Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  Tiger walked off, shaking his head and chuckling.

  Bernie looked at Doc and she smiled back.

  “I guess,” she said, “I better stick around just to see what happens in the second act.”

  “I think you’ll like it,” Bernie said.

  “I bet I will.”

  He bent in to kiss her again, but stopped when their lips were less than an inch apart.

  “By the way,” he said softly, “Tiger was right. I should have asked you your name.”

  “I forgive you,” she said, her lips brushing his as she spoke. “It’s Jane.”

  “Jane Potter,” Bernie mused. He shrugged. “Close enough.”

  Don’t Miss Their Next Amazing Adventure:

  “Bernie and the Jewels of Okeechobee”

  The Seeker: A Poison in the Blood

  Victor Milán

  Victor Milán

  I’ve written and seen published more than one hundred books. My next is The Dinosaur Lords, volume one of an epic fantasy trilogy, due out from Tor in July 2015. I came to the Change world by reading and enjoying Steve’s stuff in writers group. When he invited me into the anthology, I asked what he was looking for.

  He said the world was his own “personal Hyboria”—I could do whatever I wanted, so long as I played by the rules. So, cool. (It also gave me considerable insight into the books themselves.) I was intrigued by the notion of a protagonist who wondered so hard just what the hell happened to the world that he devoted his life to seeking answers. I’d also felt like writing a Western for a spell, and having a hero sling knives instead of guns suited me fine. So I combined the themes and plopped my pulp tale of revenge in a setting remote from the glittering courts of Montival—the Chihuahuan Desert, where a battered, wandering badass finds himself caught in the oldest game in the book: bad god . . . worse god. And learns that, not only do all knights not wear shining armor, they don’t always volunteer for the job . . .

  CHANGE YEAR 26/2024 AD

  “Brodie? Brodie? Ay, ¡hijo de puta!”

  His best friend wasn’t just dead.

  He was dead bad. Real bad.

  Zamora had been seeking Brodie since the man missed a rendezvous in Silver City ten days back. At a general store outside the ciudad de Chihuahua ruins he’d got a tip that his friend had been seen traveling south with a strange woman.

  It led him here, to this derelict hacienda. Even in the shadows of the roofless, half-melted adobe toolshed, Zamora could tell his friend’s pallid Anglo features were mottled dark, and their somewhat ratlike skinniness bloated into near unrecognizability. He looked as if he’d been dead for days. But from the smell . . . not long at all.

  “Don’t touch that body!” Recuerdo called from the doorway.

  Zamora froze in midcrouch, with the tails of the black frock coat he always wore, hot or cold, just brushing the bare dirt floor. “What?”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “No shit, Recuerdo. Mi hermano’s dead.”

  “Besides that. With the body.”

  “You better be right. It’s your fault if I get stuck like this. I am way too old for this shit.”

  He backed away from the contorted corpse and cast around for something to prod it with. He wasn’t concerned about proprieties. The friend he’d known since they were kids wasn’t there anymore.

  Where he might be now, if anywhere, was the kind of question Zamora was obsessed with finding an answer for. It was one reason he’d earned his nickname in the two decades and more since the Change.

  This part of the Chihuahuan Desert ran mostly to yellowed grama grass and scrubby-ass creosote bushes. Which meant plenty of fuel available for heating and cooking, especially here in the dry belly of the springtime. And the nearby Sierra Madre Occidental provided good pine and oak timber. The weather-grayed and cracked hardwood staff Zamora found had been the handle of a tool whose head had long since been scavenged for the metal. Maybe a rake.

  He hefted it in his left hand and drew one of his fighting knives, his big twin bowies, with his right. His stomach roiled: with grief, and with misgivings that had nothing to do with the warning. Childhood superstitions, he’d have called the sensations that raised the hairs at the nape of his neck. If not for one teeny-tiny piece of evidence he liked to call the whole last quarter-century.

  Holding the stick by one end he gingerly prodded the corpse.

  Something writhed from beneath it. Several somethings.

  Quicker than thought, one of the sinuous forms coiled itself and lunged. Zamora thrust upward with the knife. He felt an impact and found himself staring down both barrels of the business end of a striking rattlesnake. He had stabbed the creature through the throat, right behind its head.

  The tail of the now thrashing body was black to the rattles. Its body was shades of gray with crisp black diamonds.

  “Fuck,” he breathed.

  He threw down the rake handle, drew his other bowie, and with a quick motion severed the neck behind the gaping head. Flinging the still dangerous head at the body, and the half-dozen or more rattlers that had crawled out from under it, he backed out of the shed. Once clear he sheathed his thirty-centimeter blades.

  “What now?” Recuerdo asked.

  He stooped down, feeling his age and even more, and picked up his dusty black wide-brimmed hat from the ground where he’d laid it to one side of the door.

  “Follow who did this,” he said, “and pay him back for what he did to Brodie. That’s no way to die.”

  “What about your friend?”

  Though he’d been mostly raised in el norte, he’d been born in an onion field here in Chihuahua. He’d been a grad student in psych in Albuquerque, with a degree in physics, no less. But the views of his father’s people, the Ndé’indaaí band of the Chiricahua, made more sense in the world where he’d spent the latter half of his life.

  He’d devoted that life to trying to reconcile those two worlds. And how to make the one everyone was stuck in now a better place.

  “Brodie wasn’t carrying anything worth dying for,” he said. “And he’s gone now, so I’ll let his bones go back to the Earth.”

  That was the Apache world talking, with its distaste for dead bodies.

  “Three sets of tracks, boss,” Pensamiento, his second scout, reported. “Heading north. Not in much of a hurry.”

  “Thanks, ese.”

  He squinted up at the springtime sun. It was barely half up the cloudless sky, and already stung his forehead.

  “Maybe we can catch up with ’em while it’s still daylight,” he said, and clamped the hat firmly on his head.

  * * *

  Inside the cantina was dark and cool as a well. Or seemed that way after the hot and dusty afternoon. It smelled of fresh pine sawdust and not so fresh cerveza, sweat, and vomit. The usual for a place like this in a place like this. Maybe a little better.

  Zamora walked inside. He immediately took a step to his left to stop being a target conveniently silhouetted by the light of the lowering sun outside. The tracks had led him here. And the sizes of two sets would conveniently fit the two tough customers jacking up some kind of itinerant peddler in a corner of the bar.

  The doors swung shut with a creak of hinges that hadn’t been oiled in recent history. They were the double-leaf kind, proving that cowboy movies had made their mark south of the border as well as north. Which was only fair, Zamora reckoned, because the whole “cowboy” thing was largely a ripoff of the Mexican vaquero and his culture in the first place.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness he saw a blade glint in the smaller mugger’s hand. Didn’t look like steel, but that made little difference. A blade was a blade.

  He started forward. The barkeep barely glanced up from wiping the long hardwood bar—premium scavenge, Zamora guessed—beneath a neon sign, long dead like all the
rest of artificially powered civilization, which read, idiosyncratically, THE CLIENT IS ALWAYS WRONG. In English.

  The bartender seemed no more concerned by having a big, scar-faced Mexican lumber through his door than he seemed to be by the violence in progress in the corner.

  The handful of other patrons drinking standing up at the long bar, or sitting in ones and two at the ratty ramshackle tables, paid no more obvious attention. This close to the border with Trans-Pecos, it paid to mind your own business, especially when that business was selling drinks. Plus the usual things that went along with them: weed, girls, gambling, information.

  “This a private game?” Zamora asked, deliberately harshening a voice already made gravelly by years of bad tobacco, worse booze, and the occasional throat punch. “Or can anybody play?”

  The mismatched pair reacted faster than Zamora expected. The bigger, lighter-skinned guy spun right around. Just enough light bled in from the late afternoon outside that Zamora could make out his Mohawk and beard were rust-colored and his nose had been broken more than once. He was taller and wider even than Zamora.

  “Back the fuck off!” he shouted in badly norteamericano-accented Spanish. He raised a beefy fist and started forward, not waiting for Zamora’s reaction.

  Zamora saw his partner put his blade away and make a quick move toward his waist. That changed everything fast as an electron jumping shells around a nucleus. If they even did that anymore.

  Zamora had walked in bare-handed. Even a norteño cantina would regard it as an unfriendly act to walk in the door holding a naked blade. But his left hand dipped fast under the long black coat he wore despite the day’s heat, and then whipped out again, quick as that black-tailed rattler had gone for his face.

  The Anglo bruiser was quick for his weight class. He got a hand up. And howled and staggered back as he consequently took the throwing-knife meant for his bull throat through the palm of his left hand.

  The little leaf-shaped blades Zamora carried in pockets sewn on the front of his vest were intended more as distractions than lethal threats. Not so the big bowie he whipped free of the sharkskin sheath he wore, Hollywood gunslinger-style, tied down his right thigh. It was of a size and weight that kids born since the Change would flat call a short sword, not any kind of knife at all.

  A wise man had told Zamora once that the problem with throwing a knife at an enemy was that the enemy wound up with your knife. With his little specialized throwers, inexpensively stamped out and ground down from scrap steel, that didn’t matter much. But the big fighting knife was a serious thing to put in ill-intentioned hands.

  Zamora threw it anyway, underhand. Hard. As the smaller, darker-skinned assailant spun it hit him right in the notch of the rib cage, angled up. The man jerked, squealed like a frightened horse, and sagged back into the wall beside his erstwhile victim. The crossbow he’d been raising shot its bolt into the pine floorboards with a thunk that rang out before the twang of the spring-steel bow had finished.

  It was a better shot than Zamora had even hoped for. Maybe it even cut into the bastard’s heart, though Zamora knew from knifer’s experience even that wouldn’t always take a man down at once: he could still keep blood flowing through frantic, big-muscle activity, even if his heart was stopped. Of course, in this day and age, that just put death off for however long it took your legs to get tired . . .

  That didn’t concern him now. That dude was no threat for the moment, which was all he needed. The huge Anglo was still very much in the fight. And somewhat better motivated than he’d even started out.

  Howling, he plucked the throwing-knife from his blood-streaming hand and flung it at Zamora. Zamora ducked his head aside and drew his left-hand bowie from the sister of the rig on his right. The thrown blade rang off the indifferently whitewashed adobe wall behind him, which he suspected was pretty well pockmarked from similar impacts already.

  The Anglo roared and rushed him. Thinking fast—the way he always did when the shit came down—Zamora calculated that his opponent didn’t get quite that ugly, at least that kind of ugly, by doing things like running straight onto a foot-long knife blade. Especially not with just his bare fists, giant clubs of scar tissue and gristle though they happened to be.

  Sure enough, even as he charged he reached over his shoulders to draw a pair of hatchets. By the glint of backscatter sunlight Zamora could tell they were drop-forged, head and haft alike of a single piece of steel: primo salvage. So the Anglo was smart enough not to rely purely on size, strength, and a bull-rush to beat a foe. Especially one who was even less pretty than he was.

  The right-hand ax flashed down, aiming to lock up Zamora’s knife, or even knock it from his hand. Zamora took it, rolling his thick wrist slightly to make sure he met steel haft with flat of blade. At the same time he launched a straight right punch into the bearded pale face.

  It landed hard—a boxing punch, with the last three knuckles of his fist hitting flat, lined up with the sturdy radius bone of his arm. As a general thing Zamora followed the rule of not hitting hard things with your fist, but in the current case he felt a powerful need to make a fast impression.

  It made an impression on him. He felt a tooth gash a knuckle. As he pulled his hand back fast the flight of a dingy sharp shard told him the beard-fringed gape was lacking another tooth. At least.

  The punch, delivered with skill, will, and two bull-sized masses rushing together, didn’t concuss the Anglo enough to put him out. But it did rock his world enough that the ax cocked over his left shoulder failed to carry through to split Zamora’s skull. And that was all Zamora needed. He grabbed the triceps of the upraised arm with his right hand, slipped his blade free of the hatchet, and swiped it hard across the thick gullet.

  Blood splashed hot over Zamora’s chin and down his chest. The bearded bravo fell gurgling and clutching his neck with both hands, as if that could seal up two severed jugular veins.

  Zamora whipped attention to the smaller man, the one with the crossbow and the knife through his brisket.

  The man was still slouched against the wall beside his erstwhile victim, holding the bowie’s hilt in both hands. His features had gone bloodless and saggy. But he still seemed to be breathing.

  Zamora had a few too many scars, and not just on his mug, to take for granted that either man was completely out of the fight. Just like the rattler he’d decapitated in the shed, they could still avenge themselves. Even on their way out.

  And speaking of which . . . , he thought.

  “Why’d you do my friend Brodie?” he demanded in Spanish.

  The man croaked something in a language he didn’t recognize. Not Spanish, English, Apache, or any tongue he knew. He suspected it might be Nahuatl.

  There’d always been plenty of people in Mexico who spoke their own traditional tongue and no Spanish. But he doubted the white guy bleeding out into the sawdust understood enough of the old Aztec lingo for the two to communicate. To say nothing of their still undiscovered third partner.

  “En Español, asshole,” he snarled.

  “Fuck . . . you,” the man said in English.

  His left hand had slipped from the knife hilt. Zamora had not failed to note that. He wasn’t surprised when it flashed up, with astonishing speed from a dying man, and a hard glint in it.

  He slapped it aside. It did surprise him that the knife that spun away from the not-very-strong grasp had a rudely triangular blade of black stone. Obsidian.

  The trader, who was short but sturdier-looking than Zamora had first taken him for, reached over and twisted the bowie’s hilt, hard. The killer’s eyes rolled up in his head and he went limp.

  “Why didn’t you show that kinda enterprise earlier?” Zamora demanded.

  The man shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I was looking for a hero.”

  “Will you be my hero?”

  The voice was low, husky, and fem
inine. Zamora wheeled to face its source. She was short, dark, and deeply curved. She had a curious sort of stone-bead tiara around her head and a large jade medallion around her neck. The cotton shirt she wore had fallen open far enough to show that was all she had on under it.

  Her eyes met his. And held them like magnets.

  She reached a slim hand up to trail her fingers down his chest. “I could use a big, strong man like you.”

  Zamora’s reason was screaming, Get away! It’s wrong! She’s obviously not a whore. If she needs a big strong man so badly, why is she running all over the Mexican Plateau with her big old titties flopping out?

  But it had been a long time—uncomfortably long—since he’d had a woman. And with his looks and age the prospect of another had been looking none too bright. His brain, in other words, had had its throne usurped by other parts.

  And those eyes. They were pools. Black pools. Like gazing into an abyss . . .

  “Watch her other hand, coño!” a voice screamed from the doorway.

  Not the voice of reason, maybe. But the voice of Thought.

  It was as if he’d dunked his head in a Sierra Madre snowmelt stream. He swung the bloody knife in his left hand hard up and around. He barely had a chance to notice what the hand she’d had hidden behind her hips was holding before the massive blade chopped through its delicate wrist.

  The small rock rattlesnake struck futilely at air as the hand that held it bounced against the mud-stuccoed wall.

  Hard as he could, Zamora smashed the pommel of his bowie into the side of the woman’s face. He had no idea what other tricks she might have in store for him. He wasn’t minded to find out the hard way.

  The way Brodie did, he realized. Before they tossed a bunch more rattlers on him to make good and sure.

  The sound of her right cheekbone imploding was immediately drowned by the noise of her neck snapping. It put Zamora in mind of a handgun going off. A sound no human on Earth had heard for over twenty-five years, so far as he knew.