by Brom Kearne
11
The town of Webster Grove grew up on the divide between Bradenfield and the Western Frontier. It came to be known as the Gateway to the West, and it was over this narrow bend in the Old Foss that westward trekkers found their easiest point of crossing. The location also boasted the unique advantage of being the closest point between three different provinces, and so it naturally became the central hub for the quickest and most efficient trade routes that passed between Bradenfield, Spen’s Span, and the Fiann. The Old Foss itself provided fast and easy access for sailors to the Gorges Linger Mountains to the north, and the Deerwere Delta and Level Shore to the south.
The Old Foss curved as it passed through Webster Grove so the immediate land west of the river was enclosed in a half-moon of fertile land. This rich soil provided for perfect farmland, and as the town grew it facilitated the westward trek as pioneers pushed further and further into the unclaimed wilderness by providing a base of free-flowing food and supplies.
As the pioneers settled into the west, Webster Grove came to represent not just the gateway, but also the divide between the two halves of Bradenfield. The town on the eastern side of the river was grown with merchants and a bustling trade economy with all the feel of a big city, while the half of the town on the western side of the river was mostly agricultural, with sprawling farms and rustic people.
The trip from Herrickstead to Webster Grove usually took a couple of days. On his slow and rumbling tractor buggy, however, it took Thorn the better part of three. He was worn out and sore when he crested a rise and saw the river and the town laid out below him. Even after he shut off the engine and took a few moments to stretch as he looked out over the magnificent view below him, his body was still vibrating from the long trip on the tractor buggy. His spine felt about six inches shorter from all the rumbling it had endured.
The Old Foss was truly a magnificent sight as it reflected the sun’s rays in the late morning. From his vantage point Thorn could see the white Foamingwake Bridge which spanned the river, and he could see the bustling port on the far side with the barges being loaded before being sent up or down the river.
Thorn was surprised that he didn’t see the expected green crescent in the bend on this side of the river. He hadn’t been out this way in over a year, but at that time this land was lush with crops on the sprawling farms. Now there were only a few instances of green midst the dry amber plains.
As Thorn rode into the river’s valley he began to feel a lot less self-conscious about his own beat-up old tractor buggy. His looked to be in much better condition than some of these he passed, and those were only on the farms that weren’t abandoned. He passed many shuttered up farm houses and fields that were producing nothing but a bountiful crop of dust.
He pulled into the first farm that showed any signs of life. A weathered wooden sign by the drive declared that it was the Pith Farm. This farm, at least, had a meager crop growing and looked to be only a little better off than the rest of the fallow fields Thorn had passed on the way in. Thorn wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for out here in Webster Grove, and he didn’t particularly care for the idea of staying in town. To him the town of Webster Grove on the other side of the river was a completely different town altogether. He would be much happier if he could find a farmhouse that would be willing to put him up for a few days.
He was somewhat alarmed to find a police buggy parked in the drive when he neared the house. A pale green, as the police in Bradenfield were called due to the color of their uniforms, was in heated conversation with an old man that Thorn assumed was Mr. Pith. He was a tall, thick, elderly man who looked like he was a part of the very land he had spent a lifetime toiling in. He had a broad rock-like face that was set in a dire scowl as he listened to the pale green talk.
Thorn turned off the engine and walked over, leaning against the side of the barn to watch and listen. The pale green was pointing at an ancient pump around the side of the house from which several long tubes, like the arms of an octopus, were coiled.
“If you are not willing to buy the new tubing, Mr. Pith,” the pale green was saying, “then you will no longer be able to use your pump.”
“But it’s my damned pump. I dug the hole with my own hands.”
“That is, I’m afraid, irrelevant. The material used in your irrigation tubes has been found to leak. Water leakage and the waste of water is very seriously frowned upon by the Bradenfield legislature. If you are unwilling to upgrade to the new, approved, tubing material then I will be forced to fine you, decommission your pump, and possibly arrest you.”
“Those new tubes are damned expensive. It’s nothing but a rip off. I’ve been using these same tubes for forty years.”
“You have been provided with a rebate.”
“That doesn’t even cover a fraction of the cost. I can’t afford it if I want to keep my farm.”
The pale green shrugged. “My hands are tied. I don’t write the laws, I merely enforce them.”
“We don’t even use the tubes to irrigate our land anymore, not since the last time you visited. My wife and I are carrying buckets of water to irrigate, and we’re losing acres of crops every day because I can’t water them efficiently enough. You boys across the river are killing us. If you decommission my pump I won’t have any water at all.”
“Like I said, Mr. Pith, my hands are tied. The law is the law, and it exists for your own good. But I understand your situation, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I will merely issue you a warning today and I’ll return in a few days to see if you have made any progress on the problem I addressed. Ok? Does that sound right to you?”
Mr. Pith looked angry enough to punch that smug pale green right in the face. His scowl looked like it had been etched with a carving knife.
The pale green was furiously writing on the clipboard he carried under his arm. He didn’t act as though he were aware of the danger he was in. Maybe he thought Mr. Pith wouldn’t lay a finger on him on account of the authority he represented. And maybe he was right. He handed the warning over and Mr. Pith snatched it from his hand.
“I called you out here on account of the miscreants that have been attacking our farms. Aren’t you going to do anything about them, or are you too busy trying to run my business?”
“If you’re having problems with miscreants then by all means file a report through the proper channels and the issue will be dealt with.”
“I did file it through the proper channels!”
The pale green nodded and got back into his police buggy. Mr. Pith watched him drive away in a cloud of dust while he wadded up that warning.
“No work,” he said, and at first Thorn didn’t realize that he was the one being addressed.
“Excuse me?”
“No work so move along.”
“I’m not here for work, actually. I’m looking for a place to stay for a few days. Looks like you’ve got the room and could use the money.”
“I ain’t a charity case, neither.”
“I’m not offering charity; I’m offering to pay for room and board for a few days.”
“Is that it?” Mr. Pith’s eyes were as hard as his face as he looked Thorn up and down. “You’re not dressed like a vagabond, but no one drives a buggy like yours can have much to his name.”
Before Thorn could respond, and he was going to do so unkindly before taking his leave to find lodgings elsewhere, they were approached by an elderly woman whom Thorn took to be the Mrs. She had been watching from the house and surprised both of them as she asked, “Are you a bounty hunter?”
She looked as hard and haggard as her husband, with features that looked like they had been carved with a chisel.
Mr. Pith glared even harder at Thorn. Thorn had a difficult time reading his expression. It could have been scorn, or it could have been interest.
“That’s right,” he said after a pause.
Mrs. Pith stood on her toes and whispered something in her husband’s ear. His expressi
on was as inscrutable as a boulder on a mountain face as he listened to her. He nodded a couple of times before he said, “I take it you’re on a job, then. Who are you hunting?”
“A gang. They wear yellow bandanas and ride dune bikes.”
This time there was no mistaking Mr. Pith’s expression as his eyes widened with recognition. His wife excitedly stood on her toes again to whisper something in his ear but Mr. Pith waved her off.
“I don’t trust bounty hunters, and I don’t much like having a mercenary around. But we’ve had a spate of disturbances ‘round here recently from that gang you mentioned. If you’re looking into it, then it might be a good idea to have you around. You can have the loft in the barn if you pay up front and don’t make any trouble.”
Thorn agreed and Mr. Pith showed him to the loft in the barn. It had been transformed into a small room when the farm was doing well enough that they could afford to hire help. It didn’t look like it had seen any use for a while. Mr. Pith swatted aside some cobwebs and wiped off some of the dust from the dresser.
“It ain’t much, but we don’t use our rooms for much more than sleeping anyways. Supper is at seven o’clock sharp.”
Thorn threw his traveling sack on the bed. It suited him just fine, and he didn’t intend to use it for much more than sleeping either.
“You recognized the description of the gang I’m looking for,” Thorn said as he followed Mr. Pith back down the ladder.
“Aye, that I did.”
“Tell me about them.”
“They’ve been terrorizing some of the farms around here. They come at night, cause mischief, vandalize, steal food.”
“They’re a local gang?”
“I’ve never seen them before. It’s only been a few months. Three or four, since they started terrorizing us. They’ve hit the Varicks and the Prassons just recently. My wife’s been afraid they’d hit us too. That’s why she insisted that I give you the loft. I’d argue with her, but I’ve come to respect my wife’s wisdom over the years. But if you ask me those kids in the gang are nothing compared to what we have to deal with from across the river. I take it you saw that exchange with the pale green?”
“There’s nothing I can do to help with that,” Thorn said.
Mr. Pith spat on the ground and his rock-like face became, for a moment, that of a rage-filled snarling beast. Thorn was taken aback by the amount of animosity he saw in that split second during which Mr. Pith’s guard was down.
“But I need to get back to work watering my fields. What’s left of them anyway. I don’t know anything else about that gang. You might want to ask the Varicks, they live east of us two farms down. The Prassons live south. They won’t be hard to find because there ain’t many of us left. And that’ll be five dollars for the loft.”
Thorn went to the Prasson farm first, but they were unable to tell him anything he didn’t already know. They hid in their house when the dune bikes came during the night and did not see anything. When the noise subsided they went outside and found that their food stores had been stolen and their field set ablaze.
The Varicks proved to be more helpful. It was late afternoon when Josh Varick heard the rumbling tractor buggy and went to meet Thorn in front of the farmhouse. Josh did not look like a farmer. His hands were too clean and soft. Thorn felt recent callouses on them when they shook. Neither he nor his family, including his wife Marie and son Eli, whom Thorn met when he was invited inside, bore upon them the signs of having worked the earth all their life, as the Piths and the Prassons did.
“You must forgive me,” Josh Varick said as he set out coffee and corn biscuits while his wife fanned herself and looked utterly disinterested in their company. “I’m still new to farming. I took over this property from my brother after his death last year. I used to be a lawyer in Bradenfield, so you can imagine how difficult the transition has been for us. For all of us,” he added, giving a sideways glance to his wife.
From the scowl on her face to the silk clothes she wore, it appeared that she did not appreciate the move out here to the farm one little bit. She appeared to have enough resentment about her to let it be known, even in front of a guest, but enough class to keep it from boiling over. Thorn was glad he was just a guest and didn’t have to remain here after they were alone. He did not get the feeling that this was a particularly warm household.
“But it’s the best move I ever made,” Josh added. “My brother and I were the perfect examples of country man, city man. I never understood how he could make a living from the earth when all the important things were happening in town. I understand now. My life was a hollow one, and I’m grateful to the memory of my brother for giving me the opportunity to see that finally. The corn may be dried up right now, but it’s better than being dried up inside. And things will turn around; I’m certain of it.”
He said this last directly to his wife. Josh had set a cup of coffee and a biscuit in front of her but she hadn’t touched them, and she hadn’t made eye contact with either her husband or Thorn.
“I’m staying with the Piths,” Thorn said. “They were having some trouble with the law over their hoses or something.”
Josh Varick took a slow deep breath. “Yes, the hoses. Our drought is entirely man-made, and it helps to illustrate perfectly the hubris of my previous life as a lawyer. It’s quite humbling to experience things from the other side. Another parting lesson from my brother. Wherever he is I’m sure that he’s finding more than a little mirth in the reversal of my fortunes and attitude.
“There was a big push a couple of years ago for a public water system with fountains and the like, which they claimed would help serve the people of this town by providing them with fresh water. The public never actually saw much use out of it, although you’d never know that from the numbers the government continually publish. As a former insider, let me tell you those numbers are completely made up. I think they figure that every time it rains all the people are utilizing public water. It’s nothing but propaganda. The only people who get any use out of those public fountains are the already wealthy, the government officials, and the lawyers. See, it’s become very fashionable among the elite to have lavish indoor gardens, and those gardens require quite a lot of water. The whole push for public water was nothing but a ruse so none of the elite would have to spend their own money digging wells.
“They were running hoses from the public wells and fountains to their houses so they could water their plants, but some of these hoses had to be run over busy roads, and they burst. The hoses, I mean, not the roads. It caused flooding and property damage, so Webster Grove passed a law saying that all hoses had to be made of this very expensive hard rubber that would stand up to being driven over.”
“I don’t see what any of that has to do with you and your farms,” Thorn said.
“That’s the rub. The wording of the law requiring these expensive hard rubber hoses was open enough that the law applies even to our irrigation hoses out here on the farms. And while the lawyers and the government officials have been giving themselves grant money to make the switch to the more expensive hoses, on account of how they’re better serving the city by being more environmentally sound, the farmers are not. We have to pay for thousands of feet of expensive and inefficient hosing. And not only are these hoses expensive, they’re also much smaller than what our needs require for moving large quantities of water to our crops.”
Thorn noted Josh Varick’s nonchalance with relating these events, compared to the boiling anger he had seen in Mr. Pith, and remarked about it. “You seem pretty blasé about it. I thought Mr. Pith was going to kill that pale green this morning and you hardly even seem worked up.”
Josh Varick laughed. “That’s because I’m used to how the game works. I’ve got a lawsuit filed with an injunction to prevent seizure of my lands and property for my noncompliance. Of course the suit has no hope of going anywhere, but that’s not the point. We’re capable of producing a great deal of food here in this
crescent, and it’s only a matter of time before one of the trade caravans starts putting some pressure to the Webster Grove government to rescind some of these silly regulations. And I don’t doubt that Mr. Pith and the pale green were almost at blows. Let’s just say that public opinion, at the moment, is quite sour with regards to our government. But you didn’t come here to listen to me complain about our troubles. Why are you here, Thorn?”
“I’m a bounty hunter and I’m looking into sightings of a new gang. They wear yellow and ride dune bikes, I understand you were attacked by them a few weeks ago?”
The Varick’s teenaged son, Eli, had been visibly bored while his father talked about legal matters, but he perked up when Thorn mentioned the gang.
“Last week, to be precise,” Josh said. “They stole some of our food and burned one of our fields. It’s a nuisance, but it’s nothing to be too upset over. We didn’t have that much food put away to begin with, and the field they burnt was fallow. Why are you looking for them?”
“I’m looking for a friend’s son who might have joined them.”
“Then I’m sorry I couldn’t have been any more help.”
“Sure, it’s no problem,” Thorn said and shook Josh Varick’s hand. He glanced at Eli as he got up because it was clear by his sudden interest that he knew more than his father. “Thanks for the coffee and biscuits.”
Thorn drove down the path a ways out of sight where he stopped his engine and doubled back on foot. From his reaction at hearing them mentioned Thorn suspected that Eli Varick knew something about the gang. He was a teenaged boy, the perfect age for the gang to attempt to recruit. Even if he hadn’t been approached directly, perhaps he knew someone who had. Thorn had spotted a tree house on the far side of the field and figured it was only a matter of time before the kid came out here. So Thorn waited.
As the sun began sinking lower in the sky Thorn realized that he was in danger of missing supper with the Piths. After three days of traveling he had been looking forward to an old-fashioned farmer’s dinner. He still had some traveling rations in his buggy so he wouldn’t go hungry, but he had been living off of them for the past three days and they really didn’t hold much appeal in the first place.
The sun was half-set when Thorn heard movement. He crouched and watched as Eli Varick came around the corner of the field, swinging a stick like it was a sword. There was a post with a sack cloth man stuck to it which Thorn had just taken to be a scarecrow. Apparently it was more than that, however, as Eli began attacking it with the stick, shouting curses and profanities as he struck blow after blow upon it.
“Keep your feet a little wider,” Thorn said as he stepped out from behind the tree. “You’ll be pushed off balance too easily.”
Eli stopped and stood straight, holding the stick out in a threatening manner.
“You’re the bounty hunter,” he said after eyeing Thorn up and down.
“And your strikes are too wide. You don’t want to put that much force behind a stroke unless you’re certain it’s a killing blow.”
“Maybe I want to strike a killing blow.”
“You upset about something?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Look, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“So if you’re such an expert fighter you wouldn’t mind if I attacked you with this stick?”
“I think I’d mind that.”
Eli stepped forward suddenly and swung the stick. It was very well telegraphed and Thorn had no problem side-stepping it. He was a little surprised by the viciousness of the attack. Eli Varick was more than just a little upset about something.
“What are you--?”
Eli turned and assaulted Thorn again, bringing the stick down for another wide swing. Thorn stepped into him this time, circling his hand around Eli’s wrist and disarming him. Thorn held him fast, preventing Eli from moving despite how much he struggled.
“What is your problem, kid?”
Eli answered by sinking his teeth into Thorn’s forearm, forcing Thorn to throw him to the ground. Eli wiped his mouth and looked ready to pounce again. Thorn hadn’t wanted to hurt the kid but after getting his arm bitten he was having serious second thoughts.
Eli read the look in his eyes and said, “Yeah, go ahead and hit me. You’re a big man, why don’t you go ahead and hit a kid, huh?”
“You are trying my patience, kid.”
“I’m not the one invading your space. This is my tree house. What would my dad do if he knew you were here?”
“He’d probably just try to sue me.”
Eli laughed. “You’re right. My dad’s a wuss. He’s exactly the kind of person who’s going to be crushed under the revolution.”
“What revolution? What are you talking about?”
“You probably will be too. Big tough man, we’ll see how tough you are when we come for you. Only the strongest will survive.”
When Eli bent to pick up his stick Thorn spotted a dark yellow piece of cloth tucked into the back of his pants. He deftly snatched it.
“Hey, that’s mine!”
Thorn unwadded the piece of cloth to find it was an amber bandana sporting a pair of black skeletal hands on it. Eli went to snatch it back but Thorn parried, sending the teenager to the ground again.
“You have been in contact with the gang,” Thorn said.
“That’s mine! Give it to me!” Eli was enraged again, grabbing and swinging as Thorn kept him at an arm’s length.
“Kid, if only the strong are going to survive this revolution, that doesn’t bode very well for you, does it?”
Eli stopped and glared at Thorn. “I’m strong enough.”
“Really? Because from what I’ve seen you’re an even bigger wuss than your dad. I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to make it in a gang like this.”
Eli was boiling. His fists were clenched on his stick so tightly the knuckles were white. “And what do you know about the Amber Bones Gang? They’d never let someone as old as you join.”
“The Amber Bones Gang, huh? And they only let teenagers join, is that it? Sounds like a bunch of narcissistic kids taking out their frustration at their parents, if you ask me.”
“They’re warriors and we have to prove ourselves before we’re allowed initiation. But someone like you wouldn’t understand that.”
“Someone like me? Someone who just kicked your butt?”
Eli yelled and charged. Thorn popped him on the head and sent him to the ground again.
“If your leader is as weak as you, I don’t think these people have anything to worry about from your revolution.”
Eli had turned to charge again. If nothing else, Thorn had to give him credit for tenacity. But he stopped the moment Thorn mentioned their leader. Eli’s face turned white as a sheet.
“He is going to destroy you. You can’t fight the dead. And when they march over these lands, freeing everyone from their shackles, it will be a glorious revolution. And I’m going to be there to see him grind your skull into the dirt.”
Before Thorn could respond they were both arrested by the sound of Eli’s mother calling for him. The sun had set and they were staring each other down in near total darkness.
“Eli, I’m not going to call you again,” she screeched.
Eli wiped his mouth and composed himself. He glanced down at the bandana Thorn was holding.
Thorn held it out slightly, just enough to make Eli reach for it. He grabbed it and then ran in the direction of the house, casting one last spiteful glance over his shoulder before disappearing around the corner of the field.
He may not have been a willing interrogation subject, but he had unwittingly given Thorn enough information to mull over.
