Ain't Talkin'
Chapter 38 - vap

The plume of black smoke seemed not to grow closer in the way that it does. No matter how many hours Roche rode towards it the smoke remained a solid mass against the horizon of maintained size.

But by the time sundown was imminent the hunter atop his horse looked down at the smoke from a sandy bluff.

In a divot carved in the earth by an ancient bomb was a ring of cars. People traveling west had taken a leaf of wisdom from the long extinct buffalo and ringed their vehicles for the night around the elderly and the young to keep them safe from roving bands of wastelanders and highwaymen. But the cars were hulks of useless steel now and had become one with the landscape.

In the center of the ring of cars was a tractor tire filled with garbage set alight. A plume of acrid smoke rose from it up into the sky and drifted into forever.

Roche took the A-Mat from his back and settled the barrel along Lucky’s neck, staring down into the hole in the earth. In the cancer-dying light of day it was hard to make much out, and the smoke was thick around the tops of the cars, mushrooming over them like a blanket. But in the glow of the fire Roche could make out footprints ringed in orange highlights.

The dust hadn’t swallowed them yet, which meant the footprints were not that old. No gang signs painted across the car doors and hoods and no detritus of food stuffs and shitting meant that no one had lived here recently and no party of highwaymen kept it occupied, or at least didn’t want it known that they did. But, an absence of day-to-day living evidence meant that no one had been bedding down here long enough to leave evidence, and the freshness of the footprints meant that-

The bullet hit Roche in the center of his chest. Lead expanded into a disc against his flak jacket and the skin beneath the kevlar burst red with millions of tiny ruptured capillaries. The force of the shot threw him backwards against the butt of his saddle and Lucky skittered back several steps, not in fear but with the sense of a good horse who’s seen some gunfights in her life.

Roche slipped his stirrups and rolled off of Lucky into the dust.. He went prone with the A-Mat couched against his shoulder. Lucky backed further down the bluff, past the point of being seen from wherever the gunshot had come from, across the dent in the earth. Good horse.

Roche couldn’t see shit. The thickness of the smoke blurred everything. The shot hadn’t been full-on-straight, but straight enough. And fuck. That hurt.

Pressing his belly down against the sand and the dirt kept his profile small but it also shoved the growing wound in his chest against the earth. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the kevlar. Bulletproof was good, didn’t mean getting shot didn’t hurt none.

Roche was something pissed. And not about getting shot.

The corporate boys knew he was following them, or at least that a hunter was probably following them. They’d lit a garbage and tire fire that’d throw a load of black smoke and then waited on the other side. They’d bought themselves time by putting a bounty on him with the coppers at Stateline and set themselves a little trap. Whether Roche was losing his knack for the work or he’d just been sloppy. . .didn’t matter. What mattered was he was going to kill the sonofabitch that shot him square in the chest while he’d been distracted by one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Scope flash.

Whoever had the rifle had moved and a bare hint of sun had ticked off of his rifle scope.

The shooter was across the divot in the earth. Roche watched closely. The shooter had either lost sight of Roche or was adjusting himself for another shot. That gave Roche a couple seconds, three at the most. Not enough time for a shot, but enough time to move.

In a smooth motion Roche slung the A-Mat back across his shoulder and broke into a run. He drew his revolvers from across his waist and leapt with his heels together over the edge of the bluff to the floor of the divot in the earth. His heels hit and Roche rolled over the flat of his back, caught a solid step with his left foot and kept up a sprint. A gunshot cracked overhead. Roche slid on a hip into cover behind the closest car just as a third shot ricocheted off the car’s hood and buried itself somewhere in the bluff.

Roche slung his hat back on it’s leather thong off of his head. Three shots had given him a better idea of where the shooter was. He’d moved to Roche’s right for a better shot but was still covered by a heap of metal grown into the stones of the crater’s edge.

Dust exploded in a tiny puff a yard from Roche’s boot. The shot had come from somewhere else. A second shooter was off at the north end of the crater while the first had been to the west.

There was something else too. A bare moment of unease followed by a familiar sense of disharmony with the world. There were fish here and a second of clarity Roche knew he had found the corporate boys, and they had laid out a neat little trap.

Wherever the third Corporation soldier was he wasn’t shooting yet. He either had no shot or was waiting for Roche to make a mistake.

Roche wasn’t about to let that happen.

The white glimmered across Roche’s vision and filtered down his gums and across his tongue. It crept in rivulets from his navel under the kevlar and down the front of his denim to the earth. Roche holstered both revolvers and dug his fingers under the rim of the hulk of the car. Little four-door sedan so sand-blasted it no longer had a color. Roche felt the white sift through him like a flesh and blood colander and he flipped the car out of inches of accrued dust and up on it’s side. The metal screamed protest and a cloud of dust spilled from the undercarriage of the vehicle. It rocked, cried and then settled in place, burrowed on the drivers side in the dust. Full protection facing west, Roche flipped the A-Mat from his back and knelt.

Down the barrel of the scope time slipped by slower than it should have. Roche looked north atop the bluff and waited one second, then two and then the soldier made a mistake.

One quick look from behind his cover of a turned up road sign against the crater’s rim, the soldier poked his head out to peek at his target. Dark goggles and a bandana around his face, the soldier saw Roche with his gun at the same moment the A-Mat fired and blew an open hole the size of a fist through his skull.

The ether shifted and Roche turned.

There was something behind him, something huge. It moved on knuckles the size of dinner-plates, on all fours with fingers the breadth of an arm. When it shifted it’s weight the earth did not notice, and when it roared the wind carried no sound. Roche spun on a dime and shouldered the butt of the A-Mat. The trigger-pull would have happened in an instant if there had been a something to shoot at.

But there was nothing. Just a sharp sense of wrong that there was a creature beyond belief at his front many yards away and it was larger than any living thing anymore had a right to be.

Roche blinked ether and saw what the true thing was.

Something wrapped in the skin of a fish but muscled and shouldered like a gorilla in a picture book. A head too small for it’s body and rear limbs that bent at incorrect angles. It grunted and shuffled and it moved towards him at an off-kilter run screaming the ricochet sound of silence.

Roche slid into a sprint and vaulted a car into the circle. Somehow when the not-thing moved through the ring of cars in pursuit.

The walker ran and crossed the other side of the car-ring in a slide over a sandy hood. A gunshot rang from somewhere but seemed less important than the not-thing made of ether the size of a house chasing him across a crater in the earth.

Roche went up the edge of the crater. The Corporate boy who’d been hiding along the west edge of the divot made a wrong move. He stood, rifle at his hip for a shot at the hunter. Roche drew a revolver and put a bullet through his cheekbone. A scribbled line of blood followed the soldier to the ground and Roche whipped around in time to see the not-thing of ether disappear into the side of the crater and into the earth beneath his feet.

“Help!” The call came from several yards further west, just on the other side of a large stone.

Roche moved and found the man laying there. Bound at ankle and wrist the captive had shimmied his bandana-gag from his mouth and had tears of frustration cutting dusty mud-lines in his features.

“You have to help me, my name is-”

“Alex Markus?”

orat

“How?”

“No time, lad.” Roche holstered a revolver and slipped his knife from his boot. He cut the rope binding Alex Markus’ ankle’s together. “Can you walk?”

“Yes. Sore but I can walk.”

“The third soldier, where’s he at?”

“South of here. He’s armed.”

“If I cut your hands free you’re coming with me, I’m taking you back to your father.” Roche didn’t waste anymore time, he slashed the bindings on his wrist.

“My what?” Alex rubbed his wrists with his hands with a puzzled look on his face.

“Father, boy. Fuck it, no time. S’go.”

“Where’s the construct!?”

“The what?” Roche asked before he realized what the construct must have been. The not-thing made of ether that smelled of white-swimming fish had settled within the earth, but Roche could feel it probing the world with thick fingers. “Nevermind. Come on.”

The young man that was Alex Markus wasn’t much to look at. He looked a man who spent a good deal of time indoors. He was scrawny, tousled dusty hair and spectacles covered eyes that blinked back the sun. At the very least, he followed orders well, when Roche turned and edged back around the crater from cover to cover towards the eastern side, Alex followed closely.

The crater was not large enough to have taken overly long to circumvent. They reached the east side. Roche whistled for his horse and the final Corporation soldier popped up from behind a rock like a carnival pin with a shotgun drawn.

“Let him go, hunter!”

“Nope.” Roche felt the pull of the white, drew and pulled the trigger of his revolver and a hole opened between the black-masked soldier’s eyes. He crumpled and on cue, Lucky crested back over the bluff and whinnied.

“You’re riding bitch, Markus. Not going to get an apology.”

“None needed, just get me out of here.”

Arms holding tight to Roche’s waist, Alex sat behind the hunter as they rode back east along the 50 on a bay horse.

Somewhere behind the two the strange creature crawled back from the earth with thick limbs and an open mouth screamed that sounded to all the world like nothing more than a seashell’s crescendo.

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