Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  Sometimes she brought him a portion of whatever her family had been eating the day before. Sometimes he bought ice from the traveling traders and flavored it with wild strawberries. Sometimes she told him about her family and waited for him to say something about his. After a while she stopped that.

  They finished The Count of Monte Cristo; they read Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist, Gulliver’s Travels, and a lot of Jules Verne.

  One day he decided to tell her a story; she didn’t seem to notice that he didn’t have a book in his hands.

  “There is a kingdom far away…” He didn’t know how else to say it.

  “As far away as London?” She dangled her legs over the edge of the chair.

  “Farther.”

  “Marseille?”

  “Farther.”

  “Blefuscu?”

  “Farther still,” he said.

  Her face glowed with awe.

  “The kingdom had been ruined by war, smashed and burned and reduced to fields of black glass. From this ruin rose a king. A wise and benevolent king who said to his people, ‘Whomsoever helps me to rebuild this land, who breaks his back in toil, with no more reward than food and shelter, whomsoever works as a slave in thrall to me shall own their share of this kingdom once it is built.’

  “And so it was. The people toiled. The people broke their backs. The people were as slaves. Hundreds of years. Until the kingdom was restored. A city the size of a continent, a city that stretched farther than the sharpest eye could see, a city that took three months to cross on foot. The city flourished, for a time.

  “The original king did not live to see it—in his place his son’s son’s son’s son. Another king. A bitter king. A dreadful king. A president-for-life. His kingdom, his city had been built by slaves, and to him, the people would always be slaves. He did not give them what was theirs. He broke the ancient promise his great, great, great grandfather made. He expanded the city, outwards as far as the sea, upwards as far as the sky. When there was no more room for his kingdom, he began to build a kingdom in the people’s minds.

  “The buildings were high as canyon sides, blocking out all but the noonday sun. One billion people lived a perpetual night, skins painted orange and pink and green by electric lights. There were too many people. The air became poison, the water was fouled, and there was never enough food for their bellies.

  “The king built towers that peered into people’s thoughts, pylons that shaped their dreams, their ideas. His experiments were wicked, his pleasures brutal, and for that, he was killed. When he died, the kingdom erupted in violence, torn in half by fighting, by fear. Those who had been loyal took control and killed thousands in the king’s name. The rest cowered in their homes and waited to be collected, to be scooped up like chickens for the chop.

  “There came a wise man, a sorcerer, a scientist. He took pity on the people and he built a Machine, a magic doorway to somewhere the king’s men could not get them. It was very dangerous to go through. The door didn’t always take them to where they thought it would. Those who did make it were condemned to wait on the other side, waiting for the next person to come through. Waiting for the king’s men to build their own doorway perhaps. Waiting far away from home with no way of knowing if they would be alone forever.”

  “I don’t like that story,” she said standing up.

  “Neither do I.” He stayed sitting.

  “Then why did you tell it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  After she went home, he climbed into the attic and picked through the books. He wanted to read her a book that hadn’t even been written yet. He sat half the night in his chair trying to decide the next one. He couldn’t pick between A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Looking Backward. He fell asleep right there with the horse blanket pulled over his lap.

  It was the silence that woke him. The usual susurrus of soft night noises had stopped. The tiny thuds of moths battering their bodies against the house, the click and clatter of the bats that hunted them. Gentle padding footfalls moved around the house as though a deer had come up to crop at the grass. That’s exactly what he thought it was until he tried to open a shutter. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Another shutter rattled, another hinge groaned.

  The Swiss clock struck four with a peal of tinny bells. A sharp breath sounded at the window, then came back as a nervous titter. Waves of blood crashed at his temples. His heartbeat rang through his chest as if it were hollow.

  The intruder found the unlocked window. He boosted himself up and slithered belly-down over the sill into his kitchen. He was too eager. His outstretched foot knocked something metal on the counter. He stopped. Paused. Listening for movement upstairs. Carson forced himself to stay in his chair though he had a perverse urge to yell, “I’m in here!”

  He let himself get adjusted to the dark and then crept through into the parlor. A black shape against the wall. A man. A tall man. They looked right at him and didn’t see him. They walked for the stairs. He cocked the revolver. The sound was obscene in the silence. The man froze, arms locked into claws.

  “I suppose you want me to explain everything,” the man said with a sigh. “I—”

  Carson shot him in the head. The flash of the gun left purple spots in his eyes. The smoke burned his nose. He started the fire in the hearth and threw the blanket over the ruin of the man’s face; even through the sheet he could see that the head was the wrong shape. The man’s arm twitched against the cabinet making the drawers’ brass handles jingle back and forth. It took a long time to stop.

  The man was barefoot, and his soles were black with dirt. He was wearing home-cured buckskin chaps, a checked work shirt, and a bag strapped to his back. There was nothing in his pockets, but the bag was full. He dumped it out on the floor. The things inside made his joints ache with fear: a shot filled sap, a roll of silver gaffer tape, a red rubber ball-gag, pruning shears, a straight razor, and smelling salts. They would have asked him when the next station was. He would have told them eventually.

  His hands shook as he shoveled everything back into the bag; they were still shaking when he staggered into the stable. The horse smelled the gunpowder on his clothes and cowered away into the corner. He had to nuzzle his face against it and feed it handfuls of barley sugars before it would let itself be saddled. He rode about a mile too far, skirted round the end of the dairy pastures, and circled to the far side of Werner’s wood. The wood was a three-way tangle of elms, pines, and oaks; the roots choked the earth, and none but the hardiest grasses grew up around their trunks.

  He dismounted, tethered the horse to a low branch, and moved away slowly through the trees. It was a new moon, and he could barely see where he was going. He edged forward, always expecting a root or a heavy stone to send him scrambling into the bushes.

  He smelled a whiff of smoke on the breeze: a campfire, burnt kindling, roast pork. It was only as he headed toward it that he realized how cold he was—he’d rushed out without any winter clothes on. An owl circled overhead, its cry made him flinch, and small animals screamed in their burrows.

  The mud sucked at his boots as he squelched toward the boggy center of the wood. He kept low as he moved through the bottom of the dell, then back up the rolling hillock on the other side. The smell of fire grew stronger, and the dappled red light glowed on the underside of the canopy.

  He lay down to look over the brow of the hill. The two killers made their camp in a bowl of earth sheltered from the wind by the carcass of a lightning-split oak. A black boy of no more than seventeen was sitting between two canvas tents. He was as close to the fire as he could get without burning himself, wrapped in a caribou skin with a trapper’s hat tied to his head. He shivered violently and muttered to himself in a low voice. He was clearly struggling with a dilemma: sit in the cold or put another log on the fire and make himself more obvious from the road. The boy reached a decision. He dumped a log on the fire. The resulting swarm of sparks and popping knots covered Carson as he c
rept up behind the boy. As soon as he was in touching distance, he reached out and pressed the gun to the nape of the boy’s neck.

  The boy stopped shivering.

  “That’s some sick joke, Karl.” He tried to turn, and Carson pushed his face back with the muzzle. It left a perfect circle of paler skin on his cheek. “If you kill me, they’ll know we fucked up, and two more’ll appear.”

  “If they were coming, they’d already be here. That’s how it works.”

  “Tell that to Karl. He’s the expert. He knows how it all works. I’m just the triggerman.” The boy’s voice had never broken.

  “Bullshit. If you’re the triggerman, what’s he doing in my house?” He pressed the gun against the boy’s eye. The boy’s hand drew back from the knife he’d been inching towards.

  “I’m sick. He figured you was soft. He got impatient.” The boy coughed until his chin was slick with mucous. “He dead?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His elbow ached; the gun grew heavier by the second.

  “Dumb bastard. I told him there was no way you were as soft as you look.”

  “Where’s your Machine?”

  “Don’t have no Machine.”

  “You came in on a one-shot?”

  “New company policy. Everybody one shots now. Too many people going off reservation, realizing they like it a lot better back here. If the company sends another team after them, what happens if they go AWOL? Do you send another team? At what point do you stop?”

  “How were you supposed to get home?”

  “Plan was—do for you. Wait for the bitch. Do for her. Use your Machine as our return ticket.”

  “I don’t have one either. There isn’t one in this frame.”

  “Not what the reader says.” The boy pointed to the tent. Carson looked.

  The boy spun on him and stabbed him with a long-tined fork. The blades went into his wrist, bent around the bone. He dropped the gun. It skittered away from him across the ground, and he groped for it left handed.

  The boy kicked him in the guts, and he staggered back choking on nothing. He had time to raise his head when the boy tackled him to the ground. Arms pinned. Forearm across his throat. Tried to roll, tried to get arms free, tried to breathe. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. Dead air in his lungs. He felt the fever baking out of the boy’s face.

  Everything black and white. Everything shrinking. Down. Down. Down. Gone. He kicked his legs, clipped the fire, sparks flew. The boy’s caribou skin caught, flames licked, the boy tried to shake it off without letting him go.

  His vision came back in spots. The boy stood up, backed away, he squealed. All Carson could hear was the wind whistling in his ears.

  He struggled to drag a few breaths in; his throat was swollen and bleeding. The boy couldn’t get the fur off his back, the knot pulled tight at his neck, his screams turned to liquid now. The flames crawled all over him, his skin charred, sloughed off. He picked up the knife, cut through the knot, shrugged out of the burning fur.

  Carson hit the boy with a rock. The boy fell. He hit the boy again. The boy tried to get up. He hit him again. Again. Again. Again. Until the boy stopped screaming. Until the rock was coated in bloody tufts of hair. Until he couldn’t swing it anymore and he collapsed to the ground. He dragged himself away on his elbows and knees. Blood poured out of the holes in his arm, and he could barely breathe. He pushed his face into the earth and tried to make the pain go away. Tried to make the burning boy go away. Tried to make it all go away. It wouldn’t.

  Later when the boy’s body had cooled, he wrapped it in the tattered remnants of a tent and made a litter of broken branches. He tied a rope around it and climbed up onto the horse’s back. The horse shied away from the stench of burnt flesh; he didn’t untie it from the tree until the body was secure. Once they got moving, the wind blew the smell away behind them.

  He arrived home at sunrise. He drew level with the porch, dismounted, and hefted the flaking body over his shoulder. He carried the boy inside, into the trapped heat and stink of his parlor, over the other body, and down the stairs to the basement.

  He dug a shallow grave in the mud floor and dropped the body into it. The sheet unraveled as it landed, and the boy’s head lolled clear. His face looked like poorly carved wood, and his skull shone through in places.

  He made certain that the horse blanket was belted to the other corpse before he took it to the cellar. The man was much heavier than the boy, stiff with rigor mortis. He couldn’t lift him. He had to hook his hands under the armpits and drag him down the stairs backward, the bare feet thumping off every stone step. He rolled the body into the grave with his foot, and it landed with its head between the other’s legs. Though he owed them nothing and knew that they wouldn’t have paid him the same respect, he arranged them into a more dignified position before filling in the hole.

  He cleaned the blood from his floor, then his clothes, then the horse, then himself. After that he collapsed into a chair and tried his hardest not to dream.

  When he went out later to take the air, he found an envelope on the third step. It was blank and unsealed. Every dollar he’d given Lizzie was wrapped inside a note written in tiny, fragile script:

  My brother saw what you done. I tried to talk him out of it, but he told.

  She hadn’t signed it.

  He looked to the sky for a moment and then punched his hand through the rotten boards of his porch. He didn’t go back inside until the bleeding had stopped. He carried the books from the attic in rough handfuls, looked them over one by one, and then tossed them onto the fire. He did not stay to watch them burn; instead, he walked out back and carried on walking. The smell of burning paper would not let him alone.

  He beat the horse harder than he meant to on the way to his vigil. He whipped, slapped, and kicked it to a high gallop. He didn’t realize he was doing it until he heard the sound of his open palm hitting smooth muscle. His hand was red, and the horse whinnied in pain. He hit it again. It ran in silence.

  He came to the appointed place between the lumber camp and the third loop of the river. Steam rose from the horse’s flanks, and white froth sprayed as it shook its head from side to side. He got down and the horse turned to face him. Whichever way he walked, it circled to keep its eyes on him. It would not show its back. He reached out to pat its nose, and it flinched away.

  “Sorry,” he said, upending his canteen into a shallow trough for the horse to drink from. The horse snorted warily and skittered away into the trees when it had finished. He chased it through the undergrowth, and it danced out of reach. He tried again and again, and each time the horse pulled out of his grasp. Finally, he sank his fingers into the horse’s mane and held it still as he swung himself up.

  A howl of hot air rushed past him, pulling leaves and dropped branches along the ground. A flash of blackness spread around him, thicker than shadow, a momentary darkness that hung in patches that looked solid enough to touch. He fell with foot tangled in the stirrup.

  The horse reared up screaming and slammed down beside his head. Its hooves sparked on the stones. He rolled into a ball, and the horse crashed into the woods. If it wasn’t for the woman’s cries, he would have stayed that way all night.

  She had landed by the side of the road. All he could see of her was a mass of auburn tangles run through with brambles and dropped pine needles. She wore combat fatigues and a gamekeeper’s vest with a hundred zippered pockets. Jags of black electricity arced off her before earthing into the ground. The grass around her grew ten inches in an instant. It grew up around Carson’s shoulders, shot purple buds, and died back to bare soil before he could so much as raise his hand to hack through it.

  The woman babbled gibberish. Steam poured off her tongue and out of her eyes. She arched her back and then fell, arched and then fell. Jump sickness. The temporal equivalent of the bends. The worst case he’d ever seen. They’d sent her too quickly; things must have been getting even uglier at the other end.

  “
What’s your name?” He held her hands to stop her scratching him.

  “Name.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Are.”

  “Do you remember how you got here?”

  “Here.”

  A dog barked in the woods. Followed by another. Another. Another. Bloodhounds.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Shit,” she whispered unthinking.

  He laid her down and looked for her things. A long black canvas bag had landed by the bowl of moss-coated tree. Though it had been there for a minute at most, it was covered in a week’s worth of silver-scummed snail trails. He knew it would all be there. Even so, he looked. It had been so long since he had seen a Machine that his blood hummed.

  Men’s shouts rang from the wood. Chains clanked. Leather leashes creaked. The dogs barked frantically, tripping over each other to get to his scent.

  He dragged the bag to where the woman lay, its weight ripping up the ground behind him. He sat her up, and she cried with the pain. He took the Machine out and fastened her into to the flexible metal roll-cage.

  “No.” She was momentarily lucid and fought out of the straps. “You go. I stay. That’s the mission. I’m the Station Master now. I wait for next runner.”

  “There’s no time. Listen.” He pointed to the woods. Hoof beats and booted feet came slashing through the drifts of dead leaves. Her eyes grew large then contracted to the size of burnt match heads. She was gone again, into the depths of her pain.

  He started the Machine with a few touches to the keypad. The coordinates were pre-programmed. He had no idea where he was sending her. Sending her on again so quickly and while she was already jumpsick… it was probably a death sentence. If she was strong, she might have a chance. The black flash of the jump sucked the air out of his lungs.