by Eric Wood
Despite their pathetic appearance, the people here were the lucky ones. Families and lone migrants of all ages congregated or milled about silently in small clumps, nibbling at the basic, meager rations that their Shepherds included as part of the services provided. Safety, and passage to the security of one of the Free Cities. The price of this service was everything the pilgrims owned. Even that, for many of the desperate, slowly dying Uninfected in the larger Wilds, wasn't enough. Those unlucky masses were left behind, often at rifle point, to face bandits, the Infected, and likely a quick death.
These grim Shepherds were the key to getting safely past the front gates of the city – Cheyenne, it was called. And it was the Shepherd leaders they needed to talk to. Sam followed Abigail toward through the foul-smelling crowd.
At the sparsely occupied northern side of the fort, a tall, duster-clad woman and two even taller duster-clad men stood regarding the mass of refugees, each of the three sporting an array of expensive-looking equipment and powerful-looking weapons.
More than their equipment, it was their expressions that set these three apart. It was the looks on their faces — not weary and tense like the traders, and not hopeless and frightened like the refugees — that marked them as this crowd's leaders. Their eyes were alert, but also utterly without fear. Businesslike. As if they were harvesting the season's crop, or taking out the garbage, or some other dull task that might be repetitive, but certainly not dangerous. They reminded Sam of some of the older Scouts back at the Colony; the ones that had seen it all, and had lived through it more-or-less whole. If he had to guess, these three were veterans of at least a few dozen firefights, and the fact that they were still breathing meant they knew what they were doing.
"It's probably best if I do the talking," Abigail said. "Remember, we want to keep our profile as low as possible. We're shooting for forgettable. Nondescript."
"I can be nondescript," Sam said. "I'll blend in like you won't believe."
"Not with that Colony accent, you won't. Just try not to speak unless it's absolutely necessary. Like, gun in your face necessary."
"Right. Mum's the word," Sam said, nodding and trying not to gawk at the odd, mismatched patchwork of humanity around him. He narrowly avoided stepping in what he hoped were animal droppings and nearly lost his balance. "Wait, I have an accent?" he said.
Abigail ignored him, and as they reached the trio of Shepherds he decide to try something new. He'd do exactly as Abigail asked, without pushing the limits of her directive or finding some technicality that would allow him to do what he thought best. He would stay quiet, and let Abby do the talking. She might not be much for social niceties, but she did know the Wilds.
"Hey. You. Armed traffickers," she barked. "We wish to speak with you."
Sam tried not to wince as the three Shepherds turned as one to regard them with hard, pitiless eyes. This might go slightly worse than I hoped, he thought.
The two men moved slightly into positions where they could more easily swing their rifles to bear on the two interlopers. In the center, the woman crossed her arms over her chest and regarded Abigail and Sam with a smirk. Her only response to Abigail's rather gruff hail was a slightly raised eyebrow.
"We have a proposal for you," Abigail continued, apparently feeling none of the apprehension and awkwardness that Sam was drowning in. "It is one which will interest you."
The woman looked to one of her companions and then the other, the same bemused smirk on her face. She turned back to Abigail and Sam, and after what seemed like an eternity of silence, finally spoke.
"Go on," she said. Her two companions remained silent, impassive, and enormous.
"You caught this train at a particularly opportune time," the lead Shepherd — Elena was her name — told them. "If you had joined one stop ago you would have been with us when we ran into a wandering swarm of Plague-Heads. We had a few more Shepherds and a few dozen more passengers before that."
After Abigail had produced their last two bars of gold, the Shepherd leader and her two towering henchmen had become far more friendly.
Funny how that always seems to work, Sam heard Vincente's voice say. For about the hundredth time, Sam looked forward to the day when that nagging voice in his head returned to being his own, rather than that of his dead friend and mentor.
He and Abigail traveled at the head of a trail of weary souls that stretched back toward the eastern horizon. Abigail walked next to Elena, Sam trailing slightly behind, and the two other Shepherds — delightfully named Highmane and Hydra — rode on horseback to either side of them.
"It could have been worse," Elena continued, "but of course we only have so many guns, and the Plague-ys are too stupid to know when they should run. That's why we take payment up front. You're always going to have some amount of shrinkage on long hauls like this."
Abigail said little, which Sam supposed wasn't entirely out of character for her, but Elena seemed to take this as a cue to fill the conversational void with chatter. Sam was just glad it was Abigail, and not him, that she was directing her talk at. The idea of referring to people as merchandise – to move and to sometimes sacrifice – turned his stomach sour.
Elena stood nearly six feet tall, and beneath her black-brown duster she had the sturdy frame of a gymnast or a brawler. Her midnight-black hair was shaved to stubble on the sides of her head and held tightly in a long, thin ponytail at the back. Her eyes were two strikingly different colors — one a dark brown, the other ice-blue. It took Sam awhile before he realized that this was because the blue eye was a fake. She wore leather gloves and steel-toed work boots, and despite her friendly tone, she seemed to Sam like the kind of person that would be happy to maim and kill with very little provocation. It was the eyes. The real one looked him over with an equally emotionless expression as did the fake.
Highmane and Hydra had yet to speak, responding to Elena's commands with small, nearly imperceptible nods. Each was maybe a foot taller than Elena, and Sam guessed that together they probably weighed near 700 pounds. He felt bad for the horses, though the two black-haired beasts were as impassive and expressionless as their riders. Highmane had long, shiny hair held up in a tight bun, and Hydra was bald, but otherwise they looked identical. Or maybe Hydra was the one with the hair? Sam wasn't sure.
"You must have had quite the trip, traveling by yourselves," Elena said, looking straight ahead but speaking to Abigail. "Dangerous country around here. Dangerous country all over, now that I think about it. Where did you say you two were from again?"
"I didn't," Abigail replied.
"No, I guess you didn't. How about this: where are you two coming from?"
Abigail shook her head, and though he was behind her and couldn't see her face, Sam was certain she was rolling her eyes.
"I believe those gold bars answered all the personal questions you are thinking of asking," Abigail said. "We are coming from elsewhere."
Elena scoffed. "Have it your way. I was just trying to make conversation. It's a long road out here. My enormous friends aren't exactly the loquacious types. But I suppose you can keep your precious mysteries to yourself if that's what you want."
Ahead of them, the walls of Cheyenne continued to grow. It won't be long now, Sam thought. He was beginning to feel a degree of excitement. He had no idea what to expect inside those high walls, and he was becoming increasingly curious.
And then what? Vincente's voice asked him. You're running out of time. You still need to come up with some sort of a plan.
I'm working on that, Sam told himself. He almost half-believed it.
12
The walls of Mae's forest settlement, before they had been burned to the ground by Deacon's bounty hunter, had been tall and sturdy: sharpened wooden poles, reinforced corrugated metal panels, and heavy mortar. The walls of the Black Hills Survivor's Colony, where Sam had grown up, had been thick and imposing, made from the best composite materials the Old World could manufacture. Neither of them compared to t
he walls surrounding the Free City of Cheyenne.
Sam had known they were large. Even from up at the edge of the forest ridge, he had been able to see that the walls were tall. Abigail informed him on their way down to the caravan way station that these walls had been under construction more or less since the initial Horsemen Virus outbreak twenty years ago. Still, with all this in mind, it was all Sam could do to keep his jaw from hanging open in shock now that he was at the base of the Free City's fortifications.
He stood at the foot of the wall, a few yards away from the enormous front gates: Elena half-bartered and half-argued with a team of heavily armored guards stationed there. Sam stared up at the loops of razor wire at least fifty feet above him, not caring if he looked like some awestruck yokel just arrived in the big city. He put a hand on the wall and felt the rough, pockmarked texture of the brick with his palm and fingertips. He felt like he had been transported back in time to the Middle Ages, standing just outside some French king's castle, waiting for the catapults and the siege ladders to arrive. He understood at once what drew people to the Free Cities, assuming that they were all like this. Even the largest army of Ravagers or the most colossal horde of Plague-Heads could do little in the face of these walls but mill about, frustrated and harmless.
He heard a high-pitched whistle and turned in time to see Elena with two fingers between her lips, the other hand making a circular 'let's-get-moving' gesture above her head.
Abigail tapped him on the shoulder. "Time to move," she said. Sam had all but forgotten that she was standing beside him, so mesmerized was he by the sheer scope of the construction. He reluctantly pulled his eyes away and reminded himself that he needed to look, if not exactly intimidating, at least competent.
Sam felt the eyes of the guards on him as he passed through the heavily fortified front gates. There were six of them on ground level, and at least as many looking down from the towers at the top of the wall. Sam imagined all of them staring with suspicion from behind their identical mirrored sunglasses and their matching black masks, waiting for him to give them a reason to shoot. He tried to walk as casually as possible, which of course only made every step he took that much more awkward. He noted that these guards were dressed identically to the dead soldiers he and Abigail had come across in the woods. He wasn't sure exactly what that meant for them, but he doubted it was good.
He tried to take his mind off the guards — and the assault rifles, grenade launchers, and machine guns in their various hands — by further investigating the wall. Now that he was passing through its entrance, he could see that the walls were a good ten feet thick. He tried to imagine the sort of cannon or battering ram that could penetrate them, and he couldn't. Anything short of an Old World tank would be useless against these battlements.
Despite these considerable defenses, he and Abigail, along with the rest of the caravan, passed into the city without so much as a pat-down from the masked guards. Sam supposed it went to show how much trust — or power — a Shepherd like Elena could amass here. The system didn't entirely make sense to him, but he supposed it didn't need to. The important thing was that he was within the walls. He was inside the Free City.
Past a brief zigzagging path of chain link fencing was an open-air market.
Around harvest time, back in his Colony, farmers would set up a small fair where they would show off some of their smaller, boutique crops and trade them among themselves and the rest of the Colonists. The larger, staple crops belonged to the Colony as a whole, but things like sunflowers, zucchini, pumpkins and the like belonged to the farmers themselves, and Sam had always looked forward to the fun and busy day when they threw their annual fair. As the majority of the Colonists were farmers, the fair took up much of the open space in the Colony's central square. Everyone came out for it, of course, and to Sam it had always seemed a nearly overwhelming bustle of buzzing crowds and activity.
He now saw just how small and quaint those fairs had truly been.
The central market of Cheyenne was easily larger than the entirety of the Black Hills Survivors Colony, and the sheer mass of humanity in front of him dwarfed its population many times over. Framed on each side by squat, leaning wooden tenements and at its rear by a collapsed Old World tower that had been re-purposed as a horizontal line of storefronts, the marketplace was a chaotic mass of stalls, stands and kiosks swarmed by a horde of people shouting, laughing, and shopping. In its own way, it was as stunning as the enormous walls that ringed it and the rest of this amazing Wilds metropolis.
A hand appeared in front of his face and snapped its fingers, breaking his apparent trance. "You'll have plenty of time to gawk after we've finished processing you." The voice was Elena, and it somehow managed to sound amused and annoyed at the same time. It almost reminded him of Abigail, which was another sign that this Elena was someone dangerous. "You two are with Highmane and me."
"Just us?" Abigail asked.
Elena nodded. "Don't fret, love. It's nothing nefarious. We simply have to test your gold. Make sure it's what you say it is."
"Of course," Abigail said, her voice clipped and formal. She was obviously suspicious of Elena's motives, and if Sam hadn't already been suspicious of the young Shepherd, Abigail's apprehension had pushed him firmly into that territory. She might not be much for manners, or for people skills in general, but Abigail knew survival. Far better than him, which wasn't saying much, but she had survived her entire life with some of the most dangerous and evil people as companions. On the other hand, what Elena said made a certain sort of sense. Plenty of worthless metals looked an awful lot like gold, and these Shepherds probably had little reason to trust the word of strangers out there beyond the city walls.
In any case, they were past the point where they could argue. They had collected a fresh handful of gun-carrying toughs since they passed through the front gates, and they sure looked like they all took their cues from Elena. Sam exchanged a wary glance with Abigail, but with seemingly little choice in the matter, he followed Elena without complaint.
Elena led them through the market's outskirts for a bit before turning their little group to the right and down one of the larger side streets. Sam looked back over his shoulder and saw that the rest of the caravan had been herded into a blob-like mass at the opposite end of the open square, where Hydra — apparently not a mute — was engaged in a heated conversation with a man dressed in the same black garb as the guards at the gate and the dead soldiers in the wood. Sam wasn't sure those poor souls weren't in just as bad a spot as he feared himself to be in. Just relax, he told himself. You don't know that Elena is lying to you. Maybe she said exactly what she meant, and she's not going to try to squeeze you for even more gold — gold you of course don’t have. She might mean exactly what she told you.
And when has that ever happened? Vincente's voice asked him.
"If you're curious, we're heading into Ki's district," Elena said, not bothering to look back at them. "You just saw the grand bazaar, which is in what is called the Commons district. The rest of the cargo will be heading the opposite direction, into the Lawbringer's district. Be glad I'm taking you to Ki's neighborhood. All the security of the Lawbringer's domain, with twice the fun."
The path she led them down had once been a three-lane Old World road, lined on either side by two-to-four floor structures, likely office buildings. Now, the road was considerably narrower, hemmed in by newer constructions. The old, dilapidated buildings had been encrusted with equally dilapidated newer constructions built out of soggy-looking wood, rusted corrugated metal sheets, and scavenged road signs. These ramshackle dwellings leaned against each other and out over the road's center like lines of drunks making their way home after a long night at the tavern. Sam had brief, terrifying visions of the moldy old towers collapsing down on his head every few minutes. The locals milling about in the doorways and balconies all around him seemed unconcerned with the neighborhood's structural integrity, so he told himself he would be fine. Probab
ly.
As they continued down the road, the patches of decades-old asphalt began to give way more and more to packed-down dirt and splotchy clusters of dull green weeds. The road became increasingly packed with passing pedestrians, bicyclists towing trailers laden with trade goods, and the occasional two-wheeled passenger carts pulled by skinny, robe-clad men. Sam noted that each and every local moved aside to let their group pass. Furthermore, every one of them stared intently at their feet until Elena was safely beyond them. They then resumed their respective travels and errands, without a look back.
"Madame Ki," Elena said, finally deigning to look back at them as she continued leading them forward, "takes something of a...hands-off approach to governing. One of the many reasons this is Cheyenne's better half. Free bit of advice, however: don't cause trouble. It's been said that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, but trust me when I tell you that you don't want to be asking Ki for forgiveness. Of course, you don't want to be asking me for forgiveness either, and if this gold turns out to be fake, well..." She gestured to the half-dozen grim gunmen that had formed a loose circle around the three of them.
This, oddly enough, made Sam feel a bit better about their situation. After all, if Elena was planning on robbing and killing them, then wasting breath warning them about this Madame Ki didn't make a whole lot of sense. He knew that the gold, Abigail's old stash, had been good enough for someone as hard and cunning as the dearly departed Mae, so he knew it would pass whatever test Elena had in mind. He started to contemplate their next move, was even beginning to consider asking Elena herself for advice.
They came to an open intersection and Elena brought them to a stop. Straight ahead of them was an Old World storefront, the plate glass window long since replaced with thick cement on its lower half and meshed chicken wire on its upper half. A hand-painted sign above its doors identified it as 'Burt's Exchange and Dry Goods.'