The temperature had dropped considerably, the sky overhead a mixture of midnight blue and deep hues of purple, a sprinkle of stars, the moon a fingernail sliver, everything otherworldly. One of the stars flashed and Sterling wondered if it was another planet. This got him thinking about the Godwalkers, and where they could have possibly come from. In the end he settled on the fact that this tidbit didn’t really matter: Sterling would dedicate his life to bringing as many down as possible.
Taking on one Godwalker was no small feat, but bringing down the terminal, the kind that Raylan had mentioned existed somewhere in Utah, sounded like a way to really drive the dagger in. And that’s what Sterling planned to do. The alien monoliths had shown up and killed most of the world’s population, leaving behind the hyenas, whose last laugh had gone on for five years now. Sterling had no idea what things would look like if he was able to accomplish his lofty goal, but it would be a start, a way to use what was left of his life to make a difference.
Hopefully, he would be able to find out what happened to his family along the way, Isabella and his son.
Sterling finished his cigarette and flicked it to the curb. He walked past people still in the courtyard, Jimmy calling for him to join them again. Sterling waved him away as he headed under an arched doorway and from there up a stairwell crafted from blue and yellow tiles lined in white. He stopped in front of his door, his equilibrium off balance for a moment as he took a deep breath in, trying to regain his composure.
He turned to the Sunflower Kid’s door instead and knocked.
“It’s me.”
She indicated for him to come in and he did, Sterling finding the teenage girl seated on the bed, her legs crossed beneath her body. More flowers than he’d ever seen in his entire life filled the pots in the room, growing around the cactus, producing splashes of color and an incredible scent. They surrounded the Sunflower Kid’s bed as if it were a pedestal growing out of a meadow.
“Dang.” Sterling found a chair in the corner and moved some of the flowers off it. Careful not to sit down on any of her flower petals, Sterling relaxed onto the chair and let out a deep sigh.
“You should bathe,” the Sunflower Kid said.
He sniffed his armpit. “Yeah, you ain’t wrong there. Sorry, I probably smell like tequila, cigarettes, and body odor.”
She nodded.
“I’ll bathe. You want me to…” Sterling took off his hat. He looked to the door and glanced back at the teenage girl. “I can go and do it right now, if you want. I’d love to talk, if you’re willing to wait a minute.”
“No, do it before you go to bed.”
“I feel like we got a lot of catching up to do,” Sterling admitted. “A little hard to do while we were racing each other on horseback, or pronghorn-back in your case.” Sterling felt drunk, and he sensed that he was rambling. He cleared his throat. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m holding up just fine.”
“Got it,” Sterling said after an awkward pause. “And where I shot you, no scar?”
“No scar.”
“Good. Again, sorry about that.”
There was an aura that seemed to radiate off the Sunflower Kid, one that made Sterling feel uneasy. She was entirely calm, her thoughts seemingly collected, a true flower child as her name suggested. But she was also a ruthless killer, perhaps the most powerful mancer in the Southwest. Sterling had long since discarded any remorse he felt for the people he inevitably had to slay.
Aside from the memory loss, one of the things he always disliked about the Reset was the fact that one had to kill to grow stronger. It really was a lizard eat lizard world: either you kill and become desensitized to it so you can level up and get stronger, or someone will snuff you out. And the teenager before him could extinguish life as quickly as she could create it.
“Lizard eat lizard,” Sterling mumbled. He didn’t know how long he had been sitting in front of the Sunflower Kid. It could have been less than a minute, it also could have been pushing an hour. Time with her was often like that, unquantifiable.
“Did you want to say something?”
“You know, I found out more about my life,” Sterling said, looking back up at her, his cowboy hat still in his lap. He moved some of his hair off his forehead and patted it down, trying to make himself presentable. “I got hold of my old wallet, with my driver’s license in it and a picture of what I think may be my family.”
He equipped it and tossed it onto the bed. Rather than reach for it, one of her plants lifted the wallet over to the Sunflower Kid. She opened it and examined the picture first, then the ID.
“Did you go to this address in Las Cruces?”
“I did, and that’s the other piece of paper in there. It’s an insurance card.”
The Sunflower Kid took out the piece of paper and looked at it. “Your wife’s name was Isabella?”
“That seems to be the case. I don’t know what the boy’s name is.”
She took a look at the photo inside the wallet as well. “Is that all you have uncovered?”
“Aside from an address in Albuquerque which I plan to check out, that’s about it. Speaking of ol’ Duke City, you said you were there with Zephyr. What the hell is she up to? What’s she doing in Albuquerque? I meant to ask that.”
“Being Zephyr,” the Sunflower Kid said. “For a while, she was playing both sides, the Kirtland Airmen and the Barelas Glyphs, by exploiting the Glyphs’ partnership with the Old Town Toros, all of whom are at war with the Alta Monte Homecidos. I think now she’s just working for one side.”
“She can be like that, can’t she? Just like the wind.”
“An aeromancer through and through. There is one thing that she has been focused on lately, or at least she was at the old Air Force base. She’s interested in wind power, which makes sense for an aeromancer, and before I was taken, she was working with a flectomancer there to set up wind turbines.”
“So she has chosen a side?”
“Sort of, she also oversaw the attack of one of the turbines when she had a disagreement with the flectomancer. She does things her own way.”
“That she does. Do you think we should…?” Sterling swallowed a burp. “Dang, I sure ate a lot out there. Pardon me. Do you think we should try to recruit her again?”
“I don’t see why not. We get along pretty well.”
“Yet she let you be captured by the cult; who was the guy again, the hydromancer?”
“Cristobal.”
“You’re saying that this hydromancer helped you with that jungle you put together, right?”
“He must have. It’s the only way I could create something like that. Did you hear any waterfalls, anything like that?”
“Not that I can recall,” Sterling said, thinking back to the compound. “I was mostly just trying to find you. Glad I did.”
“You know it’s going to come up, right?” she asked, shifting to a topic that had weighed heavily on Sterling’s soul for the last three years.
“You mean when we get Roxy?”
The Sunflower Kid nodded. There was something radiant about her skin, not a blemish on her face, no sign of age. He often wondered how old she actually was, and he often found himself staring at her for longer than he should.
“Maybe she will just be happy to see us.”
“You’re optimistic.”
Sterling snorted. “I’m a realist.”
“A real optimist.”
“A real something. We will have to figure that out as we go. But I’m ready to talk about it, if you are. I know that I’m going to have to talk about it with her.”
“Then we can save that conversation for later. I’m not concerned by what happened. It is the past, and I know you meant well.”
“It still kills me, what happened to Liam and Karina. They really were good folks,” Sterling said, recalling what it had been like to see the skin burnt off their bones, their skeletons still embracing even in death. They were a married cou
ple, a pair who had pieced everything back together after the Reset, both blessed to be mancers. Their children hadn’t been so lucky at the start of the Reset, all five of them dead in their bedrooms, ceilings, walls, bed sheets, and pillows painted red with their blood. Sterling remembered what Liam had told him about finding his children dead, a stranger in his own house with a woman he didn’t know. But they had made it work, they had figured everything out, and they had been good teammates.
There wasn’t much that weighed heavily on Sterling’s soul. It was better that way, and with the kind of world he lived in, the less guilt someone carried the further they could crawl. But Liam and Karina’s deaths, that was something that he couldn’t help but blame himself for. He had recruited them, they had trusted him, and in the end…
“What do you really think of me?” he asked the Sunflower Kid. A plant brought his wallet back to him, a pair of leaves clasping it delicately. Sterling returned the wallet to his inventory list.
“What would you like me to think of you?”
“That ain’t what I’m asking. I’m asking what you think of me. You must think something, you know me, I mean, we haven’t seen each other for several years now, but not much has changed about me.”
“I feel like something has changed.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“You seem more focused, determined. The Sterling I knew before, at least the one after the incident, might have just accepted that his farm had been attacked and started over again. Why not just start over again? The Godwalker probably wouldn’t attack you twice, and these bandits, what’d they want exactly?”
“They wanted me to pay a tax, and I ain’t paying no goddamn chili tax to a bunch of inbred Killbillies.”
“That part of you sounds about right,” she said, offering him a soft smile. “But at least from when I left you, the Sterling you were then, I feel like you would have just accepted it and figured things out, especially after what happened three years ago and how downtrodden you must have been. But that’s not what you did. Your first instincts were to figure out where all of us were, those of us that were still alive. And now here we are.”
“In Carrizozo.”
“In Carrizozo. So that is changed about you. Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t try to do what you are trying to do, not after what happened.”
“So you’re saying I’ve done lost my mind. Is that it?”
“I don’t think anyone alive can consider themselves sane after what happened five years ago.”
“It sure is strange how we met in Las Cruces, have you ever thought about that?”
“We just ran into each other a week after the Reset, both of us wandering in the streets. You were still in your construction clothing.”
“I didn’t know what else to wear,” Sterling admitted. “There were a bunch of clothes around; it wasn’t hard to find something to change into, but I didn’t want someone else’s blood on me, and I didn’t know about taking another man’s pants off. The clothing stores had been looted early on, and I was still getting used to the whole inventory list thingamajig.”
“But you understood your power. There were several dead bodies following you, if I recall.”
Sterling nodded. “And there was a trail of flowers following you. Heck, there we were, just walking through some abandoned subdivision looking for God knows what, and we found each other.”
“We found each other.”
“Except you were naked, which threw me off.”
“I didn’t care about clothing at that point,” the Sunflower Kid said. “I’m a bit more modest now.”
“Probably a good thing, considering you look like a sixteen-year-old girl. In fact, maybe a bit younger now.”
“It’s a good age to maintain.”
“I can’t knock you there. If I could make myself look younger and wash away a bit of this haggardness, I would surely do so.”
“But that’s part of your charm, your haggardness, as you call it.”
“I wouldn’t say I had any charm,” he said, “I’m just doing what I need to do to keep alive. I still can’t shake that image in my head, though, of when I first saw you, me with zombies creeping up behind me, you with flowers, vines, maybe a few prickly cacti. Talk about polar opposites. Remember what happened next?”
“We just started laughing at each other.”
“Damn right, we did. Here we were, two lost souls both gifted incredible powers, one of life, the other of death, and the first time we see each other we just start laughing like there’s no tomorrow. Because maybe at that time, it really did feel like that, like there was no tomorrow.”
“But then tomorrow came, and here we are.”
“Crazy, ain’t it? Here we are. Look, Kid, I could talk your ear off, you know that. So I’m going to stop bothering you and head on back to my room, take myself a nice bath, smoke a cigarette, maybe write me a desert haiku. Hell, maybe I’ll do that in the morning. Maybe I’ll take a bath then as well, two baths, then we will get to Alamogordo clean as a whistle and finish off this leg of our epic adventure.”
“You think it will be epic?”
Sterling pressed himself off his chair and turned to the door. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. See you in the morning. We’ll get on out of here before most of the town is awake. Just need to stop by Gouyen’s to see what kind of charm she has for me. I see you got a lot of charms,” he said, nodding his chin toward the dozens of bracelets that lined her arms. He placed his hat back on his head. “Lots.”
“They are all for Mana,” she told him. “I don’t like having to keep track of how much I use, so I made it a point to get enough charms that I would never have to worry about running out of power.”
“What kind of Mana are you working with these days? Me, I’m at 159, got me a dream catcher on my belt loop that gives me a ten percent bonus.”
“Over two thousand five hundred points.”
“Shee-it,” Sterling said. “You ain’t playing around, are you?”
“What else is there to do besides trying to grow stronger?”
“Well, for one, there’s taking down these Godwalkers. That’s one thing that needs doing. The other thing is stopping any and all bandit groups, militias, cultists, and ne’er-do-wellers from fucking up the place any more than it has already been fucked up, at least if they get in our way. Not trying to go on a crusade here, just saying. Sorry I can’t put that more eloquently. My brain is fuzzy after being slathered in alcohol over the last few hours, but you get what I’m saying. See you in the morning,” Sterling said as he tipped his hat to her. “Glad to have you back.”
“Good night, mi nigromante agricultor de pimienta.”
“Heh, don’t you start up with that.”
.Chapter Three.
Sterling ended up taking a bath early the next morning, walking the buckets of hot water up himself. Penelope, the owner of the restaurant and apparently the inn, was up before Sterling to get the fire going. It wasn’t going to be as good as the hot springs in Truth or Consequences, but the water was nice, and the turquoise clawfoot tub was the perfect size for Sterling to stretch out in.
Once he was done bathing, he opened the window and had a cigarette, his towel still wrapped around his waist. He took a seat at the edge of the bed and summoned his book of sketches and desert haiku. For some reason, Sterling was thinking about fear, and what it did to someone. For him, fear mostly involved heights and what could potentially happen to a loved one, but he had seen it enough times to recognize it on the faces of his opponents, those ready to die, those anything but.
Fear.
It was easy to be afraid after the Reset. If you were unlucky enough to have survived that fateful day, you may or may not have been given a power. If you hadn’t been given a power, you could still grow stronger and do things that only a superhuman could do, like fly. But you could still die instantly, be tortured, be kidnapped, face off against an amalgamation, face off against a manc
er, or simply a surly son of a bitch who saw an advantage—Sterling was certain that the before people had lived with fear as well. He had perused enough of their magazines and books to see what they were afraid of—diseases, certain factions of society, old age, the list continued. And perhaps people now were still fearful of those things, but there were more pressing concerns, a world of disenchantment, of sketchy motherfuckers, broken bones, aliens, and monsters.
It was a simple desert haiku that he penned next, one that encapsulated this, from innocence to the desire to hide, how quickly a wound took shape, how easy it was to snuff out life, but also how life, even extinguished, eventually begat more life.
Rabbit in a hole
The sting of a scorpion
Flesh still on the bone
“Pinche poeta,” Sterling said as he put away his diary. He didn’t want to get too full of himself. Once he dressed, the cowboy necromancer made his way down to the courtyard, where he found that all the plants and cacti were twice their normal size, and the Sunflower Kid was seated on a wrought iron chair with her legs crossed beneath her. Before her was a spread of breakfast items—fried eggs drenched in green chili salsa, tortillas, chorizo, grilled peppers, and chips.
“For you,” she said as she motioned to the food. The Sunflower Kid had a different hairstyle now, her hair platinum blonde and combed over to the side. This was something she was able to do with her biomancer power, one that she readily exploited. Sterling didn’t say anything about it; he’d seen her with multiple hairstyles by this point.
“You ain’t hungry?”
An apple grew from the ground and she plucked it from its stem. “I’ve been eating all morning,” she said as she took a bite of the apple.
“In that case, don’t mind if I do.”
Sterling feasted, and once he was done, he went into the kitchen to pay his respects to Penelope, who told him that Gouyen had just stopped by and that she was waiting for him across the street.
Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk Page 38
