Cowboy Necromancer 2: Infinite Dark: (A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Fantasy), page 41
“We need to fix its face.” The Kid was referring to the face that had been painted across the Godwalker’s smooth front surface, which was now absent, replaced by fingerprint smudges, powdery dust, dried water droplets, and mud.
“Shee-it, what Strawberry really needs is a bath. Next time y’all do its face up, give it a little spit-shine too. Can’t be traveling around Deseret with a dirty Godwalker, the Oracle wouldn’t have it.”
“No offense.”
“Yes, it… it’s about Strawberry,” said Maron. “I’ll just come out and say it: We communicated. There are some things you need to know. What I’m trying to tell you here is that I understand it all, and… we need to talk. I know today has been rough but… Yeah. We need to talk.”
Sterling certainly wasn’t in an epiphany mood, not with the way things had played out. For a moment he didn’t even realize what Maron had said. Sure, he’d heard him, but he gave little weight to the words.
The Sunflower Kid, who was listening more intently, picked up where Sterling might have dropped the ball. “What do you mean you understand it all?” she asked as she conjured a seat for Roxie as well, who sat quickly and began dealing with one of her weapons.
“This Godwalker, Strawberry…” Maron bit his lip. “I really don’t know how to say it other than simply to come out with it. But it’s… maybe it’s a sensitive subject.”
“How so?”
“Strawberry, Beep, whatever you want to call it. This Godwalker…” Maron motioned to the floating monolith and exhaled audibly. “It’s your wife, Sterling, it’s Isabelle.”
Sterling felt as if his heart had been carved out, the emptiness within suddenly so strong, so debilitating, that his knees started to buckle. He fell, only to be aided by Paco, who happened to be standing nearby and arranging a rock.
Zephyr landed, the aeromancer darting her head left and right as she tried to understand what the sudden tension was about.
“Did I miss something…?”
Roxie, who had quit fiddling with her weapon, nodded to the Godwalker. “It’s Sterling’s wife. The Godwalker is Sterling’s wife.”
“Say… what?” Zephyr started laughing. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
The Chronicler, who had been resting in his chair as the scene unfolded, cleared his throat to clarify what Roxie had said: “Maron has been able to communicate with… Strawberry… and it appears that it claims to be Sterling’s wife, but we’ve yet to uncover how, or why, or for that matter, make any sense of Maron’s revelation.”
“Is… is it true?” Sterling asked Beep, ignoring the others now. He crouched, his insides still feeling as if they’d been scraped out like an avocado.
“Shee-it,” Sterling said, not knowing how to process any of it. The day had been too much at this point. First Don Gasper, and now this? Too damn much, he thought as he began to shake his head. Too damn much.
“So…” Zephyr looked around, starting at the Chronicler and ending up at Roxie. “So we’re just going to take the Godwalker’s word for it? I mean, that’s it? Strawberry is his wife. No one has even asked how this is even possible?”
“I can explain it…” Maron swallowed hard. “Well, sort of. I can sort of explain it. It’s complicated, as I’m sure you might imagine, but…” He chewed on his lip for a moment. “First, I should note that this Godwalker isn’t exactly communicating with me in the same way that we talk, it’s more of a communication that is beyond words or even images. It’s hard for me to encapsulate it. But I’ll try. Everything, at its core, is somehow electric, energy-related. Let’s just say it like that. Now, let’s take it a step further and assume that the soul is also electric, and that the Godwalkers are—like everything, even though they use alien energy sources—powered in some way. We can call it electricity, or not, but we’ll just call it that to make it easy. That’s the only way I can describe it, because that’s how I make sense of it here,” he said as he tapped his temple, “but I don’t know how else I could explain it aside from becoming a telemancer and beaming it into each of you, which is impossible.”
“Electric souls…” Zephyr asked.
“Sure, again, that’s a huge oversimplification of what has happened here. But basically, the Godwalkers killed ninety percent of humanity to use us as—and here’s the kicker—an energy source. The source points are stored at various points across the globe, including the Terminal in Monument Valley. Isabelle managed to escape, and in turn, inhabit this smaller Godwalker.”
“It then brought us all here, again, an oversimplification, but considering that it’s an electric soul inhabiting an advanced alien technology, it’s safe to say that she warped the space-time continuum and deposited us at various points, our timelines are all synced now, as you can tell.” Maron ran his hand over his beard, a bit wild-eyed. “Is everyone following what I’m saying here?”
“I think I am, although it sounds outlandish. So his wife, this Godwalker, brought us together but didn’t do a great job of it, and now we’re supposed to destroy the Terminal, which is where some of these electric souls, as you call them, are being stored?” Zephyr asked.
“Precisely,” said the Chronicler as several of his field diaries appeared in his lap. He began flipping through them excitedly until he landed on a series of images. “This! I was trying to interpret the meaning, but it never panned out. I thought it was a spiritual thing, or perhaps an ancestral understanding but… but it makes sense now! It makes sense!”
He distributed two of his notebooks, Sterling barely getting a glimpse at the picture, which involved a series of glyphs with people emerging from their own bodies, a Godwalker hovering above them as if it were absorbing their spirits.
“I thought that this meant the Godwalkers had killed them,” the Chronicler explained, “but what Maron is saying here makes so much more sense to me.”
“Isabelle?” Sterling asked the Godwalker, the sky too dark and the monolith too blotted out by dirt and grime for him to actually see his reflection. “Is… is that really you in there?”
“Do y’all mind…” Sterling glanced to the top of the mesa above. He wanted some privacy, he wanted a moment to talk to what was left of his wife, even if he could only receive yes and no answers on his own. “We can go up there. I want to talk to her.”
“I can help,” Maron said. “There’s… there’s more.”
“Yeah, there’s always more, amigo,” Sterling said as he waved the technomancer’s suggestion away. “But we don’t got to delve too deep. Not yet, anyway. Right now, just some yes and no questions will do. Need me some privacy though.”
Sterling stood in front of the Godwalker puffing on a cigarette, the glow of Paco’s rocks below and a glitter of stars above the only light available at the moment. He had been standing here like this for several minutes now.
“It’s hard to call you Isabelle,” Sterling finally told the alien craft. “I don’t mean no disrespect in that, but it’s hard. I don’t even know what my wife, what you, looked like, yet I find it real tough to imagine you inside that thing.” Sterling ran his tongue across the inside of his lip. “Real damn hard. So, I might end up calling you Strawberry like the others. I don’t know. Beep don’t seem right. I was rude to Beep.”
“No, I was, I know I was. Heh. I guess I’ve always been a bit ornery.”
“You say that now, but I can tell. A bit curmudgeonly, stuck in my ways. I’m fine with that. Look, I got some questions, and I don’t know how much you can elaborate on the answers without Maron around, but right now, I’ll just take what I can get.” Sterling settled his breath. He was ashamed of the fact that he couldn’t feel for his wife, but knew that this was because of the Reset, that it would always be hard for him to process his emotions. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t some pressing questions. “Is our son still alive?”
“So… all three of us survived?” he asked, feeling a melancholic sense of elation.
“But I thought you said our son was alive.”
It dawned on him what the Godwalker was suggesting. “I get it, I get it. You died.”
“Yet here you are. So our son is alive and out there, and you think I can find him?”
“I’ll take that as a yes, and… I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever I have to do,” he said, noticing how the Godwalker had grown more ecstatic with that response. “I guess I got another question about you and me, about the past, back when we were together. I’ve got to know, because frankly, I don’t know nothing about my old self. Was I a good man to you and our son? I’m sorry if that is a stupid question.”
“And we were in love, right? Shee-it, I guess that sounds stupid,” he said as he ashed his cigarette. “I mean, were we true loves? That sort of thing?”
Once again, the Godwalker answered in a positive way.
“High school sweethearts?”
“Dang, so you was with me for a while then, huh? You must have really liked me to put up with all my bullshit.”
The Godwalker tilted to the side to some degree, Sterling getting this weird sense that it was smirking at him.
“Were we together when… when it happened?”
“Figured as much. I didn’t go back and check people’s IDs or nothing, but I had this feeling that we weren’t together. Always had it and I don’t know why.” Sterling brought his cigarette to his lips again and gazed out at the brittle landscape, one of steep tiers and sculpted sandstone. He could see a bit of the moon now, a thin dark cloud in front of it diluting its hazy pale light. “Were we happy together?”
“I guess I sort of asked that already, just double-checking. Shoot, I don’t really know what to ask. Part of me wants to just let the past be the past, especially because there ain’t nothing I can remember from it, yet even now, standing here in front of you, I can still feel how it must have affected me. I can feel how much I loved you, and how much we cared about each other. Strange, right?”
“You seem like you must be real optimistic. Were you like that in real life?”
“Figured as much. Me? I ain’t too gloomy, but I can have my days. Makes sense I’d be with someone that kept things light. These Godwalkers, the aliens, are they really as bad as they seem? I know that’s a weird question especially with what they’ve done, but are they?”
“And you truly brought us here to stop them.”
Once again, an affirmative answer.
A stretch of silence spread between the two of them, Sterling recalling something that Maron had said earlier. “Since… since the Godwalkers are using this soul energy and whatnot, by destroying the Terminal, are we freeing the souls that are trapped there?”
“Does that mean that something will happen to you?”
“Well, I guess that’s a good thing. Don’t know what freeing them souls will look like, but shoot, I guess it’s just part of the process.” Sterling took his cowboy hat off and held it against his chest for a moment, not wanting to press this line of questioning any further. He knew better. “We… we still got a ways to go, I reckon. The Terminal, then Chaco Canyon, not to mention the Comanche, Commodore Bones and the Killbillies, and a bounty hunter named Ram I need to see about in Albuquerque. Listen to me just recapping what you already know. I just… I’m sorry, Isabelle, I really don’t know what else to say to you at the moment. Maybe I will later.”
“This is real weird, ain’t it?”
Sterling flicked his cigarette over the side of the mesa, watching as the ash scattered in the wind. He placed his cowboy hat back on his head and started to laugh. “Some kind of life. But I guess… I guess that’s how it goes. Let’s get back down there. And if you don’t mind, for now, I’m going to send you off to my list for a moment so I can sleep. I need me some rest.”
Of course Sterling couldn’t sleep. The others seemed to be doing just fine, even with a cold wind whipping over the high desert, the group all tucked away in whatever they had in their inventory lists and warmed by the stones Paco had heated.
There came a point that early morning that he knew it wasn’t going to happen.
It was as if he’d drunk three cups of coffee before bed, Sterling able to shut his eyes and almost feel as if he was asleep, but never getting the rest he deserved. Rather than toss and turn, or pretend to be getting some much-needed sleep, Sterling sat up and ate some of the goat cheese from his inventory list.
As he sat there eating, he heard a rumble in the distance. Sterling squinted down at the highway to see a trio of motorcycles heading south.
The Comanche…
“Rox,” Sterling whispered, only to find that the female gunner was already awake and silently moving into position. “Think you can get them fools from here?”
The previous day had ended Sterling too quickly, and he’d yet to process how he would deal with Don Gasper’s murder. There was a part of him that wanted to take it to the Comanche in Monticello head on, but he also knew it would be just as good to bypass them, that he already had enough people on his shitlist, and enough things to worry about, including the fact his wife had joined them in the body of a Godwalker.
The three motorcycles came to a stop in the canyon below, two of the men getting off to relieve themselves while the other one remained on his bike, a cone of light illuminating the ground in front of him.
Roxie stepped into the air, and began floating toward the ground.
She’d already started running by the time Sterling did the same, the cowboy necromancer finding it hard to float in the dark. To avoid the glow, he kept his sickle-sword in his inventory list and went for his magical revolver instead, holding it at the ready as he moved as quickly and as quietly as possible.
The three men had left their motorcycles running, the sound loud enough to be heard for half a mile or more, Sterling reaching Roxie just as the three Comanche detected movement on the horizon.
“Wait,” Sterling whispered, his hand coming to her shoulder. Roxie brought her eye to the scope of her weapon just as a panther-like amalgamation tore out of the shadows, its skull that of a ten-point buck. It rammed into the first Comanche, shredding the man with its antlers in a matter of seconds.
Roxie shifted toward Sterling, not at all afraid of the amalgamation. “We could get info from them,” she said in a low voice.
“I meant to do that back at the Hole ‘N’ the Rock.”
“What about the amalgamation?”
“Let it kill them, and then we’ll kill it. I’ve got…” he sighed, still not certain what he should call the Godwalker, “…Beep as well, if we need backup.”
Roxie tipped her head back toward the others. “They must have heard something by now.”
A plume of fire ignited the midnight desert air, the orange glow illuminating the amalgamation. The beast slipped to the side as an enemy pyromancer tried to unleash another bolt of fire. The amalgamation brought him down. The final Comanche started his motorcycle in an effort to escape.
Zipff!
Roxie saw to the one trying to flee, his body slumping forward and the motorcycle taking off for a few paces. It fell as well and skidded out, just as the panther amalgamation was finished mauling the pyromancer. The beast sat on its haunches, Sterling well aware of what needed to happen next.
He’d been meaning to utilize the small upgrade he’d made for a while.
His Death Sense ability allowed him to conjure corpses from a distance, and about the time that the amalgamation tilted its antlered skull in their direction, the three Comanche it had just killed came alive.
They lumbered toward the amalgamation, Roxie taking charge as well and firing yet another weapon that she had summoned, one that came tethered with an explosion once it reached its target.
Thunk - Boom!
“You’ve got a damn grenade launcher?” Sterling called after her, the ground shaking, a cloud of smoke and flames illuminating the desertscape.
She didn’t respond, which left Sterling the choice of holding back or moving forward. Naturally, he took off after her, also firing his weapon as he ran at the panther amalgamation, which was now covered in tufts of flame and trying to crawl away with a shredded leg.
Thunk - Boom!
Roxie’s next shot did the trick, the amalgamation nothing more than smoldering chunks of viscera and bones by the time Sterling reached her.
“Damn, Rox. A grenade launcher, really?”
“You should know by now that I have all sorts of shit in my inventory list. Besides, I think we are far enough out not to attract too much attention.”
“You think?” Sterling looked back to the mesa they’d been camped on, his animates suddenly without life, the mana returned to him.
“I reckon.”
“Hey, that’s my word…”
Roxie approached him, the grenade launcher she had summoned already back in her inventory list.
Sterling felt a tug in his chest, an energy link between the two of them that he knew he’d never be able to understand. It was as if time had slowed for a second, and even though it was dark and gruesome in that Deseret valley, Sterling could see her fully as if she was glowing.
The moment faded.
“Well?”
“Yeah?” he asked, just to say something.
“Are you going to use your power or not? You have yet to answer if we’re going to deal with the people that came for Don Gasper, right?”
“I don’t know,” Sterling told her.
“Mister ‘I’ve got a bounty hunter to deal with and screw the Killbillies’ is really going to let the Comanche get away with murdering one of your amigos, as you put it? Look, I know today’s been hard, and there’s the whole thing about your wife. But we have made it this far. And…”
