Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(34)
“You gonna run me out on a rail too?” she says as he sidles up next to her. She downs the alcohol in her glass in a single slug.
The marshal settles in beside her. Leans on the polished wood and folds his hands together on the bar. “Could hold you till a judge comes through.” Jenny snorts, unimpressed. “But I get the feeling you don’t like being tied down to one place too long. And, truth be told, I’d rather have you gone. So I tell you what: you leave town before the sun goes down—” he pauses, Jenny casting a sidelong eye in his direction, “and we’ll say you were never here.”
“What about them?” asks Jenny, nodding at the bodies.
“Ma’am,” he smiles, “world’s dying by slow inches, I got a town full of people holding tooth and nail to what they got while the blight cuts ’em down, and a territory full of men waiting on Spiritwood to fail so they can wipe it off the map and start over. Three dead men from out East don’t make a world of difference to me. One lone medicine woman, neither.” He straightens, waiting for Jenny to leave.
She slams her glass down and slides it back toward the bar rail. “Ain’t got no reason to stick around this shithole anyway.” She stretches out the kinks in her shoulders, pushes off the bar, and shoulders past the sheriff. Knocks him a step back to make a point. He makes no move to stop her. Just settles back against the bar and reaches for a half-full bottle as the saloon doors swing uneven in Jenny’s wake.
? ?
Twenty kilometres north of Spiritwood, Jenny stands knee-deep in dirt and mud, digging a hole. The spade, acquired on her way out of the city limits, is a parting gift from an unsuspecting prospector. She wipes the back of one gloved hand across her sweating brow – even in the dead of night the heat oppressive – and shifts another load of dirt. The moon hangs low and silvered in the sky and somewhere off in the distance a coyote howls as she bends down to dig one final furrow out of the cracked earth.
Panting, she tosses the spade to the ground and clambers out of the hole to grab the lockbox from the back of her wagon. Carries the lead-lined crate over to the hole, balances it on one knee so she can unlatch it, and upends it. The skeleton of the hanged man dumps out into the hole, and Jenny spreads the mess around with one foot while the bones rattle – still caught in the grip of the radioactive blight that was killing him long before he was hanged.
Then Jenny goes back for the rest of her wares. Dumps hard-won skins into the hole by the armload. And when the cart is empty and she’s finished covering over the hole she pats the earth down and jams the shovel in at the head of the impromptu grave as a marker. Lays one arm atop the other over the rough wood and rests her weary chin on the back of her hands, breathing slow.
She glances north to the lands of her own people, the Nakota. Considering. But there’s no life to be had there, not anymore. That land is being winnowed; history repeating itself in cruel turn as treaties are revoked – those that still stand – and her people are driven farther and farther north; a new Trail of Tears already begun. With each territory law there’s less land for any of the First Nations; day by day the men of the East hem in the West. And Jenny will not be caged.
She turns tired eyes, dirt-rimmed, closer north to the cattle yards and mills of Leoville, next stop on her seasonal round, some dozen kilometres distant. No point heading that way now. She glances back east. Dismisses the idea quick as it comes. Rubs at her sore neck before looking west, to the Barrens: a desert of salted, broken earth stretching out beyond the matchstick-dry grass of the plains, far as the eye can see. There’s open territory out West; out past the Barrens; over the mountains; bordering the risen sea. Or so they say. No one’s ever come back to tell the truth of it. ’Course, that don’t prove a thing: even if there is something past the Barrens – some fabled strip of land that ain’t swimming in sand and choking dust – who’d want to come back from that to this?
Bones aching, long arms swinging at her sides, Jenny clambers up into her wagon, takes the reins and snaps them down with a lash that echoes against the baked scrubland beneath her stallions’ hooves. And heads West.
At her back the sirocco stirs, drives her on and washes over Jenny’s dust-caked skin to scour the ruined earth. High above, a murder follows; black wings beating against a black sky. And in her wake, nameless bones rattle beneath the earth, dry as the land in which they rest.
The wind sweeps away all trace she was ever there.
SNOW ANGELS
A.M. Dellamonica
Lindy was elbow-deep in window glass when the tech started giving her hell about her Winkles.
“You haven’t been dusting.” He ran a rag over their faces. They were on a stretcher beside Lindy’s varnishing table: a boy, a girl, a something. Not kin, from their looks: the girl had Southeast Asian features and the boy was a mixed-race cherub with honey curls. “This one’s got cobwebs. You gotta take better care.”
“Who’s taking care of me?” Lindy had been fusing scavenged windshield shards, filtering out the surviving smartcrystals and printing a self-charging pane which drew power from the weak northern sun beyond her window.
“Red here’s got an elevated heart rate.” The tech meant the devil child, the one in the cheap Halloween costume.
“Take it for analysis.” Lindy didn’t move. She had to stay still when she had a shard in progress. Glass was glass. It scratched; it sliced.