Peace in an Age of Metal and Men

by Anthony Eichenlaub

  I deflected the blow with my metal hand. The metal-on-metal clang rang out in the empty street.

  She was too fast. Her leg had come down behind my foot so when I tried to step back I stumbled.

  Instead of dropping, I rolled away, coming up with a backhand swing of my huge left hand.

  I missed, but took her balance. When I followed up with a right, she took it hard in the stomach. It didn’t faze her one bit.

  Damn, that hurt.

  Two gunshots sounded from inside the bank.

  The vision in my right eye flared. For a moment the eye was blinded. Everything went white as a sheet, then black as night. It was followed by a staggering headache that only got better when I covered that eye.

  Tucker revved the engine on his six-wheeler.

  Trish was staggering back away from the bank. My right eye was recovering, so hers must be too. The image coming back was normal, no longer the false overlay I’d seen before. She would get the real thing too, which was good; she would figure out what was happening. I ran straight for Tucker’s six-wheeler.

  Only, he didn’t wait for me. By the time I got around the corner, he was fifty meters away.

  My shoulders slumped. Mission was accomplished, but I’d been abandoned.

  The gaping hole in the bank was right there next to me. I stepped inside, careful not to touch the edges of the hole where the wall was still being eaten away. A light flickered in the blackness of the bank, illuminating like lightning the grisly scene inside. The smell of burned rubber and blood hit me as I stepped into the building.

  The vault door had been opened without damage or force. The massive black metal door hung loosely on its hinges. Inside the vault, a snake pit of wires haphazardly covered everything. Color was washed out by a flickering light, but the walls glistened wetly.

  The thing in the center of that room had once been a girl. She had been shot in the head and the heart, but it was hard to believe that she’d even been alive at the time of the shooting. So much of her was missing. Her arms, legs, and half of her torso had been completely replaced with writhing wires. Her hairless head was missing half of its skull, with the back half replaced with lobstered steel and bundled conduits. There was a short console just in front of her. In it was a cube-shaped slot, the same size of my glow cube. The slot was empty.

  My knees went weak.

  The sound of a pistol cocking perked up my ears.

  “J.D.” Trish’s voice was a calm drawl. “If you don’t think I’ll shoot you right in the back of the head, then you just go right ahead and move.”

  I sure as hell didn’t move.

  Chapter 20

  “I’ll handle him, Flores,” Trish said to Swallow Hill’s sheriff.

  The three of us stood in the tavern with a rather dumbstruck barkeep. It was hard to blame him. The whole place had suddenly turned shabby in his eyes. He was no doubt questioning his own sanity. Sheriff Flores had the same look in his eyes, but Trish seemed to take the change without much trouble.

  “It’s my town,” Flores said. “My jurisdiction.”

  “That’s not a jurisdiction I recognize. Anyway, seems you might have more important things to tend to here.” Trish nodded to the street, where people were starting to gather.

  Flores looked around, eyes lingering on the shabby décor of the tavern. His lip turned up in disgust. “That man’s responsible for this. Stringing him up is part of fixing it.”

  “He’s my bounty and I’ll see it through.” She sat down at a small, wobbling table in the tavern. “I don’t know what you did, J.D., but you’ve sure as hell done it.”

  “So, that’s it then.” Tension seemed to ease out of my shoulders. I slumped into my chair and breathed deeply. “It’s done.”

  “Seems like. Your partner left you behind, old man.” Trish signaled the barkeep for two whiskeys and he promptly brought them over.

  Sheriff Flores stood impotent for a moment before storming out. I didn’t envy the man his task of explaining to his people why their whole town seemed to have gone to shit over the course of the evening.

  I had an e-cuff on my metal arm. It was latched on hard and it sent a signal that shut down all of my tech. Standard law enforcement when a dangerous criminal is half machine. It was humiliating and a little painful, but it kept my nannies from pre-processing alcohol, so the whiskey wouldn’t be a waste.

  Trish downed both shots, one after the other, and showed her teeth in a grimace. “Good stuff.”

  “Best around,” I said. My mouth felt mighty dry.

  Trish narrowed her eyes at me and shook her head. “I can’t figure it out, J.D. You’re going to have to clue me in. What the hell happened to get you mixed up in all this?”

  After a few minutes of silence, Trish ordered a couple more whiskeys, this time pushing one my direction.

  “For old times, then,” she said. “Back when you wouldn’t tell me a damn thing.”

  “I was done.” I downed the shot. “Done with all this, but I suppose it wasn’t done with me.”

  Trish folded her arms and looked me over.

  “Trish, there’s tech outta control around here. Until we hit that bank, something made your eyes see what wasn’t there and your ears hear what wasn’t said. Someone was messing with people’s headgear and people were getting killed because of it.”

  The only movement she made was to raise an eyebrow. Hell, she was good at this.

  “I wasn’t going to come to you,” I said. “I know you’d want me to, but you’re as vulnerable to all this as anyone.”

  She sighed. “What led you to all this, J.D.?” She ordered another couple whiskeys and pushed one to me. She sipped hers.

  I downed mine in a gulp and slammed the glass down. The first shot was already making my head swim. One of the side effects of nannies that preprocess all of your alcohol is that your liver doesn’t build up much of a resistance.

  Tapping my right eye, I said, “Seen it myself, with my own eye.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” She squinted at me. “You went and got eye augments.”

  “Just the one.”

  She looked at me like I was just about as crazy as a housecat hunting longhorns. “Nobody gets just one. You’ll give yourself a headache.”

  “The ear too. I can hear what’s changed because I only got half.”

  “You’re paranoid, J.D.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.”

  She leaned in close. “What happened out there? One moment it was a nice little town and the next it was Shit Town, Texas.”

  “It’s always been Shit Town, far as I could tell. The tech”—I tapped my augmented eye—“tricks people into thinking everything is just fine.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. Why would they do that?” She looked around the tavern. It was as rundown and shoddy as the first time I’d visited. “People would be able to feel the difference. Smell it. Taste it.”

  “Folks look for a lot of ways to deal with their positions in life.” I nodded to the whiskey. “Like I said, that’s some fine whiskey. Smell or touch might tip folks off, but how often have you had trouble finding the source of an odor? Since when do you notice when something’s rougher or smoother than it should be?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Folks will do what it takes to convince themselves that everything is right.”

  “Like break the law?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Who’s your partner?”

  “Just look at the tech in that bank, Trish. It ain’t no bank. It’s something worse. There was a kid in there and…”

  Trish didn’t seem to be listening.

  She took a sip from her whiskey and ordered me another, which I downed as soon as it hit the table. The room was starting to spin. Whiskey. The warm blanket of intoxication was wrapping itself around me and I welcomed it.

  Trish shook her head as if to clear it and looked around the room. Her tone turned conversational
. “What’ve you been up to lately, J.D.? I mean, besides robbing banks.”

  “The Hopi have been good.” I tried my damnedest to focus on her face, but it was getting harder. “I’m a little bit of a handyman. Horse wrangler.” I chuckled to myself. “Spiritual leader.”

  “I’ve always thought those folks did fine out there, but if they’ve got you as a spiritual leader, there must be something horribly wrong.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What do you tell them? Transcendence of shooting squirrels?” She wasn’t looking at me. She squinted hard at the bartender.

  I shook my head. “Hey, you gotta watch out for squirrels.” There were eight empty shot glasses in front of me. Had I drunk eight shots of whiskey? Maybe. I was seeing double. Holy shit, had I drunk sixteen? “Had some visitors from up north. Navajo.”

  “No kidding, really?”

  “They wanted to meet with my tribe’s spiritual leader yesterday.”

  “You didn’t go, did you?”

  I shook my head. “Why would they pick me? I’m about the last person you’d want negotiating or leading spiritually. I’m a warrior, as far as they care. A failed, retired warrior.”

  “Any warrior who lives long enough to retire must have something like worthwhile wisdom.”

  A long while passed in silence. Trish watched me the way someone watches a dog that might need to be put down. I sat there, stewing in my own sense of failure. I’d failed my tribe and my town. I’d failed to catch a horse and I’d failed to rob a bank. Hell, I’d even failed to keep sober.

  It was some damn fine whiskey, though.

  Some men entered from outside and sat down for some poker. They were the same men I’d seen earlier, but the man in the nice suit wasn’t there. These men all wore shabby, threadbare clothes. Trish watched them closely.

  “Why aren’t they upset?” I muttered under my breath.

  “Come again?”

  “Trish,” I said, “tell me what you see over there?”

  “Some fellas playing hold ’em.”

  “What are they wearing?”

  She looked for a good long while. “I don’t see anything special about what they’re wearing.”

  “Describe the farthest guy to me.”

  “Short beard, brown eyes, augmented. Missing a finger on his left hand. He’s wearing a leather duster and a button-down shirt.”

  “Is it shabby?” I was whispering, but my whispers might have been louder than I intended. A couple of the men were casting glances our way.

  “What?”

  “Are his clothes shabby?”

  She didn’t get a chance to answer. Her head cocked to one side. She stood up and checked her weapon. “You’re coming with me, old man,” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet. I swayed there for a moment, but didn’t get a chance to gain my balance because we were out the door.

  My metal arm was dead weight. I staggered, half dragged by Trish. Alcohol sloshed around in my belly and my head felt like it was on backwards. There were lights outside, around the corner of the bank. Drones hovered above casting a brilliant day-bright glow over the area. In the distance, I could hear a familiar buzz, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “What is going on, J.D.?” Trish asked in a rushed whisper.

  “Is it coming back?” I tried to pull her to a stop. “Are things changing back?”

  She looked, wide-eyed, around the town. Shit. It hadn’t even been an hour. All that work and whatever had this town in its grip had already recovered. There must have been a backup already. Folks were moving on as if nothing had happened.

  The buzz stopped.

  It was Tucker’s six-wheeler.

  Trish pulled me again, rounding the corner of the bank. There was an extra body in a heap near the spot where Tucker had made an impromptu door. A deputy right next to the body of the old man. Trish dropped my arm and rushed to the guy.

  “He’s alive,” she said. She drew her weapon, stood up—

  A crack of a gunshot rang out in the night. Trish’s head snapped back, and she landed right next to the deputy.

  The buzz of Tucker’s six-wheeler started again, its odd warble echoing off the hills. I leaned heavily against the wall, trying to make my way over to Trish, but the ground kept swaying underneath my feet.

  “Step to it, if you want a ride,” Tucker said as he hopped off his six-wheeler wearing a metallic mask over his face. He pulled a duffel bag from the trunk in back and disappeared into the bank.

  I fell to my knees in front of Trish. She was still alive, breathing in short gasps. A three-pronged dart stuck out of her forehead, pulsing every couple seconds. No doubt it was a fancy model of the e-cuff that I had on me. She was awake, but the only thing she seemed able to do was glare at me.

  She was going to live. Relief washed over me. My stomach churned on the whiskey, but I held back the nausea and tried to keep my senses about me. Trish had my weapon. I patted her down and found it in one of her coat pockets, holstering it immediately.

  “Flores will find you, Trish. Hell, someone’ll come tonight to investigate what’s going on here now that we’ve made some noise.” I looked up at Tucker as he emerged from the bank carrying a satchel. “This isn’t going as we planned, but you’ll see it was the right thing.”

  Tucker emerged with a grim look on his face. He slung the stun rifle over one shoulder and pulled out the other rifle. He turned to Trish.

  “We can’t let her say anything, J.D.” He stepped up to her and leveled his rifle at her head. From that distance with that high-caliber rifle, no armored skin would hold up. Even if the bullet didn’t penetrate, her skull would be crushed.

  I shifted so my body was between Tuck and the sheriff.

  “No witnesses,” Tuck said. “That’s how we roll.”

  “No killing either.”

  “Has to be done. You knew that once this went south. I’m just cleaning up the mess.”

  Tucker reached into his pocket and tossed a handful of dark cubes into the air. They emanated a high-pitched hum as they hovered up and swarmed around the drone.

  “No witnesses, J.D.”

  His shoulders tensed.

  Before I could think what I was doing, I grabbed at his rifle. He ducked back, throwing me off balance. His knee came up into my hip hard, doubling me over and sending me sprawling to the ground. The man was faster than he looked.

  The muzzle of his rifle pressed into the base of my neck. Tuck breathed hard, uneasily. He swallowed.

  The flying cubes, the drone, and the entire night sky lit up in a series of explosions.

  Then there was darkness.

  “Dammit,” Tuck said. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

  Voices. Shouts of townsfolk looking to investigate.

  Tuck kicked my ribs hard. Bolts of electric pain radiated from my gut; when I recovered, the gun was no longer pressed against my neck and I was still alive. The six-wheeler buzzed and by the time my eyes were adjusted enough to see it, he was far away.

  The duffel bag. It must have been the bulk of the explosives we’d gotten from Court. How much time did I have?

  I grabbed Trish and the deputy, dragging them as best I could by their shirts. We inched our way down, away from the bank.

  The bank lit up in a column of light. It wasn’t so much an explosion as it was a column of pure brilliance. The heat of it struck us in waves, singing the stubble of my beard. There was no concussive blast. This was pure destructive heat.

  Right about then I vomited. I can’t say that I threw up directly on Trish, though it wouldn’t be honest to say that I’d entirely missed.

  When I was sheriff there were plenty of times when an outlaw would do something for good reason. He’d come to that point where he could put himself at the mercy of the law or he could run. The mercy of the court wasn’t an easy thing to deal with, but running always made things worse. They’d break more laws and make their case of justified law-br
eaking that much harder to argue. Hell, I’d sent more men up to Iowa than I’d care to admit in just that circumstance.

  Trish glared at me from where I’d propped her up against a rock. Oh, she was not happy. Taking her hand, I pressed her thumb up to the e-cuff, deactivating it. The jolt of all my tech waking up to find itself in a poisoning emergency caused me to stagger back. Vertigo took me again as my eye adjusted to the false feed.

  An outlaw’s situation always got worse when he ran.

  I ran.

  Chapter 21

  Nothing sobers a man like a nice long jog under the stars. The Milky Way stretched across the belly of the sky, mocking my steps for their insignificance. There were times when I woke to find I was still walking. There were times when no matter how hard I pushed, there weren’t any more steps to be had.

  Trish didn’t follow—or at least, she didn’t find me. Townsfolk gave chase for a short time, but they were easy to lose. It wouldn’t have been hard for an experienced tracker to find me. Trish was good at a lot of things, but she was no tracker. Maybe she hadn’t bothered to try. Whatever the case, I walked all through the night, the whole time debating the benefits of collapsing right there and giving up.

  The pains of my life slipped back in, one at a time. My ribs ached first, a dull poke in the side that expanded as I walked. My legs, my back, my belly—everything took its turn. Each overshadowed the last. By the time I saw my skidder illuminated by the rising sun, my head was hurting worst of all. Light seemed to shine unfiltered directly into my skull, toasting my brain with its radiance.

  Still, every time I stopped, there I was starting again.

  Then I saw him. Francis, standing at the edge of the dead zone, watching me with cold, emotionless eyes. His black duster hung off him like someone had tossed it on a coatrack. His hat was a size too big and a gaunt face framed his hollow eyes.

  “Well,” said Francis, “what did you think?”

  I squinted at him. He was only visible in my right eye, so I knew he wasn’t really there. A projection, then. But how would he project here?

  “It’s peace. Just like we wanted.” A lizard smile crept across Francis’s face. “Peace that lasts. Doesn’t need a war to make it or lawmen to keep it.”