Seven Threads

by Jason Fischer

  The crooked mob eyed him off as he entered their turf, and they reached for home-made spearguns and what shooters they had. He could make about perhaps seven of them, wild folk living as far from town-law as they could.

  “Where’s your bossman?” he said. “I brung a tinkerman, like we agreed.”

  There was a man wearing the top half of a business suit, denim cut-offs and a cowboy hat on his head. He swung a cricket bat loosely in one hand. It was studded with cruel looking nails, stained with old blood.

  “I’m Hat-Trick,” and now he was close enough Lanyard could recognise the man. They’d met a few months ago, at an outpost that tolerated crooked men if they brought good trade.

  “Got your tinkerman in the back,” he told Hat-Trick, and the crooked men swarmed forward, hauling Cobbler out and laughing at his protests, mocking him for his tears. There was a great spreading wet patch on his trousers from where he’d pissed himself.

  “Where’s my money?” Lanyard demanded, and Hat-Trick pulled something out of his pockets, planted it firmly into his hands.

  It was a purse, and with horror Lanyard realised it was made from a man’s scrotum. There was the heft of coin inside it, but nowhere near the agreed amount.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “All our coin,” said Hat-Trick. Lanyard felt the rage come on, had the shotgun and his revolver out in the blink of an eye. The mob made to rush him but Hat-Trick held up a hand.

  “I’ve been through hell to get here. If you mean to cheat me I’ll kill you where you stand,” Lanyard said through clenched teeth. Hat-Trick laughed.

  “Look around, you bloody fool. We’ve a fortune in forage. In the morning I’ll let you take as much as you can carry.”

  Lanyard looked at the cannibals. One of them smiled, and in the firelight he could see that the woman’s teeth had been filed into points. Common sense told him to leave now and count his losses. Greed won.

  “I sleep light and I shoot quick,” he told them. “If you would nibble on my toes, think on that.”

  He wouldn’t drink or eat with them, turned down a plate of mystery stew which set the mob to laughing. He rolled out his swag and sat with his back against the wheel of Cobbler’s buggy. They watched him nodding off, sharing little grins and whispers. He took one long heavy blink into sleep, but was awake with heart pounding. One of them was sliding towards him with a knife in hand, but the man dropped it into the dirt at the sight of Lanyard’s revolver.

  “Jokes. Just jokes,” the man said with a weak smile.

  #

  The crooked men started as the ones who kept the true worship of Papa Lucy and the Bone-Man. Their practices were so repugnant that the towns turned them out, even as a sanitised version of the religion sprang up behind the thick walls.

  The eating of a man became the eating of a suckling pig, wearing a child’s clothing. The true believers still laugh at the townsmen now, rolling ox-tails for the Bone-Man instead of knuckle-bones. Something of the visceral nature of these new gods was lost, watered down by the civilised men who claimed these cults as their own.

  So even as the crooked mobs tore up the countryside and preyed on lone travellers, Lanyard respected them. They were outcasts, much like him, yet remained true to their faith, which was more than he could ever do.

  #

  “I’m gonna start a new town,” Hat-Trick told Lanyard in the morning. “For all their talk of laws and society, I know them other towns started out much the same. Just good forage, and a tough bossman.”

  “True enough,” Lanyard said. “There’s bigger crooks behind a town wall than anything out here.”

  They had Cobbler face down, holding down his arms and legs. One bloke was heating a great steel rod in a fire, until the end glowed cherry-red.

  “Old days, in the Before, folks got together into villages and such,” Hat-Trick told his crew. “They had blacksmiths, folks like our tinkerman here what kept everything working. Built all the stuff to keep the village alive.”

  He approached the man, pulled a sharp rabbit knife from his coat pocket. Cobbler saw it and screamed, wild-eyed, weeping, and begging for mercy.

  “That blacksmith, most important fella in town. They needed his special skills just to keep the place going. Those villagers couldn’t let him leave, not ever. They made sure he stayed, that he would serve his community for life.”

  It was over in seconds, but Lanyard fought the urge to vomit, made himself watch lest he appear weak. Hat-Trick hamstrung Cobbler, mutilated his tendons while the man screamed in agony. The man with the hot steel rod cauterised the wounds, and another bloke bound them up with bandages crusted with lake salt. The file-toothed woman cradled his head, forced a good belt of grog down his throat. Cobbler spit up the first mouthful, but gratefully gulped at the booze. She let him have the rest of it, and he lay there sobbing and sucking from the bottle like a pouting baby.

  “Can’t have our tinkerman pissing off in the middle of the night,” Hat-Trick said. “We’ve found cars, radio sets, fridgerators and such. That bloke’s gonna make this place the envy of all the towns.”

  Lanyard was led to the bleedthrough fields, a stretch of Before-Time junk bigger than any town. There was a car with the front half melted and poking up out of the ground like a headstone, two blokes scraping away with picks and mattocks to free it. As bossman Hat-Trick got first dibs on anything found, the deal was that Lanyard could cart off whatever he could fit in the buggy so long as Hat-Trick didn’t want it first.

  “You ever see anyone else around here?”

  “Any fool sneak through my stuff ends up in the cookpot,” Hat-Trick said, and Lanyard hid a smile. Witches didn’t get eaten, they ate.

  Lanyard couldn’t feel anything sinister nearby, but the grey space between the worlds was thin here, thinner than paper. There’d be no trouble, no work for a witch to step through into the Now. It was only a matter of time.

  He hauled out the murderous cannon he kept hid in the swag, and sure enough Hat-Trick eyed off the old double-barrelled shooter.

  “There’s jesus marks on that thing,” Hat-Trick said. “I could haul you into a town, give you to a magistrate. You could make me very rich.”

  “Lawmen would take you too, crooked man,” Lanyard said, scanning the warped buildings for movement. “We could end our days together, choking side by side on the gallows.”

  Nothing came for them, nothing but flies and dust as they poked through the ruins. Within an hour Lanyard had gathered a carton of smokes, a new shirt, some tins of food, and a book called “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.

  Lanyard was far from finished foraging, and a deal was a deal. He could fit a tonne of stuff in the buggy, and even intended to strap things to the skiff. He would leave this place a very rich man.

  “Enough for now,” Hat-Trick demanded. “You get one more forage after lunch, but then you leave.”

  They returned to the main camp. Lanyard could see a few other people now, filthy and haggard but not crooked men. A one-armed man was hauling a cart full of scrap wood for the fires, boards stripped from buildings and fences. A young girl was digging a latrine hole with a hand-scoop, eyes dark with exhausted terror. She was missing her right leg.

  “Like any town, we got citizens,” Hat-Trick laughed. “They pay us taxes to live here.”

  Most of these “citizens” were missing limbs. Lanyard eyed the cooking pot and decided he didn’t want to know.

  As his hosts ate their lunch, Lanyard hauled up a bucket of water from the soak, rank water barely worth drinking. He stripped off his shirt and washed himself for the first time in days.

  “Nice tatt,” someone said, and Lanyard saw it was the file-toothed woman, gnawing on a bone and looking at his leathery chest. At his jesus tattoo, a picture of a bleeding man bound tight, hands clenched into fists but for his pointer fingers, one to left, the other the right. BEFORE and NOW were writ under each hand.

  “You’re a jesusman,” sh
e said casually.

  “I’m nothing,” he said, wriggling into his new shirt. He’d gotten stupid, too tired to notice someone sneaking up on him. His pulse raced wildly.

  “Fingerbone said you had a gun with that mark,” she said, picking a scrap out of her teeth. “They all think you’re toting the kit of some jesusman you killed. But my own eyes, they tell me you’re the worst kind of fool.”

  “You keep your mouth shut,” Lanyard said. “One word and I’ll kill you first.”

  It was that moment that the familiar pains started, the throbbing inside his skull. There was a witch, real close, close enough to step through into the Now and make a meal out of him.

  Trying to get a fix on the creature, he reached back for his shooter and that was the moment that the woman pounced. She wrapped her legs tight around his waist and worried at his neck with her sharp teeth, even as he rained blows on her head and smashed her nose with a fist. She drew blood and crowed with triumph.

  The crooked mob were all over him in moments, kicking and punching and bearing him down by weight of numbers. When he came to, naked and bound before Hat-Trick, he knew that all deals had fallen through.

  #

  The first jesusman to come for him after Bauer’s murder was quick and strong, a man armed with naught but a sword-cane. He wore the image of the jesus across his leathery forehead and there was no mistaking him for anything else.

  “Them I can understand, but why you?” the man had raved, and in a blur of movement he was so close with that sharp blade that Lanyard could see the cataracts filling his left eye, the scars covering nearly every inch of his skin.

  The jesusman kept coming, even with a bullet in him, and buried his blade in flesh even as Lanyard put one final round through the man’s temple. Lanyard barely survived the attack, nearly bleeding to death in a muddy Riverland street.

  He found a revolver in the dead man’s belt, and it spoke volumes of the contempt he must have felt for Bauer’s murderous prentice. Not even worth a bullet.

  There was only one more jesusman to attempt vengeance, before the pogrom and generous death bounties meant that the jesusmen had bigger problems than him.

  #

  “A genuine jesusman,” Hat-Trick was saying. “In our own town, no less.”

  Lanyard spat blood, nudged a loose tooth with his tongue. He’d had worse beatings. He could feel the nearness of the witch, content to watch for now from the safety of its nest.

  “Some great work from Teeth, uncovering Mister Lanyard’s dark secret,” he said, and the woman gave a curtsey with an imaginary dress. Her face was a ruined mess, and it was hard to tell where his blood stopped and hers began.

  “Now, the question on all our lips: what are we to do? What do we do with a jesusman?”

  “Kill him!” one said. “Chuck him in the pot!”

  “Make him a citizen and eat him slow,” another said.

  “Give him to me, I’ll punish him enough,” Cobbler said with passion, and the mob cheered. He hobbled over, ramming one of his crutches into Lanyard’s stomach and spitting on his face.

  “It was your kind what brought us here, you jesusmen!” Hat-Trick said, resting the tip of his cricket bat on the back of Lanyard’s head. The weight of the willow pushed the sharp nails into his scalp. “Your dying man led us to the damned dusty Now. Not paradise, here. Our mob, the whole bloody human race having to pick through junk to survive, and it’s all your fault.”

  He’d heard this rhetoric before, even believed it once. There was nothing worth saying, and perhaps in his heart of hearts Lanyard always knew it would end like this. The discovery, his brutal ending in some forgotten place. He was about to die, and mercy was a concept that never left the town-walls.

  Hat-Trick hefted the murderous bat, held it high. He made to smash it into Lanyard’s face, but pulled the bat up at the last second. Lanyard flinched and the crooked mob fell about laughing.

  “You won’t die that easy,” he said. “You will beg for a bat in the face by the time I’m finished with you.”

  They bound his wrists with a loop of barb-wire and nailed the other end to a railway sleeper. A stretch of train track had bled through almost intact, like an obscene mouthful of teeth stuck sideways out of the ground and held together with a twisted belt of steel rail. Lanyard could see some of Hat-Trick’s mutilated citizens shoring up the gaps, and knew this would be the basis for the town’s walls.

  They took turns to piss on him, and Teeth gnashed her horrid fangs near his privates. Hat-Trick would not let them harm him overly, and Teeth whined that he was ruining their fun.

  “Mind your mouthhole around me,” he said, a quick fist knocking her onto her bony arse. “I say he suffers long and hard, like every bloke who followed the jesus out of the Before.”

  They gave him nothing to eat or drink, and Lanyard baked all day, naked and red raw beneath the burning sun. They left him a rusty saucepan full of piss, all they intended for him to drink. He held out into the chill of night, but even he knew that he’d eventually give in, anything to stave off this crippling thirst.

  “I’ll have you eating manflesh inside of a week,” Hat-Trick said. “This is just the beginning of a most delicious death.”

  They left Fingerbone to guard him, and the gap-toothed cannibal said nothing throughout the frosty night, just pointed his home-made speargun and dozed beneath a filthy old poncho.

  “Will you take my fingers?” Lanyard croaked as the sun rose. “Will you wear them around your neck?”

  Fingerbone looked at Lanyard, and nodded for yes.

  They set him to working for forage, digging out the old car that Hat-Trick had his heart set on. His muscles ached from the honest rhythm of the work. The heft and swing of pick and mattock drove him on, through pain and thirst and heat.

  No water when they called it a night, nothing but the pot of stale piss waiting by his post. Another guard, some crooked man without a proper name, who kicked him in the ribs when no-one was looking. Teeth drank grog with the man by the light of his little fire, her nasty little eyes watching Lanyard the whole time.

  He would die of thirst tomorrow, if he survived the night. Lanyard found himself looking at the piss-pot, made himself tip the urine out before he was tempted.

  “Not give you lot the satisfaction,” he said through a dry tongue and leathery mouth. Somewhere between sleep and death, Lanyard felt a cool stream of water pass his lips, gulped greedily at the waterskin.

  “Hat-Trick’s got a temper,” he heard the guard say. “Don’t want the jesusman dying under my watch.”

  When he finally felt the witch step into the Now, Lanyard was almost grateful.

  #

  Drink helped a little, but Lanyard Everett found himself drawn more and more to violence, to risk. Every time he got the shakes, or had one too many dreams about the demons he’d seen in Bauer’s service, he’d throw himself into a fight.

  He gambled, stole other men’s sheilas, exploited the natives, shot his enemies before they could shoot him, and soon he found that the criminal underworld could accommodate a man of his temperament.

  But always there were the dreams, and the certain knowledge during his waking hours that bad things were real and quite often nearby. And that he was the only person left who could do anything about it.

  #

  “You bring anyone with you?” Hat-Trick asked again. He’d beaten Lanyard black and blue after discovering the shredded remains of one of his mob. There wasn’t much left of the man.

  “I didn’t have to bring anyone,” Lanyard said through a fat lip. “You bring trouble, just by being here. Witch trouble.”

  In dust Lanyard had tried to etch what wards and marks he knew, but when his guard saw that he swept them away, fearful of jesusman magic.

  “Witches,” Hat-Trick snorted. “More of your jesus lies. We follow the word of Papa Lucy here, cast his bones and do all the custom. We’re watched over.”

  “Papa Lucy,�
� Lanyard laughed. “Your crooked god won’t guard you against what’s out there.”

  The cannibals went for vengeance instead of sense, gathered into a great pack to hunt for the killer. They left Lanyard to his exhausted slumber, and he woke up to look into the eyes of the crippled girl.

  She’d fashioned herself a crutch out of scrap wood, and limped over to give him more water when the crooked men had left the camp.

  “You need to run,” she said, picking at the wire twists that bound his hands. They’d bent it with pliers, and she couldn’t budge it. She tried till her fingers were pricked and bleeding.

  “Please take me with you,” she said. “They’ve done bad things to me, and Hat-Trick said they’re gonna eat me a bit at a time until I’m just a torso that they pass around.”

  The end attached to the post was hand-twisted, and between them they unravelled the wire around the nail. She helped him stand, got him moving.

  “Where’s my stuff?” he said. She shrugged, didn’t know. He needed the shotgun, fast. The witch would feed on stragglers, and then it would come for him. They didn’t like groups of people, and now that the crooked men were gone the danger was very real.

  They passed the new workshop that had been made for the tinkerman, a lean-to surrounded by piles of Before-Time junk that they wanted him to fix. He was working on some gadget and looked up to see Lanyard moving towards him, murder in his face.

  “Help!” Cobbler hollered out, a second before Lanyard whipped him with the loose end of the wire.

  “Shut your mouth,” Lanyard said and gave him an absolute belting. “Get me out of this, or you’ll get another.”

  With shaking hands, Cobbler fetched a set of tin-snips, sheared through the barbed-wire. Lanyard felt the circulation return to his hands, winced at the deep cuts that the jags had left.

  The posse had taken the tinkerman’s horse, and there was only a bicycle and a broken motor-bike left in the camp. He would have to leave the girl.

  Ignoring her cries, he ransacked the dwellings of the crooked mob. He found a sharp rabbit knife but none of his own stuff, pulled on some filthy clothes that had seen better days.