Lostlander

by Dean F. Wilson

   Nox raised his pistol. This time, he felt no reluctance to kill.

  5 – ONE MAN, FIVE WOLVES

  Nox turned slowly, flicking back his coat on the left side to reveal his second pistol. Oh, he knew he'd need that one too. He flexed his fingers, and the wolves flexed their fangs.

   The first wolf leaped at him, snarling. It came with such force and ferocity that Nox barely had time to fire. The wolf didn't so much as die as eat those bullets, and choke and gargle on them. Nox side-stepped out of the way of its falling body.

   Then the next came, fast and just as ferocious. It was smaller than the first, pressing itself against the ground before pouncing on him. He had to use his left arm to block its snapping mouth from taking his head clean off. He nestled his right pistol on his arm, pressing it between the beast's eyes. They say you couldn't tame nature, and in some respects you couldn't—but it didn't matter how wild you were. Bullets made you tame.

   As the body of their companion fell limp, the next two wolves stalked in slowly. It looked like one of them wasn't sure if it should attack or run. It was a pity of sorts that word of the Coilhunter didn't spread in animal tongues too. Maybe then they'd know for sure that they should've ran.

   But there was a fifth wolf, and he saw it circling around him on the right. It was farther off, but as it circled, it came in a little closer. Those other two weren't just cautious. They were a distraction. Nox turned suddenly to the predator, keeping one pistol on the other two. It froze. Maybe it wasn't used to this. Maybe it was used to catching its prey off guard.

   Nox could've filled them all with lead, but he was hoping to scare them off. He had a feeling in his gut he'd need all the ammunition he could find, so he certainly didn't feel like wasting any. It wasn't like he had access to his supplies in his trusty monowheel, or those in his hideout in the Canyon Crescent. He wasn't just lost. He was low. So, he had to make everything count. Right now he counted three bullets spent. He wasn't sure how long it'd be before he'd have to spend blood.

   The dominant wolf on his right didn't budge. That was good, of course, but it didn't just mean it wasn't attacking—it wasn't running either. It sniffed the air, and a curious look formed in its eyes. Some of the ferocity faded from it, but Nox knew not to be fooled by that. He had the scars of many animals that feigned meekness just before the kill.

   Then it dawned on Nox that it might've caught the scent of its kin on him. It'd been about a week since he stumbled upon Umna in the north-western stretches of the Wild North. She was a tribal woman, a guide for folk like him, and she had a tamed wolf by her side. It remembered him and nudged its head against his legs. Not quite a pet, and not quite wild. Umna said she preferred it like that.

   So, it left its scent. And this wolf, this larger, hungrier, wilder wolf, tried to reconcile the smell of man and the wild. Funny, that. This unmarked place was causing confusion for all.

   It was then, as they gunned each other down with their glares, that Nox noticed they were wearing collars too. The fur obscured them, but they were there. And they looked just like the one he wore. He wasn't sure what to make of it. Not quite a slave, and not quite wild.

   Throughout all this, Old Reliable moaned and whinnied fearfully. Nox couldn't calm him, not while he was killing the calm with his iron clap of thunder, not while the living wolves were snarling, and the dying ones were gargling in their death throes. The only calm was in the Coilhunter's unwavering, unshaking hands, in the untrembling twitch of his fingers. He could've gunned them all down, could've made it thunder even more. Then, only then, would the true calm follow in the wake of the storm.

   But something else happened that the Coilhunter did not expect. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the unmoving wolves start to spasm. Oh, the dead spasmed. They made a living show of it sometimes, as if Death were an unskilled puppet master. But this was different.

   Nox stepped back slowly, slow enough to lower one hand towards his belt, where instinct told him he'd need to pull out something better than a pistol. Slow enough to watch the three living wolves back off. Slow enough to see the two dead ones come back to life.

  6 – BELIEVER

  The Wild North was the frontiers, but that didn't just mean of civilisation. It was the edge of everything. It was a place that seemed to straddle worlds. It didn't matter if you came doubting. It didn't matter if you questioned all and answered less. No matter what your personal convictions, the Wild North'd make a believer out of you.

   Nox stepped back, almost stumbling over Old Reliable behind him. He'd seen many things—monstrous things—but so far he hadn't seen the dead rise, though he'd heard tell of it before. Why, he'd rationalised it all, like he always did. Maybe they weren't quite dead. Maybe it was the tug of ligaments, the spasm of muscle. Or maybe, just maybe, they were what the crazy called them—deadwalkers.

   As he tried to collect his thoughts, and didn't feel he was collecting them quick enough, his instincts took over. And he was lucky they did. The first raised wolf snapped at his leg, but he moved out of the way of its jaws just in time. It still had the bullet nestled between its eyes, those glazed-over eyes, which should've been staring up at the sky instead of him.

   The second wolf turned and jumped, almost before it even looked where it was jumping. It was working on instinct too. Nox tumbled outs of its path, launching himself right over Old Reliable's body. The horse tried to buck and kick, but there was no energy for bucking, and no legs for kicking. If Nox were a heartless man, as some liked to paint him, he could've used the horse's body for cover. It was a funny thing. He'd rather use the bodies of men.

   So Nox did what instinct told him. He cupped a few butterfly capsules from his belt and scattered them into the sand before the wolves. They leaped away as the little orbs rolled to their feet, or snapped at them, or howled at them. Then the capsules burst open, and out came dozens of small, mechanical butterflies, all hungry for movement, and all with a bellyful of sleep-inducing gas.

   Nox stayed still, with his gloved hands on Old Reliable's head, trying to calm him. The wolves, however, roamed, thinking this an easy prey. They'd seen insects before. They'd swatted them away, or devoured them whole. These colourful kin were no different. And yet, they were.

   The first snarling, leaping wolf, with its glazed eyes and blood-covered brow, took a lungful of the noxious gas, and slumped to the ground. The second increased its pace, but this only drew the butterflies to it all the faster. They flitted around, grasping onto its face with their tiny hook-like claws. It tried to shake them, but the shaking only lured more of them in. It howled through the haze, then coughed, then fell.

   The other three wolves fled in terror. That they fled from other apparent creatures of nature was of little consequence to them. The Wild North was for the wild. You lived in the wild and died to the wild. Maybe it'd be another wolf, or maybe, in this crazy world of Altadas, it'd be a butterfly.

   Those little insects finished with the wolves and came now for Old Reliable, who Nox couldn't calm enough to keep still. They sprayed their gas into the sorrel's face, sending him to sleep. That was a better sleep than the one Nox had planned for him, but only if he had good dreams. Nox almost never did.

   “Dream deeply,” he said. Deeply, because you didn't want to dream too close to the surface, when the surface was all sand and sun.

   The butterflies flitted around him. He didn't swat them away, and he didn't sleep. His mask filtered out their gas, just like it filtered out the unclear air, just like it protected his tender lungs from the growing industry of the Iron Empire and the war down south. He could feel the oxygen tank on his back, pumping in that precious gas, along with a concoction of other chemicals to help reduce the swelling, to help numb the pain. They were the inspiration for the butterflies. Sometimes he just wanted to put the world to sleep, to take away the pain. That he did it with flair and colour was an homage to his days as a toymaker, back when th
is all started, back when he was Nathaniel Osley Xander, and not the Man with a Thousand Names.

   He tapped a button on the wristpad attached to his left arm. The butterflies stopped flapping and dropped suddenly all around him. It was almost symbolic. You could sleep all you liked, and you could make the world around you seem colourful, but sooner or later it'd all come tumbling down. Then all you'd see is the desert, that constant killer called “the land.” In a way, it was kind of soul-destroying, but if you had enough determination, you could find it inspiring.

   So that's what Nox did. He scooped together his little toy butterflies, holding one up to the light to inspect the tiny glass cylinder, now empty. He loaded them back into his belt and replaced them with his favourite toys: his guns. See, Nox was a killer too, though he only killed the worst of what the wild had to offer. And it offered a lot.

   He strolled over to the two sleeping wolves. It was hard to make out exactly what they were. Were they already dead? Could the dead even sleep? No doubt he could've held a sermon here, and he would've gotten a following. That was a how a lot of those cults started, by someone stumbling onto a miracle, and making others think they were the one behind it.

   No, Nox thought, thinking now of the Man with the Silver Mane. It's you. You're behind this.

   He pointed each pistol at the wolves, and fired. He now knew why his gut told him to save those bullets. He didn't think he'd have to kill the same wolf twice. He only hoped that the phrase third time's the charm wasn't quite what charmed these beasts.

  7 – NOT A LEG TO STAND ON

  Now, Nox wasn't just lost. He'd come to terms with that, sure enough. Now he had to come to terms with everything else, with seeing the dead rise, and putting them down again. By rights, out here, wherever here was, he hadn't a leg to stand on—but he kept on standing, and kept on walking. That was something the land thought him. That was something the sun thought him. You persevered, maybe only out of spite, but you did it anyway. You eyed the sun and said: You ain't lightning my funeral pyre. You scooped up a handful of sand and said: You ain't burying me yet.

   Then Nox thought of his former captor. You ain't getting away with this.

   He left Old Reliable sleeping. He hadn't the heart to end him, and thought maybe he'd fade off in his dreams. That was the best way to go, so long as you didn't go in the middle of a nightmare. In many ways, that's how most did, but they were waking ones. Often times, they were the Coilhunter.

   He ventured on, looking for the trail of those fleeing wolves, but the wind covered it quick, or he was lost again. Either was equally likely and unlikely, and altogether unhelpful. He kept trying to mark terrain features on the map of his mind, but the land here had a way of looking different every time you glanced at it, just like the eyes of the Man with the Silver Mane. He tried to breadcrumb his way, but the sand was even hungrier than he was. As much as he wandered by foot, he also wandered in his mind, drifting from thought to thought, from a glimpse at some future bounty to a half-forgotten memory.

   He remembered hearing of the Resistance's attack on the city of Blackout in the south, and how the Regime had sent the Iron Guard to take it back. Those were the Iron Emperor's personal guard, and they were formidable. You see, they were half-man, and half-machine, and both halves made an abomination. Taberah Cotten, the so-called “Scorpion” of the Resistance, sent one of their bodies up to Nox for inspection. He still had it in his workshop, strapped and chained in case either part of it woke up. General Rommond had put an iron-piercing bullet in it, and by rights that meant it was dead, both the human and mechanical parts. But there wasn't much right in the Wild North, and Nox was starting to get used to surprises.

   He heard something. A whisper. He looked around, expecting to see something else he'd dismissed as the rumours of children. There was nothing there. And yet, he felt like there was. There was a widespread belief among the tribes that machines had their own spirits, that they could communicate the secrets of mechanics in ways that nothing else could. There was one man who folk said was a living testament to that, a man more skilled than Nox with machinery, but all he was now was a testament to the dead. Brooklyn, they called him, though he had another name among the tribes. The Coilhunter had wanted to meet him, to learn from him, but the war got him before he ever got the chance.

   Nox was no tribesman. As much as the desert tried to pry his eyes open to things beyond his reasoning, he wasn't one for dancing around campfires and singing for rain. There'd been a lot of dancing and singing over the years, and a lot of campfires, but there hadn't been much rain. Yet as much as the Coilhunter had his doubts about spirits and magic, he'd seen enough to know that he couldn't yet explain everything in this world. Well, he was no philosopher either. He was content to explain enough with his gun.

   He tried to focus back on the path, but the whispers increased, until they almost seemed to come from everywhere around him. There was a paradox in them, for they seemed both distant and near, and both inside and outside of him. That was one reason he wasn't keen on the spirit world. He liked the simplicity of Dead or Alive. The other reason hurt more deeply, and he though part of him desperately wanted to hear his family's voices, he tried just as desperately not to listen.

   “Whaddya want?” he barked to the land around him. Of course, the land wanted him, wanted to chew him up and leave just his own spirit voice. But the land didn't answer. The spirits did.

   “Adoo alla kanna,” they said, though maybe it was just the way the wind sighed, the way his boots creaked, the way his hair rustled. Everything had a voice, and maybe everything had a language. Or maybe it was all just gibberish and the Coilhunter'd finally cracked like folk said he would.

   “What does that mean?” Nox asked.

   “Adoo alla kanna,” the voices repeated. The wind repeated. His boots repeated. His hair repeated.

   Nox rolled his eyes and sighed. “One of those answers then.” It was like saying the definition of a word was the word itself. You either knew it or you didn't. You couldn't teach it to someone. Well, Nox was used to teaching folk, and he only ever thought them one thing.

   Adoo alla kanna, he mused. The voices seemed to hear his thoughts just as much as his spoken words. They knew he didn't understand, but they made no effort to enlighten him—at least, none that he could see. Maybe he'd need the vision powder or the journey tea if he was to figure this one out, but first he'd have to figure out where he was.

   And then he stumbled into something. His boot struck something metal in the ground. He halted and got out some of his tools, digging around the object. It took him longer than he liked, but not long enough to realise it was part of his own old reliable, his monowheel. That vehicle'd got him out of many scrapes in the past, but it'd got him into this one. And it most certainly wasn't going to get him out. Not in this shape. Not in this many widely-dispersed pieces.

   “Well, howdy,” Nox said with a kind of affection bikers shared with their hogs. He patted the chassis like he did the horse's mane. “I ain't got a bullet for you,” he said, thinking back to Rommond's iron-piercing rounds, a technology the Coilhunter had first created, and then shared for the war effort. He always considered himself outside of that war, but that didn't mean his weapons had to be.

   He pulled the piece out of the sand and bunched up all the loose wires. It was junk, fit for the iron walls of the Rust Valley—or maybe Porridge's scrap collection—but it was his junk. He thought he might be able to salvage something.

   “Adoo alla kanna,” the voices spoke again, prodding deeper into his mind. He got the impression they'd directed him to this severed piece of machinery, and that his wandering thoughts about the Iron Guard weren't so wandering at all. Maybe they were guided thoughts.

   Nox cradled the machinery like a child. It reminded him, a little painfully, of how he held little Ambrose when she was born. It reminded him, stabingly, of how he held her when she died. He thought, a little
guiltily, of how he'd pondered Mrs. Mayfield's idea in the Rust Valley, of how he wondered if machines could bring them back to him.

   He was so lost in thought that he hadn't realised he was walking again. He wasn't sure where he was going, and he only knew he was backtracking when he found Old Reliable again. That stubborn horse just wouldn't die. Maybe he was waiting for Chance Oakley. Well, he'd be waiting a long time. Longer than he had, stubborn or not.

   “Adoo alla kanna,” the voices urged, and they were stubborn too.

   “Ah, I'd do all, but cannot,” Nox replied grumpily, as if those voices were just a taunting child or a nagging wife. How we wished for those taunts and nags right now.

   Then he paused and looked at the hanging wires in his arms. They looked an awful lot like ones he'd yanked out of that Iron Guard solider back in his workshop. They looked an awful lot like the ones he'd studied in its limbs.

   “Hmm,” he said, and even that was full of grit.

   He knelt down, placing the machinery next to Old Reliable. The horse raised his head and showed his teeth. He still had a lot of fight in him. He still had a lot of life in him. Nox was starting to slowly realise that maybe he'd get to see Oakley after all.

   Nox took one of his knives out, and Old Reliable flinched. Something was telling him to connect one of the severed ligaments with a wire. That shouldn't have done anything, but the tribesfolk said the spirits of machines course through wires like blood through veins. Maybe it wasn't so much a merging of two things. Maybe it was just plain old possession.

   The Coilhunter followed his gut. It usually told him when to sling a gun, when to dodge, when to cast a butterfly cannister. Now it wasn't listening for the flaws of his enemies. It was listening to some phantom voices. Or the voice of his imagination.