“Take this,” he said. “It'll slow the poison.”
She held up the vial, looking at the odd-coloured liquid inside. “How much should I take?”
“The lot.” He didn't have the heart to tell her that it likely wasn't enough. It was meant for smaller scorpions with smaller stings. By his guesswork, she'd be dead within a day.
She swamped the liquid down, and it had a noticeable effect. Her breathing became less fleeting, and some of the colour returned to her face. But the poison was still there, diluted a little, but working away nonetheless.
Nox paused for a moment. He was faced with a dilemma. He could try to bring her back to his hideout, where he had more anti-venom ready and waiting, but that was more than a day's ride. If she died on the way, he'd never find his answer. Or he could push on with her, and not tell her that each step was one closer to death. She'd die out there in the wastes, but at least then he had a chance to find out what Waltman knew, what he'd been chasing for all this time.
“So,” she said, getting to her feet. She looked at him, as if she could read the struggle in his face. “Are you coming?” She hopped forward, cringing from the pain. “I think this is gonna slow us down.”
“Yeah,” he said, regretting his shortcut more than ever. It'd slow them down all right. Death had a way of doing that.
27 – NO COUNTRY FOR LIVING MEN
After a brief inspection of the monowheel, and a quick restock of their weapons from the vehicle's spare supply, they set off again, slowed and wounded, but not altogether beaten. Nox heard Sally moaning periodically in the back. He could feel her body getting warmer. The fever was setting in.
The sun was falling fast asleep, but now they neared their destination. It was quite a thing to think of a place more desolate than the endless expanse of the Wild North, but there were pockets here and there where even the sun seemed to dare not tread, where the sands gave way to a cracked earth, barren even of the breeze. Here, under the great shadow of the wall of the vehicle graveyard that was the Rust Valley, was another resting place for unknown and unseen things, a territory unclaimed and unwanted, watched only by the empty eyes of the metal dead.
“We should walk the rest of the way,” Sally suggested.
“Why?” Nox wondered if she'd even be able to walk.
“This monowheel'll draw the attention of them clockwork constructs.”
“Do they come out this far?”
“For scavengin', yeah.”
“Fine,” the Coilhunter said. He thought he could probably outrun those mechanical monsters if he kept his wheels, but then some of them had wheels too, or tank treads, ripped from vehicles they hauled into their iron web. He figured it'd be best to follow Sally's advice. After all, she knew these parts better than most.
He halted the vehicle and stepped off. Sally struggled off behind him, one knee buckling. She was evidently trying hard not to seem like she was weak. He was trying hard not to seem like he noticed.
“Now I know why you bring a wooden cart,” he said, “and why you pull it manually.”
“Yeah, I didn't do it out of love for manual labour, y'know.”
He stared at the jagged mountains of scrap vehicles in the distance, hiding the setting sun. The Rust Valley was a mechanic's nightmare. It was where machines went to die—or to live as clockwork constructs under the watch of the Clockwork Commune.
“Would ya ever go there?” Sally asked him. She was making quite an effort to make small talk, maybe just to prove she could still do it. Her eyelids drooped down periodically, as if she was fighting off sleep.
Nox shook his head. “I'd never be caught dead there.”
She forced a smile. “What about alive?”
They walked for what seemed like hours, feeling the shiver of the shadows as the sun abandoned them. That fiery eye wanted to kill you, but this land was no place for the living, so it turned its gaze elsewhere.
“Here,” Sally said, stopping suddenly. How she knew the place was beyond the Coilhunter's reckoning. It looked the same here as anywhere in the wastelands, dark and empty.
“This is it?” he asked her.
“Around here.” She stumbled in place, getting her footing again. “I think. I didn't really consider I'd be back to dig it up again.”
“Yet here we are,” Nox said, handing her a shovel. It was mostly for show, and for support.
She dug, and he dug. The earth crumbled apart at the slightest touch, like the bones of the long dead. Thankfully Waltman wasn't dead long enough for that, or his secrets might've died with him.
“There,” Sally said. “I've got something.”
They kept digging, until they unearthed Waltman's body. It looked like he'd gotten a blow to the head. It also looked like they'd decided to bury him before they were certain the blow had done the trick. One way or another, he was certainly dead now.
Sally reached down, pulling a rolled-up note from Waltman's grasp. It was odd how tightly he held it.
“They told me to bury the evidence too,” she said. “I … I didn't read it. Thought it best not to. None o' my business and all.”
“None of your business,” the Coilhunter mused. “So says the gravedigger to the dead.”
He snatched the paper from her and straightened it out. Nox could feel the blood leave his face.
“What's it say?” Sally asked. Now she was curious.
Nox couldn't quite get the words through the noose of his throat.
Sally grabbed the paper and held it up, bemused. “It's just symbols.”
Nox knew those symbols. He and Waltman had come up with them some years ago, a kind of code. There were just two of them on the paper: a spiral and an arrow. Or the way he read it: a coil and a hunter.
It was hard to accept what the message said. If Waltman had a clue to who the killer was, and this was it, then it meant Nox was wrong to be looking for a criminal. He should have been looking for a bounty hunter. He should have been looking for someone just like him.
28 – WHAT THE DEAD TELL US
Nox sat down, clutching the paper close, like maybe he'd hold the hand of his wife or the hands of his children. You could try to hold the hands of a ghost, but those spectral fingers would just keep on slipping through.
Waltman's dead eyes stared up, empty. The sky stared down, empty too. There were no stars that night. Just that black veil, that funeral pall.
The criminals hoped the dead were eternally silent. Many were. Sometimes, though, the ghosts of them stirred. They might not have had voices, but they spoke all the same. The Coilhunter had learned that well enough before, but some lessons kept on teaching.
He rifled through all the names and images of his fellow lawmakers, all those bent on bringing some frontier justice back—back from the dead. Some of them were good people, others not so much. He wasn't entirely sure where to start. He had an inkling though.
If you ever wanted to get a start in the business, there was probably no better place than the Deadmakers' Den. That said, if you were looking for law, order, and justice, there was probably no worse place. Oh, they spoke the words all right, but they didn't walk the walk. It was one thing to have a gunslinger's gait. It was quite another to have a lawman's soul. You'd go through a lot of bounty hunters trying to find one of those. Nox thought he might just have to go through them all.
The Coilhunter's attention was drawn back to Waltman's body, and those cold, dead eyes. What had he seen with them? Whose image was burned into the retinas? Some said there were Magi out there who could read stuff like that, the so-called soothsayers of the soul. Nox didn't go in much for that. If magic did exist out here, it didn't work anywhere near as good as lead in a barrel.
His thoughts focused on Waltman. He was a good man, as men go. Sent by the Regime to look after the Bounty Booth. He'd been there as long as the Coilhunter could remember,
as long as he was hunting bounties. He'd been good to Nox, gave him some direction when he felt lost, gave him some easy kills when he was starting fresh. You always remembered your first kills. Nox remembered that he'd barely gotten his. He recalled how proud Waltman was. He was like a father to him. It seemed the Coilhunter just wasn't allowed to have family.
Sally seemed awfully quiet. He glanced at her, and she worked hard to form a smile. Her face was covered in sweat. It was too cold for that.
The Coilhunter rose.
“Right then,” he said, looking at that little slip of paper that cost Waltman his life. “I guess I gotta hunt a bounty hunter.”
29 – WHAT THE LIVING DON'T
Sally fell suddenly very ill, fainting on the spot. He held her head up, tapping her gently on the cheek.
“You got any more of that syrup?” she asked, her voice weak.
“No.”
“Pity.”
“Yeah.” It was a pity all right. It was more than that.
She tried to grab his hand, but couldn't find the energy. “I'm sorry, y'know.”
“For what?”
“Buryin' 'im out here.”
“Well, at least you dug him back up.” He wiped her face with his neckerchief.
She coughed. Even that was weak. “I guess it really is fate.”
“It's not,” he said, knowing too well that, once again, fate was him.
“I hope you find him.”
“So do I.”
“I hope ...”
“Yes?”
She faded off, and he closed her eyes. Often he just left them staring, but this time it seemed like she was staring into his soul, and seeing the rot there. He pressed his fingers at her throat. There was still a very faint pulse, but the poison would make short work of that.
He sighed, casting a glance at the grave where Waltman lay. It certainly did seem a little like fate that the last grave Handcart Sally had dug would inadvertently be her own. He gave it a moment, enough for a silent requiem, then rolled her body into the hole. She dropped down onto Waltman, hugging his cold body with her cooling one.
Poor Waltman, he thought. It was quickly followed by: Poor Sally. He didn't like thinking that, because that made it complicated. It was better when it was black and white. The good guys versus the bad guys. Simple. There wasn't anything simple in the Wild North.
“It may not be fate,” he said, casting the first bit of dirt into the grave, “but it's fittin'.”
30 – SCAVENGER
The walk back to his vehicle was more sombre than before. He wasn't entirely sure why. It wasn't the first time he'd buried someone. It wasn't the first criminal who ended up dead under his watch. But Handcart Sally wasn't like most of them. She'd been caught up in things against her will, or so she said. Somehow, for some odd reason, he believed her.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he barely noticed the object sailing through the sky over the towering scrapyard heaps of Rust Valley. When he finally gave it his full attention, he realised just what it was: a makeshift copter, one of those flying machines from the madmen of tomorrow. That was fine, but it was what it was carrying, hooked by chains, that made his heart leap: it was his monowheel.
“Damn,” he said.
He followed the route it was taking, starting into a trot, then a full-on run. It was hovering low, probably from the weight of its latest catch. Nox hadn't heard of the Clockwork Commune taking to the skies, but it wouldn't surprise him. It was only a matter of time before they weren't content with their little scrapyard community of man-hating machinery.
He got closer, and it seemed the pilot must have noticed, because the copter started to veer off in another direction, deeper into the wastelands. Nox panted and wheezed as he tried to keep up, but he knew he'd be panting and wheezing a lot more if he lost his mode of transport. The journey back to civilisation was long and hard. The journey to the afterlife was easy.
Then one of the copter's engines seemed to choke up, and two of the spinning propellers stopped. It dipped a little, but it didn't quite fall. It seemed to simply rotate around to where another set of propellers kicked into action. The pilot, who didn't look like a clockwork construct from the Coilhunter's vantage point, sat in a chair that rotated around inside, coming out at another globular window. The monowheel span below, the chains clattering off the hull of the copter.
Nox gauged how close it was, then pointed his right arm towards the copter and fired the spring-loaded grappling hook. It hooked onto one of the chains and hauled him off the ground. Whoever was inside must have panicked, because just as Nox's boots landed on the top of his monowheel, another of the copter's engine's conked out. The vehicle dropped almost completely before the driver could start up another.
Nox grabbed one of the chains and tugged on it. The copter itself might have been cobbled together, but these chains were solid. The scavenger wasn't going to let go of its prize so easily. Nox swung about for a moment until he came near a small compartment beneath the box at the back of the monowheel. He punched the button on the side and it opened up to reveal many tools he often used to repair the vehicle, including a blowtorch. He fired it up, burning through one of the chains. The monowheel swung down, causing the copter to dip again. The engine groaned.
The monowheel was now further away from where Nox hung. He swung towards it, firing up the blowtorch as he came near. He did this several times until the second chain was cut, sending the vehicle down into the sand below.
Nox still hung from the remaining chain. He could have just let the grappling hook loose and reclaim his vehicle beneath him. But the thing about scavengers was that some of them scavenged from the living, and there was another name for those: thieves. It might've seemed like a free for all to some who lived in the Wild North, but he liked to remind them that it wasn't free for everyone.
He grabbed a hold of one of the unmoving propellers, then unlatched the grappling hook, letting it coil back into the launcher. He pulled himself up with one hand, feeling his muscles bulge from the weight, and tried to reach for the handle of the nearest door. There were many of them, just like there were many windows, but the handle was just out of reach.
Then he heard something that sounded like straining machinery, and he realised that the driver was trying to turn on the propeller he was holding onto. If he did, it would slice through his hand just as easily as he cut through the chains. It moved a little, seeming to catch on something.
Nox hauled up his weight as much as he could, stretching further. His fingers grazed the handle, but that wasn't enough. Then he heard the chug of engineering, and he let go of the propeller not even a full second before it span into action. He fired the grappling hook again, towards the door handle, where it pulled him up past the spinning blades of the propeller, but left him dangling a little too close. He had to pull his legs up to keep his feet out of the rotating metal.
He pulled himself up further until he could grasp the handle with his left hand, pulling the door open. He swung out with it, back and forward. Then he leapt towards the open doorway, barely grabbing the edge. He climbed inside, immediately getting to his feet. The inside of the vehicle was as ramshackle as the outside, with bits and pieces of machinery lying around the place, some attached with netting to the walls to help keep them in place when it rotated.
Nox kicked open the nearest door, making his way past one of the globular windows. He forced open another door, spotting the driver in his seat with his back to him in a large chamber.
Nox took out a revolver and pointed it. “Did your mother never teach you not to take what isn't yours?”
The driver span around, revealing the oddest dressed man Nox had seen in a while, like someone from a carnival. He was decked out in high-heeled spotted boots, with a long multi-coloured fur coat over a frilly shirt and tight polka-dot trousers. His golden curls crawled out fr
om a large hat of feathers and flowers.
“Oh!” he cried, when he saw the gun. “My mother taught me to scavenge. It's how we made our way.”
“I'm bettin' she didn't teach you to steal.”
“Oh, dear, no, pickle! If I'd known it was yours, I wouldn't have taken it!”
“Then why'd you keep on runnin'?”
“Well … you're kind of scary.”
Nox smiled beneath his mask. “Yeah,” he said, cocking the barrel. “I kinda am.”
31 – THE ANTIDOTE TO THIEVERY
Nox fired, but even as he hit the trigger, the eccentric trader yanked the lever on his chair. The seat dropped, rolling down on a track until it came up again at the other side of the vessel, looking out at another globular window. Nox turned, aiming again, but he saved the bullet, because he could see the trader itching to hit the lever again.
“Please!” the trader shrieked. “I can explain.”
“Explain it to God.”
Nox made a feint, watching as the thief plummeted again in his odd pilot's chair. Few evaded the Coilhunter so easily, but he didn't so much as dodge as let gravity dodge for him.
Nox heard the chug of the wheels on the rails as the chair sailed beneath the metal grail he stood on. He quickly followed the sound, turning sharply onto another rampart that crossed over the other, charging up to yet another window.
He leapt, even before the trader emerged again. When he did, Nox caught hold of the chair and pulled himself up, much to the shock and terror of the thief. He grabbed the man's throat with his right hand, and when the trader made a motion to press the lever again, Nox drew his pistol with his left hand and pointed it at the man's hand.
“You know what the antidote to thievery is,” Nox crooned.
Coilhunter - A Science Fiction Western Adventure (A Coilhunter Chronicles Novel) (The Coilhunter Chronicles Book 1) Page 10
