by Keith Crews
CHAPTER FIVE
13 WALKS THE LINE
(1)
Piercing heat slapped the hitman in the face as he bounded out through the broken door into the unknown. At first his eyes were overwhelmed by the sudden brilliance, but that harsh blindness quickly faded. He crashed down onto an ashen hillside of a gradual sloping rock face. His chest absorbed the brunt of the impact, his hands braced forward as they tried to stop his tumble down the rugged slope. Unfortunately, the angle of descent coupled with his mass afforded him too much momentum.
Thunder was held awkwardly, hindered his ability to grasp firmly onto the rooted rock, but he dared not release the firearm, not after losing Lightning to the demon inside of Boondocks. He would ride out the fall until gravity had finally satisfied its law, or perhaps until one of those arms snaked out of the door behind him and clutched onto his ankle.
But nothing grabbed hold of him and so he was left to tumble.
An arc of stone smacked him in the shoulder. His hip dashed off a jut of rock and then his knee followed in kind. The rock face beat him like a dusty rug, its dull unyielding surface punishing him for having had the audacity to escape. Then, he no longer scraped down along the rock face, but rather fell silently through the dry stale air. The final leg of the plummet ended with a sudden collision upon a flat barren landscape of ashen soil. Dust spooled up around him.
Angelo groaned as he lay in the dirt, bruised and beaten, but not defeated.
After all, he had finally made it out.
(2)
Slowly, he climbed onto his feet. His body was a protest of aches and pains. The cold that had encased his bones had been replaced with the kind of deep penetrating heat that threatened to melt him. But at the moment the hitman didn’t care. The hot salted whip of sunlight felt good, and if in time it saw fit to set his flesh to flame, then so be it.
He wedged Thunder into its holster and stepped away from the cliff face. He looked back up over the steep ledge and to that miserable acreage called Boondocks. There, he would surely find a fortress of black castle stone with iron shutters, the sky above a frozen bale of wintry storm clouds. However, what he found was quite unexpected.
Boondocks was a shimmer of hot gas, like a hazy mirage as seen across a vast desert landscape. The cobalt sky and the ashen rock fluttered inside a translucent wave of heat vapors. The door he had jumped through was in fact an energy portal, a vortex that spun like a scarlet red hurricane. At its core a shiny ripple of quicksilver stared down on him with a lidless malevolent eye: the barroom mirror.
Boondocks was an evil entity that resembled a tempest in one of Jupiter’s bands, and all of its dark energy circled around that wickedness that lived inside the mirror’s hub.
Angelo took a step backwards. Thunder was empty of ammo and Lightning was a casualty of war, but Angelo nonetheless felt stronger than he ever had felt in his entire life. He had escaped Boondocks, and if he could do that, then he could do anything. If the chrome beast swooped down from its wretched perch, then Angelo would meet it in good form. But the glittering evil remained fixed in place, glaring down on him with a hunger and a hatred that once again encased his bones in frost.
There would be no going back up that hill to retrieve Lightning. The gun belonged to the chrome beast now, and as such, was gone forever, and for that Angelo couldn’t help but feel deeply saddened. The Howitzers were separated, and he couldn’t help but feel it was a bad omen of things to come. Angelo’s karma felt unbalanced, out of step. After all the hardship he had suffered in Diavalo only to lose the weapon to a mindless beast was unthinkable.
Angelo bowed his head and leaned forward with his hands upon his knees. His eyes closed as he tried to think of what to do next. Somehow the Avalon felt like a big pipe dream. No one ever came back to life, except for a guy in a toga two thousand years ago, and even then that miracle seemed highly suspect to Marchetti.
But then where else was he to go?
Angelo straightened back up and looked at Boondocks.
It was gone, vanished, lost to that translucent flutter of thinly blown glass upon the hilltop.
“Good riddance,” Angelo muttered, although its absence served to reinforce the reality that Lightning was gone forever as well.
He turned around and faced out into a vast empty wasteland of sun baked desert. There were no waypoints or signage to advise him.
He was alone.
He removed his leather jacket and slipped it over his sturdy shoulder, preparing to set boot to heel. He did not know where the Avalon was, but knew intuitively it would reside at the end of a long arduous pilgrimage.
(3)
Mile after mile fed into a barren wasteland. The blazing sun scorched its sweltering heat down upon the hitman with a cruel persistence. Thirst had rolled his tongue up inside of burnt sand and made his head pound like a tribal drum. Each step felt timed to the beat of a death march. As a result, a dangerous state of delirium had stolen a part of Angelo’s mind, leaving him to mutter incoherently and hallucinate.
“Gonna die out here I reckon,” Carlos said.
Angelo could see Carlos waiting ahead, a canteen of water held within his wart riddled hand. The son of a bitch drank generously and then poured the remaining water down over his homely face until its last few drops were wasted upon the barren hardpan.
“Shut up,” Angelo muttered.
“Now is that any way to talk to an old teacher?” Carlos said with a sarcastic lilt. “Don’t forget, I was the one who made you strong, Marchetti. I was the one who made you into an Elitario you ungrateful mutt. You know, hate can take you a long way, Marchetti!”
“So can love,” Bianca’s said softly into Angelo’s ear.
Angelo stopped and turned.
She wore a white summer dress, its spaghetti strings hanging gently over her delicate tanned shoulders, her long dark mane of raven hair covered over with a wide brimmed hat of white lace.
“I miss you,” Angelo said.
“I’m so sorry, Angelo. I never meant to break your heart.”
Angelo closed his eyes as an old sorrow visited his heart. “I’ll see you again angel…I…” Angelo opened his eyes---she was gone. “Not real,” Angelo mumbled with a bit of a laugh. “Damn heat has me seeing things.”
“Va-voom!” Uncle Vincent said as his big mitt of a hand clasped onto Angelo’s shoulder. “Good to see you Little Capone.”
“Good to see you, too,” Angelo replied.
Angelo’s previous assertion that these visitors weren’t real was promptly forgotten.
“That was quite a show back there in Boondocks,” Vincent said with a wink.
Angelo offered a wan smile. “Yeah…guess it was, wasn’t it?
“Damn straight!” Vincent replied.
“Lightning’s gone,” Angelo said with a sigh “Lost it to a goddamn squid arm. Can you believe that?”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff kiddo,” Vincent replied. “Survival is often won at the cost of sacrifice.”
Angelo tapped the holster which held his last remaining Howitzer. “Thunder shot a lucky thirteen…un-freaking believable.”
“I guess thirteen is your lucky number,” Vincent said.
Angelo shook his head gently, hunched his eyebrows with the kind of effort reserved for deep thought. “How could it do that? How could it fire a thirteenth round? It couldn’t…I mean, I must’ve miscounted.”
“Did you?” Vincent asked, as if already knowing the answer.
Angelo considered and then shook his head. “No, I know how many rounds I fired…twelve aside…it was definitely twelve aside.”
“So where did thirteen come from?” Vincent asked.
Angelo let his hand wipe a layer of perspiration from his slick brow. “Don’t know…perhaps the tooth fairy…va-voom.”
Vincent roared laughter. “Well here’s hoping on a lucky fourteen.”
Angelo raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t bet on it.”
“You d
idn’t tell them did you?” Vincent asked.
Angelo shook his head and jabbed a finger in between his own eyebrows. “Nope, nota. The number’s up here, and there it’s apt to stay until judgment day.”
Vincent laughed and slapped Angelo on the back. “Ah, Deluca’s gonna have a fit when he realizes what you did.”
“A lot of people are gonna pinch a loaf when they find that out,” Angelo smirked.
Vincent suddenly lost his merriment. “It’s too bad you’re dead Little Capone. You know they killed you on that casino rooftop. You’re stuck out here.”
Angelo paused and considered just that. “No…I just have to get to the Avalon…then I can go back home.”
Angelo staggered forward once more, his friends and enemies having abandoned him for the time being. But he knew they would be back soon enough, and when they returned, he knew it would be for their final farewell. In this heat without water and shelter he would soon perish, and perhaps that’s why the chrome beast inside the fire storm of Boondocks had not pursued him. It knew that he would eventually succumb to the elements, and when he did, his soul would drift back to Boondocks where it would be promptly locked away forever.
His snakeskin boot unexpectedly clipped a stone, and before he could throw out his hands to catch his fall, he was face down in the desert’s parched soil.
(4)
Angelo rolled onto his back, his face smudged by a thin crust of dirt. The fall had been easy, the landing hard. He was sprawled out, spine arched across a long smooth obstruction, boot heels propped up on a hard rectangular surface.
What in damnation had he tripped over?
With a great effort his torso lifted into a sitting position. His eyes squinted, the sun was brash, bright. He inspected that which had stolen the feet out from beneath him: train tracks, a veritable set of black iron rails spiked to a foundation of railroad ties.
He looked up and down their length and into a distance that went on without measure.
How had he missed spotting such a blatant landmark?
He crawled into a tired stance, boots kicking at the iron rails and wooden ties to test their validity. They were indeed real. He knelt, placed a hand upon the smooth strip of metal. It was hot, cooked by the sun to a temperature that would easily set a man’s skin to blister. That pain reinforced the legitimacy of its presence and convinced him that the tracks were not a hallucination.
But where did they go?
And who had put them there?
He wanted to put an ear to those rails and listen for a train, but knew the heat would fry the ear like an omelet. Besides, he didn’t know if that kind of nonsense actually worked. Sure, cowboys did it on the big screen, but what flew in Hollywood seldom courted practical science.
From across the waste’s vast expanse, a steam whistle blew out a long lonely note. He raised a hand to the level of his eyes and peered deeper into the barren wilderness to find a thin brush line of black smoke trailing the horizon.
It was a train and it was coming his way.
Angelo laid his jacket out onto the ground and sat beside the tracks.
“You’re going to make it,” Bianca whispered into his ear.
“There were so many things I never got to say, ” Angelo said.
“Shhh,” Bianca hushed. “I know…and I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps in another life,” Angelo said softly.
Bianca’s full lips touched the side of his rugged face. Her delicate caress both cooled and comforted the hitman. “Perhaps,” Bianca replied. “Perhaps.”
The woman departed, leaving the hitman alone to suffer the demon sun.
He checked Thunder: no bullets nor magic energy resided within. The power of lucky thirteen remained a mystery, but that was alright. He was free of Boondocks, and in a little while he would jump a rail car and be on his way.
The hitman holstered the gun and then fixed the distance with a determined gaze. Regret had cast a shadow upon his fortune with the absence of Lightning. One Howitzer would have to suffice for the journey ahead. He thought to number thirteen again and his need for bullets. Arguably if there were railroads with trains in this vast desolation, then there had to be ammunition as well. In time he would find some, and when he did, he would travel beyond the scope of the Avalon and return to the land of the living. After all, there was still a great deal of killing left to do, and the hitman was apt to see that it got done proper.
The End
WASTELAND II
LAST TRAIN TO DIAVALO
