Ain't Talkin'

Night cleared in like a flock of black birds and brought with it an unusual cold. Roche left the horse and his charge in the shadow of an old general store with a high wooden front by the side of the 50. When little wood could be found nearby for a fire Roche took a length of rebar and pried an armload of boards from the rear face of the building beside a pair of ancient propane tanks.

The fire burned brightly enough that Roche worried about it being too visible to the surrounding hills. He resolved not to sleep without a revolver snuggled in each palm.

“I’m sorry about today.” Was all Markus said when they had both sat beside the fire on a pair of old plastic crates. The mark took a draught from both the vodka bottle and the water skin in turn and passed them back to the walker.

“You’re just more talkative than most.”

“I could say you’re less talkative than most by the same token, then.”

“Ain’t no one worth talkin’ to this far out in the wastes.” Roche drank deeply and lit a smoke.

The pair were silent for a good while, listening to the yipping of coyotes in the sand dunes as they hunted night terns and rodents.

“You hungry?” Roche asked.

“Yeah. The dehydrated stuff the horse eats isn’t awful but it isn’t very filling either. They’re cecal fermenters and our bodies break down food differently. I don’t know how much more of that I can handle.”

“Alrigh’ then. Be right back.” Roche snubbed his cigarette beneath a booted heel and strode into the darkness away from the fire.

Orange smudges of oil on a lens blinked away. Roche crossed the dust between burned trees and hollow things until he crested a small hill.

Atop a car in a low point in the earth a half-dozen terns perched, avoiding a group of coyotes who jibbered and cried at them, trying to frighten their prey down.

Roche clicked the hammer back on his Ruger and aimed for the largest desert-dog.

A gunshot rang and the flash from the muzzle left a set of blinks behind his eyelids. Roche slid down to the carcass with his Ruger still drawn.

The coyotes has turned on their brother once he’d gone down. Roche fired a second shot into the sky and they scattered. The terns took off and the coyotes took their chance at chasing after their dinner.

’Sides a few bites on the legs and throat from it’s kin the coyote was whole with a bullet through the rear point of it’s skull. Roche took his boot knife to it’s belly and spilled it in the sand.

The walker slung his kill over his back where the blood wouldn’t ruin the oilskin and made his way back to the camp.

Alex Markus had the A-Mat in his lap again, having taken it from Roche’s saddle-sling.

“Fuck! I heard shots, is everything alright?”

Roche smiled down at him with thick teeth. “Boy, I said I was gettin’ food. Can’t eat what you don’t kill. Second shot was just to keep this’n whole and uneaten by his friends.” Roche dropped the coyote by the fire and took his boot knife to the skin at the base of it’s tail and back of it’s skull.

“Her.”

“Hm?” Roche kept skinning.

“It’s a she. There’s no penis.” Alex had his knee hugged to his chest and had set the A-Mat aside obediently.

“Fuck cares? He, she, they hump and they make more coyotes. Tastes the same.”

“It’ll taste better. They say that uncastrated males who produce excess testosterone have bitter meat. It’s the same with swine.”

Roche stopped. He removed his glove and stuffed two fingers into the space between the coyotes hide and it’s muscle. The hunter licked the red tips of his fingers. “Tastes fine. Lemme ask you something.”

“Sure?”

“You say you learned, erm, classically. What did you mean by that?”

Markus rolled the question through his mouth before he answered.

“In the old world. There were places called universities, colleges, places of higher learning where adolescents would be scholared in. The especially gifted were treated in high regard and trained to become masters at their chosen profession. A good number of these institutions still exist, in that the buildings still stand.

I grew up not too far from some of those buildings. Old libraries and research laboratories. I took it upon myself to learn to read and then to make the studies of the old sciences my own. The reading took a good long while and I had some help along the way, but I eventually, after years, had a very solid grasp on a number of old sciences. Mathematics, geology, veterinary, medical, physical, theoretic, even some old religious rhetoric studies. The kind of stuff the world forgot. The kind of stuff that. . .”

“Hm?”

“The kind of stuff that we learned that made us smart enough to do what we did to the world. We broke it.”

“We sure did. That’s why the Corporation and the Resistance both want you then?”

“I suppose so.”

Roche skewered the coyote up it’s ass and out it’s neck with the rebar and held it over the fire.

“can I ask you something, then?” Markus ventured.

“I suppose.”

“If it came down to it, who would you bring me to. Where do your loyalties lie. I think I have a right to know that at least.”

“Whoever pays more.”

“That’s it? You throw in with whoever is willing to pay you more?” Markus had a scared look.

“Has been for longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Why?” Markus seemed even more nervous to ask again.

“Because I’m a hunter-”

“And a walker.”

“And a walker, yes. You find your place in the world and you make it your own. I am what I am.”

“A drunk with a penchant for violence?”

Roche laughed aloud, the first good laugh he could remember in a long time. “That’s the funniest thing you’ve said yet, kid.”

“So you be who you are regardless of how it affects the rest of the world, regardless of the impact you can have?”

“That’s it.”

Both men were quiet again. The coyote roasted on it’s rebar skewer and what little fat was on the dune-dog popped and crackled. Roche pulled the animal from the flames and handed it across the pit to Markus. The man the Corporation and the Res wanted so badly stripped a bit of meat from the coyotes thigh and swallowed it whole.

“Thank you.”

“Welcome.” Roche bit into the coyote’s shoulder with bare teeth.

“Before all of this is over you’re going to know what you are in relation to all of this. How you can make a difference.”

“Tall order.”

“You don’t even know do you?” Markus seemed genuinely surprised.

“Know what, kid?” Roche chewed down another mouthful of meat and took a swig from the vodka bottle.

“The walkers. They’re choosing. And the ones who are not, well. . .the Corp is seeing to them with public executions.”

Roche stopped chewing his meat, swallowed whole and drank another draught. There was no reason to believe Markus, but it made things seem a little clearer.

He smelled campfire again.

“Those who are taking sides are the few and far between. Most of the walkers out there are as stubborn as you. They’re content with their loneliness and their freedom. They aren’t geared for a war. They’re geared to do what they do and be left alone doing it. You. . .you get me to the Res and you’ll see this all come to pass and to end.”

“They’re killing walkers?”

“By the hundreds. There are few of you to begin with. And the Corp is seeing that there are even less of you for when they launch the 13th step.”

Roche stood quietly and brought the vodka bottle with him. He strode a ways into the night and drank headily, staring across the dunes of dust lit silver by the waning moonlight.