Cowboy Necromancer 2: Infinite Dark: (A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Fantasy), page 5
“Uh-huh.”
“That all you’re going to tell me?”
Yankee Judd nodded this time.
Sterling snorted. “You sure got a poker face on you, son, you and your little buddy, White Eyed Anderson. Hell, I don’t know what’s going on in Vegas any longer or if it’s even a place, but if it is, that’s where you and Anderson should go. Y’all would be the talk of the town. Ever heard of Las Vegas? I read a book about Nevada two years back. All about that place, lots of gambling and debauchery.”
“I ain’t never heard of Vegas. Is it in Deseret?”
“I don’t know where Deseret is, but Vegas, and hell, where I’m from, sort of looks like this place. So you may be closer than you think. Hell, we may even be neighbors.” Sterling bent just a bit closer to the boy. “Look here, son. I don’t know what your plans are for the future, but if I were you, and I had a sweet dune buggy like you done got, I’d hit the open road and see what’s out there. It’s a big world, believe you me. There has to be more than this place; in fact, I can tell you there is.”
“One day, I’ll have my own compound with my own sister-wives,” came Yankee Judd’s reply.
“Is that what you really want?” Sterling asked as he suppressed the urge to tell Beep to scoot away from the door.
“Yep.”
“Well, to each their own, I suppose. The way I see it, you got two male role models at the moment. One owns all of this, and has plenty of women to please him, enough that he feels the urge to offer…” Sterling didn’t finish that sentence, instead switching to himself. “Then you got me, an outsider in all black that appears with a strange glowing sword and a gun, no friends in the vicinity, no family,” he said, truly feeling these words as he thought of the picture in his wallet, the photo of his wife and son.
No family.
Sterling blinked a few times and started up again: “So hell, now that I say it out loud, I don’t blame you. Maybe trying to become an Elder in the Serpents of Paradise is the best way forward for someone like you, for anyone with any sense. I’ll stop my jabbering. You tell them sister-wives that I got a baby to rescue mañana, tomorrow, and I plan to set out early in the morning to see to this. In other words: I need to count plenty of sheep tonight.”
“Count sheep?”
“Get me some good rest. Don’t need no womenfolk bothering me. Are you a man of your word, Yankee Judd?”
The youth nodded.
“Good, if anything, always be a man of your word. There ain’t much left for any of us aside from what we can say, and how it affects what we do, and the choices we make. Now git; I’m getting tired and ornery.”
Sterling shut the door and turned back to Beep.
“You need to listen to me, damn it,” he scolded the baby Godwalker. “I don’t know what’s up with these people, but I’ve got a feeling that they wouldn’t like to find out that I’m a necromancer, and they definitely wouldn’t like to find out I’m traveling with a little Godwalker like you, even if you seem relatively harmless. Should have just sent your ass to my inventory list, but here I thought we could come to a little understanding. I’ve already seen what you’re capable of, and I’m probably just about the biggest fool in all of Deseret for keeping you around, not leaving you back at the salt flats. But I got a hunch about you…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sterling said as he returned to the bed and plopped down onto it. “Don’t get ahead of yourself now. Just because you saved me back there, and you ain’t tried to kill me yet, don’t mean that you aren’t going to try at some point in the future. But maybe I want you to. Maybe when that time comes, I’ll wait for your laser blast with open arms,” he said with a hint of dramatic flair.
“Don’t talk back to me, not after your little show back there. Shut your yapper, and don’t bother me.” Sterling removed his boots. He got comfortable on the bed, still with his revolver nearby, his sword on the floor in front of the bed. “The sooner I get to sleep, the sooner we can get this journey on the road. Now keep quiet.”
Sterling laughed. “You sure are a little son of a bitch, ain’t you?”
Cracks in the desert
Birds calling for their mothers
Cliffs separated
Sterling reread the desert haiku he’d written just about a year ago and sighed. A sense of longing had come over him that morning, one that he couldn’t quite place. He figured that some of his previous words would do it justice, lift his spirits. It didn’t work, the haiku reminding him that everything would one day come to pass.
Daylight, however bleak it was at the moment, had come faster than he would have liked, Sterling still in the trailer adjacent to the Elder of Nauvoo.
A tingling sensation in his arm led to a spark of inspiration, and over the next fifteen minutes or so, Sterling penned a desert haiku about his arm.
He had been attacked by a bounty hunter named Ram back in Madrid, New Mexico, a man who was still on Sterling’s shitlist, and a man whom he would go out of his way to kill once he figured out where he was. An ice-wielding cryomancer, Ram had cut Sterling’s arm off at about the elbow, and to fix it, Sterling had grafted an arm and a hand from a local cemetery, the Sunflower Kid doing the rest by repairing his flesh.
He’d grown used to the new arm by now, but now that Sterling finally had a moment of respite, he was finally able to put his thoughts to paper, for whatever that was worth.
New bones, same old man
Blue skies seem a bit darker
Death underrated
Sterling smoked a cigarette as he reread the haiku, especially that last line. Death really was underrated as long as it wasn’t too painful, and those who had died at the start of the Reset were lucky to some degree. Sure, they’d had their heads blown off. But the world after? The things that were to come?
Them fools got lucky.
The cowboy necromancer looked at the glowing embers of the cigarette, remembering a comment that the Sunflower Kid had made to him about smoking too much, that it was bad for his health.
“What else is there to do?” he asked aloud as he took another puff off the cancer stick and finally put it out in a ceramic mug that he was using as an ashtray, one missing its handle and which read YOLO, an acronym he was unfamiliar with.
Once his boots were on, Sterling stepped out of the trailer, the sky blotted out by the thick blue tarp above. He spotted the Elder of Nauvoo seated in his courtyard amidst child soldiers and cracked garden statues. To say that Sterling didn’t like the Elder was an understatement, but he tipped his hat at the bald man anyway, and the robe-clad Elder gestured for Sterling to join him.
“Please, sit. Breakfast will be ready soon,” he said. “I hope you like the bulbs of sego lilies.”
“The what?” Sterling asked.
The Elder of Nauvoo motioned to the chair in front of him, but Sterling didn’t sit. Both child soldiers, who couldn’t have been older than eleven years old, motioned with their assault rifles toward the chair.
Sterling remained standing.
“Centuries ago,” the Elder began, “the Shoshone saved the pioneers who had reached this area broken and starving, the travelers poor from such a strenuous journey. They taught the settlers to eat the bulbs of sego lilies. The bulbs are considered a delicacy now, and these ones came directly from Saltair.”
“Yeah?”
Once again, the two child soldiers motioned Sterling toward the chair.
“Your defiance is commendable,” the Elder of Nauvoo told him, a twinkle in his eye. “I wish more of the people here were freethinkers such as yourself, but I’m also glad that they aren’t.”
Sterling laughed at how blatant the man was being. “I bet you are, with all these wives you have, and the fact that there ain’t no kid older than about the age of thirteen around here. You’re the alpha male, and to be an alpha male takes more dumb betas than you could fit into an oversized fishbowl.”
“Or it just takes a vision,” the Elder told him, a hint of humor behind his eyes that made Sterling feel like the man actually liked him. “And the blessing of the Oracle, the first Nephite.”
“Yeah, something like that. Look,” Sterling said, “you have information I want, and that’s all I’m focused on right now. Your lifestyle is your lifestyle.”
“As I said earlier, if you head south of here a few miles, you will find the bandits and then you’ll have your information.”
“That easy, huh? Just head that way and, boom, there they are.”
“That’s right. Just due south. I could get one of my boys to take you in a dune buggy, but they won’t be able to get too far without needing to cut the engine, otherwise someone may hear you.”
“I can make my own way there.”
The Elder of Nauvoo nodded. “I figured as much. You won’t be able to miss them. There’s an escarpment that you will come to; you’ll be able to easily see them from there. Keep to the shadows or keep a low profile, however you intend to do it. I’m sure they won’t create much of a problem for you, not with those remarkable weapons you have,” the Elder of Nauvoo said as he looked from Sterling’s sickle-sword to the revolver on his waist. “Never seen weapons like that before, not going to lie.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“The work of a flectomancer.”
“Yup.”
“The only useful kind of mancer.”
“If you say so.”
Two of the sister-wives brought food, Sterling recognizing Lily Gray, whom he had spoken to the previous day about one of the other wives stealing her sleeping bag.
Lily set the food down and made prolonged eye contact with him, neither sister-wife saying anything as they quickly slipped away.
“Lily catch your eye, eh?” the Elder asked.
“Shee-it,” Sterling said with a shake of his head. “It ain’t like that, not with none of yours. I’ve got ninety-nine problems and a sister-wife ain’t one.”
Sterling examined the food on his plate. He had never eaten flower bulbs before. Even if they were cooked up with some beef-looking meat and had eggs cracked over it, the dish was missing a very important part of a balanced diet, at least for someone who hailed from New Mexico.
Red, green, or Christmas? Sterling thought as he added some peppers to the top of the food, using a knife provided to cut them on the plate first.
“I’d offer you one of these here peppers,” he told the Elder as he started mixing the mush together, “but they’re quite potent, and I don’t think it’s something that someone from here could handle. Unless you know something about Scovilles…”
“Never heard of it,” the Elder of Nauvoo said as he ate his food, no indication on his face that he had been offended by Sterling’s statement. “And I don’t like spicy food.”
“Heh. Probably best you don’t try the peppers then.”
“Probably best.”
The two ate their meal in silence, Sterling getting this strange feeling that the Elder of Nauvoo was continually on the cusp of explaining his philosophy to him, what it meant to be the Dejected, part of the Serpents of Paradise and overseen by the Oracle, the first Nephite, and how he and whoever was an Elder alongside him had reinterpreted what was once some form of Christianity, at least from what Sterling could tell by the language he’d used thus far. Sterling had seen a few crosses in his walk through the compound yesterday, but not more than some of the old Catholic churches back in New Mexico. Yet again, he could tell there was something different about it here, something much more on the cult side of things.
Hogwash, all of it, Sterling thought, the flower bulb just about as good as he expected a flower bulb to taste, earthy and slightly sweet.
The Elder of Nauvoo never launched into his ecclesiastical spiel, the man smart enough to pick up on the not-so-friendly vibe that Sterling was giving off.
Sterling was glad for it, and even if he had to eat with child soldiers standing guard, it was a relatively peaceful meal.
After breakfast, Sterling immediately set out on his quest, glad to leave the compound.
White Eyed Anderson and Yankee Judd followed him out, the two boys pointing him in the right direction, reminding Sterling of the escarpment where he would be able to see the bandits’ camp, and wishing him luck.
“Y’all behave yourselves today,” Sterling said as he turned away from them, a freshly rolled cigarette tucked between his fingers. “I’ll be back later.”
He was greeted once again by a landscape that was both mystifying and ancient, mountains to the east with dark clouds over them, the ground brittle and cracked, small shrubs hanging on for dear life, Sterling passing everything from dried creek beds to debris so rusted that he didn’t know what it used to be.
Signs of the Before People barely held on in such a harsh environment.
He summoned Manchester once he was about half a mile away from the encampment, the horse bones appearing on the ground in front of Sterling. Soon, they were clinking together as the skeletal steed took shape, Sterling hopping on after he set up his saddle.
“Might as well,” he said as he also conjured Beep, the miniature Godwalker appearing next to him. “Don’t say nothing,” Sterling told the alien craft. “I know you’re happy to see me.”
Sterling snorted. “You really don’t listen, do you?”
He took off, Beep gliding alongside him and casting a square shadow onto the hardened soil.
Arid tablelands in the distance looked like a great place for giants to play chess, the clouds pressing away as the sun bore down on the landscape like an inquisitor. A sea of desert, the start of epic canyonlands, stretched to infinity beneath a distended belly of clouds casting fantastic shapes over the horizon. It was an unlikely landscape, one tested by time and demarcated by passageways and fissures, hidden grottoes and fertile glens slathered in dry wash, vertical canyon walls seemingly propped up by talus slopes.
Geological chaos.
“Geological chaos,” Sterling mumbled. “Seven syllables.”
He stopped and equipped his leather notebook, turning to the haiku he had written about his arm back at the encampment.
“One of them days when inspiration just can’t seem to mind its own business,” he told Manchester as he penned another desert haiku about the landscape set before him.
Petrified sand dunes
Geological chaos
Snakes twist together
“Yup.” Sterling read the desert haiku a few more times and made sure it was exactly how he wanted it to flow. Once he was finished, he sent the book back to his inventory list, grabbed the reins of his skeletal steed, and hunched forward. “Vamos!”
The pale sun above seemed almost alien around the time that midday came, the land set before him a moonscape, silent like the inside of a black hole, igneous rock no more than a texture marking the passage of time.
“I damn well heard you,” Sterling said as he continued in a direction given to him by the Elder of Nauvoo, his eyes locking on a bird circling above, something big, some kind of vulture.
Sterling flicked his cigarette to the dust beneath Manchester’s hooves. He summoned some of the water from his inventory list and took a big sip.
Got to stay hydrated, he thought, glad he had filled up back at the camp of the Dejected. Them brainwashed fools…
But even if he didn’t like what was going on there, part of him couldn’t blame the group.
After the Reset, you did what you had to do to survive, including joining up with some delusional leader spitting a mix of cherry-picked Bible verses and watered-down sagacious wisdom. It all depended on setting and circumstance, Sterling once again wondering how the other parts of what was once United States of America, and for that matter, the world, had fared.
Damn Godwalkers, he thought as the miniature version sped ahead, Beep always a few paces ahead of Manchester.
“Never thought I would need me a damn pet,” he mumbled. “Whoa, Pingo!”
Manchester leaped over a sudden crack in the dirt that he had spotted. The landing kicked up yellow dust, the vulture that had been making its rounds slowly moving away.
It wasn’t long before he came to a camper seemingly in the middle of nowhere, all the paint on the side of the RV bubbled and split, now the color of sediment, signs of life including the black markings of a recent fire, animal bones, and clothes hanging out to dry.
Someone was home.
Sterling wasn’t of the mind to disturb anybody unless he had to, so he gave the camper a wide berth, continuing on his way when something struck him from behind.
Ka-bam!
Sterling went straight over the side of Manchester, his skeletal steed rearing up as he tried to figure out where the buckshot had come from. He reached for his mana-powered revolver as he turned to the side, Sterling’s eyes landing on a hillbilly in tattered overalls and nothing else, a shotgun pointed right at him.
The man’s next shot was reflected by Beep as the miniature Godwalker zipped in front of Sterling.
“Quit your damn shooting!” Sterling shouted as he aimed his weapon at the man.
“Damn mancers! Y’all the ones that did this! Y’all are!” the man shouted. “Worse than the hell pigs!”
Beep started to vibrate.
A flash of light; Sterling had to look away as the man was vaporized into pulp.
He had been warned.
“Talk about a way to go,” Sterling mumbled as he slowly sat up, wincing as the wound on his back began to heal. The buckshot had ruined the back shoulder of his duster to some degree, which annoyed him, especially because the small holes weren’t going to be easy to stitch up, not without a patch. While he could wash his clothing by cycling it through his inventory list, this wasn’t the same for actual damage.
