That feeling of exhilaration I felt leaving the depot? That lasted about an hour. Then the thrill faded and I felt that post-adrenaline nausea that always follows an extreme experience. This particular discomfort, however, was soon pushed out of my head by extreme exhaustion.
No matter what pace I worked the beam, the handcar never got above the speed I could achieve on a brisk walk. The horses strode alongside, occasionally getting to a slow canter, but never a gallop. The sun beat down on me as I worked. Sweat drenched my clothes. I am...I was a forty-two year old office worker with a beer belly and a receding hairline; I wasn’t built for adventure. Eventually I removed my shirt and wrapped it around my head to protect my scalp.
I could rest briefly if I got the handcar really going. Never more than a minute or two, but this prevented me from reaching muscle failure. The handcar would glide for a bit before slowing. I tried to make sure it never came to a complete stop, as it seemed to take more force to get it started again.
My gray-clad travelling companion just sat in the corner of the platform, scanning the horizon for threats.
“So can we trade off?” I asked. “I keep watch while you push?”
“I’ll work the beam later so you can rest,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on the horizon and never meeting mine. That ended that discussion.
There was nothing to see in any direction, just empty desert. For the first few hours, the only event that broke up the monotony was when the dirt road that ran along the tracks turned south and disappeared. With nothing to distract me from my discomfort, I made another attempt at conversation. “So everything here seems kind of like the Old West, except for those bandits, and the gas station. What year do you think it is?”
“Last time I saw a calendar,” he began, “it was the two hundred and third year of independence. Year three thousand three hundred and two by the old calendar.”
Well if he was talking about the American Revolution that would make it nineteen seventy-nine, which didn’t seem right. Working off the second number, maybe I was a thousand years in the future and history had somehow circled back around. If so, the language hadn’t changed much. None of this made sense.
“Well that’s decidedly unhelpful.” I said, continuing to work the arm, “Where I’m from it’s the year of our lord nineteen ninety-two. Second year of the reign of Clinton.”
He was silent.
“Well,” I began, “You sure make it sound like I’m not on the same planet I grew up on. Any idea how I get back? Have you met anyone else from my world?”
“I have encountered other folk like you in my travels.” He spoke slowly. “Not many, but some. People and things from another time or place that mysteriously find themselves in the Western Wastes. I have never heard of one finding his way back. I would suggest you focus on the concerns of the present, and leave difficult questions for later.”
I was now thoroughly disheartened. That ended our conversation for the day.
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True to his word, at sundown the Marshal took over on the beam. I was not expected to keep watch. Instead I was allowed to sleep, which I did gratefully, rearranging the supplies so I could stretch his bedroll out on the moving platform. That’s when I think I had the first dream. The one about the bookworm who wanted to be a sea captain. I didn’t place too much importance on it at the time. I always had vivid dreams when I traveled.
When I woke the next morning the Marshal was still at the beam, silently pressing the arm back and forth. Maybe the dream had been a glimpse of my new travelling companion’s past. It would be easy enough to confirm, but what had that child’s name been?
“Hey...you.” I started, still shaking off sleep. “What is your name anyway?”
“There are only two of us, do I need a name?”
He had a point. Anyway I couldn’t remember the boy’s name. I would have to find another approach. I stood up and peed off the side of the moving car, careful to avoid hitting a horse with my stream. My urine was a shockingly bright shade of yellow. Zipping up, I grabbed a canteen and drained it.
“Limit your water.” the apparently nameless Marshal said. “I do not know when we will reach another watering place.”
My annoyance at his comment chased away any thought of last night’s vision. It would be many hours and a lot of adrenaline before I would think of it again. Limit my water? Maybe he should be the one to take the dayshift. Still, I found my place at the beam again and began to push, slowly driving the cart forward. I felt my sore muscles riot in response. I could not do another day like yesterday. My tired muscles refused. Still, I kept the car moving.
“You don’t know about water huh? So you’ve never been this way before?” I asked. Talking to him might resemble beating my head against a rock, but there wasn’t much else to do. Anyway, I needed to take my mind off the pain in my shoulders and back.
“No one has.”
Well that didn’t make any sense.
“So who left all this?” I said, broadly gesturing at the railroad tracks, the handcar and everything else. “And where did those bandits come from?”
“I don’t know.” he said, and then, defying his tendency for short cryptic answers he drew in a long breath and began to speak. “When I say no one, I mean no one from the civilized East has been this far in the West and reported back in many, many years. Some settlers were caught in the West when the Ghost Army rose up and defeated the Republic. When Arkady agreed to the Frontier, the treaty had no provision guaranteeing the settlers’ return and many did not come back. Perhaps they survived and continued to build and expand without the Eastern Men’s knowledge. Or it may be that settlers from the Empire continued to invade native lands without our knowledge. Or perhaps the Nations created all this themselves, or their ancestors, or some other forgotten race that has disappeared.”
Now we were getting somewhere. It sounded like listening to an eight-year-old explain the plot of The Lord of the Rings, but at least there was some narrative.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The Marshal then sighed. “Or perhaps, like you, I have fallen out of my world and into another.”
I let that one sit for a minute. This is the closest I had seen the man in gray get to showing emotion. Even when he was killing those men back at the depot, his face had been stoic. We rode for a while in silence. He sat with his watchful gaze on the eastern horizon.
“When are you going to sleep?” I asked.
“When we stop.”
“When will we stop?”
“Soon.” The Marshal had gone cryptic again.
I thought for a moment. “If no one has been this far west, why are we headed there? How do you know where to go?
“I have heard rumors –not from a reliable source, but rumors. They said beyond the plains was a vast desert. As I went west this proved true. The same source suggested that beyond the desert, I will find mountains, over the mountains, another desert, then more mountains and beyond that desert again, and then the ocean.”
“So we are headed to the beach, sure. But why?
“Somewhere between here and there is a woman I need to find. She took something from me.”
The tone of his voice made me uncomfortable and I decided to let that statement lie.
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As he was facing to the rear I saw the cloud on the horizon before the Marshal could. Cloud is not an adequate description; it was a wall of brown fog that stretched from the earth up to blot out the sky and stretched far enough in both directions, north and south, that I could not see the end. The Marshal noticed the concern on my face and turned.
“Haboob,” he said.
I remembered that word from the news coverage of the Gulf War. It was a word the field correspondents used to describe the sand and dust storms that plagued American troops in the desert before the fighting began. It was an Arabic word though, wasn't it? I thought cowboys were supposed to be illiterate yokels, and this one spoke Arabic.
“Should we stop?” I asked.
He shook his head, so I continued to push, though slower than I had a minute earlier. The Marshal, still sitting cross-legged, turned himself to face forward and raised the rifle to his shoulder. With his left hand he raised a thin metal leaf-sight on the weapon and began to scan the space in front of us. We entered the brown cloud front.
When I was a kid I would watch cartoons where Quick Draw McGraw or Johnny Quest would get caught in a sandstorm and it looked and sounded like this loud, windy affair that stung your face and tore your clothes. This wasn’t like that. Inside the brown cloud it was nearly silent. I could hear the working of the handcar mechanism, the horses as they clopped alongside the tracks, a faint whistle of far away wind and that was all. The air was moist, like a humid summer day when it is just a little too hot to rain. I could feel myself inhaling the airborne dirt and dust and began to cough.
After a few minutes the fog thinned a little and I could see —something. Giant black square pillars, at least ten feet wide and stretching up farther than I could see, began to appear and soon surrounded us. The railroad track, straight as an arrow until now, began to twist, weaving its way between the smooth, non-reflective edificies. They seemed to be too slick and uniform in appearance to be natural structures, but I couldn’t imagine what purpose they might have.
The Mashal, still scanning in front of the car though I couldn’t imagine he could see more than a few feet in the now gray-brown cloud, turned his head slightly and pressed a finger to his lips. I stopped moving the beam. Inertia continued to carry us forward and all we heard was the sound of the wheels scraping along the track and the footfalls and breathing of the horses mixed with the occasional snort. I could tell they did not like this at all. Then we heard the...things.
It was the sound of leathery wings flapping, like what I imagine the sound the flying fox from the zoo would make if it was released from its cage. I looked up and thought I caught a glimpse of black clawed hand or perhaps a taloned, prehensile foot. The Marshal rose to a squatting position, and rotated his body so the rifle was now pointing over my head. It was the first time I had really gotten a look at the rifle. It was lever action, like an Old West Winchester repeater, with another cylinder below the barrel running along the length of the weapon.
The Marshal squeezed the trigger and hell exploded. The rifle fired with an indescribably loud report. That noise was answered with a chorus of screeches, both animalian and somehow disturbingly human-like, coming from above us. The horses began to neigh and whinny and pull desperately at the reins binding them to the handcar.
“Push!” the Marshal yelled as he let loose several more rounds in all directions around us. Do not misunderstand and think these shots were random, a change in the pitch and volume of the screams from the cloud indicated each of his rounds struck home. I have heard an expert marksman turns the firearm into an extension of his body. This was different. With his precise, mechanical movements the Marshal seemed to become an extension of the weapon.
After several more shots he rose to a standing position and dropped the rifle, placing a boot on it as it clattered onto the wooden floor of the handcar, ensuring it did not slide off the side. He drew his pistol and again began to take what looked like carefully aimed shots. Maybe my friend had sonar, because I could not see anything much beyond the horses in the impenetrable brown cloud.
I heard something fall onto the tracks behind us with a sickening crunch of flesh and bone. I mentally counted as the revolver bullets exited the marshal’s barrel. Two-three-four. Still working the propulsion system of the handcar with one hand, I drop my other to the handle of the revolver in my waistband. I was not sure if I planned on using it myself or tossing it to my companion when his pistol was empty. I never got the chance to find out, as after he fired the sixth chamber he holstered his pistol and joined me on the beam. Facing each other we both pushed and pulled in turn and the car accelerated. The horses began to canter to keep up with the railcar.
“What the hell are these?!” I hollered.
“Don’t know.” was his only response.
The dust-fog seemed to thin a little, and I thought I saw daylight ahead. We both continued to work the handcar furiously and the screeches and flapping noises seemed to grow closer. The car went faster and faster. There was suddenly a loud equine squeal and snort, followed by the handcar tipping violently to the right.
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We cleared the end of the haboob, and daylight shone on us again. Nothing followed us out of the clouds, but we didn’t stop. His gray clothes now spotted with a layer of brown dust, the Marshal kept pumping furiously and I tried to follow suit as best I could. The two horses on the south side of the railcar remained. An empty bridle dragged behind us, lashed to the north side of the vehicle. It was several minutes before we had enough distance to feel safe. At the absolute limit of our endurance we both collapsed on the platform, facing each other. It was quite some time before I had breath to speak.
“This woman you’re after,” I said between gasps for air, “is getting back at her really worth all this?”
For the first time since we met, the Marshal seemed tired, both physically and metaphysically tired. He waited for his breaths to slow before he spoke.
“At this point,” he said in the deep, calm voice to which I had become accustomed, “it would be at least as far back as it will be forward,” He paused for a moment, as if to contemplate his own statement, then added, “and there is nothing for me back there.”
We might have looked the same age, but he was definitely in far better shape than I. My lungs still burned as I sat up to respond and I had to cough up and spit out several chunks of mixed mucus and sand before I could speak again. “So this is all that’s left?”
He nodded as he dutifully refilled both his rifle and handgun with fresh rounds from his cartridge belt.
I got to my feet and started to work the beam again,”Sad state of affairs.”