Ain't Talkin'

Alex Markus chattered most of the morning away while Roche rode silently, smoking his cigarettes and rolling them against the groin of his jeans. Markus walked beside the horse at a good clip, asking now and then for Roche’s water-skin to waylay the hangover he’d incurred from the night before.

The landscape of dust and dead trees was spattered with steel skeletons and low brick walls that were all that remained of the world before the catastrophe. Above them, the sky was clouded and the sun shone only weakly.

“So, how old are you, Roche?”

“You sure as shit talk a lot.”

“And I could make the argument that you don’t talk enough.”

“Ain’t no need to talk when you’re in the badlands alone. Better make time to listen.”

“You don’t even talk to the horse?” Alex patted Lucky on the neck and the mare shied away from him a step. Even the damn horse wasn’t totally thrilled with the kid’s caterwauling.

“Lucky and I only been partners for this one gig, kid. Picked her up from the Emporium not long back.”

“Why?”

“You and your lot had motorbikes. I had to get right up on you quicker than usual.”

“Couldn’t you have just walked all day and all night? Might have been just as fast. The way you walkers do. Or just bought a synthetic.”

“Maybe I didn’t feel like it. Maybe I liked the idea of having some company. Walking all night might have worked, what makes you so sure I’m a walker.” Roche knew Markus knew, but if the kid wouldn’t shut up wouldn’t matter to get him talkative about like-minded things.

“I could feel it in you. You know? People been around and through the ether enough get to know the feeling of others that have seen the same things. The emptiness, the possibilities.”

“Possibilities?”

Markus got excited and started talking with his hands. “Yes. Think about it. It’s a blank canvas. The white is everything and it can become anything, we can create anything.”

“You’re sounding quite the Corporate boy.”

“I never wanted to see the ether weaponized. That was never my endgame.”

“Wasn’t quite what you thought any of it was, is it?” Roche looked at the boy for the first time this morning and saw that he really did look like hell. A person like Alex Markus would never have survived in the wastelands, unless he had grown up in them. This was a man who’d been nurtured by artificial lighting and an employee handing him three meals a day without compensation that didn’t come from the top down.

“No. I suppose not.”

“When they recruited you, did they tell you what you’d be doing?”

“No. They came the spring after my old man died. I learned . . .classically, I suppose you might say. I devoured books and they, well, they said that they could find me a place where a person like me might flourish.”

"Like you.”

“I’m not a soldier, I’m not a warrior-”

“And you’re not a survivor. Lots of folks learn the way you did. What’s that. . .classically?”

Neither spoke for a long time. Lucky nickering some miles down the road seemed to be the only thing that prompted Alex to speak again. “Is that how you learned, walker?”

“Maybe it was.”