Western Epic Part 2

Chapter 4

Across the river, the general sifted through maps on the large combat table in the middle of the room. Engineers huddled at the edge of the table, bowed in a bit of submission.

"seriously, how long does it take to collate all these drawings?" he said, sliding a metal file into an aluminum waste basket.

"it's not like I have to promote him," he said. Perhaps the most literate and least creative creatures on the planet, General Parnassus had a penchant for pandemonium and was extremely paranoid. Everyone was always making a move against him and his army, and this required the most devastating response. "let him keep working, it's not like they'll stop paying him for being worthless, he was already pretty worthless when I told him to compile that book or maps, and they paid him then. Funny how lazy and unproductive a man can be when he knows he cannot die.  I'll see if I can't get him to kill himself when he brings me the finished copy and I show him your completed draft, turned in first, and tell him he wasted his time; though he is making me wait for the satisfaction."

"I'm not sure how he suffers here, sir. If you don't care about the plans," said one of the cowering engineers, "since we have provided them for you, you're not going to bother him about it and he'll just go on working at it, and whatever else he does down there all alone. It seems like, despite your preference for lose-lose situations, which you resolve by nuking whatever remnants are left of your competition, you seem to have stumbled on a win-win."

It was true, the last Lieutanant who had defied the General had caught a sniper bullet in the teeth. The lieutenant in question never seemed to see the general, and when he did he friend to make sure that the general had just killed something, which always put him in a sedated, somewhat satisfied mood. Oddly, a desire for strawberry ice cream overcame the general, who would float his metal toy submarine in a bathtub of oil after every kill. There were lots of wildlife on this side of the river, all of it dangerously overgrown from the various fallout radiation, carnovious and carcinogenic thanks to early genetic experiments in the river, and keen to kill anything that came into range of their various lethal capabilities. The river, what little was left of it, was swollen with a gigantic cannibalistic crocodile creature with incredibly thick hide that deflected ordinary artillery. Unfortunately for these slow-moving leviathans the general rolled around the wasteland in tanks, making sure to drive over everything between him and his destination. He tapped his finger of the top-most map and said, "take us here." The engineers bowed, no longer grumbling aloud in the general's presence. Underneath the maps were schematics for new, more advanced engines and thermal drive cores, which they had placed on his desk hours before the general had barged in with his cigar stub extinguished and clenched in his teeth, waved and slammed these maps on top of them. The maps had taken all attention away from their work and the engineers had wasted a whole day waiting for the general to shift on his own terms. Now they would go into the main complex and get the navigators, rather than rouse the anger of the general by pointing out that he had forgotten about the plans. Last week there had been three engineers, one of which had decided that the general wasn't paying enough attention at the bore calibration of his fifty-caliber guns, to which the general had turned in his command center and fired his gun at him. The other two were standing next to the still-smoking, blackened skeleton what had melted into the floor.







Chapter 5: In Town


And of course the proper companion for a matron is a master assassin. He sat in the hall, considering his short lifestyle and resisting the urge to sit with the men who rolled their own cigarettes.

Privilege came with hard work in this town, the privilege to self-medicate with whatever one could afford. The matron could afford all, so people were drawn to her. The man sitting alone in the chair knows to keep himself in shape, and tries to make enough to regularly patronize the matron, but times are hard for men like him, with his particular skills. He's a mechanic without a car, and engineer without a career. He's a lone wolf and he's not welcome in the desert.  He feels at home, keeping him from needing to feel while at work.

He's been in the hall for a while. He was asked to sit quietly by someone who seemed to know much more about what was going on than he did. It was his polite way of sitting that left him unnoticed, like a coat rack or a stranger at a fancy party. All of Jesse's parties were fancy, if she could help it, and with all the hellions inside, always ready to explode.

From that very chair, Muerto had once been invited to protect the mayor's daughter, a long time ago. His secretive training had hardened him to many of life's more inconvenient required actions, such as sleeping or eating on a regular basis. He simply stood by her bed and watched her sleep, in case he needed to catch an arrow, or kill a stumbling gunslinger who wandered down the wrong hall. He had a blade instead of a gun, not too long as to be conspicuous, though no less deadly for that fact. He kept the machete strapped to his back, rather than at his side, for travel. The hilt and the edge were remarkably samurai with their red wrapping and razor-edge, though the fan of the blade was compact, like a travel-katana. He had an incredible inventory of explosives and small knives, though his pockets didn't bulge. Years of training in the woods had made him silent when we walked and hard to see when he moved, even in the glaring daylight of high-noon. His slender frame made him blur out easily, and though it didn't look like camouflage against the satin interior of the matron's house, you could lose track of him standing right next to you.

This made him an excellent ninja, able to catch fireflies for the mayor's daughter while she was just a child. She wonted for nothing, except human contact. The mayor kept her hidden from the world for fear of his gun-toting, trigger-happy enemies. The outlaws in his town didn't care if they lived or if they died, and concerned themselves with others' lives just as flippantly. He's seen Marco and the band kill a bar full of people without so much as asking a question. Cost more to replace the liquor those boys drank that night than they'd spent on the whole building. The mayor had kept them out of town while his daughter was a child, keeping is ninja on a leash to keep them down in the gully to the east, but when she became the matron of the saloon they came looking to rile some goods of the grease bucket. Nothing disgusted her more than to deal with these creeps, though in a town as desolate as dirt creeps were better than wolves, and better for the matron than the Indian chief.

The indian chief dealt mostly with the death of his people, as well as the death of anyone who came across him. People don't wander into the desert unless they want to die, though not everyone is ready for that kind of ultimate commitment. The Indian chief made it easier for them to accept, sometimes handing out cactus fruit to dehydrated men who just needed one more day to get home. Not many people had what it took to see the Indian chief unless they wandered around looking for death, since one only comes close to someone so close to death by getting closer to death themselves. Carver could see him easily, and took comfort in his frequent company. Without realizing it, the sheriff was getting closer to the Indian chief, and was only calm about the matter thanks to how little he knew about the mysterious man with the faded sarape.


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Of course even the most trustworthy gent in town looked like a gangly tarantula, arms all bowed and jagged.

Their mustaches were sinister, their smile crooked and teeth loose, somehow despite its imperfection giving off a stench of freedom, and of sincerity if despite secrecy.

I'm sure many of the things the people of this dreadful town have to tell me I wouldn't want to hear. I see it well enough in their beady eyes.

Fortunately, from under the sombrero sunset, he thinks better of talking to me, kind enough to leave me dangling with that sneaky grin and wheezing chuckle.

The only thing to pull my mind from that drooling madness of a mouth was the glint at his belt, long and revolver-like. Not of these natural origins, though it's lethality notorious in network outskirts like these. It was a magnum, Undone Co., and it was said to do you in as though no one had ever known you. No decent man carried anything as terrifying as that. With his face as twisted and aghast, it held good sense that he was willing to use it, even maybe that he had before. Not a man to trifle with, or rather one better to remember.

Nothing other than the weapon seemed that much out of place, no matter how unlike anything Oliver had ever known seemed ever to appear. Things were mangled in this town, and to some it might seem beyond recognition. The tin roof was twisted into such an amalgamation that it didn't seem possible to keep out the weather, whatever that might be like in these parts. Oliver considered that the weather might not be of chief concern for whoever had slathered this ramshackle town's buildings together.



Further into town, at the top of the stairs, stood Jesse. She liked to spend what money she got on material things, rather than fix what slip-shod stuff she had. Her bed frame was all but busted, banged about by this saloon town, holding up her mattress with three wiggling nails. She's have to save up two whole weeks to pay to get it replaced, just to jiggle it to pieces again a week later. Not worth the hassle, or what she could get daily with a week's pay. Rent didn't cost nothin but a free ride when requested, which suited her lifestyle just fine. Not a god damn thing in that dilapidated building was worth a thing to her, save what she kept in her trunk. That trunk, though, she kept locked up tight. Anything on or about the trunk was fair game, but nobody every got even a glimpse inside.


Marty watched Jesse from across the street, catching her silhouette by the corner of his eye while he read by candle light. Jesse was bathing, quickly, over a basin of milk-water. The milk-water kept her skin soft, and she was one of the few people in town who put aside time in the day to bathe. The hot, dusty roads were torturous to her Venutian skin, but moving from place to place by steamboat-stowaway had its disadvantages. She wiped away the dirt and the heat with a wet washcloth, dipping it in the milk-water to wash it clean and cool it off. She put the towel down beside the bowl and moved behind a partisan. She returned with a lemon and a knife, which she used to split the lemon in two beside the bowl. With each lemon half, Jesse traced the curves of her chest, spreading the aromatic juice along her meridians. Spent and freshly scented, Jesse left the used-up lemon on the stand and retreated further into her chambers.

For Marty, candles had no more important purpose than to cast her shadow on her closed curtains.




Now Jesse had a strange habit of coming to like the things which other people liked after they had shown her they liked them. There was one man who would visit her and who liked to have the windows open while he was with her, so that whatever conversation they might be having could be heard by people as they passed by. It was true that people could hear them while they passed under her room, as the balcony jutted out beyond the natural lines of the building and formed one of the larger patches of shade in the whole town. People who stood below that balcony could hear every sound that came from the room clear as if they were standing inside. Some people would scatter at the sound of these secrets, others would linger a bit longer as they got to where they were going.

Over time Jesse came to love that window being open, even when her peculiar man wasn't spending time with her. Just the thought of the people below and what they thought about the things they heard, it gave Jesse a joy before which she had never felt.

Not everyone wanted their business known to the whole town, though they had tells just as obvious as the next guy. The mayor would slam the window shut, first the left clack then the right. No one ever heard better than muffles from the mayor's visits to Jesse, though one can assume they were no more important or stimulating to her than any other man's, since she talked aloud to no one about no one.

When Jesse was sitting on the piano she was all business, and despite the common knowledge that shutting the window cost extra, there was an irrepressible aura of trust about her.

Across the street from Jesse's saloon was the jail, where the Sheriff lounged with his spurs on his boots, spinning lazily in place as the tips of his shoes drifting back and forth. The stars of the spurs were loose, like every other bit of metal that spun around or rested on any kind of hinges in town. Hand-me-down bits from a dusted generation long gone, worn-out and worn on citizens as familiar to them as alien invaders.

Intermittently, the Sheriff would shake his fists and scream; a great big hearty, bellowing scream. The scream shook the cell bars, and carried with it the wet, bloody sound of ripping one's lungs out. It was a terrifying thing to see.