Ain't Talkin'

The husk of a city that had once been South Lake Tahoe wasn’t much at all anymore. The main stripe of road was dotted with buildings that were barely four walls and a roof. Whatever the population had been before the catastrophe it had dwindled to the occasional group of squatters in a building, or the odd child playing in the street with a tin can.

The sun set in a spasm of reds and oranges and by the time Roche reached the center of town it was minutes until dark. Spotted orange fires in tires or old drums poked from the hulls of buildings and dark shadows huddled around them against the coming cold of the night.

A beggar with a mountain of collected things slung across his back crossed Roche’s path and the walker hailed him.

“You there. Stop a moment.”

The beggar looked at the walker with one eye that was far too large for his head and an empty socket besides. His teeth were rotted brown and he seemed to be wholly hairless.

“What’choo be needin’?” The beggar let the satchel of his things clatter to the ground. Roche could only imagine what was in it but it sounded like bones.

“I need water for my horse and a place to lie down for the night.”

“Places all ’round but water is so precious to us.”

“I can pay. Where is the nearest well?” Roche lit a smoke.

“Pay my way and pay the wellmaster.”

“Pay you to tell me where the well is, and then I have to pay the wellmaster? Right then, how much?” Roche reached into his pocket to remove the fold of bank notes.

“Three smokes is all.” The beggar eyed Roche’s cigarette. The single eye left in his head look like a ripe fruit about to bust.

“Alright then.” Roche flipped open the pack of rolled cigarettes he filled every night, removed three and held them to the beggar, who took them eagerly.

“Follow me.” The beggar placed a smoke behind each ear and one in his lips. He hefted his bag of bones across his shoulder and hobbled down the street back the way he had come.

Roche squeezed Lucky with his calves.

The beggar with the bag of bones led Roche down a sideways alley between two walls that were all that remained of two great buildings. Further on a small hovel town had been shored up into organized streets with wooden pallets and tin roofing.

Past that Roche was led to a series of dried up river beds, no larger or deeper than hand dug canals made by children. The beggar turned and followed the canals up and to their source which proved to be an old stone well beneath a stand of dead trees. Atop the three foot high ring of slabstone was a wooden lid. Sitting on the lid was an elderly man smoking a pipe.

“Five punts.” He didn’t bother to look up, his hood was cowled lightly over his head and he wore a long oilskin coat.

“Do you have a bucket?”

“Bucket’s one punt.”

Roche fished in his jacket and peeled off a count of eleven from various old-world banks.

“Bucket, refill it once the horse is done, please. Roche hopped down from the mare’s back with a thud of boots and rustle of leather and denim and flak gear.

“Oi.” The old man with the pipe slipped off of the well and took a steel bucket on a rope from behind the well. He bit down on his pipe and lowered the bucket, clashing on the stones, down the well.

“Got a light?” The beggar-man asked.

Roche flipped his bronze lighter open and held it out to the little man. The beggar smoked greedily and plopped himself down atop his bag of bones.

“Brings you this way?” The old man asked Roche, though the question seemed idle chatter rather than genuine interest.

“Job. Might have some folks following after me.”

“Folk’n.”

“Yeah. Went awry of the local coppers back north a ways.”

“Copper’s ain’t come here any.” The pipe clicked in his teeth as he spoke.

“Killed a couple of them. They may be looking for me for whatever they can get out of finding me.” Roche inhaled and held the smoke in his throat for several seconds before letting it out.

“They draw first?”

“They drew on me first and I ended that.”

“Ain’t no thing. Coppers don’t come ’round here.” The old man tugged on his pipe with one hand and set the full bucket in front of Lucky when he’d drawn it up.

Roche settled back on his heels and watched the other two men. An unlikely trio of a beggar, and old wellwatcher and a walker sitting around a horse while it drank, smoking their pipes in the center of a world that had burned and never regrown.

“Why didn’t you offer me any water?” Roche asked the wellwatcher, somewhat idly, but with intent.

“Walker’s don’t drink much, as I understand.”

“Who says I’m a walker?”

The old man with the pipe looked out from under his hood at Roche with fixed eyes. “No man kills four men without a scratch on him and then tells about it without blinking unless he be a psychopath or’n a walker.”

“And how is it you know I’ve killed four men?”

“A man listens by a waterwell long enough he gets so’s that he knows a man who’s thirsty. He get’s so he knows what a man done to come through this place. Not darkest of worst places to be but still nowhere to be.

And I can smell it on you.”

Roche laughed aloud. “Smell it, eh?

“Aye. Seen some walkers come and go. Old ones and younger ones, new comer walkers. You all got that distaste about you. You stink like a life that’s gone bad and ain’t never gonna be the same.”

Lucky finished her first bucket and the old man sent the rope back down the well to fetch another.

Roche dragged on his smoke and listened.

“You though. You’re different ain’t you. A walker who hunts? Ain’t that a strange mixture. Found yourself a niche though haven’t you? Fine little place in these blasted worlds all joined at the hip.”

“Suppose I have.”

“I know what you’re after, walker. I seen the fish schooling around those boys who came through. Ain’t not a one person ’round here can see ’em or been around long enough way I have, but I seen ’em. Fish ’round ’em like that.”

“So I’ve heard.” Roche took a hint from the last person who’d warned him about the Corporate boys and the etherfish that seemed to be particularly attracted to them, and took Alma’s bottle from his saddle bag and swigged back a belt of vodka.

“Aye. Anyone who been around enough could see it. ’Specially those getting ready to return to the ether.”

“Old ones do know me better. Old ones and ex-walkers. Been some time since I met someone your age though, fella. Which one are you?” Roche was keenly aware of that. Older folks just didn’t last outside of walled cities anymore, and those that lived in said cities often cared little and less for the outside world. It was why they shut themselves in their protected holes in the first place.

“I’m old enough for this world. And you’ll likely not see another. I’m eighty-seven last count I took and may not live until tomorrow.”

The old man was right. Most folks in the post-catastrophic world barely lived past fifty. The fact that he’d made it to eighty-seven was nothing short of miraculous. Though why he was still sitting and charging people to use the well and no one had simply taken the well or his life from him was anyone’s guess.

Roche hopped back atop his horse when she’d finished drinking.

He felt they eyes of the old man and the beggar watching him as he rode back towards the burnt out buildings to find a place to bed down.

It was true, too, that the elderly, the truly old, could all but taste the ether on a walker. Their bodies and minds so close to being reunited with that particles that made up the iotic nothingness that made up all things, they could feel it. Whether the man was as old as he said or just a retired walker was still a mystery when Roche awoke. He’d always wondered, late at night when he dreamt of his Mollie, if there was a way to end this ageless life, to repent for the sin of walking too long. Perhaps that old man had found it. Walkers could recognize each other. But Roche never got to ask him, he never saw the old wellwatcher again.