Ain't Talkin'

Roche slept between the walls of two abandoned buildings. He shored up a pile on old metal to one side and wheeled a dumpster to block the other. He rested that night more for the horse than anything, she’d run hard for him that day. No way of telling whether the coppers from Stateline would track him this far, but the mare needed to take the night.

Roche hobbled Lucky and slept with his head against her saddle, propped up in the alley.

Worlds away he still heard her screams, though he hadn’t been there to hear them at all or protect her.

When Roche had found her she’d already been dead.

Beaten.

Raped.

Beaten and then left to snuff out in the cold like a candle.

He’d taken her as far as he could, and even then been dismayed when he realized the only blood of hers on his shirt was from carrying her. She wasn’t bleeding anymore. She wasn’t bleeding onto his collar and she wasn’t breathing against his neck.

Some nights he knew that for a cold hard fact. Some nights he knew that her eyes had been open and empty and going yellow in the cold when he found her. And then there were the nights where his heart told him different.

There’d been a mist of breath from her lips, there had been hope.

Maybe she could come out of it.

Maybe she could be his Mollie again.

He’d known her as a girl only once in his life, the evening following the harvest feast. Way away in a land called by books New England.

There was a rift in the quarry. There was a hole to the nothing and they said that the white there was different. The stories said. . .

What had they said?

Bang. They said bang.

Roche shot up. The gunshot had awoken him and he drew both of his revolvers. Lucky nickered and Roche held up a finger to shush her. She obliged.

Smart horse.

Sounds of an engine, sounds of shouting and somewhere on the wind was a whiff of cordite from a single gunshot.

Roche waved a hand at the horse to make her stay and hopped into and over the dumpster blocking the alley. Reaching the corner he peered around the bricks into the night along the city street.

The coppers had been tenacious. Gasoline was a precious commodity and they were wasting it coming after a hunter. ’Course that might have been a little bit of combined rallying for the bounty the Corporation had left on any pursuing hunters and the fact that Roche had slain four officers in the city streets.

They had a truck. Single cab that held three coppers and a fourth in the bed with a 50-cal. There were two other officers in the street on foot, and a further two on synthetic mounts.

Eight of them in all and a dead man on the ground. From the corner where he hid Roche could see a single bulbous eye and a bag of bones clutched lovingly to the dead man’s chest. For whatever reason they’d shot the beggar. Either they’d asked for his whereabouts and the beggar hadn’t told them or he’d demanded more cigarettes for the information. One way or another they’d shot him like a dog in the street, holding on to whatever it was that the beggar-man collected in his pack.

Roche eased himself back behind the brick wall, out of sight.

There were whispers and scrapings in the buildings around him. The wastelanders who called this defunct city home had crawled out of their holes to see what the commotion was all about. They were spiders on the walls peeking from cracks and crevices in the ruined masonry. They paid Roche no mind.

“Fan out!” The lead copper called to his crew and a number of the wastelanders shuddered back into their cracks.

The coppers hoisted their guns to their chests and shoulders. Long arms and automatics, a few long-barreled revolvers and one fella with a pump-action shotty. The engine of the truck revved and the two coppers in the bitch and passenger seat put boots to ground too.

Eight men, four on foot, two on mounts, two in the truck.

Roche loosened his sawed-off in his leg holster and checked that his A-Mat was loaded. He slung the high-powered rifle across his back.

“Wait here.” He told the horse.

Roche peeked back around the brick corner of the wall down the street. The truck was moving slowly down the street, the copper in the bed scanning the 50-cal left and right. In the light of the headlights the other six, some with flashlights pored over the ruined main drag of the city.

The coppers were a block from the hunter, far enough yet that the headlights from the truck had not touched the alley where he hid.

Roche went prone and steadied the A-Mat with a crossed grip. He stared through the scope. The rifle would put a bullet through the radiator and stop the truck, but if he fired they would almost certainly see the muzzle flash.

Safer to stop the truck or to beat the hell out of dodge?

Sometimes it seemed it was safer to just fuck off and let the coppers keep thinking their badges made their dicks bigger.

Roche shouldered the rifle and went back to Lucky. Quietly he placed her saddle back on, strapped the girth and swung a leg. Lucky moved carefully over the pile of scrap that blocked the alley in the other direction and down a side alley southwards out of the dead city.

The mare’s hooves clopped on the pavement but the copper’s were near enough the trucks engine that they couldn’t make out the noise.

By the time the trucks lights were a memory among the rotting buildings and stories-high heaps of debris, Roche was south of the burned city of South Lake Tahoe and on his way still down the 50 towards the Sierra’s.

Moving at a walk, Lucky kept a steady pace through the night and until the first knuckle of the sun bent up in the east. Neither the horse nor the walker knew that they were still being followed by something thin and thick all-at-once.