There’d best be Neville’s fortune at the end of this road, Lanyard thought. That small use of sorcery had left him shaky and a little nauseous. Every encounter like this reminded him that he was only half a Jesusman, one who knew just enough to get himself killed one day.
The further north they went into the Waste, the weirder the light got. The sun was now a pinpoint barely penetrating the blanket of cloud cover. Though they kept a true path guided by the girl’s internal compass, the light shifted, playing a little to left and right. When Lanyard wasn’t noticing, it was over his right shoulder, shuddering across the sky.
If they got lost out here, the sun would only navigate them to their deaths. Looking back, the scar of their passage was already erased by wind, as if the Waste had already forgotten them.
Slopkettle’s bike was low on fuel and began to falter. Signalling a halt near the warped twist of a lone traffic light whose misshapen globes still blinked, Lanyard haggled a tin can of grain liquor out of Spence. The price he demanded was a fistful of rifle bullets. Slopkettle handed over the greasy kerchief reluctantly, fists clenched as the skinhead tipped them out to count in front of her.
“My bullets should be in his heart, not his hand,” Slopkettle whispered as she passed Lanyard. “Make it soon.”
Spence made camp on the rise of a broken bridge. A coat hanger of steel and cement missed its central span and arched over nothing but clay. For once, the Leicesterite did not object to Lanyard joining their camp. As the sun slid towards false west and night, they made a fire with the last of their wood. Lanyard added some camel dung he’d saved.
Poked into one of the dried nuggets, Lanyard had secretly hidden a scrap of paper, marked with some writ he remembered from Bauer. Safeguards, sigils of protection, the names of known Waste devils—the fire was as holy as he could make it, which was little comfort.
“Do you hear the people of this place, man-eater?” Spence asked, looking over the broken edge of the lost bridge. “My dead wife…men I killed…they’re all whispering, up here.” He tapped his temple with a fat finger.
“That means the Waste comes for you, tonight,” Lanyard said, as he sat down on the buckled asphalt to wait, his back to the fire to preserve his night sight. He made a neat stack of guns at his feet, sharing out what was left of Mutch’s kit with the crooked women.
He was cleaning Bauer’s old gun when Tilly arrived with a ladleful of weak broth, fresh from feeding her nervous protectors.
“Be careful, it’s hot,” the girl said, holding the ladle steady as Lanyard sipped at the soup. He coughed as a chunk of scalding meat slid down his throat the wrong way, and Tilly’s hand shook, dropping the rest of the broth onto the Jesusman gun.
“I’m so sorry,” she said as she made to mop up the mess with the edge of her smock. Lanyard quickly pulled the gun out of her reach.
“Don’t touch this,” he warned. “Guns are dangerous.”
She stared at the old gun, taking in the eye-twisting mess of pictographs and writings, forbidden marks. Lanyard laid the shotgun to one side and draped the cleaning rag over the stock.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“I had to kill the man who owned this, Tilly,” Lanyard said. “He was a bad person, or perhaps he was too good to live. A gun’s a gun, so I took it.”
“Are you a Jesusman?” Tilly asked warily.
“No,” he replied. This was truth enough for a child’s ears.
There was one final squeeze of light from the sun and then darkness fell at once. There were no stars out here, and the moon was a wasted thing, defeated by the unmoving bank of clouds. The only light in the universe was the weak sputter of their campfire.
The group huddled nervously within the circle, clutching at rifles like talismans, looking outwards. As Spence stacked masonry and junk into a barricade, Tilly sat close to Lanyard, arms clenched around her knees, her tired eyes staring into the murk.
Lanyard’s mind drifted away from the island of frightened humanity. He cast around in the dark for any sniff of that which did not belong, any sign that the world veil was torn.
“You can feel them too,” Tilly whispered. His teeth ached, a faint hum in his ears grew into a painful buzz like a dozen mosquitoes trapped inside his ear, burrowing into his brain.
Joints aching, Lanyard fought the urge to vomit and rose to his feet. The world veil stretched into a sharp point working at the fabric of the universe. This far into the Waste, it was so thin that it gave way almost instantly. Murder slipped through the rip in the cosmos, close enough to raise the hackles on his neck.
“They’re here!” Lanyard shouted, his gun barking into the night.
The gloom spat out horrors, nameless grinning things that circled the edge of the campfire’s light, faces shifting and greasy. These intruders were nightmares made of scale and horn and limbs sheathed in tin and barbed wire. One creature had a marble bust installed as a head, the stone features flexing and mouth gibbering. Another was a cluster of slimy limbs erupting from a rusted refrigerator, trampling over a snake with a television for a face.
Junkers, Lanyard realised. They were bleedthroughs gone wrong. The Greygulf caught the objects somewhere between Before and Now and churned them into an unnatural life.
Lanyard’s flimsy scrap of protection held. The junkers roared and tested the boundary, but they were unable to advance on the terrified people within.
He remembered a time when Bauer held firm against a roving horde of junkers. That sharpshot paladin hollered out all the words of unmaking, then sent a barrage of lead for those junkers too stubborn to hear him. As a prentice Jesusman, Lanyard could do nothing but reload his master’s guns. At some stage during the onslaught, he had wet himself.
He was no Bauer.
Lanyard Everett unleashed the thunder of his holy gun at the fridge beast that shrieked as a round of shot punched out its life. Spence and the other townsfolk responded with a flimsy defence, peppering the hostile detritus with rifle shot, but their bullets were unmarked and made little difference.
The scrap of protection held the junkers back for another moment, but the fire flared into a blast of magnesium brightness as Lanyard’s journeyman sorcery finally failed.
The shotgun offered another almighty kick, and Lanyard saw the junker before him fall into a splintered heap, a dining setting melded together like a wooden cockroach. The sharp chair legs twitched once and were still. Lanyard’s camel wasn’t so lucky. The animal’s horrified honking was all the warning Lanyard had before a small pack of junkers tore it apart like a chicken.
Slopkettle snagged a monstrosity of umbrellas and TV antennae with her spiked chain, dragged it down, and stomped the life out of it. Gog darted about like a bloodied fighting cock, his talons ripping apart any junker that dared to face him. Dogwyfe clung to her husband’s bird, eyes wide, the speargun in her fist forgotten.
Lanyard heard the alien cries of the junkers, words never uttered by a human tongue, and the sickening crunch as an engine-block hand fell onto a man, turning him into red paste. As Lanyard quickly reloaded from his dwindling supply of shells, he beat back junker arms with the gunstock when they got too close. He swung that smoking hot hammer, driving the iron butt-plate into anything with a false face.
He was down to his last two shells.
A sound, and he turned to see a junker bearing down on him. It wore a marble bust as its own face, someone with a hawk nose from the Before-Times. Its body was lumpy cement punctuated with brick, wrapped around an old safe.
The statue mouth curved into a hateful smile, and the fist rose, an engine-block smeared with gore. Lanyard let off a round into the trunk of the demon. This did little more than drive it backward a half-step and gouge out a fist-sized chunk of cement.
One shell left, he realised. He aimed high and took out that hateful face, leaving nothing but a marble stump. The junker wobbled and reached up with its off-hand—one that ended as a blender—to gingerly touch the da
mage.
It rolled forward, its cement arms throwing a flurry of wild blows. Lanyard danced backwards until he slipped in the spilled guts of his dead camel. Unable to rise, he held up his empty gun like a sword to block the downward chop of the blender arm. The effort jarred his arms and shoulders.
The engine-block fist rose, and Lanyard looked up helplessly at the brutal instrument of his death. Then he spoke a forbidden phrase he’d heard a lifetime ago, a guttural tongue that made little sense to him.
Lanyard’s voice wavered, but the effect was unmistakeable. The junker teetered above him as the sorcery binding the bleedthrough parts failed. The building materials caved in on the safe that served as the beast’s heart, and the engine-block dropped from the sagging cement arm, narrowly missing Lanyard’s head.
The words of unmaking. There were words strong enough to bring down your enemy’s walls and words to part dark parasites from the bodies they’d stolen, but Lanyard remembered only the barest handful of the Jesusman’s rote.
In the face of this magic, the remaining junkers darted for safety, a few even leapt off the edges of the bridge. Lanyard could see them in his mind’s eye galloping across the dark plain and braying with fear. These errant bleedthroughs would terrorise the Waste until something stronger crushed the false life from them.
He turned to look at the chaos where the campsite had been. The fire was trampled and close to going out. By its dim light, he could see the bodies of the junkers and the broken remains of two of Spence’s crew. Underneath the buggy, Tilly Carpidian huddled untouched but weeping.
Good. Our treasure map is safe, he tried to convince himself. He was relieved that Tilly was safe but felt nothing for anyone else on that bridge.
Dogwyfe was busy tending to Gog’s wounds with pitch and a hot coal. Slopkettle stood above the ruin of the big junker, poking at the separated parts with her boot. She made no offer to help Lanyard to his feet.
Did she hear me say the Jesus words?
“What are you?” Slopkettle demanded but backed away with hands raised, not interested in anything he had to say.
There was only one explanation, and it ended in blood.
— 5 —
Dawn. That perfect darkness gave way to a blazing fury of light, the clouds gone somewhere else in the final hours of night. The sun was as hot as anywhere in the Inland and jerked across the dark blue sky like a greased coal.
Those who’d survived kept the morning fire going with the flesh of dead junkers, wood being wood. While the others slept or cooked what might be a pitiful last meal, Lanyard laid his pistol bullets across a rock. Barely a dozen rounds.
With his bowie knife, he scored the lead tips of each bullet with the mark of the Jesus—a simple cross flanked with the letters B and N, Before and Now. He hoped this would be enough to give any demon the true death, and he rued the useless weight of the empty shotgun on his back.
Slopkettle and Dogwyfe were busy carving up the fallen camel for meat, plucking out the yard-length ruddy feathers, taking care to cut around any of the bite-marks. Lanyard spent a minute or two picking through the large stack of his gear figuring out what he could do without.
With a heavy sigh, he left most of the gear foraged from the last bleedthrough but kept one packet of cigarettes for himself. The rest he traded with Spence for fuel and ammo. The bald Leicesterite drove a hard bargain.
“You ride with me, bossman,” Dogwyfe said as she charred camel steaks for quick transport. “Slop won’t have you on her bike.”
I bet she won’t, he thought but nodded in agreement. After Spence doused the fire, the dwindling caravan continued onwards, today’s north somewhere closer to south if the sun was anything to go by.
“Everything is a lie out here,” he told the birdwoman, who said nothing as she urged the reluctant Gog onward with the weight of two on his back.
Tilly rode with her uncle and the remaining Leicesterite, a timid townie with a name like Bevan or Darren. The buggy misfired more often than not as the roughgut fuel slowly scoured the insides of the motor. The machine might make it to Fos Carpidian’s miracle bleedthrough, but there was no way it was getting home.
“Idiots. They’re already dead,” Lanyard said. He clutched Dogwyfe’s bony waist as Gog lurched across a vast field of shattered gravestones stacked two or three deep. The woman said nothing, whirling the clacker stick and whistling through her teeth to drive the great bird up and over the mess. The bike and buggy picked a slower path through this cemetery litter. The names of the dead were too faded to make out.
“If they build a new town, set to digging out here in the Waste, those folks will be dead within the month. Or turned monster themselves.”
“Never going to be a town. No dig neither,” Dogwyfe said. “Just their bones, and us.”
“Only when I say so,” Lanyard said. “We need them still.”
“It’s not up to you now,” the birdwoman said.
Quicker than thought, Lanyard had his gun out and poked into her ribs. He yanked down her braid so hard that her head tipped back.
“Your smart mouth just got you killed,” he said.
They saw the buggy clear the hill of headstones. Spence was running the wounded engine hard, swerving and sliding sideways down the last slope.
A crack of a desperate rifle shot from the buggy, and then Slopkettle jumped that apex of tombstones on her bike, throttle back and whining. She had the hook and chain out and she was swinging it good.
The crooked women had set up an ambush.
“You pair of bitches. We’re in this now.” Lanyard swore. Dogwyfe smiled as he withdrew the pistol from her ribs, lining it up on the approaching buggy instead.
Spence shouted when he saw the bird. He cursed them as he fought the bucking of the steering wheel, rifle over the dash as he tried to aim at them. Tilly sat beside him wide-eyed and screaming.
When the bike drew level with the buggy, Slopkettle released the chain so it tangled around the nameless Leicesterite, its fat hook jagging deep into the side of his neck. The flenser jumped from the bike, slid down the stones on her backside, and hauled back on the chain. The man tumbled from the car, shrieking, twitching like a hooked fish.
The buggy was so close now that Lanyard could see the knives protruding from Spence’s chest and the glaze in his eyes as his life ran out of him. Tilly was the picture of fear, white-faced and crying.
“He’s going to ram us,” Lanyard said as he released his grip on the birdwoman’s braid. Smirking, Dogwyfe tapped her knout lightly against Gog’s scarred neck, and the bird danced on the spot, muscles quivering as the machine bore down on them.
In that final moment, Spence Carpidian steered into them, hoping to take out the bird with speed and metal. His rifle cracked once, the muzzle low and shaking. Gog leapt up into the air and landed on top of the moving car as it passed through the space where he had stood a second before. The bird became a flurry of claws and beak, stabbing downwards at the bald man.
The buggy coasted along until the motor belched and went silent. A moaning gurgle escaped from Spence as Gog feasted on him, claws squeezing the life and juice out of that belly. Dogwyfe tapped a command onto the bird’s neck, and he climbed out of the buggy dragging the dying man with his beak.
Lanyard dropped from the saddle and walked over to the buggy. Tilly was crouched low on the seat, whimpering and staring at the bird’s grisly feast, rapid sobs shaking through her small body.
He leaned into the car and picked her up. Rather than fight this, the girl hung limp in his arms like a rabbit weighing almost nothing. The back of her dress was wet from both her bladder and the life blood of her uncle.
“Your uncle Spence was a stupid man, Tilly, but you’re safe enough,” Lanyard told her. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“It ate him,” she kept saying, babbling and sobbing.
“This wasn’t my doing,” he told her. Now she fought him, little fists pounding into his chest, fee
t kicking into his belly with no consequence.
“I’m going to put you down now,” he said, depositing the girl onto the clay. She stood back, fists clenched, and looked around helplessly. There was nowhere to run.
“Your people are dead, and that’s just how it is,” Lanyard said. “Your Pa and all those people following, they’re not going to make it out here either.”
“No!” she yelled. “You’re lying.”
“You’ve seen how it is here,” he said, kneeling to her eye level. “This place is going to kill them. But you’re still alive.”
She stared at him in silence, rubbed away the tears and snot until her face was a dirty slimy mess. Lanyard saw an inner strength to her, fists bunched as she sized up a grown man twice her size.
Her childhood ended today, he realised.
“I’m your people now, girl. You lead us to your Leicester-We-Forget, and I’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
“Mister,” Tilly said, “you can fuck off.”
Lanyard took the buggy and ran it gently to conserve the dying motor. Tilly was trussed up in the back seat after having jumped out of the moving vehicle once already. Slopkettle wanted to carve the insolence out of her, but Lanyard drove the flenser off with a pistol butt to the side of the face.
Everyone else was dead, and everything around them was melting weirdness.
The only thing visible for miles was a lone bottle tree standing near the shattered finger of a cement pipe. A trickle of water from the pipe lent the tree just enough life to survive. Lanyard called for a halt, wondering if Before-Time water was safe to drink.
“Maybe we boil it,” Dogwyfe suggested, as the crooked folk considered the unusual sight. Lanyard dipped an empty can into the shallow pond and sniffed the water suspiciously.
It had a rotten egg whiff to it and seemed almost yellow. He tipped it out and watched the tainted water soak into the cracked earth.
Papa Lucy & the Boneman Page 6