Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  Sterling took a quick look at his Mana to see that he now had a hundred and fifty-two points. “Yup,” he told the seller as he looked for a place to ash his cigarette. The man produced an ashtray made from an aluminum can, and Sterling put his cancer stick out.

  “Welp, I’ve got to get to Las Cruces, so let’s see about this brother of yours,” Sterling said as he also sent the two flashlights to his inventory list.

  “Yes, just give me a moment.”

  The seller led Sterling around to the front of the trading post, where he spoke to the front door guy. The big Hispanic man walked over to the two still seated in the eating area and let them know it was time to go. They didn’t question him. Once they were gone, the two brothers locked up, and guided Sterling around to the gravesite out back.

  “How deep is he?” Sterling asked, not that it mattered. As long as the soil was fresh, he’d be able to summon Diego’s corpse.

  The two Hispanic men stood a few feet back, both a bit hesitant. “Three or four feet,” said the seller.

  “I’m going to warn you now, this is going to seem kind of strange, but it ain’t too scary, and you won’t see his face or anything. First, I’m going to have to raise him from the dead, and then I’m going to need to extract a little blood to do what I need to do. One of y’all got a saucer or something in your invo lists? I also need a pocket knife. A saucer and a pocket knife.”

  “I got one.” The seller produced a small saucer made of ceramic, colorful and clearly native, as well as a sharp knife with a deer antler handle and a leather cord hanging from its grip.

  “Y’all hold tight.”

  Sterling raised his hand and curled his fingers. The soil began to move. A hand eventually pressed out, just the fingertips and a portion of the palm. “You might want to turn away,” Sterling told them. “Just need to get a little blood.”

  The zombie hand was already starting to turn colors, Sterling mentally telling the corpse to stop for a moment. Perhaps he’d be able to get enough blood from the hand, considering how the body had been placed. If the corpse had been kept upright, all the blood would have been in the feet by now, but since Diego had been flat, it would be a little easier to do what needed to be done. Sterling drew the blade across the man’s wrist. The blood was thick, almost coagulated, but there was enough to fill the saucer.

  Once he was finished, Sterling turned to the two brothers and sat with his legs crossed beneath him, the hand slowly sinking back into the grave behind him. He took power away from Diego and motioned for the brothers to sit. He placed the saucer and the knife in front of him, the blood settling.

  “He won’t be around for long, just a couple of minutes or so, and he’ll be confused, but you can ask him questions and talk if you need to. Don’t mind me,” Sterling said as he lowered his hat over his eyes. “Pretend I ain’t even here.”

  He cast his Death Whisper ability and the blood started to boil, a small, glossy face slowly taking shape.

  “Where… Where am I?”

  “Diego?” the seller asked, shock coming across his face. “It’s me, Carlos. Carlos and Julian.”

  “Carlos? Julian? Mis hermanos!”

  “You stupid motherfucker,” Carlos began, his tone taking Sterling off guard, “you got your ass killed, and you never told us what you did with all the turquoise! That was our turquoise too, you, me, and Julian. Where the hell did you leave it?”

  “Wha…?”

  “I ain’t kidding with you, Diego, where is the turquoise?”

  “Where… where am I?”

  “I don’t give a goddamn where you are!” Carlos threw his hands up in the air. “I’m going to ask you again: where is the turquoise? Answer me, Diego. Where is it?”

  “Look, Carlos, you have to understand, they had this donkey show in Las Cruces… ain’t never seen nothing like that before. I mean, I knew they had—”

  “You… spent it at a donkey show?”

  “What? No, I didn’t spend it on no donkey show, I ain’t a perv. It was a ping pong show, the opening act for the donkey show,” Diego said in a whispery voice. “And I didn’t spend it, to be clear. I was robbed. There was this girl that worked there. I was trying to help her, rescue her, you know how I am, Carlos. But it turned out she tricked me, and stole all of our turquoise, her and some militiamen.”

  Carlos exchanged glances with Julian. “Where at? Where is this fucking place?”

  “In the red light neighborhood. Just ask about it. Before you get all riled up, I was drunk, Carlos, it wasn’t my fault,” Diego pleaded with him. “A friend suggested the place. I was only going to stay for the opening act, but then I saw her, and I knew she was the one for me,” he said, something melodious about his voice now. “Such a sweet woman… until she betrayed me.”

  “The one for you?” Carlos asked, trying to calm his nerves. “I need to get this timeline straight,” he said as his counterpart mumbled a litany of Spanish curses that almost impressed Sterling. “You went to a donkey show—”

  “—Ping pong show.”

  —And you got robbed by one of the putas who works there, and then you got your ass killed by the militia?”

  “They ambushed me, it was a trap…” Diego said, his bloody form starting to constrict. Sterling started to feel a dip in his power, and he knew it wouldn’t be very long until he lost his hold on Diego, nor was he interested to see where this conversation would go. “Where am I? How are you talking to me?” Diego asked.

  “Never mind that part. You are lucky I’m not there on the other side, wherever the hell you are. I would have whooped your ass for this. Julian too. That was our turquoise, Diego. Our turquoise. We earned it selling these damn trinkets. You stole it from us, and then you head off to Las Cruces…”

  “I was drunk, and she… she looked like our sister; I had to help her.”

  “Diego, I swear, if you bring Josefina into this…” Carlos glared at the face made of blood as it started to drop back into the saucer. “She wasn’t even our real sister! Hey, I ain’t done…”

  “I can’t hold it for that long,” Sterling said. “Sorry, boys, make your peace. It takes a lot of my Mana to cast it,” he lied. “Drains me.”

  Carlos pointed at the saucer of blood. “Don’t you leave without telling us that woman’s name!”

  “Who? Which woman? Where am I?”

  “The woman who stole our turquoise, who tricked you, the one working with the militia. What was her name?” Carlos demanded. “Don’t you do it, don’t you leave without telling us, Diego.”

  “I didn’t get her name. Maybe Cristina? I… I…” And with that, the face splashed back into the saucer of blood.

  Carlos got to his feet and kicked a rock. Julian quickly joined him and tried to soothe the furious seller. Eventually, Carlos stopped stomping, his arms now crossed over his chest as he loaded up a pipe with marijuana and puffed it in an angry silence. Figuring it was best to get going before they asked him to conjure Diego again, Sterling stood, dusted off his black jeans, and wished the two men well. He was just stepping away when Carlos called out to him.

  “Hey, necromancer, if you meet a woman named Cristina who works in the red light district, bring her back here, dead or alive. There will be money in it for you, amigo. Charms, too. We got other stuff in the store…”

  “Nope, sorry fellas, I ain’t getting involved in none of that.” Sterling tipped his hat at the two men. “Y’all have a good rest of your day.”

  Next stop, Las Cruces.

  .Chapter Eight.

  There was a reason Sterling tried to keep his powers secret from the general public. There was never any telling how your average person would react to a man able to summon the dead, a mancer who could bring forth a loved one from just a small amount of blood. It could work as a bartering tool, which he had just seen back at the trading outpost, but it also forced Sterling to sit through whatever grievances needed to be aired, which had happened a couple times now.

 
; He couldn’t help but smirk.

  “I wish you had heard them,” he told Manchester as they neared Las Cruces. “Talking about all sorts of crazy shit.” There were more cars on the highway now, all abandoned, the occasional ATV or bicycle heading north or south. If there were Killbillies out looking for him, which he assumed they were, it would be much harder to find the cowboy necromancer once he hit the big city. Sterling had read up on Las Cruces before, which was once the second largest city in the state of New Mexico. There had been a bunch of universities in the city before the Reset, governmental agencies focused on things like nuclear testing and trips to outer space through an agency known as NASA.

  “Crazy to think that people used to want to go up there,” Sterling said to his bone horse. “Bad enough down here.” As he continued alongside the highway, a cigarette perched on his lip, Sterling squinted up at the sky, a hazy blue with cirrus clouds holding court around an apricot sun. It was hard for Sterling to imagine that before people had gone to outer space. “Crazy.”

  It wasn’t the most comfortable, but Sterling had grown used to what it felt like to ride his skeletal steed. He could always get a living horse, but that would cost him a good bit of silver and turquoise, and Manchester was portable. Sterling didn’t quite know the limitations of his inventory list, but it was definitely big enough to fit Manchester when he was in his deanimated form.

  He would have to send him to the list sooner rather than later. Either the Killbillies or the White Sands Militia would be controlling the entry into Las Cruces, he was sure of that. Sterling could always skirt around it, heading through some outer borough or disheveled subdivision, but he preferred to make his way straight toward the city center, where he assumed the shaman festival would be held.

  It really would depend on who was manning the gates.

  Leave it to Don Gasper to attend a shamanic festival in the middle of a war zone, Sterling thought with a shake of his head. The old kook…

  Whatever was about to happen, one thing was for certain: it was going to be wild. There was never a dull moment with the old sorcerer and his unique form of brujería, of witchcraft.

  Sterling passed a green highway sign barely hanging from its bolts, the sign announcing that he had reached the Las Cruces city limits. What was left of the suburbs, most of it burned out, had slowly crept toward the highway in the form of debris and scattered objects, more collateral, more roadblocks, the remains of a once thriving society. He saw a group of people moving about half a mile ahead at a roadside trading post. Figuring it would be best to go on foot from here, Sterling got down from his horse and sent Manchester’s saddle to his inventory list. He lowered his hand and the bone horse collapsed, Sterling sending the bones away as well. With a flick of a finger, he sent his cigarette to the gray asphalt that used to be an interstate highway.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said as he headed toward yet another trading post, which just so happened to be along his way. As he walked, Sterling straightened his black jeans, his shirt, his bulletproof vest beneath, his duster, and finally his hat. Once he reached the trading post, he found a woman using a chipped plastic bowl of dirty water to clean machine parts. The woman, whose eyebrows had grown together, had wispy black hair with strands of gray in it, her skin brown and cheeks pink from scrubbing. She paid no attention to Sterling.

  “Ma’am,” he said after clearing his throat didn’t work.

  “Él no está aquí,” the woman mumbled without looking up at him.

  “Who?”

  “Mi esposo.”

  “You got me all wrong, ma’am. I ain’t looking for your husband, lady. Just got a quick question for ya: who’s running the entrance to the city up there? We talking ‘billies or the militia?”

  “Milicia.”

  “Muchas gracias.”

  “De nada,” she said before launching back into whatever she was cleaning.

  Sterling tipped his hat at the woman and headed on. He thought about rolling up a cigarette as he walked, but decided against it, just in case the militiamen at the gate wanted a smoke. Since he hadn’t had any interactions with the militia yet, Sterling hoped to keep things low-key so he wouldn’t end up on their radar like he had the Killbillies’. The more forgettable he was, the better. It really depended on how thoroughly they had militarized the city. Sterling needed to reach Level 60 as soon as possible. If that level came from killing militiamen and Killbillies indiscriminately, then so be it.

  Sterling didn’t quite subscribe to a ‘kill them all, let God sort them out’ policy, but his personal philosophy, one slowly stitched together over the last five years of survival, wasn’t far off from the famous phrase. The post-apocalyptic southwest corner of what used to be the United States was a lizard eat lizard kind of world, where all the cacti were prickly, all the corners dark, a place where the scorpions stung you twice out of spite, and the boot kicked you on the way in and on the way out.

  It became clear as he walked that some of the overturned and abandoned vehicles on the highway had been arranged to prevent ATVs rolling up on the checkpoint en masse. Once he saw guard towers hastily constructed from building supplies stripped from the suburbs, Sterling began second-guessing going through the main entry point. He caught the start of what looked like it would eventually be a fence, as well as a line of people waiting to get into the city.

  Surprisingly, the line seemed to be moving pretty fast.

  His first glimpse of one of the White Sands Militia told him that they were much better supplied than the Killbillies. They all wore desert camo with hints of white in it, their pants tucked into their thick, camel brown boots, something organized about their looks. They were decked out in bulletproof vests and tan gloves that matched their boots, all of the guards with helmets as well, guns on their hips, their faces clean-shaven, no beards.

  Sterling got in line behind a small family, the father carrying one of the children in his arms, the mother with a baby strapped onto her back. It wasn’t long before he reached the front of the checkpoint only to realize the fatal error he’d made. Sterling still had his revolver out in the open. “You, come over here,” a dark-skinned militiaman said before Sterling could send his sidearm to his inventory list.

  “It ain’t loaded,” he said coolly. “Doesn’t work worth a damn either. It’s just, you know, just a piece to make me look tough. Got to look tough nowadays.”

  He started to lift his hands in the air as the militiaman came toward him. The man drew Sterling’s revolver and checked it, finding that there were no bullets in it, and there was no barrel for that matter either.

  “A flectomancer made this?”

  “Nah,” Sterling lied. “I just found it in a museum out in Truth or Consequences. They got a Native American museum there, cowboys and Indians, you know the drill, most of the stuff is looted, and I figured I would take a little keepsake for myself.”

  “What about your sword?” the militiaman asked.

  “Sword? I’d hardly call that a sword,” Sterling said with a big grin, relying on his Persuasion technique. “Look at the curve. I got a pepper farm out past T or C. This here is to fight off any amalgamations. They are known to come around from time to time, especially the armadillo ones.”

  “What kind of peppers?” the militiaman asked.

  “Mostly Big Jims, but my farm was attacked by a swarm of Killbillies,” Sterling said, finding an angle. “And they ruined my second crop of reds. I’m here to attend the shaman festival, see if I can get some advice on what to do next year to prevent them boys from rolling up on my farm like that. Mighty unkind of them.”

  Another militiaman approached, having heard pieces of his story. He was taller than the fellow currently interrogating Sterling, the side of his face covered in pink scars from a fire or an explosion, possibly both.

  “One easy way to stop the Killbillies is to support the White Sands Militia,” the man said as he took Sterling’s revolver from his counterpart and examined it. “We
won’t raid your pepper farm, that’s for sure.”

  But you will take a tax, Sterling thought as he smiled at the man. “Hey, anyone not trying to raid my farm has my support.”

  The second militiaman handed Sterling his revolver. “Keep moving on through. The shaman festival is being held at an old Sam’s Club parking lot. You won’t miss it. Straight down along the interstate—I’d keep to the left, if I were you—easier to travel that way, and the Killbillies have set up shop to the right. You’ll come to a big overpass. Just make your way through that, and it’ll be on your left,” he said, motioning toward the interstate.

  “One more thing, if you don’t mind,” Sterling said as his wallet appeared in his hands. “So I recently found out that, well, before the Reset, turns out I lived in Las Cruces. Imagine that. You don’t know anything about this location, do you?”

  He gave the second soldier his ID.

  The man examined it for a moment, and nodded. “I know the area. That’s on the other side of the interstate, an old subdivision. Like I was saying, that’s Killbilly territory, so if you’re going to go in there, you’d best go in with a gun that actually fires. Killbillies have the territory south of I-25, we’re holding the area north. The highway can be the battle zone at times, so once you veer off here, I’d stay about a quarter mile or so off it on your way to the festival.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Sterling said once he had his ID back. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

  Sterling recognized Don Gasper as soon as he laid eyes on him.

  The shaman stood on a stage, people gathered around him, the size and stink of the crowd making Sterling instantly claustrophobic. Gasper was covered in blood, a wild look in his eyes, spit dangling from his beard as he spoke to a large rattlesnake. Two attendants held the rattlesnake, both wearing all white smeared with ichor, one of them with a black leather whip in his hand.

  Don Gasper spoke some garbled tongue and nodded to the whip. The man stepped around the old shaman and lashed against his back, and Gasper cried out in what was either ecstasy or pain, it was hard for Sterling to tell.