Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  “How many others are out here with us, do you think?” Beck asked in a low voice as they moved away from Brighton on a straight path to the west.

  Eshton shook his head as if trying to fling the sour expression from his scarred face. “Here? None. We were the only two from our Rez to stand trial. In total I think about twenty people were found guilty, but they’ll be entering the badlands from all over the place.”

  “That’s too bad,” Beck said. “It’d be nice to meet up with the others.”

  Eshton’s head slowly craned toward her. “How can you be so goddamn cheerful right now? You might as well be talking about the weather.”

  Beck pulled her dust cloth up and felt it snug down across her face. “Speaking of weather, you’ll want to pull yours up too. The wind is picking up.”

  “Smooth,” Eshton said. “Where’d you learn to deflect so subtly? I almost missed it.”

  “Your sarcasm is noted but not appreciated,” Beck said primly. “Besides, what do you want me to do, Eshton? Beat my chest? Scream at the sky at the unfairness of it all? We’re out here. That’s the deal. We’ll either survive or we won’t, but we have a better chance than most.”

  She saw him unconsciously glance south, in the direction of their meeting place with the Remnants. “You mean—”

  “Yeah, our training,” Beck said, cutting him off. Her eyes flashed at him in warning. He might not know why she didn’t want him talking about their tenuous friendship with Scott, Karen, and Andres, but he at least got the hint to shut the hell up. “We’re better suited to living out here than almost anyone. Assuming we get to some kind of shelter before any Pales find us.”

  “We could hit a watch post,” Eshton suggested, the words coming with a pained expression. Beck struggled not to smile at him. The man spent his adult life enforcing Protectorate laws. Suggesting she—they—break them by having her override the security on a supply cache went against his programming.

  Beck reached over and pulled his dust cloth up, holding it in place as they walked until it tightened across his face. “No, we can’t. Forget for a second that the only electronics we have are embedded in the back of our skulls, so I have no way to access the key pad. If we did somehow manage to get inside, the Watch would have to hunt us down for that. It’s one of those laws you’ve always been so keen on.”

  His face fell, obvious even with just his eyes and the top of his nose visible. “Oh. Yeah. Kinda forgot we’re not in the Watch anymore there for a second.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get used to it,” Beck lied.

  Taking the lead was relatively easy; Eshton was too out of sorts to even question following Beck. She saw this and understood its root cause, and it saddened her.

  Eshton was a good man, a strong person in the right circumstances. Not that she judged moments of unease or weakness. Far from it. She’d been weakened to the point of breaking after losing her family, as had he many years before her. There was no shame in those moments. They just made you human.

  Eshton was brittle. When in his comfort zone, the familiar routines of his daily life, the man was iron. He could lead fighters or be an emotional rock for those around him. His time with Parker exposed the thin spots in his armor, however. Life in the Watch—or perhaps it was just who he naturally was—showed that when taken from the carefully constructed predictability of those routines, he lost direction. His gaze turned inward, and Beck suspected he didn’t like what he saw there.

  That was fine. She would watch out for him. Her own nature was far more adaptive and flexible, and she knew a couple things he didn’t about their circumstances. Which was why she took the lead.

  After nearly two hours of walking mostly west, stunted trees began appearing. They dotted a landscape choked with the ever-present orange dust and low brush. Beck hadn’t had much more than her own sense of direction to go on, but was pleased to discover she wasn’t very far off. Without markers of maps, she led them within fifty yards of her goal.

  She put a hand on Eshton’s shoulder to get his attention, then raised a finger to her lips. His brow wrinkled in confusion, though he nodded agreement. Maybe he thought she’d seen a Pale. Didn’t matter so long as he remained silent.

  Beck led them to a tree with a blackened strip across its trunk, stopping a few yards away. Her eyes darted across the ground around it, looking for…yes. There it was. Sticking up from a clump of dust just high enough to be seen was a thin metal rod not much thicker than a length of wire, bent into a loop.

  A steady pull revealed the chain the wire was attached to, and this Beck wrapped around her fist twice before setting her legs and pulling. A hatch raised up from the ground and sent a cloud of dust wafting into the air.

  Still silent, she gestured toward a bemused Eshton to follow her down the narrow ladder and into the bunker below.

  Once the hatch was secured, she slapped a button on the wall. “Purification cycle,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

  The tiny space was barely large enough for the pair of them. The howling hiss of high pressure fans bombarding them with streams of air was too loud to bear comfortably. The dust was pulled through the filtration system for what felt like minutes before the system decided that yes, they were clean enough for its purposes. As soon as the fans disengaged, one wall of the chamber split down the middle to allow them into the bunker proper.

  “You can talk now, by the way,” Beck said. “Our BIMs can’t transmit through the walls of this thing.”

  Eshton followed her into the bunker, a simple space four yards long and half that wide. It was curved in a single arc, and clearly old.

  “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird?” Eshton asked. “You know they can’t transmit that far. You know that way better than me.”

  Beck shook her head. “You’re right, I do know that. I also know the shoes we’re wearing have transmitters built in. The chips in our heads process all our brain activity, and the devices they hid on us pick out everything we say. Bowers suspected they’d try this and planned ahead. There are other supplies here just for us.”

  Eshton looked dubious but humored her. “So where did this place come from and why do you know it’s here?”

  Beck waved a hand at the racks of supplies, which included several sets of labeled clothes. “It’s one of the old supply bunkers the Watch used to keep back before we started setting up caches with our watch posts. This place was put out here around the same time Brighton was built. It was a way station for single Watchmen on patrol. Until a few weeks ago, it was empty.”

  “Bowers,” Eshton said. “He set this up. He knew we were going to get charged.”

  Beck waved her hand. “Eh. Kind of. I guess we’re far enough away from him to tell you the truth, which is that he pointed the Cabal right at us. He gave them a target to keep them from looking too hard for other members of the Movement.”

  Eshton went blank at these words, a curious stillness taking over his body. “What?”

  Beck grimaced. “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d take it well. If it helps, just think of this as us obeying orders. You wouldn’t hesitate if Bowers sent us on a suicide mission. This is kind of the same thing. It’ll just take a lot longer.”

  Eshton sat down on the single fold-down cot. “Except we’re pariahs, now. Everything we had is gone. We’re fucking exiles, Beck. No going back.”

  “True,” Beck said, “but only for as long as the council and Keene are in power. Only until the Cabal is cut out like the cancer it is.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll be back home by next Tuesday, then,” Eshton said acidly. “Any thoughts on how we’re supposed to get along until then?”

  She began gathering up supplies left by her team. The parcels meant for her were clearly marked, some with personalized notes scrawled on polymer paper. Wojcik, she couldn’t help noticing, wrote in big loopy script she’d have expected from Jen or Lucia. “We join up with the Remnants, obviously. We could stay here for a while with what we have, but t
his place isn’t very defensible. I’d rather have walls I can fight from than a hole to hide in.”

  Eshton shook his head erratically, off and on as if the reality of the situation was too much but kept reasserting itself after every successive reboot. “I’m going to fucking kill Bowers.”

  Beck reached over and patted his shoulder. “Hey, at least you’re thinking about what you’ll want to do after we get home. Though, yeah, I’m not thrilled at being stuck out here. I’ll have some things to keep me busy, though. You should consider taking up a hobby.”

  He watched as she produced a set of compact but powerful terminals from one of the supply boxes on the rack, then sat next to him on the cot. She pulled off her right shoe and yanked out the sole to reveal the transmitter. “This I can use. It’ll take some time. Until then, I’d rather not let it spy on me.”

  She found a small shielded container and dropped the thing in. Changing clothes completely was still happening. Risking tracking in a working transmitter that was smaller or better hidden when going to the Remnant camp was not an option. A few minutes of digging through the surprising variety of equipment left for her produced a small hand held device she was intimately familiar with.

  “This,” she said, holding it up, “will let me manage our BIMs. Best to disable some of the higher functions just to be safe. I’ll switch them to read-only.”

  Eshton frowned thoughtfully. “What will that do? Can you not turn them off?”

  Beck shook her head. “No, the most I can manage is making it so the only thing our BIMs do is go to low-power mode, limited to feeding out our armor settings when pinged. Not very useful without suits, but it’ll keep them from scanning our brains, even when triggered remotely.”

  She pulled the sole out of the other shoe and grinned as she removed a thick data stick from it. “This is what I’ll be spending my time on. Some of it, I guess. Remnants will probably want us to work for our supper, but I should have free time to mess with this.”

  “What is it?” Eshton asked, not sticking his hand out for the memory stick as most people would. The human need to get tactile with objects even when it did no good was absent in him. Beck thought he must have drowned the impulse in a tub right around the time his own family was killed for having a Fade B infection. Everyone coped and changed in different ways.

  “It’s the encrypted information I took from the Cabal lab I found Remy in,” Beck said. “There are some hidden files we’ve never been able to crack. I don’t know how much luck I’ll have with it, if any, but it’ll be fun to try. It’s better than spending my days navel gazing.”

  She circled a finger, indicating he should turn away. “Now let me change into new gear. We’ve got a long way to walk before it gets dark, and we’ll have to move toward the Remnants on a wide arc to avoid any Watch patrols.”

  Strange how easily her mind fell into the necessary habit of seeing her own people as a threat. Not all of them would be, of course, but Beck wasn’t stupid enough to believe the Cabal hadn’t seeded the Brighton watch with at least a few corrupt agents looking to kill her and Eshton if they got the chance.

  14

  They took a full day reaching the familiar Remnant outpost. Part of the delay was having to take the long way around, since neither wanted to lead any watchers in the direction of their allies.

  Well, presumed allies. Now that Beck and Eshton weren’t in the Watch and needed help, it was impossible to ignore the chance they might be seen as easy targets. The Deathwatch had never been popular among Remnants, though the infrequent meet-ups with members of their community had softened a few hardened hearts.

  One of those gentle souls spotted their approach.

  “Stop right there or I’ll put a bullet through your eye,” Scott Riddle said with disturbing politeness from twenty yards off. Beck stopped, putting an arm out instinctively to catch Eshton before he could walk past her.

  They weren’t far from the old airplane fuselage used as the Remnant’s forward observation camp. It was hours from Brighton by foot, well into the slowly recovering forest to the southwest. Even this close to it, the plane’s shape was hard to make out. The wings and tail were long since cannibalized for their metal, and the body of the thing rested flat on the ground. Dust and vegetation conspired to blur its lines, though Scott was easy enough to make out from his perch atop the hull.

  “Eshton?” he asked, voice carrying across the space. “Beck? That you?”

  “It’s us,” Beck said. “Can we come in or are you gonna set the dogs on us? If it’s the latter I’d like to think I’ve earned at least a ten-second warning.”

  Scott lowered his weapon and waved them forward. “No dogs today. Just me out here. Come on in and we’ll have some dinner. I have stew cooking.”

  Beck didn’t need to be told twice. On her previous visits she had learned a deep appreciation for Scott’s cooking. Remnants led a harder life than citizens of the Protectorate, but the food was generally much better. Silver linings were silver linings.

  Scott had a rule about not talking business while eating, so it was a solid twenty minutes before he finally settled back on the pile of ancient pillows and faded cushions he preferred to lounge against when entertaining and asked the question that was clearly burning a hole in his mouth.

  “The two of you haven’t been here together since that first trip,” he noted. “What’s going on?”

  Beck and Eshton shared a glance. They had discussed this on the long walk here. Beck would take the lead. She was after all the one most recently in contact with the Remnants.

  “Well, you remember that whole thing where we thought we might need to hide our scientist with you? Turns out we do have some exiles in need of a place to stay, but it’s not him.”

  Scott’s dark, intelligent eyes widened. “Wait, what? You two?”

  Beck nodded. “Yeah. It’s been an…interesting week.”

  In the interest of building trust, Beck had gotten in the habit of briefing Scott and the others on the general goings-on in the Movement every time she visited. He knew about the raids on Cabal operatives, though the impending trials and the hard left turn that made Beck a target in them were news. She quickly brought him up to speed.

  “So, basically we were hoping your people would take us in,” Beck said. “It might be permanent, though I can’t say for sure. Our people will keep working to bring down the Cabal, and if they manage it our names can be cleared. If that happens, I’m pretty sure I can work out some kind of beneficial deal for your people. Get you some supplies or even medical care.”

  She knew not to offer a place within the Protectorate itself. Very few Remnants would take such an offer, and the rest would be insulted to their bones by it. They were fiercely proud, and with good reason. Many were exiles or the children of exiles, surviving in a world of Pales, animals tough and canny enough to survive those Pales, and scarcity of resources.

  But offering some kind of token help was perfectly acceptable. Good, even, since Remnants were equally fierce about balancing debts. It was unclear whether this was part of Remnant society in general or a function of their interaction with Protectorate citizens, but Beck didn’t care. It had worked for her so far and she planned to carry on for as long as needed.

  Scott chewed the inside of his lip thoughtfully. “Exiled. Hmm. If you were random citizens it wouldn’t be a problem. We’ve never taken in Watchmen before. Not that I can remember, anyway. I don’t know how that’ll work out.”

  “So what do we do?” Eshton asked. “Wait here?”

  Scott nodded. “You’ll have to anyway, at least for a day or two. Andres is supposed to relieve me tomorrow or the day after, but I’ll probably send you back home with him. He’s the one you want on your side when it comes to arguing your case. He’s a lawyer, after all.”

  Beck suppressed the urge to smirk. It was easy to think of Remnant society dismissively—most fiction depicting it presented those living out in the world as little more than
savages—but she recognized the folly in that way of looking at them. The truth was more complicated. Remnants were less technologically advanced, that was true, and certainly less uniform in culture. The last appeared primitive at first glance, but it wasn’t. Diversity looks like chaos at a distance.

  Though she had to admit, the idea that lawyers survived the Collapse did make her wonder whether the human race really needed to carry on…

  She’d have to use that one on Andres. She loved watching him get red in the face.

  In terms of running into trouble, taking the long walk to Canaan was uneventful. The local environs were shaped and trapped thanks to decades of effort by Andres’ people, and the Pales were smart enough to keep their distance for the most part. The dangers between the observation post and Canaan itself were thin.

  Beck was still wracked with nerves the entire way. She was about to cross a milestone that couldn’t be undone. Every other meeting with the trio representing the Remnants—Scott, Karen, and the man currently guiding them, Andres—took place at the plane. No member of the Watch had ever actually seen Canaan, and Beck was no exception.

  Once she did, once she knew how to reach it, nothing short of death could take that knowledge from her. It was a terrible risk for the people there, and if the three Remnants she knew were any indication, they couldn’t be all bad.

  A sense of déjà vu took over as her legs covered the miles. They moved nearly dead south after the first few hundred yards, taking them through and finally out of the zone marked by pervasive orange dust. Beck always expected the area ravaged by an old world weapon to end abruptly when she left its boundaries, but so far that wasn’t the case in any of her excursions. Always the same gentle transition from land choked with abrasive orange powder to gradually thinning coverage and nature reasserting her dominance.