Peace in an Age of Metal and Men

by Anthony Eichenlaub

  “J.D.,” he said in the image. “You gotta help me. Stop by the ranch sometime today and I’ll tell you. It’s—It’s about Francis.” There was desperation in the boy’s voice that I’d never heard before.

  It was too late in the day to do anything about it. His words gnawed at me as I fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of nothing at all and everything at once. My body still ached and it was keeping me from any kind of proper rest. My dreams wandered to war.

  Dreams of war were few and far between for me, though, and they didn’t stick. My dreams turned to Zane, the handsome man from the city. He looked at me with that amused expression. He smiled and showed his too-white teeth. His voice…

  His voice was speaking to me. “J.D.,” he said. “J.D., you gotta pick up the earpiece.” Seemed an odd thing for a person to say, even in a dream.

  “Just put the damn thing in your ear, J.D.”

  I blinked and shook the grogginess from my head. The voice wasn’t in my dream. It came from my duster, which was still hung on my chair. My muscles protested, but I sat up and rifled through the pockets until I found the earpiece.

  “J.D., are you hearing this?”

  I nodded. The earpiece was loud enough that I could hear it just fine, even though it wasn’t in my ear.

  “J.D., come in. You sleeping or what?”

  “Not anymore.”

  He seemed to hear me. “It’s worse than I thought. Put the earpiece in and you’ll see.”

  “What about Tucker?”

  “I’ll tell you about Hale when we meet up.” His voice took on a sharp edge. He was getting upset.

  “Alright.”

  There was a long pause. “Did you put it in?”

  “What? No.”

  “I thought you were going to put it in.”

  “Never said that.”

  “Just put it in, Crow.”

  “I don’t trust you and I can hear you just fine.”

  “There’s more to that tech than talking.” He sighed. “It lets you see and hear what I need you to see and hear. Plus, if you want it out you can always just grab and pull.”

  “That easy?”

  “Well, it hurts and can cause minor brain damage if you yank it too hard.”

  “Oh, well, in that case I’m sold.”

  “Really?”

  I bit my lip. This was clearly important to him, but I didn’t know the guy. For all I knew, it was some kind of trick, though I couldn’t imagine why he’d be trying to trick me. It was a simple matter of trust and I didn’t have any for the city slicker, even if he was brave enough to come all the way out into the desert to talk to me.

  Sometimes bravery means trusting folks who haven’t earned it yet. Sometimes being smart means not trusting anyone ever.

  A minute passed.

  “You do it?” Zane asked.

  “No.”

  Zane’s voice came through tense. “You need to see something.”

  “Send it to my cube.”

  Zane muttered something that I couldn’t quite hear. It didn’t sound like pleasantries. Soon, my glow cube lit up and I tapped the top to project the incoming image. While it loaded, I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. Puffs of smoke drifted through the image, sharpening the picture but causing it to waver and distort.

  A man was sharpening blades on a spinning grindstone. Behind him, shimmering translucently at the edge of view, was a long table and a hook hanging from an unseen ceiling. Next to the table was a stocky steel machine with a flared opening in the top. The man had a scruff of a beard and overalls unbuttoned to allow the straps to hang loosely at his sides. His hands were covered with black gloves, and white-hot sparks from the grindstone showered his chest and arms but didn’t seem to affect him.

  “What’s this all about then?” I asked.

  Zane was silent.

  The man in the video continued his work. When he had finished one blade, he moved out of view for a moment and returned with another knife. When that was finished, he returned again with a third knife, this one barely longer than his thumb. Once he had ground all three knives, he used a whetstone to carefully work each blade until it was razor sharp. He tested each on a strip of leather, showing that each knife could slice through with little resistance. The ash lengthened on my cigarette as the man toiled.

  “A man’s sharpening knives, city boy.” I tapped ashes onto the dirt floor next to my bed. “Implication is that he’s planning a murder, right? Sounds like something the law ought to handle.”

  “I told you,” Zane said, his voice shaking with uncertainty. Or was it fear? “We have a strong interest in not involving the sheriff. In fact, the less we can involve anyone, the better.”

  “The law handles stuff like this. Even out here.”

  “It’s not that I don’t have faith in their well-meaning,” Zane said.

  In the hologram the man set down all three knives and left the field of view. Long moments passed. Just as I was about to break the connection and go back to sleep, he returned. The man dragged something behind him, but the object wasn’t visible in the hologram. It struggled. I leaned in close so I could see, and the smoke from my exhale briefly obscured the view.

  I waved to clear the air, but managed to trigger the controls on the cube at the same time. The image disappeared, instead switching back to the main console. Cussing, I quickly gave the gesture to move back to the video, but the signal got misinterpreted and instead brought up some still images of the surrounding area.

  Zane gasped, his voice clear through the earpiece.

  “What is it?” I asked. “I lost the feed.”

  “It’s…”

  My gestures started working. Flipping madly through control screens, I managed to bring up the video, but it was stuck for a painfully long time. The image was distorted, but the image of the man was clear and behind him—

  The picture cleared and resumed motion. The man had moved again and was much closer to the camera. He was testing a knife’s sharpness on his arm. Then he moved and I winced because deep down I knew he’d have a man on that hook.

  I was wrong.

  It was a boy, not more than ten years of age. His legs were bound tightly with rope, and tears streamed from his eyes. The boy wore ragged clothes, like a he’d been dragged off the street. There was no sound, but I could almost hear the wails as the boy screamed and pleaded. The man didn’t seem to hear anything. He smiled, pursing his lips like he was whistling the whole time.

  He slit the boy’s throat and slashed his wrists in three fluid motions.

  It took the boy no more than a few seconds to die. A quick death is a mercy sometimes. It can be a kindness.

  What I saw there sure as hell was no kindness. Rage boiled up in my belly. This needed justice. Someone needed to get in there and make that man face what he’d done. Someone needed to stop this from happening again.

  The cigarette dropped from my lips.

  “Call the sheriff,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

  “We can’t,” Zane said.

  “Why not?”

  “Take the job, J.D.” Zane’s voice shook. “Take the job that Goodwin’s offering. Make this right and earn some money at the same time.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “You won’t bring Sheriff Chin into it?” Zane said.

  Sheriff Trisha Chin was in charge of justice for a hundred-kilometer radius around Dead Oak. She had been my partner for a time before I stepped down. She cared as much about justice as I had, and so when she took over as sheriff people had been happy. They got someone who was both tougher and nicer than me. Prettier too.

  “Something’s gone wrong in the town of Swallow Hill,” said Zane. “Something bad and you might be the only one who can fix it.”

  I didn’t answer for a long time. Peace. I’d known peace. Could I really put that aside for this?

  The image of the boy still flickered above my cube and in its light my guns seemed to
dance on the wall. I’d seen boys like him before. Poor, hungry, tired. Abandoned. I’d neglected them before, too. Were they ever really better when I tried to help?

  The moment was broken by the acrid smell of burning fabric. I quickly patted out the fire on my shirt where my dropped cigarette had landed. My jaw was set so hard that saying the words was difficult.

  “I’m in.”

  Chapter 6

  Bad things happened in the desert. Corporations made profits on the backs of men. Bandits killed for upgrades. Most who’d be called innocent weren’t even close. A religion of pain grew like a cancer in the darkest corners of the wasteland. Injustice thrived everywhere from city to town.

  None of that put to rest my outrage at what I’d seen. Something had to be done. That man, that horrible man who had murdered a kid, he had to be stopped. Killed.

  What did I need? I grabbed my gun and clipped the holster on. Plain, simple justice. That’s all this was going to take. The glow cube might be helpful. I stuffed it into an ammo pouch, which I hung from my belt. The ruined duster wouldn’t do me any good in the desert, so it needed to stay behind. A man can’t leave the house without his hat or a good knife. Knife, gun, hat. Yes, that’s all I needed.

  But I hesitated. The gun felt so heavy at my side. So awkward. How long had it been since I’d carried it on a regular basis? How long since I’d dispensed justice? How long since I’d killed someone? That wasn’t me anymore. A good sheriff could do that. Not me.

  I drew the gun and looked at it. My hand shook and no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t stop. The butcher wasn’t a bandit. He wasn’t a gunslinger. He was just a man. He could be stopped without a bullet. This was a test. Years ago I’d sworn off guns. Killing never did me any good back then and it wouldn’t now.

  Would it?

  Ben and Francis Brown could answer that. Were their lives better with their mama dead? Was that the justice they needed for her killing their pa? If I’d let it go from the start, they’d still be together. She’d have guilt eating at her, but guilty is a hell of a lot better than dead. The gun went back on its peg.

  My skidder was still a ruined mess, and getting around the desert on foot was a slow suicide of heat stroke and dehydration. Nobody deserved that, not even me.

  The aches in my body were easy enough to shake off, but the one in my metal arm still throbbed. It needed a half a day at a charging station, but since that wasn’t an option I opted for the next best thing: ignoring the problem. It wasn’t a great solution, but it was the best I had. The thing would last days on low battery. Experience had taught me that much. It took time for my eyes to adjust to the black of the moonless night. The scattered mess of the Milky Way stretched across the night sky.

  My skidder’s antigrav still worked, but propelling it would be a problem. I had no rockets handy, so my best idea involved pushing myself along with an old steel bar I’d picked up from a scrap pile. I got my bearings with the stars, pointed my skidder in the right direction, and pushed. It was just like poling a boat.

  Movement was slow at first, so I pushed again. Then again. Soon I was moving at a reasonable clip and the kilometers vanished behind me. Cool, dry air tugged at my hat and chilled my bones. It would take an hour or two to reach Dead Oak, but it was better than walking.

  The glow of that small town graced the horizon right around the same time that the eastern sky lightened with the impending morn. Dead Oak was a town of modernized hogans. They were lumps on the surface of the desert. Along the outskirts of town were some of the old structures: buildings constructed before the megastorms started scouring the land on a regular basis. Most of them were crumbled into ruin, but a few still stood, monuments to a time when Texas was a far friendlier place.

  A few stabs with the steel bar adjusted my direction. On the near side of town, over a short rise, was the junkyard. That’s where I needed to go. My skidder slid forward silently, taking a slightly sideways angle toward its destination. It slid effortlessly over the rise, cresting with a gentle leap off the top of a hill.

  The junkyard was closer than I remembered. Too close. A couple hundred meters away, there loomed a junk pile outside of the metal wall, mangled into sculpture of expressive anger. It was a heap of hurt with jagged metal and slender spikes of glass sticking up everywhere.

  I grabbed the steel bar in both hands, braced myself, and jammed it hard into the ground in front of the skidder. It hit a rock, jerked back, flew out of my hands sliding straight through my giant metal fist.

  The force of the impact slowed me a little, but now the skidder was spinning. I gripped the handlebars.

  Nearly a hundred meters away now, the junk pile gleamed in the first rays of morning. Steel and stone jutted from the heap like jagged teeth getting ready to chew a meaty breakfast. Fifty meters.

  I yanked the bars right, trying to compensate for a hard counterclockwise spin. It wasn’t enough. My head whipped around as I tried to track the incoming heap.

  Twenty meters. I leaned hard. The skidder was sliding fast, but if I could get hold of some scrub on the ground maybe I could—

  Ten meters. It wasn’t working. I was going to hit and there wasn’t anything—

  I cranked the antigrav as hard as I could. My stomach dropped and the skidder launched straight up, catching the top spire of the heap as it passed. The skidder spun faster, up, up, over the wall and into the junkyard proper.

  With a twist, I cut power. The skidder plunged down, hit the red dirt with an ear-splitting crash, and sent me flying into a dingy shack. My back hit the door, tumbling through with enough noise and violence to wake anybody a hundred meters around.

  It didn’t need to. The two women were sitting at a tiny table holding cards and smoking cigars. When I crashed through the door, neither one of them so much as flinched.

  The older of the two women placed her cards down on the table, took a swig from a bottle of amber liquid, stubbed out her cigar, and smiled at me. “Evening, J.D.,” she said.

  The younger woman smiled. “It’s morning, Auntie.”

  The older woman frowned at that. After a moment, she smiled. “Morning, J.D.”

  I stood up, realized I was still terribly dizzy, and fell flat on my ass.

  Chapter 7

  Josephine Jefferson had a laugh like a hyena—a hyena that had just spent a hard day drinking and a hard life smoking. She laughed so hard that tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down the smooth, dark skin of her cheeks. She clutched her belly as if to keep it from shaking right off. Jo was a big woman with the grimy fingernails of someone who worked and the nimble fingers of someone who knew how to operate tech. She wore overalls and her bare arms were covered with scars. When she laughed, her age showed in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had lived in Dead Oak all the while that I was the sheriff, but I’d had little to do with her other than to have her work on the cruisers from time to time.

  The young woman across from Jo was probably in her late teens and pretty as they get. She was just as dark as Jo, but where Jo’s skin bore the lines of a life well fought, this girl had the smooth shine of tech-enhanced skin. Her hair was a long, dark mess of unkempt dreadlocks. She was nearly drowning in a pair of Jo’s old overalls, and her feet were bare. She looked at me with wide eyes that glittered with tech and struggled to focus, as if a night of drinking whiskey had taken its toll.

  The younger woman’s eyes showed just as much laughter as Jo’s, but she had significantly more tact. That’s not to say she kept from laughing entirely. Rather, she covered her mouth politely and snickered like a pot of humor was nearly ready to boil over. The restraint was appreciated, but a man’s pride can only take so much humiliation.

  My head steadied itself so I stood up, tipped my hat, which was somehow still on, and said, “Howdy,” to the young girl. “Name’s J.D.”

  “I gathered.”

  The shack was little more than a machine shed with workbenches along three of the four thin, metal w
alls. The fourth wall sported a lofted bed and a hammock. Shelves covered every surface that might support a shelf and some that looked like they didn’t. Elaborate overhead storage dominated the center of the room. To my left was a collection of brutal, heavy tools like saws, vices, and hammers. Moving clockwise, the tools got progressively higher-tech. Wrenches gave way to spanners, arc-circuits, and nano-gel. Directly to my right, an array of rockets was prominently displayed above a row of parts from old combustion engines that would do any museum proud. The whole place was filled with cigar smoke.

  “Bit of a time crunch,” I said.

  Josephine gasped a noisy breath of air, then coughed up another peel of laughter.

  The younger girl spoke. “Auntie was just telling me how much we needed a man around here.”

  “That so?” I said.

  Josephine clutched the edge of the table and, with apparently great effort, kept her laugh down to a low chuckle.

  “It’s true,” continued the girl. “Why, we were just having a nice, pleasant drink and a game of hold-em this evening.” She peered at the door behind me. “Morning,” she corrected. She indicated a nearly empty whiskey bottle, reached behind her to produce a second empty bottle, and then pointed across the room to where the remnants of a third bottle were shattered next to a garbage can. “Well, the topic of men did come up once or twice, though I must say it wasn’t the main topic.”

  Josephine shook her head.

  “Well, it was not five minutes ago we decided just exactly how much a representative of the male community was needed around here.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Not very much,” said the girl.

  The high, hyena laughter burst out of Josephine like TNT out of a coal mine. I endured it for what seemed like an age. It finally settled, and the two women looked at me expectantly.

  “Ms. Jefferson,” I said, “remember that skidder I stopped by with a while ago?”