Peace in an Age of Metal and Men

by Anthony Eichenlaub

  A long minute passed. Another set of eyes appeared a short distance away, then another. Three of them. I had no doubt that they could finish me without any real trouble.

  But they didn’t. Moments later, the three sets of eyes disappeared back into the night.

  By then I was nearly all the way around the ranch. Another half-hour would finish the loop. It would also prove me a failure. I’d have to come back and try again in the morning. The idea of it sapped the strength from me and I stumbled, dropping to one knee.

  How long had I been pushing too hard? How long had this been too much? I’d lost sight of reason a long time ago. Nothing but stubborn grit moved me now. Hopeless tasks seemed like all I’d seen for years out in this waste. Hell, hopeless didn’t seem so bad anymore.

  Still, I kept going.

  The last segment of the perimeter went fast. The moon was higher, brighter. The coyotes came back. They were behind me now. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. They sniffed and scratched at my trail. The wind hinted at their stink.

  Running would be foolish, but my pace quickened. The hopelessness of the task choked at me, making my eyes quicker to dismiss the small things that need to be registered to pick up such a tricky trail.

  That’s why I nearly missed it.

  The longhorns’ trail cut like a gorge across the moonlit earth. It was like a road crushed into the ground and kept clear by constant use. Nothing grew anywhere near it, so I knew I was in the right place. My skidder was just on the other side of it, and I hurried to it, spitting mad at my own failure.

  When I crossed the path, though, my foot twisted on the hard, uneven ground. I dropped again, wincing at the tearing sensation in the wounded leg. I stared at the ground, forcing my breath to slow down. Sweat broke on my brow.

  The branch in the path was almost invisible. From any other angle it would have been almost impossible to see. Down near the ground I could see how the plants just a short distance from the longhorns’ path were stunted and crushed. It was only about fifteen meters away, but I would have missed it if I hadn’t fallen.

  I forced myself to my feet and rushed to the impression.

  Cracked clay soil sported broken edges and several tufts of grasses were crushed entirely to the ground. It wasn’t the lone path of something that had been passed once. This was a trail that had been used for months, maybe years.

  Longhorn hoof prints were sunk into the clay. My heart sank. This was just another trail for cattle, then. One of those grass-fed beasts liked to wander from the herd here, nothing more.

  I followed the path a short distance, but soon I’d lost it. Once away from the trail, the path feathered out and nearly disappeared. I lost it and picked it up again three times, making good use of some choice cuss words in the process.

  Limping back to my skidder, I ignored the yips and howls of the coyotes. There were many more now, maybe dozens. Their eyes flashed in the night as they edged closer and closer.

  I jammed my metal hand into the console and threw a leg over the seat. In seconds I was in the air, hovering above the second trail. It was difficult to see from the air. The light of my thrusters made black ink of everything outside of its range. The thrust also crushed plants and scorched the land. It was useless to try to follow a trail from above. The smart move was to get back to Ben’s ranch and rest overnight. Hell, the smarter move would be to rest for a few days. My leg wasn’t getting better and whatever Ben had put on it wasn’t designed to take any kind of continued abuse.

  The night had given me all it was going to give. I spun the skidder around and rocketed back to Ben’s ranch. Once there, I made my way quietly inside, noting that Abi was curled up at Ben’s side on the sofa, just where I’d left them. She had relaxed some and drifted off into a proper sleep. They looked good together. Peaceful. There wasn’t much hope in the world, but I suppose there was that.

  Soon as my boots were off, I was asleep in the rocking chair. It was by far and above the most comfortable place I had ever been in my entire life, and I swear that is the truth.

  Chapter 25

  Don’t ever let a fool tell you sleeping in a rocking chair is comfortable. It sure as hell isn’t. In addition to the burning fire in my calf and the pinging ache of my low battery, I had a kink in my neck and a stiffness in my back that would not go away no matter how I stretched. On the bright side, my ribs felt better, and the stitches on my belly seemed to be oozing clear fluid rather than bleeding. Most folks would take a morning assessment like that and rethink their life choices.

  Ben handed me a cup of coffee without saying a word. The morning was looking better already.

  The brew was bitter and strong. I gave it a minute to warm up my belly.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  “Better.” He took a sip of his own coffee. “But not good. You want biscuits?”

  We went back into the house and my stomach let me know how hungry it was. Biscuits were already on the table, and Ben hurried to the stove, where he’d been making a heavy beef gravy. Grits were cooking too, next to a pile of sizzling sausages. Ben brought the food over to the table, where Abi already sat wearing some of Ben’s old clothes. His shiny leathers with spiked elbows hardly seemed to fit with her wetted-down hair and glassy eyes, but at least she was moving. She perched on her chair and fiddled with a fork, hardly noting my entrance.

  Sitting across from Abi, I made short work of the breakfast. Ben similarly ate like a starving man. The biscuits were wonderful, soft and flakey. The gravy and sausages were hot and just the right amount of greasy. Washed down with coffee, it seemed a fitting feast for a king.

  Abi hardly ate. She picked at a biscuit, but didn’t get far into it before giving up.

  “We need to find your brother,” I said when I was finished eating.

  Ben set his fork down. “Well, sure as shit we do, old man. You just coming to that conclusion?”

  “I saw him yesterday, Ben.” I tapped my modified right eye. “He called during the attack and…” I glanced at Abi. “And he taunted me after what happened to Jo.”

  Abi’s grip tightened on a spoon.

  Ben didn’t seem to notice. “And that’s why you think he’s dangerous?” He leaned forward.

  “I shouldn’t have waited to find him.”

  “But you did.”

  My voice came out louder than I wanted. “I can’t do every damn thing.”

  Ben’s jaw clenched.

  “It doesn’t always have to be me. Plenty a trackers coulda figured out where he went. Hell, the law could probably find him.”

  He stood up, sending his chair sliding across the room. “But I asked you, J.D. You owe this family. You owe me.”

  I swirled the last of my coffee around in the mug and drank it down. “It’s more than that. I don’t owe your family, Ben, but it was wrong to wait so long. I thought I had too much other stuff going on and now Jo’s dead and Abi’s scared as hell.”

  “I ain’t scared,” Abi said, barely loud enough to hear.

  “What are we going to do, then?” Ben asked. “Can you protect Abi? Can I? I take it you didn’t find anything out there?”

  “I ain’t scared,” Abi said a bit louder.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Hell, half of it was in the dark, so it’s worth going over again.” I stood up and cleared my plate. “Only thing I found was a spot where one longhorn splits from the herd on a regular basis. Coyotes too. Hell of a lot of coyotes.”

  At the mention of coyotes, Ben glanced at Abi, like it might frighten her to talk about the creatures. She caught the glance, stood up, and looked him straight in the eye.

  “I ain’t scared,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’m furious.”

  Ben’s jaw worked like he was trying to find something to say.

  “Mad as hell,” Abi continued. “She didn’t even give me a chance.” She stuck a finger out at me. “Just like you’re not giving me a chance.”

  “What do you mean?�
�� asked Ben.

  “I can shoot. I can fight. Aunt Jo knew that, but soon as those monsters came, she shoved me in the safe.” She collapsed back into her chair. “I could have helped. It didn’t need to end like that. She said if they saw me it was over.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder, hoping that it would help comfort her. Some of the tension seemed to ease out of her.

  “Tell you what’s going to happen,” Abi said. “I’ll take J.D.’s skidder back to town. I’m going to clean up and get Auntie Josephine ready for a proper burial. You two are going to find Francis and figure out what the hell he’s up to. If it’s what J.D. said, then you’re going to throw him in a jail or take off his head. I don’t care which.”

  “I can’t leave the ranch,” Ben said. “Not even for a day.”

  She looked at him like he was stupid. “You don’t have it automated?”

  His expression was answer enough.

  Abi sighed. “Fine, but you can help him for a few hours in the morning, then again in the evening.”

  “That’ll work. Morning chores are already done.”

  Abi turned to me. “I’ll meet you back here round sundown. I’ll have Josephine’s rifle and a few other tools. You just need to figure out where we’re going with them and how to get there, all right?”

  I nodded, unsure if there were any other possible response.

  She looked at Ben. He nodded as well, but his look seemed to be more of awe than of the confusion I felt. “Good,” she said. With that, she stood up to leave.

  “How are you going to drive my—”

  “I can drive it.”

  With that, she left and seconds later was in the sky flying away on my skidder.

  “Hey,” Ben said quietly. “Did you say that one longhorn split from the herd?”

  “Yup.”

  “They don’t do that.”

  “This one did.”

  “No. They stay together until they get to the grass. It’s not just for fun. It’s engineered into their genetics. The programming doesn’t force them to stay together, but it suggests pretty damn hard.”

  “If someone wanted to get somewhere a good distance away, and they didn’t want to drive…”

  “They could ride.” He looked at me, biting his lip. “You said there were coyotes out there?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But they’re nocturnal.”

  “Didn’t seem nocturnal yesterday when they attacked the town, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you need a weapon?”

  My hand twitched. “Got one.”

  Ben left for a minute. When he came back he was carrying a shotgun with a short, shiny barrel and a cartridge the size of my forearm. He checked it over, worked the action a few times, and stowed a couple of spare cartridges. He looked at me with a sideways grin.

  “Hell of a weapon,” I said.

  “Haven’t ever been sorry to own it.”

  “I suppose not.” I pulled my pistol out of its holster and handed it to him, handle first. “You mind taking a look at this for me? Hell if I know how it works, and I can’t seem to hit a damn thing with it.”

  He took the weapon and let out a low whistle. Turning it over, he pressed something that I didn’t even know was a button. A laser sight lit up. Another quick movement and a slick little compartment opened on the side, revealing dozens of tiny balls neatly arranged in a magazine.

  “Smith & Wesson BB gun?” Ben smiled. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Where’d you get it?”

  “A BB gun?”

  “Well, not like a toy gun or anything. See these panels here that make up the octagonal barrel? Those are accelerators.”

  “Magnets? Like a rail gun?”

  “No, they’re not magnetic.” He pulled a tool out of his back pocket and used it to check each segmented piece of the barrel. “Gravitic and nucleic, if I remember right. Speeds the ball up to near half the speed of light. Doesn’t even matter if it’s small when the thing’s going that fast.”

  “Why can’t I hit anything with it? How do I sight it in?”

  “Maybe you just need practice.”

  I took the weapon from him and closed it up, switching off the laser sight.

  “Use the laser sight. Nobody uses the little metal ones, J.D. Those are just for show.” He held the front door open for me. “Plus, the gun will auto track to wherever the laser is pointed. Makes it accurate a hell of a lot farther than a pistol has any right.”

  Our first stop was the enormous, black shed. Its photoelectric layering made it sit like a black blotch on the dry dirt, but it housed a hundred huge longhorns.

  “It’s probably not the right path,” I said as I peeled the bandages off my leg. The longhorns were already gone, having lumbered their way out just before we arrived at the barn. “Likely one of your longhorns just got a head worm and nobody noticed.”

  Ben shook his head. “Doesn’t seem likely to me.” He tore open another first-aid kit and wrinkled his nose when he saw my wound. “Hell, J.D., that’s worse than it was before.”

  It felt like it.

  “You gotta stay off it this time. We’re not walking out there like damn fools.” He stuck a thumb out at the corner of the barn, where a small utility truck sat parked. “We’ll take the truck.”

  “Can’t track from a truck.”

  “Like hell you can’t. Maybe you can’t track a person, but we’re tracking a thousand-kilo beast. This’ll work just fine.”

  He was right. The herd instinct wasn’t the only engineered part of those beasts. They also weighed a thousand kilos and stood as tall as the old American Bison with which they’d been spliced. They were a fearsome sight to anyone who didn’t realize that docility was engineered into them as well.

  Once my leg was bandaged, we climbed into Ben’s truck. It was a closed cab, with an open bed that was littered with tools and equipment. I recognized some of the tech that Ben had been working on days ago, including the drones and harnesses. The young rancher jabbed at the manual controls and we lifted off.

  When we passed the point where the longhorn’s trail split off, Ben clicked his tongue. The clusters of windmills made it impossible to see very far, but the trail was obvious from a few meters up. After the initial split, there was a long stretch of trampled, dead grass. Now that we knew where to look, there wasn’t any missing it. This wasn’t a trail someone had walked once to get off the property. This was something a giant had walked on a daily basis for years.

  “How often did he come out here?” I asked after a few minutes.

  Ben didn’t answer right away. He seemed to roll his words around on his tongue before saying them. “My big brother Jason and I were busy holding everything together. The rest of the kids pitched in some, but nobody really had time to take proper care of them. Francis was big enough he should have been working, but he didn’t.”

  “So when Jason left…”

  “I had a choice. Work my ass off and keep the ranch or sell out like he did and move to the city.”

  The trail slid by below us. After a while, the dry patches of prairie grasses got greener and more frequent. Thick cacti spotted the terrain as the windmills thinned out.

  “The city’s no place for me. I might be hot shit out here, but I know enough not to think I’m nothing in Austin.” Ben got a far-off look. “There were some strong words between me and Jason. I regret it, but not enough to call him up. Not yet.”

  “And Francis in all this?”

  “Francis was there at sunup for breakfast. He was there at sundown for supper.”

  A kilometer went by, then two. At one point we passed over a lone longhorn, but we paid it no mind. We didn’t need the steer to show us where we were going. The land swayed gently below us, the rise and fall of rolling hills getting bigger and bigger as we moved west. Windmills covered the land at first, but as the hills got steeper, soon the mills only adorned the tops of the hills. The trail joined up with the wispy path of a dry
creek.

  The ground had transformed into flowing emerald waves of grass. Hills on either side blocked the furnace winds and shortened the day. Water from some unseen spring must have kept life thriving in this hidden place.

  Ben set the truck down at the edge and I hopped out. Brutal heat yanked the air from my lungs. Such heat so early in the day was not a good sign, especially in such a protected valley. I shrugged it off and started making my way forward, following the trail again. From up close it was easy to spot. The earth was soft there, and soon I was able to find some human footprints.

  Ben hurried up behind me. “The longhorns have different feeding grounds on the property. We rotate them around, but this one’s not on the map. I’m sure of it.”

  I held up a finger to shush him.

  “Wait here,” I said. “Keep an eye out.”

  “For what?”

  “Got a bad feeling about this. Something’s fishy.”

  The trail led a short distance to where a grove of mesquite nestled up against the side of a hill. The small trees were packed in tight, hardly passable, but when I got close I could see there was an opening right where the trail went. I had to crouch down and move sideways to get through, but it was only thirty meters until a clearing opened up, revealing a door in the side of the hill.

  The door was a black metal slab stuck into the side of the hill at an angle. It resembled the old cellar double doors put in as tornado shelters in the old days. There were no hinges visible, nor were there any handles or locks. Across the clearing from the door was a single black metal post.

  “So this is where you’ve been,” I muttered under my breath.

  The air above the post shimmered with wavy iridescence. The image flickered in the sunlight, seeming to sway in the warm breeze. At first it was hard to make out the image, but after a short warm-up, it became clear. It was a keypad, floating in the air. Why wouldn’t they just make a regular keypad? Didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

  Regardless, the panel expected some kind of code. I scratched the scruff of my chin a few times, guessed at a few numbers. No good.

  There was a slot on the side of the column, however, that looked mighty familiar. It closely resembled that slot on the console of my skidder, the one Jo had installed. Tentatively, I connected my hand.