Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

“G-Gasper?” Sterling asked, his head spinning. Movement to his right caught his attention; Roxy was slowly starting to pick herself out of the plant that the Sunflower Kid had used to cushion her fall. This left the Kid, Sterling’s heart thumping in his chest when he couldn’t find her.

  “Sterling…”

  “Gasper… what the hell are you going on about now?”

  The shaman’s face was covered in blood, crimson spittle dripping from his beard, and while his wound looked painful, Sterling knew that he was able to press himself off the spike, that he could recover from it. But he wasn’t. Gasper refused to budge.

  Groaning again at the pain, Sterling waved Gasper away and turned his focus back to Roxy, who was on her feet now, a dazed look on her face.

  Roxy dropped to help the Sunflower Kid out of the protective plant formation she had created. The Kid gasped, her armor missing now, her eyes wide with surprise as she sat up. Sterling ignored Gasper as he looked back up at the sky, marveling at the silver flames. He lowered his head and saw huge chunks of the Godwalker impaling various areas of the military base, fires raging all around them.

  This inspired him to get to his feet. “We did it,” Sterling said as he hobbled toward Roxy. “We fucking did it.”

  “Did it?” Roxy squinted at the sky, and then at the troubled landscape before her, her eyes lifting in surprise. “We destroyed the Godwalker?”

  “Looks like it,” Sterling said as he located his cowboy hat. He limped over to it, grabbed it, and placed it on his head. There was a lot to unpack in that moment, but he ignored it all as he equipped his tobacco and his rolling papers. Sterling rolled up a sticky cigarette, his hand still covered in plant viscera. He put the cigarette in his mouth and went for his lighter. After a long exhale, he turned his focus back to Roxy and the Sunflower Kid, both of whom were starting to look a little more presentable, their Resolve kicking in.

  “We did it,” Roxy said, her eyes suddenly wet. “We did it!” She came forward as if she were about to hug Sterling, stopping just inches away from him. The smile on Roxy’s face faded. She pressed some of her hair off of her forehead, and flicked some of the plant viscera to the ground.

  “I’m sorry, goddammit, I’m sorry!” Gasper howled.

  “Is he high or something?”

  “Does a cactus grow in the desert?” Sterling asked Roxy as he took another puff of his cigarette.

  “You’re still smoking, aren’t you?”

  “Like a chimney. You alright, Kid?”

  “I’ve been better.” The Sunflower Kid approached, and as she did, plant tendrils lifted from the earth and quickly went about cleaning her off. Her hair began to grow and turn blonde, forming a short bob. Another plant handed Sterling his revolver, which he quickly began to wipe off with the inside of his duster.

  “Lo siento. Fui un tonto…” Gasper said, lowering his head in shame.

  “We better figure out what the hell he’s going on about,” Sterling told Roxy and the Sunflower Kid as he turned to the shaman. He holstered his weapon for now, knowing it would need to be cleaned better once he got a chance.

  “Sterling, mi vaquero nigromante…” Gasper looked up at him, his brown-blue eyes pleading for forgiveness. “I have failed you, and… and my heart is broken. I didn’t know… I knew… But I didn’t know.”

  “Goddammit, Gasper.”

  “Get the hell off of that spike,” Roxy said as she came over to the shaman. Rather than let him do it himself, she simply placed her hand under his arm and yanked him up, Gasper wailing in pain as she dropped him on the ground in front of them.

  “Careful, I’m an old man!”

  “Hold this for a second, if you will.” Sterling handed his cigarette to Roxy, who begrudgingly took it from him. Sterling used the last of his marijuana and a bit of his tobacco to roll Don Gasper a spliff. He crouched in front of the shaman and placed the spliff in his mouth, Gasper practically weeping with remorse. Sterling lit the spliff, and then took his cigarette back from Roxy. “Thanks,” he told her under his breath, a thought coming to Sterling. “Where’s Maron? Where’s the technomancer?”

  “I’m sorry… lo siento…” Gasper sucked in deep breaths, the festering wound beneath his rib cage glistening in the sunlight. He took a deep drag off his spliff, his lips trembling as he spoke. “They took the technomancer, Magdalena and Commodore Bones. We were tricked!”

  “We?” Sterling asked.

  “You have to understand, I was blinded by love. Estuve enamorado. You’ve been there before,” Gasper said, gesturing his joint toward Roxy. “Ask her.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked, her fists tensing.

  Gasper buried his head in his hand, waving the joint around as he spoke. “Magdalena is a telemancer. But she doesn’t focus on warping people’s minds, at least, not other people. Maybe…” He sniffed and took another hit off his joint. “She played with mine, yes, maybe. Certainly. Yes, she did. Yes. But that’s love, no? But she’s more than a telepath. Magdalena can move things with her mind, objects and people. Remember I told you,” he said, peering up at Sterling. “I told you about how they flew from White Sands to Las Cruces, her and the other pinche maleficiadores. It was through her power that they did this, there’s a name for her power…”

  “Telekinesis?” the Sunflower Kid asked.

  “Sí, telequinesia. Magdalena protected all of us from the blast.” Gasper pointed his spliff to where the Godwalker once floated, silver fire still burning in the sky. “Dios mio, you three did it. You destroyed the Godwalker! You—”

  “—Gasper, get back to the technomancer,” Sterling said. “We can deal with the damn Godwalker later.”

  “Sí, sí. Magdalena, Commodore Bones, me, and the technomancer. All of us were united for just a moment once your plant formation came to the ground,” he told the Sunflower Kid.

  “Then it was boom, an explosion, el estruendo the likes of which… Magdalena protected us, she did—she meant well! But then impaled me on this spike. They left with the technomancer. I failed you… Magdalena and the Killbillies have the technomancer!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me, Gasper.”

  “I am not kidding you!”

  Sterling took a quick drag off his cigarette. “Well, which way did they head, then? Did you happen to see?”

  Gasper pointed toward the west. “That direction.”

  “Back toward Las Cruces?” Sterling asked, making an educated guess.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Figures. Well, you and Raylan were right about one thing,” he told the humiliated shaman. “We need Maron, or a technomancer like him, to bring them Godwalkers down. And while he was a little jumpy, I personally liked Maron.” Sterling squinted up at the sky. A prompt told him that he had leveled up, but he ignored it for the time being. He had more than enough time to assign his Stat and Technique Points.

  He knew that the Godwalkers would come back at them in force. They’d done it three years ago, and there was no reason why they wouldn’t do it now. It could happen anytime, which meant constant vigilance from here on out. But at least he had a direction, and at least he had a fledgling team to fall back on.

  “You know what this means, right?” Sterling stepped over to Don Gasper. He helped the old shaman to his feet, figuring he would give him hell later for falling for Magdalena’s trap. For now, it looked like Gasper had suffered enough.

  “Las Cruces, then?” Roxy asked.

  Sterling slowly started to nod. “Unfortunately, yes. We’ll get Maron back, head north again and pick up Paco along the way—I’ll tell you about him later—then it’s the Turquoise Trail to Madrid, and Duke City from there after we’ve checked on Raylan.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Just thinking as we go. Kid?” he asked, turning to the teenager. “What do you think?”

  “Las Cruces it is,” she said, composed once again. The Sunflower Kid was the only one of
the three that didn’t look like she’d just been through the middle of a warzone.

  “Yep, Las Cruces. Heh. Not bad for our first day back on the job.” Sterling looked from Don Gasper to Roxy and finally back to the Sunflower Kid. He accessed his inventory list and summoned Manchester, the skeletal steed coming alive in an instant, his bones clicking into place. “Hell, if we leave now, maybe we can make it to Las Cruces by nightfall.”

  “And… and you still trust me?” Don Gasper asked.

  “Hell no, I don’t trust you. But I consider you family, and everyone makes mistakes,” Sterling told the shaman. “Anyhow, someone can ride with me. And one of y’all can ride with the Sunflower Kid, or we can figure something else out. There has to be a working dirt bike or an ATV around here, maybe a dead horse or two. Point is: we need to get on out of here before the ‘Billies or militiamen show back up. It’s bound to happen.”

  Roxy crossed her arms over her chest. She was framed by the silver plumes of fire in the sky, much of the sun-drenched horizon charred, the haze clearing. Somehow, they had done it. Somehow, they had survived the encounter. And regardless of what the next few days brought, they’d proven to themselves it was possible to bring down one of the larger Godwalkers.

  A crucial first step.

  “Just like that, huh?” Roxy finally asked, a hint of mischief flashing across her eyes.

  “Just like that.” Sterling flicked his cigarette to the ground and smiled at her. “Let’s ride.”

  The end.

  Cowboy Necromancer needs your review!

  I have 100 limited edition Cowboy Necromancer postcards made to thank readers for reviewing this book. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. To get one, send me a screenshot of your review, or forward it to me when it posts on Amazon. My email is writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

  Thank you so much for your support! It means the world to an independent writer like me. Continue on for a look at how this book was conceived, and the other works that went into its conception.

  -Harmon Cooper

  .Back of the Book.

  Hi, I’m Harmon Cooper. I am an independent author, and my works live and die by their reviews. If you enjoyed this, please take a moment to let people know. I’m planning for Cowboy Necromancer to be trilogy, but based on reviews, it could go longer.

  Much longer. As in, Sterling traversing the USA. It’s an absolute dream to write this series.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet. The next book, Cowboy Necromancer 2: Infinite Dark, will be set in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. I will start the second installment once the first book reaches 150 reviews. Thanks for taking the time to review this book!

  More about this series

  The idea for Cowboy Necromancer was first pitched jokingly to my writer-amigo, Luke Chmilenko, in one of our lengthy, meme-heavy message threads in the summer of 2019. I was fucking around at the time, telling him stories that I should one day write if I started writing under a pen name (which I did - Gideon Caldwell now writes books). I mentioned “Cowboy Necromancer” we lol’d and moved on.

  I keep track of ideas when they come, so I put a folder in my google docs tab for ‘Cowboy Necromancer’. About a year later, I showed my Facebook readers’ group some of the ideas I had via a screenshot of folders, including one labeled, you guessed it, Cowboy Necromancer. The response was not what I expected. Those in the group wanted to know more about it, and through the thread, they even ended up naming our main character’s bone horse Manchester, a tongue-in-cheek reference to my Cherry Blossom Girls series.

  The grounds were set, and I began conceptualizing the book and its game system while listening to Tao Wong’s System Apocalypse, L.M Kerr’s Reborn Apocalypse, and Dakota Krout’s Completionist Chronicles. I also drew from my own life in Texas, and the time I spent in a the piney woods of Bastrop with my sometimes tough-talking father and his local friends, several of whom were actual cowboys (or the closest thing to a cowboy that the late 20th/early 21st century can produce).

  The research I’ve done for this book is the most extensive of any of my works yet. I’ve been fascinated with New Mexico, the setting for Cowboy Necromancer, since my first visit in the summer of 2009 when I accompanied my brother on his trip to Idaho, where he had been stationed as an Airman. We only spent a day in the state, and it was mostly just passing through on our way to Colorado, but I was immediately inspired by the landscape and the people. I used the setting for my first book, Star-Spangled Apocalypse, and I used it multiple times in the Cherry Blossom Girls series.

  Cowboy Necromancer’s usage of New Mexico is nothing like my earlier works. For this series, I’ve dug deeper than I ever have into the culture of a place, encapsulating everything from its geography to the various groups that have lived in and ruled over the Land of Enchantment, weaving their histories into this post-apocalyptic narrative. I went on a research trip to the state, spending time in the locations, from Truth or Consequences to Madrid, to get a better understanding of what it was like to be in these places, what it looked like, smelled like, and what the chilis tasted like. (Spoiler alert: hot!)

  Aside from location-based details, something I was looking for on my trip was primary documents, or at least secondary documents that weren’t as easy to find online. These documents turned out to be clippings from magazines, a book on witchcraft in New Mexico called Witchcraft in the Southwest that I picked up at a gift shop at the Bandelier National Monument , Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder (my absolute favorite history book), an old library book on Puebloan mythology published in the 1960s, and, as Sterling uses in Cowboy Necromancer, a heavily dog-eared travel guide which serves as a way to flesh out the world.

  While it will seem that I have made shit up for this book — such as the “Juan Circle,” a ritual in which you find someone named Juan and perform a divination with him after having the man turn his shirt inside out; or the usage of toad venom as a hallucinogen; or some of the otherworldly names and locations that seem too good to be actual places like “The Turquoise Road” or “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico”— all of this was, alas, not my imagination. To shed a little light on my background —I have a degree in history—the usage and study of history is very important to me, and since I wasn’t making up histories for this book as I normally do for my series, I wanted them to be accurate. Any of the historical facts or dates listed are accurate, and should shed some light on the amazing history of the state of New Mexico, from its indigenous peoples to the Spaniards who arrived in the 1600s and changed the face of the landscape.

  But none of that matters. What matters is an insanely cool story, and that’s what I hope I’ve written for you here.

  The LitRPG game system is the most complex I’ve developed yet, with stats, class proficiencies and a technique system. The novel’s imagery spans the gap from the graphic novel series East of West to videogames Red Dead Redemption as well as Ghost of Tsushima (the haiku writing!), The Teachings of Don Jaun: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. While writing Cowboy Necromancer, I used Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as an inspirational text, listening to the audio to capture some of the bleak descriptions and savagery of his imagined Southwest. Music-wise, I went with things like ZZ Top (La Grange!) and Ennio Morricone, whose soundtracks for spaghetti westerns have shaped this book to an insane degree, as have pretty much anything by Gustavo Santaolalla or Roberto Lara (a late, but great discovery). Austin, Texas metal band The Sword’s High Country is an album that really pairs well with this story. I was certainly inspired by the Old Man Logan comic series (where I got the idea for Killbillies), and was even inspired by more contemporary westerns like Longmire, Hostiles, and, for that matter, God’s Country. The comic series Scalped was hugely influential toward the end, although the book doesn’t deal with ‘rez life’ or operate as a Southwestern noir. Also inspiring this one, at least in terms of scenery, were the controversial video game, Last of Us 2, and the book The World Without Us.


  So a lot has gone into this book, to craft a post-apocalyptic Southwest that just keeps on giving as our main character Sterling traverses the desert in search of his companions, battling amalgamations, bandits, militias, his own damn self at points, and the ominous alien Godwalkers. My wife, who has done some art in my books before, really stepped up her game for this one in a preview of what I plan to do in the future with some of my works. I look forward to what she’ll do for the second installment…

  Please don’t forget to review Cowboy Necromancer, and be sure to check out my other books.

  Yours in sanity,

  Harmon Cooper

  Writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

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  Other Books by Harmon Cooper

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