by Tom Abrahams
Chapter Thirty-Three
Zeke was on the porch, the swinging doors creaking lazily. It was hot. The sun was at its apex in the cloudless sky. Standing there at the entrance to the cantina, he had no idea how he’d gotten there, no memory of what had happened between the time he’d walked alone along a mountain highway and this moment.
The Stetson was on his head, the cushion of his boots felt good against his heels, his buckle was front and center, and tucked behind it was his revolver.
Before entering the cantina, he stared down the long highway. Across the road, beyond the haze of dust that danced in swirls and waves across the black asphalt, was an unflinching Horde. They stood there as they had before, watching him.
What a difference death makes, he thought. Sucking in the warm, dry air, Zeke spun on his bootheel to enter the cantina. Inside, he heard the strains of the jukebox mixed with the buzz of conversation, laughter, and the clink of glasses.
Before he stepped inside, something caught his attention. To his right in the parking lot was a familiar-looking car. His car. The Superbird was there, no worse for wear, shiny as ever and awaiting its next adventure. Zeke tipped his hat at his ride and stepped into the cantina.
Pedro’s dog was the first to greet him. It was lying with his large head resting on its paws inside the entrance near the stairs. It lifted its head when Zeke whistled at it and said hello. It clumsily got to its feet, wagging its tail, and sauntered the short distance to him. It sat and offered a paw. Zeke took it, shook it, and rubbed the animal behind its ears. Then he turned his attention to the large open space of the cantina.
It was as he remembered. The tables were filled with men and women busy at cards or heated discussions. Some of them nursed sweating glasses; others took healthy swigs of whatever Pedro had seen fit to serve them.
Zeke didn’t recognize any of the patrons. Some wore hats or bandanas and well-worn cotton garb. Others were in bespoke suits or donned head to toe in leather. It was as motley a collection of customers as it had been before.
He searched for any sign of Uriel. His eyes skipped across the room, hoping to spot her, to find her playing with her auburn hair or giving someone a hard time. She wasn’t there. An unease filtered through Zeke, that indescribable discomfort that comes with knowing something is out of place, something isn’t as it should be.
Then guilt flooded his senses. Why had he searched for Uriel first? Why hadn’t his initial thought been to look for Li? Li was here, wasn’t she?
Gabe and Phil weren’t around either. Raf and Barach, both of whom he imagined would be playing cards or throwing darts, weren’t anywhere to be seen. Zeke felt a tightness in his chest. Had Uriel told him the Watchers could reemerge to assuage his concerns, his guilt? Were they gone for good?
“Ezekiel,” came the resonant call of the cantina’s namesake and barkeep. Pedro wore a wide grin on his face, evident even behind his thick beard.
His brown leather vest was unbuttoned at the top, his linen shirt rolled to the elbows. The large brass buckle that sat at his trim waist was barely visible above the bar.
Pedro’s aged hands, replete with the off-color spots of a man who’d spent a lot of time outdoors, were planted on the bar, and he called Zeke over for a drink. The proprietor and grand-schemer-of-things didn’t reach for a glass or a bottle. Zeke did eye the Book of Enoch on the shelf behind the bar as he bellied up and took a seat.
Pedro stared with the wide grin, studying Zeke. He looked him up and down, paying attention to his hands.
The music of the jukebox swung from one unrecognizable song to another. A blossom of laughter erupted at the table behind Zeke. He didn’t bother to look over. Neither did Pedro. Uncomfortable with the silence between them, Zeke spoke up.
“How’s it going?” It wasn’t the best icebreaker.
Pedro responded by pounding a fist on the bar. It startled Zeke, who nearly fell from his barstool.
“It’s going wonderfully,” Pedro said. “Wonderfully.”
The barkeep reached under the varnished bar top and pulled out a heavy leaded highball glass. With his other hand, he fingered a pair of large chunks of ice and dropped them into the glass.
Zeke steeled himself, not wanting an answer. “Where is everybody?”
“Whiskey?” asked Pedro. “Rye? Rum? Tequila?”
Zeke eyed the glass, considering his options. He wasn’t thirsty, but he didn’t want to refuse the offer. Before he decided, Pedro raised a finger.
“Oh, I know!” he said, his voice swimming with excitement. “I received a wonderful malted scotch. It’s a sinus-cleaner, I assure you, but it’s delightful.”
Pedro clapped his hands together and spun to search for the bottle of scotch. His enthusiasm was disorienting. Zeke didn’t remember Pedro being so jovial. What had changed?
Pedro found the bottle, grabbed it by the neck, and brought it back to the bar, setting it down before uncapping it. The pour was generous, and the chunks of ice shifted, melting within the room-temperature scotch.
When he’d recapped the bottle, Pedro slid the glass over to Zeke, careful not to slosh the amber liquid.
“Drink up,” said Pedro. “We have much to discuss.”
Zeke picked up the glass, relishing its cold in his hand. Toasting Pedro, Zeke lifted the drink and then took a healthy sip. It was like fire at first, burning his throat and stinging his nostrils. He coughed and set the drink on the bar.
“Whoa, that’s strong,” he said.
“Perhaps,” said Pedro, “but not as strong as you, I hear.”
Zeke spun on the stool and searched the bar. His scotch-blurred vision drifted to the balcony that ran along the edges of the second floor. Still no Uriel. No pink ribbon at the end of a knotted ponytail.
“What have you heard?” asked Zeke. “Did Uriel tell you?”
“Plenty,” said Pedro, not answering the question, but giving him hope she really was back. “I want to hear it from you though. Start from the beginning.”
Zeke thumped his chest with the side of his fist. Checking over one shoulder and then the other, he leaned into the bar and lowered his voice. “The beginning of what?”
Pedro folded his arms across his broad chest, considering the question. “That’s a good question,” he said, stroking the beard now. “The beginning of what. So many beginnings. So many endings. So much in between the two. It’s hard to keep track of it all.”
Having become accustomed to the vague nonanswers that greeted his questions in the afterlife, Zeke tried formulating something more specific. He thought another sip of the drink might help, so through clenched teeth, he filtered more of the scotch into his gullet. It was as scorching the second time. But the tension in his muscles relaxed a bit. It was odd to him that while he didn’t require food or drink, or even air, as a dead man, alcohol could intoxicate him. He’d heard someone once refer to something alcoholic as the nectar of the gods. Was that the meaning?
Zeke refocused. “How about I start with the moment we left this bar the last time?”
“Cantina,” Pedro corrected. “It’s more descriptive than bar. It connotes a certain desperation, a homespun earthiness to it.”
Again, with a nonanswer. Zeke sighed.
Pedro eyed the glass, seemingly willing Zeke to take another sip. Zeke obliged and then began to tell Pedro everything that had happened, from his recollection, between the time he’d settled into his Superbird with Uriel to the start of his march through the mountains.
Admitting he didn’t remember how he’d ended up back at the cantina, Zeke spent more than an hour telling his version of events. Perhaps it was less than an hour. Or it might have been three. Time slipped in the cantina.
After he was finished, Pedro spent several minutes cleaning the bar with a rag. When he was finished, he stepped back over to Zeke. The glass in front of Zeke was empty, the ice melted. There was a faded amber sheen at the bottom of the highball. Pedro didn’t offer to refill it.
&
nbsp; “What made you come back?” he asked. “And what made you bring Adaliah?”
Zeke’s chest tightened. “Li’s here?” He glanced over one shoulder and then the other. His eyes swept the open balcony on the second floor, moving from door to door.
“She’s here,” said Pedro. “Don’t worry. That woman is a strong one. She’ll give Uriel a run for her money.”
“Where is she?”
Pedro smiled. “Resting. Being tough doesn’t mean she’s infallible. Remember, she was wounded before arriving here. It takes some time. Remember?”
“I remember. What will happen to her?” asked Zeke. “Will she get the same opportunity I did?”
Pedro shrugged. “That’s up to her,” he said. Then he hesitated, his mouth held open while he appeared to reconsider. “And up to me.”
“Thank you,” said Zeke.
“For what?”
“Letting her stay here, giving her the possibility of a second chance.”
Pedro smiled broadly. He leaned on the bar and wagged a finger at Zeke. “You’re a good man, Ezekiel,” he said. “Not too good, mind you.”
Zeke chuckled. It was a nervous response. He understood what Pedro meant but not why he’d said it.
“Who was it she worked for?” asked Pedro.
“Li?”
Pedro nodded. “Yes, Adaliah.”
Zeke had a sense that Pedro knew the name of the protectorate’s governing body. He answered the question anyway.
“The Overseers.”
Pedro swung the damp bar rag over the shoulder of his vest. “Ahhh yes,” he said, “the Overseers. I thought it a pompous-sounding name, didn’t you? Overseers? It has a grandiosity to it that’s best reserved for those who truly oversee. But what’s done is done.”
“I never liked the name,” said Zeke.
Pedro raised an eyebrow. “But you liked Tic?”
“We were parasitic bloodsuckers.” Zeke chuckled. “So I guess it fit.”
Zeke searched the bar for any sign of his friends. They were his friends. They’d become his friends.
“So,” said Pedro, “have you figured out yet what this was all about? What it is still all about?”
“My redemption,” Zeke said. “This was about redeeming myself. I’ve done that. I went back to right some of my wrongs, help the woman I betrayed, and apparently rid the world of a rogue Watcher. It turns out she wasn’t who I thought she was, who anybody thought she was, but I helped anyway. I wanted redemption.”
Pedro’s wizened stare locked onto Zeke, his ice-blue eyes penetrating, mesmerizing, and a little bit frightening. The old man shook his head. “Oh, Zeke. My dear Ezekiel Watson, who told you this was about your redemption?”
A flutter of unease sprinkled across Zeke’s body. He shrugged. “Everyone?”
“No,” said Pedro. “Nobody told you it was about your redemption. This was not about you at all. You were a mechanism, a cog, a part in a much larger contraption.”
“I don’t understand,” said Zeke. The flutter was swelling into panic. A cold sweat bloomed at his temples and he adjusted the Stetson atop his head. “Whose redemption was it?”
The intensity of Pedro’s gaze didn’t wane. If anything, it sharpened. The ice blue seemed to glow, to pulse as the barkeep spoke.
“To seek redemption,” said Pedro, “one must be doing it for others. It must be a selfless act. Everything you did, while noble and in some cases heroic, was ultimately self-serving. You sought redemption for yourself, which is, in so many ways, the opposite of how it works.”
Zeke didn’t know what to say to that.
“Redemption,” continued Pedro, now leaning against the bar, “is not something born from a single act or series of actions aimed at a single outcome. It comes from a change in your heart forged during the course of a multitude of unrelated acts. Those unrelated acts benefit others, things from which you gain nothing but the cleansing of your soul.”
Zeke’s head was swimming. Whose redemption had this been about if not his? And how would he ever earn his own? He was about to explode with a thousand questions he knew Pedro would never answer when he felt a familiar touch on his leg and he inhaled an intoxicating floral scent that almost made him fall from his stool.
“Hey, big boy,” said Uriel, sliding around him and onto the stool next to him. “Long time no see.”
Zeke blinked to make sure she was real. His eyes darted between Uriel and Pedro, looking for an explanation.
“This was about her redemption, Zeke,” said Pedro. “The others too.”
Zeke felt a presence behind him. He spun around in the stool to find Phil and Gabe standing behind him. Behind them were Barach and Raf.
“I don’t understand,” said Zeke.
“Of course you don’t,” Uriel said brightly. “You can’t be that good-looking and smart too.”
Heat flushed Zeke’s face, but he was quick with a retort. “So which one are you?”
That drew laughter from the others. Phil slapped Zeke on his back.
“Being a Watcher is about redemption,” Uriel said. “That’s why our job is to maintain the balance of things. We were bad enough in life to understand how the darkness works. We’re good enough in death to find the light in things.”
Zeke searched Pedro’s face for confirmation of what Uriel had just told him. Her revelation made sense in a place where nothing made sense.
“Watchers are chosen because, despite how dark their lives were, there was something redemptive in them,” said Pedro. “That’s not an easy thing to find in someone. Sure, most humans live a life filled with a spectrum of color. Nobody is all good or all bad. But to be a Watcher, to be someone who can keep the balance, one must have the right mixture of both. Maintaining that balance between good and evil can require you to get your hands dirty.”
“Hands dirty?” asked Zeke.
“Like we said before,” explained Phil, moseying closer to the bar, “sometimes we have to fight for the dark side of things. If you were too good a person in life, that’s too much of a leap in death. If you mixed it up, but had a soul, then you’re Goldilocks.”
“He means to say, you’re just right,” said Gabe.
“So what does this have to do with me?” Zeke asked, likely knowing the answer to his question for the first time in a long while.
“Being a Watcher is difficult,” said Pedro. “You’re stuck here in purgatory for an indefinite period. Until you’ve done enough to redeem yourself, you stay a Watcher. You go where I ask you to go. You do what I ask you to do. In between, you sit here at the bar awaiting the next mission, the next act toward redemption.”
“Are you asking me if I want to be a Watcher?” asked Zeke.
Pedro winked. “If you’re interested, there’s an opening.”
“How long does redemption take? And what if I say no?”
Uriel laughed and squeezed his thigh. He’d forgotten her hand was there. “You don’t want to say no,” she said.
“Saying no isn’t an option,” said Raf.
“Don’t do it,” said Barach.
“Nobody says no,” added Phil.
Chuckling, Pedro took the rag from his shoulder and wiped the bar. It didn’t need the scrub. “There’s no telling how long it will take,” he said. “But I can promise you, however long it takes, it’ll seem a lot shorter than it is.”
“Or longer,” said Gabe.
“Or longer,” conceded Pedro.
Zeke drew a long, measured breath. He looked to Uriel, who smirked and nodded him along. Then the others, all in eager anticipation of his answer.
The truth was, he’d made the choice, without even knowing it. The moment he sent himself back to the bar at the end of the world. He touched the handle of the revolver at his waist, making sure it was still there. It was.
“So,” he said, “I guess the next round’s on me?”
Epilogue
Without knowing how he’d arrived there, or where it was he w
as heading, Graham found himself in the middle of the Badlands. The last thing he remembered was shooting.
Was I shot? By a dead man?
Impossible.
A single two-lane highway stretched in front of him. He was driving a 1985 Buick Regal T-Type. The two-hundred-horsepower V-6 wasn’t the fastest of the muscle cars in the Tic’s stable, but it was fuel-efficient and fast enough to outpace the TMF.
Disoriented, Graham gripped the wheel and applied even pressure to the accelerator. He checked the rearview mirror and saw a Horde of bikers and truckers following close behind.
Gone was the sensation of confusion. Instead, he focused on the new task at hand: getting away from the men chasing him.
Why were they chasing him? They weren’t TMF. They didn’t look like Tic. They were Badlanders. They had to be Badlanders, didn’t they? But he had no idea how he’d gotten here. Maybe he’d hit his head too hard in the fighting.
He pushed the gas pedal to the floor and the car responded. Its Garrett turbocharger surged, and Graham put distance between himself and the pursuing Horde.
The gain was short-lived, however, and a pair of the bikers closed the distance. They moved to opposite edges of the road and held steady at his rear fender.
Up ahead, all Graham saw was dirt and rocks and the low rise of distant hills. The sun was high in the sky, straight overhead. How long had he been driving? How long had these men been chasing him?
The barren no-man’s-land that surrounded him in all directions offered no clues. He couldn’t tell in which direction he was driving. It felt to him as if he were on an endless treadmill of asphalt, surrounded on all sides by the brown and gray of petrification.
Graham tightened his grip on the wheel with one hand and wiped the sweat on his forehead and under his eyes with the back of the other. When he returned it to the wheel, it was darkened by red liquid.
Blood?
His pulse quickened. In that instant, his head pounded with the memory of a wound. What wound? How had he been hurt?
A pop interrupted his thoughts, and he checked the rearview mirror to see the back window was gone. Shards of glass littered the back deck of the Regal behind its rear seats.
