In the morning, he woke alone. This suited him fine, though there was a part of his mind somewhere in the back that felt a little sad about it too. Nevertheless, eyeing the sunlight falling through the slats in the window screen, he figured he should get up. The morsels of the night before had passed through him and he desired something with a little more heft to it.
Getting up in the unusual place, he felt his way over to some clothes hanging by the door (oversized, but thankfully not by much he noted). He also touched at a cream-colored patch, considering it for a moment, before he looped it over the hole in his head and slipped the door open. He heard and smelled the grilltop sizzling away, the snap and crackle of grease popping off the top. Ambling down the stairs he found Trish working away at some ground meat. She gave him a lazy morning ‘hey’ as she sprinkled salt into it.
“It’s not pure thread, before you ask,” she started. “No beef within a hundred wheels of here that doesn’t have something wrong with it.”
He nodded, sitting down at the bar. No one else was in the bar yet: his internal clock told him it was before noon, but not by much. He gratefully took the seat next to the broken stool he had perched on last night.
“Sleep well hon?”
“Aye,” he nodded. “Always rough sleeping in a new place for the first time, but it’s better than leaves and dirt by a fair sight. When do we open?”
“We’ve been open for a little while, strictly speaking, but no one comes in for a couple more hours yet. Here,” she laid a plate of steaming hashed browns in front of him. “Eat up.”
He dug in. It was efficient food, and after so long out in the woods surviving on what he could scrounge up, he found himself more than satisfied, even with a little grit here and there.
“Where do you come from, anyway?”
“South,” Daniel said between mouthfuls. He had decided he would tell no specifics if he could help it.
It didn’t fool Trish for a bit, unfortunately. “I thought you had a bit of Gilead in you.”
He winced, putting down his fork. “Is it that obvious?”
“We’ve had plenty of your type come through before,” she said with a small hint of mirth. “A couple gunslingers even, years back now.”
Daniel’s face darkened for a moment. The word dug up matters he would rather stay buried, forever.
This didn’t escape her attention either, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. “Like I said, it was a while ago now. You got the law after you or something?”
“No,” he replied, relieved at the misdirection. “Why, do you have a problem with lawmen?”
“You could say that,” she muttered. She sprinkled some water on the grilltop, mopping it with a thick cloth. “I’m sure you saw the name of the bar last night.” He nodded, one eyebrow raised. “Jackson is actually the grandfather of the bar’s current owner. Family trade,” she sighed. “Lunpa Jackson set up here forty years ago when Barstow wasn’t quite so shabby. The distillery in the back,” she thumbed up the stairs, “makes whiskey. Rumor has it that Lunpa was good and clean, and his son Donpa was fine too, but his grandson Dodonpa can’t be said to be either good or clean. Barstow’s gone to shit mostly ‘cause of him, ‘the law’ around here mostly being some ugly folk he left to watch after things for him.”
“Is that why all the houses outside look like that?”
“Yar,” she spat. “The people who’ve stayed this long don’t care so much—they’re smart enough to leave people here alone if they aren’t causing trouble, it’s usually any traders comin’ through that get the worst of it.” She sighed, resting still for a second. “Most of the caravans have wised up, stopped coming here a while back anyway. A couple decades ago, most people up and left when Dodonpa took over. The man’s cruel and a degenerate.” Her mouth twisted unpleasantly, screwing up lines in her face and creasing her forehead. “Before last he took off, he had two men strung up in front of his house by their ankles. Left ‘em to die there from the blood going to their heads.” She started scrubbing the grilltop again, even harder now, her whole body heaving with the movement. “Another that made the fool decision to help ‘em was given the same treatment.”
The scrubbing stopped as Trish closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath. “He’s usually gone these days. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in a couple years or so now. I hope to God he’s forgotten this place, but I know he’ll be back one day or another.”
“Any idea where he’s gone?”
“Somewhere out west,” she waved a hand. “The toady he left in charge of the distillery says he doesn’t know, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much; Richard couldn’t tell his ass from his chest if you had a gun to his head.”
Daniel thought of a mound of dirt next to a bonfire, but shook his head before the idea could settle in. “Well… we can hope that he stays far away, for the foreseeable future.” He pushed away his plate, nary a crumb left on it. “You want any help cleaning up?”
She didn’t need it, but she set him to sweeping around the tables anyway. Not a word was exchanged on the previous night, but not much needed to be said, he supposed.
A small crowd began wafting in after the morning changed to afternoon. Half these louts worked in the very distillery that supplied the bar, the other half worked the field that supplied it grain. Daniel took the spot of the ugly fellow whose job he had stolen. He found himself worried about that, slightly. There was a little ball of nervousness in his belly: from the possibility that the grotesque man would come in, angry over his sudden destitution; and that, perhaps, his mysterious power would not function at some critical junction. He had been telling the truth when he said he did not know how it worked.
As the night went on, though, the first possibility never ended up manifesting. He breathed a sigh of relief as he began to believe that what’s-his-mug would simply stay away. For the second… around six o’ the clock the bar was full, and his first opportunity to test his ability presented itself: two burly fellows, both drunk as sin, were trying to lay into each other with the particular grace afforded to those who would not remember anything the next morning.
Trisha sicked him on them, and so he went.
At first, neither of them bothered to acknowledge his existence, or perhaps they were simply incapable of registering it. He focused on one who sported a dirty woolen hat, though nothing seemed to happen. The two continued to awkwardly exchange blows, most of the heavy punches hitting nothing but air.
Feeling foolish, and his nervousness at potential failure growing, Daniel began mumbling a mantra to himself. You will leave the bar, you will leave the bar, you will leave the bar… The more he said the words in his mind, the firmer the command felt to him. After a few seconds, the earthy fellow with the hat haltered in the middle of a swing. The other, a taller man with a grubby beard, took the advantage and smacked his opponent in the face with a meaty, open palm, and stopped when the slap elicited no reaction.
You will leave the bar, you will leave the bar, you will leave the bar…
“Mark?” Beard said thickly. “Whassamatter?”
Mark had a foggy, distant look in his eyes that could easily have been mistaken for the drink. To Daniel’s amazement, however, the man did as he was unknowingly asked. With the red outline of sausage fingers imprinted upon his cheek, he made for the door to leave, stumbling all the way.
Beard watched this with no small amount of confusion, and once the door to Jackson’s was closed, he seemed to notice Daniel for the first time, turning to look him dead on. “Whatchu want, runt?”
Excited nervousness fluttered in his belly as he looked Beard in the eyes. They were the exquisite brown of diarrhea, bloodshot throughout, with the lids drooping dangerously. Daniel summoned his concentration again, bending all his thoughts on the man. The words you will leave the bar filled his mind again.
It seemed tougher going this time. “You got somethin’ wrong witchu? Go starin’ at someone else you little freak,” Beard slurred, and made to shuffle threateningly at him. The nervousness in Daniel turned to momentary panic, and he willed the words in his mind to take root.
Beard stumbled as there was a little blurt of blood in his nostrils, trickling down into his face and scraggly chin hair. The fog in his ruddy eyes intensified, and instead of trying to throttle Daniel he abruptly shifted away, shambling towards the door a little faster than Mark had. Daniel heard mumbling, a disoriented jumble that sounded less like words and more like aimless noise. In the end the man left, and that was good enough for him.
His job done, he went back to his seat. Trisha was waiting there, an approving smile playing on her lips, and a cloth napkin. “Nicely done. Here,” she said, offering the napkin. “Got some on you.”
Daniel touched at the top of his own lip, frowning when his fingertips came away red. “Hm.” He took the cloth and wiped his blood in it, worry sprouting in the back of his mind.
“Gonna be alright?”
“I think so. Not used to this,” he muttered. “Should be fine,” he said a bit louder, not sure if he was lying.
“Well, keep up the good work,” she replied with a wave, moving back behind the bar.
No other fights erupted for the rest of the evening. This was just as well, he thought: he did not know his limits, though they clearly existed. He wanted to know more of this strange ability he had been graced with, but it begged experimentation. He took time to think as the patrons filtered out, some quietly, some raucously. This was fine with him.
That night, after he was stripped down to his smallclothes, Trisha came to him again, fierce and domineering. This was fine with him too.
The next day brought him more opportunities to test himself. It wasn’t hard to work out a pattern, to explore the boundaries of what he could do. Proximity seemed to help, as did the pliability of the person in question—the drunker and less focused, the easier it was to get rid of them. He thought on it even as Trisha settled into his bed yet again.
He pushed himself a little more the next day, and some more the day after that.
Before he knew it, he found himself in an inexorable pattern: wake up, eat, practice, sex, sleep. There was some comfort in this for him.
Days turned to weeks, to months. Before Wide-Earth thawed the streets and turned them to so much mud, Daniel had built his strange ability to a point where he could coax any brute out of the bar without even getting out of his seat. He could attenuate the strength of the Touch (as he was coming to think of it), being as light or as heavy as the occasion demanded.
He had to exercise some restraint: if any particular ruffian he tried to usher out was too sober, they were a lot more likely to realize something fey was happening to them. Once, a spectacularly rotund jackanape who was purple in the face from a shouting match kicked over a table the second Daniel tapped at his mind. He forked the sign of evil, screaming “FUCK this place! There be demons here, I swear it!” as he squeezed his tremulous girth out through the doorframe.
This was decidedly bad for business, and Trisha elbowed him as if to say keep it down, you’re spooking the fish.
On some level, Daniel knew that she was using him, in more ways than one. It bothered him a lot less than he might otherwise have believed.
Sometimes the thought of leaving occurred to him, but never enough that he actually considered it.
Occasionally, there was a visit from a man in better clothes than the rest of the people frequenting the bar. The outfit was not necessarily finer, just less covered in grime or muck than normal. If anything it was oddly out of place: a two-bit, mismatched suit that was a garish yellow, of all things, which did little to hide his wiggling belly. Despite his weight, the man’s face was stretched thin over his cheekbones, giving him the permanent appearance of exhaustion.
Looking at him, Daniel felt an oddness, a little prickle at the back of his neck that made him shudder. When he looked straight on at the stranger, there was nothing he could really point to that made him feel this way. When he watched out of the corner of his eye, though, he got the wildest impression—a soft blur at the most, like there was dirt in his eye—that there was a scrape or abrasion on the man’s forehead, dripping blood.
When he looked straight on again, though, no such mark existed.
This uncanny fellow would inspect the bar (though he didn’t seem particularly attentive), collect money from somewhere upstairs, and leave. “That’s Richard Patroose,” Trisha explained the first time Daniel saw him. Derision played openly in her eyes and the downward set of her mouth. “Good-for-nothing asshole just comes to collect every so often. I never know when he’s coming.”
Indeed, the check-ins seemed to occur at random. They could go a few weeks without a visit, or a few months. Once, when Daniel was watching Richard make his cursory visit, he saw the odd man look around at the wall hangings. couldn’t make head nor tails of it, but it didn’t matter too much to him: he received room and board, and a few copper pennies on the side each week, which he used to buy more clothes or some equipment for when—if—he decided to leave.
It was a comfortable arrangement, and time stretched on. His hair grew long, and he stopped wearing the eyepatch after his bangs grew enough to cover the hole.
To make himself seem less conspicuous sitting by his lonesome seemingly without ever doing anything, he often acted the part of just another barfly. After a mite of thought, he introduced himself only as Hubert Gadling (the author of some books he had appreciated whilst still studying). He rarely drank himself, true, but he would occasionally buy a shot of jack or three for any fellows who brought information of the outside world.
For a long while there was only the usual tidbits. Supply lines of varied importance continued to halter and break off across Mid-World (for the world was ever moving on and moving on, say sorry), the price for all manner of once common goods increasing exponentially as folk all over felt the impact of a slow but steady collapse.
Eventually, there was disquieting talk of Farson’s armies crossing the Shavéd Mountains, pouring into New Canaan like a torrent and laying waste to the land. His heart would flip whenever he heard the name ‘Gilead’ upon someone’s lips, though with just rumors to work on, he couldn’t quite pierce the fog of war. Some said that the great city was under siege, the Good Man trying to starve the defenders out. No, it was holding fast, and Farson’s armies were routed. No, no, it had already fallen, the gunslingers were all gone, and the Affiliation was broken.
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Daniel felt quite sick whenever he heard that last. There were things that flashed through his mind at the thought: his classmates and their boy taunts, his teachers with their vicious disappointment or gentle praise, his father’s steely eyes. The thing that he always thought of for the rest of the night, though, was the library, and all those books.
Were they safe? Did they yet rest on their shelves, dusty and forgotten by all but the scholars and thieves? Or had they been looted, to be sold at a hefty sum for more men, more war machines?
The most terrible idea always loomed over him as he laid in bed, later that night. Behind his eye, he saw piles of ancient tomes, words of people out of time and mind, set aflame in the carnage of battle.
Finally, on a quiet summer day in his twentieth year, the unknowns all collapsed into a certainty. There was nervous muttering (and not a few hoots and hollers) all throughout Jackson and Sons.
Gilead was no more. The last of the gunslingers, in a rout, had fled to the Outer Arc in the east.
Daniel fell into a gloom at this news. Though he kept to his newfound routine in Barstow, clearing out the riffraff night after night, in the back of his mind he had the dim recognition that he was just going through the motions. The urge to leave waxed and waned in his breast, but beyond a few cursory expeditions along the poorly-maintained road leading southeast he made no real effort to do so.
Trish, for her part, tried to offer some solace to him. The nightly routine transformed; where once there was an animal passion and bare lust, she came to him now as something of a lover, though there was not exactly love between them. He rested his head on her ample, tawny chest, wondering why no tears came to his eyes. His home was gone… though, he guessed it hadn’t been his home in a while now. He thought of the books again, and felt a little water leak out of him then. His hair was longer now than he had ever dared grow it before, and Trish stroked at his vivid red mane as he slept.
Her carnal visits slowed, and over the course of another year she stopped coming to his bed entirely. He found his solitude bittersweet, allowing himself the blank hollow of sleep that was his only respite from his grim thoughts.
In the early winter of his 27th year, he had a dream. It did not thunder in him with the oracular power of the rose-Dream that he would have in Deepwood years later, but it nevertheless seized him in a way that his normal dreams did not.
It was very simple, he would think to himself later: an eagle and a lion were affixed on the summits of great mountains, staring each other in the eyes with a pride that seemed so strong it should burn anyone caught in their glare to cinders.
As one they turned to cast their eyes on him—their right contained only a hollow, dragging emptiness, but in the left each held a milky glow like starlight. There was a warning in their gaze, but he could not delve the meaning in it.
Before he could think on it to any real effect, the mountains they perched upon crumbled, churning and reducing themselves to boulders like so much gravel strewn about the earth.
Garuda and Aslan folded in on themselves like cloth, collapsing into dust that sprayed about, pluming into thunder anvils in the heavens.
Mid-World shook with the passing of the Guardians.
And indeed, Daniel was woken by a rumbling of the earth. The distillery and bar together shrieked and moaned as wood in increasing need of repair was stressed by the quake. The shuttered window rattled in its pane, threatening to shatter. Then just as suddenly as it came, the shaking stopped.
He had no way of knowing it to be true, but there was an unshakeable conviction in his mind: the way-paths of the Eagle and Lion had been destroyed utterly, and Gilead with it.
The next day, a stranger appeared at Jackson and Sons: a tall man with sandy hair, in denim jeans and a leather vest covered up in a light blue fleece jacket against the cold. He sported a broadbrimmed felt hat and an almost comically large handlebar mustache.
Thus it was that Dodonpa Jackson came back to Barstow. On his heels was his lackey, Richard.
Snow was falling outside, the bar packed to the gills with its usual assortment of roughnecks spewing their bile at each other. Whosoever turned to look at this man fell to silence immediately, sometimes leaving their mouths hanging open as they stared. A ring of quiet fell, spreading through the bar like a ripple on water. Trisha’s own mouth was clamped shut, muscles at her temple bulging as they worked her teeth together. There was black hatred, murder in her eyes.
Dodonpa’s own eyes, a stark hazel, blazed in their sockets as he stared at them all in turn. His eyes seemed to linger for a heartbeat when they turned to Trisha and then Daniel, all the way across the bar, but there was no sense of recognition he could see. No, all Daniel had seen behind those yellow-green eyes had been seething, frothing madness.
After a few seconds of this, Richard coughed and hacked as he stepped around Dodonpa to address the fine patrons of Jackson and Sons. A thin, nasally voice issued from his haggard, unsettling face: “There is a man named Daniel Bryne on the run from the law,” he squeaked. “Presumed armed and dangerous, Bryne is affiliated with the gunslingers of Gilead, who have murdered soldiers sworn in service to John Farson in cold blood. It is known that this criminal,” Richard said the word with a sneer that turned into a brief cough, “went north out of New Canaan, though it is not known exactly when he may have passed through this place, if at all. Any who know of Bryne’s whereabouts are strongly encouraged to report to myself or Mr. Jackson. Information leading to the successful capture of Daniel Bryne will receive a reward not in excess of—”
The rest was cut off as the salt of the earth rose up in tandem, clamoring one falsehood after another.
Daniel, his gray eye opened wide, looked over at Trish. Her expression of hatred had been wiped away with shock. She dared to peek over, mouthing at him: gunslinger?
He shook his head near imperceptibly, his wenberry locks shaking slightly in front of his face.
Keeping himself low to the ground, he crept behind the bar as the raging mass of drunks cried out. “He was here, I spoke to ‘im myself!” said one, and another “A man with guns came through to Laria, he’s gone there!” Together, it was an unmitigated din that pounded in Daniel’s ears. Trish slyly stepped in front of him to hide his form as he retreated.
He made his way out of sight, behind the back wall of the bar. The squeaks and squeals of the planks underfoot could not be heard through the screams, but he risked nothing, making that first step as lightly as he could.
Then, as he laid his foot on the second stair, the unmistakable pounding of a gunshot cut through all the noise and desperation, a ringing silence following in its wake.
With all the grace he could muster in his body, he turned around and peaked his good eye around the corner. No one was looking at him: all were entranced by a fat, pale man—the very same that had been dragged out by his legs on Daniel’s first night here. He lay in a pool of his gathering blood, shot dead between the eyes.
The weapon responsible still trailed smoke from its nozzle. It was a pistol not unlike the one he had buried seven years ago, though this one boasted a gold filigree inlay rather than rust. Dodonpa had been concealing it in a docker’s clutch, under the leather vest.
“We’ve been given something of a description on the son of a bitch,” the voice of Jackson’s grandson rang out strongly. There was no timidity in it, offering instead a baritone solidness that belied the mad flame behind his eyes. “You may be tempted to give false witness against him. I do not recommend doing so, lest you wish to join this one in the grave.”
Daniel felt seized by a madness of his own, then. Perhaps… he could get this one to leave, too. If he was truly mad, then perhaps he would not be so hard to influence. His eye absorbing the disaster unfolding in front of him, he reached his mind out, hesitantly focusing upon the despot that would surely lay waste to him if he got the chance.
As soon as he Touched the man, Dodonpa’s head snapped up from the cooling body leaking its life all over the floorboards. Daniel flinched behind the wall, cursing himself for a fool.
“Everyone out. This establishment is closed.”
The scuffle and scrape of boots scrambling for the door—many of them stepping over the fresh corpse in the process—covered the sound of the stairs as he climbed up to his room with renewed haste.
Taking care not to bang against anything, he nevertheless rifled through the bedstand and closet for what little he owned. His staff, the oaken wood now dusty and gray at the ends where he had blunted it, was snatched up first. He now had a stitched leather sack, in which he stuffed his gunna: the ugly knife, the waterskin (empty, he noted regretfully), and the flint and steel. He put in some other odds and ends he had secured over the years, including another knife and some rope. He looped the sack around his shoulder, and he went to uncover the window.
A trickle of sense stopped him at the last minute. He went to peek through the shutter, his good eye opening wide to let in as much light as possible.
Standing outside the saloon was a posse. Harriers, searching the crowd that milled away and into the snowy night.
Harriers, he thought, or are these somehow Farson’s men? I thought that business was done.
Then again, what difference did that make?
Looking closer, he felt the same sense of lopsided strangeness that he got whenever Richard had come by. They were less finely dressed than the sniveling man, to be sure, but they seemed to possess the same strange taste for bright, unseemly clothing: with an orange here or a pink there, their shirts and pants seemed to stand them out from the riffraff fleeing further into Barstow.
Daniel frowned as he looked. These certainly were an odd bunch. None of them seemed to be dressed against the cold, really. Only one wore a hat, and it was made of no material Daniel could name. It seemed… glossy, shiny, and what snow drifted onto it seemed to slide right off.
There was no time for this, he reminded himself with a shake. The window was a bust, and gently stepping back over to the door, he pressed his ear to it. He could hear muffled shouts through the wood paneling.
Edging it open, the shouts resolved themselves to clarity. Dodonpa’s harsh bellow echoed up the stairs: “I felt it, Tricia. If you lie to me one more God damned time, I swear I will burn this shit heap to the ground with you in it, woman.”
Daniel stepped out into the hall, eyeing the door opposite. He had never been through there, out of pure disinterest. His heart hammered in his chest as he stepped across the hall and twisted the brass knob in front of him.
The smell of alcohol intensified sharply, and he stepped into the distillery proper. He pulled the door to a thin sliver behind him, but lingered. After a pause, Trish replied, sullen: “He’s gone up to his room.”
Cursing under his breath again, Daniel tipped the door shut and locked the deadbolt—thank Gan it had been unlatched in the first place. Turning around, he was assaulted by an assortment of twisted, unpainted metal pipes that seemed at once aimless and everywhere. Many of the seams and bends seemed to have leaks, with discoloring drips of harsh liquor staining them. He seemed to be up on a catwalk—no doubt for the overseer, not that he had ever heard of one in the time he’d stayed here.
Making his way across as quickly as he dared, he stepped down a thin metal stairway at the end and turned to look at the main boil chamber. Curiously, he could find no hearth underneath. Taking time he knew he should not, he stepped closer and peered at the large tank. A thick coating of grime and dust obscured it somewhat, but clearing away the muck revealed a plaque. At the top, in the rough letters of the Low Speech, he found the following:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS
ALL-IN-ONE COMMERCIAL DISTILLATION UNIT
MODEL #7-4NG-6
WARNING: THIS EQUIPMENT IS POWERED BY CLASS D CONSUMER-
RATED ATOMIC HARDWARE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REMOVE OR ALTER THIS UNIT IN ANY WAY, CALL 555-614-6794 TO SCHEDULE A
The rest of the plaque was so dirty that a couple of wipes with his sleeve was not going to do the trick. He was already wasting valuable time as is, and cursing himself thrice over for the foolishness of his curiosity, he looked for the back door in the gloom. It was not hard to find, a giant and heavy looking thing made of metal that sat opposite the front of the bar.
Determined to exercise at least some caution, he searched with his mind before opening the steel portal. Unsure if this would even work, he nonetheless detected… something, out there.
It did not feel like the people at the bar normally did; the average barfly’s mind felt like catching your hand in the wind, a perceptible smoothness that dragged gently. This one’s mind felt like… being pricked by needles. Short and irritating. The longer he dwelt on the mind, the more intense that feeling got, like when he laid on his arm wrong in the morning.
Still, it was there all the same. He gave a small huff of relief as he felt around, sensing only the one person.
There was no time for subtlety here. Using the weight of his experience gathered here at the bar, he immediately hurled all of his cognition and will at whoever stood just outside, presumably waiting for him. The light of consciousness was snuffed out like a candle flame in a gale, and he opened the door into the sharp cold.
Snow flurried around him as he looked out, checking again visually to make sure no surprises waited. Nothing leaped out to him, and he spied the crumpled form of the man who had been sent to catch him, dressed in more strangely bright clothing.
Looking closer in the darkness, though, he was sure this was no man.
Along with a great deluge of blood pouring freely from the nose, there were red splotches ringing his—it’s—face, and when he looked at its forehead, sure enough there was a mark like oozing blood. Where looking at Richard had left him feeling disoriented, his eye sliding away like a bead of water off glass, there was no such effect while looking at this one. Daniel presumed this to mean it was dead.
He looked down and saw with a shock that the creature had been armed with a scatter-gun.
He stared in silence for a few seconds. Why did these harriers—or soldiers, or monsters, whatever they might be—want him so badly? Was their intent to capture, or to kill?
Leaving the scatter-shot where it lay, Daniel fled into the rotting ruins of the buildings surrounding Jackson and Sons, to the east. Before he could pass too far, a dim shout echoed from the front of the bar that brought him up short.
Trish’s face flashed into his mind, and he closed his eye, sighing. She had given him up, but she hadn’t really been given a choice. Could he really just leave her to this madness?
As unwise as it was, no, he did not believe he could. He felt ka tugging at him like hooks in his navel, urging him away from Barstow with all haste, but…
He doubled back around, sending his mind out for more of the strange creatures that may be hunting for him. He only came across a few, and he crossed cattycorner or hid in the shadows as they passed to avoid their scrutiny. The snow underfoot was light and powdery, and he dragged his leather boots through the shallow drifts to avoid any loud crunching. One of the minds he felt passing to the back of the bar cried out: he took it to mean that they had found their unnatural kin behind the bar, turning to ice in the winter night.
Once back at the main drag, he found himself a few houses down from the bar. He saw the collection of strange, outlandishly dressed creatures, including Richard in his yellow two-piece. Under the porch awning to Jackson and Sons, out of the snow, was Dodonpa and Trish. The Jackson man had the pistol pointed at the back of her head. He could see her crying quietly, no sound but for an isolated hiccup.
“Daniel Bryne!” the foul man’s voice boomed. There was an unpleasant, ringing quality to it as the words bounced off of the deteriorated houses on the stretch, dappled with snow that was starting to fall harder. “I felt you. I have been charged with your capture! I expected to be at your trail for far longer, but if you make this easy for me and my can-toi, you will be treated with dignity and comfort.”
Daniel cocked his head at the usage of the High Speech. Little man? No, that wasn’t quite right—he needed practice, evidently. Before he could recall the truer meaning, Richard keened at his boss: “He killed Toms! He killed my fam! We want him first—”
The rest was cut off by a blunt thwack, a twist of the arm with the gun like a snake striking at unwary prey: his boss caught Richard high up on the temple, sending him to one knee. In less than a half second the gun was up against the back of Trish’s head again. “Shut up,” was all Dodonpa told him. Richard held a hand up to his head, the ring of dripping blood around his face more obvious for the blow.
Casting his voice out again, Dodonpa continued: “I’ll not repeat myself: I am told you are an intelligent man, and you should need little time to think this over.” He cocked the golden gun in his right hand, to the faintest whimper from Trish. “If you do not appear before me in the next 10 seconds, or if I sense you in the middle of some ill-attempt to stop me, I will shoot Tricia in the head.”
Daniel’s thoughts came to a complete halt. It was practically no time at all, and yet he felt every single beat of his heart in that timespan. Two panicking pumps for every second, each with a whoosh in his ears like the coming wind of a thunderstorm. Every muscle in his body was tensed, primed to take that step forward to surrender himself, but there was some critical block
(lion and eagle)
in his brain that kept him from sending the nerve signals out to his limbs. He could not even summon the breath to shout for mercy, for a halt.
In the last two seconds, he scrabbled up a broken chunk of brick underhand and hurled it with all his might across the street, desperate for any kind of distraction, any delay he could achieve. He watched it sail end over end, disappearing over the roof of the pitiful shack in front of him.
Before it landed there was a little pop, strangely quiet with the snow covering the earth. His knees jerked together once, the tension in his body running out of him like water. He stifled a sob as she fell over, the snow around her head turning crimson.
Only then did the brick crash into some woeful westward dwelling, making a great clatter that drew all attention to it. “Find him,” the foul man said to his harriers in the garish outfits, scattering them in the wrong direction.
In the end it was of no consequence. Daniel was gone: his failure leaked out of Tricia, freezing on the cold ground as he fled to nowhere in the north and east.