Joseph shook his head. “It’s good to see you, son. I’m happy to drink a cup of coffee with you, and you can tell me what it is you really want. Grace Baptist took up a collection last month—you need money, we can talk. But I ain’t going to live inside of walls for you.” He turned around, started to walk back to his ladder.
And P.K.—Christopher—hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle.
The preacher crumpled.
My instinct was to reach for the Colt, but I balled my fist and stood very still. Christopher kneeled and fumbled in his father’s jacket, withdrew a ring of keys.
“He doesn’t want to leave the wilderness anymore,” he said. “He’s senile. He needs saving. If you want to help him, the best thing you can do is help me get him on the horse.”
You could smell the bullshit in every word. I watched him as he searched through his daddy’s keys, and I remembered Xin’s story about the New French. I remembered that the minder told me to bring back the old man, and a nasty hunch worked itself out in my head. I would have shaken my head in grudging admiration, but no one had told me, and that left me scratching the nub in the back of my neck. Feeling the dim heat of my feed, the constant heat of debt and return. Coroner had sent me into this blind, and now I was stuck, choiceless. Why had he chosen me? Because I was dependable? Or because he thought I was stupid, expendable?
Finish the job and you’ll be fine.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll get this arm, we’ll hold him up together.”
We pulled his father to his feet, draped his arms over our shoulders and carried him to the stable. Christopher unlocked the steel door, and we hauled Joseph inside. The place was cramped and thick with shit-stink. Bars of light slanted through the grates, and the ground was covered with hay. The horse huffed, stepped back. It was gaunt, its fur as black as Joseph’s coat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such a large animal alive. Rodents tended to stay dead, but most mammals bigger than cats were liable to come back. You didn’t see them much in the cities.
The horse was calm; it let us push Joseph onto its back without much fuss. We swung the preacher around by his legs so that he was sitting more or less upright, his head hanging forward. Christopher climbed onto the horse, inclined his head to me. “Thank you,” he said.
Then he shot me in the chest.
The blast knocked me into the dirt. Even with the armor under my coat, it felt like someone had jackhammered the breath out of me, and I fought to suck down air. Christopher’s horse charged into the woods, and for a beautiful, adrenaline-soaked moment, I stopped worrying about money and consequences and Coroner. I raised the Colt, fired.
The first shot missed. The second hit its mark, and the boy toppled from the horse. The animal panicked, reared back, and knocked off the preacher, who fell on his side and rolled.
I winced and climbed to my feet. Staggered outside in time to see the kid duck behind a tree, weaving and heavy-breathing but alive, the M-16 in hand. I pulled the trigger again, splintered bark, took cover behind a fallen trunk.
It looked an awful lot like Coroner had bought the kid Californian armor, too.
“So,” I called, “You want to sell your old man?”
Christopher coughed. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “Is that why you’re shooting at me? Because I’m a bad son?” His shot grazed bark, burned moss, whistled over my head. “Or do you want to sell him yourself?”
“Didn’t plan on it,” I said. I slid down the length of the log, listened for footsteps or tells. “I just make a point of shooting folks who shoot me.”
He was silent.
“I want to know if I got this right,” I shouted. I willed him to make a move while I talked, willed him to peer out and try to find me. ”You were sick of it, weren’t you? The preaching. The wilderness. You were sick of it, and you were sane, and you wanted to go live with the living, so you ran off to the city and got caught up in cards and whiskey. Do I have it right so far?”
Wind in the leaves. The snap of a reloaded magazine. I focused on the snap, raised the barrel of the Colt over the log.
“You play the tables long enough in the New French, you start owing money around town. Which, in the end, really just means you owe Coroner. I bet it wasn’t long before Coroner came calling, and you started to wonder what you could give him to get him off your back. Then you remembered your daddy, and it all—”
He cut me off with a thundercrack. I fired twice over the log.
The Colt clicked.
Christopher must have heard it. He coughed and fired into the dead tree, tearing through moss and bark and wood as if he were hacking with a machete, moving closer and coughing and ripping apart the air—
And then he stopped.
There was a snap, and the woods fell silent.
I peered over the log.
She held him like a lover. His head hung limp, twisted. Her forearm was mangled, her mouth bloodstained. She was still covered in the powder from the airbag. Three dead rescue workers in camouflage armor staggered through the trees behind her.
I gave up, then.
Those armor suits, so bulky and futile. Xin Sun with blood in her mouth. Everyone was dead. No one was coming for me. And even if I found my way home, Coroner would be waiting.
Xin pressed her lips against the dead boy’s throat. At first, it looked like a kiss. And then it didn’t. She opened the artery, ripped away muscle. Her eyes flicked to the side and met mine; she seemed torn between finishing her meal and moving on to me. The boy’s blood ran down the front of her shirt. The rescue crew’s legs were all bent into painful angles—maybe they’d wrecked—but they still hitched toward us, inch by inch.
“You were right,” I said softly. “I’m a stupid asshole.”
She watched me, shifted her weight. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.
“I can’t go back to the city. Don’t know why I’d go back, anyway. I ain’t got no family, no daughter in California. All I got is a landlord and some funerals I ain’t paid for.”
The rescuers were close now. I opened my fingers, dropped the Colt.
“I don’t want to be owned,” I said. “I don’t want to owe nobody no more. I been stuck a long time.”
She was silent. I tried to relax. Tried not to feel the blood drum in my neck, my chest. The air tasted good—I was glad to die outside. It was the best I could hope for, going out where I could see the birds. There was a kind of relief in it, a lightness. This is how it’s going to be. Feet scuffed the dirt, one step and then another.
“Go on, Xin,” I said.
She jerked backward with a thwip.
Xin and Christopher fell, tangled together. Before they hit the dirt, the rescue workers’ heads shattered in a spray of bone and blood. I spun around, followed the sound of silenced shots. The preacher stood at the base of his tower with a pistol in each hand, his guns raised toward me and the dead, his face empty as an abandoned city.
We burned the bodies in silence. Joseph stood too close to Christopher’s pyre, head bowed and lips moving wordlessly. The sun was almost down. I held one of his pistols and watched the woods. Far as I could tell, the preacher didn’t know what his son had planned to do. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t have anything more to say to Xin, and I felt guilty for it. Still, I stood by her pyre, clinging quietly to my only friend at a lonely party.
When the preacher finished his prayers, we climbed the tower and watched the fires burn down. He made bitter coffee, and we drank it slowly as the stars came out, denser and brighter than I’d seen in years. When Joseph spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat.