Ain't Talkin'

Nights along the highway was always the same. Campfires slung up in barrels along the 88 cropped up every fifty yards or so, and around them huddled black-toothed men and women who wore too much robbing from whatever beast they could come across, all grunting and sneering as the hunter passed them by and left them alone.

Roche flipped the cover of his collar up over the back of his neck and buried his head down deep. If he was going to find this one he’d need to dig through the lesser things.

A tug at the hinged corner of his instincts told Roche to veer back the way he had came, and he rounded a corner of stacked vehicles on rubber wheels.

The hunter wound through the ragged figures huddled around their orange flames against the chill of the desert nights. They flickered and danced like moths round a dim bulb hoping to bask in it’s light for as long as they could before the nickel and copper wiring finally sputtered out and whined dead.

Shades of humanity like these took little notice of the world as it moved by all around them, and cared less and less for those that stood beside them. The daily drawl was the search for a few fresh drops of water and a hooked end of bread to drag along the tongue for a meal. Then the cold of the night came and even your jacket needed a jacket against the winds that howled over the dunes from the west where the sun buried in sand.

The hunter had friends here where the scum of the earth huddled around flickering candles for warmth. Once his presence was known they would find there way to him, hoping to be repaid with a glint of copper coin or the ass-end of a loaf of bread. The hunter always paid his informants, it was bad business not to.

The night growled awake as the winds picked up, the sky going a deep bruised color and fading to a curdled black. A withered form detached from the nearest group and shuddered towards the hunter. Roche dug his bootheels down against the rising wind and waited for it to come to him.

“Your. . .your back, hunter.” Sand crunched through the shades teeth when it spoke.

“Has a man come through these parts, asking for me?”

“I don’t know your hunter-ship. . .I’m so hungry I can’t remember.” The shade grinned, it was missing more teeth than it had left.

The hunter twirled a curl of bread out of one of his deep pockets around a finger and spun it in place around his index finger. “Where did he go? The bread after.”

“Back, back that-aways, towards the ruins and the city.”

“Did he have a name?”

“None that he told us.”

Roche flicked the hook of bread through the air into the sand at the vagrants feet and was walking away before it landed.

“I’ll be back if I need anything more.” He said over one shoulder, sparking another thin cigarette, but the strange man wrapped in canvas and made of bones stretched under tar-paper was already clawing at the sands and digging for his hunk of bread, smashing the crust between the remaining teeth in his jaw.

The hunter puffed on his smoke and felt the wind and sand tugging at the hems of his coat as he made his way further from Parmiskus and towards the ruins of the city where the sand dunes bellied up from the old tunnels beneath.