a peaceful ride

The clerk crested the hill and looked down on the valley of tree stumps. They were the corpses of a century of pillage, the great ecosystems in their crowns long ago having fallen silent forever. The great swath of destruction showed the first few signs of being erased. Saplings springing up about the bodies of their parents stretched their infant leaves out to catch the sun and rain.

He was facing east by southeast, and the sun dazzled his eyes as he scanned the horizon. The trees came up again after what was likely half a mile of barrenness. There, at the edge of that distant tree line, the clerk saw the red-eyed man standing next to a black horse. The clerk had no glass he could use to get a closer look. No way to tell if he had yet been seen.

The red-eyed man was not alone, the clerk could see once he shaded his eyes with his hand. Three people were standing around the red-eyed man. Too far away to catch speech or to see if they were armed. There was no time. The clerk gigged his horse forward and approached at a trot. His body was as loose and easy as if he were wandering out of church during the recessional. No wind stirred the poncho.

The clerk watched as the red-eyed man turned and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the logging valley. The way toward that tree line was downhill, and the clerk felt his horse pick up speed, felt the footing become uncertain. The three at the tree line were headed toward him. He saw they wore similar clothes, moved in fits and starts. Closer now – they were younger than him, and violent.

Down the hill and the ground leveled out. He could take them in passing if he tried, but they might start shooting. They might start shooting anyway. No cover amid the stumps. No way to herd them if they came at him. At best he'd lose the horse, which he needed if he wanted to catch the red-eyed man.

The clerk knew it was another game. He was always playing games, the red-eyed man.

He slowed to a dignified canter as he approached them. They leaped from stump to stump as they got closer, eventually closing on him and surrounding him. His horse came to a stop as the one in front stepped in. He was a tall whip-thin guy with a ratty face freckled and cratered with acne, hair in some kind of samurai topknot with the whole left side of his head shaved. Clothes black and covered in chains and studs. The others circled behind the clerk's horse. The kid in front was seventeen, if that.

You gotta pay a toll, you wanna cross this field.

The clerk said nothing. Looked down from his perch at the kid and the smirk on his face, looked back at the other two. Nothing on his face, and anything that was on it hidden by the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat.

I said you pay if you wanna cross.

The clerk tugged on the reins and spurred his horse forward into a canter, right past the kid, who stood in stunned silence for a moment, the other two looking to him, confused. The clerk had made no move for the shotgun that hung alongside the saddle. The horse had negotiated a path through a small copse of stumps before the kid and his two companions surrounded it again.

Hey! Maybe you don't hear so good or maybe you don't speak English, but you pay the toll! The gun, a flat-topped polymer toy of a handgun, came out of the kid's waistband as he grabbed the clerk's reins and tugged them to stop the horse.

The clerk's hands moved with no great speed. With the right hand he reached down and jammed his index finger behind the trigger so it couldn't be pulled, wrapping his thumb around the front of the trigger guard and taking firm hold of the entire weight of the gun in that vise-grip. His left hand jacked the gun's slide back and then slid it off of the rest of the gun, leaving the boy with a handle and a barrel and no means of firing any bullets.

The clerk threw the part at one of the other two, striking him in-between the eyes as he tried to pull another gun just like it. The third had a small revolver, but by the time he had it out, the clerk had taken the first boy's hand, twisted it up behind his back, and then dragged him from the ground and dropped him on the saddle behind him, facing backward, the arm braced up by the clerk's back. The clerk grabbed hold of the boy's belt in his right hand as the boy screamed out and cursed, his tendons and ligaments raging.

The horse started a steady trot toward the tree line. The clerk spoke as if to nobody in particular.

Sure would be a shame if anybody interrupted my nice peaceful ride on this sunny morning.

I'll fuckin' kill you, you asshole! I'm gonna fuckin' AAAAAAAAAAH

The clerk leaned a centimeter back in his saddle, his back pushing against the arm and sending the boy into pain that drove all other thought from his head. When the clerk leaned forward and the pain went back to the insistent burning it had been before, he heard the clerk talking to himself. Mmhm – a mighty fine peaceful ride. A damn shame if it got spoiled by talking.

The two others were following, the clerk knew. They were arguing loudly over whether or not they could get a shot in. One of them came up on the right, and the clerk could hear the revolver's hammer cocked back...

So peaceful. Would be quite irritating to have anybody take up following me on such a peaceful ride.

The clerk shifted as if to look off to his left, his right hand dragging the boy by the belt so he hung partially off the edge of the horse's rump, covering the clerk from that angle, the boy's arm still crimped up and the pain the worst yet.

AAAAAAAAHYOUFUCKINGIDIOTHE'LLKILLMEHE'LLKILLMEBACKOFF!AAAAAAAAH

The clerk readjusted himself and the boy and did not hear them following. Soon he had reached the tree line. He let the boy's belt go and leaned back, knocking the boy to the ground face first. He brought the horse around and looked down at the boy, laying there with his arm cradled to his chest and weeping openly.

That was about the most peaceful ride I've had in a long time. I might gladly have paid a toll to have such a fine, peaceful ride.

I'll fucking kill you. Snarling through the tears. I'll fucking rip off your head.

I'll have to pass this way again and have another ride just like that one.

The boy did not look at the clerk as the horse continued on into the woods at a slow canter, that man's eyes again focused intently on the tracks of his quarry.

At length, the boy's two companions made it to him. He punched one of them in the face with his good arm and shouted at them.

We're going after 'em! Fucking asshole with the faggy haircut set us up! We're gonna kill 'em both!

Jer, what's that on your belt?

What is what on my belt what the fuck are you...?

He looked down, found a small cylindrical thing as large as a fun size candy bar dangling from a belt hook he did not own, a green light pulsing on it.

What?

The light turned red, and the three of them became an expanding torrent of the individual parts that made them up. They rained down to the ground amidst the fire.

Some several hundred yards into the forest, the clerk put the detonator back into the saddlebag alongside the two other triggered charges. His eyes never left the tracks the entire time.

By next spring the saplings at the forest's edge had taken hold of the pieces, and in time the roots rose up and consumed those excisemen.

Those who chanced by the place found it to be peaceful.

south through the trees

The red-eyed man fled through the forest, and the clerk followed.

The clerk wore an earthy old poncho over the green shirt and black jeans that made up his faded uniform. The flat, wide-brimmed black hat on his head shaded the features of his face. The horse beneath him was an older model with few amenities, and the voice box had been taken out of it so long ago that the corrosion at the neck from that old surgical wound had worked its way up to the base of the skull, and the actuators wheezed and pumped loudly in the stillness of the redwoods.

The clerk made out the red-eyed man's trail as best he could during the day, stopping at the first lowering of the light that he might not miss the slightest trace of his wandering quarry. His target had taken to concealing evidence of his campfires or going the night without them altogether. The clerk appreciated this knowledge, because it betrayed the fact the red-eyed man knew he was being hunted and needed to take time to cover his tracks. Another sort of man might have been infuriated at this, but the clerk, with his impenetrable gaze and his absolutely silent demeanor went about the hunt unperturbed.

Today his quarry was passing closer to the ocean, the clerk could see. The pathway had always been south, sometimes shivering acutely to the east or west, but never doubling back north. It might be an elaborate ruse, but the clerk did not think so. He thought the red-eyed man had somewhere he wanted to go. The clerk had an inkling that maybe he should stop the red-eyed man before he got there – head him off somehow, if only he knew a way to do it. Since he did not, he suppressed that worry when it did rear up in him. There were things worrying didn't solve, and solutions unknowable to even the most inquisitive.

The light was waning as he came to a stream. The red-eyed man had camped there the previous night, he could tell. He'd tried to cover the campfire with silt from the stream, but the scent lingered even still, and the clerk walked about the area in a thirty-foot radius, again finding droppings and the bones of a bird, picked clean but for the last vestiges of black meat and gristle clinging stubbornly to them.

He was gaining despite the nature of tracking. The red-eyed man would throw things about to create a ruse. He would, for instance, canter his horse along one route and then order it to reverse precisely backward in its own footfalls, then he'd blunder it into some thick underbrush where the tracks would not be immediately apparent and continue onward. The clerk would be fooled for the better part of an hour on a few of these occasions, but he would always find the trail again, and if he saw two campsites in a day or a campsite and another good bit of travel, it meant progress.

This was one day behind. Closer than he'd ever been. Tantalizingly within reach – almost worth the risk of another hour's worth of travel. Almost. Even half an hour's worth of messing around in low light meant he could set himself back a day's worth of tracking if he lost the trail.

He tied his horse to a tree and set about making his own campfire. From its sheath in the saddle where it hung next to the big shotgun, he drew out the hatchet. The trees about him yielded first thin branches and leaves for kindling and then an armful of logs.

He doffed the poncho for the work, revealing the skeletal figure beneath. The body thin and white, seeming almost emaciated. Good concealment for the wiry strength in his arms and legs. Not tall enough to be tall and certainly not short. The hair and eyes were the darkest, starkest black. He kept his hair and face well-barbered, taking time each morning to take a straight-razor to his stubble, each movement just so. It spoke more of precision than of prissiness – something that found its root in habit rather than vanity.

Affixed to the chest of his shirt, just as carefully, the name tag that read:

S P E N C E R

The gun sat at his right hip, the holster and the grip oriented such that it was clear he was a left-handed draw. The bandolier hugged his middle snugly, the bullets in their loops casting the occasional glint as a dapple of sunlight caught them through the great canopy overhead. The gun was a monster, seeming too large for so slender a man, until he rested his hand on the butt of it, as he sometimes casually did. Then you could see how well the long-fingers, as if it had been crafted precisely to his spidery hand.

The machete sat in its canvas scabbard on his beltline at his back, the handle protruding from behind his left hip, the blade nearly as long as his arm, sharp at the edge but corroded and patina-covered along its flat. The weapons had the effect of making his lower body appear wide and weighty, his upper body frail and insubstantial. This he could not have cared about.

Wood was never a problem, and so he soon had what he needed. From his saddlebags he withdrew the small electric cooler he had plugged into the outlet in the horse's left ass cheek, and out of that he selected a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch with chunks of rabbit meat inside it and several chopped bits of onion and red and green peppers. With the hatchet he whittled a small branch down to a skewer, speared the ingredients and started the fire with the horse's cigarette lighter.

With the kabob in his stomach and night having fallen, he donned the poncho again and put the hat over his eyes, though it was some time before he could will them to shut. All about him the shadows of the forest quivered in the uncertainty of the firelight, painting for him many grim and intangible falsehoods upon the faces of those things that were somehow still tangible, and he had seen all of it before and so slept through it unmoved.

those last parts of her

The clerk's first bullet put out the man like a candle. He stood with his head cocked back, all thought and personality canceled, the face shocked and the powder burns of such a close gunshot only beginning to appear.

The others – some nine men – had rested their rifles on their shoulders or stood with their weapons barely at the ready, and they were not ready to shoot when he executed the man who had grabbed his rifle and thrown him to the wall, and they were still not ready to shoot when he spun about and brought the heel of his left foot into the dead man's side in a roundhouse kick that might have decapitated a teenager – and as that was ending, they had time to process his left hand fanning over the hammer of the pistol and nobody could tell if they were hit or if the blood on them was somebody else's.

He let the empty gun fall without ceremony. It hung stewardless from the strap as he ran low to the ground, snatching up the rifle. He knew about how many paces to the nearest rock large enough to provide cover, and he scrambled for it, swinging behind it as bullets clattered across it and tore into the ground. He'd killed two outright – wounded a third and fourth to the point of dying. There were still too many of them.

From above he heard the high voice of Shep, heard another contingent of them scrambling down the rocks, putting more fire on him, yet another approaching from inside the cavern. He caught a brief glimpse of the store up at the top of the canyon - gouts of flame and smoke darkening the sky. They'd done an old-fashioned Zippo raid on it when they'd found out where he'd gone. He put the ear bud back in, hands working the revolver, flipping the loading gate open and ramming each chamber clear with the speed of a robot.

Saladin. Salaam alaikum.

---

Shep's machine pistol spat in a dangerous arc before him as he stumbled down the rocks alongside his squad of four. The rocks gave under one of his men, and that one went tumbling headfirst along the crags and debris, becoming at some fateful point in that journey an empty sack of flesh. The body crashed into the path of the bullets of those already on the canyon floor, perforated by them.

The marauders paused in horror at what they had done, and in the ringing silence that followed, there came the clear, impossibly loud cry of the falcon diving out of the sun toward the cavern entrance, within which there were still at least ten of Shep's men. Shep watched the grim thing barrel toward its own ruin, the metal of its body and wings searing red-hot as it intentionally cranked more power than the fragile body could handle.

The clerk rose. Six men on the canyon floor, one just emerging from the cavern. The clerk put a bullet in each of the six and ducked down just as the firebird struck the dumbfounded new arrival in the chest and drove him back into the cavern.

---

The man at the head of Shep's spelunkers had lost two men on the way down – stuck in the crawl space, still screaming, hyperventilating with claustrophobia and without any light to guide them. He'd become convinced this was perdition. All of the wandering over the world in Shep's band of demons, all of the murder and pillage and rape, all had added up to this. It was the tribulation, the end of days, and this, here, was his final reward – to wander in blackness unending, without depth or contiguity.

When he saw the light, he praised Jesus. And when he emerged, he saw the tall, golden-haired man destroy the lives of six of his comrades. The marauder stood there, the seven or eight others that had managed to follow him bunching up behind him.

When he looked to see the source of the shriek coming out of the sky, it was upon him. The hawk's face white-hot, the talons that sunk into his chest destroying the flesh that surrounded them. It was not some false construct that felled him, he realized, but the winged messenger of the gods themselves. The others staggered back, the darkness of the cave lit by the searing glow of the falcon for one instant as it opened its beak to unleash a final utterance, and then its valediction became light and concussion.

---

The clerk heard Shep's roar of frustration as the cavern erupted in flames. Man-shaped things came stumbling out of it one by one, each covered in flames that blotted out all distinction, featureless and uncommunicative, but aware. They tried to swat at the flames that cloaked them, and each in his turn fell to the rocks lost in his own agony.

Shep's voice spurred his last three men onward.

Keep fire on him! I want him!

Shep had the sun at his back, and the clerk fired up at them with the rifle, but couldn't get a good sight on them...

The clerk felt a bullet bite into the side of his left arm and the rifle fell out of his grip. He retreated to cover, falling into a sitting position.

Their boots beating down across the rocks, getting closer. He took hold of the pistol as Shep rounded the corner. They were surrounding him, guns up.

Nobody kills this asshole but me! Nobody shoot, got it?!

Shep grabbed the clerk by the vest and dragged him to his feet kneeing him in the stomach and then hurling him to the dirt. You smart now, huh, you fuck? I'll fuckin' fix you. He kicked the clerk in the face, sending him rolling back along the dirt.

Shep. The scraggly-bearded youth calling after him. Get that gun away from him!

Shep whirled around. His face-paint running, the skull-face becoming a dripping two-tone highlight of the sickly-thin contours of his face. The wound in his side from the falcon still oozing. I SAY WHAT GETS DONE AROUND HERE! HE FUCKED WITH US AND NOW I FUCK WITH HIM! DO YOU ALL SEE?!

Shep, the gun...

He shot six times, you fuckhole! It takes a year to reload that piece of shit! Pay the fuck attention!

The clerk stumbled slowly to his feet, hand still on the grip of the pistol. He spat blood out of his mouth. Well, you dress like a girl, and here I see you hit like one. It makes me sorry about having to kill all of you. Though, maybe one or two of your crispy friends over there isn't dead and can see after burying you. This climate is terrible for burn victims, I'm told... but great for consumption. I don't suppose any of you have that.

Shep let out a single laugh and regarded his prey as a mafia don does a shop owner. The three of his men stood bathed in their own cold sweat, their eyes fixed firmly on the clerk, the looks on their faces incredulous as their leader strutted about before this force of nature as if he could ever own it.

I'll forgive everything if you kneel down and beg me for it and promise to join me. I am also merciful.

The clerk had not really been addressing Shep when he'd last spoken, and he turned to the scraggly-bearded youth now, speaking as if Shep weren't even there.

How much is this guy paying you? Or you... yeah, you, with your mouth hanging open. I mean, what does it take to constitute gross mismanagement these days if this isn't it? Weren't there like, ten times as many of you a few minutes ago? How hard do you think it's going to be for me to whittle down the rest of you? I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

The sounds of hoofbeats echoed in the distance – grew closer. The scraggly-bearded youth wasn't sure anybody else was hearing it. Shep... there's a—

Their leader wound his fist back and struck the clerk in the stomach again, flooring him. How you think you're gonna take us now, huh? Tell me how.

Shep...

SHUT UP!

The clerk smiled up at his enemy from his position on the ground on his back. Still he held the pistol in his grip, still hanging from the strap. The same way I do everything – with a seven-shot pistol.

The clerk kicked Shep in the scrotum and put a bullet in the head of one of the last of the three other men. The clerk was up, dropped the gun to dangle again by its strap and had Shep in a human-shield choke hold, stealing the machine pistol from him in a single deft move, unleashing a completely inaccurate salvo at the other two, who leaped to cover.

The horse Saladin jacked thundered into view, and the clerk shoved the barrel of the gun up to Shep's temple. You are a special kind of dumb son of a bitch, and this is the last chance I'm giving you to run away from all of this and clean that stupid paint off your face and take up the ways of the monastery for the rest of your born days. Put my rifle in the horse's saddle.

He released Shep from the choke hold but kept the hand on the collar of his jacket. Finding his breath again, Shep spat out a curse.

Fuck your moth—

The clerk grabbed the man's left hand and twisted it up behind him and Shep's voice went high with pain. My mercy is that pile of original recipe henchmen over yonder. I'm afraid if you want a complete performance, I'm going to need a major credit card. Otherwise, you can put my rifle on the horse, if you see what it is that I am saying to you.

The clerk forced his captive over to where the rifle had fallen to the ground. No sound from the last two men behind their rock. When Shep had the rifle in the horse's saddle he whispered something to the clerk through the redness between just the two of them.

Kill me. Just fucking do it.

I told you how I wanted to see you die. I told you exactly how.

The clerk kicked him over to the rock and got up on his horse. Boy's I'd say it's been fun, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another.

Shep wheeled around. KILL HIM! SHOOT HIM! F—

The scraggly-bearded youth and the other one – a man of forty with a gut and a shiny bald head, clad in a biker's jean jacket – came around the corner. Jean jacket leveled an old M1, but the scraggly-bearded youth brought his police Beretta up and shot him in the head, then turned and put his sights on Shep.

Shep stood there for a moment weaponless and without horde to surround him, the redness gone from his eyes in his panic and all the fragile regalia of his violent empire passed away with the wind. In the light of the early afternoon, he seemed to have shrunk in his biker jacket.

His last underling gunned him down there in the canyon. When the youth had put every last bullet into Shep and the corpse laid in an expanding pool of blood on the ground, he stood over it and kicked it and beat upon it with the butt of the pistol until he had nothing left in him but tears. The clerk watched this with some interest, and when it was finally over, the youth looked up at him and threw aside the pistol.

I'll do anything you want. Just please don't kill me. Please—

Anything?

Shit. Yes. Fuck. Anything, any good god damn thing, I swear it if you just don't hurt me or nothing.

Pick my hat up and bring it here.

---

The gunshot wound would not stop bleeding despite his attempts to bind it, and the injuries he'd suffered at the hands of Shep stung as he thundered out of the canyon into the sun. Eli and the girl had found the horse and made their way westward as he'd instructed. He rode him a lonely journey, all through the night without sleeping again, and his exhaustion brought him to the edge of hallucination.

At length he smelled the coast, if that were possible, and when he crested a hill he saw the great ocean spread out before him. The promised land spoken of in the girl's leaflet filled the horizon before him, glimmering with a billion little lights so many miles distant, all noise of it lost over the grandness and imperceptibility of distance.

He followed their tracks down to the rocky shore that had been created in that great cataclysm, and he found Eli beside the girl and a campfire. The clerk felt he might go into shock at any minute as he sat down.

Thank God you made it.

Thanking him again, are we?

I... I prayed. Like I told you I would.

Thank you.

They coming?

No, I— ahem. No.

I gave her the pill. There's one more. You should take it.

She needs one more dose. She might not make it without it.

Shit, YOU need it.

No. I don't need anything.

They sat in the glow of the campfire, both men staring into it for a time. Eli would cast glances up toward that other continent. The clerk saw that he was looking there.

There's another kind of purgatory in there. Do your best with her out here.

You'll be helping us.

I'm going to lay down here in a minute and I rather think I'm not going to get back up.

I need to help you. Take the pill.

The girl is your salvation. Do you understand? He got to his feet again, shakily, and lead his horse away, tossing the machine pistol to Eli. Do unto her as you would've done to your own daughter, and be saved. I'm outta here.

The sound of the horse's hoofbeats fell off into the night bit by bit until there was nothing to mark the solemnity of his passage. The man Eli sat up a lonely vigil with the girl until morning broke, and her eyes fluttered open.

---

She put flowers in her hair that summer, and when the rains came she could drink water from the leaves that rustled in a great ocean above her. In later years, grey with what wisdom the world had allowed her and toughened by her motherhood, she made the journey alone across the desert back to the white car, finding there the mummified remains of her grandmother and the men that had tried to kill them both. The desert's preservative dryness was almost respectful and apologetic.

The decay of decades had long since masked the single neat little hole that had sent those last parts of her heavenward. The old woman sat down in the driver's seat and took her grandmother's hand, and as she had done in ages long past, she lead her granddaughter along to where next she was ordained to go.

the smiting of necks

(Author's note: We resume the main story, joining immediately after the events of “it always is with heroes.”)

Shep smiled at the rejoinder. Sent a single snarling thought toward the clerk's head, into the shadow beneath the hat, where he knew there resided some equal intelligence to his own.

What do you have, little hero-man? Why are you so special?

Silence. Shep felt his band pawing the earth behind him. Besides the movement of the thumb and maddening motionlessness of his reply to Shep's first taunt, the clerk might have been a mannequin set out there to ward off the otherwise unwary. When it became clear the clerk would contribute nothing more, Shep gigged his horse forward another step, and from the redness in his eyes screamed silently at him.

ARROGANT FUCK ARROGANT ARROGANT PATHETIC —

Hey.

The single syllable from the clerk's shaded mouth cut Shep's rage-garbled thoughts off in the middle.

Didn't your mother ever tell you it's not polite to speak another language in front of people who don't understand it?

Shep would have been caught off guard by the comment enough on its own, but what entered his mind next had the effect of a sledgehammer striking drywall. The shrieks and keens and wails came from every direction. Shep squirmed in his saddle at the dissonant chorus and the screams they seemed to send right into his ears. The other men whirled around in their saddles, rearing their horses around, searching the horizon for the far-off sources of some of those lamentations, jumping at the ones near them.

Shep found himself again as he saw the clerk thrust the gauntleted hand into the air and send the raptor skyward with a tinny stereophonic war cry.

You idiots! It's in your heads! Get him, kill him —

The clerk had doffed the glove with a single violent thrust of his left hand and then had the rifle up, eyes smoldering and there was no telling if his voice came from his own throat or originated in the hellish corner of his imagination, broadcast to his hapless prey.

NOW WHEN YE MEET IN BATTLE THOSE WHO DISBELIEVE, THEN IT IS THE SMITING OF NECKS! SMITE THE NECKS AND SMITE OF THEM EACH FINGER!

There was no accounting for the bullets of the rifle as they spat into the midst of their unknowing prey. He shot at each man one, two, three times in the space of half as many seconds, acquiring another target as one man fell from his horse or slumped sideways in the saddle or sat straight up with his head bent back and the blood dribbling neatly down his face from the hole in his forehead. Each death as neatly thorough as it was swift.

He backed toward the storefront the entire time, and when he had run out, Shep still sat motionless at the head of his scattered crew, untouched by a single one of the clerk's bullets and struggling to free his machine pistol from his belt line. As he liberated it and pulled the trigger, the falcon struck him in the side and raked his armpit with its claws.

That marauder fell stunned to the ground, and in his ears were the screams of his own men. He looked up and saw the clerk ducking into the doorway of the store as bullets shattered the sliding glass doors, clanged off of the derelict shopping carts and puffed into the long untended pile of discount T-shirts sitting on the front-most display.

Shep gained his feet, his own blood cold across his body, and the falcon was tearing open the throat of Johnnyjohnnybobonny, the men blasting at the bird but in their panic dismembering their own comrade. The bird rocketed into the air again, a ropey trail of internal fluid leaking onto the floundering corpse as it fell to the ground with a gut-curdling squelch.

There followed a period of nearly a minute while Shep screamed at them to stop firing into the air after the damn bird, which seemed to be arcing far out over the canyon in an effort to get out of range. When he'd finally gotten them calmed down, the clerk leaned out of a gap in the storefront glass, shouting at them.

I GOT BLISTAS ON MY FINGAS!

His torrent of lead blew out the eyes of two of the horses standing in front and sent them careening into the crowd. The heart, throat, and right eye of the man standing next to Shep all opened up with a fwupfwupfwup like somebody punching a hanging slab of ribs with a boxer's glove, and that one looked over at Shep before falling to the ground. Shep took a step back. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

When the shooting stopped, Shep and the dozen or so of his smarter men had their horses kneeling down, taking cover behind them. One of them, a spindly-legged, scraggly-bearded one maybe twenty years old whose name Shep did not know and had never cared to know dove behind Shep's great black horse and laid there on the searing-hot hardpan, quivering.

Sh-Shep, Christ, how we gonna—

Shut your goddamned mouth. Shep clutched his wound. The tightness of the damned leather jacket creaking and stifling him, making it impossible to figure out how hurt he was. You leave the thinking to me. Reaching out with the redness, he detected nothing. An impossible hole where the hero's mind ought to be. Not fucking possible...

What isn't?

I said shut up, shut the FUCK up! He could hear the sound of bullets clicking into the rifle's tube. He's reloading. Shep found his inner voice again, threw it at the group. Two columns, move up and take him while he's empty—

The clerk's voice came rolling out of the storefront, jolly and clear as a Broadway singer of old.

I never thought that I would climb / over the moon in ecstasy / but nevertheless it's there that I'm / shortly about to be! / 'cause I've got a golden ticket...

He's still got that pistol, Shep...

Yes, indeed, Shep, I've still got that pistol! It's a fine pistol and for absolutely free with your purchase of three rolls of film at five ninety-nine a roll, you too can witness a demonstration!

None of his men moved. He wanted to shout at them, but he couldn't show his enemy that there was hesitation on the part of his gang... couldn't have them back off or they would have left an offense unanswered— HE would have left an offense unanswered and that made him weak, it made him unfit...

A voice whispering at his ear. The voice of the clerk, the words casual and almost friendly.

You're thinking about bluffing to me that I haven't got a chance and I should just give it up right now. Trouble is, my good fellow, that just isn't the case. I have met your kind on many a flat and barren plain such as this, and here I am still. I was a liberal-minded individual before everything fell apart you see, and I believed in equal rights and sociopolitical sensitivity and all that, and the reason I tell you this is so you appreciate the level of disdain I have for you when I tell you that I have seen your worth, and that I have judged you to be a pathetic, pretentious, prepubescent little faggot and it is now my ambition to see you die like one.

Shep stood up, roaring.

Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch!

It was something his men could understand, and they sprayed the storefront with the bullets of their varying and mismatched weapons, exhausting their magazines and loading in more and firing until the brick storefront became pitted with craters and no glass remained in the door frames – the mechanism for sliding them open seized on itself as the misshapen door ground against the track it sat in. No answer from the clerk— neither bullets nor taunts.

Get in there! Fucking get in there, rip his goddamn head off so I can take a shit on it!

He leaped the side of his horse, spitting more bullets into the cavernous darkness beyond the doorways, the men following him, their yells a crescendo following him.

They burst inside, swarming the front of the store with footfalls and bullets. Bottles of nail polish along the cosmetics wall unleashing their own fonts of blood upon the floor. The two registers shattering, bursting open and the dollars within frittering away to dust in the air. Their weapons fell silent amid the mournful fluttering of the greeting cards through the gunsmoke. Through the shivering sound of their settling, there came no retort.

Fan out. Cover each other. He's here. You.

The scraggly-bearded youth straightened as Shep barked at him. S-sir.

On me. You three, too. I'm going to wear his face. You find him, you hurt him enough he can't fight. Nobody kills him but me, got that? He's mine. Move the fuck out.

---

The clerk crawled out from under the rock into the larger cavern, the rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows like a child, the pistol dragging over the rocks with a clatter as the echoes of the gunfire drifted down to him from above. He had maybe two or three minutes before they discovered he was nowhere in the store, and then the smart one, Shep, would certainly find the hatch.

He'd shot down seven or eight men, wounded a few more. He brought out the little flashlight and clicked it on, drawing out the box of bullets for the rifle. They were no larger than thick nails. He had one more reload left, minus three or four shots. He could put a few more of them in the soil with that, but it wouldn't break them. The two boxes of pistol ammo he had sitting in his vest might do it, but that meant letting them get close, and he had no intention of doing that.

Time to move, he said, plugging the ear bud into his ear. Saladin.

Half a mile away, the bird responded. Warning – unit has sustained abnormal trauma. Estimated remaining battery life is one and one half hour.

Assess two equubots with highest functionality, mark as Rowdy One and Rowdy Two. Subvert navigation — set Rowdy Two for rally point two and execute. Rally Rowdy One to my position. Execute.

---

The falcon found the field of battle to be free of hostiles, all having flooded into the store. It ignored as irrelevant the shouts and battle cries and roars of frustration within as they continued to tear the place apart. It alighted upon the saddle of one and leaned in toward the mane. As if to whisper in their silent language of conspiracy.

When Saladin had finished with the two horses, they both came about and thundered along the rim of the canyon, the procedural workings of their manufactured minds as mercifully ignorant of the depth of their betrayal as the winged instigator above them was of its treachery.

---

The clerk came to the steep, low-ceilinged drop that made any ascent through the cold, lightless cave impossible. Tucking the loaded rifle again to his chest and skidding down it, raking his backside with the roughness of the stone. It was fifteen feet down at least, and at the bottom a fully-grown man needed to crawl feet-first on his back to go forward through the dark. That Eli and Fanny were not here proved the man had found some way of conveying her through – probably by dragging her through after first leaving her, crawling out and then subsequently reorienting himself so he could crawl back in and get hold of her ankle, he imagined.

It became easier after he got out from the smaller tunnel. The darkness widened out into a passageway that could be traversed while hunched over. The clerk searched his memory for any recollection of claustrophobia in his former life, and could find none. He saw the sharpness of daylight peeking through the hole up ahead just as he heard a shout from the tunnel far behind him, echoing from the chill of the unreal dark from whence he'd come.

He stepped into the wandering afternoon, the brightness and heat somehow mellowed and completely divorced from the hell that had broken all about it and would still—

The clerk went tumbling forward, the rifle wrenched from his grip, slamming into the canyon wall. He whirled about to find himself staring at a dozen of the filthy men with their ratty weapons, murder in every eye. The one that had thrown him clutched the rifle as a war prize.

Fuckin' dumb you think we are, all of us to bottle up for you like that?

The clerk grinned just slightly.

Gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen, dumb is no barrier.

The pistol was in his hand and pointed at the head of the one who held captive his rifle, and the movement was so fast none of them knew from whence it had come.

Slow... now that might be.

it always is with heroes

He swaddled her in his long brown coat, and clad in his shirt, tie, and vest he bore the cold of the night. Picked up the injured bird and gathered up the parts he could see were of immediate necessity, shucking all of it into one saddle bag. Bade the horse kneel so he could place her upon its back, mounted up himself and the fake creature rose shakily. The beating of its hooves and the hazy glow of their breath in the campfire vanished into the night along with all of the other half-remembered dreams.

She leaned shivering against him, cheek resting on one of his shoulder blades and hands clasped about his belly, squeezing with what must have been every last bit of strength left in her. He felt her breath move sharp over her lips whenever they hit a bump. He held one of his leather-gloved hands over hers to keep them warm. In the dark, even with the moon, he could only get them up to thirty safely. They'd said something about a Shep, and it meant they were not the only ones. It meant others might come looking for them. The black pill would stave off death, but not in that case – with more of them and she an invalid and he without the rifle on the flatness of the plain.

He felt her shiver awake. Gramma. Don't leave her.

He grasped his hand over her thin, bony fingers just a little tighter. She's ahead of us.

---

At the first light of morning he stopped the horse. The canyon off in the distance, with the road slanting up to take them above it and back to the store. In daylight, he could make the ride much more quickly. He had the horse kneel again as he got off and lifted her. She had fallen into a comatose slumber that he knew to be the necessary side effect of the drug.

The clerk examined her wound and nodded. The bullet had gone straight through her, leaving a terrible exit wound. The exit wound had closed up into scabbed scar tissue that he found to be agreeably free of any signs of infection. The impact site at her belly was nearly gone but for the scar tissue. The internal damage was hard to gauge. Her previous infections had been utterly eradicated, he could see.

We'll have you set aright quite soon, Miss. First some fresh bandages.

---

The shadow that fell across the empty, flyblown corpse of Berg was comically thin in the stretched light of early morning. Straight as a rail and all sharp edges. No hat to protect from the sun. Belts and straps dangling down about the pants – which were themselves a nightmare of zippers and straps. The double-breasted leather jacket sucking all heat out of the chill air surrounding. He'd painted his face and neck with white makeup and darkened the pits surrounding his eyes with black, rubbed jagged lines of black perpendicular to his lips to make a sort of death-face. The eyes glowed a red so deep there was no distinguishing where iris ended and white began.

Little insects little insects. Not even God could love such little filthy cowards, could He? You watch them gorge now... watch them get fat. And then the sun comes out and they run and leave the rest to the buzzards and the pathogens.

Boss?

Nothing. Never mind. I apologize for using so many syllables at once. I'm assuming we have found tracks, Johnnyjohnnybobonny?

That way, Shep. Out toward that canyon, east.

We're dealing with somebody interesting, boys. He knew the old hag would slow him up, so he shot her. She could've been worth something to the city boys.

Mighta been Berg or Yancy, Boss. They both been knowed to shoot fer no good reason.

Quite true. But this was the same gun that killed the others... well, except Lige. And neither of these idiots would have left so immac— clean a body. Mount back up. We can't have somebody killing our own and thinking it's a small thing.

You really think it was one guy, Shep?

It always is with heroes, isn't it?

He got back onto the horse. Waved his hand over the controls and the horse's speakers regurgitated Aerosmith. He reached to the small of his back and pulled out the Ingram, let out a rallying spray into the air and the thirty of them hanging about at the outskirts of the camp drew into rank before him. He reared the horse about and shot forward at a full gallop, the horses actuators straining to keep up with his orders.

The horde thundered out across the flat wastes toward the burning sun just out of its cradle, in its entirety a small point of ferocity and hatred in the otherwise featureless and emotionless plain of the desert.

---

The clerk found Eli waiting out front of the store with the rifle at his approach. It was not quite noon, and still the girl slept. Eli shouldered the weapon and took the girl down, holding her in his arms.

What happened to the old woman?

The clerk dismounted.

It was too late. He went for the saddlebags and drew out the damaged falcon. Get her inside.

---

The bullet had clipped a pivot point in the left wing and bent it severely out of true, the clerk could see. He rumbled about in the toolbox to find the proper part as the man Eli looked over the comatose form of the girl. The harsh fluorescents of the pharmacy gave her skin a funereal hue. Her wounds were completely sealed – identifiable only by a horrendous blood blister at entry and exit, and the scar tissue.

She was shot?

Clean through, the clerk said as he slid the replacement part in and bolted it securely. Been laying there for hours by the time I arrived. She's made of tougher stuff than some other men I've known.

These black pills...

No idea what they are or how they work – I just hope that machine in the corner there keeps making it when I ask it to, or that Aesclepius drops by to jerk another load into it, as, lacking a rational explanation, we can only assume such a powerful plot device would be powered by god-seed.

The clerk could see the shotgun impact had embedded itself in the bird's cooling system and the battery, and he did not have anything to replace either. Sighing, he brought out the epoxy and sealed the acid leak, then dug the shrapnel out of the freon reservoir and patched that with the adhesive as well, muttering to himself all the while. Bunch of savages in this town.

---

The machine in the corner of the pharmacy had not excreted any more of the black pills by midday, and the clerk felt anxious. That it could run out now, after all the other times he'd used it, seemed to him a sad sort of joke, even compared to the general state of things.

He brought the falcon outside and considered starting it up again, but knew that any flight it made could be its last. The man Eli stayed with the girl as the clerk scanned the horizon, the fingers of his right hand drumming across the grip of the rifle as he held it. Others. There were others, and they'd come looking. Any crew with characters that rowdy – that split them into teams to work the area like that – had a confident leader. One who could command from afar.

It was an hour later that he saw the first telltale speck in the distance – another few minutes and he realized it would expand into a cloud of dust and from it would emerge a large group. He sighed.

This all seems to be leading inexorably toward exactly the sort of tiresome confrontation I came out here to avoid.

---

Behind the freezer – the air harsh and rotten-smelling in their nostrils. Eli held the girl in his arms, still wrapped in the coat of the clerk. The clerk moved aside a rolling shelving unit full of empty milk crates to reveal a stairway leading down to the basement. He nodded at it.

Earthquake shifted stuff something fierce, I can only guess. There's a tunnel that leads down to the canyon floor. I'd have brought us up, but you see, there are a few first steps that are a doozy, if you see what it is that I'm saying to you. Meaning, you know, that it's a one-way path of transit. I'm going to hold off those guys off for as long as I can. I strung a wire that'll show up nice and bright orange when you shine this little flashlight on it. That wire leads to a button near the entrance that when you press it will let me know you've got out to the other end – so I'd be much obliged if you'd do that, old sport. Then what you do is run west until your sides feel like busting, at which point you run until you feel like dying, at which point you run some more.

Eli shook his head. I should stay here and fight with you. I shouldn't leave after what all you did for me.

Believe me, there's no thought more comforting than you getting your face shot off after all I did to try to get you back up on your feet, but you don't need to hang out here just because I want you to. Really, you can get going any time, and see that the girl is out of the way of any bullets.

You promise me that you'll meet back up with us.

That would be at best overly optimistic and at worst downright disingenuous.

You pretend to be hard and crazy and not to care, but it isn't so. Promise, and I'll do as you say.

The clerk sighed. I'll do everything I can to meet up with you. Now get going, and give the girl a pill at sundown tonight and tomorrow night. Her wound may be closed but it takes at least three days to completely heal.

I'm going to pray for you. I know you don't appreciate that.

I'll take it. Git.

He watched them disappear into the dark and wandered back to the pharmacy where he donned the heavy left-hand glove and activated the falcon. The bird's claws scratched against the countertop as it bumbled up onto the glove.

Sallah ad din.

The mechanical eyes snapped to his.

At the risk of sounding like an unenlightened, disrespectful jingoistic fuckhead, I happen to know some virgins who are dying to meet you.

---

At their thundering approach, the store seeped out of the horizon like rot on wood. Shep knew immediately that this lonely place was the one, even before he saw the man standing out in front of it. In the high sun of noon, the figure stood tall and shadowless a few feet before the store, the legs evenly apart, the vest and shirt and tie sharp and unmoving.

The pistol hung motionless from its strap, the rifle pointing downward parallel to his leg but not touching the ground, the ragged falcon perched on the glove eying them with its alien and unfeeling gaze, the only pair of eyes visible between those two. Beneath the fedora, his face hid in the one point of darkness amid the silent rage of noon.

He did not move, even after Shep's entire crowd of marauders stopped before him and their dust drifted over. When it had settled, there seemed not to be a mote of it upon him, and still he stood motionless.

Shep called out to him.

Well, you couldn't have made it more obvious, standing there like that. I appreciate you saving me the trouble of having to tear all over this country finding you. You're pretty brave for someone who shoots little old ladies.

Silence for a moment, and then, without the slightest motion of anything else, his thumb cocking the rifle.

Well, that's a funny coincidence. You're pretty eloquent for someone who's about to be dead.

all good deeds

They carried on the fight with it – the soulless machine leaping from rock to rock, flying through the air and swooping down, but rarely daring to engage them in a direct attack any longer. It must have figured out they were wise to such a dive-bomb maneuver now that it had been used twice.

Berg, through his destroyed face, could only lay behind the car in pain next to the hobbled Yancy – both men had the entirety of the gang's sterile bandages upon them and it was not enough to bind all of their wounds.

Berg had his mind back, and the redness. In the expanding dusk, he had one red eye and the other curiously dulled. It had not yet dawned on him that this eye had gazed upon its last image – he assumed it was closed and couldn't open, and he did not think too hard about any of it.

Finally one of them hit the bird as it perched on a rock – winging it in the side. It responded with the high-pitched shriek again, capered about on the rock as if to take off but couldn't. Yancy wailed something out, leaped from cover, and fired the shotgun off.

The falcon caught the shrapnel and sailed off the rock, seeming for a moment to hang brokenly in the air. It struck the ground with a shattering noise – bits and pieces of itself drawing out some strange meaningless pictograph across the alkali.

I got it! I got the sumbitch I...

Shudfugup. Gimme the licker.

One of the others dropped down to his knees next to Berg and handed him off the canteen full of grain alcohol. Berg brought it to his lipless teeth and drank in the numbness. Coughs tearing his lungs apart from the inside. Warm flecks leaving his mouth from deep within him, and he had to hope it wasn't blood.

Berg, what about the girl? We don't know where...

Fug the girl. Fug fix me up.

The sun was sinking. As the two unharmed tended to Yancy and Berg, the grandmother sat in the passenger seat of the car, clearly expecting somebody to start driving. Harrumping and looking impatient as one of them would pass by, and they ignorant of her scorn.

---

The man on the horse racing toward all of it heard something from the mind of the broken bird, echoing from within that form crucified on the ground.

Status of Subject Fox unknown. Subject George is hostage. Hostile combat capability sixty percent. Four tangos. System has sustained damage outside of regular operational parameters. Initiating safe shutdown procedures.

He took the ear bud out and stowed it, kicking the horse's ribs a final time and leaning forward in the saddle as together they traversed the dusty expanse with the speed of a hawk's telltale shadow.

---

Pain thudded through all of them with a dullness that lacked specificity of any kind. Berg's mind sank into slumber and the pain clawed his mind out of it. Night fell and he was vaguely aware of the three of them starting a fire.

How he gonna head us up with no fuckin' face?

Yancy, shut up.

I'm just sayin'. How he gonna shoot with one fuckin' eye? How he gonna talk with no lips?

He's got the redness better'n we do. He's...

Fuck his red and fuck him. You know what Shep'd do.

Berg forced his eye open and fixed it on Yancy. Tried for some threat, but the pain in his head wouldn't let him form anything. Watched as the three of them stood over him, talking. The looks on the faces of the two others dubious and unsure. Yancy's speech disappearing in the depth of Berg's agony and he only had Yancy's wild gestures with the shotgun and the look of frothy glee on the man's face at the thought of murdering him.

Wait... what was that?

What you fuckin' talkin' about?

Sh! Fucking idiot, cork it for a sec...

The sound echoed from somewhere in the west – the voice low and mournful before spiking up again.

Do you don't you waaaaaaaant me to love yooooooooooou?

They clustered by the car all of a sudden, except for Yancy, who stood his ground.

Hey what the fuck is...

Three crunches in a row so quick as to be a single one. The head snapped back at the same moment the left shoulder seemed to try to jump away from the body and the stomach popped open. It was only a split-second after the bullets struck that the crackcrackcrack drifted from the great expansive dark surrounding the camp.

Blood dribbling down the whole front of his body, the rivulets joining one another and becoming a torrent on the alkali as he took a half-step back. Tried to lift the shotgun. A sneer of effort that turned into a whimper, and he fell to his knees and sagged forward, and the last revelation for him was that he'd shit his pants.

The shots had come from the east, but the voice came from the north, and it was a vaudevillian singer.

Oh you don't say fuck in the presence of a lady! / No you don't say fuck to a gaaaaaaaaal! / And though it slips out most times 'fore you know it / A proper-fine gal won't ask you to show it / and sure m'friend as shit she don't offer to blow it / if you drop an eff bomb on a gaaaaaaaaaaaal!

Berg tried to get up, but didn't have the strength. The other two were loading up their AKs, and god damn it, Berg couldn't tell them to stay calm, couldn't tell them that the bastard was clearly using a silencer, that the cracking was no report but the sound of the bullets going supersonic...

All the while the voice coming from a different direction each time. They sprayed into the dark, shouting at him to reveal himself, and after each volley he would snicker from the southwest or mock them from the north.

A whisper, directly behind them, the voice snarling and gravelly and filled with rage, savoring every word.

Tell me what thy name is on the night's plutonian shore.

They whirled around and fired themselves empty. As the last bits of brass clinked to the ground, they heard his boots on the hardpan behind them. When they turned, they saw him step into the light from behind another rock, the gun in his right hand, aiming from the hip, the left hovering over the hammer and a silencer screwed onto the end of the barrel.

They dropped the guns – one of them held up a hand.

Please –

—kill you? Not a problem.

A brief storm of high-pitched hisses, and they fell to the ground next to one another. Berg could not see the tall gunman's face as he approached the car, the fire backlighting him and leaving all in shadow.

The old woman's voice snapped from the car.

When are we going?

He gestured toward her with the gun without even glancing at her, the movement nonchalant and ingrained in muscle memory. A single sharp hiss. Berg felt the car jerk with her movement, and the clerk did not believe that those parts of her that were left on that sullen, resigned earth joined those already redeemed in their ascension. The round had no time to break the sound barrier and so no crack followed to mask the rattle of her final exhalation.

Berg found he could not move as the clerk stood over him with the pistol, carefully unscrewing the silencer and slipping it back into a pocket on the inside of his coat. With his thumb he slid open the loading gate and his fingers got to work on unscrewing the extractor, and he stood over the man Berg as the bullets clinked across the ground one by one.

He spoke as he started clicking more bullets into the gun.

I'd say I'm sorry I had to do that, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another. Incidentally, that's also why I won't say it wasn't the most damn fun I've had in who knows. Now, what I will say though, and you need to believe me when I say it because I mean it – is that it was not my intention for Sal to go for your face like that. You just went after my little friend so fast it completely slipped my mind to tell him not to do that. Speaking of old Sal, I realize you and your buddies there did what you all had to. I can ask neither more nor less of a man. Well... I do suppose I can ask that a man refrain from destroying a helpless girl's car and planning on either putting his penis in her or handing her over to people that'll surely do the same... then again, things are different than when I was a boy, and who's to say what new societal mores have arisen in these freer times, what with flappers about on the street without so much as a respectable man to escort them, and ladies who have a condition walking about like it's nothing to be embarrassed of, and other such advances that reveal my latent nineteenth-century misogyny... I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Don' kill me...

The Koran tells us that for every man there is a purpose that drives his life, and that yours should be the doing of all good deeds. You have lived your whole life and done the precise opposite of that.

'm surry.

Strangely, I am too.

The bullet put out Berg's remaining eye. It bled only for a moment and then stopped. The clerk dropped the gun, and it dangled lazily down at his side again. As if twiddling its thumbs and whistling, looking away from its murder as if to slyly distance itself from what it had done.

The clerk brought out a small flashlight and soon found the trail of blood away from all the others – the one leading behind the rock that had been Saladin's last stand. She lay in a fetal position, curled up, hands covering a wound to the stomach. She was shivering violently. He took her in his arms and reached into his pocket for the pill bottle.

He put the pill in her mouth and massaged her throat until she had swallowed it. He kissed her forehead.

Not going to let you slip away just yet, little friend. I'm not as merciful as all that.

false beliefs

The girl lapsed into slumber and stayed under it for nearly the entirety of the next day. The clerk woke her up to dispense the meds and give her things to eat and drink, then bade her lay back down and she was out like a light.

The old woman took to wandering the aisles of the store. Picking things up, subjecting them to a variety of sensory tests. None of them seemed to meet her specifications, for she threw them into the middle of the aisle and moved on. Sometimes she would loudly start complaining to a clerk who was not actually there. One or two laps around the floor's perimeter and she would stop at the pharmacy, give instructions to the empty counter, and then sit in one of the chairs waiting for her prescription to be ready.

Eli followed her around at first, picking things up and re-shelving them with a custodian's care. When he would try to speak to her, she would ignore him, even when he made a decision to become whatever figment of her imagination on which she had chosen to heap her limitless abuses. He offered her some more food when he thought she needed it and she threw it away like she had before, calling him a filthy pig fucker and calling his mother other things.

The clerk was up on the rooftop, doing something to the solar panels. Eli found him there, taking a break, a Lucky Strike lit in his mouth as he rested in the shadow of one of the big solar panels, his back leaning up against the pivoting joint. The glare of full daylight made the shade a stark black, and with his eyes dazzled by the light, Eli could only see the silhouette and the occasional brightening of the fire on the end of the cigarette in time with the clerk's silent breath.

She won't eat.

Well that is just a shame.

You've got pills down there she can take.

That's true.

Why did you help the girl if you won't help the old woman?

A few reasons. Some of them are good, others aren't, I don't think.

Well which ones are good?

The girl's problems will go away if she keeps with those pills and the inhaler and the drops. They'll be gone. If I give that old woman two hundred pills or two thousand, those pills will run out some time, and the problem will still be there when the pills are gone. Do you see?

I do. But isn't a little time... can't you? For the girl? Doesn't she deserve just a little time?

He exhaled a thick cloud of blue smoke, the voice dusky with it. The other reason is that I don't really believe people are ever crazy. If you see what I mean. Just like I don't believe you really believe in God. I keep thinking, how can these people really not have their heads on straight? They must be faking it, I think to myself. I know this belief to be false, you understand, but it doesn't change the fact I believe it. I know that there are people who really are certifiably nuts. Sometimes, I think I am one.

Sometimes? When don't you?

When people roll on in uninvited and I'm suddenly reminded how much less sense they make than I do most of the time. Getting back to the matter at hand though, the girl relies too much on her. Soon she'll be dead anyway – particularly if she won't eat. That's the sane part of her exerting some degree of control. That's the only mercy she has for that little girl, and she's of course being a cunt about it.

Don't say that word.

The red dot waved off to the side as he took it one hand that gestured in apology. Sorry. You're right, of course. It's easy to forget... well.

What are you? How did you get here?

I am what I have always been and what I will always be, and I got here from the same direction you did.

How long ago?

I haven't been counting.

How many summers?

There is no summer here. It was summer four months ago and it's summer today and it'll be summer tomorrow. Every day is summer.

I don't aim to stay here forever, but...

The two of them are leaving as soon as the girl is well enough to travel again. I can't feed or care for them any more than I already have, and the old woman is dangerous. I shouldn't even be up here with her down there.

That girl is going to follow that woman straight to ruin.

The girl has a choice in that, doesn't she?

They're kin.

And?

And she can't walk out on her own flesh and you know it! You can't act like you don't.

I said she had a choice, not that she had a good one or an easy one. I need to let her make it.

You're letting her die.

Probably. Smoke?

---

The clerk was disappointed when the woman accepted a slice of pizza. It was two days after the night of their arrival, and the girl's temperature had gone down to an acceptable level, her eye was without mucus, and her cough had disappeared. She ate when the old woman was not around, attacking the food as might a wolf in winter not yet gone to ground.

They sat beneath the collapsed drive-thru and the clerk watched her eat. When she looked up at him, she found the expression on his face was sad.

You don't need to follow her. You should be in charge.

She did not look at him.

Momma told me I should lissen ta her if...

I respect that. But she doesn't have her wits any more. She can't even drive that car properly. At least get her to let you do that. And if she won't let you eat, you just grab the food from her. The two of you surviving isn't up to her anymore.

She won't like it.

That's too bad. She can have her opinion, just don't let her have anything else. Is that all right?

I caint.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Fingers drumming across the surface of the pressure tube kiosk on which he leaned, and he clearly unaware of it. After a moment he looked back at her. I know. I just don't know what it will take to divorce you of this catastrophic course.

Was it like she says, before all of this?

You ought to be old enough to remember something.

I remember Sesame Street. On TV.

Hm. I am getting old.

She says it'll all come back on and there'll be... po-lice and hospittles and I dunno what all. Says we can find it west where there's still that stuff. We got the paper.

She drew out the rumpled paper and showed him.

We're goin' there. Gramma says they got work and school...

He slowly handed it back to her, and she could not tell what his face said.

You shouldn't go there.

I caint take care of her. Nobody'll help out here. You caint even help her, I know it.

No. There really isn't anything I can do for her.

We're goin' there.

Then I guess I'm going to teach you how to drive stick. It's been a good life I've lived, I suppose – one without regrets. Shame to end it now anyway. Come on.

---

Eli helped them load a large plastic pallet of bottled drinking water into the trunk of the hatchback, along with lots of ice dumped into some pots and pans that, according to the stickers, had been on sale for twenty thousand hillaries each. The clerk wondered if Howard might have been able to do something about the car's air conditioning had he been around, but said nothing about it.

They had gas for maybe a hundred miles – maybe enough to ride around the great crack in the ground and perhaps find some way around to the highway again. The girl's grasp of manual transmission would suffice, he'd decided – and in any case they couldn't sit around wasting gas in second gear.

The old woman sat in the car grousing endlessly. Unaware that she'd been placed in the passenger's seat. She accepted food from the girl without complaint of any kind and through her mouthfuls of food she crabbed further. The girl reached up with one of her inhumanly thin hands and patted the old woman's hair down. The crone did not notice it, and kept on about Clinton, the fucker, and now his frosty bitch of a wife's face on the money and everything.

The clerk didn't seem as if he cared to say goodbye, and so wandered back to the collapsed drive-thru and sat in its shade, seeming to stare off at the canyon and the cracked road curving around it that was soon lost to the predatory expansion of the desert. Eli leaned down and looked into the rolled down window at the girl. Her face dark with the coming of tears. He saw some of the weight that had been on him. Remembered it. Realized with the deepest guilt he'd ever felt that what came to his mind after the grief was the relief at being somehow free of it.

You gotta hold on for her.

She looked at him. One little drop rolling down her cheek. It's so hard.

I know it is. But you'll do it. You've got to. It's the only thing that matters.

He reached in and took her hand and held it. She squeezed back for a little while, and then he stepped away as she shakily got the car turned around and up to speed. He watched the car speed along the road, the sun glinting sharp off of it, kicking up the snaking trail of dust in its wake. The two occupants shrinking until they were swallowed by the looming mountains mountains off in the distance that had no terminus, and the rumbling sound of the engine faded until it was only a telltale murmur in the man's expectant ears.

---

He whispered into the small mic dangling next to his throat as the car thundered away. The words bouncing up invisible through the air, reaching the keen internal ear of the immobile facsimile perched upon the rooftop. Its head did not perk up, as per his earlier instruction.

Escort vehicle to maximum operant range. Signal blue. Defend. Signal red. Prioritize subject Fox. Disregard subject George. Disengage when payload depleted. Signal white. Execute.

Silently it beat its wings and glided down into the canyon, cruising just beneath the rim until it was far out beyond the sight of any who might glimpse it from the store. Borne aloft by the wind and its cold loyalty, it rested its unfeeling eye upon the single speck crawling in its toil across the dessicated face of the long-dead earth, trailing dust behind it that soon settled back from whence it had been kicked up into the windless air.

He leaned back against the brick wall and removed the ear bud.

I am just all kinds of a fucking idiot lately.

choice

Eli could see the woman's mania in her movements and her speech, but he couldn't decide what exactly had brought her to it. There hadn't been that many people back where he came from – those that did raised hard, happy with a day of work and a bit of money to show for it. He saw this old woman had something once. Had a lot of things her husband probably couldn't really afford. He saw it in the clothes on her back, the way she carried herself, always expecting the girl to take her bag or hold the cane she used.

The clerk had bunks in the back office that were actually hospital beds he'd clearly stolen from somewhere and rolled out to the store. There were only two, and so the clerk let the women have them, he and Eli abiding beneath the collapsed overhang.

The whole time, the girl was silent. If Eli got too close to her she would scurry away, never looking either of them in the eye. Her face hidden behind the cascading veil of dirty brown hair. Her figure as delicate as a dancer's, fingers long and clumsy, wrists awkward. Maybe a twelve-year-old of freakish height. Maybe a sickly twenty. She seemed to be trembling, and the clerk saw she had a cough but didn't offer her anything.

When he had them settled in the office and laid the two plates of hot snake meat in front of them, the old woman threw it into the computer monitor. The plastic clattered impotently against the long-dark and dusty screen. Tough, nearly burnt flesh falling to the tiled floor.

I am NOT eating this! I am a SHAREHOLDER and you won't treat me like this.

The girl touching the woman's arm. The voice raspy and thin, just above a whisper, and the clerk for an unreal moment thought her lips were not moving. Gramma it's all right, he worked hard to get that now... She reached over and took a piece of her own, holding it to the woman's mouth like a mother a petulant child unwilling to be weaned.

Fanny, you will NOT eat this. You'll get all thin and sick eating trash like this. He's probably spit in it. You throw it away.

Gramma I ain't...

YOU WILL THROW THAT AWAY! She moved with surprising speed for an old crone, the clerk thought, as she snatched away the girl's plate and threw it uneaten into the trash. And YOU! She rounded on the clerk again and found herself staring at empty air.

He'd taken a large step to the right for no reason other than to confuse her, and when she finally turned to him again he was standing there patiently, thumb hooked in his pocket, and those fingers drumming along. Ma'am, I feel if I'm dishonest with you at this juncture it'd ruin the rapport we've built, so in that spirit I feel you should know that it's been several months since I last needed to calculate whether thawing something out of the freezer or killing someone and stripping their corpse of all valuables was more of a hassle.

The girl inhaled deeply and shook. In his periphery, he could see her eyes finally. A crisp blue. Round, bloodshot. Something there he had not seen in so long. The desperation to live – to survive somehow, even if another minute of life meant another minute of pain. As primal and thoughtless as the eyes of a snared rabbit.

The woman looked away from him and said nothing. When he'd let the moment pass, he spoke again.

Well, I'm too tired for that kind of macroeconomic utilitarian calculation anyhow. Do let me know if you need anything else.

He heard the girl start to weep as he shut off the light and walked out.

---

Eli looked back into the center of their fire, watching as the sparks billowed up out of it, searing the sharpness of the light into his vision when his eyes were closed.

What you think they're doin' out here?

The clerk took another slug of Everclear. Same thing you probably were doing. I assume you got the flyer.

No... we'd just heard.

Doesn't seem like word would travel to whereverat you're from, no offense meant, of course.

Sometimes it'd be on the radio. The District. I thought, you know.

I know. Nothing wrong with thinking.

Lord... I fucked everything up. The tears fought with him, and closing his eyes only filled his vision with redness. I thought it was the only way, was to move along ahead of the bad people, the thieves and rapists.

The clerk nodded as if this were a novel idea. A man can't be blamed for what sounded like a good idea at the time. He passed over another bit of snake meat – the last bit of it – and with it dropped the blue and white pills onto the man's plate.

The sight of them put an end to his tears. He felt anger for a second at the abruptness and cynicism of it, but it stopped by the time he looked up and saw the clerk looking back at him without a hint of pressure or judgment. Watching him, somehow hopefully, for the same reaction he'd given each and every other time.

Why you keep giving me those if you said yourself you don't want me to take 'em?

The clerk shrugged. Same reason the Almighty lets you do evil – if there's no choice, being good really isn't all that special, is it?

---

When Eli had drifted into sleep, the clerk tossed another armload of unsold romance novels on the fire and stoked it, then ventured out into the sharp, liberating chill of the night. Through the window, he could hear the woman screaming and going on about the girl's coughing and you stupid ungrateful little cunt I am TRYING TO SLEEP. He heard the girl get up and leave, no protest on her lips. She did not see him, standing there in the wide shadow of the hunched building.

In the moonlight, the edge of the canyon was easy for her to see even through her tears and the coughs that racked her body like blows from an assailant.

She sat near the edge but not on it. Tears pooling beside her. She did not sense him there until he spoke, and then she started as if stung. He sighed – the first bit of impatience he'd yet betrayed to her.

Look, I'm the sort of crazy you don't need to worry about for the most part. How long you been sick?

Please... please I jes... I jes wawnt be lef alone. Please...

When you talk, she doesn't hear you. That voice that used to know just how everything should be, that told you stories and taught you how to knit... there isn't any Gramma behind it any more. When she cusses you and she tells you to do things or ignore things - ignore what feels wrong or unwise - that isn't her saying it. She's already off somewhere.

The girl heard that his voice was kind and quiet when he said it. In the pale late of the moon he was a phantom, voicing the doubt and dread she had long known but couldn't bear to form into words. It had stayed there inside, deeper than lust. Deeper than prayer. She wrapped her arms around his pant leg and wept into his shin. He stood still. She'd had no comfort, and so the slightest bit of it from him was enough. At length she let his leg go and looked up to him. So grateful he could not bear to meet her gaze.

That parta her... is it in heaven, you think?

If you prefer. Come on inside. You're dying.

---

They tread carefully so as not to wake the old woman. The girl's head lowered, submissive now to this new elder. Back in the pharmacy he had her sit on the counter. He covered the drive-thru window with the large comforter so the light wouldn't awaken Eli. She squinted in the flood of fluorescence. He saw the sweat on her face, saw, in the clarity of the light, the crust forming on her left eye. He reached under the counter and brought out a black bag, opening it and removing the implements within. Her jaw dropped as she saw them. Memories flooding back to her. Stethoscope. Otoscope. Thermometer. Tongue depressor. Sterile syringe.

Tell me everything that's wrong with you.

She was still fascinated with the tools. I... I dunno. I gotta cough.

Is your throat sore? You can barely speak.

Gramma says it'll --

That's not what I say. Look up.

She met his gaze.

I mean look at the ceiling, miss.

She did. He reached up to sweep her hair out of the way and she flinched. He lowered his hands to his sides. You can trust me. I'm only going to touch you to help you. Now relax, or I'll rape you blind. For fuck's sake, that was a joke, settle down. He felt for the lymph nodes at her neck – found them swollen and nodded. Open your mouth, hold this under your tongue.

She was running a hundred and one. He shook his head. Open up, say ah. She did – and after that she was under his instruction. The reassurance of somebody who knew what he was doing took weight off of her she hadn't even realized she'd been carrying. He felt her body relax as he looked in her ears with the otoscope, listened to her rattling lungs with the stethoscope. When he'd finished, he nodded.

My diagnosis is that you're a complete mess. Eye infection, ear infection, throat infection, what sounds like bronchitis. Have you been having headaches?

She nodded. I... I think I have. The heat... our air don't work. In the car. Sometimes it's like a hammer in my head.

You feel pain in your face? Here? He touched her jaw firmly.

She inhaled sharply.

Tsk tsk tsk. Sinuses, too. All right. From a coat hanger set in the wall he took off a white pharmacist's smock and draped it over her shoulders, picking up one of the plastic baskets and placing it in her clammy hand. Take that and come with me.

The rows of shelves sprawled out beyond the view of the counter. When he threw the switches, the light that fell upon them flickered, revealing bank by bank the long-shadowed treasures that were useless to all but the initiates whose footfalls had long ago been lost in the cloying silence. Bins sat piled high with white bags, instructions in print too small for her to read, and words she could never begin to understand. Some of the shelves had the new prices on them, but most still had the old $ symbol.

He laid a finger on the sloped metal rim of one shelf, running it along as he walked, his eyes fixed and on the fingertip as it wandered over the alien descriptions. Behind him, the girl with her hair down about her face like a veil and the basket held before her like a bride's bouquet. He stopped with such abruptness she nearly ran into him.

He was muttering in some other language, the utterances seeming to form words but falling meaningless to her ears. Levofloxacin to start – probably go with five hundred milligrams – two weeks to be safe. You will take one of these every day until there are none left. The large orange bottle went into the basket, the large pills rattling inside it. He looked at a small box with a nasal spray printed on the front and took that as well, his mouth forming more bizarre constructions. Mometasone furoate. You shove this up your prim little nose and squirt twice in each nostril, and then you breathe in deep as you can – ought to loosen things up a little bit. He laid hands on another nose spray. Zinc gluconate ought to kill the little fuckers dead... no. He tapped on it with his index finger, then returned it to the shelf. No. Too much risk of friendly fire – might counteract the antibiotics. This on the other hand. He took hold of a tiny eye drop bottle and put that in the basket to join the others. Moxifloxacin. As murderous to conjunctivitis as it is fun to say five times fast. A veritable war criminal in the microbiotic theater of engagement. You just need to drip one tiny little drop in your eye three times a day – and don't touch the tip of the bottle to your eye or you'll spoil it. Something for your lungs. Hm. The antibiotics will probably do enough on their own, but we can do something about the cough. He snatched up a small box and tore it open to reveal an inhaler. Nothing amazing here. Some albuterol. You just put this is in your mouth and you push down and breath in nice and deep, and your lungs will open right up. You can do that whenever you feel the coughing is too bad for you to handle.

He nodded. That should settle you up.

She looked down at the meds, then back at him. I ent got a bit of money.

Nor I, miss. Devaluation being what it is, I haven't had any around in some time.

She stared.

It's on me, if you see what it is that I am saying to you. Let's dose you up now and get you to bed.

With a single skeletal hand she swept the hair from her face and tried to look him in the eyes, but could not. The kindness she saw there was detached, clinical, paper-thin. As if he only waited to see something in her he'd been looking for over a great deal of time. He was probing her with his eyes. Not in the way some of the other men had back east. She knew what they did. Remembered what they'd done to Momma, though it had been years. Her recollection had somehow spared her the burden of remembering that day had been the first one Gramma had started insisting the power would come back on and the roads would be fixed and President Bush would come back on TV.

Thank you, she said. You... didn hafta.

I know. I think that's why I did it.