The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Let’s hope it’s not also the start of the grievous wounding process.”

  “Marzi, here in the desert, all we’ve got is hope.”

  They walked in silence for a while, exchanging glances when the hardpan became a rutted coach road, but neither of them saying anything about it. The heat was steady and strong, the air dry as a pumice stone and hungry for moisture, but Marzi wasn’t thirsty, nor was she sweating overmuch. There were some advantages to wandering in a largely metaphorical desert, it seemed.

  “Um, Marzi? What are those?” Lindsay pointed toward an expanse of reddish sand. It might have been the surface of Mars over there. Marzi squinted and saw tiny shapes, just blobs at this distance, approaching over the sand. They moved quickly, fluidly, growing larger.

  Marzi knew what they were. It wasn’t surprising that she could identify them, even from so far away. After all, she’d created them.

  “Comanche,” she said.

  “Fuck,” Lindsay said. “Should we run?”

  “We can’t outrun them. Besides, they like it when you run.”

  The Comanche in Marzi’s comic weren’t much like the real tribe, though they had a common origin. In reality, they’d been a fierce, warlike people—the name “Comanche” was taken from the language of a neighboring tribe, and literally meant “always against us.” The real Comanche had been famed for their horseback-riding prowess and their skill with spears and arrows. While other tribes used horses primarily for transportation, the Comanche seldom left horseback, not even dismounting during raids, preferring to fight from the saddle. They were excellent trick-riders, too, capable of hanging upside-down beneath a galloping horse, firing arrows, or even throwing fourteen-foot lances. They were a proud, ferocious people, one of the great terrors faced by the settlers. Bad treaties and overwhelming enemies had finally broken the Comanche—but not in Marzi’s comic. In the land beyond the Western Door, the Comanche had realized the futility of their battle against the white men, and made recourse to dark powers—such powers were always lurking in the pages of Rangergirl. The Comanche made a deal with demons in the desert, and received an army of chimerical monsters to use for mounts, mix-up beasts with wings, claws, scales, and fangs, each lethal, each different from the next. The chief rode a huge manticore, and was reputed to play chess with it. The battle leader rode a sphinx, and people whispered that the man and the monster were lovers. With the help of their vicious mounts, the Comanche retained control of a large part of the plains. They were not the Outlaw’s allies—he wasn’t the being they’d dealt with—but they were no friends of the beleaguered settlers, either. The tribe as a whole was slowly becoming monstrous, and some of the children were born with tails or the jaws of serpents or talons instead of fingers. The abominations were killed at birth, but that took its toll, too; the tribe’s numbers were dwindling. Their territory was changing as well, the sand becoming red, the air taking on a bitter smell, fumaroles opening in the ground. The demons the Comanche had turned to for salvation were transforming them, making the Comanche like themselves, making their homeland a hell. Marzi hadn’t decided yet what would ultimately become of the Comanche, whether they’d become irredeemably evil, or if some small part of the tribe might find redemption by destroying the rest. As the Comanche of her imagination approached her over the sands, Marzi wished she’d given that subject more thought.

  Rangergirl had been in this situation once, faced by the chief of the Comanche. What had she done? She’d parlayed, let the chief know she was tracking important prey, a monster from the depths of a silver mine that was rampaging across the plains, killing settlers and Indians alike. The chief had given her free passage across his territory, though his smiling, urbane manticore had wanted to devour her “womanly parts” as a toll.

  But that was in her comic, and it wouldn’t work out that way here. She had to remember that, appearances aside, these weren’t her comic-book Comanche. They were denizens of the medicine lands who were, in some fundamental way, similar to Marzi’s imagined tribe. And what were the basic qualities of that tribe?

  Fierce. Proud. Violent. Not fond of intruders.

  “Draw your guns, Lindsay. Shoot the guy in the lead, riding the sphinx.”

  “What, if he goes down, they all go down? Or they make you their new leader because you killed the old one?”

  “No. He’s just the most dangerous.”

  “But Ray said my guns won’t work! They’re just special effects!”

  “I think he’s mistaken. I think your guns won’t kill the things that live here, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. They’ll be noisy, the bullets will hurt, but the spirits won’t actually die.”

  The Comanche came, dust flying up around them, reddening the air, and they were totally quiet, without war cries or shouts; the silence was more unnerving than screams would have been.

  “Marzi, they’re throwing spears or something!”

  “Yes,” Marzi said. There was no time to tell her not to worry about the spears and arrows she could see. If you saw arrows coming at you, they were approaching at an angle, and would likely miss. The ones that hit you came point-first, and you couldn’t see those at all. “Fire!” Marzi said, knowing Lindsay had never fired a gun before, and her accuracy would be for shit. The tide of monster-mounted Comanche presented a broad target, but still. She wished Lindsay had a tommy gun, something wildly inaccurate anyway, but that sprayed such a torrent it wouldn’t matter; when it rains bullets, everyone gets wet.

  Then she heard the deafening sound of automatic weapon fire, and Lindsay’s thin high scream of surprise. Lindsay did have a tommy gun now, and against the laws of physics, she wasn’t being spun around by the recoil, but stood her ground, firing. It was astonishing.

  But then, Marzi had made sketches of a woman stagecoach robber armed with a sentient submachine gun, hadn’t she? She’d just now imagined Lindsay into the role.

  The chimera mounts began to fall as Lindsay swept her gun across them, blood spraying. Up close, Marzi saw that the monsters were horribly diverse—beetle mandibles, tentacles dragging on the sand, jointed crab legs, overlapping scales. The first rank of monsters fell, howling and thrashing, to Lindsay’s gun, and they formed a barrier to the creatures rushing behind them, and even the uninjured mounts stumbled and tripped over their fallen fellows, throwing their riders. The unhorsed Comanche mewled and crawled weakly, helpless without their symbiotic mounts. The injured chimera were more than a wall, now; they were a trap, their spikes and flailing claws and grinding mouths inadvertently injuring their allies. They were making plenty of noise now, not war cries but howls of pain.

  Lindsay’s gun stopped chattering, and she and Marzi stared at the heap of groaning monsters a dozen yards away. The Comanche looked at Marzi and Lindsay with flat murder in their eyes, but none of them could do more than writhe or crawl among their fallen lances. The battle leader was pinned beneath his mount, the broken-legged sphinx licking at his bloodied face tenderly. None of them was dead, though.

  Marzi’s ears still rang from the gunfire. She’d never even pulled the trigger on her own gun. “Lindsay, let’s get out—” she said, but then Lindsay screamed and pointed to the sky.

  Marzi looked up and saw a black dot in the blue, growing rapidly larger, screaming down toward them through the air—was it a meteor? Whatever it was, she couldn’t run, couldn’t move, and then it was blotting out most of her vision.

  The thing hit the ground with a heavy thump, but not an explosion, and Marzi looked at its dinner-plate-sized, mindless black eyes, its overlapping segments of armor, its six nastily barbed legs. It was a flea the size of a small car. It must have been at the rear of the initial charge, and jumped—a normal flea could jump four hundred times its own height—and landed here.

  The Comanche on its back swung down. He wore an elaborate leather harness, tethered by springy cords to dozens of points on the flea’s body, so he could have a full range of movement without leaving his mount
. He swooped in close, snatched Lindsay’s gun, and whooped, aiming at them and pulling the trigger.

  The gun didn’t fire. Marzi concentrated fiercely on that thought, that it wouldn’t fire; it was a gun with a mind, and it wouldn’t shoot its allies. Disgusted, the Comanche tossed the gun down, and the flea snapped it up with a flicker of its frightful jaws, and swallowed. The Comanche swung back up to his mount’s back and took the reins.

  Marzi drew and fired her Peacemaker into the Comanche’s chest, then swung the pistol down to put a bullet in the flea’s eye.

  The flea fell, and its rider dangled upside-down in his web of straps, blood running down his chest, his neck, and onto his face. A few drops fell to the sand.

  The other Comanche and their wounded mounts stopped howling. They all stared at the dead flea, its dead rider.

  Dead.

  “We’d better go,” Marzi said.

  “I don’t think they’re going to do anything else,” Lindsay said. Her eyes were glassy. This was too much, too fast; it had all happened in moments.

  “I know,” Marzi said. “But I can’t look at them anymore.” She holstered her gun. She wanted to vomit. Rangergirl gunned down monsters all the time. Why had Marzi never written about the guilt, the shame, the outrage at one’s own capacity for violence? It didn’t even matter that it was self-defense—imminent danger made such action necessary, made it possible, but it didn’t make it easy, or even right. They were the ones trespassing here, after all, not the Comanche.

  For the first time, Marzi wondered if she’d be able to perform whatever acts of violence might be necessary to stop the Outlaw.

  But she had to. It was that, or let countless people die, and she had to choose the lesser death. “Could” or “couldn’t” didn’t even come into it.

  “Let’s go,” Marzi said, and they set off into the deeper desert, a tribe of silent wounded monsters at their backs.

  As they left, they heard flapping wings, and saw enormous, almost humanoid vultures spiraling down to eat the dead.

  Another Jump to Hell

  * * *

  The land became more hilly as they traveled, until the horizon went from a distant, hazy line to something sharp and up close, just the top of the next hill. They crested a hill and looked down at a black shape snaking across the valley, roughly perpendicular to their path. They stood watching for a while. “It’s a steam engine,” Lindsay said at last. “See the smoke puffing up?”

  Marzi nodded. A black locomotive moved slowly across the plain in the far distance, black metal gleaming in the sun, cloud-white billows rising from the smokestack. There were passenger cars, a seemingly endless line of them, stretching away behind the engine.

  “Who’s driving it?” Lindsay said. “And who’s riding on it? It looks like a lot of people.”

  “In my comic,” she said, but Lindsay interrupted her.

  “Oh, God, the bone train? You’re telling me that’s a locomotive to the underworld?”

  Marzi shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s something we’re perceiving as the train to the underworld, something similar in function, maybe, or . . . I don’t know, maybe not similar at all, but just close enough. I don’t really understand the rules.”

  “This is creepy stuff, Marzi. It’s starting to get to me. And this sky, Jesus, it’s so fucking big, it stretches from edge to edge, you know? It makes me feel tiny. . . .” Lindsay shook her head. “I never understood agoraphobia, but I think I’m starting to.”

  “I don’t think people like us are meant to be in a place like this. Our minds are working overtime trying to translate all the data, trying to make the stuff we’re seeing make sense to our eyes, projecting it all through the weird Western filter of my Rangergirl comics. It’s bound to be a strain.” And yet, it wasn’t really a strain, not for Marzi—presumably because she was the guardian. Lindsay didn’t have whatever special resources Marzi did, and she was starting to look a little wide-eyed and dazed. Marzi put her arm around her. “We can take it slow, stop whenever you want, you can close your eyes, lean on me . . .”

  Lindsay nodded gratefully, squeezing her eyes shut. “I always thought I’d love to do the whole Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland thing, going to a strange new world, but it’s hard. I can feel things aren’t right, or I’m not right, or something, and I see movement from the corners of my eyes, like the landscape is filling itself in, so it’ll be whole by the time I look at it straight on.” She inhaled sharply, then released a long, shaky breath. “I am not a proper astral adventurer.”

  “We’ll get through it, Lindsay,” Marzi said.

  Lindsay opened her eyes and then, gently, kissed Marzi on the lips. Marzi was surprised, but she didn’t freeze or pull away. “Thank you,” Lindsay said. She scowled. “Can’t you do something about the sun, though? It’s weird, being this hot and not being sweaty or anything.”

  “I don’t think the sun’s going to set anytime soon.”

  Lindsay rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. In Rangergirl there’s that whole prophecy, right?”

  Marzi nodded. “In the land beyond the Western Door it’s always high noon, but once the land is free of evil, the sun will set, and the girl who won the West will walk away, into the sunset, never to return; giving her kingdom to the people.” Marzi grimaced. “It didn’t seem so silly when I wrote it.”

  “It’s got a certain pulp majesty, I always felt,” Lindsay said. “Bet you would’ve written your comics differently if you’d known you were going to have to walk through them, huh?”

  “There would’ve been more restaurants, trees, and swimming pools, yeah.”

  “I don’t believe I’d get into a swimming pool in this place. You’d probably find the Midgard serpent living at the deep end or something.” She shaded her eyes and looked down. “There’s the caboose, finally. I guess we should keep going.”

  They went down the hill, losing their whole-landscape view, and then Marzi stopped, listening to what sounded like distant thunder. “Aw, fuck,” she said softly.

  Lindsay raised her eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “I think it’s . . . buffalo.”

  Lindsay nodded. “Of course it’s buffalo. What else would it be?”

  “I just did sketches for this. It didn’t make it into the comic because I couldn’t see where it was going . . . shit. I think it’s white buffalo. Bone white.”

  “You’re going to have to be a little more explicit, Marzi,” Lindsay said.

  “In my original idea, the bone train was followed by a herd of stampeding, skeletal buffalo—they were like psychopomps, Western Valkyries, there to pick up stray souls, or people who jumped from the train, or . . . I never worked out exactly what they were, because I decided not to use them. But it sounds like they’re coming.”

  “Or something like them,” Lindsay said. “Something that likes to pick up stray souls?”

  They looked at one another.

  “I’d say ‘run,’ ” Marzi said, “but I don’t know where we’d run to. It sounds like they’re pretty far away, running through another valley. . . . If they are following the train, we should be fine, right?”

  “Right. I am officially reassured.”

  They hunkered down, protected from the thunderous noise by the hillside. The sound swelled, like the crescendo of an all-percussion symphony; there was the sound of bony hooves hammering hard-packed earth, and along with that the sound of bones clacking together, and in her mind Marzi could see the creatures, rushing in a herd shaped like a wedge. She could imagine every joint, every bone wholly scoured of flesh, if these creatures had ever had flesh. Then Marzi realized what they were: the ghosts of all the buffalo slaughtered during westward expansion. Those stampeding, skeletal creatures weren’t shepherds or guardians; they were the vengeful dead, and the humans on the train to the underworld were finally in their territory again. If any poor souls missed the train they would be ground beneath those hooves forever, smashed and ground into the finest particles, int
o constituent—but still conscious—atoms.

  Marzi moaned. Because if the noise over the hill hadn’t been a herd of skeletal white buffalo before, it certainly was now. She had to get her imagination under control. She shaped this place, after all, she defined—

  Marzi stood up, slowly. Lindsay tugged at her trouser leg. “Are you crazy?” She had to shout to be heard over the clattering thunder of hooves.

  “No,” Marzi said. “It’s all right. We’re safe. They can’t hurt us.”

  “And you’re sure about that?”

  “Yes,” she said simply, and that was enough for Lindsay, who stood up, too. “We’re not dead,” Marzi explained. “They hate the living, too, but they can’t hurt us.” That was true. She’d decided it was true. She went to the top of the hill, and Lindsay followed.

  They looked at the bone white cloud of dust, which filled the sky in that direction, and then at the tiny-by-comparison herd of white buffalo running after the black train. They were broad-shouldered, thin-legged things, each one as white as fine china, making a sound like castanets, like maracas, but like nothing so much as thousands of bones grinding and banging together. After a few moments the sound began to fade, and the herd disappeared from view. The cloud of bone dust still hung in the air.

  “We’ve gone far enough,” Marzi said, and knew it to be true, made it be true. “The scorpion oracle is here, now.”

  “What—” Lindsay began, but Marzi held up her hand, and Lindsay fell silent. Marzi pointed at the cloud of dust, which was beginning to dissipate.

  In the depths of the cloud, revealed as the dust settled, a structure stood, part mountain, part walled fortress, a lumpish, squat thing of granite, imposing and vast.

  “What’s that?” Lindsay said.

  “It’s where the scorpion oracle lives,” Marzi said. “Where the rattlesnake sphinx lives, in my comic, but they’re not that different—wise and dangerous creatures. I think it’s worth noting that the scorpion oracle appeared to me, not as something I’d already created, but as something I might have created. You see? The scorpion oracle is the other side of the coin from the Outlaw: It’s life, it’s creative, it’s not totally dependent on me. But I can control it. A little, at least.” She gestured. “That building is my version of the Arizona Territorial Penitentiary, the Devil’s Island of the desert. In real life the prison was bordered by desert, a river, and a town full of people who liked nothing better than shooting escaped prisoners.” As she spoke, the sound of running water filled the air, and a fast-moving river . . . insinuated itself into the landscape, curving around the prison. A town—clearly a ghost town, abandoned—grew on the other side of the prison, some buildings popping up like mushrooms after rain, others seemingly precipitating out of the still-settling cloud of dust. Lindsay gaped, but for Marzi it was just like drawing a picture, only on a bigger page. The hills faded away, flattening out into a brutal plain of hardpacked earth. “There was a Gatling gun on a turret over the courtyard, and once when a group of prisoners tried to escape, the warden’s wife fired it into the crowd, mowing the prisoners down. This was the place where the worst criminals were sent. It’s all granite, and iron bars, and as near to escape-proof as they could make a prison in those days. There’s even a snake pit. An honest-to-god snake pit. And in my version, it’s even worse, it’s bigger and meaner, it grows like a tumor. It’s a haunted prison full of hate and poison and snakes, and the rattlesnake sphinx, of course, lives in the snake pit.” Marzi looked at Lindsay, who took a step backward, apparently startled by something she saw in Marzi’s eyes. “But here it’s a scorpion pit, and a scorpion oracle lives there. We have to go talk to it. We have to ask it a question.”