7th Sigma

by Steven Gould

  Kimble took another step back and brought the jyo around. It smacked into the man’s ankle just before his foot touched the ground and the man went down hard. He tried to catch himself with his arms but it didn’t keep him from pitching head over heels down the rocky hillside.

  It was clear to Kimble that the man didn’t know how to fall.

  Kimble gave a sharp whistle and Mrs. Perdicaris stopped, maybe fifty feet down the road, but his attention was on Mr. Big and Tall.

  The man wasn’t moving.

  Kimble picked up a rock and threw it hard, smashing it into the road a couple of feet from the man’s head. Gravel and sand scattered but the man didn’t move a bit.

  Great.

  He found where the man had been waiting, apparently for a while. There were six small apple cores eaten down to seeds and stems next to a burlap sack that contained a t-shirt, a couple of wrinkled apples, and half a roll of toilet paper. Beside the bag were a torn and frayed wool blanket and two more ceramic-headed crossbow quarrels.

  The breeze shifted and Kimble smelled shit. Down the other side of the hill he found where the man had been going. He hadn’t even bothered to kick dirt over his feces. The flies were buzzing all around and it was clear he’d had the squirts.

  Someone has been drinking untreated water.

  Kimble covered the feces with dirt, gathered up the man’s meager belongings, and went on down the hill.

  He was breathing, at least. Kimble ground his knuckle across the man’s sternum, a trick he’d learned from a Ranger paramedic, but Mr. Big and Tall didn’t flinch a bit. Well and truly unresponsive.

  There was a goose egg of a lump over his right ear and a bit of blood had seeped through the hair. Kimble thumbed his eyelids back one at a time. The pupils looked normal and they responded to the bright sky, but Kimble didn’t like his color. He was pasty under his tan. He hadn’t looked like that before he’d fallen.

  He’d hit any number of rocks on his way down the hill and Kimble was concerned for his spine. He fetched Mrs. P and the cart back and took off the cart seat, a padded board that covered the tool compartment at the front of the cart box. After he eased it under the man, he duct-taped him to it, a strip across his forehead and some generous strips across his chest to immobilize his head and neck.

  Kimble unhitched Mrs. P and tilted the cart shafts up, bringing the back of the box down to the road. Of course everything slid down, but Kimble moved most of his stuff to one side and eased the man in over the tailgate, then tilted the cart back up and rehitched Mrs. P. The man’s legs were hanging over the back, but Kimble didn’t bother to adjust him—he just wanted to get them out of the sun.

  He walked Mrs. P another hundred yards along the road, to where it sank back down to the level of the river, then turned into the bosque and the shade of some Russian olive trees. Kimble unhitched Mrs. P and took off her harness, too. She walked off toward the river for a drink, then had herself a nice roll in the sand.

  Kimble soaked a cloth with water and put it on the lump on Mr. Big-n-Heavy’s head. He had a chemical ice pack in the first aid kit but he didn’t feel the man deserved it. The cloth cooled down pretty good, though—evaporation in the dry air.

  The man was wearing outside stuff, manufactured clothing from overseas, but the jeans had been retroed for the territory. The metal rivets at the corners of the pocket had been pulled out and oversewn to replace the reinforcement, and the zipper and slide had been replaced with Velcro and the metal snaps with plastic. His shirt was one of those long-sleeved sunscreen affairs, with the collar that rolled up high over the neck and vents for cooling, and he wore hiking boots with Velcro closures.

  But his pockets were empty, no ID, no money—neither cash nor territorial script.

  He also stank. He reminded Kimble of himself after three days in the stocks. Well, maybe not quite as bad—the man had been able to take his pants down when he needed to go.

  Kimble tried to get a little water into him but it either ran out the side of his mouth or he inhaled it, so he left well enough alone.

  There’d clearly been a thunderstorm upriver; the Puerco was up from its usual trickle to a steady flow. Kimble took a quick dip, rinsed out his pants and shirt and spread his bedroll for a nap.

  He awoke to great swearing.

  The man had gotten up but the way he was taped to the seat board, he was staggering around like Frankenstein’s monster, his upper body stiff.

  “Whoa there, fella,” Kimble said. “Settle down—you’ll do yourself an injury!”

  The man swiveled around at the waist to look at Kimble. He was patting at the duct tape running across his shirt. “Who the hell are you?”

  Trauma-induced amnesia? Then Kimble realized he was only wearing his boxers and probably looked a bit different. “We met on the hillside,” he said. “You had a crossbow, I had a stick? You fell down the hill?”

  “Oh.” Then, “Oh, shit!” He dropped to his knees and threw up.

  “Okay, then,” Kimble said. He let the man get on with his retching and fetched the water bottle. Then, on reflection, added a cup. (He wasn’t going to let the man drink out of the same bottle—Kimble didn’t have any idea what germs he was carrying.)

  The man was on all fours and weaving a little. Kimble held the cup to the man’s lips and let him rinse out his mouth, then took hold of the board and eased him back against the trunk of one of the Russian olive trees. He put a bit more water in the bottom of the cup and the man swallowed it abruptly. “More?” the man asked.

  “Sure, just slowly, okay? Unless you want to vomit it up again.”

  This time Kimble gave him a full cup, watched for a second to make sure he was just sipping, then went and found a patch of goat-heads and picked one of the bigger spiky seed heads. The man had finished the water by the time Kimble got back and, while he was still pale, he didn’t look as green as he had a minute before.

  “Want that board off?”

  The man tried to nod, but of course that didn’t work. “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to look for nerve damage, all right?”

  “Look? What do you mean? How can you look for nerve damage?”

  Kimble poked him in the back of the hand with the goat-head.

  “Ow!”

  “Good.” Kimble moved the sticker toward his other hand and the man jerked it back. “Well, you have motor control.” He jabbed him in the thigh.

  “Stop that!”

  The man tried to get up again but the board caught on a low branch and shoved him down again. Kimble used the interval to try his other leg. “Ow! Nerve damage, my ass. You’re just trying to get even!”

  Kimble grinned broadly. “Any numbness?” he asked. “In your toes? In your fingers?”

  “No! Get that thing away from me!”

  Kimble went back to the wagon and got his knife block, a core of glassy Jemez obsidian, and his knocker, an oblong fist-sized chunk of river-smoothed granite. He knelt down and chipped off an obsidian flake about two inches in diameter, a quarter-inch thick at one edge and tapering to razor sharp nothingness on the other edge.

  “Hold still, I mean it.” The whites of the man’s eyes showed as he tried to track the blade as Kimble moved it close to the man’s ear. Kimble cut the tape off on both sides of the man’s head and then on both sides of his chest, but he let him peel it off his face and shirt.

  “Ow!”

  As soon as the man had sat up and moved away from Kimble, Kimble took the seat board and stripped off the remnants of tape, then put it back in place on the cart. Kimble’s clothes were not quite dry, but he put them on anyway. The damp cloth felt good in the heat.

  Kimble let the man drink more water. While he was doing that he commented, “You’re not a very good highwayman, Mr. Big and Tall.”

  “Don’t call me that. Name’s Pierce.” He put his hand to his head and glared at Kimble. “I’m not a highwayman, either.”

  “Well, you had me fooled, Mr. Pierce. Pointing a
crossbow at someone could get you dead around here.”

  “I was robbed,” he said. “Twice. Had my horse stolen. Then someone else took all my food and luggage while I was, uh, away from my campsite.”

  “Away? What does that mean, away?”

  He blushed. “There was this farm girl…”

  “Let me guess. She wanted a place more private, more secluded. When you got back, your stuff was gone.”

  Pierce scowled and looked away.

  “And there was a lot of kissing but you didn’t get to first base.”

  “Someone called her name and she said it was her husband. She put her top back on and ran for it.”

  “Second base, then.” Kimble tried not to laugh. “It probably was her husband. Or her boyfriend. And he had your stuff before he yelled for her.”

  Kimble whistled and Mrs. Perdicaris came trotting in from the riverbank where she’d been cropping green grass. He grabbed the burlap bag with Pierce’s stuff out of the back of the cart and dropped the crossbow on it. The three quarrels he held in his fist. “I’ll drop these beside the road after a bit. Don’t want to tempt you.” He set the quarrels on the cart seat. “Here.” He set a two-liter plastic bottle of water on the burlap sack. “This is good well water. You wanna keep away from the river water unless you boil it.”

  He pulled the cart back around and went over to the tree where he’d hung Mrs. P’s harness. He was keeping his eye on Pierce because he didn’t want him going for the quarrels. He didn’t think Pierce would be stupid enough to go for Mrs. P.

  He was wrong.

  She wasn’t even looking at him but Kimble could see her ears were tracking Pierce and when Pierce stood and took a step toward her, the ears went back. Kimble opened his mouth to warn him, but Pierce took two quick steps forward and leapt, trying to get up on her back. Mrs. P bucked, a twisting sideways thing that slammed her hindquarters into him in mid-leap, like a rugby check. Pierce flew back at least eight feet before his feet touched and he fell backward, tumbling over and over.

  It would not have met the standards for a back roll at the dojo. For one thing, he didn’t end up back on his feet. And he was all corners, not smooth like a ball. Corners bang into the ground. Elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, head.

  He groaned much too loudly to be dead, so Kimble didn’t check on him until Mrs. P was harnessed and they were pulling out of the grove. Kimble looked down at him from the seat of the cart. Pierce had gone from lying to sitting and he was holding on to his elbow like it really hurt. He tried to glare up at Kimble but he was having trouble meeting Kimble’s eyes.

  “Try washing yourself and your clothes in the river—get rid of some of the stink. Don’t drink the river water unless you boil it. And the next person who comes along, you might just consider asking for help. Tell them you’ve been robbed. You might be surprised.” Kimble waited a beat and felt his eyes narrow. “But if you try this takin’ shit with some of the people who ride this road, you’re gonna be dead. Or worse.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Pierce said.

  Kimble thought about the previous night and smiled again. “Have a nice day, Mr. Pierce.” He clucked his tongue and Mrs. P headed out at a trot.

  15

  Bugs in the Arroyo

  Kimble crossed the Rio Grande north where the Puerco joined it, upstream from an old county road bridge. It was concrete rubble, of course, all the steel eaten out of it by the bugs, but the debris formed a dam that spread the river wide and shallow. The water reached Mrs. Perdicaris’ stomach but didn’t quite make it to the bottom of the cart.

  Safely on the other side, Kimble topped off Mrs. P’s water barrels and spent the afternoon in cool, moist industry up to his waist in the river cutting tule—cattail—bulrush, and common reed until the cart was stacked high with tightly bound bundles. He also collected a pound of male cattail pollen for pancakes as well as a salad’s worth of young shoots.

  He spent the evening boiling river water to top off his supply of drinking water. He was headed east, over the hump of the south end of the Manzanos. There were some streams and seasonal water but you couldn’t count on any of it and they would be crossing the alkali flats.

  This close to the river, the mosquitoes were vicious, but burning dried cattail in the fire produced a dense smoke that kept them off. Kimble didn’t try to sleep there, though. The moon, three-quarters full, had risen by then, and Mrs. P pulled the cart an hour east until the green bosque, bathed in moist air and mosquitoes, had been replaced by brown grass hillsides stirred by a bone-dry southern breeze.

  He put Mrs. P on a halter with a long light lead she could easily break. It was a reminder more than an actual constraint and she did break it when a pack of feral dogs approached the camp during the night.

  Kimble took hold of his jyo and stood with his back against the cart wheel while they circled. After Mrs. P broke her lead they charged her, barking madly, to stampede her, get her running in the dark where she might break a leg or at least tire enough for them to take her down.

  Mrs. P turned away, as if she was going to run, and then kicked the pack leader, connecting with both rear hooves. The dog flew ten feet into the air and didn’t stir after landing. More kicks connected with other dogs, sending them tumbling away, yelping in distress.

  Kimble popped one of the dogs on its shoulder with the tip of his jyo, as it swung by, knocking it over, but the rest of the pack fled, more in fear of Mrs. P than of Kim.

  Kimble slept late, until the sun crested the Manzanos, but Mrs. P had spent the time profitably, getting a good feed of dry grass.

  * * *

  TWO days after leaving the Rio Grande, on the downslope east of the Manzanos, they pulled over the lip of a hill and found an argument in progress.

  Mrs. Perdicaris heard them first, her ears twitching forward well before the top of the hill, but Kimble was not surprised. The trail they were following had become more of a road, well-defined wheel ruts with fresh tracks and fresh horse manure just beginning to dry.

  Mrs. P was driving herself—Kimble had looped the reins over the brake lever while he was weaving a wide-brimmed hat from green cattails—and she slowed as she approached the cluster of vehicles just over the hill.

  There were five carts similar to Kimble’s, high-wheeled boxes with composite wheels and axles. Three were horse-drawn, one mule-drawn, and one cart had lowered shafts and a crossbar so it could be pulled by hand, like a Mormon cart. Three freight wagons with six-horse teams stood in a row with a cluster of saddle horses in front of them.

  Kimble took Mrs. Perdicaris off the edge of the road to where a tough patch of dry buffalo grass was doing all right in the shade of some low mesquite bushes. He pulled off her bridle so she could crop grass and said, “Pull up a chair, Mrs. P.”

  The road dipped sharply into a cut running down into a broad arroyo running down from the mountains. That’s where the cluster of people stood, crouched, or sat.

  “—dehydration is really the issue.”

  “Maybe we could throw a canteen?”

  “Hell no. You crush a bug they’ll swarm her for sure. Us, too.”

  Kimble looked out beyond them and saw that the arroyo glittered gray and copper and silver and crystalline blue. Out in the middle, on a large chunk of limestone, a small figure sat cross-legged and still.

  “Oh,” he said aloud.

  Several people turned and saw him.

  “Afternoon,” Kimble said.

  They looked at him blankly. A big man wearing a teamsters’ emblem on his vest suddenly swore loudly. “Who’s watchin’ the wagons? Marty, Richard! Get your lazy asses up there! Unhitch the teams and let ’em have a little water.”

  A short, dark man in orange and maroon Buddhist robes turned around and Kimble blinked. It was Thây Hahn, the Buddhist priest from the capital. Kimble shaded his eyes and looked harder at the figure out on the boulder. “Shit! Is that Thayet?” It was. True to form she wasn’t just sitting cross-legged, she was in
full lotus.

  Thayet was Hahn’s twelve-year-old daughter.

  “Kimble?”

  Kimble bowed, his hands together. “Thây Hahn. What happened?”

  Hahn stopped counting on his rosary and bowed back, his face calm. “There was a storm up in the Manzanos that sent a flash flood. It happened before we reached the arroyo but the water was still high when we reached here so we waited, filling our water barrels.”

  “All of you?”

  “Ah, no, Mr. Graham’s teamsters arrived only an hour ago. Some of the others came yesterday. At first it was just the Joffrey family’s two carts and us—we’ve been traveling the same road since we met near Isleta. The water was down to a trickle on the far edge and the sand was starting to dry so Mr. Joffrey took an empty cart across to test the footing.”

  A man with male pattern baldness was standing a bit farther down the road. He turned. He held a cloth hat and was twisting it back and forth in his hands though the sun fell full upon his head. “I ran over a damn bug.”

  Kimble squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.

  “Was Thayet in your cart?”

  The balding man shook his head. “Hell no. I heard that pop. It’s like nothing else, right? Once you’ve heard one and seen what happens you know forever. I whipped up the horse and we bolted forward, but the damn thing sank up to its axle in some quicksand and I panicked. The bugs were already in the air and I just jumped up and ran for it.”

  “Let me guess,” Kimble said. “Thayet went for the horse.”

  Hahn nodded. “Just so. She got him unhitched and tried to ride him out but he bucked her off when a bug burned him.”

  Mr. Joffrey added, “He made it out. Stupid was grazing on the far ridge at sunset.”

  “Sunset? How long has Thayet been out there?”

  Hahn’s fingers clicked through his rosary automatically. It was not unlike Mr. Joffrey’s twisting hat. “The storm was two days ago. She’s been on that rock for two nights.”