Writers of the Future, Volume 29

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “S’almost midday,” Rey said, after a time. He sounded bored. “Anyone see anything?”

  “No,” Mara said, staring down the road to where it faded into the horizon.

  It was remarkable how far she could see.

  Keera said nothing for a time, but then brought her rifle to bear, her expression firm. “There,” she said. “Dust.”

  Mara swiveled to look and at first saw nothing. But after a moment, it appeared: a cloud of dun-colored dust, rising in the distance like the trail of a snake.

  “Could be animals,” she said.

  “It’s not.” Keera and Rey moved up behind the log, rifles readied, no tension in their faces. Keera looked back at Mara and nodded. Mara nodded in return and shifted in the copse, coating herself in shadows.

  They waited silently. Mara scratched an itch on her nose; Rey shook his head fiercely to dislodge a fly. It’s too long, Mara thought. They’re taking too long. They must have seen us.

  Keera lifted a hand, never taking her eyes from the road. “Scythes,” she whispered. Rey nodded and readied himself. Mara counted the seconds, lips moving silently—one, two, three, four, five, six—

  Keera fired, shuddering back with the recoil, then Rey fired. The shots were deafening in the little copse, the shock of them traveling through Mara’s blood and leaving her shaky. She saw Keera’s trigger hand go to the bolt on her rifle and tense, then relax. The men were dead.

  “Easy,” Keera said, pulling back the bolt to release the spent cartridge. A curl of smoke and the smell of gunpowder wafted out and disappeared into the warm air. Keera’s hand shook a little, like it always did after she killed. Rey clapped her on the shoulder and she smiled at him.

  Mara scrambled forward to the downed log, hooking her elbows over the top and peering out into the road. “They were harvesters?”

  “Scythes on their backs,” Rey said.

  Mara hesitated. “We’ve got to do something with the bodies.”

  “Leave them for the birds,” Rey said, and chuffed something like a laugh.

  “We’ll pull them into the woods.” Keera got to her feet. “No harvester deserves a burial—the animals will take care of them.”

  They stepped out of the copse and onto the road, sunlight flooding Mara’s eyes and making her blink.

  The bodies lay half on, half off the trail, heaped in careless piles. Two men in rough-spun and denim. One wore a black hat that had slipped back when he fell and cradled the back of his skull where it lay on the ground. A gray horse stood away from them with its head down.

  Both men were headshot, as Mara and Keera had been trained to do. One had a round dark hole in the middle of his forehead, like a bloody third eye. The other shot had nearly missed—the second man’s face was blown off from cheek to ear, a red ruin with the white of bone and broken teeth standing out.

  “Wait,” Keera said. Mara turned and saw her face was pale. “Where are their scythes?”

  Neither man carried anything like a scythe. They were empty-handed, in fact; the horse was laden with supplies, but the men had nothing but their own blood in their hands.

  “I saw them,” Keera said, her voice ticking higher.

  Mara looked to Rey.

  “I saw them, too.” Rey’s hand closed convulsively on the stock of his rifle. “They had them on their backs; they reflected the sun. I saw them.”

  “All right,” Mara said, softly. “It’s fine.”

  She knelt down by the body of the man who’d been neatly shot and tipped its head so its neck was not so unnaturally crooked. Its eyes were open, but she didn’t bother closing them. They wouldn’t have stayed. She picked up its right hand and examined it, running her thumb over the palm and the mounts of the fingers, feeling for calluses. The hand was as smooth as a preacher’s.

  “It’s no matter,” Keera said. “No one comes this way if they don’t mean us harm.”

  “You’re right.” Mara pressed the dead hand back to its chest, lying across the heart. “The Lady said they were harvesters, anyway.”

  Ray said, “We still have to move them.”

  “I’ll get the horse,” Mara offered, and left them standing quiet in the road. Her sister and her sister’s husband. The two dead men.

  The horse had gotten tangled in brush, its long split bridle reins wrapped around the branches. She stooped to untangle them, saying quiet nonsense to the horse to settle it. The reins were tacky with blood all along their length. She thought it might try to run as soon as it was free, but it didn’t. It stood next to her and leaned into her touch. She stroked its neck and then led it away. Its gray coat was spattered with red.

  She tied the horse short to a tree limb, so it wouldn’t run. Sacks of grain lay across its back, she saw, and supplies enough for a pair of travelers. She riffled through the packs, wondering. They seemed to be traveling heavy for men planning to raid and kill. Then she closed everything back up and tried to put it from her mind. She went back to help with the bodies.

  Rey took one body by the armpits and dragged it away himself. Mara and Keera managed the one with the ruined face, each taking an arm. They dragged it to a low spot with tall grass and spreading trees and left it lying next to the other one. The razor grass folded around them and hid them from view, and it sliced at Mara’s arms and ankles as she knelt to lay the body down, then stepped away.

  Rey closed the dead eyes and put flat river stones over the lids to weigh them down.

  “Let’s go,” Keera said. She had folded her arms across her chest, elbows in tight to her sides. “We’ve spent too much time here already.”

  They left the bodies and returned to the path. The razor grass left long red scratches wherever their skin was bare, but no one complained. Keera went ahead to gather their things, Rey stepping quickly after. Mara hung back as they knelt together, slinging the rifles back over their shoulders. Rey said something quietly to Keera and she shook her head once, very sharply.

  Mara untied the horse from its tree and looped the bloody reins around her fist. It twitched away at the smell and she laid a hand flat on its thin neck, whispering to it. Then they left: Mara, Keera, Rey, and the dead men’s horse. They walked slower than they had on the way there, and quieter.

  Before she got far, Mara turned back to look at the river road. Some big bird had settled down where they’d left the bodies, pleased for the meal. A big dark bird with hulking shoulders. It ducked its head and came up with something stringy and dripping in its beak.

  She turned back to the Goldwater road and didn’t look back again.

  Mara dropped the horse off in her little post-and-rail barn that for years now had housed nothing but possums. Then she took the things it had carried and went up to store them in the house. Enough provisions in there to keep a pair of travelers for a couple weeks, plus the sacks of grain. Maybe for trading.

  But Keera and Rey both had seen scythes.

  She piled the supplies away and thought on it. But every time she got close to it, she saw instead the dead man’s eyes slipped closed, weighted down with rocks. The ruin that was his face.

  By the time she finally made it back to the barn to feed the horse and rub it down, Rey was already doing it.

  “Oh,” she said stupidly, watching him rubbing the horse with a rag in brisk circles. He had nice hands, long-fingered and deft. She’d liked that about him, before her sight went cloudy and everything got complicated. “Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s a nice horse.”

  “Too thin,” she said.

  He shrugged. “That ain’t his fault.”<
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  They lapsed quiet. Rey kept rubbing the dirt up out of the horse’s coat and Mara stepped over to pet its nose. The horse had its eyes half closed.

  “Your eyes still good?”

  “Yeah,” Mara said. “They are. For now.”

  Rey nodded, made some approving noise. “That’s pretty long, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mostly the Lady’s treatments came and went in a blink, Mara’s vision clearing and then fading within the space of a day. Never long enough to make a difference. Once it had lasted three days. This time—

  “Well, I hope it’s for good,” Rey said.

  “Me too.” She smiled a hard smile. “Of course, it’s a little late now, right.”

  Rey kept silent.

  Mara retreated back to sit on the beam between the two tie-stalls, splintery and slightly too tall for comfort. The tips of her boots just kissed the ground if she stretched her legs. “You must have known it would be you, even before our parents arranged it,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  Rey stilled for a moment, then returned to his work. His hands found an itchy spot on the horse’s withers and the horse stretched out its neck, wiggling its upper lip in happiness. “Yeah, I did.”

  “And that was all right with you?”

  “It was an honor,” he said. “I was the best shot in the Goldwater. I was chosen to help guard it from harvesters.”

  Mara picked at the wood of the rail, peeling back loose, stringy pieces with her fingernails. “You never had anything else you wanted to do?”

  “Nothing that mattered.” He patted the horse on the shoulder and stepped back, putting the rag aside. “What’s this all about?”

  She didn’t respond. Rey waited, fussing with the horse. “I think sometimes that it’s a sad place we live in, where a little girl gets raised with a gun in her hand and her husband’s picked for her because he’s the best at killing.”

  “Someone’s got to keep this town safe,” Rey said, quietly.

  “Yeah,” Mara said, looking up at him. “But it should be me. Keera’s life should be mine. She wasn’t raised to this, like I was.”

  “Keera does a fine job,” Rey said, shoulders stiff. “It ain’t nobody’s fault what happened.”

  “I know,” Mara said. “I know.”

  Rey stepped forward and touched her shoulder gently, as if she might spook. “Come on out of here. It’s been a strange day, but it’s done, yeah? Tomorrow things’ll look different.”

  He winced as he thought over what he’d said but Mara laughed. “Maybe they will,” she said. “What do I know?”

  She hopped down off the rail and they left the horse in the barn for the night with a little of the grain it’d carried on its back. The next day she’d have to go to one of the neighbors, arrange to pick up some hay. It might be good, having something living to care for.

  They didn’t talk as they left the barn and walked the bare-dirt path that led back to their houses. When they came to the fork, where Rey would go on straight and Mara would turn right, he hesitated as if he would say something, but Mara cut him off with an easy smile. “Thanks for the help with the horse,” she said. “Tell Keera I’ll see her tomorrow out in the field.”

  He nodded and they parted. The smile slipped from Mara’s face as quickly as it had come.

  The shadows were long when she got to the front porch of her house, the last of the sun gleaming through the scrubby trees. She stood a moment watching the sun set, squinting into the light. And then she heard a scrabble of claws over her roof, and the whirr of gears. A clockwork finch launched itself off the edge of her house and into the air.

  “What the hell’re you doing here?” she said, her heart hammering.

  The finch didn’t answer. It flew in low loops overhead, crying the same thing over and over in its shrill, rusty voice: “Well? Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you see it?”

  Mara watched the bird for a while, and then went inside and closed the door.

  Two weeks after the incident on the river road, Mara woke early in the morning, lay still under her quilts, and counted wood grains in the ceiling. As she counted, something in her gut relaxed, something that awoke every morning tight and scared that this morning, she wouldn’t be able to count them.

  Then she got up, dressed, and made herself some chicory. She looked out the narrow kitchen window that faced the turnip field and wondered if Keera was there already. She finished her chicory and rinsed the cup. Then she went to the barn and tacked up the dead man’s horse.

  If the gray horse thought this strange, he made no mention, taking the saddle and the bridle with the same quiet timidity he showed lipping carrots from her hand. He was a good-natured horse, respectful and docile. The last horse they’d taken from a dead harvester had been headstrong and young, a barely broke roan gelding that they’d given to Rey. That one was still prone to little displays of temper and meanness, with a wicked sideways spin. Not the sort of horse she would choose to ride on a hunt, to be certain.

  Mara tied the gray to a rail outside the barn and then stepped back inside. In the empty stall where she kept the hay there were three trunks, each one small and neat and locked. She took a silver key from the pocket of her coat and fitted it to the lock on the first trunk. The lid opened easily, without a catch or hesitation. The inside smelled of oil and metal. She pulled a wrapped bundle from the trunk, about the length of her arm. She closed the trunk, locked it, and returned to the horse.

  She stepped into the stirrup and swung her leg over the gray’s back. She settled the wrapped bundle over the front of the saddle, balanced atop her thighs. The horse shifted his weight uneasily but didn’t move. She nudged him with her heel and they set off at a swinging jog, away from her little house, away from the turnip field.

  On horseback, the trip out to the river road would take half the time it had on foot. She didn’t hurry, though, and let the gray set his own pace. His ears twitched back and forth like bird’s wings and she wondered if he remembered this path. How at the end of it lay a slick of dried blood.

  But the air was very fine, warm and still with nothing stirring but insects, click-click-clicking in the grass. So she kept a loose rein, her face turned up to the sun, and didn’t think too much about what she planned to do.

  Most of the fields stood empty. She saw only one man out, paused over his crops and leaning on his hoe. He hailed her and she stopped. He asked Mara if she and her sister would attend the wedding in town, a few weeks away. She said they would, though she hadn’t talked to Keera about it.

  When the path ran into the river road she turned right, the way they’d gone to ambush the harvesters. She rode up to the place and stopped the horse but there wasn’t much trace left. All the blood had churned into dust and flaked away. She got down and toed at the dirt with her boot. The horse stood by her shoulder and snorted long bursts of breath—catching some scent in the air, or maybe just ghosts.

  Mara returned to the vale where the bodies were hidden. Though some part of her expected them to be gone, they were still there, lying in the razor grass. Scavengers had been at them, and everything soft was eaten, leaving sunken holes in their faces and their bellies and their throats. The smell of rot was strong enough to make Mara’s eyes water and her throat sting.

  “What were you?” she asked the dead men. “Why did you come here?”

  A black beetle crawled out the bottom of one man’s jaw.

  She turned and left the bodies where they lay and went back up to the river road. She walked on foot with the horse beside her. When she reached a
clearing on the side of the road, with open space and big, mature trees, she stopped and pulled down the long bundle she’d taken from the chest that morning. She unwrapped it and let the cloth fall to the ground. The feeling of the wood and metal under her fingers was just as familiar as she’d known it would be, as if she’d never put it away.

  She fussed with the rifle for a few minutes, making sure all the parts were clean and working. Then she breathed in and raised it to her shoulder. There was a tree with a big burl in the center, like a target, and she squinted one eye shut to aim.

  She breathed out, and fired.

  Much later she sat on the grass in the clearing with the rifle leaning against her shoulder and looked up at the spattering of shot deep in the burl. She couldn’t put a shot just where she wanted it anymore.

  “Missed you in the field this morning,” Keera said behind her.

  Mara leapt to her feet, the rifle in her hands. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “Didn’t think you were gonna shoot me,” Keera said, eyeing the gun.

  “Did you walk all the way out here?”

  “Yeah. I thought I might find you here.” For the first time, Mara noticed the bag lying on the ground by her feet. Keera’s rifle was there, too. “I’ve got something I need to do,” Keera said. “Figured this was as good a time as any.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  Keera didn’t answer. She stepped up next to her sister and looked over at the trees, with their peppering of deep pits. “Looks pretty good. I didn’t know you were gonna take it up again.”

  “It’s been two weeks.” She didn’t want to say it out loud, that she might be able to see again, forever. Things like that couldn’t be said, lest the sound of them in the air prove them false. “I thought I’d try.”

  “You don’t need to,” Keera said. “Rey and I, we do all right. You don’t need to do anything if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to.”

  “Why?” Keera asked, quietly.