Cowboy Necromancer 2: Infinite Dark: (A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Fantasy), page 8
One of her eyebrows lifted. “Peppers give me indigestion, you know that.”
“What? Oh, come off it. That’s just the Española and Chimayó peppers. Actually, I picked up some mighty fine Jalmundo peppers back in Las Cruces. You never met my buddy, Judge, but his wife was running his shop, and these peppers ain’t half bad.”
“The people here had some canned foods. Freshly canned, I should say. Wherever we are, someone has an operation going.”
“Wouldn’t mind me some canned goodness,” Sterling said as she handed him the child. The baby girl took one look at him and began to cry. “Hey there, partner, it’s just your Uncle Sterling. Is that what I should call myself?”
“Do you have any other nicknames?”
“The Hopi called me Skeleton Man.”
“You have gotten thinner…” said Roxie.
“Yeah, probably. Shhhh,” Sterling said as he began rocking the baby in his arms. “I ain’t going to bite you. Shhhh. Who is your favorite necromancer? Huh? Who?”
The baby looked at the miniature Godwalker and started to giggle.
“Cousin Beep? You like Cousin Beep?”
“I swear, I still can’t believe you are traveling with that damn thing,” Roxie said as she opened one of the cans of beans using a combat knife. “How do you know it isn’t spying on us?”
“I don’t. But it hasn’t tried to kill me, and like I keep telling you, ol’ Beep here has saved me twice now. I figure we’ll see what happens once we encounter one of the big sons of bitches. Beep has a wicked laser it can produce; it may come in handy in ways we don’t yet know. Shoot, I’ve already come across hell pigs, damn swine, and an amalgamation, some sort of buffalo hybrid. Big ol’ bastard. I want to say we ain’t in Kansas anymore, but I’ve never been to Kansas, so maybe that’s where we’re at. Saw some pictures though, and Kansas don’t look like this.”
“It looked very yellow,” Roxie said as she poured one of the cans into a pot. She turned on a generator, which started a small stove, the baby’s eyes seeming to spark just a bit as electricity entered into the equation. Roxie had already turned on two lamps, both gas-powered, which told Sterling that Deseret had access to resources that were a bit harder to get in New Mexico.
Just need to get to Saltair, he thought as he continued to rock the child.
“New Mexico ain’t exactly green,” he reminded her, moving back into their conversation. “Hell, the whole Southwest seems to be the victim of an eternal drought.” Sterling summoned a few of the Big Jim peppers, the baby’s eyes lighting up as she saw them. “I think she likes peppers.”
“Don’t you dare give that child a pepper,” Roxie said.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch; I ain’t giving this kid a pepper. Them peppers are for me. And you, if you want one. These are the mild ones, Rox, trust me. Toss them in the beans. You’ll thank me later.”
Roxie begrudgingly procured a cutting board and began chopping up the peppers.
“They have coffee too, believe it or not,” she said as she went about her work.
“Shee-it, these fools were practically living like royalty up in this cave,” Sterling said as the baby laughed once again at Beep. “I can’t remember the kid’s name. The Elder said it, something real American sounding. You been calling it anything?”
“I didn’t want to name it,” Roxie said, a dark look coming across her face. “I didn’t know who it belongs to, or how long I was going to be taking care of it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get that, but the kid still needs a name.”
“Any suggestions?”
Sterling recalled the woman that he had befriended at the Tiwa trading post near Socorro, the place that the bounty hunter named Ram had later attacked. That damn cryomancer, Sterling thought as he remembered the man and how he had taken his arm. There was no way in hell he was going to let him get away with not only murder, but insult to injury on Sterling’s part.
“Maria,” Sterling said, bottling his thirst for revenge for the time being. “Let’s call her Maria until we are told otherwise.”
“Works for me. It’s a much better name than Beep.”
“What else would you call this thing?” Sterling asked as he bounced from foot to foot, the baby giggling once again. “I’m a godfather, you know,” he told Roxie. “Things have changed over the last three years. That’s the truth of the matter.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I swear on my mother’s grave, even though I don’t know who my mother is. There’s a kid in New Mexico named after me, believe it or not. Belongs to my buddy, Judge. Same one whose wife sold me the Jalmundo peppers I was telling you about. Little baby Sterling. He’s a cutie too, like his godfather.”
A rare smile took shape on Roxie’s face, a genuine one, as she looked up at the cowboy necromancer. She was currently crouched by the pot, stirring it, the normal harsh focus in her eyes softening to some degree. “Look at you hopping around like a daddy.”
“Don’t get no ideas, Maria,” he told the baby in a playful way. “Even though you are a technomancer and we need one of them in our crew, there ain’t no room for a child on a journey like this. Speaking of which, are there any more of those hell pigs around here?”
“I know which ones you’re talking about,” said Roxie. “Took out a couple of them myself.”
“They aren’t as hard to kill as I thought they would be,” he said, skipping over the fact that he had been nearly plowed through by the giant hogs more than once. “And if I could kill a few more, I might be able to get me a level.”
Roxie continued to stir the beans. “We will deal with the swine tomorrow on our way back to the compound you were talking about.”
“Speaking of levels and killing things. How many people have you killed since you arrived here in Deseret?”
“I don’t keep count,” Roxie told him in an offhand way.
“But you must have an estimate.”
“A couple dozen, maybe less.”
Sterling tutted in a teasing way. “You’re practically the Grim Reaper, ain’t you?”
“No more than you. And you know I have a policy of shooting first and asking questions later; I’ll keep that policy until the Godwalkers screw off to whatever hellhole they came from.”
“I don’t think there are hellholes in outer space. Black holes, maybe, but not hellholes.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“This is why I think you and Beep are going to be fast friends,” Sterling said as he used the baby to motion toward the tiny Godwalker. “Both of y’all are trigger happy.”
“Don’t use Maria to point at things.”
“Damn, now both of y’all are on my ass?” Sterling started to dance around with the baby, the child cooing at his movements. “Don’t listen to them, Maria. Don’t listen to them none.”
The smell of coffee the next morning was just about the most inviting thing Sterling could imagine, especially with his current unknown location, holed up in a hollow like an Apache pocket mouse, Deseret a mystery he hoped he’d be able to crack sooner rather than later.
He awoke feeling cold, and Sterling remembered that he had removed his duster last night so Roxie could patch up the buckshot. She was good at things like that.
“Can’t believe Maria was so quiet,” he mumbled as he sat up and went for his black cowboy hat. He summoned his tobacco and rolling papers, noting that he still had a few days’ supply left, and began crafting yet another cancer stick.
“Don’t smoke that in here,” Roxie said as she stirred the pot of coffee she was boiling. Maria was awake, and to prevent the baby from crawling around too much, Roxie had used a rope to tie the child to something at the back of the space.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Sterling said, even though he had actually been planning on it. He went ahead and rolled up another one for the road.
Sterling tipped his hat to the small Godwalker, who floated near Maria. “Good on you for being quiet last night too. Got me a good night’s rest, believe it or not.”
“You and Maria, apparently,” said Roxie, agitation in her voice. “Not so much for me. I kept waking up ready to kill the Godwalker. That is, after all, why we were together in the first place, then and now.”
This statement hurt Sterling in a way he wasn’t expecting; he’d once had a relationship with the scrappy woman currently cooking up a pot of coffee, and while they were often disagreeable, he didn’t like the way it had ended. He liked to think they’d gotten together for other reasons, aside from a thirst for revenge. But the way things had shaken out three years ago…
All Sterling needed to do at that time was tell them what had happened, that he’d been transported away from their campsite by a Godwalker, that he would have been there fighting alongside his former teammates, Liam and Carina, willing to die with them as well.
Instead, he simply took his licks, which in his case turned out to be a fist straight to the kisser from Roxie. The group parted ways after that, Zephyr and the Sunflower Kid heading to Albuquerque, ol’ Duke City, Sterling gravitating toward Truth or Consequences like he was a space-bound billionaire looking for an escape and a tax cut.
He’d seen the launch sites and whatnot outside of T or C, the infrastructure that would have kickstarted the space tourism industry of New Mexico. It was hard to imagine now as he looked up at the sky at night that the Before People had gotten themselves to the point that they could simply get the hell off the planet if they wanted. Spoil one planet and move on to the next, a blueprint for how those who had survived the Reset often lived their lives, moving from one location to the next once the population of an area was no longer sustainable, ripped to shreds by violence, or simply exploited to the point that it no longer made sense to live there.
Move on or get mauled.
But there was a culprit for a lot of what had happened over the last five years, aside from humanity being humanity. The Godwalkers had kept people from working together again, building communities, once again taking hold of the land and forcing it to bend the knee, to better serve humans.
So two were at fault in Sterling’s book for how things played out after the Reset: humanity itself and aliens.
“Heh.”
“What are you snarking about over there?” Roxie asked as she looked up at him.
“I get philosophical in the morning, you know that,” he told her, a twinkle in his eye as he looked up at the woman. “Usually one of my better times to write desert haiku.”
Roxie poured the coffee out into a mug and handed it to him. “Drink your coffee and we’ll get to killing hell pigs. How’s that for a desert haiku?”
“Let me see…” Sterling brought the coffee to his lips, the smell invigorating him. “I think I could make it work. But I’d need to add some syllables.”
“I’m sure you would,” she said as she opened a can of beans.
“We got anything else to go with them beans? I got more peppers.”
“Then get your peppers. Why are you asking me?”
Sterling winked at her. “Thought you might have some eggs stashed away for a rainy day. Make us a Deseret huevos ranchero or something. Wouldn’t mind me a pancake neither. Been ages since I had one of them. Sure Maria would like one too.”
A thin smile formed on Roxie’s face. “Does this look like a diner to you?”
“Wish it was…”
“You know I only carry essential rations in my inventory list.”
“Mostly guns in that ol’ list of yours, from what I recall.”
Roxie nodded. “Used to be guns and ammo, now just mostly guns and other supplies. Last time I saw Raylan, I had him hook me up.”
“Did you now?” he asked as he took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter, but he expected that.
“Sure did. Was actually on my way back from Madrid when those goddamn Killbillies ambushed me.” Roxie stirred the beans. “Bastards. They got very lucky.”
Sterling’s deposition soured. “That good-for-nothing Commodore Bones. Betraying sons of bitches. I ain’t done with him or the Killbillies. Soon as I get back to New Mexico, I got me some scores to settle.”
“You aren’t the only one.”
“At least we can agree on something. Once we get home, aside from dealing with Godwalkers, we’ve got to rid the Land of Enchantment of its Killbilly roaches once and for all. There’s also this bounty hunter named Ram out in Duke City that I need to play the reaper for, if you get my drift.”
“Yeah?”
“Let me get them peppers; I’ll tell you all about that sack of shit over breakfast.”
As they ate the beans and sipped their coffee, Sterling detailed his trek toward Madrid, New Mexico, and what Ram had done, from killing off a group of kind Tiwa natives to eventually taking his arm. He left out the part about Maria, figuring that part of the story wasn’t any of Roxie’s business.
“You had me at killing Tiwas,” she said once he’d finished. “Those are good people. You’ve got backup whenever you do want to go after him.”
“Appreciate that,” he told her. “But when the time comes, it’ll be my shot to take. I know you could split his head in two from a mile away. Nah. That ain’t how it’s going to go when I see that illiterate cryomancer. Thinks he’s slicker than owl shit. He’ll find out soon enough…”
“I’ll let you get final kill, if that’s what you’re asking for,” Roxie assured him. “But I have ways to make someone suffer in the meantime.”
“Shee-it, I don’t mind an assist. And speaking of ol’ Duke City, we need to fish Zephyr out of there anyway at some point. Always good to have an aeromancer around.”
Roxie’s smile thinned. “I don’t know why we need her. The Sunflower Kid, I get, but Zephyr?”
“She can be a bit much at times, a little airy, pun intended. But we all got our strengths and weaknesses.”
Maria started to cry.
“Shoot, better feed the baby too,” Roxie said. “Then it’s hell pig time.”
“Indeed,” Sterling said as he ate a spoonful of beans. “Indeed it is.”
Roxie had a plan for the hell pigs that involved trapping them in a narrow canyon via explosives. It sounded crazy enough to work, and this turned out to be the case as Sterling did the corralling part—feeling just about as close to the word ‘cowboy’ as he’d felt in ages—while Roxie dealt with the explosives part, Maria strapped to the front of her chest because this was life after the Reset, this was Deseret, and explosives around babies weren’t anything too out of the ordinary in a post-apocalyptic world.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Sterling did his best to kick up a ruckus, the sounder of hell pigs instantly taking charge.
“¡Vamos!” he shouted as Manchester galloped toward the trap they’d set out, the hazy Deseret sun bearing witness to an oncoming massacre. Sterling buckled down as a shadow reached toward him, Beep right behind him, the miniature Godwalker actually following his directions for once.
“Don’t shoot at them!” he yelled to Beep as he grew closer to the canyon, Sterling spotting a cloaked figure up on the ridge, Roxie with her explosives wired up and a modified assault rifle in her hands.
Buckling down, the dirt whipping past him, a half-extinguished cigarette in his mouth, Sterling fired his magic revolver a few more times, stirring up the pigs even more as he neared the choke point.
He passed through it, the ground quaking as an explosion rippled through the canyon.
Boom!
The debris that followed forced Sterling to hold on to his cowboy hat as he charged away. He eventually circled back around, up to the ledge where Roxie was currently perched with her weapon trained on the swine below.
“Go on,” she said, the pigs whipped up into a frenzy below. “Get to killing.”
“Beep, stay here.”
“Do what I say, dammit,” Sterling told the Godwalker. He hopped off Manchester, his bone horse settling immediately, obedient as always.
Maria stifled a cry.
“Shhhh… shhhh…” Roxie said, not changing her position, her weapon at the ready and aimed at the increasingly frantic sounder of hell pigs below. Sterling counted eight of them, which would be enough for him to reach his next level.
“You want me to make this easy for you?” she asked.
“Hell nah, Rox,” Sterling said as he approached the ledge, his black duster picking up in the wind, yellow dirt settling below.
“You sure about that? No shame in it.”
Sterling remembered his last encounter with the hell pigs. “I… I’ve got this.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t you hop down there, and if one of the hell pigs overwhelms you, I’ll start making it easier. Will that satisfy your ego?”
“You know what?” Sterling said. “Sure. Make it a little easier for me. No need for an ego at the moment. Just trying to get me a level so I can get some points.”
A surprised look stretched across Roxie’s face. “That doesn’t sound like the Sterling I used to know.”
“Shit has changed.”
“It’s like you’ve gotten wiser over the last few years.”
The hell pigs squealed below; Roxie fired her weapon, three quick shots, which made them even wilder.
“Maybe I just don’t feel like having my ass handed to me by a bunch of bone-headed prehistoric swine this early in the morning. Call me crazy.” He looked back to the Godwalker. “Beep, stay your ass here. Listen to Roxie too.”
Beep didn’t respond.
“That a yes or no?” Sterling asked as he raised an eyebrow at the floating monolith.
“Good enough for me. Here we go!”
Sterling drew his revolver and his sickle-sword. He hopped down into the canyon, ignoring his fear of heights, and the way his limbs tingled as he lowered to the bottom.
Rapid bursts of gunfire accompanied him, the cowboy necromancer launching into action with his blade, turquoise energy crackling all around it, pigs dying, blood splattering into the air, grunts, and dust, and grime, and hooves digging into the parched soil as the demon swine coughed up their last breaths.
