One fat, well-formed print sat perfectly formed in a section of soft soil several meters away from the trampled grass. It had four small pads and marks of long, wicked claws.
“Coyote,” I said.
Mina moved up behind me and peered at the print.
“Big coyote. Probably more than one.” I bit my lip. “They bedded down over there for a bit. At some point one of them pissed right here and another one stepped in it. That’s how we got that print.”
“It’s not a wolf?”
I shook my head. “Not quite right for wolf. Size is right, but the claws are wrong. It’s coyote, but probably bio-engineered. Maybe escaped or something.”
“We walk this path all the time, though. We’d have noticed giant coyotes this close.”
Coyotes coming this close meant there was something odd about them. A coyote was likely to see just about anything as food, but they were smart enough to fear humans. Maybe whoever was walking the path hadn’t noticed them, but those coyotes had been there a while. The grasses might have concealed them, or maybe the creatures had moved away when they heard people coming. It was like a coyote to be cowardly.
“Folks ought to walk in twos for a while,” I said. “Might be safer.”
Mina nodded. “You think they’ll come back?”
“All that noise we made might have scared them off. If they like it here, they’ll come back.”
“You can tell Broadfeather what you saw when you go see him tomorrow.”
“Pardon?” I said.
“Elder Broadfeather said that you should speak with him when you get back. It’s very important.”
“Thanks for the message.”
She slung her rifle back over her shoulder. Her expression got deadly serious. Mina put her hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eyes.
“J.D.,” she said. “There’s just one thing I’m gonna ask you about today and I want a straight answer.”
“Sure.”
“Can you please tell me the reason that your ass crack is showing out the back of your ripped-up pants?”
Chapter 3
My back creaked in protest at the mere thought of movement. Bruises lined my legs and arms, tying the muscles into rock-hard knots. My very bones ached, like maybe coyotes had chewed them on. It was luck that kept those bones from getting broken in my fall off the skidder, but I sure as hell didn’t feel lucky.
One advantage of a metal arm is that it doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities as the rest of my body. It could drop from the sky into an active volcano and not show so much as a scratch while the rest of me lit up like a bonfire. I had some tactile feeling in the hand, but it never hurt, no matter how hard it got hit.
That morning, the arm throbbed with dull pain. It had a low battery, which was not surprising, given that I hadn’t charged it in a month. The low-battery warning presented as a dull, irritating ache in my elbow.
It was still dark. Why was I awake so early? Sure, pain made it hard to get a decent night’s sleep, but why was I sitting up looking around at my dark room?
A gentle rap at the door gave me the answer. A visitor. How long had they been there? Who was it? My heart raced. Where was my gun?
The gentle tap came again, slightly more insistent.
Light. I needed light.
A sweep of my human arm knocked my glow cube from its position on the little table by my worn-down cot. I swore out loud.
There was another gentle tap at the door. In my experience, death didn’t knock. I forced myself to calm down. Deep breaths.
“Just a minute,” I said, though it might have come out as a rhythmic cadence of grunts. I rolled off the cot and landed on my knees on the earthen floor. The cube had to be close. Crawling, I carefully swept the area for the device, finding it after only a few seconds.
My thumb found the indentation on the top of the device, and a blue glow filled the room. A red light on the top of the device indicated some kind of message, though I couldn’t figure who it might be from. There wasn’t time for it. I stood up and opened the thatch door. Only once it was open did I remember that I was wearing only an old pair of long underwear, one of the few remaining intact items of clothing in my possession.
Isi Broadfeather was the tribe’s chief by the simple authority given a brilliant, charismatic man of advanced age. Like many folks of his years, he was not of a mind to sleep much more than a few hours a night. Maybe his body didn’t require it, or perhaps he felt the looming end of his long life pressuring him to make the most of those final days. Even my sleep-addled brain should have figured it was him at the door.
“Morning,” I said. “C’mon in.”
Elder Broadfeather’s eyes twinkled with amusement when he saw me. His gnarled wooden cane tapped the earthen floor as he waddled past me. There was only one chair in the place, and he settled comfortably into it and folded both hands on the end of his cane. The old man wore tanned leather and a modest assortment of feathers. His gray hair was pulled back and tied neatly away.
I sat on the cot across from him, and there we stayed for several minutes. My neck and arms benefited from a good stretch, and soon felt like they could move as reliably as a person could expect.
Broadfeather spoke first. “Good to see you walk back to town last night.”
I nodded, wondering if he saw me come into town or if Mina had told him.
“Didn’t want to come back on horse?”
“Not badly enough.”
“Maybe they would rather be free.”
“Wouldn’t we all?”
Broadfeather smiled at that. He had always supported my attempt at taming the horses, but I couldn’t help but feel like he’d been betting against my success. Yet, every time I came back he’d lay out a new ploy to try to catch them.
“It almost worked,” I said. “Had them running right for the canyon, but the skidder failed and they got away. That black’s a smart one, I think. She had an eye out for me.”
“I once heard a story of a man who wanted horses, but all he had were apples. The man would walk out into the field with apples each day, leaving them for the wild horses that roamed the area. Soon the horses started visiting that location each day, and each day the man would get closer to them. One day he fed an apple directly to a beautiful mare.”
“He made friends with it?”
“No, of course not. He tricked her and broke her until she would do his bidding.”
“Seems a broken horse wouldn’t be as good.”
Broadfeather shook his head. “Nonsense. A horse must be broken to be ridden. That is how it’s done. The horse is no good if it’s too free. It won’t obey orders or let its rider ride. If it can’t be broken, then the horse is no good to its owner.”
I grunted.
Long minutes passed in silence. The sky eased from the gray of predawn to a stunning mix of reds and yellows. There was movement outside and somewhere a rooster crowed. The tribe was waking up and my head was starting to clear. The ache of fatigue and injury faded into the background of a life lived hard.
“The tribe needs you, son,” said Broadfeather quietly.
I raised an eyebrow.
“We do our best to follow the Hopi Way, from before the land was ruined.” The twinkle was gone from his eyes, replaced by a grim expression. “It guides us in how we live and how we care for the earth. How the earth cares for us. Few of us remember anything. Stories of the Hopi have passed the generations by, and most of what we know is from the books. Word of mouth is much better, but there isn’t much left.”
“Agreed.”
“No doubt, you know of the Navajo.”
The Navajo and Hopi traditionally were rivals, but little of that rivalry had survived the ages. When America fell, the Navajo Nation asserted its own independence. They rejected the technology that changed Texas and since they lived so close to the Yellowstone caldera, Texas left them alone. Even the desert-dwelling Texans considered land too close to the Yellow
stone supervolcano to be uninhabitable. Not the Navajo. When the supervolcano brought Americans to its knees, the Navajo survived. Then they thrived. The Navajo Nation was notoriously independent, even hostile to outsiders. Their people were spread thin along the Rocky Mountains, loosely organized but very powerful due to a fierce loyalty. With all its technology and power, Texas had never been able to stretch its borders too far to the northwest. Not that there was much will to do so.
“We need you to be our ambassador,” Broadfeather said.
I blinked.
“They will visit with a spiritual man in two days. They are bound by the word of this two-spirit and they would like us to send our spiritual leader.”
My jaw opened like I had something to say, but nothing became readily apparent that needed saying. The Navajo never visited Texas. They stayed to themselves and expected Texans to do the same.
“You’ll negotiate an alliance. We don’t need trouble.”
My head was starting to hurt again. A dull throbbing pounded on the backs of my eyeballs. Broadfeather’s walking stick tapped out an even rhythm as he made his way out the door. The laughter had come back to his eyes. Was this a joke?
“Spiritual leader?” I asked dully as the old man stepped outside.
He turned around and winked at me before hobbling on his way. It took me nearly an hour before I stood up. I dressed in some old jeans and a button-down shirt. My duster was ruined. Huge sections had been worn clean through, and a tear ran down its length. Tossing it onto the chair, I grabbed my glow cube and tried my best to find room for it in the pocket of my jeans. Eventually, I gave up and tossed the thing on the table. It was still blinking red, but that could wait.
My Smith & Wesson Model 500 hung on the wall. Heavily modified, but without an ounce of tech, it had always been my go-to problem solver. It was a big gun—a revolver with significant heft and enough stopping power to give pause even to armored foes. I kept it well maintained, but it had been a while since I’d shot anything other than coyotes or the occasional armadillo. The services I provided my tribe were nonviolent and I liked to keep it that way.
The gun’s heft felt good in my hand. Its balance, perfect. I’d been a lot of things with this gun at my side: a Texas Ranger, a lawman, a hunter. It seemed like the gun had been my partner my whole life. It had helped me be whatever the world needed me to be.
But a spiritual leader?
I hung the gun back up on the wall.
Chapter 4
The day passed in relative quiet. In the concrete shadow of the broken bridge, I spent my whole morning watching the spot on the hill where there had been coyote tracks. The spot remained empty, except for periodic patrols of tribespeople. They walked in pairs now, which they probably always should have done.
I turned the coyote’s stick over in my hand, looking at it in the bright daylight. It was mesquite by the smell, but I couldn’t recall any thickets of mesquite anywhere nearby. That meant the coyotes either traveled long distances with their stick or there was a grove somewhere close that I didn’t know about. If my skidder had been functional, it wouldn’t have been hard to scout around. I tossed the stick to the ground and went to look at that skidder. Maybe it would be an easy fix.
The skidder wasn’t in good shape. It still floated when I powered it up, and I could get it to propel slowly if I leaned forward and nudged it just so. The boosters were worthless, though, and I had no clue how to fix them. They needed expert attention if the skidder was ever going to be anything more than a fancy wheelbarrow.
I wasn’t sure I wanted it working again. The laid-back life suited me fine.
After the sun set, I was sitting a good ways from the small fire someone had set up for cooking. The hunters were back with rabbits and an armadillo. Most of the tribe gathered nearby, chatting up about the day’s events.
“He hit the thing from fifty meters,” said Edgar Buck. He lined up the day’s kills next to him and started sharpening his knife. “Hell of a throw.”
“Mmm,” said Mina. She stripped apart wheat and filled a large stone bowl with the grain while the chaff went into a pile at her feet.
“Boy’s turning into a fine hunter, just wish there was more out there to hit.”
“You think we’ll need to move?”
“No.” Ed pulled the skin off of a rabbit. “Water’s clean here. Long as the well doesn’t go dry we can manage.”
“Water’s good, but we need food.”
“Bah. We can trade for food. Grow it.”
“Trade what?” Mina started grinding the wheat with a stone.
The conversation continued, but I stopped paying attention. It was the same conversation every day—comfortable in its consistency, but not very informative.
A wisp of dust lazily circled in the wind. It was a gentle breeze. A quiet breeze. Hardly a breeze at all. It was, in fact, not nearly strong enough to pick up that little bit of dust on its own. That dust must have had help. Something was there, stalking me from just beyond the light of the fire. The hunter was so absolutely silent that I could hardly hear it coming even after I knew it was there.
But I could smell it.
Sweat. Dirt. Piss. Only one creature had this particular combination of scents. Only one kind of monster fed off grown adults right in the middle of a settlement. I was being stalked by the most frightening creature around: a kid.
Maybe more than one.
A scrape. I dropped forward, evading a lunge. The kid stumbled and fell with a grunt. Another hit me from the side, stepping right on my metal arm and launching herself at my head. I caught a flash of blonde hair as she laughed and slammed a black sack over my head, then rolled away.
I roared in mock fury and crouched into a defensive stance.
The sack smelled of earth and rice. A footstep. I lunged.
Nothing there.
Someone yanked hard on a rope, cinching the sack tighter around my neck. I gagged and breathing got hard. I grabbed the rope, pulled so I could breathe again. At the same time, I shifted my weight and pulled away from the rope holder.
My shoulder slammed into something soft and solid. It was one of the bigger kids, then. That meant whoever was on the string wasn’t their biggest muscle. I tucked and rolled forward, still blind.
Feet under me again, I yanked hard on the rope and shoulder-blocked in that direction. I made fleeting contact before that kid skittered away. The rope was loose. I started to pull the sack from my neck.
There wasn’t any time to get it off. A quick footstep from my left warned me of incoming, and I dropped straight down. The kid’s center of weight hit above me and I lifted and tossed. The satisfying thud put a smile on my face.
It didn’t stick.
The rest of them hit me all at once. Two low and one high. My back hit the dirt hard. I was pinned.
Then, I laughed like I hadn’t laughed in a long time. Laughter made my whole body hurt, but it felt so, so good. The kids mercifully pulled the sack from my head and let me sit up.
Marcus, the twelve-year-old I’d tossed, handed me my hat. He had a goofy grin on his face. “Didn’t think you’d put up such a fight.”
I nodded and brushed the dust off of my shirt. “Not a bad play, there,” I said. “Distract me, then blind me.”
“Yeah, but you heard it coming,” said Gertie, the smallest of the group. She stood next to her brother, Dustin.
“I didn’t hear it at all. Was that you that snuck up on me?”
“It was me,” said Haley. “Mama made me some sneaking shoes.” She had a big grin on her face and soft leather shoes on her feet. She was a few centimeters taller than Gertie, but not much younger than Marcus.
“Well, that’s good news. We ought to get you out hunting.”
“I’ve been practicing my shooting,” Haley said.
“I killed a rabbit today,” said Marcus.
“Boomerang?” I said.
“Yeah.” Marcus grinned. “From a hundred meters, at least.
”
“Heard it was a hell of a throw,” I said.
Marcus glowed at the compliment.
“Shooting’s good,” I said, turning back to Haley. “But it seems like you ought to learn to use a bow or a boomerang. Maybe a knife.” I stood and tipped my hat to the other adults, who had been watching. They knew my arrangement with the kids. I taught survival skills. Then those skills got tested on me.
Her grin spread wider, and her eyes twinkled.
Marcus didn’t look so amused. “With just a little tech we’d a been able to see you better in the dark. Made ourselves invisible and silent. Hell, a decent gun might have taken you out at a thousand meters.”
“Eyes adjust to moonlight if you don’t look at the fire. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got a sack on your head.” My expression turned dead serious. “And there’s only one good way to defend against a bullet from a thousand meters.”
“What’s that?”
I walked over to the fire, grabbed a bowl of stew, and started back for my home. The mood of the evening had darkened for me, soured by memories of war and fights that I’d fought and lost. The world was full of fights I’d never win and enemies I’d never defeat. There was injustice everywhere and I’d done what I could, but that wasn’t much and I knew it.
“What is it, J.D.?” Marcus asked. “How do we defend against a sniper’s bullet?”
I looked him right in the eyes. “Don’t make enemies.”
Chapter 5
Ben Brown’s image appeared in flickering holographic imagery above my glow cube. Ben had grown since I’d last seen him. He wasn’t much taller but he’d filled out with muscle. Working on the ranch would do that. Ben was a good man, still a boy at sixteen, really: strong and stubborn in a way that fit him perfectly to a hard life in the outlands of Texas.
When his parents died, he and his brother had taken responsibility for the ranch, including various power generators, livestock, and their siblings. It wasn’t an easy choice for the boy. He’d been headed for more than one kind of trouble before life hit him. Now he was mired down in running the ranch. The modern ranch involved a wide range of technology and production; it wasn’t uncommon to host both solar and wind generators along with longhorns or sheep. It was a tough life and not one that young Ben had envisioned for himself.
Peace in an Age of Metal and Men Page 2
