Peace in an Age of Metal and Men (3 page)

The day passed in relative quiet. In the concrete shadow of the broken bridge, I spent my whole morning watching the spot on the hill where there had been coyote tracks. The spot remained empty, except for periodic patrols of tribespeople. They walked in pairs now, which they probably always should have done.

I turned the coyote’s stick over in my hand, looking at it in the bright daylight. It was mesquite by the smell, but I couldn’t recall any thickets of mesquite anywhere nearby. That meant the coyotes either traveled long distances with their stick or there was a grove somewhere close that I didn’t know about. If my skidder had been functional, it wouldn’t have been hard to scout around. I tossed the stick to the ground and went to look at that skidder. Maybe it would be an easy fix.

The skidder wasn’t in good shape. It still floated when I powered it up, and I could get it to propel slowly if I leaned forward and nudged it just so. The boosters were worthless, though, and I had no clue how to fix them. They needed expert attention if the skidder was ever going to be anything more than a fancy wheelbarrow.

I wasn’t sure I wanted it working again. The laid-back life suited me fine.

After the sun set, I was sitting a good ways from the small fire someone had set up for cooking. The hunters were back with rabbits and an armadillo. Most of the tribe gathered nearby, chatting up about the day’s events.

“He hit the thing from fifty meters,” said Edgar Buck. He lined up the day’s kills next to him and started sharpening his knife. “Hell of a throw.”

“Mmm,” said Mina. She stripped apart wheat and filled a large stone bowl with the grain while the chaff went into a pile at her feet.

“Boy’s turning into a fine hunter, just wish there was more out there to hit.”

“You think we’ll need to move?”

“No.” Ed pulled the skin off of a rabbit. “Water’s clean here. Long as the well doesn’t go dry we can manage.”

“Water’s good, but we need food.”

“Bah. We can trade for food. Grow it.”

“Trade what?” Mina started grinding the wheat with a stone.

The conversation continued, but I stopped paying attention. It was the same conversation every day—comfortable in its consistency, but not very informative.

A wisp of dust lazily circled in the wind. It was a gentle breeze. A quiet breeze. Hardly a breeze at all. It was, in fact, not nearly strong enough to pick up that little bit of dust on its own. That dust must have had help. Something was there, stalking me from just beyond the light of the fire. The hunter was so absolutely silent that I could hardly hear it coming even after I knew it was there.

But I could smell it.

Sweat. Dirt. Piss. Only one creature had this particular combination of scents. Only one kind of monster fed off grown adults right in the middle of a settlement. I was being stalked by the most frightening creature around: a kid.

Maybe more than one.

A scrape. I dropped forward, evading a lunge. The kid stumbled and fell with a grunt. Another hit me from the side, stepping right on my metal arm and launching herself at my head. I caught a flash of blonde hair as she laughed and slammed a black sack over my head, then rolled away.

I roared in mock fury and crouched into a defensive stance.

The sack smelled of earth and rice. A footstep. I lunged.

Nothing there.

Someone yanked hard on a rope, cinching the sack tighter around my neck. I gagged and breathing got hard. I grabbed the rope, pulled so I could breathe again. At the same time, I shifted my weight and pulled away from the rope holder.

My shoulder slammed into something soft and solid. It was one of the bigger kids, then. That meant whoever was on the string wasn’t their biggest muscle. I tucked and rolled forward, still blind.

Feet under me again, I yanked hard on the rope and shoulder-blocked in that direction. I made fleeting contact before that kid skittered away. The rope was loose. I started to pull the sack from my neck.

There wasn’t any time to get it off. A quick footstep from my left warned me of incoming, and I dropped straight down. The kid’s center of weight hit above me and I lifted and tossed. The satisfying thud put a smile on my face.

It didn’t stick.

The rest of them hit me all at once. Two low and one high. My back hit the dirt hard. I was pinned.

Then, I laughed like I hadn’t laughed in a long time. Laughter made my whole body hurt, but it felt so, so good. The kids mercifully pulled the sack from my head and let me sit up.

Marcus, the twelve-year-old I’d tossed, handed me my hat. He had a goofy grin on his face. “Didn’t think you’d put up such a fight.”

I nodded and brushed the dust off of my shirt. “Not a bad play, there,” I said. “Distract me, then blind me.”

“Yeah, but you heard it coming,” said Gertie, the smallest of the group. She stood next to her brother, Dustin.

“I didn’t hear it at all. Was that you that snuck up on me?”

“It was me,” said Haley. “Mama made me some sneaking shoes.” She had a big grin on her face and soft leather shoes on her feet. She was a few centimeters taller than Gertie, but not much younger than Marcus.

“Well, that’s good news. We ought to get you out hunting.”

“I’ve been practicing my shooting,” Haley said.

“I killed a rabbit today,” said Marcus.

“Boomerang?” I said.

“Yeah.” Marcus grinned. “From a hundred meters, at least.”

“Heard it was a hell of a throw,” I said.

Marcus glowed at the compliment.

“Shooting’s good,” I said, turning back to Haley. “But it seems like you ought to learn to use a bow or a boomerang. Maybe a knife.” I stood and tipped my hat to the other adults, who had been watching. They knew my arrangement with the kids. I taught survival skills. Then those skills got tested on me.

Her grin spread wider, and her eyes twinkled.

Marcus didn’t look so amused. “With just a little tech we’d a been able to see you better in the dark. Made ourselves invisible and silent. Hell, a decent gun might have taken you out at a thousand meters.”

“Eyes adjust to moonlight if you don’t look at the fire. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got a sack on your head.” My expression turned dead serious. “And there’s only one good way to defend against a bullet from a thousand meters.”

“What’s that?”

I walked over to the fire, grabbed a bowl of stew, and started back for my home. The mood of the evening had darkened for me, soured by memories of war and fights that I’d fought and lost. The world was full of fights I’d never win and enemies I’d never defeat. There was injustice everywhere and I’d done what I could, but that wasn’t much and I knew it.

“What is it, J.D.?” Marcus asked. “How do we defend against a sniper’s bullet?”

I looked him right in the eyes. “Don’t make enemies.”

Ben Brown’s image appeared in flickering holographic imagery above my glow cube. Ben had grown since I’d last seen him. He wasn’t much taller but he’d filled out with muscle. Working on the ranch would do that. Ben was a good man, still a boy at sixteen, really: strong and stubborn in a way that fit him perfectly to a hard life in the outlands of Texas.

When his parents died, he and his brother had taken responsibility for the ranch, including various power generators, livestock, and their siblings. It wasn’t an easy choice for the boy. He’d been headed for more than one kind of trouble before life hit him. Now he was mired down in running the ranch. The modern ranch involved a wide range of technology and production; it wasn’t uncommon to host both solar and wind generators along with longhorns or sheep. It was a tough life and not one that young Ben had envisioned for himself.

“J.D.,” he said in the image. “You gotta help me. Stop by the ranch sometime today and I’ll tell you. It’s—It’s about Francis.” There was desperation in the boy’s voice that I’d never heard before.

It was too late in the day to do anything about it. His words gnawed at me as I fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of nothing at all and everything at once. My body still ached and it was keeping me from any kind of proper rest. My dreams wandered to war.

Dreams of war were few and far between for me, though, and they didn’t stick. My dreams turned to Zane, the handsome man from the city. He looked at me with that amused expression. He smiled and showed his too-white teeth. His voice…

His voice was speaking to me. “J.D.,” he said. “J.D., you gotta pick up the earpiece.” Seemed an odd thing for a person to say, even in a dream.

“Just put the damn thing in your ear, J.D.”

I blinked and shook the grogginess from my head. The voice wasn’t in my dream. It came from my duster, which was still hung on my chair. My muscles protested, but I sat up and rifled through the pockets until I found the earpiece.

“J.D., are you hearing this?”

I nodded. The earpiece was loud enough that I could hear it just fine, even though it wasn’t in my ear.

“J.D., come in. You sleeping or what?”

“Not anymore.”

He seemed to hear me. “It’s worse than I thought. Put the earpiece in and you’ll see.”

“What about Tucker?”

“I’ll tell you about Hale when we meet up.” His voice took on a sharp edge. He was getting upset.

“Alright.”

There was a long pause. “Did you put it in?”

“What? No.”

“I thought you were going to put it in.”

“Never said that.”

“Just put it in, Crow.”

“I don’t trust you and I can hear you just fine.”

“There’s more to that tech than talking.” He sighed. “It lets you see and hear what I need you to see and hear. Plus, if you want it out you can always just grab and pull.”

“That easy?”

“Well, it hurts and can cause minor brain damage if you yank it too hard.”

“Oh, well, in that case I’m sold.”

“Really?”

I bit my lip. This was clearly important to him, but I didn’t know the guy. For all I knew, it was some kind of trick, though I couldn’t imagine why he’d be trying to trick me. It was a simple matter of trust and I didn’t have any for the city slicker, even if he was brave enough to come all the way out into the desert to talk to me.

Sometimes bravery means trusting folks who haven’t earned it yet. Sometimes being smart means not trusting anyone ever.

A minute passed.

“You do it?” Zane asked.

“No.”

Zane’s voice came through tense. “You need to see something.”

“Send it to my cube.”

Zane muttered something that I couldn’t quite hear. It didn’t sound like pleasantries. Soon, my glow cube lit up and I tapped the top to project the incoming image. While it loaded, I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. Puffs of smoke drifted through the image, sharpening the picture but causing it to waver and distort.

A man was sharpening blades on a spinning grindstone. Behind him, shimmering translucently at the edge of view, was a long table and a hook hanging from an unseen ceiling. Next to the table was a stocky steel machine with a flared opening in the top. The man had a scruff of a beard and overalls unbuttoned to allow the straps to hang loosely at his sides. His hands were covered with black gloves, and white-hot sparks from the grindstone showered his chest and arms but didn’t seem to affect him.

“What’s this all about then?” I asked.

Zane was silent.

The man in the video continued his work. When he had finished one blade, he moved out of view for a moment and returned with another knife. When that was finished, he returned again with a third knife, this one barely longer than his thumb. Once he had ground all three knives, he used a whetstone to carefully work each blade until it was razor sharp. He tested each on a strip of leather, showing that each knife could slice through with little resistance. The ash lengthened on my cigarette as the man toiled.

“A man’s sharpening knives, city boy.” I tapped ashes onto the dirt floor next to my bed. “Implication is that he’s planning a murder, right? Sounds like something the law ought to handle.”

“I told you,” Zane said, his voice shaking with uncertainty. Or was it fear? “We have a strong interest in not involving the sheriff. In fact, the less we can involve anyone, the better.”

“The law handles stuff like this. Even out here.”

“It’s not that I don’t have faith in their well-meaning,” Zane said.

In the hologram the man set down all three knives and left the field of view. Long moments passed. Just as I was about to break the connection and go back to sleep, he returned. The man dragged something behind him, but the object wasn’t visible in the hologram. It struggled. I leaned in close so I could see, and the smoke from my exhale briefly obscured the view.

I waved to clear the air, but managed to trigger the controls on the cube at the same time. The image disappeared, instead switching back to the main console. Cussing, I quickly gave the gesture to move back to the video, but the signal got misinterpreted and instead brought up some still images of the surrounding area.

Zane gasped, his voice clear through the earpiece.

“What is it?” I asked. “I lost the feed.”

“It’s…”

My gestures started working. Flipping madly through control screens, I managed to bring up the video, but it was stuck for a painfully long time. The image was distorted, but the image of the man was clear and behind him—

The picture cleared and resumed motion. The man had moved again and was much closer to the camera. He was testing a knife’s sharpness on his arm. Then he moved and I winced because deep down I knew he’d have a man on that hook.

I was wrong.

It was a boy, not more than ten years of age. His legs were bound tightly with rope, and tears streamed from his eyes. The boy wore ragged clothes, like a he’d been dragged off the street. There was no sound, but I could almost hear the wails as the boy screamed and pleaded. The man didn’t seem to hear anything. He smiled, pursing his lips like he was whistling the whole time.

He slit the boy’s throat and slashed his wrists in three fluid motions.

It took the boy no more than a few seconds to die. A quick death is a mercy sometimes. It can be a kindness.

What I saw there sure as hell was no kindness. Rage boiled up in my belly. This needed justice. Someone needed to get in there and make that man face what he’d done. Someone needed to stop this from happening again.

The cigarette dropped from my lips.

“Call the sheriff,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

“We can’t,” Zane said.

“Why not?”

“Take the job, J.D.” Zane’s voice shook. “Take the job that Goodwin’s offering. Make this right and earn some money at the same time.”

“Where did this happen?”

“You won’t bring Sheriff Chin into it?” Zane said.

Sheriff Trisha Chin was in charge of justice for a hundred-kilometer radius around Dead Oak. She had been my partner for a time before I stepped down. She cared as much about justice as I had, and so when she took over as sheriff people had been happy. They got someone who was both tougher and nicer than me. Prettier too.

“Something’s gone wrong in the town of Swallow Hill,” said Zane. “Something bad and you might be the only one who can fix it.”

I didn’t answer for a long time. Peace. I’d known peace. Could I really put that aside for this?

The image of the boy still flickered above my cube and in its light my guns seemed to dance on the wall. I’d seen boys like him before. Poor, hungry, tired. Abandoned. I’d neglected them before, too. Were they ever really better when I tried to help?

The moment was broken by the acrid smell of burning fabric. I quickly patted out the fire on my shirt where my dropped cigarette had landed. My jaw was set so hard that saying the words was difficult.

“I’m in.”