Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(33)
When Jenny deems it’s been silent long enough she straightens, and without taking her eyes off the wheat field reaches into the back of the wagon to retrieve her flensing knife. Rail-thin legs covering long strides, she moves into the field.
? ?
Her cart loaded down with new hides still curing in the burning sun, Jenny pulls into the outskirts of Spiritwood: the town still rebuilding after the Big Dry in what had once been the heart of lake country. Shanties at its edges give way to larger establishments in the city proper. Cattlemen drive their slave stock through unpaved streets – harrying filthy, heat-sick stragglers on with a crack of the lash – past whorehouses and saloons fighting for space with gambling dens and dingy hotels: all the elements of a booming frontier town – except there’s nothing left beyond Spiritwood’s westward edge but the dust bowls of the Barrens.
Jenny cranes her neck to admire new-cut boardwalks. The planking is sound wood – a rarity in the scorched expanse of the desert burn, the forests of the North denuded centuries back.
A lawman tips his hat to her. Jenny notes the polished, virgin shine of his sidearm. Notes, too, the blight lesions sluicing along his forearms in clear runnels, poking out from under rolled-up sleeves. The sores haven’t begun to weep yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Jenny makes a mental note to move on quickly. The marshal watches her, not sure what to make of her; shudders as he sees the contents of her wagon.
Her Clydes halt on their own in front of a saloon and Jenny vaults down from the wagon before it settles, eager to be out of Spiritwood’s board-stiff closeness. Eager to be out on the plains again. She leads her team to the trough, the wagon dragging behind. The water is caked with silt, but clean beneath the scum, and her stallions drink greedily, heads bent low. She strokes their sweat-flecked hides as she moves past them to the wagon bed, pulls the collapsible metal cover over the split wood and peeling paint, and digs deep in the pocket of her pants for the key. Retrieves the flensing knife from the wagon bed with her other hand and tucks it away in her hide jacket before locking up.
Jenny pulls a pair of leather gloves from the back pocket of her pants as she heads up the stairs. Slips them on and pulls them tight; not wanting to touch anything in a town where the blight has made itself at home. Takes a deep breath before she opens the swing doors and heads into the noisy, grimy saloon.
The first thing that catches her eye isn’t the bar itself, or the patrons, mostly grizzled veterans and whores; it’s the impressionist mural adorning one full wall of the interior: an iceberg floating in choppy seas. The rendering an imagined one with no subject available for reference since the polar melt. The painted blue is as cooling as the ice itself would be and Jenny leans her face toward a phantom arctic wind, drinking in the genetic memory of the cold.
“Something, ain’t it?” The bartender flashes a broken smile at her, hands working the counter with a dirty rag.
Jenny startles at a white face behind the bar. Then comes up to lean on the wood with her elbows. There’s plenty of room, though the tables are occupied well enough. “How long you had it?”
“Since my grandfather opened the doors, back when Spiritwood was just starting over: all of two streets and a railyard.”
Jenny frowns at the boldfaced lie: the mural’s new, and the saloon’s belonged to the Chamakese family since George came down from Pelican Lake Reserve with his sons a couple of decades back and built it. She looks around pointedly. “I don’t see many medicine men ’round.”
The bartender rubbernecks awkwardly as his patrons raise their heads at Jenny’s words; leans in to whisper, “They ain’t welcome round here no more. Local marshal and his boys run what few of ’em were left out on a rail few months back.” He answers Jenny’s confused stare with: “New law passed in the territories. We don’t have to treat ’em like people no more.”
Jenny spits on the floor, thinking about George. About his sons. About herself. “Well how in the hell am I supposed to make a living now?” She slams one hand down on the counter, startling the bartender; shoves a finger in his face. “I ain’t gonna end up like one of them doxies down by the depot.”
He opens his mouth to answer but looks up past Jenny, eyes widening, and slips off down the bar to “attend” to other patrons.
Jenny glances over her shoulder as a tall shadow falls across her; turns to stare up at the men caging her in a semicircle. “I think you’d make a right good doxy,” leers the head man, big grey cow’s eyes sizing her up. Both he and the two men who flank him are ham-fisted bruisers, built like trees and just as broad. Jenny knows their kind, the remnants of their eugenically bred lines still working the mines back East; she’s put down more than a few of them in her time. She’s not sure what men like this are doing so far west but there’s always work on the frontier for big men who don’t think too much. “What’s the matter, whore, you didn’t hear me?” the ringleader barks, shoving her back.
His hand flies into the air before any of them realize she’s drawn the knife. His eyes widen as she cuts open his throat, hot blood spraying where she was standing a moment ago. She’s already moving in among the other two bruisers, opening up bellies. They goggle stupidly at their own spilling intestines, trying to hold them in, before they topple, gurgling.
By the time the lawman makes his way in the bartender is crouched down behind the bar, whimpering, and the patrons are all carefully minding their own business. Jenny stands farther down the bar, finishing an abandoned drink. The lawman takes in the bodies on the floor, the crowd nursing their drinks in dead quiet, and lonely Jenny down the other end of the bar. She cradles the remnant of the alcohol in her glass like a dying lover. She can feel his frown from across the room as he steps over the dead men, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.