Life and Limb (The Ebon Chronicles) (3 page)

"Freezy Breezy!" an older man's voice called from the sun-blind distance, "Get back here, honeymuffin.  I only shot the horse."

Shakily I raised the pistol at the shadowed silhouette still approaching, and saw the girl's face.  She had a casual smile, one that didn't match the fact that I had just pulled the hammer back on the seven shooter pointed at her face.

"Mister I know the look of a man who wants to shoot a young girl, and you ain't got it," she said in a vexingly singsong tone, gently reaching across and taking the blood slick pistol out of my hand without effort.  In the world I was in, between life and death, between consciousness and sleep, I saw her turn holding the dripping pistol above her head and shouting, "Pa!  He had a gun on him!"

There was silence for a few moments more as the man started moving near us,

"Well that's nice for him, but we ain't thieves.  You best give it back."

The girl, Freezy Breezy, looked at me holding the pistol loosely in her hand.  After an additional moment's consideration she leaned down and handed it back with something not entirely unlike concern on her face.

"You okay, Riderman?" she said.

Speech was beyond me as pain raced up and down the whole of my body, each breath reminding me of my injury with an unfamiliar clicking sensation between two splinters of bone running into one another.  I leaned back and dropped the pistol onto my chest.  Soon I had the barrel of a rifle pressed against my forehead.  It was hot, still burning from the shot that had fired out of it moments before.

"Just lay still there for a minute while I think this thing through.  We ain't gonna hurt you more.  We come for the horse."

"Lotta blood, Pa," Freezy Breezy said as she jabbed a pole under the horse near my leg, "Some of it might be his.  I don't know much about fixing a broken leg."

I think it was when they first tried to lever the horse up off the ground that I blacked out.  Darkness swallowed me easily, like a midnight tornado.  I don't know if I dreamed.  It must have been only a few seconds later that I woke up, grasping at the loose sleeve of a blouse in my hand and crying out as a sickening click reached my ears.

"Ask your sisters how they're coming along.  I'm done with you," I heard Pa say from further down, hovering above the pain in my left leg.  My head dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, and I could see the girl run off out of sight.  Pa continued, "Why a sensible man such as yourself would be riding a horse to the Dustlands when there's hungry folk about I never will understand.  Hunger does strange things."

"Who are you?" I asked between quick breaths shooting in and out in time with the jabs of pain.

"Jester Breezy," the man said extending a wet and sticky hand.  Realizing it was unclean, slick with my own blood, he rubbed it on his pant leg, "Good thing you were out.  I just set your shin and got some corn-still on it.  It might get infected, but out here with a bum leg that's the least of your worries."

He wrapped thick cotton strips across the wound in an odd pattern.  After a few wraps he added a pair of thin iron poles, ridged and elastic like rebar, placing them carefully on either side of what was apparently a compound fracture.  I'd suffered fractures before in the waste, but never alone.  The first time I had been carried back on a wagon by my companions.

"Ripper dogs," he said, shaking his head as he tightened the bandage into his odd intricate pattern, "They smell man blood pretty fair.  I feel awful about all this, but you know the old rule.  Kids gotta eat.  I hope it gives you some comfort to know that horse is gonna keep us alive for a couple good weeks.  You too.  Try to move your leg."

I strained, but couldn't.

"See that?" he said smiling with unparalleled satisfaction, "Real good work.  Okay, let me help you up and I've got a crutch for you."

"You shot my horse," I said finally as he helped me up onto my one good leg.

"Horse was alive, not yours.  Now it's dead, finally in man's domain.  I laid claim to that meat before it hit the ground.  That's my law."

He handed me a wooden pole intersected at the end with another smaller piece of wood, wrapped in musky cotton rags.  I took it, placing it under my arm and hobbled once, nearly falling over as the iron bars in my leg tapped the wooden support.  Reacting to the wince I gave out, Jester slapped me on the back,

"There you go, good as new.  We've got to unload this horse and get what dry goods we can in town.  You're coming with us."

I slept most of the way there in the back of a wagon pulled by Jester and his six daughters, trying to keep my leg from moving in the jostling rickety wagon.  Finally I gave up, resting my head back on Atus' cooling body, his hooves hanging and bouncing stiffly over the wagon's side.  Flies crawled over us both, invading nostrils and tickling lips.  I dreamed not an image, not a sound, but a thought.

A simple thought ran through my brain over and over.  I was laying my head on Atus' cold and dead body, and he somehow knew something that I didn't.  It must have been nearly half a day's worth of sleep, covering myself from the sun with my coat and hat, and dreaming that one delirious thought.

This dead horse knows something that I don't.

When we reached the town Jester had been talking about, I pulled my hat down from my face and leaned my head over to look up ahead of us.  It wasn't as small as the first hamlet I had crossed, made up of nearly thirty ramshackle earthen huts topped with rusted metal and grey dry grass.  At the front of the town, guarding the opening of a three foot high adobe fence, a man and a woman with rifles around their shoulders held out dirty hands and the wagon came to a stop.

The shorter of the two, the man rounded the back and stared in at me.  He was clean shaven, bald with a straw cap woven tightly around his head.  He ripped the coat covering me down and saw the pistol in my hand.

"This man's been shot," he called up to the other, "Looks mean."

"He ain't gonna do well unless we get him out of the sun," Jester called out rushing back.  His hand quickly retrieved the coat and covered me up again with a chuckle, "He won't shoot you, don't worry."

With the ringing of a bell the cart moved across the threshold of the wall and into the village.  Excited noise followed us as I leaned up to take in my surroundings.  An old woman with thick arms in a long apron hurried along the cart ignoring me, but feeling one of Atus' legs and calling up to the front,

"How old?"

"Half a day," Jester said, "What are you offering?"

"I got lots of shacks.  Room and board for up to eight people per pound smoked."

I rolled the coat around me, wrapping the collar around my shoulders and jabbing my arms weakly into each sleeve,

"You know anything about broken legs or bullet holes?" Jester called back to the elderly woman.  She eyed me suspiciously, then looked back at the horse's leg.

"Sure do," she said, "Three pounds smoked."

"Meet us at the well in a minute," Jester said, straining as the ground hit a rough patch.

The town square was arranged around a large well with barbed wire and a small group of men surrounding it.  They laughed between themselves as the youngest tried to throw a pebble down a small rut that had been traced in the dust, each nodding and clapping with what was an apparently impressive toss.  As they noticed us, they quickly started ringing another bell attached to a pole.

"Alright, folks!" Jester said hopping up onto a small cement block, adopting the charismatic tone of a salesman, "Gather round here, no pushing.  Enough for everybody here.  Those of you who've traded with me before know my method.  Let's make a deal."

"Where'd you get it?" an older man from the crowd called out, his skeletal face glaring suspiciously up at flies buzzing around us.

"Shot it myself," Jester said, not missing a beat, "This morning Riderman here was taking it across the sand toward the hills up North.  Mad as a midwife he is, so I took the horse out from under him and saved his life.  In payment I took the horse here to sell to you here today."

A gentle chorus of chuckles rose from the crowd along with a few clapping hands.  Jester had won the crowd easily.  Soon he was breaking out his rifle, holding it above his head and bragging about headwinds and shooting with an eye-scope full of sunlight.

"Like a flea on a light bulb he was," Jester said to the delight of the mass gathering around us, "Racing up Hell's ass like a man condemned."

More gap toothed laughter from the crowd - those that had seen a light bulb.  They were interested now, a few of them reaching out and staring.  One of the older men leaned his head deep in at the cart with hungry tranquil pools of cataracts dancing above a weathered graveyard of teeth.  I felt a hand on my shoulder,

"Best get moving," the girl Freezy said helping me up, "Folks make a hole.  Riderman needs a cool cot.  He'll confirm all of Pa's story when he's well."

We passed through a part in the small crowd, moving to where the old woman was staring beyond us wringing her hands,

"Flank cuts.  That was the deal," she said, "Smoked."

"You'll get it," Breezy said as I limped past, "Just give him a spot off the ground.  And take a look at that leg if'n you got the talent.  It's all messed up.  I'll be there in a bit with your pay.  You got a bucket?"

The old woman, who's name I learned was Anna, lived in a modest adobe and concrete hut like the others in this town.  Inside there wasn't much.  The cot I was laid on was a single piece, built into the wall and covered by thin wooden planks.  Rolled over a nearby line were several fleece blankets.  At the head of the cot was a soft net basket, which I learned served as a hammock to support the head in lieu of a pillow.  The old woman, Anna, explained it with two words: damned fleas.  And then she left the room.

I leaned back, letting my head hover an inch from the cot, suspended by the net hanging above me.  And so that's what I looked into - that spiderweb pattern leading up to a single black nail in the ceiling.  I waited.  The gun, which no one had attempted to relieve me of, still nestled in its holster.  My palm occasionally touched it to remind me it was still there.  It was small comfort to an odd sort of delirium.

The next thing that happened, other than the occasional pair of voices running past the open front door, was some time later, close to sunset.  Freezy came in through the front of the hut with a piece of cloth wrapped around some bread and a couple long strips of meat.

I ate them both without a second thought, downing it with what Freezy called, "Cornstill and water."  Essentially alcohol poured in well water to kill off the less ambitious parasites.  Cornstill wasn't what everyone in town called corn alcohol, but I gathered that the Breezys weren't from around here originally.

After I had finished, Freezy asked me why I had been riding toward the hills.

"Those hills," she said, "You know they're outside the purview of reason, right?"

"A thing landed there," I said, "Something I need to confirm is safe before I can go home."

"I'll save you a trip," she said taking the cloth and sternly pouring the last breadcrumbs into her pocket,  "It's not."

"Why?" I asked.

"Used to live there," she said, "Not too many years ago it was a nice place.  Flat plains and green grass as far as your eyes could go.  Now if I tell you this land south of the hills gets rain, I bet you wouldn't believe me." I shrugged, not sure if she was trying to tell a joke.  She continued, "It does.  Once every now and again we get an eastbound cloud that finds fit to spit on us.  Helps the crops a little, but there's something even more important than that.  It hardens the earth.  Cracks it up, keeps it thirsty and solid.  Up north we stopped getting that rain."

"Dust storms," I said nodding, "I've seen them."

"Not just one dust storm, though," Freezy said in melancholic tones, "The whole land is haunted by spinning monsters fit to drink the ocean.  Can't breathe, can't sleep.  Before it got to its worst, last Spring Pa and me went south to sell a few buckets of grain.  When we came back our home town was gone.  Nothing there but a great big fluffy hill.  No footprints.  It must have happened during the night.  Only my sisters and Pa survived on account of us heading south.  Lots of places went like that.  So we headed back down and this is where we live now."

"Spinning monsters," I said, "Cyclones?"

"Cyclones with a mind of their own, wandering the land and fighting amongst themselves for supremacy of their domain, eating one another and getting bigger.  Stronger.  Down here we're scared of ripper dogs, but you never hear folks talking about what those dogs are scared of.  It's the damn sky growing arms and snatching you up.  And it's that hungry dust wind that'll eat the skin right off your body."

"Freezy," I said hoisting my leg over the side of the cot, "Have you seen the walking cities?  I come from one of them.  I'm out here to pick up something that landed in those hills.  It might help a lot of people."

She considered me, an enlightened smile twisting her face slowly as realizations compounded one another in her mind,

"I had a feeling it was something like that.  You're obviously not from around here."

"I kind of had a feeling you weren't either," I said running my fingers down the rebar lashed to my leg, "This is going to hold well.  I'm going to need a way to get moving again."