Skin Game

by Tonia Brown

  “Dispatch them,” Chambers echoed. “I like how I am a monster who kills people, but when our stalwart hero here does it, he dispatches people. How noble that must make you feel.”

  “He did what he had to do,” Bowden said. “I sent him up there to dispatch your people because your wandering monsters were massacring my people. He should’ve killed you too, when he had the chance.”

  That was certainly hard to argue with.

  “So you cured my snot nosed nephew,” Bowden said, “and he what, talked you into working with him?”

  This made Chambers visibly uncomfortable. She looked away, shifting against the floorboards. “He was very convincing.”

  “Promise you the moon and stars, did he?” I said.

  “No,” she said, “it was nothing like that. You must understand I had worked on a cure for so long, so many years. To have such a breakthrough as him, such triumph after so much defeat, it was intoxicating. I was drunk on success.” She sighed. “Funny thing is, I had him lined up for dissection, so I could discover what made him survive when all the others died. That was when he suggested he would be of more use to me alive.”

  “He is nothing if not silver-tongued,” Bowden said. “That man could talk the birds out of the trees.”

  “He certainly could. Or rather, in this case, talk subjects into my laboratory.”

  “That sounds ominous,” I said.

  “It was a brilliant suggestion,” she said. “At the time I was trading supplies for help from the locals with procuring test subjects. Trouble was, I was quickly running out of things to trade. Somehow, Dillon found out the source of my worry and came up with a plan of action. He would go out into the world, show them my success and bring back genuine volunteers. Selectively, of course.”

  “Did he?”

  “At first, yes. We worked together for nearly a year. Then he disappeared on me. I assumed he was lost to either the elements or the wildlife, or both. After nearly a year and a half later, he returned with armed men and offered me a new deal. It seemed he had changed his tale to the one he tells now. This story of natural immunity had garnered him a special place among the outcasts of the Badlands. He offered me supplies as well as both men and undead if I kept my mouth shut and continued my work, with some additional responsibilities.”

  “The monsters,” Bowden said. “He told you to make them.”

  “Not exactly. He wanted a controllable revenant. The combination of animal and men was a means to an end.”

  “A controllable revenant?” Bowden said. “His madness knows no end. Yours too, little lady. He puts revs on the end of a lead and thinks of them as dogs. Then you go and give them actual dog parts. You both deserve whatever is coming to ya.”

  “And he wanted a workable cure,” I reminded them. “One he could control as well.”

  “That too,” she said.

  “Why did you agree to it?” I said. “Why not just tell everyone the truth?”

  “Because he had far more men than I did. Because I value my life above all else. And because I recognize leverage, Theo. I always recognize leverage.”

  A cool chill crawled across my skin at those words. She was referring to our little chat in her madhouse. Thanks to her serum, I had told her my darkest shame. The truth about folks is a powerful source of leverage to be sure.

  “She says she got rid of the eye thing,” I said, ignoring her jab.

  “Which means we don’t know who has been cured and who hasn’t,” Bowden said. “That makes things a sight more difficult.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I only recently made that development. Dillon didn’t have access to it. You will be delighted to know his access to my work was far more limited than he would’ve liked.”

  There we were, finally to the meat of this whole thing.

  “How limited?” I said.

  “Practically non-existent. While I had shared the cure with a few I considered close to me, I had to be very selective. You see, not everyone has the wherewithal or metabolism to survive the cure. It’s tough on the body. You could say the cure is almost as bad as the disease.”

  “How limited?” Bowden said, pressing her for a more direct answer.

  “My, my, but we are demanding,” she said.

  “Do you have numbers?” I said.

  “As far as I know,” she said, “none of his crew has ever survived the cure.”

  “She’s lying,” Bowden said without hesitation.

  “Believe what you like,” she said with a shrug. “Frankly, I don’t care what you think.”

  “I think she is telling the truth,” I said. “She, Dillon, and myself are the only living folks with the cure in our blood. Right?”

  “Unless he has someone else on the side making up secret batches of the stuff, yes, we three are it.”

  The idea sounded silly on the surface, but her words echoed with possibility. Who could’ve done just that?

  “Tinsdale,” I said under my breath.

  “Who?” Bowden said.

  “Mortimer Tinsdale. He was the fellow that showed up at my cabin. The one working on a cure as well. Did Sam not tell you about him?”

  “She didn’t exactly have time.”

  “Another scientist I presume?” Chambers said, her attention caught by my description of poor Mortimer.

  “Yes, though it doesn’t matter. The man is dead now.”

  “Pity. I would’ve liked to have exchanged notes.”

  I covered my face with my hand as I thought about the connections. How did Tinsdale tie into all of this? His appearance at my place was far too coincidental. I thought so at the time, but that Sam was so damned raring to help the man. If Dillon knew of the cure, then surely he already knew Tinsdale was working on it. Then why feign such ignorance? What did it profit him to pretend such a thing? What was really going on here?

  The wagon gave a heaving lurch, then came to a sudden stop. All around us rose the sounds of men and animals shuffling about, then all fell quiet. I got up and peered out between the slats. The men around the wagon parted as a figure moved toward us.

  “What’s happening?” Bowden said.

  “Looks like we have a visitor,” I said.

  The wagon swayed as someone climbed up the side. A hatch opened in the closed roof, revealing Dillon’s ugly smile. There he waited, quiet and half smiling for what seemed an unnatural amount of time. Heartbeats stretched into long seconds, then a full minute.

  At last he finally said, “Don’t stop your chat on my account. Mack tells me you wouldn’t shut up just a little bit ago.”

  I glanced to Bowden. The doc sneered, but said nothing. Chambers turned her nose up and looked away from Dillon, obviously disgusted by the man.

  “Well then,” Dillon said. “If you won’t talk to me, maybe you will talk to Gerald.” He snapped and motioned to someone behind him.

  The wagon dipped low as a large man barely squeezed through the narrow opening and dropped to the floor. He was seven foot if he was an inch, with the kind of build ole Ben used to call brick shit house. The man had to crawl about on his hands and knees on account of his size. He stopped to glare at us and snorted, not unlike an angry bull.

  Dillon peeked down at us. “Gerald here has volunteered to ride the rest of the way to Truth with you. He loves a good chin wag, so feel free to go back to your conversation. I am sure he will just delight in hearing everything you have to say.”

  I started at the news.

  I wasn’t surprised that we ended up with a guardian. To be honest, I wondered what had taken Dillon so long in assigning one to us. It seemed a bit trusting to leave the three of us alone to talk. Or perhaps that was his plan all along? To draw us into a sense of false security only to toy with us along the way. Now that seemed like him.

  What did surprise me was our destin
ation. Truth was one of three so called towns Dillon had founded during his stint as head of the Syndicate. The main town, Newton, sat several days travel back west. At one point, it housed most of Dillon’s followers, acted as the Syndicate’s headquarters, and held that awful revenant factory. I also left it in smoldering ruins after retrieving Sam.

  Iron Station was nearly two week’s travel due south, resting inside a nearly impenetrable old stone fort. It hosted the nastier of Dillon’s cohorts, as well as a working foundry. Hence Dillon’s steady supply of weapons and the like.

  Truth, a scant few days to the north east, was a different sort of place. The closest of the three to Convergence, the town of Truth hosted neither revs nor guns. Truth wasn’t even really a proper town. It consisted of a single ranch house built in the middle of an enormous fallow field accompanied by a handful of broken down lean-tos and all surrounded by a rather strong fence. A lucky twenty or so souls, or unlucky depending on how you looked at it, called the place home. Truth’s main purpose was farming. Pig farming, to be more specific. The few folks that were selected to live in Truth specialized in breeding, raising, and slaughtering hogs. And by selected, I mean forced into labor under the cruel hands of the Syndicate and the threat of the revenant watchdogs.

  Dillon got most of his supplies from his contacts all over the west and east, yet he always held the cherished goal of self-sufficiency. Truth was a great start to that. A man that could supply his own meat and fat and other animal product was a man of powerful means. What this powerful man didn’t know was that I knew quite a bit about pig farming. I had some experience in the area. Experience that I had no intention of sharing with the likes of Dillon Thomas.

  Dillon slammed the hatch and climbed down the wagon.

  “Hey!” Bowden called out.

  “Yes, uncle?” Dillon said. His voice moved around the wagon as he climbed down Bowden’s side.

  The doc drew close to the wooden slats, lowering his voice as he gravely said, “This young man you shot has passed on.”

  “One less mouth I have to feed,” Dillon said, then dropped to his feet and walked away.

  “Bastard,” Bowden growled.

  “What did you think he would say?” I asked. “He has no respect, for the living or the dead.”

  “Shuddup,” Gerald said. The big man took a seat with his back against the wagon door and leered at us. He cracked his knuckles, huge and thick, popping each one off in a miniature gunshot of power and tension.

  “So much for small talk,” the doc whispered.

  The wagon jumped into movement again and we rode on in silence with Gerald as our new escort.

  * * *

  Despite its close proximity, the journey to Truth took several days. This was partially due to the large entourage of men traveling together, and partially to the nearly full wagon I sat in. As near as I could tell we stuck to the common road that ran between the towns of Truth and Iron Station, yet it was still a rough journey. Dillon pushed his troupe and his animals hard, with little resistance from either. The animals were probably used to such abuse, as were the men. Everyone smoothly took orders from Dillon, doing his every biding without question. At his behest, they traveled nearly sixteen hours every day, with a few hours set between for breaks and a longer stretch at the end of each day to get some sleep.

  We prisoners were confined to the wagon for the entire trip, with a rotation of different men to watch over us should we decide to escape. They watched us from inside the wagon when we were on the move, and from outside when we stopped. This limited or communication to the occasional sigh and yawn. Any attempt to talk earned a scolding from our current watchdog. It was clear that Dillon didn’t want us to share any more information. I wondered if he hadn’t slipped in leaving us unguarded for so long at first.

  They fed and watered us once a day, something that didn’t matter to me, yet I could tell the pair of doctors would suffer if kept on such a strict regimen. Both of their stomachs roiled and growled as time dragged on. Sustenance, such as it was, came as a portion of gruel and a skin of murky water. When I complained about the need to take care of personal business, someone opened the hatch and tossed a copper piss pot down to us. The three of us took turns with the thing, Bowden and I taking care to give Chambers first go and plenty of privacy as we looked elsewhere.

  “Such gallantry will surely be rewarded,” Chambers said from behind me. “Someday. Somewhere.”

  “Nothing gallant about it,” Bowden said from off to my left. “It’s just common courtesy. And who would actually want to watch a woman make her toiletry?”

  “I know men who would pay for such a thing,” Chambers said.

  “As do I,” I said.

  “Then you both need to get to know a better class of men,” Bowden said.

  We shared an uneasy laugh at this, only to be rewarded with a sharp rap on the outside of the wagon and a reminder that we were to keep quiet.

  And so it went.

  Four days of silent staring at one another, of eating slop and drinking swill, of losing all sense of privacy and self. I couldn’t speak for the doctors, but I had been in this kind of soul crushing situation before. Years ago, when the world was so very alive and I was so very young. I wouldn’t stand for it then, which is why I ran off and ended up in the employ of Ben Jackson. And now? Now I had learned that biding one’s time is worth the suffering it takes to reach that moment of truth. I wasn’t in a rush. If I was going to defy Dillon and get out of this, I would need to wait for the right moment to act. And I would defy Dillon. Regardless of giving my word to obey him, I would make him pay for his sins. Four days of silence gave me plenty of hours to think about what Bowden had said that first night. That making a deal with Dillon was tantamount to dealing with the devil himself. Would even Christ keep His word in that situation? No, I had decided. Not even the son of God would keep his word when dealing with the devil. Especially if the devil welched on his half of the deal.

  The Bible warned us not to deal falsely, lest we lose our soul in the process. Dillon promised that Sam would survive, then the moment I surrendered myself, he left her to die. Dillon dealt falsely with me, and I would repay him with the full fury of the Lord. Of course, I might or might not have been twisting the scriptures a bit, but I didn’t reckon God would mind.

  We arrived at Truth in the late afternoon hours of that fourth day, though I began to smell the place a good hour before that. Just before of our arrival the other two started to show signs of picking up the same scent.

  “What is that smell?” Chambers said as she held her nose.

  “It’s our destination,” I said. “Truth is a pig farm.”

  “You’re joking,” she said.

  “I wished he was,” Bowden said. “I used to make folks meet me down the road from here to avoid that stink. Now here I am in the thick of it.”

  “You get used to it,” I said. I felt the presence of eyes on me when I realized what I had said. “I imagine you get used to it. You can get used to anything, given enough time.”

  While the others contemplated my slip, the wagon finally came to a short and jolted halt. I was sore as all get out from riding in the back of that damned wagon the whole way. I could see I wasn’t the only one. Bowden winced with every movement, as though he had been beaten with a stick the last few days. Which, in some ways, he had been.

  “Sore?” I said.

  “As hell,” Bowden said. He popped his neck and stretched his back from his seat beside of me. “I am getting too old for this, Theo.”

  “You aren’t the only one.”

  Chambers kept a stalwart attitude, all sly grins and knowing glances.

  “You not sore?” I said.

  “Oh I lost the feeling in my extremities hours ago,” she said, then laughed.

  I didn’t see what was so funny about that, but I chuckled with h
er.

  The back of the wagon opened and a young man motioned for us to disembark. We let Chambers out first, waiting as they all but manhandled her from the wagon’s bed. Bowden went next, scooting to the edge and teetering on his single leg. A man to his left held out an arm to help, but Bowden waved it off, opting to hop away from the mouth of the wagon. I came last, shielding my eyes as I crawled into the late afternoon light. Dillon’s men immediately grabbed me and bound my wrists together. I didn’t put up a fight, choosing not to waste what little energy I had left on wrestling a bunch of kids. I was unceremoniously led around the side of the wagon, to stand beside of the others, as well as a dozen or so of Dillon’s men.

  While I normally avoided most towns like the plague that built them, I had in the past made a special point of dodging Truth. I had heard all about the place, but never intended on visiting. Not freely, at least. I’d had enough of pig farming to last me a lifetime, yet here I was, as Bowden put it, back in the thick of things.

  The place was more populated than I expected, as I swept my eyes over nearly twice the number of men that traveled with us here. And those were only the ones I saw. In the middle of the place lay a single ranch house, bordered by lots of little shacks. The northern field was dominated by some huge, half-built wooden structure, the use of which I had no idea. The other fields around the house were sectioned off into plots, most of which housed a handful of wily and wiggling pigs. Squealing filled the air, as did the pervasive smell of pig shit.

  Memories drifted back to me on the back of those sights and smells. I closed my eyes as I drifted back to my youth. So long ago. So much pain and heartache. So much loss.

  “Theo!” Dillon shouted. “Glad to see you made it in one piece. My men tell me you didn’t say much on the trip. Not in the mood for a chat? I don’t blame you, considering your company.” He eyed my fellow captives.

  I stared back in silence, as did Bowden.

  “Piss off,” Chambers said, surprising us all.

  Dillon clapped in a mock, slow applause. “Nicely put. And such delicate language from such a feminine form.”