane’s Drifter. Nate’s Sunblazer.
“My Race pack?”
“Not much left.” Kane points at a crumpled trio of bags. “But they were lean to start with. Got nothin but the basics in mine. That and two bottles of pop.”
“Two bottles of pop?”
“Yep.”
Adam shakes his head. “It don’t figure.”
“Nope,” Kane says. “Nothin much does.”
Adam hurls the stick into the fire and straightens up. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“You say your name’s Kane, but who has just one name? You come and go like smoke. It’s like you don’t exist. But here you are.”
Kane takes a swig from his canteen and squints at him. “Here I am.”
Adam stands there, fighting an urge to scream. He’s afraid of Kane—of his eyes that see everything—but he can’t help admiring him too, even liking him. This admission irritates and frustrates Adam. It’s as if Kane were playing him. And he doesn’t like being played.
He glares at Kane. “You say you’re from other side the desert, but nobody’s ever been to the other side. Not any that came back alive.”
“Riders don’t come back from Sky-Base if they win. Doesn’t mean it don’t exist.”
“Where were you? When it mattered?”
“Reckon it mattered when you were swinging upside down.”
Adam balls his fists. “Where were you yesterday?”
“You’ve got an interesting way of thanking a person.”
“I need to know. Why’d you leave?”
Kane sighs. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“What kind of an answer is that?”
Kane shrugs and pokes the fire. “Went to see a man about a horse, then.”
Adam shakes his head. “They killed him. Did you know that?”
Kane doesn’t speak.
Adam stares at him. “You hear me? They killed Frank!”
Kane’s eyes flick from the fire to Adam and back again. For a second, the line of his mouth seems to tighten. Just for a second. Then his thousand-yard stare returns.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I am. But people die. They get killed all the time.”
Adam stumbles back a step, dizzy and out of breath. “What kind of person are you?”
Kane looks at him. “Know what kind of person you are?”
“I know enough….I know right from wrong.”
Kane keeps his eyes fixed on the fire. “Trust me. You know nothin about yourself till the time comes.”
“What’s wrong with you? Why are you like this?”
Kane roots through a pile of dried kindling. The gnarled wood is old and bare and bleached of color, like a pile of white bones. He picks out a few sticks and feeds the fire.
“S’pose I got bad in me. Bad straight to the bone.”
They sleep on their rolled-out mats, taking turns to stoke the fire. When it dies, the darkness is absolute. There are no stars. No moon. No lights to guide them. They wake before dawn, alarmed by some internal clock that understands peril.
“We can fashion a sled from branches,” Adam insists after a breakfast of nutrient biscuit and hydro-pills. “We can drag him.”
“Won’t work,” Kane says, watching streaks of pink and orange light up the sky above hills black as pitch.
“Why not?”
“What about his byke?”
“We can haul ’em both.”
“You forget what this is?”
“I know what it is, but I’ll bet we’re not the only ones in trouble.”
“Trouble? I’m in no trouble.”
Adam looks at Kane. “I never did thank you. Not properly.”
“No. You didn’t.”
“I’m not sure how you did it. How you took ’em down like that, like they were nothin. But you did and I’m thankful.”
Kane claws dirt-smeared fingers through his cropped hair. He makes his way to the motionless shape of Nate.
Adam watches him. Then he scans the area for the limbs of fallen trees. “We better get moving if we gonna build a sled to haul him.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Kane says.
Adam feels something twist in his stomach.
“Remember when I said people die?” Kane says, without a change of tone in his voice.
Adam flicks his gaze to the small, dust-covered figure on the ground. Unmoving, like a rock, a part of the desert.
Don’t say it. Don’t you say it.
“Well, they do,” Kane says. “They up and die. Just like that.”
—
> They bury Nate’s thin body in a shallow grave, dug with byke parts. They work fast. They don’t pause and they don’t speak and sweat pours from them. Now they stand, looking down at the overturned soil. Adam wonders if they dug deep enough to guard against rooting night animals.
“He didn’t deserve it.”
“He’s free now,” Kane says. “Death’s his reward.”
Adam shakes his head and stares at the horizon. A line of silhouette sails steeple into the sky. Above them float the airships, moving away, silent and watchful. He pulls a dry energy biscuit from his supply pack, looks at it and throws it into the scrub.
“Why do they have to make it so cruel?”
“Hell. Only reason they don’t leave us for good is because they need the Voddenite and us Left-Behind to work the drills till we die. Rest of us are here for entertainment. Pure and simple. We’re dogs. Fighting on a chain.”
Adam watches the trykes. Glances up at the silent airships. “I think they’re afraid. Afraid of what we’ll do. Look at the bandits: they’re savages. Sky-Base would never let ’em up.”
Kane kicks dirt over Nate’s grave. Adam watches him and does the same.
“And those Dog Soldiers? Heard they steal babies. Sell ’em to the bandits. Or sacrifice them. Sky-Base wouldn’t let them up either.”
“Yep. Dogs are berserk. That’s a fact.”
Adam stands with his arms pinned to his sides. Sky-Base is all that’s ever sustained him. The place of his dreams. But a seed of doubt plants itself in his brain and he feels it sending out crawling roots. He looks at the mound of earth that holds Nate’s body. Dead before his thirteenth summer.
“Where do you think we go?” he says to change the subject. “When we die?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me it does.”
Kane looks at him. “S’pose we come back.”
“We come back?”
“That’s right. We come back and avenge all those who wronged us.”
“And after? After we avenge ’em?”
“Then it ends.”
They stand like this for a long time. Until their shadows—once elongated and thin with the rising sun behind them—shrivel across the mound of earth and shrink back into their boots.
“It’s my fault he’s dead,” Adam says.
Stone Rider Page 11