Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  “His name is Ram.”

  “Is he a mancer?”

  “I don’t know. Someone just mentioned that we may… encounter a bounty hunter named Ram… and if we do, stay out of his way.”

  “Is that all you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think any of your compadres know anything about this Ram fella?”

  “No… Where am I?” she asked again. “Everything’s dark…” She began to sob.

  “Rest in peace, ma’am,” Sterling said as he deanimated the female bandit.

  He stood, wishing he had a little more detail to go on. Somewhere out there, a bounty hunter named Ram was searching for him in the high desert, and there wasn’t much he could do to prepare for their eventual collision aside from stay on his toes. Because he knew that time would come. Even though he hadn’t met this man, if Ram was looking for Sterling, he had a feeling they’d eventually run into each other. Star-crossed killers, as it were.

  “I’m coming,” he told the female hostage after he collected the peppers that had spilled out of the crate. They were decent, but not as good as he could do. Sterling rolled up a cigarette. He brought it to his lips and found that he was barely able to use the muscles in his jaw to keep the cigarette in place. He ended up having to clamp down on it with his teeth, a haze of smoke following him into the tent as he stepped inside.

  “I’m sorry for leaving you waiting,” Sterling said once he found the woman hogtied and bruised. He retrieved his sword and quickly cut her loose, the woman trying to cower away from him. “Don’t be afraid of my ugly mug,” he said, his cigarette falling out of his mouth. Sterling reached down to pick it up, ashing it in the process. To keep it in place, he stuck it in the gap between his teeth, the new tooth already starting to regrow. “Your people sent me to get you.”

  The woman, who had a soiled yellow bandanna tied around her mouth, tried to speak, but her voice was muffled.

  “Let me get it,” Sterling said as he removed the bandanna.

  “Th-thank you,” she said as she turned to him, allowing Sterling to cut the rope that still bound her hands. She was a square-jawed woman, in a similar shawl to the one that her aunt wore back at the trading post. Her skin was the same brown color as the rocks outside Mountainair, and she had a big mole on her neck.

  “They do anything to you?” Sterling asked cautiously.

  She started to sob. “Just beat me. But maybe later…”

  “There ain’t no later for them fellas now,” Sterling said. “I saw to that.”

  The woman rushed forward and hugged him. Sterling threw his arms up and noticed just how sore his fists were, his knuckles bloody pulps.

  “Not too tight,” he said as she squeezed him even harder. “We’ve got to get you back to your people. And before we do, I need to collect me some bandannas. The name is Sterling, by the way.”

  “Maria.”

  “Mighty fine to meet you, Maria.”

  Sterling led her outside, and once he collected the bandannas of the Killbillies he’d slaughtered, he returned his focus to the Tiwa woman. “You know how to drive one of them things?” he asked, nodding toward the two ATVs.

  The woman nodded.

  “Well in that case, let’s ride out of here in style.”

  Sterling laughed as he tore through the desert on the ATV, Maria on the vehicle behind him now wearing his black cowboy hat. It had flown off as soon as he’d picked up speed and she had managed to catch it. The two raced toward the trading post, Sterling’s hair whipping in the wind, his face still bruised up but slowly healing, his tooth nearly regrown, his broken nose and the cuts on his cheek stitching right up.

  His stats flashed before him and he waved them away.

  You have received 770 XP!

  Name: Sterling Monedero

  Race: Human

  Mancer Class: Necromancer

  Class Ranking: Bone Sculptor

  Level: 60

  Fortitude: 117

  Strength: 35

  Resolve: 152

  Mana: 137/159

  Current Armor Rating: 28

  XP: 307,474

  XP to Next Level:6,450

  Stat Points Available: 0

  Technique Points Available: 1

  He revved the engine of his ATV, the wheels spinning even faster. Maria sped around him, Sterling now trying to catch up with the native woman. She took off, a cloud of dust obscuring her form for a moment as she zipped ahead.

  Sterling veered left, avoiding most of the dust as he tried to pull a wide circle around the woman to catch up with her again. They were approaching a subdivision along the highway, and he knew he needed to slow down at some point. The pair cautiously made their way through the neighborhood, and then weaved their ATVs around burned-out vehicles on the interstate. They came to the trading post, the flectomancer and his two mechanic assistants coming out of their garage once they heard the roar of the engines.

  Maria greeted her tribe, and explained in their language what had happened, Sterling standing back and enjoying a cigarette. The Tiwa seller that he had made a deal with earlier approached.

  “Thank you,” she said, procuring the ring that gave him a Class Proficiency bonus per three levels gained.

  “I believe these are yours.” Sterling equipped all the Killbilly bandannas and dropped them onto the ground.

  “Muchas gracias,” she said as Sterling removed his necklace with the topaz piece on and added the ring to it.

  “Pleasure was all mine.”

  He got out his bag of turquoise and silver and paid the woman, as promised. Once he was squared up, Sterling was led to the compound’s restaurant, the seller explaining that they were preparing his room and his bath.

  “Fine by me,” he said as he was seated at a wooden table, kachina masks hanging from the walls around him. The woman brought him a bucket of warm water and a clean cloth so he could wipe his face down, which Sterling did, paying little attention to the amount of blood in the water once he finished. A candle was lit on his table, and it wasn’t long before an appetizer was brought to him by a short man in a dark green apron, chili peppers stitched across the front pocket.

  As he drank his beer, Sterling enjoyed fried breadsticks served with a side of honey. This was followed by a plate of tender buffalo meat sautéed with squash and corn, a scoop of white rice, and a cube of blue cornbread. Eventually, Maria, the woman he had rescued, joined him at the table. “Is it good?” she asked, a big smile on her face. She still wore his cowboy hat, which she placed on the table, Sterling nodding to it.

  “Been meaning to ask for this back,” he said as he returned the hat to his head. “Sentimental value. As for the food, it’s amazing. Give my regards to the chef.”

  “My aunt told me to tell you that she asked about this man you are looking for, the man in all white…”

  “I ain’t looking for him so much as he’s looking for me,” Sterling said. “His name is Ram. Just learned that.”

  “He stopped by a day ago. My father and my uncle saw him. He had a meal and left. That’s all they know. My uncle said that there was something off about him, something real cold about his personality. He felt the chill around him.”

  “A chill, huh?” Sterling asked as he took the last bite of his cornbread. “Killers can have that about them, that’s for damn sure. I’ve experienced it myself.”

  “You don’t have the chill,” she said, a twinkle in her dark eyes.

  “Heh. You don’t know me that well,” Sterling told her.

  “You saved me.”

  “I did what had to be done,” Sterling told her, sensing what the young woman was suggesting. Not that he was opposed to it, but he didn’t rescue her for something like that. It wasn’t uncommon for sex to be on the table when it came to bartering across the Land of Enchantment, but Sterling didn’t normally partake. It just wasn’t his style.

  “You would have done the same for me, right?” he asked as he leaned back in his
chair and placed both hands behind his head. He was stuffed.

  “Maybe,” she said with a cute shrug. Maria had cleaned up as well, and now wore the swath of fabric draped over her head, just like her aunt. “Your bath is ready, your room too. That’s what I came here to tell you.”

  “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day,” Sterling told her. He reached forward and finished what was left of his beer.

  “Another cerveza?”

  “Maybe I’ll enjoy one in my room over a hot bath.”

  “I’ll take you there,” she told him as she stood. She called to the man in the kitchen and he returned with a cold enough beer. There was no refrigeration after the Reset, and people had gone to great extremes to keep the beers cool, Sterling noticing that the natives preferred to bury them in shaded areas, which seemed to help.

  Maria led him out of the restaurant and to the lodgings behind the trading post, all of them set into large pueblo with wooden ladders leading to the rooms. Sterling climbed one of the ladders, surprised by the spaciousness of his room. Sure enough, there was a tub carved out of stone and filled with boiling water, the smell of lemon and herbs filling the space. The ceiling was too low for Sterling to stand, forcing him to lean forward a little, Maria short enough that her head barely grazed the ceiling.

  “I could stay,” Maria said. “Give you a massage.”

  “I think I got it,” he finally told her. “You get yourself some rest and heal up. I’m sorry you had to go through what you went through. I’ll be out in the morning. Maybe we can have breakfast.”

  “I’d like that.” She set his fresh beer on a table near the door and stepped toward the arched entryway. “Where are you going next?”

  “I got a friend that needs visiting in Madrid. You heard about the Culto Demente Sagrado down in Mountainair?”

  “Just a little. We trade with the Hopi, and they told us about them.”

  “I got a buddy there in Madrid, like I was saying, a flectomancer. If anyone knows how to deal with the cult’s telemancer calling herself Jesus, it’s him.”

  “You want to stop the cult?” She chuckled to herself. “You trying to be some kind of superhero or something?”

  “Me? Superhero?” Sterling placed his hat on the bed and removed his duster. “Ain’t no superheroes left, Maria, and don’t you forget that. I’m just a man on a mission, and I got a friend holed up with the cult that needs rescuing, a friend crucial to my mission.”

  “So you stopped by our trading post just to rest before going to Madrid, and then decided to come find me just for the hell of it? And the whole reason you’re going to Madrid is that you need to meet this crafter friend of yours to figure out a way for you to break into the cult’s compound so you can rescue a friend. Sound right?”

  “You writing my biography or something?”

  Maria smiled. “Just curious about you, that’s all.”

  “Yup, that’s the plan. Then I’m heading down…” Sterling shook his head. He was telling the woman too much. “It don’t matter where I’m heading, just know that I’ll get there eventually.”

  “I like that,” she said. “I feel the same way.”

  “Maybe we all do,” Sterling said as he sat down on the bed and started taking off his boots. “You have yourself a nice night, Maria, we’ll have breakfast in the morning. You like haiku?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll explain tomorrow.”

  .Chapter Six.

  Sterling read the desert haiku he wrote for Maria once again, counting the syllables out as he did so. It was morning now, his room nice and cold. He was seated on a chair near the open doorway with a quilt draped over his shoulders, enjoying a morning cigarette. The sun was starting to come up, the deep red hues and soft pinks and blues invigorating, inspiring. He took one more look at the desert haiku he’d written for Maria:

  Don’t you worry none

  Ain’t no more superheroes

  Stay strong, Maria

  “You old dog,” Sterling said as he carefully ripped the page out of his book and folded it. He stuffed it in the front pocket of his shirt and sent his book back to his inventory list. Just before bed, Sterling had spent some time with the map in his travel guide, and figured out that he was about a hundred miles away from Madrid.

  Even though Manchester’s stamina was unlimited, he would be pushing it to reach Madrid by nightfall, especially with the fact that Sterling was going to have to make a wide loop around Albuquerque, which might put him in direct contact with roadside robbers or an amalgamation. There was no telling, so he wanted to give himself a little wiggle room. He would certainly reach Madrid by noon tomorrow, and perhaps even earlier than that, as Sterling was not opposed to sleeping on Manchester as the horse trotted along. He’d done it before.

  Another cigarette or two, and he was ready to start his day, Sterling putting on his bulletproof vest, his boots, and slipping into his black duster, all his charms on his body, his cowboy hat on his head, hair combed back and tucked behind his ears. It was about this time that Maria appeared outside of his room, the native woman in the same green dress she’d worn last night but with a different colored cloth draped over her head this time, one that had a light shade of blue to it, reminiscent of the sky the day after a long rain.

  Down the wooden ladder Sterling went, where he joined Maria and tipped his hat to her. “Ma’am. I don’t know what y’all got in the way of coffee, but I do have a tin if you’re interested,” he told her.

  “We have some, not the canned stuff neither.”

  “Really?” Sterling asked as they headed toward the restaurant, which was next to the repair shop.

  “The tribes trade frequently, and we were able to get roasted coffee beans from Central America.”

  “Did you now?” Sterling asked, impressed. “Any word on what’s going down in Central America? Mexico? I never really think about other parts of the world.”

  “They don’t know,” she said, referring to the natives her tribe had traded with. “Questions like that don’t come up. And we’re getting things after they’ve been traded several other times.”

  “I know how that goes,” Sterling said as he got the door for her, holding it open long enough for Maria to step inside the onsite restaurant. The two had coffee, which turned out to be one of the best cups he’d had in the last five years. For breakfast, they were served a plate of fried quail eggs and blue cornbread, and Sterling asked the chef if he would chop up the jalmundo peppers he’d been saving for a special occasion, the ones he’d gotten from Luna back in Hatch.

  While they ate, Sterling explained what a desert haiku was, Maria not too interested in his unique form of poetry until he produced the piece of paper he’d scribbled on earlier. “This one is for you,” he said as he slid the piece of paper across the table. “I normally don’t share with people what I write, but I figured… Well, just read.”

  She opened it and read the poem. “You wrote this for me?” Maria asked, a fondness coming over her face as she looked up at him.

  “I sure did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back by here, but if I do stop by, I expect another cup of this coffee and a good meal.”

  Maria pressed the folded piece of paper against her chest, and then slipped it into a pocket hidden in her dress. “It’ll cost you,” she said with a smirk.

  “Shee-it, I don’t mind paying,” said Sterling.

  “You are an odd man,” she said as she took a sip of coffee. There was a bit left over on her lip, which she wiped away with a hand-stitched napkin. “You’re a necromancer who was once a pepper farmer who likes to write haiku. Never heard of nothing like that. Where did you get this idea of a haiku anyway? Where did you say it was from?”

  “Japan. I ain’t never been, unless I somehow visited before the Reset, but that’s where I got the idea from, from a book about their culture. I got this feeling that if I did go there, I wouldn’t like what I found anyway.”

  “Why’
s that?”

  “They got peppers there?”

  Maria shrugged. “I don’t know anything about Japan.”

  “What about deserts?” He shook his head. “No, ma’am, from the picture books I’ve seen, Japan doesn’t have any deserts. And as much as I’m tired of the desert monotony, I’m also accustomed to it. I like it. It suits me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know how to get into it without saying something that would make me feel foolish later, something about how I may be hard on the outside like a desert, but I’m still soft on the inside, somewhere deep, in a place that’s hard to reach. Something stupid like that. It’s almost better not to say nothing.” Sterling pressed away from the table.

  She smirked. “You just said a lot.”

  “Yeah? I can be a little garrulous,” he said as he finished his cup of coffee. “I blame this here caffeine. It’s got me saying all sorts of stupid shit.”

  “So I’ll never see you again?” she asked, the smile on her face fading.

  “I wouldn’t say that, Maria, but the odds are high this is the last time you’ll ever lay eyes on me. Like I told you last night, I’m a man on a mission, and I plan to see that mission to its natural completion, even if that completion is my ass six feet under. Who knows where it’s going to take me.”

  “But you have to come back by here, when you head south to White Sands…”

  “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It sort of depends on where my little mission here takes me. Read that desert haiku I wrote you whenever you think about me. Try to find the space between the words, and be extra careful if any Killbillies stop by. I won’t be around next time to fetch you. Hell, maybe it’s best if you head up to the pueblo itself, where it’s safer.”

  Maria’s eyes started to water; Sterling knew it was time to leave. He thanked her once again for the meal and stood, the woman joining him as he reached the door.

  “Want to see something neat?” he asked her, a gust of wind picking up as he stepped outside, blowing the ends of his duster in the same way it blew through the ends of her dark hair.