Rusted Heroes

by Andrew Post

  Gently touching Anoushka’s arm, Kylie-Nae asked if she was okay. Her jaw hurt—a lot—but the worst was that her mouth kept filling. She spat a long scarlet stream to the floor, glaring after Ruprecht and his seven-foot pet. “Fine,” she said.

  At the church’s broad doorway, bright midmorning suns streaming in, Ruprecht inclined his head toward Mann O. Mahan. “I want that wax.”

  “No.” Mann O. Mahan laughed, throaty and booming. “Unless you want your whipping boy to encourage me to have a change of mind.”

  “Fine, keep it,” Ruprecht said. “Still, we need to talk. Your team’s headed for New Kambleburg?”

  “We are.” Mann hooked his thumbs on his belt. “You too, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never thought I’d see the day we’d get a priority assignment from the Committee,” Mann said. “Nearly shit my britches. Usually, we’re kicked scraps and crumbs—since we don’t have any bigwig friends.”

  “I trust the Committee knows what it’s doing,” Ruprecht said with a bitter tone.

  “You don’t like sharing this, do you?” Mann said, grinning.

  “And you do?”

  Mann shrugged. “Eh. Work is work. But you lot might as well wait here. After we snuff Eichelberger, we’ll swing by on our way home to tell you how it went.”

  Anoushka moved forward to join the exchange. Erik continued cranking the spiralphone, tweaking it side to side as Mann and Ruprecht spoke in turns. He looked at her, and she looked at him. In that instant, despite how much her face hurt and all their challenges facing her squad and the horrid place they were, she felt twin blasts of warmth in her chest and stomach: anger and something else. Some still-cooling leftover . . . something she had for him. Idle lust or genuine love, she couldn’t determine. A mix, maybe. It was sparked and warmed a degree by just having him look at her. There was no forgiveness or shame in his eyes, and she didn’t volunteer any into her own. Not for what they’d called each other the night they broke up or for him selling the story about the troll. A hurt came. One that aches in a way that it straddles between a tickle and a sting, like a paper cut catching a lick of cold air. Whatever it was, she shook it away.

  Anoushka caught Mann giving her an unabashed up-down—lingering on her breasts—before returning facing Ruprecht to say, “Anything you might like to voice before we part ways?”

  “Yes,” Ruprecht snapped, “Eichelberger is ours. I sent the deet myself saying we were taking his bounty. You can aid the troops being dispatched to reclaim New Kambleburg if you wish—I cannot stop you—but Eichelberger is strictly ours. Understand?”

  Mann poked a lumpy, poorly rolled cigarette between chapped lips. Slashing a match down his breastplate’s side, he said, “Couple of days back, we came up on a handful of boys in uniform. Committee fellas, you could tell right away. Good posture gets beat into them during orientation, I hear. Anyhoo, since we had a minute to spare, we reined up and had a chat. They asked if we’d seen a snowball, a dwarf, a blonde gal, and some old bag in a robe.” Mann O. Mahan’s bloodshot gaze measured each of Anoushka’s squad in turn. “I see a snowball. I see a dwarf. I see a blonde gal. And I see an old bag in a robe, back there, with half her head missing. The boys gave no description of any pudgy fop or a giant with a dog . . . but I do happen to remember they said the gobs they had recently questioned had killed one of the team’s people. A young man with yeller hair and a whole bunch of pens and ink and paper in his bag. Shit a bard might carry—or a bard’s assistant. Anyway, those aforementioned, though losing one of their own, had broken someone out of Breakshale. A big fella. A big, mean fella. A wife killer, they said. A family killer.”

  “What’s your point, Mann?” Ruprecht said.

  “My point is you’ve got one shit storm ahead and another brewing behind. If it were me, I’d rather surrender to one downpour before getting splashed by both.”

  “We’re going after Eichelberger. He’s our assignment.”

  “See, you keep saying that,” Mann said, “but I’m trying to let you down easy here, LeFevre—”

  “Your books are shit. Your songs worse,” Ruprecht snapped. “Don’t you know more than two chords?”

  Mann sighed twin gray plumes from his gin-blossomed nose. “When you say shit like that, Ruprecht, it makes me wonder if you’d level such mean things my way if Big Boy wasn’t standing right there.”

  “I would,” Ruprecht said after moving halfway behind Peter.

  “If you two are done measuring,” Anoushka said, “I’d like to ask a question.” All eyes were on her. The Blaggards, her own squad. Erik. Mann especially, ready with another up-down. “Did you tell them anything?” she said.

  “The Committee? Shit. Didn’t know nothing to tell. I figured it was y’all, but I’m no rat.”

  Ruprecht said, “If you see them again, will you tell them you saw us?”

  “Drop the contract, and absolutely,” Mann feigned zipping his mouth shut. “Not a peep.”

  “We can’t do that,” Ruprecht said.

  “Well, since I’ve seen you and know it was you they were looking for . . . tsk, I wouldn’t be doing my duty in helping due justice run its course, now, would I? Best I can say is you best ride as hard as you can. Get there before they do. They won’t chase you through the Scorch. Other than that, I say whoever nails the Baron of Decay first wins. Gets the story, gets the pay, and wins the godsdamn day.” Mann’s gaze swung to Peter. “When you’re done with this one’s candy-assed outfit, come see me in Freeport. We’ll get you onto some real work. Saddle up, boys! New Kambleburg awaits its true champions!”

  While the Blaggards did as ordered, Erik walked his sable nag over, head low. “Anoushka, I—”

  “The fuck are you doing with them, Erik?” she said. She could feel those behind her exchange confused looks. Ruprecht’s slippers shuffled in the dirt, edging in. Anoushka pulled Erik aside, turning them around to use his horse as a living curtain.

  Erik wouldn’t speak until he’d glanced across the church lawn, seeing the rising dust cloud over the cornfield had moved down a way. He didn’t seem afraid to be left behind by the other Blaggards.

  His armor didn’t fit; it was smithed for a man with twice his shoulders’ breadth. He seemed very much aware he looked as if he were playing dress-up.

  “You never fired a gun in your life, and you join a contractor squad? And what the blazes was it with you selling my story?” Anoushka bared into him, refusing to let him drift too far away—every step he took back, she advanced to maintain their closeness.

  “Your lip is bleeding,” Erik said. “Gods, when he did that, I was gonna go over and—”

  “Stop,” Anoushka said. “I think this getup you’re in is doing a good enough job embarrassing you, Erik.”

  His shoulders slunk. Anoushka felt only a little bad.

  “Now, about selling my story.”

  “I’m sorry. I . . . I was hard up. And they were paying good for them, the war stories, early on. It was a good story, Anoushka.” He tried looking her in the eye but couldn’t hold the connection for a longer span than a couple of muttered words.

  A hard anger wrung every vein in Anoushka’s body, but it was joined by an annoying, indefinable tickle, too. Hurt or love, hurt or love?

  “I didn’t tell you that story for you to repeat it,” she said. “I told you so I could forget it, be done with it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “And why join with Mann? Why become a contractor?”

  He started to answer, stopped, and sighed. “I saw the ad saying he needed someone to operate a spiralphone, and they’d train, and I wouldn’t see much combat, and I thought, ‘Well, it sure beats the workhouse,’ which is where I was quickly heading.”

  Anoushka sighed.

  He was about to say something more, likely apologize again, when Ruprecht ducked his head under Erik’s horse’s neck. “Uh, sorry to interrupt . . . but could I request you not speak to the competition, Miss Dema
ine?”

  “Mister LeFevre, I’m Erik Redmondt. We met last year. I—”

  “I remember,” Ruprecht said without looking the Blaggard’s way. “Let’s say good-bye, Miss Demaine, in order that we, like Mister Redmondt, can get on the road, yes?”

  Anoushka relented. Because, really, what else could she say to Erik? He’d made it clear he knew he’d done a bad thing. She believed his apologies were sincere. When she stepped back from Erik to let him get his boot in a stirrup, she recalled him doing the same the day he left her. And how his horse had been nearly wobbly with the weight of things he’d loaded onto its back. She’d been at the front door, her arms crossed, watching him spur off. He’d looked back as he moved along the lane before her house—their house, up until that moment—and she could tell, even then, he was regretting it. They had threatened to leave each other plenty. Like all couples, they fought. But this time, he seemed to want to follow through on the threat and go, maybe return later during the night. He hated, she could tell, completing the show of packing up his stuff and getting it loaded onto his horse. Once allowed to run, a man’s pride was hard to call back.

  And now he was spurring off again. Looking back again. Anoushka didn’t fold her arms like she had or track him along the perimeter of the yard scowling at him. She watched him go, kept her gaze on his, allowing him to be the first to look away, trying her best to give him nothing.

  A dust cloud in the distance chased a slightly larger one. Once merged, moved together from view.

  Ruprecht clapped his hands and shouted, “Well, what’re you standing around for? The game is on. We need to find Eichelberger first!” He pushed back into the cornfield. “Come on, come on! To New Kambleburg!”

  No one followed.

  Shooting a mouthful of blood slopping to the ground as if it were red chaw spit, Anoushka looked over at Peter. “So he wasn’t at the trial after all? You were mistaken? Whoopsie?”

  Peter clanked after the bard, as Teetee followed him, close at heel, obedient.

  “You know that guy?” Kylie-Nae said.

  “Yeah” was all Anoushka said.

  Kylie-Nae didn’t push it.

  Zuther said, “So what do we do about this place?” He took a swig from his canteen before passing it to Kylie-Nae.

  “Could leave it for the Committee,” she said, passing the canteen to Russell. She coughed after her sip—apparently it wasn’t water. “In case we manage to get Lyle alive, they’ll need every bit of evidence against him they can collect. Might even take it easy on us since we helped, in a way.”

  “Fuck the Committee,” Russell said, nearly crushing the canteen in his grip when it was passed to him. “And doubly fuck takin’ Eichelberger alive. Ask me, this place shouldn’t be left standin’.” After using his beard to clean the canteen spout, the dwarf handed the canteen to Anoushka. “But . . . what’re we thinkin’ for Lodi?”

  The empty sockets in her jaw, splashed with the giggle water, hurt. Forgoing a second sip, Anoushka took what remained in the canteen into the church.

  Through the scattered pieces of the chopped farmers and their trampled offerings, past Otis Kelly and Pastor Keene, Anoushka stepped up to Lodi’s corpse slumped near the wall. Kylie-Nae’s shot had opened her right ear wide, a yawning cone driven into her temple.

  “I’m sorry, Lodi.” Anoushka had to force herself to pour cheap hooch on the wizardess’s corpse.

  Striking a match, Anoushka tossed it down. Gods, what an end. No time for a proper funeral, no family or friends to inform. With the heat lapping at her back, the fire taking the church barn quick, Anoushka exited and handed the empty canteen to Zuther.

  “Anyone who rides outside of Joan is not to be trusted. Understand?”

  “Yes, Cap’n,” her three friends replied.

  “Do we understand?”

  “Yes, Cap’n.”

  After making sure their radio’s power knob was turned all the way to the left, off, Anoushka dropped into the captain’s chair, strapped in, and pulled her gloves on. As the others were busy getting seated and Zuther and Russell got Joan’s springs drawn, Anoushka stole a moment to close her eyes, grit what remained of her teeth, and wrap her fingers around the steering yoke, tight. Keep it together. Keep it fucking together . . .

  “Forward,” she called out. To her squad. To herself.

  Nothin’ but a Good Time

  “There’s people,” Kylie-Nae called out at the forward viewport.

  Anoushka triggered a short-range lens, the horizon dissolving to a fuzzy green line. Ahead, closer, Peter moved to one side of the road to make room for the stream of bodies coming the other way.

  Easing down to quarter speed, Anoushka put one tread on the road shoulder. She slid open her narrow side hatch in the armor flank. Mostly humans. A few dwarves. One pair of sandy-haired prairie elves, husband and wife. Every time a train had passed them thus far, it had been going away from the coast. Those who could afford a ticket for themselves, their families, and their animals. But not these people, not the large families of farmers guiding their oxen pulling wagons loaded heavily with stuff they didn’t want to risk coming home to find missing: grandfather clocks and bureaus and crates brimming with their dishes only brought out for when company came.

  “You’re here. Wonderful, but what difference will this time make?” someone drawled before a rock struck armor.

  Anoushka still called out for Kylie-Nae to work as voice for the Ma’am.

  After Kylie-Nae had ascended the central ladder, banging the hatch closed behind her, the cannon master knelt atop Joan cupping her mouth with her hands. “Please make your way to Yarnigrad. It will be safe there. The situation is being tended to. We wish you the best in this tough time. You’ll be notified when it’s safe to return to your homes.”

  Anoushka watched out her six-by-three slot in the armor. None seemed reassured by Kylie-Nae’s words. More than one waved a dismissive hand at them, and a few old biddies spat in Joan’s direction. A few of the horses, unaccustomed to being around a big clattering metal box, got spooked. Their handlers fought to get them back under control and threw heated looks toward the cause.

  Among the endless flow of people, Anoushka spotted a young girl sitting on her father’s shoulders. Four, maybe five, her big curious eyes framed by a scarf. She wasn’t peering at the tank but into Joan, through the same slat which Anoushka peered out. Shoving it shut felt like the thing to do, but Anoushka knew if the girl had seen her and been inspired, then already her future was assembling itself before her. Too late.

  The line of bodies continued down one hill, up the next. Sucking in a deep breath, Kylie-Nae again looped her call. “Please make your way to Yarnigrad. It will be safe there . . .”

  The evacuee line continued unbroken, five miles on. “Please make your way to Yarnigrad . . .”

  Not until the suns were setting did they finally reach the final stragglers. When they were behind them, Kylie-Nae shambled down the ladder again, then drank from her canteen to soothe her tired throat. She sat with her back to Joan’s bulkhead, looking at the canteen in her hands. She didn’t talk much the rest of the day.

  * * *

  The opening salvo of winter came in eye-watering punches over the evacuated farms, dragging in the big flakes of gulf-effect snow. The kind of aggressive cold that felt almost sentient settled in—screaming as it threw itself against Joan, angry at the armor blocking its path when there was so much warmth within to strangle. It still managed to soak through, clawing at the squad, numbing ears and toes and inspiring noses to run like faucets. In less than an hour, the abandoned farmsteads they passed were under a layer of white. Each grain silo they came upon was shorter than the one previous. It was like the world’s color was sloughing away, or Joan was merely a microorganism winding along an enormous creature’s bleached white rib.

  * * *

  During camp, Russell came to where Kylie-Nae and Anoushka were sitting by their struggling fire. “Uh, I have a wee
problem, lasses. If I might ask for some assistance . . .?”

  Not exactly wee. A bloated tick the size of a crab apple was fastened to his lower back. It took stabbing it with a stick, hot from the fire, to get it to detach.

  * * *

  Kylie-Nae developed a cold and, after medicating herself with mulled wine, fell asleep at the forward viewport. They hit a rock partly hidden by the snow. The left tread needed to be repaired. Two days wasted.

  * * *

  They ran out of smoking moss. And for hours they argued who had taken the last pinch. The culprit would take the secret to the grave.

  * * *

  Ruprecht emerged from his caravan one morning with three sheets of ink-filled paper. He’d written a eulogy for Lodi. Although it was difficult to admit, Anoushka thought it was beautiful. It was clear he respected her a great deal. After he finished reading it, he cleared his throat, threw the pages into the fire, and returned to his caravan. Later on, the others finished Russell’s ale keg, toasting to the wizardess’s memory.

  * * *

  “We were comin’ back from my uncle’s place. Me brother and sister were riding in the back. It was the mornin’, and we were knackered from playin’ so much. We were sitting backward in the cart, and I was watchin’ the road drawin’ out behind us.” Russell paused, coffee going forgotten in his hand, his gaze locked onto the fire between them all—as if he were reciting what he saw in the flames, not dredging it up from memory. “Two dirt ruts, woods to the right, a freshly plowed field to the left. It was warm. Birds were singin’. It smelled like spring does. My pa stopped, nearly makin’ me sister flip over backward. He told us to look. And way out in the field, stumblin’ around in the unplanted rows was a raccoon. It was daytime, which was the first odd thing. It wasn’t movin’ right, as if it was pissed blind, movin’ like a bee does—in circles and swerves, its legs workin’ together. It kept fallin’ over and rollin’ around before gettin’ up for a moment, takin’ two steps, and fallin’ over again. It seemed to want to get to where we were, on the edge of the woods. I don’t know why Pa stopped; we’d seen raccoons before.