~*~
“Pod hatch open. Hope you enjoyed your float, Mr. Watkins.”
Josh’s eyes flooded with light. His labored lungs sucked in mouth full of clear, humid air in salty gasps.
He looked around. The water was once again clear, his feet pointed to the back of the pod. Josh slipped and scrambled out of the pod, trying to gain his footing on the slippery plastic surface.
His body once again felt normal. Young.
Josh stood shivering and confused, staring at the isolation pod. What the hell was that?
He put his clothes on in a frenzy, he didn’t want to spend one more moment down in these basement depths with this crazy pod. He knew he would never get in that thing again.
He raced down the hall to the elevator, and caught his reflection on the elevator door. He breathed a tremendous sigh of relief when he saw, once again, his young face. The doors opened and Josh got in, and hit the button for the lobby. He didn’t want to go back to his apartment. He wanted to be outside in fresh air and open spaces. Most of all, and not a little surprising to Josh, was that he wanted to be around other people. His mind was overloaded as he tried to process the last hour.
The elevator doors opened to a sea of commotion. The lobby was packed with tenants and police. He’d never seen so many people in the lobby at one time.
Josh pushed past some cops that were huddled by the elevator. They eyed Josh as he walked around them heading for the door. Charlie the doorman stared at Josh as he walked up.
“What's going on?” Josh said. Charlie looked at Josh confused.
“Where have you been man? It’s Mr. Oatman. I found him dead outside of his apartment. The police don't think he died naturally, because he had scratches all over his face. And I gotta say I kind of agree with them.” Charlie wore the worried look of someone accused. Josh felt bad for him.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Two people stepped out, making the droning hum of conversations come to a screeching halt. The two men wore jackets with CORONER stenciled on the back. They pulled a gurney out of the elevator with a white sheet in the shape of a body, and started to make their way to the front of the lobby. People parted like the red sea, as if death were a disease.
Charlie hopped to his duties and quickly opened the door, letting in a gust of wind. The breeze blew part of the white sheet off revealing the dead staring eyes and skeletal smile of Mr. Oatman. Josh knew the old man was dead, but Oatman’s dead eyes talked to Josh. They said, It’s my turn to float. It will be your turn to float forever soon. We all float in the end.
~*~
LEDGE TOWN
Jason Anspach
~*~
Oregon. 500 Years Later.
~*~
The old masters called it high desert. An expanse of sagebrush intersecting with blue skies that went on forever, wistfully, like an old man giving an account of the bride of his youth, now low in the grave.
Harris rode side by side with Bart Jessup. Neither felt the need to speak to one another, a sign of friendship. Or, the closest approximation that could be had. The duo, backed by a gang of outlaws and bandits, spread death throughout the Oregon territory with wood grained repeater rifles and matte black six-shooters. Bart murdered with glee. Harris killed with purpose.
Each man wore a black glove over their shooting hand, signifying a rite of passage. Harris intended to dissolve the partnership through murder. Kill for the sake of their friendship. An act of mercy.
But that was a deed for later.
The Ranger, who aimed to kill Bart and Harris both, to make them pay for their crimes, had not followed them from the steppe. This too was mercy, but of a different sort. A softer sort. A weaker type that could not stand against what was coming.
If the Ranger knew it all, man, Harris mused, he would have killed the child. But only he truly knew what the future held.
A devil posing as an old master, white hair and white linen suit, with a neatly clipped mustache and Van Dyke, also white, had shown him. The old master told Harris that he owned many names. “Call me Aldrich, for now.”
Aldrich opened worlds and visions to Harris, showed him the end of days like unto a prophet in the wilderness. He unveiled terrors through swirling mists, a grand drama of death—ragnarok, revelation, the final trump—performed on a stage that transcended space and time. This woolly white old master, a friend and rival of Mayhem, smiled as Harris watched eternity’s end in rapt terror.
Aldrich pulled the curtain back further still to show Harris the coiled black horror at the root.
When Harris did not go mad from the revelation, the devilish old master explained an alternate path.
“There is of course, another way, Harris,” Aldrich said. “A dark way, yes, but a lighter end.”
Harris took the dark path, and worked for the light end. It would involve the Ranger, or it would not. In any case, for Harris it meant visiting the town beyond the end of the high desert.
And so, Harris rode on with Bart at his side.
The high desert was arid, always tugging away at whatever moisture seeped from the corners of traveler’s mouths. The sun was bright overhead and warm, intense enough to sear the tips of ears and the bridge of the nose, like roasting game left unattended on a spit—both burnt and raw at once. Harris and Bart wore hats, black, against the sun and kept their dusty flesh unmolested. The desert warmth lubricated the rider’s legs at the saddle, and sweat gathered wherever leather belts or bandolier pressed their ragged broadcloth and buckskin against their skin.
A cool wind brought with it unacknowledged thanks. The land before them was without the oppressive heat that danced in the mirages of the sandy dunes that waited beyond, right up to the bluffs and cliffs dropping off at the world’s end. The high desert was benevolent, a stern and fair judge of constitution, unlikely to pass a sentence of death on the men who traveled among its underbrush. The town was close now, and neither Bart nor Harris feared becoming a sun-bleached stretch of bones, foretelling the fate of the next traveler to come upon them.
The horses were a different matter.
Drink had grown scarce. The water skins, two to a man, once crisscrossed like voluptuous thighs around the waist of the riders, had shrunk and lost their figures. The skins groaned and creaked with every movement, but held within a sloshing promise of a few more days life. Their horses foamed at the mouth, desperate for cool draughts to slake a maddening thirst. All vegetation had dried and there was no relief in sight. When the animals stumbled, the riders dismounted.
“That about does ‘em,” Bart croaked to Harris. It was the first word spoken in days. Yet there was no emotion, no concern in the voice. He spoke like a bag boy, loading the last sack of groceries into a wagon. A finished job, time to move on.
Harris chewed the inside of his lip, his black tumbleweed beard and matted oily hair swaying from the effort. He spat. “Best put ‘em down.”
“Take some to eat?”
“Ain’t hungry.”
Taking his horse by the reins, Harris watched as Bart pulled a long, gleaming knife from its sheath. A Bowie, named for an old master. The blade reflected the sun like mirrored glass, dazzling as the bandit held the knife high before burying it in his steed’s neck. Whinnying and bucking with the last embers of its strength, the horse fell defeated into the scrub covered hardpan. Bart’s face shone like Moses’, but with a perverse delight at taking life. The blade disappeared again and again into the horse’s neck and mane.
Harris steadied his own mount, alarmed by the violence, and drew iron. He pressed the barrel against the middle of the forehead of the bay that had carried him as far as it could.
The shot rang loud and far, a singular church bell in the desert.
Bart, huffing from exhaustion and half-crazed by the blood, stopped his assault at the sound. He looked down at the lifeless horse at his feet, drew himself up, and laughed. “Guess I got carried away.”
“Guess you did.”
&nbs
p; Bart wiped the blade clean on the sleeve of jacket, more paint on a canvas stained rust red from deeds past. “Gonna hafter find water to drink ourselves ‘fore too long,” Bart said, and he patted his withered skin.
Harris nodded. It was so.
Harris had a gift for sensing when the old places, buried by the Shake, were near. He walked east, toward the sun as it labored to reach the heights of noon. Bart followed, and the two resumed their silence.
There was uncertainty in Harris’ mind about whether or not he was himself an old master. He had not asked Aldrich. The old world ended with the Shake, and a new world began. Sometimes Harris would dream of the time before the Shake, of cars and air conditioning, business meetings, and holidays by the sea.
Old master or not, he found among the sagebrush a crack in the earth, almost imperceptible at first, then widening like a gash of lightning, just large enough for Harris to enter. Using uneven red rocks and exposed roots to ease his downward navigation, Harris reached the bottom. He could feel through his boots the cushion of a commercial carpet, woven tight for high traffic, just beneath a patina of orange dust.
Bart looked down the crack from above, his dark visage a lone black cloud among the drifting white in blue skies. Harris whistled, and Bart began to climb down.
As he waited, Harris walked where the old masters once treaded. The Shake had opened the jaws of the earth, and nearly the entire old world was swallowed greedily into a rocky gullet. Harris supposed he stood in some lobby, though boulders and sheer basalt rock forever closed off whatever once buttressed the area.
Jumping down the final six feet, Bart joined Harris, dusting off his clothing as he surveyed the lobby.
“Old world,” Bart said. “Makes me jumpy. Makes me think of Portland.”
Harris closed his eyes in concentration and answered distractedly. “Don’t mind that.”
“What’d you find?”
“Don’t know yet,” said Harris, reopening his eyes. He laughed—a bemused sound, echoing off the stone walls. “Maybe I found the end of our lives, man. Yours, anyway.”
Bart folded his arms and spat, Harris made him uneasy when he got like this. “Hell.”
Harris walked to the far end of the lobby tracing the rocky walls with a black gloved hand while singing an old world song to himself, “Buffalo gals won’cha come out tonight? Come out tonight, come out tonight?”
Reaching the end of the lobby, he found a hidden corner behind a protruding boulder. Following the turn, Harris entered a room with red non-slip floor tiles. He sang softer now, almost whispering. “Buffalo gals won’cha come out tonight, aaaaannd dance by the light of the moon.”
In the middle of the room stood a green clad drinking fountain with a sign that read, “Refill your water bottles here and help to reduce our landfills.”
Bart rushed past Harris and began slurping noisily at the station, rinsing his hair and refilling his skins. Harris chewed the inside of his lip and stared at tiny droplets of water that splashed against the stainless steel basin. Droplets that were still in the process of evaporating before Bart turned on the fountain.
Harris began to laugh quietly, amused by a private joke. “Someone was here for water earlier, man.”
Bart lifted his face from the arcing stream of water, keeping his thumb on the button, a wasteful extravagance. “The hell you say?” His eyes grew in fear, like a mouse realizing he mistook the flap of an owl’s wings for wind. “Deacon? The Ranger?”
“Ranger wouldn’t have been found out. Would’ve dried the basin before he left. Someone else.”
A sigh escaped from Bart’s lungs. “Or your imagination,” he said, taking a long drink before wiping his mouth with his sleeve, leaving a crimson streak across his lips. “I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but there weren’t no rope or ladder down here.”
Licking his lip, Harris squinted up at the ceiling. “Now that I got an idea of what to look for… there.” He pointed upward. “They just drop right down from little hole up yonder. Guessin’ they take the rope with ‘em.” He laughed again. “It was a good idea. Nearly saved their lives.”
Skins full, the bandits climbed from the rock-encased lobby, returning to the desert. The sun had reached high noon and Harris’ compact shadow rested directly beneath him. Circling on his heels, Harris slowly examined the countryside. He stopped his rotation and faced a copse of pine and juniper trees hundreds of yards away.
“There,” he said, pointing at the treeline. Bart followed him to the grove.
Harris took in a great breath, filling his lungs like a bellows. Cedar, pine, gin, and sweat mingled together, wrestling one another for dominance as they hung heavy in the air. The grove rose, then angled down into a rocky depression, still peppered with trees. Harris meandered and then followed a small game trail. He was close and a contented smile eased onto his face, like a hunter finding a sudden peace in solitude.
Bart walked with his gun drawn. Predatory anxiety forced beaded sweat around his brow. Unlike Harris, Bart did not walk into unknown circumstances with both hands in his pockets and a song in his heart. When bullets swarmed the air like a hive of angry bees, Harris would stand up, remind his gang that he would be the last man on earth to die (and that he’d pull the trigger himself) and walk into the maelstrom. Bart had seen so many men standing next to Harris die, that he believed the boss spoke truth. And so he was careful.
The trees grew thicker, then like a summer’s rainstorm, rapidly gave way to sunshine and open space. Bart holstered his weapon and joined Harris in examining a lone homestead, nestled snugly in the valley below. A man and woman worked the land, vanishing behind woodsheds, rows of corn, and a small barn as they performed their daily work in the soft comfort of everyday oblivion.
“How’d you know, Harris?”
“Small miracles.” Harris sat down behind a fallen timber, wood nearly petrified. He motioned for Bart to join him. “I aim to sit until they head inside for supper. A man able to live in seclusion is liable to be trouble. Best if we show up while they sit down, man. Shoot ‘em both through a window I reckon. Nice and quick like. It’s the decent thing to do.”
Pushing his back into the obscuring log, Bart grunted and pulled his hat down over his eyes. He fell asleep, his arms crossed at the interchange of chest and stomach.
Harris removed a bullet from his belt and began to turn it over with his fingers, watching the sun glint off the brass casing. He listened, straining his ears and taking in the soft sway of the trees in the sighing wind, the shrill, distant cry of the hawk. Most of all, he listened to the faint buzzing deep down at the very bottom of his ear canal. Harris closed his eyes and focused on the hum as it grew and vibrated until finally, Aldrich, the old master, spoke.
And Harris listened. And Harris obeyed.
Daylight had faded into a pulpy orange sunset when Harris’ eyes split apart. Aldrich’s voice was gone, but his meaning was plain and remembered. The pioneer man and woman were withdrawn into their cabin, and a thin tendril of smoke wafted from a stacked stone chimney.
Rising, Harris kicked Bart’s boots to wake him. His fellow outlaw stretched and creaked from his repose, nodded, and drew his pistol, ready to walk the switchbacks that led down to the homestead.
“Holster that iron,” Harris said. “Change of plans. Let’s try to have dinner first.”
~*~
Abigail Keller looked on from the wooden porch in front of her cabin for her husband. Had she looked at the tree studded ridge, she would have seen Harris and Bart, rising from behind the petrified log. But the familiar solitude had calmed the need to constantly scan the horizon in fear of walking death. So, she missed the sliver of opportunity to see the bandits coming.
William Keller was where she expected him to be, spending the final moments of dying light on the property’s burial grounds. Eight graves were each marked with a wooden cross and a mound of river rocks to keep the diggers away. Seven contained the bodies of whoever lived on th
e land before Abigail and her husband arrived. The eighth marked the final resting place of their infant son. Unable to stand the thought of putting their baby boy alone in the ground, they buried him with strangers.
“William?” she called. “It’s about time for supper.”
“All right,” the man answered. “Just spending a few minutes with the baby.”
Abigail winced. The baby. How a little person could both amplify joy and sorrow left her feeling numb. She preferred her husband not to talk about it. He should avoid that part of the property, like she did. He couldn’t let go, couldn’t see the perverse joke of it all. To run from a biting, consuming, death in Los Angeles only to find a slow death in… wherever they were.
Retreating inside, she ladled out two bowlfuls of corn and potato stew. William entered and joined her at the table, taking in a mouthful as Abby did the same.
“Oh, Abby,” he said. He was always melancholy after visiting the grave. “I wish he could have just hung on for a few more weeks. We’d have figured it out by then.”
“I know, but it’s been years, and—” she froze in midsentence when the knock came to her door. The howl of wolves, snuffling of bears, and warning shake of rattlesnakes had all at one time, sounded near that door. Yet none had induced the heart swelling terror she now felt, to be both alone and found.
Hot soup went cold in her stomach and she felt damp, as if touched by fever. Her eyes sought for some assurance from her husband as the two locked their gazes. William reflected a stolid, confident demeanor, but the trembling spoon in his hand betrayed his worry.
William nodded at the shotgun mounted above the fireplace. The weapon was familiar to them, black and studded with long-dead attachments on a rail. They had seen the like of it in movies and triple-a video games before they fled to Oregon for their lives. But here, the weapon was an ancient tool of the old masters. Its shells were of newer construction. William acquired them through trade of excess corn with the God-forsaken town just yonder beyond the high desert’s end, a terrible place the inhabitants called Ledge Town. Maybe they would work, maybe not, but the weapon itself should give any townsman leaving Ledge Town pause before he sought to bring further trouble to the Kellers.
Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: Omnibus Page 7
