“Careful, Jessica!” he said as the woman reached Sterling. She had skill, Sterling would give her that. The knife-wielding Killbilly expertly sent her blade forward, slicing it through the air, and nearly nicking him a few times. But eventually, Sterling came to understand her rhythm, and the next time she leapt forward with her blade, he cut her wrist off, her hand and weapon flipping into the air and cracking against the bloodstained asphalt as she fell.
This inspired her companion to launch forward with a flurry of fists. Anger clouding his vision, the Killbilly tripped on his own footwork. Sterling crouched quickly, pulled the man’s head back, and slit his throat. The female bandit, who had just had her hand cut off, tried in desperation to scoot away from him. Sterling would deal with her in a moment.
The final Killbilly still standing was a young man pushing seven feet tall. He had a big chain, which he was slowly twirling at his side, an indecipherable look on his face due to his pair of reflective wraparound sunglasses, his bandanna just below his bottom lip. It was clear in the way that he held himself that the bandit had balls, that he wasn’t going to let what happened around him stop him from engaging the cowboy necromancer.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Sterling told him as he motioned for the man to approach him.
Thrusting into action, the Killbilly launched his chain forward, Sterling not able to get out of the way in time. The chain struck him across the chin, Sterling feeling as if it had shattered one of his teeth. He stumbled backward and the woman whose hand he had cut off lunged for him. She brought him down and tried to get on top of Sterling, rage now in her eyes. He cut her away with the broad end of his sickle-sword, his blade lodging itself somewhere beneath her chin as he dragged her to the side.
Goddammit, Sterling thought as the man with the chain struck him again.
The next time the bandit tried to attack, Sterling dropped his sword and grabbed onto his chain, pulling the man in close and bringing him to the ground as well. The two rolled around for a moment, occasionally colliding with dead bodies and shards of broken glass, bullet casings, and the filth and scattered debris of the street war.
Sterling managed to finally overpower the Killbilly and used the man’s own chain to choke him out. Once he was sure that the bandit was dead, Sterling slowly got to his feet and sheathed his sickle-sword. He retrieved his revolver once again and took a few painful steps toward the Killbilly with the barbed wire bat, the man barely breathing through the slit in his throat. With a single shot he made sure that the bandit was dead. Sterling turned his focus to the woman, who was still alive. He crouched in front of her, the woman’s face streaked in blood and grime.
“I told you to run,” Sterling said.
She spat blood at him.
“You’re a fiery one, ain’t you?”
“Kill me already,” she said, the wound under her chin making her voice raspy. “This world… fuck this world.”
“That’s something I can agree with, lady,” he said. “Anything you’d like to say before I finish the job?”
“Just… fucking… do it; I’m no pussy.”
“Your gender says otherwise, but you’ve got bigger cajones than these puto cabrones, I’ll give you that. I’ll try to make it quick.” Sterling pressed the muzzle of his firearm to her forehead, and the woman closed her eyes.
“Gracias,” she said, a smile taking shape on her face.
“De nada.”
Sterling pulled the trigger and finished the job.
.Chapter Nine.
Sterling took a look at his stats. He still hadn’t gained a level, but he was getting closer to where he needed to be.
You have received 2,133 XP!
Name: Sterling Monedero
Race: Human
Mancer Class: Necromancer
Class Ranking: Blood Mage
Level: 59
Fortitude: 117
Strength: 35
Resolve: 152
Mana: 92/152
Current Armor Rating: 28
XP: 298,984
XP to Next Level:3,132
Stat Points Available: 0
Technique Points Available: 0
“Ain’t too bad. Could be better, but ain’t too bad,” Sterling mumbled as he made his way through the parking lot of carnage. As he walked, he made sure no one was still alive, more than ready to put a person out of their misery. This triggered the memory of how the woman had just thanked him for ending her life. He hated to see that, but it wasn’t the first time someone showed appreciation for removing them from this realm. A part of him wondered if he would one day thank someone for doing the same.
Sterling spotted Don Gasper right where he had left him, the shaman tied up to one of the legs of the makeshift stage, his head bent forward, drool dripping from his lips. Rather than immediately go over to the man, Sterling equipped his bag of tobacco. He rolled himself up a cigarette, and then rolled a joint with some of the mota he’d picked up in Hatch for Don Gasper. Sterling lit his cigarette and approached Don Gasper. The man’s muscles were pulsing, his nearly naked body covered in scrapes and self-inflicted wounds.
“Gasper,” Sterling said. “Afternoon.”
The old shaman didn’t look up at him.
“I know you can damn well hear me. I got you a joint. Figured you’d want to take the edge off.”
Don Gasper tilted his head up, his eyes going wide as he took in Sterling’s appearance. “Sterling.”
“That’s the name my mama gave me. But you already knew that. What did you take exactly to get you all crazed like this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this bad.”
“Colorado River toad. Bufo… bufo alvarius. I know this peyotera. Mixed them both.”
“Wait, did you just say a frog?”
“Let me down from here,” Don Gasper said, his voice wavering. “I’m not meant to be crucified.”
“Ha! You and me both, and believe you me, you ain’t crucified at the moment,” Sterling said as he took a drag off the cigarette. “But that’s a story for a little bit later. You promise not to try to run away?”
The old shaman snorted in response.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” Sterling began unroping the man, his cigarette perched on the edge of his lip. As soon as Don Gasper was free, he swung at Sterling, the cowboy necromancer easily sidestepping his punch. The old shaman fell forward and hit the pavement, scraping his knee in the process.
“Goddamn son of a bitch,” Sterling mumbled. “Don’t make me hogtie you, Gasper. I’ll do it. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it.”
Don Gasper pushed himself to his feet, and brought his fists up, the shaman slowly surveying the battle that had taken place in the parking lot. He started to weep. “The poor people, they were just here to transcend. Why would they attack us? Why would they choose a day like this?” He turned to Sterling, the tears streaming down his face mixing with the blood and dirt streaked across his cheeks. “¿Por que alguien haria esto? Why would someone do this? Why!?”
“Because there are bad people in this world, there always have been, and the bad far outweighs the good. That’s why shit like this happens. You need to settle down.” Sterling offered Don Gasper the joint he had rolled. The shaman readily took it, and waited for Sterling to light it for him.
“And to be clear, next time you throw a punch at me like that, I may throw one back.”
Don Gasper took a long puff off the joint, his cheeks going gaunt as he did so. He exhaled a cloud of gray smoke, that familiar smell of marijuana reaching Sterling’s nostrils. “I thought you would be here yesterday,” Gasper said. “Had a vision.”
“Yesterday? What can I say? I was busy.”
After another drag from the joint, Don Gasper nodded. “I had a vision, Sterling… You were coming to Las Cruces for me, for my assistance.”
“Well, I guess you turned out to be right, how about that?”
“Why did you not come yesterday? Why show today?”
<
br /> “It’s a long story, and it involves a lot of shit I don’t want to get into right now. Look, I got to get to this neighborhood on the other side of the highway. Turns out, I used to live in Las Cruces.”
“You lived here?” Don Gasper asked, as if he were judging Sterling.
“What do you mean by that? There ain’t nothing wrong with Las Cruces, and it’s where we met first, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I’ll explain everything in a bit, but we need to get going before more bandits and militiamen show up.”
The shaman took another puff off the joint and pointed it at the parking lot. “First, we must… we must find her.”
“Find who?”
“La bruja,” Don Gasper said, his eyes flaring with anger.
“There ain’t no witches here, Gasper. Everyone’s dead. Take a look around,” said Sterling as he swept his hand toward the parking lot. “Like pigs to slaughter, all of them.”
“You were the slaughterer,” Don Gasper said defiantly. “El carnicero. El pinche carnicero.”
“Dammit, Gasper, don’t you go around calling me a butcher. I did what I had to do to survive. And what about you? What about the man covered in blood talking to the damn rattlesnake? You’ve already tried to swing at me, and you told me earlier you wanted to feast on my intestines. Who’s the butcher now? I didn’t bring my ass all the way down here to get berated by you. You’re my friend, remember?”
“Sí, I remember.” He didn’t have much hair on his head, but he ran his hand through the hair that he did have, most of Don Gasper’s long white hair extending from the sides of the skull, strands of it braided and reaching past his scapulae. “Other side of the highway, yes?”
Sterling nodded.
“Let’s do it.” Don Gasper—barefoot and looking beat to hell, a joint pinched between his thumb and his pointer finger—started walking toward the west. Sterling quickly caught up with him, surprised at how spry the hallucinating man could be when he wanted to be.
“That’s the spirit, a little pep to your step.”
“That witch,” Don Gasper murmured after taking a drag off the joint that nearly finished it. “She’s trying to kill me, you know. La bruja.”
“Trying to kill you? It looked to me like she was trying to fuck you.”
“No, no, we’ve already done that.” Don Gasper offered Sterling a big grin that lifted the ends of his beard, his teeth yellow and brittle. “And now she’s trying to kill me. My Magdalena. What’s the old saying? Lovers in the morning, murderers by night? You ever heard that?”
“I don’t think that’s a saying, Gasper, at least not one that anyone sane has ever used before,” Sterling told him as they started down an embankment that would eventually lead to an access road. Sterling could now see what was left of the interstate ahead of them. From their current vantage point, there were pockets of black smoke on the horizon, people gathering at another department store across the interstate.
“Come on,” he told the shaman as he led him over a thirsty stretch of land dotted with brown shrubs and sharp rocks. They reached the interstate proper and crossed it, Sterling looking at the bridge that passed over the highway and how it had fallen long ago.
“Pinche la bruja,” Don Gasper muttered under his breath. “Sterling, I need you to find her for me, mi Magdalena. Yes, I need you to find…”
“Gasper, I didn’t come here to find a witch for you.”
“Not just one witch, several. They’re out past White Sands, at Alamogordo. You know Alamogordo?”
“I do, and from what I recall, she seemed to be here,” Sterling said. “Saw her with my own two eyes.”
“No, Magdalena’s not here anymore. She flies there or teleports. I don’t know how she does it. She can turn into something, into a coyote maybe. La bruja puede convertirse en coyote. It’s true, Sterling, saw it with my own eyes. Brujería malvada.”
A question came to Sterling as he ambled alongside the barefoot shaman. “Let me ask you this: what did you do to piss off these sorcerers, as you call them, anyway?”
Don Gasper stopped and Sterling turned back to him. The man smiled and shrugged, his eyes filling with delight. “Me?”
“Stop fucking around, Gasper. I know you ain’t the angel in this story.”
“Angels are often devils in disguise, but in this case, I actually was the angel. All I wanted to do was cleanse their souls. One of them made a pact with the Devil. And as you very well know, un pacto con el Diablo es muy malo. It’s so bad, and I was just trying to help. I mean, what can I say? I accidentally took one of their hearts, but it wasn’t anything serious. Not so serious.”
Sterling sighed. He knew what he was getting into when he came looking for Don Gasper, but even this seemed like a pretty far out statement.
“It’s true, you know,” Gasper said as he stepped closer to Sterling, almost eye to eye with him now. “It’s a spell that I learned maybe two years ago. You capture someone’s heart in a rosary.”
“How the hell do you go about doing that?”
“I told you, it’s a spell. Take the rosary and one of the… cómo se dice en Inglés? Beads? Yes, beads. Sorry, been speaking mostly Spanish lately. Remove one or two beads on the rosary. Heart goes there. Then you own the heart. It belongs to you. It’s your heart.”
“So you trapped one of these witches’ hearts in a stone and put it on a rosary. Then what?”
“Then I burned it with fire,” Don Gasper said as he started up again, Sterling once again at his side. The old shaman walked casually, as if they weren’t crossing a pretty expansive interstate in the middle of a city entirely engulfed in a turf war. The mystic’s leathery feet took care of the sharp rocks and broken glass on the ground, the old shaman almost bouncing with each step.
“But to put it bluntly: you killed one of their sorcerers, and now they are trying to kill you. Am I following this correctly?”
“Something like this, yes, but that one, Magdalena, she tried to kill me, and now she loves me, but I think she wants to kill me again. Mi amor, Magdalena mi amor.”
“This has to be some sort of joke,” Sterling said under his breath. “Let me go ahead and take a wild guess here, Gasper: you’re in love with her too?”
“How could I not be in love with her? Never have I seen a woman make sex like that,” Gasper said as he thrust his thighs forward. “I want to die fucking her, Sterling, reach nirvana through the tip of mi verga.”
“Thanks for the visual. Need I remind you that, at least according to you, she’s trying to kill you.”
The shaman tilted his head to the side a little and smirked. “Lovers’ quarrel, nothing more. Magdalena will come around.”
“Welp, that’s your business, and before you ask, I don’t want to get involved. I’m not trying to head to White Sands anyway.”
“You are here for Roxy, no?”
Sterling stopped, remembering what Judge had told him at the supply camp, that Roxy had once been imprisoned there and that she had escaped. An image of the woman flashed in his mind in that moment, of how they had parted three years ago.
“Actually, yes,” Sterling said, suddenly feeling deflated. “She is someone I’m looking for, one of several people.”
“Then it sounds like you are trying to head to White Sands, which means you could head to Alamogordo just as easily. Who else do you want to find?” Don Gasper asked.
“Let’s start with Roxy because you mentioned her; what were you saying about Roxy and White Sands?”
“The militia took her,” Don Gasper told him as they started over yet another patch of parched earth, one separating the highway from yet another access road. They were almost in the neighborhood that the Killbillies had taken. Sterling knew that they would have to stop soon and regroup if he was going to find the house that he used to live in, at least according to his old driver’s license.
“The militia has Roxy? I find that hard to believe. She could have taken
a whole platoon of those camoed bastards. She already broke out of a Killbilly supply camp in Radium Springs.”
“The militia has mancers; Roxy isn’t one of the Adapted like you, mi vaquero nigromante.”
“I don’t like it when you call me that. I’m not a cowboy.”
“Pfft! But you are a necromancer, no? You dress like a cowboy, yes?”
“I was a pepper farmer until…” Sterling pinched the bridge of his nose, realizing he had a lot to explain to Don Gasper. The only problem was, they were still out in the open, and it seemed like Gasper was still slightly hallucinating, the shaman occasionally whispering to himself in Spanish while Sterling spoke.
“We’ll get to that. I’ll explain everything in just a moment. Let’s…” Sterling looked across the access road to the nearest abandoned neighborhood. At least from where he stood, he didn’t see anything that signified that particular part of the neighborhood was under Killbilly control. “I got it. Let’s look for shelter in one of them houses. You can smoke some more mota, and we can eat something. I got a little jerky, and some peppers. I’ll tell you everything, and I’ll need to know about Roxy.”
“And who else do you need to know about? You said you’re looking for some people, right? Is it the people I think you are looking for?” Gasper asked, a sudden twinkle in his eye. “You came all this way for me to help you find some people, no?”
“I did.”
“Yet you don’t believe that there are sorcerers out of Alamogordo trying to kill me…”
“Dammit, I never said I didn’t believe you, Gasper, I just said I didn’t want to get involved.”
The old man chewed on his lip for a moment. “I see, I see. So you only trust my power when it’s helping you, yes?”
“Stop playing around with me, Gasper. I came to you because of all the people I have encountered in the last five years, you’re the person that’s going to know what I’m looking for, and what I need to do about it. Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into with these sorcerers—including your little love affair—ain’t none of my business.”
Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk Page 15
