Ain't Talkin'

Roche followed the two men at a small distance down the alleys that ran behind the main drag of Parmiskus. The corners of the road were piled knee high with garbage from a hundred years ago, all festering and rusting to a solid mass of oxidized toxicity. Beyond the buildings to either side, Roche could hear the familiar small sounds of people readying for the day. Cart-mongers and newsboys were getting their up-and-at-em going with the rise of the sun and making their way to the streets. The many of them made a small enough living to squeak by and those that didn’t poured their pay into their arms through dirty needles and bent spoons.

Overhead crows perched on power lines that hadn’t carried current in longer than most books recorded histories, those books that hadn’t been put to the torch for fuel or a cause shortly after the catastrophe. Most of the buildings that still had electricity did so by the grace of in ground power strips that had gone into common practice before the end of the world, and then a good deal of them had gone out, poof, when all of civilization went dark.

Somewhere in the distance a steam whistle sounded and a stray dog barked at the noise.

The two Corporation men stuttered a step. They didn’t stop walking, but the jig in their gait was enough of a clue. They’d noticed something was amiss, made a quick decision to keep walking and then kept up appearances. Roche knew better though, they’d sensed him behind them the way an animal knows a hunter is looking at it down a scope, even from a long way off. They got that feeling, and trained killers they were, they kept right on walking as if nothing was wrong.

Roche buried his hands in his pockets to the holes cut in the bottom and fingered his revolvers. In front of him one of the men in black coats broke left a half step, making for a pile of old shipping crates, barely a noticeable move but Roche caught it.

One instant they were strangers in an alley amidst bowling dust under the early morning Polkun county sun, the next they were gunslingers and the air was thick with cordite.

The Corporation soldiers bolted left and right, one behind the shipping crates with a handgun pulled, the other slid behind an oil drum, turned it on it’s side and stuck a shotgun with a sawed off barrel over the top and pulled the trigger.

Roche hit the dust flat on his belly and spun, rolling like a log to the far side of the alley under the cover of a heap of rusted metal in a low dugout in the dust and sand.

“Who’s there!?” One of them called, cocking his sawed-off to reload.

“No one in particular, just a fella with some questions. You two got names?” Roche slid his guns from his hips, laying flat on his back.

They answered Roche with a pair of shots from the handgun, both bullets spitting noisily against the pile of twisted metal he lay behind, the echoes of the shots sounding back and forth across the brick alley for some seconds.

Roche sighed to himself, edged his chin over his breast and looked around. He spied a busted tin can near one heeled boot and kicked it into the alley. The can bounced a yard or so and a gunshot rang, the can leapt into the air and spun there for a beat before falling back to the ground.

They were crackshots, Roche could see. That wouldn’t make a world of difference in the long run, but it did mean he might not be able to take them alive.

The hunter could hear them chattering to one another down the alley, and he knew he would have only one more chance before they stormed down towards him guns blazing, and even an expert shot like he might not make it out of that alive, it was always safer to never chance the odds against you. He’d survived this long to know that.

He could call on the ether and the permeated white that bled into the planes of the worlds that overlapped all around him, but he didn’t think that was all so necessary for these two. Roche did what he did best. He holstered his guns, pulled his coat over his hips and spread his hands. Over the din of the still echoing shots and the tin can that was still awkwardly rolling, he shouted. “Hold up! I ain’t armed, and I’m comin’ out! Don’t shoot!”

He could sense the two of them looking all quizzically at each other. They had no reason to doubt him, really. Roche hadn’t fired a shot yet. For all they might have known Roche was just a passerby caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their doubt was palpable.

Roche held his fingers above the scrap metal barricade, just enough that they could see he was empty handed. When neither black jacketed soldier shot, Roche edged his hands higher, and then stood, ever so slowly.

They were where he had left them, the one with the sawed-off knelt behind an overturned oil drum, and the other poked out from behind the pile of crates. Neither moved as he stood up.

Roche still had a cigarette gripped tightly in his teeth as he put on a simpering and how-do-you-do grin and asked; “Look fellas, sorry to startle you. Just wanted to see if either of you mugs had a light?”

They tensed when Roche slid his hands into his coat pockets as if looking for a matchbook. He bent an eye under the brim of his hat at them and smiled shyly.

“Can’t seem to find mine.”

The two Corporation soldiers chanced a glance at one another across the alley, and once their eyes were off him Roche pulled the triggers of his revolvers and fired through the bottoms of his holsters and the bottom of his jacket.

Pink spray puffed out the backsides of each soldiers skulls, taking little torn curls of their wide-brimmed hats with them. The two paused half a moment as if in thought, their bones buckled and both of them collapsed.

Crimson pools of blood circled around their busted skulls in the dust. Roche slipped his hands from his pockets while gunsmoke laced from the hem of his coat.

While he stepped forward to check the bodies, Roche slipped his bronze flip-top lighter from his breast pocket and lit his cigarette. Far away, the stray dog barked again.