Alan’s smile disappeared, replaced by a cold stare. “Are you listening to me, Cal?”
“No.”
“So you don’t care at all about the tens of thousands of years it probably took to create this remarkable feature? How season after season of floods and deposits shaped the channel? How they cut nearly perfectly even stairs for the water to roll down?”
Cal shook his head and shrugged; the latter motion made almost pitiful by his bound wrists. “It’s just Lower Leclair Falls. If you want to talk about how it was made, you need to talk to the guy they’re named after. He’s a real enthusiast of that kind of stuff.”
“It may be just that to you, but it’s so much more to me.” Alan drew his pistol—a semiautomatic model he chose before leaving Mercy—and motioned for Cal to leave the road. “Nature is perfection in so many ways. So many people can’t look past the obvious to her deeper meaning. Here, you see the churning rapids. I see perfect death.”
At once, a hard lump rose in Cal’s throat. His calves, which had slowly burned for hours, went numb, and Jerk lost all semblance of control, pounding and screaming in the prison of Cal’s mind.
“Get moving,” Alan lowered his voice, his eyes narrow slits. “Before I make you.”
Quivering, Cal stepped from the road, carefully navigating his way down the steep slope toward the roiling river. The noise was thunderous at the water’s edge. Cal closed his eyes, muttering a prayer for Andrea under his breath. He felt the cold, hard barrel of the pistol jam roughly into his side. He took a breath and waited for the slug to rip through him.
A few seconds passed, but no shot was fired. The barrel was jammed into his side twice more. Cal opened his eyes and looked at Alan, who shook his head.
“Not here,” the man bellowed over the noise of the Fairweather. “Up there.”
Alan thrust the end of his gun upslope a couple hundred feet, where a rock precipice jutted out over the river. Cal shivered and gasped. Alan had something worse in store for him that a simple execution-style shooting.
His captor led him to the top of the rock, then urged Cal out toward the edge. The man then backed up slightly and shed his pack. He rooted around in it briefly, glancing up every couple of seconds to ensure that Cal had not tried to escape or attack him. When he stood up, he grasped a mostly empty bottle of whiskey in his hand. Alan tucked his weapon into its holster, double-checking the snaps that secured it in place.
In an instant, Alan’s ugly, scarred face twisted in pure hatred. He closed the gap between them with almost unnatural speed, delivering a hard kick to the back of Cal’s knee. The sting of the blow was immediately forgotten, replaced by sharper pain as his head hit the rock. Cal’s mouth opened, trying to both scream and suck in air at the same time. Alan dropped his knee onto Cal’s chest, pressing the precious air out of his chest. In one motion, he popped the cork open on the bottle and upended it into Cal’s mouth.
Everything burned. His lungs, desperately trying to find air, sucked the whiskey down his trachea. Cal coughed and convulsed in a bid to expel the offending liquid, which burned on the way up. As he was short on breath to begin with, this process repeated itself numerous times before he had coughed it up, swallowing much of it in the process. Alan stood up and took a step back allowing Cal to roll onto his side, wheezing for air. His chest was on fire, and each breath fanned the flames.
Alan cut the ropes from his wrists; clearly Cal was in no condition to put up a fight. He lay on the ground for a few more minutes, finally catching his breath. Cal struggled to his knees. His head was swimming, and the trees seemed to rock violently. The blow to his head combined with the accidental ingestion of alcohol made him unsteady. He reached to his face and dabbed at the stinging laceration. His fingers were slick and tinted with the deep red of blood when he retracted them.
Alan shoved the bottle roughly into Cal’s hand, nearly knocking him over backward. “Drink the rest if you want. It might make your end less painful.”
“Than what you just did?” Cal coughed.
The man took another couple steps back and deliberately unsnapped the fasteners on his holster. “Don’t forget the part you played in this. If you hadn’t put your nose where it didn’t belong, you wouldn’t be here. You did this to yourself.”
“I did what I had to. For my friend. You would have done the same.”
Alan shook his head. “I can always make new ones. Besides, haven’t you learned what friends are really worth? You trust the wrong one…” his voice trailed off and he shrugged passively. “You end up drinking too much, fall in a river, and drown. Speaking of which, it’s time for you to do that now. Get up.”
“Fuck you,” Cal seethed.
Alan snatched the pistol from his side and leveled it at Cal’s head. He shook his head and sneered, “You’re going in the river whether you jump or I dump you in. Just remember that if your friends downstream see your body wash up with a bullet in its head, there are going to be more questions. More people like you are going to ask questions they shouldn’t. More people will disappear and meet unusual deaths.”
“You’re a sick piece of shit, you know that? You say you want to retire from your hit man job here, then you threaten to kill more people if I don’t kill myself?”
“Of course I want to retire,” Alan snapped back. “But whether I get to or not is up to you. Now how much blood do you really want on your hands?” He narrowed his eyes, grinning wickedly. “I think it’ll only take one person to motivate you. You know, I read somewhere that babies didn’t survive very long on the frontier a couple hundred years ago. And that’s about the level of medical treatment that Concordia has access to.”
Cal’s fingers wrapped so tightly around the neck of the bottle that it threatened to shatter. “No. Don’t you fucking dare. She’s just a baby, you prick. For Christ’s sake, it’s bad enough that you’re about to kill her father. You’re making my daughter an orphan. Isn’t that enough for you?”
Sunlight glinted off the barrel of the gun as Alan wagged it. “It’s not up to me. Now get up.”
Just do it, you idiot, Jerk screamed. We’re already dead. Don’t piss him off and make him go after Andrea, too!
Cal lowered his head and sighed in defeat. His knees wobbled and his fingers trembled as he slowly gained his feet. Tears streamed down his cheeks, mixing with drying blood and blurring the grotesque visage of his tormentor.
“That’s a good boy,” Alan grinned, raising his arm a little higher to maintain his aim.
I’m sorry, Andrea. I hope you get to grow up knowing the truth about me.
Cal was in the process of taking a deep breath when something to the left side of his vision caught his eye. There was movement in the brush just beyond the massive boulder on which the stood. He heard a soft thrum just barely over the chorus of the rapids, and a blur streaked from the bush. Alan shouted out in pain and alarm. His pistol clattered to the ground. Cal blinked, barely able to comprehend what he had just seen.
Jutting about six inches through Alan’s forearm was the bloody shaft and head of an arrow, its fletching protruding from the opposite side.
Gabrielle Serrano
24 July, 6 yal, 11:36
Fairweather River, en route to Concordia
“Stay here!”
It was a directive to her brother, Diego, and all she had time to say to him as the vinewood bow clattered to the ground. She whipped the tomahawk into her hand and charged from the bush, her legs catapulting her over the uneven ground between her and her prey. A fierce, curdling sound rose from her chest. It was the cry of bloodlust, something that she had not uttered since before the storm that annihilated her people.
The man wheeled around, clutching his lame arm with his uninjured hand. His eyes widened as he recognized the danger, and his good hand shot for a knife at his hip. Gabi was on him too quickly. Her axe bit into his thigh as she passed, and he crumpled to his left in a heap, screaming and flailing. The other man—a tall, lanky b
lond—fell backward, nearly backpedaling into the river as she approached. He was no threat; Gabi turned from him and returned her attention to his would-be murderer. The man who would make a little girl an orphan. The man who threatened to kill that same girl.
Take him out, she thought, her grim focus training itself on his vital parts. Like a jaguar. Because that’s all he is.
Bloodied and gasping, her prey managed to free a long, cruel, serrated knife from its sheath. The corner of Gabi’s mouth ticked upward in glee; this opponent was no match for her. From ten feet away, Gabi hurled her tomahawk with deadly accuracy, burying its head more than an inch in his neck, just above the clavicle. He fell backward again, dropping his knife. He gurgled and clawed at the handle of her weapon, dislodging it. Blood sprayed like a fountain as the axe no longer restricted flow to the man’s carotid artery. He was dead within seconds, his blood pooling under his body and enveloping the bone handle of Gabi’s tomahawk.
Diego’s shrill scream pierced the air, cutting through the droning of the river. Gabi cast a glance over her shoulder to make sure the blond man was still incapacitated with shock and fear, then retrieved her weapon. As a hunter, blood was nothing new to her. The fact that it was human blood was only mildly unnerving. Then again, this man had it coming. Gabi had secretly watched a couple executions, long ago. Chief Vandemark had presided over every one of them. One thing that Gabi knew is that the chief never tortured or beat his prisoners, as this man had done.
Not an execution. Not a legal one, anyway.
She looked back at the bush she’d come from. Diego sat huddled next to it, clutching her bow.
“Stay there!” she commanded.
Gabi turned to face the other man, tightening her grip on the tomahawk. Blood still trickled from a gash on his brow. He was frozen in place, his fingers digging into the rock like roots of a stubborn tree.
“Get up,” she said sternly. He stared back at her, still as a statue. “Get up!”
He flinched on her second command, but scrambled to his feet. “W-who are you?” he stammered.
Gabi pointed her tomahawk toward a narrow game trail that led to the river thirty or so feet below. “Move it.”
“B-but…”
“Move it,” she repeated. The blond man complied quickly, checking over his shoulder often as he hustled to the trail.
She cast a backward glance at the bush and whistled. “C’mon, D.”
Diego shuffled quietly from his hiding place. Tears streamed down his face. He squealed and nearly dropped Gabi’s bow as he passed the corpse of the pock-faced man.
Gabi returned to the body, kicking it and ensuring that no life was left. “What, Diego? He’s dead. Can’t hurt anyone.” She knelt beside the dead man, relieving him of his knife and gun. She moved on to his pack, rifling through it for a length of rope before proceeding down the slope after her brother and prisoner.
When Gabi reached the bottom of the slope she found the blond man splashing water on his face, washing away the blood and muttering under his breath. She took a moment to wash the blood from the handle of her tomahawk and the scavenged knife.
“Are you from Concordia?” she asked the man.
“Y-yes,” he stuttered.
“Take us there.”
“W-who are you? Why are you dressed like that?”
Gabi glanced down briefly at her fur leggings and top. She found nothing odd with the way she dressed. The man sported thin, dingy cloth pants and an equally soiled shirt. His clothing was reminiscent of what people in Camp Eight wore before the Sorrow. Before they were wiped off the map.
“You have a daughter,” she said, diverting the conversation from herself.
The man’s eyes widened, and again he froze. “Y-yes.”
“That man was going to kill you. You said she’d be an orphan.”
“That’s right.”
“Want to see her again?” Gabi retorted sarcastically.
“More than anything.”
“Hands behind your back, then.”
“What?” he gasped, eyes bulging.
“Hands behind your back.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know you. I don’t know why that other guy had you tied up, but I’m not taking my chances.”
“You saved me,” he protested, complying anyway. “I owe you my life, I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.”
Gabi’s fingers wove the stout cord gracefully around his wrists. The bindings were secure, though likely not comfortable. Her captive grunted and winced as Gabi pulled the last knot tight.
“Show us the way,” she ordered.
The man nodded and got up. He scrambled awkwardly up an embankment to the road that Gabi had departed just a few minutes earlier. She had caught sight of him and his attacker from a fair distance. Recognizing that something was amiss with the execution, Gabi had hurried Diego along. They got close enough that Gabi could hear the exchange between the two men. The would-be executioner seemed cruel, and indifferent to the fact that a little girl would be left without a father. This first lit the fire within Gabi; she recalled a memory from her distant past, when an arrogant young man by the name of Lon Carney brutally murdered her own father. Then the executioner threatened to kill the girl himself. Gabi couldn’t stand by, no matter what the prisoner had done.
They walked for some time, the silence of the forest interrupted only by the prisoner’s occasional attempt to engage them in conversation. He seemed to figure out that Gabi wouldn’t talk to him, so he tried his hand at getting Diego to open up. Every time he did so, Gabi quickly warned Diego, and her brother remained silent, other than occasional complaints of fatigue.
After a couple hours, Diego’s whining escalated to the point that Gabi called for a rest. She selected a spot near the edge of the river that was shaded by a dense grove of shorter, thin-trunked trees with bluish-white bark. She distributed hunks of bread and strips of dried meat, given to them by their ephemeral hosts in Rust Creek. Diego plopped down in the dirt and gnawed at the food hungrily. The tall, blond man smiled nervously as he took his portion, clutching it securely in his bound hands.
Her prisoner took a seat on a small boulder. He closed his eyes, seeming to absorb the sun that washed over his face. In the light, his hair shifted from a murky shade to near golden. Once Gabi had a chance to look past the grime caked on his face, he looked very young indeed. Possibly even the same age as Will.
He’s too young to be a dad, Gabi decided.
“What’s your name?” she finally addressed him.
The man finished chewing his bread before speaking. “Calvin.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?” Gabi asked, leaving no time on the heels of his response.
“Andrea.”
“How old is she?”
“Uhh… six weeks?”
Gabi furrowed her brows, and her tone was laced with disgust. “You left a little baby alone?”
“No, no, she’s being watched over by a good friend,” he quickly spluttered. “I only meant to be gone a couple hours. But then I was kidnapped and shoved in a cargo pod for a few days and…” he sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t know what day it is. By some miracle you came along and saved my life, then tied me up again and won’t tell me what’s going on. You’re clearly not from Concordia, but I’m so confused and scared that I don’t want to ask about it. I miss my daughter. I miss my home. I just want this nightmare to end.”
“You were kidnapped? Why?”
Calvin stared at her silently for a moment. The muscles under his right eye twitched slightly. “I was trying to help out another friend that was kidnapped. Our governor. That man you killed, he… well, it turns out he took my friend and murdered him. I didn’t know that Darius was dead at the time, I was still hoping to find him.”
Diego leaned over, whispering in Gabi’s ear. “What’s kidnapped mean?”
She opened her mouth, about to answer,
but instead simply replied, “I’ll explain it later.” Locking eyes again with Calvin, she continued her questioning. “So why did they take your governor? What did he do to deserve that?”
Calvin shrugged. “All I know is that he stumbled on to some secret. That man and his boss aren’t from Concordia. Something that Darius found meant something to them. Something important enough that they’d kill him. Or me. Or anyone.”
Great. So I’m being led by some idiot that is trying to get himself killed.
She chewed pensively on a strip of jerky as she tried to sort through the scenario.
“What’s your name?” he asked quietly.
“Gabi.”
“I’m Diego!” her brother burst in cheerfully.
“Quiet, D,” she muttered sternly.
“Gabi, I can’t possibly tell you how much it means to me what you did today. You’re right, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. I don’t know how I can possibly repay you. If we get back to Concordia, just let me know what I can do for you and Diego. I’ll make sure it happens.”
“What could you do for me?” she scoffed. “About the only thing I can think of is shutting up.”
Calvin leaned back, arching his back until his shoulders rested against a leaning tree. His hair turned sandy again as it slinked into the shade. “Something bad happened to you as a kid, didn’t it?” he asked. There was a softness in his tone that was chilling. Oddly familiar and comforting, yet it shouldn’t have been. “You’re armed to the teeth, dragging around what, a four-year-old kid? No adults around you. You didn’t hesitate to kill Alan. You could just as easily have killed me, but you didn’t.”
Gabi turned away and took a bite of her bread, trying to disengage from the conversation. Every word he spoke reminded her of her long-dead father, and how he used to talk to her when she was upset. Memories came to her, not of her time on Demeter, but even farther back. The faintest recollection of life on the ranch back on Earth filtered through the stone wall of her heart.
Project Columbus: Omnibus Page 128
