nothing but time

From above, they looked like two rock lizards making their treacherous way along the shaded bottom of the box canyon, picking through the shattered stones and cracked alkali. Following the sightless twists ahead – the settler with his head down – silent and numb to all things. His lips never once touching the waterskin given to him by the man with the dangling pistol.

This new friend would not stop talking. It was a consistent running chatter that came from everywhere and went nowhere. First the damn ground with its various and sundry failings. The inconsistency of the weather, damn it all to damnation. Bugs. The general nuisance of horses beyond the most glaring inconvenience – that being the fact they exploded at the slightest sign of maltreatment. Isn't the distance just a bitch to judge this far out? Flatter even than the myriad girls he'd bedded, a description of each and imitation of their bedroom verbatim he supplied. Kidding, really I'm a gentleman – just ignore all that. You don't say much do you? That's fine.

Maybe a mile, they walked. Maybe three. Finally, a turn in the bend and there the settler laid eyes on the horse, standing at rest, pawing the ground. Its procedural mind paused.

His child's head on backwards. Decapitated. Her half-destroyed visage and her suffering. The way her face disappeared and skull imploded with the shell, but her body wouldn't stop moving until he gave her another.

Well now, buddy, here's your missing friend. You can go right on and keep that waterskin there if you like, I got...

The settler raised the shotgun and blew off the horse's face. It charged blindly into the wall directly in front of it, slamming at full speed and continuing to shred the ground with it's paws, no sensory information of any kind making it to the navigation system.

Fucker, you fucker, I had the faith! I had the FAITH you -

The next shell – the last one – hit it right across the broadside and the legs seized in mid-kick and the unit fell flopping to the ground. A wave of heat rolled off of it. Warning. This model fifteen hundred equubot has sustained abnormal trauma. Cooling system is not responding. It is advised that advised that advised that mod mod model fiffiffiffifteen hundreddred equuuuuuuuuuuuuubot advised that advadvadvadv

The settler took hold of the barrel and with the stock he beat the side of the machine. Split the stock to splinters and kept hitting it as it bucked and seized and shredded metal and ground gears. The high-pitched beeping of the inside rose in volume. The voice of doom stuck in an endless loop of its solemn intonation.

He had nothing left in his heart but resignation. I'm coming, fucker. I'm coming and I will go to hell for having mercy on my wife, you fuck, and when it comes time I will stand alongside the devil and tear down your throne. I will be evil. I will kill you, you...

A shattering blamblamblamblamblamblam, all in one single chatter, no stops in between. The settler's eye could not figure out which of the six holes popped up in the horse's ass first, but they were in a hex pattern, perfectly evenly spaced.

A grotesque slurping noise welled up from inside, and the settler struggled back as steam burst forth in high-pressure gouts from the holes. The horse's spasming slowed. Life – or the autonomic imitation of it – draining. No peace in the creature's posture as it seized up for the final time in a harsh, rusty-sounding grind. A final jerk and it came eternally to rest. Heat boiling off it, the air rippling like silk in the wind.

The settler turned. Eyes found the smoking barrel of the pistol, in the man's hand but suspended from the thin leather strap. He'd fired from the hip – his left hand poised over the hammer to fan it. He let go and it dangled tiredly by his side, as if the short exertion had been all it could muster before crawling again to the shadows to slumber in the height of the day.

The gunman's face was shadowed by the brim of his hat, and the settler could only feel the coldness of the stare. The right thumb hooked into the pocket of his brown slacks and the fingers drummed against his thigh – a thoughtful, almost nervous gesture, certainly unintentional. The voice that came from the shadowed face was thoughtful.

I like you. You know why?

The settler couldn't speak, so sat on the ground with his breath heaving, covered in steam, still grasping the barrel of the destroyed shotgun.

I like you because you may be crazier even than my own self. I don't guess you've ever heard the word schadenfreude?

The settler threw the shotgun aside, and his rage turned to weeping. I had to kill her... I had to kill her she made me promise I had to... please I wanna die, I wanna go to hell...

The gunman drew a deep breath and seemed to raise his head to the sky. The light tinted his face – calm and smiling. The settler looked up and through his tears, saw the reflected sunlight on the pale face of the stranger as a blurry halo – wondered for a moment if this was Raphael come to explain away the callousness and irrationality of god to one of his perfect flawed creations, and the effort just as omnipotently doomed to failure.

Nobody goes to hell, old sport. And besides, we just met. You can at least stay for coffee.

---

As they continued, the water from the rainstorm grew deeper – when they were about waist-deep, the stranger walked with a small satchel of his ammunition and the pistol held above his head – the settler dropped the shotgun in the water without comment from the stranger.

The settler gaped when he saw it.

Split aside as if by the power of Zeus himself was the road. The skeletal guts of it bent and twisted away at the gap – a great vein of the fallen country split aside by a force older and greater.

We were searching for it... we couldn't find it.

Amazing what you find in canyons. I-motherfucking 80. The great uninterrupted sea-to-shining-sea outpost, the longest and largest purveyor of heavy metal thunder in these great united states. I do wish I could've been here to see it torn up like that – but I did feel it. Bet my spent shells you did, too, pilgrim.

The settler in bed, having made their youngest with his wife. The televisions silent a week – the phones soon to go the same forgotten way. Outside, the great black hills. He had it in his mind to hunt a buck. It would give them meat for many months. The new cellar for storing food nearly completed. Let the rest of the world fall down from their sin. Here I have my heaven – His kingdom among me as the son of God said. I will build it and it will glorify Him, and he shall be an aegis and to me a tower of strength.

She turned and fixed him with a sightless gaze in the dark.

We shouldn't have.

It's our duty.

He'll starve.

Might be a she. We don't know yet. 'll be nine months before we know, and by then I'll have the cellar done and two bucks frozen in it and we'll have the water generator running and

There're bad men, Eli. If they find we've got things that work, they'll kill us.

I'll protect us, and so will the Lord.

She was silent. He knew what she wanted to say – knew he would hit her if she said it.

Eli...

From below the ground came a tremor unlike anything he'd experienced before. They held tight to one another. The sound outside of the concrete of the road running by their house on the hillside shattering. Windows bursting. The abandoned car down the street had an alarm that went off. The sinking feeling of the entire house dropping.

In the morning light of the bloody dawn he found his wife and his son alive and uninjured, and thanked the Lord. The fact that the quake had filled in his cellar and destroyed three months of labor he saw no reason to need to forgive.

It was before he'd questioned the fucker. When he'd thought the one on high still had some plan for him – when he'd thought that being given a wife and family and the strength of his arm were all gifts granted to him.

I was... home... when it happened. Felt it a thousand miles away.

The stranger nodded. I expect you were. I was, too.

---

They climbed the rocks up to the great destroyed highway, the stranger showing the settler every trick and handhold and safe place to rest. Allowing for the settler's exhaustion, it took them an hour.

There at the top lay the remains of town of perhaps a hundred people. The houses annihilated by the tremor. The fault line of the canyon extended another mile before stopping, taking a sharp northerly curve – the expanse of it went back east and the settler could see the ruins of his car and his life off in the distance and did not look.

In the flat destruction, there stood only one structure – not defiant, but resigned. Rusted and neglected shopping carts out front – the drive-thru window of the pharmacy unusable since the roof above it with the pressurized tubes had fallen down, the edge connected to the building still hanging on and giving it the look of a trap-door halfway shut and dangling from a broken hinge.

The stranger beat the dust off his hat and scraped his boots on an American flag welcome mat, inviting the settler to do the same.

Some useless columnist made a piss about these thingies – I waited for the government to be totally gone before I started using 'em, you see, because I just hate to offend.

The settler felt a sort of shock upon entering. The same precise layout... the same products in the same places. Cash registers of the same type. As if he were there all over again... back home.

The stranger removed his duster and the settler could see now, for the first time, that he wore the uniform of the store, a nametag hanging in its proper place at his breast.

PATRICK

He threw the duster across the checkout counter to the right and walked behind it, grabbing two wrapped cigars from the case there.

We'll get you on something happy tomorrow – haven't ever used 'em, myself. Until then, I think we got some stories to tell and nothing but time to tell 'em, old sport.

(Author's note 02/27/2009: Through my own negligence, the next post I posted actually skips over one. Click here to go to the next post if you want to keep reading the main story in order. Sorry for the confusion.)