Facing the Bullets
For a story that was already outlined over a year ago, this sure has taken a long time to write. May be up to three chapters long. Do not consume after midnight. Side effects may include dizziness, feels, irritation with fictional characters, and irritation with authors who take two months to put out the first chapter of a story they promised ages ago.
I would drive on to the end with you,
a liquor store or two keeps the gas tanks full
-"Demolition Lovers"
Nearly Three Years After
Arizona
Worth moves before he has time to think. Synapses fire, but they're firing for his legs and arms and not his common sense.
He's been here before.
He knows this feeling.
His legs and arms have all the synapses to themselves, and they, at least, know they're going to die. It's a downright pity his survival instincts were always such utter shit.
The bullets are beams of light, scorching through his skin, leaving a dozen glowing holes in his body that look like burning glitter with the light behind them.
He turns, because there's something there, something behind him and it's more important than anything—more important than air, than the blood he ought to be losing—and he has to know if—
He wakes up.
-A-
All the Midwest states blur together at the seams. Not even Conrad could keep them straight all the time; they're huge and one end looks completely different from the other end and half of their names Worth doesn't even remember learning.
Right now he was placing his bets on Nevada, because Nevada seemed like a fairly appropriate state to place a bet with.
The heater spewed vaguely chemical smelling waves of not-quite-hot-enough across the passenger seat, and the glass on the window was cold where it pressed against Doc Worth's temple.
"You okay?" Conrad asked, a shadow settled into the driver's seat. "You're breathing kind of hard."
Heart beating like a raver's speakers, lungs pumping hard enough to pressurize an airplane, jittering fingers on the one hand that isn't crushed against his side? What was the problem, there was no problem.
Worth glared at him blearily. "Maybe my carcass is finally givin' out, on account a you hoggin' all the hot air?"
"Hey," Conrad snapped, "fuck you, I have a right to these vents. I get two, you get two, learn to live with it."
"Shit, two whole vents? Careful, ice queen, yer gonna melt yerself at this rate."
"I'll show you ice queen."
"Oh sugar, ya make it sound like I ain't already seen that plenty."
"Right, yes, let's do this song and dance routine again, that's exactly how I want to spend my night."
"A routine, just fer me? Well now, lookit that, now I feel like a real classy date, y'sure know how ter treat a fella."
"You know, you're saying some words but all I'm hearing here is bluhbluh passive aggressive douchery."
"Sweetcheeks, any'a yer old headshrinks ever told ya 'bout a little thing called projection?"
"Don't get smart with me, it isn't cute and it doesn't suit you."
"Aw, but how else am I goin' ter show off my fourth grade edumication?"
A frizzled red head popped into the space between their seats, and like a hot needle jabbing through a big rosy boil, all the tension that had been quietly bubbling up around the cockpit started to disperse in a sickly slow trickle.
"Whoa hey," Hanna said, a slightly strained grin pulled across his teeth, "do I need to get Horatio up here for some hardcore marital counseling?"
"Screw you, Hanna," Conrad muttered, white hands flexing on the wheel. "Mind your own business."
"Okay, okay," the magician replied, palms up in the universal gesture for keep your panties on, "it's just that lately you guys've been goin' at it a lot harder than usual, and I'm gonna be frank with you, it's starting to make me and Horatio uncomfortable. I mean, more uncomfortable than usual which is a sort of baseline uncomfortable we're all learning to live with."
"Horatio and I," Conrad hissed, staring straight ahead.
"Uh, what?"
"Horatio and I, not me and Horatio, Hanna, grammar is one of the basic laws of humanity separating us from the ranks of lower primates and this parasite in the passenger seat here, and it would be great if you'd learn to use it."
"Wow." Hanna looked back and forth between the vampire and Worth, who was tapping a cigarette against the dashboard and had been for the last minute. "See, now I know you're not okay, because you never do this heil Grammar routine when you're feeling okay."
Conrad said nothing.
"Seriously, Con-man, you can tell me. What's up?"
And Worth had sunken into one of those transparent moments when he forgot that he was actually a player in this scene, so that when Conrad finally looked up, fixing a blazing red eye on him as Hanna followed his gaze, Worth felt a little like he'd been punched.
"Well," the doctor ground out, pushing up out of the abused cushion, "looks like I ain't needed here. Try not ter have too much fun while I'm gone, eh?"
When he slouched out of the room, he was fairly certain that he felt eyes on his back all the way to the door of the bedroom. Thank god Hanna hadn't made him stick around. That was all he needed, a therapy session on top of an already shitty night.
-A-
According to the zombie, the town they were headed for was objectively a curiosity. Objectively a massive cocksucking pain in the ass, more like; but when Worth had said as much, Horatio had patiently pointed out that he was confusing objective for subjective and goddamn but it was impossible to get into a proper argument with the walking slim jim.
Worth had kept the rest of his opinions to himself for the afternoon.
What made the town a curiosity was mostly that it had continued to be a town in stubborn opposition to the sweet pillow talk of common sense. Miles into the desert, in the flat basin between far away mountains, it sat like a little sun bleached tick on the Arizona dirt (it was Arizona after all, but only just barely). A full day's drive from the nearest holding pond, somehow their tiny little world had kept on spinning long after the sprinklers lost water pressure and the sunbeam bread trucks stalled out halfway through the desert. They were in a minority. For all that Worth had seen of various deserts in the course of three years, they were the minority.
Roswell shifted at the back of his mind, a town full of sand and skeletons.
Of course, they hadn't had much reason to go snooping around in deserts before Roswell, and somehow they'd managed to completely avoid them afterwards. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that more towns like Mesquite were out there in the world, struggling blindly on. Worth certainly wasn't about to go looking for them.
…Unless Hanna decided that was their next job, god help them all.
Somewhere in the latest hours of the night—Worth could almost feel the pink fingers of dawn slipping over the horizon—long after Worth had settled back into a restless sort of sleep, the queen-sized square of Worth's current universe squeaked and bent under a new weight. Cool hands shoved him over into a smaller territory of mattress, yanked blankets out of his weakly fisted hands.
Looked like the princess wasn't mad enough to sleep on the floor, at least.
Worth slipped into a somewhat less restless sleep, and the morning glimmered away somewhere far above them.
-A-
They were on the lookout, but even if they hadn't been, enough time on abandoned country roads had trained them to recognize the signs.
In the last half-lit hours of the new evening, Worth spotted a fresh track of dust on the asphalt. Half an hour later, the RV pulled up into a desiccated parking lot on what appeared to be the edge of somebody's former down-town. The four of them unloaded messily, Conrad squinting slightly as his vision adjusted snap-fast to the darkness, Hanna jamming new batteries into a flashlight with so much enthusiasm he nearly lost his hold on the damn thing.
The zombie turned his headlight gaze on the sterile-looking police department across the street. "Hanna," he started, a cautionary rumble in the quiet, "don't you think we ought to wait till morning? In the dark, we may find it even more difficult to pass ourselves off as neutral merchants than we usually do."
Hanna screwed up his face in concentration, peering down the business end of his flashlight. "Nah, I wouldn't worry about, Lear. No wait. Bad name choice, not that one. Sounds too much—shit fuck damn!"
The light bulbs in the flashlight had suddenly remembered how to function. Long suffering, Conrad sighed and plucked the flashlight out of Hanna's hands, leaving him free to rub wildly at his starry eyes.
"Look," the vampire said, brows scrunching downward, "it's not that I don't trust your social tact after years of watching you introduce us at every rat hole village on the continent, but I frankly do not trust your social tact. Let's get back in the camper and wait till morning, when we won't look as much like vagrant hoodlums."
Blinking blearily, Hanna answered, "Man, no, you just don't wanna introduce yourself to strangers anymore. You gotta get back out there in the world, meet some people! Like the rest of us, we make friends all over the place! Well, me and Patroclus do, Worth mostly just makes enemies but that's kind of like making friends for him, right? Long lasting emotional bonds, deep personal connections, et cetera? Come on, it'll be good for you!"
Conrad looked just a hair shy of horrified.
"Yeah Connie," Worth pitched in for the hell of it, "y'gotta forge some deep pers'nal connections, meetcherself a handsome prince, settle down, have some rugrats. Y'know. Be a proper lady."
"It's people like you who set the feminist movement back a century," Conrad sniped back.
"Come on guys," Hanna shouted, already halfway down the block by the time they turned around to look. "Meaningful human contact waits!"
The artists sighed, shouldered his bag of soaps, and followed wearily after; his footfalls were silent on the concrete. Worth and the dead man got their less-spry bones moving a few seconds after. When the two of them had fallen far enough behind that the figures ahead were mostly silhouettes against ovals of white light on the sidewalk, the zombie shifted a fraction of an inch closer.
"It's probably not going to end well," Frankenstein confided, graceful movements shoulder to shoulder with the doctor's careless slouch. "Hanna worries about Conrad. He worries that Conrad has no one to talk to."
Worth frowned. "He's got us, don't he?"
The dead man turned his head slightly and raised one mute eyebrow. Well, fuck, you always forgot that he could make facial expressions when he took a notion to.
The awkward sideways staring contest finally broke when Doc Worth slammed his foot into some abandoned bloody hubcap in the middle of the sidewalk and went spinning, clutching at the foot in question and swearing hard enough to resurrect the royal fucking navy. Teach him to try and outstare the eye of Sauron, wouldn't it.
He heard whatshisface sighing heavily somewhere in the background, but he could damn well get over himself. That sighing shit wasn't fooling anybody.
"Fuck," Worth grunted, when the worst of it had passed.
The dead guy just looked at him.
And then the sirens went off.
As sirens went, they were pretty lack luster. Somebody's old megaphone turned to its most obnoxious setting, followed pretty quickly by some squalking and a car alarm of all things. Worth realized belatedly that he hadn't really heard the full, horrific scope of a car alarm's capability until now, in this brave and more importantly silent new world, when the loudest ambient noise in a thousand mile radius was probably somebody's shrieking toddler.
In a matter of minutes, there was a whole street teaming with slapdash militia. By that point, Worth and the Zombie had caught up with their better halves and were exchanging a full rainbow of expressions ranging from resigned disapproval to seething murderous rage. Hanna was actually whistling, the little bastard. Finally, somebody shut off the goddamn car alarm.
There was silence in the road, while either side regarded each other. God knew what conclusions the raggedy fuckers were drawing right now, but Worth was drawing plenty enough of his own. There were a lot of them—mostly men, almost all men, and even if more men had survived the grand old reckoning in general, you still had to account that for maybe seventy percent of the population at most—and they were a ratty bunch of guys dressed in boxers and crocs, shouldering shotguns that had that particular look of probably all belonging to the same old coot's collection before things changed. Sometimes you could just look at a collection and tell.
"Hi!" Hanna called out, taking it upon himself to open negotiations. Yet again. "Nice town you got here! A little Windswept but hey that's cool too, I mean, this is a desert what else would it be?"
The mass of local boys shifted suspiciously, attempting to peer through their own ranks subtly with varying levels of success. Looking for a leader. Worth knew mobs, and he knew that probably the only thing keeping a damper on this powder keg was a shortage of bullets. How many of those guns were actually loaded? Impossible to say, but definitely not the whole batch.
They needed to single somebody out of the ranks, and quick.
Hanna must have been thinking the same thing, because he flashed a face-splitter of a smile at one of the few women and said, "Does anyone around here run an inn? It's been a long night and I know I'm game for a real bed. We can pay for it, as long as you don't mind barter! I mean, who takes cash any more, right?"
The crowd shifted uneasily, and the woman glanced meaningfully at the guy to her right a couple times before she finally came out with anything.
"Ray-Anne Jenkins' place has three spare bedrooms. If she'll take you. What's on the table? We're not letting strangers into our houses for some shoelaces."
Hanna's shoulders relaxed, and he took a little half-step forward. He was in his element now.
"We've got a little bit of food," he started off, ticking off fingers as he went, "and we do actually have shoelaces. Aspirin, bicycle chains, some fabric, dog food—a little worse for the wear, I'll level with ya—plaster mix, bug spray, netting, and I think we picked up some chicken wire in Utah, didn't we, Patroclus? Yeah, so, there's that. Also, the shady looking guy here is actually a doctor, and I'm a magician."
Somebody elbowed the woman, and she flashed them a glare before tugging the terrycloth front of her robe back into order. She looked cold as goddamn balls but she was sticking it out, Worth would give her that. "What, like a performer? We're not exactly putting on a birthday party here."
"No no no," Hanna said, waving her off. "Like a wizard. Um. Specifically, a rune-mage. If you've got any sick livestock or lost children I could—why are you looking at me like that? It's… really weird in stereo."
What you usually got in places like these were doubtful looks, or outright laughter. Plenty of places were still out of the loop, where ambassadors hadn't been interested in visiting and out of town traffic was minimum. Isolated farmtowns, survivor enclaves in heavy dying areas… desert cities…
What you didn't usually get was a wave of swearing and tripping backwards over the people in the back row.
"No seriously," Hanna pushed, uneasy, "what's the hubbub for?"
"Where are you from?" their lady asked sharply, eyes narrow.
"Wuh, uh, California originally but we—"
"How long have you been in the area?"
"Well we just drove over the county line about an hour ago—"
"Do you know the Rowleys? The Spaceys? Have you talked to a man named Ishmael?"
"No, we really haven't—"
"Does peezaknalost mean anything to you?"
"No, it… wait." Hanna paused, pressed his palms against his eyes, started mouthing unintelligible strings of sounds under his breath. Eventually he seemed to settle on an answer, and when he dropped his hands his eyes were bright and curious.
"You mean, prizrak znalost?" he asked. Slow nods chorused across the pavement; Hanna's eyes burned brighter. "Yeah, then I know a little bit! It's theoretical knowledge though, I never wanted to mess around with summoning if I didn't have to, and it's hard to get names without some serious connections. Um. Why is Prizrak Znalost something you guys are worried about?"
The woman exchanged a look with her nearest neighbor.
"Why don't you come with us. I think there's probably a few open rooms in the Captain's house."
To Worth's surprise, the Captain's house was not a jail. He forked over a handful of pennies to Hanna as their Welcoming Mob directed them towards what looked like a very expensive house masquerading as a very cheap saloon. The woman ahead of them explained that the Captain's widow had been looking for someone to rent the top floor to a few years ago, and after "you know", it had stayed empty. The widow and her daughter lived on the bottom floor.
"Thought fer sure it was gonna be a jail," Worth remarked, as the woman mashed the doorbell.
"I have to admit," Conrad murmured, "I was expecting that too. I mean, two women living alone in the middle of town?"
Their de facto tour guide glanced back at them. "Oh, you haven't met the Captain's widow."
At that precise moment, the door flung inward and Conrad—who had made the mistake of standing directly in front of it—got jabbed in the forehead with a double barrel shotgun.
"Oh," Hanna said, "you must be the widow!"
-A-
The living room was strung up with ornamental plates and lace doilies, and the Captain's Widow standing in the middle of it looked like the grim reaper looming over an issue of Better Homes and Gardens from 1955. Two kinds of shotgun were hung from the far wall on thick iron hooks.
"So," she said, "where did you boys say you were from?"
Hanna had his hands folded in his lap like a first-grader in the timeout corner. "California, ma'am," he managed, eyes darting desperately in search of someone else to defer to. Nobody was volunteering to help him out.
"And what brings you down to Arizona, boys?"
Conrad and Worth exchanged a brief and complicated communiqué in a sign language most composed of eyebrow lifts.
"Uh," said Hanna. "Well. We basically do nothing but travel! We're merchants you see, kind of the whole package really! Saving people, hunting things, you know."
Grandmama Death waited in absolute, waiting silence.
Hanna squirmed.
She waited.
"So nice house wow where did you get those plates with cats on them that's so old school I think my fifth grade teacher had some of those in her office gosh she was ancient I mean not that you're ancient you're looking really good for your age do you work out?"
She waited.
Conrad sighed and hid his face with both hands.
"Ma'am," the zombie cut in, mercifully, "I don't know if you're aware, but there's a sort of order that has arisen in the last year or two. We gather that your town has had some exposure to the negative side of magic. We're what you might consider the more positive side."
"Oh yeah?" the widow replied.
"Yes."
She crossed her translucent arms gracefully. "The way I see it," she said, at last, "we've got one of two options here. One, you're a pack of snakeoil salesmen looking for a quick buck, in which case I oughta have the Jones boys ride you out of town on a rail. Two, you're a bunch of dangerous characters likely to get somebody killed before you hit the highway again, and I ought to pull that over-under off the rack and blast you right across the room."
Worth would bet the contents of his ammunitions box that he wasn't the only one who looked across the room right then.
"Please," Hanna said, "Mrs—"
"Herring."
"Mrs, uh, Mrs. Herring. Do we look like dangerous people?"
The widow gave them each long, dissecting glares, her thin fingers tapping on her sleeves. "That one," she said, nodding towards Patroclus, "looks like a close personal friend of Mr. Romero. That one looks like Dracula's snotty nephew, the other one looks like Deliverance, and you're just a plain sorry customer."
Hanna ran a hand through his knotted orange hair. "Wow. You, uh, you sure watch a lot of movies."
"Look, boys, I'm the closest thing to a chance you got in this town, so if you want to stay you better give me a damn good reason to stick my neck out."
"Can I call a timeout for a huddle?"
"I don't think so."
"Dang it. Okay, give me a second."
In the ensuing silence, Worth pocketed a knickknack that had been placed too close to his hand.
Hanna looked up again.
"I can't actually prove that we're not a bunch of really terrible people," he started, unencouragingly, and Worth thought about the pros and cons of just knocking him out before he could dig them in any deeper. "I mean how do you prove that?" Hanna went on. "But we really want to help, and we've got resources and knowledge you don't have here. Wouldn't it be more to your advantage to kick us out after you've gotten some free labor out of the deal?"
Herring unfolded her arms. She was like a stone wall—if Worth didn't already know that she was alive, he'd have been tempted to believe she was a kind of breathing automaton.
"You'll be staying here, where I can keep an eye on you," she said finally, tucking her hands into her apron pockets. "You've got three days and then you're out. We'll work out some kind of equivalent exchange for food and board when I get a good look at your skill set."
"What, really?" Conrad nearly squawked, peeling his fingers away from his eyes. "Seriously?"
"Economics is economics, son," the widow replied, matter of fact. "I don't imagine a bunch of world travelers like you four haven't got a keen eye on our condition out here in the desert. Last time a truck came through here was May three years ago. Last time we saw anybody from outta town was fall the same year. Let's all try to be some kind of frank with each other."
"Oh."
Herring turned her head and called over her shoulder, "Miriam! We've got guests!"
Hanna blinked. "The angry lady in the robe didn't tell us you had a sister."
"Sister," Herring snorted. "Miriam gimme a hand with the welcome wagon. Boys, this is my daughter."
Miriam walked in. Miriam was, indeed, not Herring's sister. Hanna popped up like a toaster strudel off the couch and ran across the room to make the first introduction.
She stood about a foot over the kid, which was hilarious considering the way he was bouncing on his toes like he could break even height-wise if he just bounced high enough. She tucked a dog-eared book up under her arm and went to shake his hand.
"Heh, check out the Prairie Companion over there," Worth sniggered, elbowing Conrad in the shoulder. Goldmine. Worth had always suspected Conrad's shoes had come from the ladies' section, and now here was proof: Herring's daughter was stuffed into the same scuffed up, stupid looking boots. It made sense, of course; Conrad was both a fag, and a faggot with dainty little pixie feet not made for manly shoes. Probably needed to flounce around in something with "high arch support." Surprising how the old adage about foot size matching junk size hadn't really held true in his case—or at least, not from what little Worth had managed to feel so far.
Not that he'd felt anything except cold fucking shoulders since Christmas. Happy holidays, sweetheart. Go fuck yourself.
"Two'a ya oughter trade tips on shoppin' fer shoes in the post apocalyptic wasteland."
"Yeah," Conrad said. "Sure."
Worth furrowed his brows and went to give Conrad a skeptical look, but the poncy bastard was already stumbling across the room towards Whatsherface and the grand firestarter, still shaking her hand like it was a water pump. God damn it Hanna, she wasn't even that good looking. Her ruddy sunburnt face sported a nose fit to rival Conrad's.
"Is that Prachett?" Conrad asked, voice uneven, like he'd forgotten how exactly to approach a person who wasn't trying to mutilate or maim him in some way.
With a half-amused kind of sideways glance, Herring's kid twisted her hand free of Hanna's impressive grip.
"Oh," she replied, with a chap-lipped grin, "yeah, it is. Colour of Magic. Are you a fan?"
"Yes!" Conrad replied, then speared himself through the lip as he bit down apologetically. "Er. Yes, I'm actually… a really big fan. Are you just starting it? I mean the series, are you just starting the series?"
A speck of (suspiciously bone-like) grit between Worth's molars made itself known, and he realized vaguely that he'd been grinding his teeth. There went the enamel. And the ridges.
"No, no," Herring Junior said, patting the side of the book. "Actually I'm starting it over, going to read it chronologically. I mean as much as we've got in town—I think the last one that came out never got shipped this far before—well. Things. You know."
"Oh," Conrad replied, "Yeah, of course. I think I actually still have a copy from the last raid—"
The two of them started to shuffle absentmindedly toward the edge of the room, the way you do when a private conversation seems imminent and looming.
Worth squinted after them. "Oi, don't let me keep ya," he grumbled. "Guess we ain't got the invite t' the Princess Party, huh Hanna?"
But Hanna was trailing after Conrad and Whatsherface like a lost puppy, wringing his hands and half-starting words as he moved across the linoleum.
Worth turned and raised his eyebrows at the zombie, made a gesture towards the door. "You got somewhere ya gotta be too, Slick?"
"Actually."
Worth jammed his hands into his pockets. "Feh," he snorted, "good riddance to the lot'a ya."
Maybe there was some booze in the kitchen he could nab.
-A-
Worth got his own introduction to Miriam much later. This was because she seemed constantly to be in the company of Conrad from the moment she stepped through the door, and Conrad had gotten unreasonably good at shuttering Worth out of conversations over the last week or two.
At something like one in the morning, while Thelma and Louise were chatting away in the living room, Worth was sitting across the kitchen table from the Captain's Widow with a glass of lukewarm gin. She took a sip of its twin.
"What was yer husband captain'a?" he asked, scratching a nail over the quail logo painted on the side of the glass.
Herring made an ugly noise low in her throat that probably wasn't intended to sound as harsh as it did. But who knew. "Lawrence wasn't captain of anything," she replied, "except maybe a gravy boat."
"Sounds like a real winner," Worth observed, swirling his lukewarm gin. "How'de get the name then?"
"Football team, first Freshman captain they ever had," she answered. "'59. Funny how it stuck like that. You know it got to the point where the kids my daughter's age though he'd been in a war somewhere. Lawrence thought it was funny at least, god rest his soul."
"Dead long?"
"About five years now." Herring pursed her lips. "Nothing for a mourning period like a great big societal collapse. That'll pull ya right out of it."
Worth flexed his hand under the table, twisting away from the impulse to reach for the chain around his neck.
"What's the situation look like around here?" he asked, changing the subject back to something useful. "Any big skirmishes goin' on regular like? Civil unrest?"
Herring lifted one gray-blond eyebrow. "Are you aiming to join up or back out if I say yeah?"
Worth shrugged. "Depends on how well Hanna's gonna have himself occupied the next couple days. If he's got things to do, I could use some busy work myself."
"Soldier?" she asked, skeptical.
"Shit naw," the doctor replied. "Not officially anyhow. Got some battlefield medic experience, though. Last coupl'a years. Ain't actually been on any front lines yet."
There was the time in Florida, of course, but the more left unsaid about that political fiasco of a black op the better. It wasn't like he was obligated to explain anything.
"This town ain't right," Worth went on, laying down the only cards that mattered. "Yer militia's armed to the teeth out in the middle'a bumfuck who-gives-a-shit-land, an' you tell us ya ain't seen somebody from outta town since two years ago. What ain't we bein' told?"
"Who says you need to be told anything?"
Worth grinned.
On the other side of the wall, Conrad and Whatsherface burst out laughing like a couple of nail-painting preteens. Worth's grin slid off his face.
"Lemme lay it out for ya," he said, tapping the table with one thin finger. "You got a problem. Dunno what it is, dunno whose it is, but ya got one. Me'n the boys, we got a thing fer solvin' problems. You got magic, we got magic, ain't much gonna get done 'bout it till you fill us in. Ya wanna waste us on a couple days fixing roofs, sure, it's yer house. But how about ya just tell me what the hell's happenin' here an' maybe see iff'n we can't do somethin' about it."
"Is that a Tennessee accent?"
Worth frowned. "That's yer guess? Yer fuckin' kiddin' me."
Herring shrugged. "I'm no good with accents." She stood up, empty glass in hand, and shifted some letters that had been stacked up on the countertop. A letter, smeary post-apocalypse printed, came out of the bottom of the stack.
"This showed up on nearly every doorstep in town about a month after the cable stopped working. The mail had stopped coming a couple weeks before that."
She handed him the paper and crossed her arms, waiting. Worth squinted down at the smudged gray print.
The Winds of Change
At this point in your life, you are probably coming to the conclusion that things won't be going back the way they were. McKenly's grocer hasn't restocked in weeks. The president hasn't been heard from since channel 7 went off the air. You're probably coming to the conclusion that even if America's scientist came up with a full proof cure overnight, things will never really go back to the way they were. The day that the Bank of America shut down—maybe you heard about that, maybe word hasn't reached you yet—we signed our resignation papers from the cushy first class world we've been inhabiting. We're at war now, with nature and soon, with each other. Maybe you're starting to wonder how you can join the winning side.
That was it. Doc Worth looked up, waiting.
"I don't know if you've had time to wonder yet," Herring said, blue-gray eyes like storm clouds gathering in the middle of the kitchen, "but sooner or later, you're gonna. You wanna know where we get our food?"
"Lady," Doc Worth warned, "if yer gonna tell me ya done gone Texas Chainsaw in this town, I think I'm gonna need another drink."
An odd, bent smile broke the severity of her lined face. "You seen anybody like that yet?"
"Alphabetical or chronological?" Worth replied, although the list probably wasn't long enough to warrant that kind of ordering. In all honesty, even one instance was one instance too many.
Herring looked at him like she wasn't sure if he was pulling her leg. Eventually, she gave up picking at his poker face and settled on a shrug. "That's not us, thank God," she told him, "we got a surprisingly nice deal here, and that's just the thing. We—Am I going to have to explain this to your redheaded friend again tomorrow?"
Worth waved her off. "I'll fill 'im in."
"Fine by me. Boy talks like he's got a jet engine attached to his mouth." Herring pushed off the edge of the counter and busied herself putting away glasses, moving mechanically. "We aren't the only ones living in this desert," she said at last, tossing a nearly dry towel into a drawer. "Used to be a neighboring town, of course, but the survivors holed up with us pretty quickly when things started going south. Never did get much disease around here. But that's not what I'm talking about."
Herring gestured towards the window over the sink, the glass filmed with frost. Beyond it, in the sweeping darkness, a pinprick of what might have been distant light shimmered. Worth could have easily mistaken it for a glare on the pane, if he had noticed it at all.
"That's what's left of White Town, minus most of its original occupancy. In the old days, you couldn't have seen that light from here. After they evacuated the place, it was dark for a while, and then… light. By that point we were rationing gas, so it was a while before we got damned curious enough to see about it. Wish we hadn't, now. Wish we'd just up and left this desert while we still had the juice. You think anybody out there woulda taken us?"
"Not 'less ya came with an apple in yer mouth, I figure."
"Yeah, me too. Wishing doesn't hurt though. The first guy we sent back to White Town didn't come back. Spooked the hell out of us. Most everybody who had the disease was dead by then, and we really thought we were done losing folks. We were still getting flyers, then, and nobody knew where they were coming from."
Herring reached across the chasm between them and took up the first flyer, fingers smudging the grayscale ink.
"So eventually we sent another guy, and by then we were hurting pretty bad for supplies. A day, we don't hear anything. Some of us are talking about taking all the gas and making a last stand of it. Then Bruno—his name was Bruno—comes back the next night, with a truck bed full of corn in these big plastic barrels. Says he's made provisions for us. What kind of provisions, we ask him."
Herring's hands curled down on the paper, creasing it sharply in jagged patterns.
"A half year's worth, he tells us. Won't say anything more on the subject. Food keeps coming in, Bruno keeps running his truck between us, and we live. At the end of the year, Bruno starts talking funny. Will and testament kind of talk. The day that the year's up, Bruno disappears right out of town, and we never see him again. The next morning, a flyer shows up on the courthouse. I don't have a copy of that one, but the jist of it was that we ought to send somebody over next door to talk about renewing the contract. Contract? we say. What contract?"
"What contract?" Worth echoed, pursing his lips. There were only a couple ways this could be going, and none of them were good news.
"Exactly. Everybody's in a panic. So I go on over my damn self, since everybody else is busy wringing their hands. Me and Brendan Thompson's boy, we load up and we drive over, and White Town is… strung up. Buildings gutted, big simmering firepit outside the courthouse doesn't even smoke, and at first it looks empty. Then the boys come out—couldn't one of them been over thirty five, some a lot younger. They have this kind of… military look."
Herring sighed and patted at her pocket, the idle search of the used-to-be smoker.
"The long and short of it is that we made a deal. We didn't understand it, but they wanted Brendan Thompson's boy. At the time, I thought it was a recruitment deal. Military like. But now, I don't think that was it at all. He said yeah, of course. I tried to see if I could switch with him, but they weren't interested in picking up an old woman like me. You know, the whole time we were in that town, I never saw a hint of a cornfield." She paused for a moment, brows lined deeply across her paper skin.
"So how's the story end?" Worth asked.
"With another flyer," Herring answered. "This June will be our fourth deal. Last year we lost Shannon Quan. Disease got her husband, back at the beginning. I guess she was ready to go." She gave him a thin-lipped look that said plainly how just how much they had expected to see that lady again. "They want somebody younger now."
"Younger?" Worth echoed, lifting an eyebrow. "How young're we talkin?"
"Too young to know what they're agreeing to."
"From the sound of it," Worth observed, "ya don't much know what it is yerselves."
Herring pursed her lips and untied her apron, throwing it over the chair at the bar.
"No. And that's exactly why I don't plan to stand for it another year."
-A-
The next day dawned thin and chill, and there was a leak in the roof. As it turned out, this was probably the worst thing the crew could have been tasked to deal with, on account of not one of them owning their own damn house since childhood. Hanna was the closest thing to an expert on hand, with a little experience patching up the hellhole of an apartment now and then—if there was one thing Hanna was good for, it was picking useful things up through simple repetitive pigheaded stubbornness.
Ultimately, Herring had to come up on the roof with them for an hour and hand out directions with a side of verbal lashing until everyone figured out what they were supposed to be doing. This was exactly what Worth had been talking about when he got into dumb fucking wastes of resources, but when he pulled up beside Herring to give her a piece of his mind, she wasn't having any of it.
"You want to come into town pulling rabbits out of hats like a traveling circus?" she asked him, tossing a hammer to Gallahad, who despite his various mortises managed to catch it pretty deftly. "This town's so high strung you'd have a lynch mob on your hands in a day."
"No, no," Hanna cut in, "Worth, I totally see what she's getting at. We look super useful and like, sincere and stuff if we pitch in kind of visible like. Big team player gesture, y'know?"
"We look like a damn three ring circus," Worth grumbled, stalking up the side of the roof with a defiant slouch. "If ya wanna get the people's guard down so bad, put on some red shoes and a rainbow bleedin' afro."
"I wish it was a four ring circus," Hanna sighed, "instead of three. Conrad is a total boss when it comes to detail work."
Worth sneered. "Li'l miss sunshine's havin' a grand old time downstairs without us, I reckon. This late in the mornin' they're probably paintin' their nails."
Herring cocked an eyebrow at him, but he didn't particularly feel the need to elaborate. Actually, some good old fashioned banging things with hammers was sounding better all of a sudden.
At 11 o'clock in the morning, despite the snappish January air, Worth was starting to feel a swampy heat coalescing under his collar. When he glanced across the roof, Hanna was looking like a radiator in his jacket. Arizona wasn't too far a cry from places further south, except that it was drier than somebody's mouth the morning of a hangover. He might have to drop the jacket altogether pretty soon.
There was a series of noises from down on the ground, but years of performing complicated medical procedures while a patient was bleeding out on a dining room table or god knew where else had taught him how to focus on the task at hand. Manual tasks brought out the concentration in him. It wasn't until Hanna shook his shoulder that he bothered to look up at all.
"Come on," the younger man was saying, "there's lunch and drinks and stuff!"
Worth spat out a screw that he'd been worrying absentmindedly. "Here's hopin' ya mean real fuckin' drinks and not some tapwater."
"No, it's tapwater," Hanna grinned, "but hey, if it was alcohol you wouldn't let me drink it anyhow."
"Damn straight I wouldn'," Worth muttered, "not the way you been workin'."
Hanna swung down the ladder to the ground in record time and left the doctor to amble his way over to the edge of the roof and peer down. Speculatively, he considered the repast. Water. Goddamn. Something that looked like hardtack and… pinkish jam. Barberry probably. Alright.
The person holding the tray was less desirable, though.
"Doc!" Miriam called up, raising an over-friendly hand. "Come down and get some! Hanna looks like he's got an eye on your portion."
Worth's lips thinned a bit. "Yer mum send ya out ter coddle us?"
"Nah," she replied, "sent myself out! Now seriously, come down here."
"Ain't hungry. Let Hanna have my share."
Hanna rolled his eyes. "He does that sometimes. I dunno how he manages it, if I skipped meals like that I'd just probably pass out or something. Pass the jam."
Miriam frowned and crossed her arms, orange sweater bunching around her shoulders. "That's not healthy. You're much bigger than Hanna, you need more calories than he does."
"Oi," Worth snapped, "who's the medical professional around here?"
"Oh, just let me feed you already."
"I ain't done up here," Worth replied, "an' I ain't hungry neither."
"Luce!"
Worth whipped up ramrod straight, and glared down the barrel of his nose at the woman on the ground. "Listen here lady, you 'n me ain't on first name terms, an' when I figure out who spilled that one to ya I'm gonna give him a helluva talkin' to."
Miriam gave him an incredulous look and then exchanged a bewildered one with Hanna on the side.
"Uh," she said. "Okay. Well, I'll just leave your lunch for you, then. In case you… get hungry later. Doctor."
"He's not even a real doctor," Hanna mumbled, making a displeased face into his toast.
"I know," Miriam muttered back, and then turned inefficient patent-leather heel on the whole scene. Worth waited until the front door fell closed with a muffled bang, and then leaned over the edge of the roof.
"Toss me up some'a that jam," he said, and ignored Hanna's deeply put-upon sigh as he complied.
-A-
Herring and the World's Shortest Wonderboy disappeared sometime in the middle of the afternoon, leaving the Doctor and the dead guy to their unending menial labor. This was exactly the kind of thing Worth had been trying to avoid when he went to medical school. Hanna was probably putting on some flashy Siegfried and Roy routine in the house with the convenient wind-blocking walls, meanwhile Worth was out here dismantling a junked car for parts. Ought to have been Conrad's job, the sorry bastard.
Although the widow Herring's house was located more or less at the center of the still-inhabited part of town, for most of the day, Worth didn't see much in the way of people. Some time late-afternoon, the first real visitor stopped at the door, shuffling anxiously as the zombie gracefully sidestepped her on his way from the half-gutted automobile.
Herring met her at the door, while Worth busied himself with a task coincidentally nearby. Pure happenstance.
"Mrs. Herring," the woman started.
"Julia," Herring corrected, "Gus and me were at your wedding, you don't have to stand on formality now."
"Mrs. Julia," the woman tried again. "Word's going around that you won't support the new contract in the spring."
"Yes."
The woman blinked. "Yes?"
"Yes, no, whatever," Herring flicked a dismissive hand. "I'm not supporting it. Not again."
"Think about this! What'll we do if there isn't—"
"Marcella," Herring interrupted, "have you ever known me not to have a plan?"
Marcella shifted uncomfortably, but didn't seem to have a reply.
"Look," the widow sighed, "I'm working on something. You all got to have some faith, alright? I'm the same as anybody else, I want to keep on living as long as I can. I won't get any of us killed if I can help it."
Marcella pursed her lips and tucked her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "Alright."
"There's got to be a limit," Herring remarked, putting a hand on the woman's shoulder. "There has to be a point where you step back and ask yourself how far you're really willing to go."
Marcella put up her hands, surrendering. "I believe you," she said. "You know I do. It's just… not everybody does, you know?"
"Trust me," Herring replied, shaking out her apron, "I know."
Marcella said her goodbyes and carried on her way towards wherever she was going—there wasn't as much in the way of farming in this town, the desert being what it was, so what the people did all day long was a was a mystery to Worth. Sounded like a lot of scheming and politicking so far, but then that might just be shitty timing on the visitation front. Seemed like they were always popping into places at exactly the worst time.
Worth abandoned the whole pretence of useful work and walked up to the door, where Herring was watching her friend disappearing down the road with a hard expression.
"Yer a bigger fish than ya let on," he noted, settling himself into the plaster beside her.
"Town this small, any old goldfish is a big fish."
"Ya got some political clout, though," he said. "They di'n send us ter ya just 'cause yer handy with a shotgun."
"No," she answered, drawing the syllable out like a sigh. "Guess they didn't."
"When y'gonna tell 'em?" he asked.
Herring didn't say anything for a while, her faded blue eyes scanning the empty street for something. The sky was the same dusty color, the two equally pensive in the uncertain January wind. "Tonight," she said at last.
Worth tapped the wall. "I'm comin' with ya."
"You?"
Worth shrugged. "Me 'r Hanna. Yer call."
"Why would I do that?"
Again, a shrug. "Mostly cause I got a feelin'," he said, "things're gonna get real ugly real fast, an' the sooner we get in, the less people're gonna die."
As a man who had lived through the collapse of one civilization and the dissolution of several smaller clusterfucks, the doctor felt that he had a pretty good sense of which way the wind was really blowing.
-A-
It was decided by popular vote that Worth was absolutely not allowed to go with Herring to the town hall meeting that night. Conrad brought up the time that he had nearly singlehandedly caused a minor civil war in Virginia by hitting on the wrong Governor's daughter, and after that nobody was too keen on letting him leave the house again. Apparently ever. Worth sat sour in the corner and chewed a toothpick down to splinters while the rest of the room talked policy. Lousy thunder-grabbing traitors. See if he told the bastards anything next time they ran into a hotbed of political instability.
While he seethed, a thin cloud of white smoke went up from the black spot on the horizon. No one paid it much mind—not then, at least.
In the end, Hanna went alone with Herring.
There's an antsy feeling you get sometimes when it feels like you ought to be doing something that you don't have the means to do—twitchy, like an addict eyeing a locked cabinet. Worth had a couple methods for dealing with that feeling, when just barging through and taking care of business wasn't possible. First thing on that list was ragging on Conrad, a time honored and highly recommended method with a killer success rate. The twat was still glued to junior of course, and Worth paused for a moment to determine which of them was twat and which of them was junior. Ultimately, he figured he had it right the first time.
Worth slung an arm around Conrad's shoulder and bent down over the back of the sofa where the dynamic duo had been sitting for the last ten minutes. He grinned as much at the Herring kid's uncomfortable wriggle as Conrad's immediate lock-joint stiffness. Good old Conniekins, stiff in all the wrong ways, as usual.
"Noticed ya weren't lobbyin' too hard to get outta the house," Worth observed, still grinning, although some of the humor had already seeped out of it. "Gonna have dinner on th' table fer 'em when they get home?"
"Can you cook?" Miriam asked, somewhere between discomfort and interest.
"Yeah," Conrad replied, lips pursed, "but that's not why he's asking."
"Oh… uh?"
"Connie here's our portable little housewife," Worth exposited graciously, "for our portable little home, ain't that right?"
Conrad's pained expression actually looked a little painful itself. "Worth, can you at least do me the tiny, insignificant favor of not undermining my masculinity in front of strangers?"
"Aw, but we ain't strangers no more," Worth replied, showing molars. "Me 'n yer BFFsie got proper introduced yesterday, didn't we sugar?"
"I don't think I'd really call that an introduction," she said, clearly nonplussed.
Worth waved her off with the hand that was hanging over her shoulder. "Eh," he said. "Point is, we're all one big happy family now."
Miriam frowned, a little skeptical. "Is that how you welcome family around here?"
"Here, there, sure, wotever."
"Worth," Conrad hissed, "you didn't."
"Di'n wot?" Worth asked, brow cocked. "All I—"
There was a knock at the door.
Miriam sprang up from the couch, patted non-existent dust from her jeans and then said, "I'll get that."
The second she was out of sight, Conrad swung around and grabbed Worth by the collar of his beaten up button-down. The way his lip was pulled back, his longer fang glittered.
"What is your problem?" he demanded, yanking the green cotton. Unlike some people, Worth had limited wardrobe. If Conrad ripped that thing, he was down a sixth of his closet.
"Me?" Worth retorted, "I ain't got a problem. What, man can't chip in ta make friendly with the lady? Ya done plenty enough yerself, 's only fair I get a turn."
"You think I'm stupid?"
"As yer so fond'a remindin' me, I ain't the one who graduated with a big shiny degree, am I?"
"Don't pull that passive aggressive shit with me, Worth. I'm so done with it."
Worth scowled. "Oi pot, ya looked at yer bum lately?"
"Well kettle, maybe it takes one to know one!"
"Guys?" Miriam called, cutting through the miasma of a fight about to break out. "I'd feel a lot better if I could have some back up right now."
Worth vaulted over the couch almost as fast as Conrad could stand up and head for the door. Miriam was planted defensively in the atrium eyeing a white pickup truck parked on the scrub of what passed for her lawn. Its headlights lit up the front wall, pale against the fading greenish sky.
"What is it?" Conrad asked, quietly. "People you know?"
"Not so far," Miriam replied, and allowed a preoccupied moment for the implications of that sentence to set in.
"White Town?" Worth guessed, ducking back into the living room for his rifle. Not much of a close range weapon, but faster to get his hands on and more familiar besides.
"Maybe," Miriam said. "Nothing else I can think of."
The driver's door of the pickup truck swung open, and the sizable silhouette of a man stepped out.
"Ominous," Conrad muttered, more sour than anything. "Yes, well, that always leads to wonderful places."
The man from the truck approached them, what looked like poorly polished army boots smacking the brickwork path. The closer he came, the better Worth could make out the nasty scar across his cheek, a pitted pinkish Y stretching up into the blockish side of his nose. He looked like any other roughneck backwoods survivor, but there was something in the way he moved—
"Hey," he called out, smiling, "I need to talk with Widow Herring."
Miriam crossed her arms. "Sorry, she's already left. Can I help you?"
Scar-face's smile unwound a crank. "For the town hall," he clarified, and it probably ought to have been a question, even though it clearly wasn't.
"Yeah," Miriam answered. "I'm sorry, do we know you?"
"You don't," the man clarified. He stuck out his hand, huge and dark and scarred up the wrist like a shimmering stain leaching out at the edges. "Name's Jackson. Miguel Jackson."
Miriam shook his hand with a certain wary kind of chilliness. "I'm Miriam Herring," she replied. "This is Conrad Achenleck and Doc Worth. They're staying with us."
"Huh. Well your mama and me have something to talk about, and I had really hoped to catch her before she left tonight."
"What's that?"
Jackson tugged a pack of camels out of his pocket, tapped one perfectly white cylinder free and slid it between his teeth. He gestured toward the three of them, offering silently. Worth—never one to turn down anything free, let alone a cigarette—plucked one free before junior or Conrad could give him any nasty looks. Boohoo yeah he was a traitor. But a traitor with a four inch roll of paper that could probably buy a middling class hooker in one of the larger sized surviving cities.
"Mr. Jackson," Miriam pushed, the pinkish sunburnt skin of her forehead wrinkling. "What did you need to talk to my mother about?"
"Contracts," Jackson answered succinctly, lighting up with the quick flick motion of someone well practiced.
"Great," Miriam said, fingers tapping on her arm. "Town Hall's one block down and follow the street left till you hit the building with the lights on. I'm sure they'll all be real interested in whatever you have to say."
"I'm sure they will," Jackson hummed. "Word is you're all thinking about going it on your own come March."
"How come we never see any of the people we send over to White Town?" Miriam responded, eyes narrowing.
The scarred man regarded them through the pale smoke of his cigarette, dark eyes cool and calculating for a flickering moment.
"On second thought," he sighed, at last, breaking into an inviting half-smile, "I don't think I'll be stopping by town hall after all. Tell your momma I said hi."
Worth sniggered over the Herring girl's shoulder. "Wot," he said, "'fraid'a playin' twen'y questions with the lady?"
"Not really," Jackson replied, turning his back with a half-wave. "I'll get the news later tonight anyways. It probably doesn't matter much what they decide, if I know my boys."
He paused with his hand on the white door of the truck, its dustless curve half-glowing in the settling darkness. Even this far away, his teeth were visible as he grinned across the lawn. "I think it's about time we looked into expanding the company," he said.
As the monster of a truck rumbled away in a flash of headlights, Worth grit his teeth and shot Conrad a glance—their looks met in the middle, crackling around the back of Miriam's head like invisible telephone wires.
"Think ya may've called it with that ominous bit," Worth admitted, lifting his gold-trove cigarette to his lips. "Can't say that sounds like it's goin' anywhere good."
Now, where did he stash his lighter?
-TBC-