Cowboy Necromancer 2: Infinite Dark: (A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Fantasy), page 30
He also had his eye out for Remuda, who seemed to have disappeared. Damn chickenshit bastard, he thought as he holstered his revolver and went for his sickle-sword, retrieving it from the breakaway sheath that Raylan had made him.
Gritting his teeth, Sterling launched himself into the air, his hand coming up at the very last moment to grab the end of Matilda’s whip. He was able to do so, and it burned like hell, but with one quick swoop, Sterling cut through her weapon and tossed the end behind him, ignoring the throbbing pain in the palm of his hand.
Fire in her eyes, Matilda produced a tactical blade and lunged for him, Sterling not at all surprised to see that she had leveled up her combat abilities. She waved it through the air, still with that maniacal look on her face, Sterling just about to make his move when a pair of arms wrapped around him from behind.
A monster of a man lifted him and slammed him onto the ground.
He turned to cut the animate’s legs out when a bullet exploded the back of the muscled zombie’s head—Roxie’s doing.
Sterling glanced up to the rooftop to see that not only had she protected him, but she was also currently engaging a pair of teenage animates. The first one went down in a matter of seconds as she shot forward and brought her blade into his stomach, tossing him off the rooftop and onto a table below. The second one jumped for her; she punched him so hard in the stomach that he went sailing twenty feet back.
Y’all done pissed her off now, Sterling thought, secretly wishing he could watch her in action.
Inspired by the female gunner, Sterling once again went for Matilda, who had taken a step back for a moment, the woman clearly trying to gather her wits as the madness swelled around the two of them.
He wouldn’t give her that chance.
Swish!
Sterling brought his sickle-sword down just as she swiped her tactical knife forward, his weapon cutting her hand off. Matilda cried out as Sterling brought it around again, this time with a vertical cross slash that cut through a portion of her neck, taking off her ear as well.
She gasped; Sterling sent his blade across her skull, the tip of his weapon hooking into the side of her head, piercing her brain. He unceremoniously kicked her off the end of his weapon with his boot, withdrew his revolver with his free hand, and fired a few more shots just to make sure she was dead.
Brrrrrat! Brrrrat!
Sterling didn’t have time to look around for Remuda. The bullets that hit him next were magical, the cowboy necromancer cursing himself for not wearing his bulletproof vest, even if he didn’t know how much that would have helped.
Brrrrrat! Brrrrat!
He should have been dead. He took multiple shots in a matter of seconds, yet the person who had shot him had made sure that he didn’t kill Sterling.
Apparently, Remuda had other plans for the cowboy necromancer…
Lying on the pavement now, his shoulders bleeding out, biceps and thighs riddled with bullets, Sterling tried to press himself up but found that he couldn’t. He had been completely debilitated, and it would take some time for his Resolve to repair all his wounds.
Wincing through the pain, Sterling crawled his fingers forward and found his revolver just as Remuda approached him.
“Look what you’ve done…”
The dark-skinned necromancer lowered his modified submachine gun and gestured toward Matilda. The woman, who was missing a good chunk of her face and full of bullet holes, came alive, blood dripping from her chin.
“Look what you’ve done!” Remuda said, his voice with a sick edge to it now. “My Matilda. My poor… poor Matilda.”
“Remy…”
An amalgamation that Sterling had never seen before, one with the body of a cougar and the head of an antelope, jumped into the air behind Remuda and brought Beep down. More of his animates began to cover the Godwalker, who tried to fight them off, sending laser blasts into the air, only for the smothering to continue.
Roxie… Sterling thought, a feeling of panic rising in his chest.
Sterling tried to scoot away, but his legs were practically useless, his shoulders, arms, and thighs shot up to the point that he couldn’t move.
Roxie…
Remuda lifted Sterling by the front of his shirt. “I’m going to make you pay,” the man seethed, his teeth slightly sharpened. “You will suffer for this, and then you will become mine.”
Sterling spat in his face.
Incensed, the man brought his fist back and punched Sterling hard enough that it felt as if he had shattered all of his teeth. His cowboy hat went flying off his head, Sterling’s mouth filling with blood.
Now it was his turn to grin.
“See you in hell, peckerhead.”
Remuda had made the fatal mistake of not kicking Sterling’s revolver away, and even if his arm was practically useless, he still had enough strength left to tilt his wrist at a forty-five degree angle.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Four shots eviscerated Remuda’s gut, the man dropping him and instantly pressing backward, the look on his face telling Sterling that he wasn’t used to the kind of pain he was experiencing.
Sterling aimed his revolver in Remuda’s direction and fired it as many times as he could squeeze the trigger, each magical bullet striking the necromancer in his chest, his shoulder, his neck, his face. Remuda’s animates descended upon Sterling, but he continued on, shot after shot, gritting his teeth as he did so, angrier than he had ever been.
The animates trying to rip him to shreds suddenly stopped.
The others staggered and fell, Sterling hearing the sound of more falling bodies all around him, a few from the rooftop, the amalgamations that had gathered crushing furniture and other animates beneath their weight.
Sterling had killed the second necromancer.
Goddammit…
He tried to press himself away from the closest animate, and was finally able to do so, the pain ever-present. Eventually, he gave up and just relaxed there on the pavement, bodies all around him.
Now lying on his back and looking up at the dark sky above, Sterling wondered for a moment why he couldn’t see any stars, and why his breaths were so short. With the number of times he had been shot, Sterling should have been dead, but no, he was still kicking, the only one alive amidst the field of dead bodies.
“Shee-it…” He squinted at the Godwalker and let out a deep breath. “I need you to find Roxie. Don’t you worry about me, Beep. You find Roxie.”
A pair of feet landed behind Sterling; he craned his neck back to see who it was. “R-Rox? That you?”
The woman lowered to her knees and helped him into her lap, where she held his head, Roxie pretty bruised up herself.
A smile spread across her blood-splattered face. “We… we haven’t had that much fun in a while.”
Sterling laughed until it hurt. “I knew things were going to get wild, I just knew. But I didn’t expect them to get that wild.”
“What did you expect?” she asked as she ran her hand through his hair.
“Heh. I don’t know; it would have been nice if they just listened to us and stopped bothering them tree folks.”
“They lost their minds, those necromancers.”
“I saw that.”
Sterling would never forget the image of zombies moving about the town of Midway as if they were alive. There was something tragic to it all.
“What now?” he finally asked, his mouth still filled with blood. “Not that I mind just lying in your lap here.”
“I’m waiting for you to heal.”
“You sure I can’t just rest here for the rest of the night?”
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?”
Sterling nodded. “You know I would, but it don’t have to happen. I’m just wondering what happens next. How do you plan to get back to the treehouse village?”
“I don’t plan to go back there. As much as I wanted to leave a trail for us, I was unable to while following Melody.”
“Any idea what happened to that one?” he asked, referring to the zombie who had fetched them earlier. “Melody?”
“She put up a tough fight; if you want to see what’s left of her, she’s on the rooftop.”
“I’m good…” He started to laugh, each chuckle sending a spark of pain through him. “What a night. What a goddamn terrible night.”
“We will send Beep back with a message. The others can meet us here, and we will move on. There’s no reason to stick around.”
“A message, huh?” Sterling shifted his gaze in the direction of the Godwalker, once again seeing the now half-smudged smiley face that Paco and the Sunflower Kid had painted across the Godwalker’s front surface. “Do you plan to just tack the letter to the front? Maybe you got some duct tape?”
“Not necessary. We will store it inside the compartment where it keeps its weapon.”
“Good call. You always were a smart woman. Best I ever met.”
“I agree,” Roxie told the Godwalker, her hand once again tracing through Sterling’s hair. “And you shouldn’t say things like that; you don’t know what your wife was like.”
“If only she could see me now…” He laid his head back and tried to relax, knowing that this semi-intimate scene wouldn’t last forever.
Isabelle… my wife… damn. Damn.
The past didn’t matter. For now, they were alive.
Part Three
Moab and the Elder of Icaria, Tukuhnikivatz, Monticello, Beep’s Revelation, Monument Valley, Comancheria
.Chapter One.
Nomadland, Deseret.
Not too distant future.
The rainstorm came on suddenly, blackened clouds rolling in from the northeast, lightning illuminating their faces as the sky opened up onto the dune buggy. Roxie drove as always, Sterling in the passenger seat, Paco, the Chronicler, and the Sunflower Kid in the back. The droplets never touched them thanks to Zephyr, the aeromancer creating a cyclone of air around them that kept the dune buggy dry. She floated within her own sphere of influence, matching the pace of their vehicle as she had over the last several days as they journeyed through Nomadland.
As far as Sterling could tell, there wasn’t a soul in sight in Nomadland. The last people they had encountered were the tree people outside of Morgan, who were so happy that he had killed the two necromancers that they’d even hosted an epic celebration. Spirits were enjoyed by all, and for one single night, all of them, including Roxie, had let their troubles and what they planned to do in the future fall to the wayside.
But that was days ago, the group finding out firsthand what the Chronicler meant when he said that Nomadland was a harsh country. Sterling was glad that they had plenty of water in their inventory lists, but he was even happier to know that they were soon going to be at what was once the Arches National Park, which meant the city of Moab wouldn’t be far beyond that, a territory belonging to the Oracle and the Serpents of Paradise.
They really needed to restock.
Sterling noticed after they had stopped to take a quick break just how sponge-like the desert could be, the heavens above still dark, the rain no longer falling. The sheer vastness. A cigarette in his mouth, he kicked at the dirt and found that the water had evaporated pretty much as soon as it touched it, the heat of the day ever-present, even if the sun was currently blotted out.
I wonder how long they have been dealing with this drought, he thought as he wiped sweat from his brow and took in his surroundings yet again, the great expanse of mountains and mesas, sandstone arches and oddly shaped buttes, ones that seemed as if natives had carved them out of stone just to mess with people a thousand years later. Some of the buttes were as tall as buildings, the only thing seeming to survive around them being juniper and pinyon trees appearing like scabs across the expansive badlands, the occasional flowering cactus, the wildlife Sterling had spotted thus far consisting of sparrows, evidence of other critters, discarded snakeskins.
It was that kind of place, the kind he wished he could just sit in the shade and enjoy for a while, something existential about it, something beyond him. He had done just that over the last few days, the Chronicler adamant about them not traveling too long in the heat, even if they had a vehicle. There was always the chance that the dune buggy would break down, yet they had trusted the mechanics of the past, the Before People and their ingenuity, none of them actually flectomancers but able to build things with a similar skill.
The dune buggy had prevailed. They’d made it this far, Moab just another few hours away, maybe less.
“Yep,” Sterling mumbled as he finished his cigarette. “Yep.”
As bleak as it was, something about the environment called to him, tugged at his brittle heart strings, the desert solitude something that he had come to appreciate over the years. Had he felt the same way about nature before the Reset? What had his life been like then with his son and his wife? Did they enjoy the beauty of their natural environment, or were they the type to escape via other means, televisions and the Internet, computers and smartphones?
Technological distractions.
Sterling had gone through a phase in which he thought the Before People were lazy and unimaginative. What had led them to the lives that they had, ones that seemed designed around getting through the day as quickly as possible to enjoy the night in front of their televisions, to spend hours upon hours lost in fantasy worlds?
But then it all made sense.
One day, Sterling understood how humanity had shifted in this direction. Not only was it more comfortable, it was much easier than what he was doing now, trying to traverse an alien land of peaks and canyons, one of wind-sculpted stones and skirted rock shelves set beneath the bellies of clouds, traveling for days on end, sweating and toiling in the high desert heat like a pack of scorpions. It made sense, being comfortable, growing fat with loved ones, enjoying the finer things in life. Those ancient people, and not just the ones in the Southwest but across the world, had struggled for eons for Sterling’s generation to be able to come home, pop open a cold one, kick up their feet onto the mass manufactured coffee table, and disappear to a new world through hours upon hours of televised entertainment.
And suddenly, Sterling couldn’t get enough of how the Before People had lived.
He had gone through that phase as well, wondering who he had been before, what he had liked, from sports to automobiles, and everything in between. Had he been a typical man from the South? What was his favorite food? Was he into guns? Was he an avid reader? What were his favorite movies?
Since he didn’t know, he tried to discover as much as he could about all of the things he might have been into, some of his attempts more successful than others. There was the one year that Kip had traded some turquoise necklaces he’d won from an Apache fellow for a DVD player. Kip had used a borrowed generator to power the DVD player and a television, the two watching the only two movies they could get their grubby hands on. The Disney cartoon had a bit too much singing for Sterling’s taste; the action movie, full of explosions and graphics, was about what would happen if aliens tried to take over America. In the end, the Americans had won, the world had won in that regard, and Sterling found himself wiping away tears at the end of it all, at how real it seemed and how far from the truth it was. Those aliens in the movie, and the Godwalkers they were faced with now, represented a superior force and they didn’t go down so easily. No amount of patriotism would stop them.
But as Sterling had discovered, they were defeatable.
Or at the very least, they had been in the past.
So maybe the movie hadn’t been as far off as he had felt it was at the time; looking back now, especially with what had happened in White Sands when he and his group had brought one of the Godwalkers down—maybe there still was hope. Maybe there was a happy ending to this after all.
“Took you long enough,” Roxie said as Sterling got back into the dune buggy.
“I was thinking.”
“About what?” Paco asked.
“Have y’all ever seen a DVD? A movie?”
Roxie started the vehicle up, once again forced to travel along the side of the highway due to how cracked and potholed the asphalt had become over the last five years of constant torment from the sun and wind. It was amazing that there was anything left of it all.
“I’ve seen movies,” the Chronicler volunteered. “Back in Saltair, they have a weekly movie showing in one of the conference rooms in the Oracle’s estate. It’s invite-only, only because there are a limited number of seats. They try to cycle through everyone so the villagers are allowed to watch a back to back showing every couple of weeks. Food is served, and every now and then we even have popcorn. I remember you saying something about the currency that people use here in Utah; you can also go pretty far with DVDs in a place like Saltair.”
“I’ll remember that just in case I ever find myself transported back to the Bonneville Salt Flats,” Sterling said.
“I’ve seen movies and cartoons in Albuquerque,” said the Sunflower Kid in a cheerful voice. “It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it. It didn’t last long, though. Last I heard, the Barelas Glyphs took the theater over and ran it into the ground.”
Sterling snorted. “Crying shame. What about you, Paco? You seen anything?”
“I haven’t, but I have read comic books.”
“If we can finally locate this technomancer, then we’d have a good shot at watching something, believe you me,” said Sterling. “I’m sure ol’ Maron has a DVD player tucked away in his inventory list, maybe one of them slick flatscreen TVs. Don’t quite know how he’ll power it, but I don’t know how many of our powers work, just so long as he has the items. He’s not an electromancer, but from what I’ve been told, there are some similarities between the two. Shoot, there’s no telling what that fool can do. I can imagine a number of things. A blender, a fan, maybe even one of them smartphones. I always wanted to see one powered up, figure out why the Before People seemed to worship them so much.”
