Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (30 page)

There
was no question as to which of the myriad of paper faces Amonson was talking
about. It hung like a bad joke over the head of the man at the corner table,
and depicted the dozing diner himself.

“That’s
a fair likeness,” Ocobock allowed.

“Ain’t
it though?” Amonson said through his yellow teeth. “How’s your numbers,
Dorado?”

Dorado
had come to understand from looking at years’ worth of wanted posters that the
first amount on a sheet was what a man got if the one in the picture was
brought in dead, and the second (usually greater) amount was what a man got if
he was brought in alive. But the third amount toward the bottom of the post
confused him.
More so, because it was the greatest number of
the three.

“Five
hundred dollars dead, and a thousand alive,” he mused. “But what’s that big
number on the bottom for?”

Amonson
smiled, and silently thanked the Lord he was blessed with ignorant partners.
Five thousand dollars for the return of a scroll, which he knew was a roll of
paper. The man at the table had a set of black saddlebags next to him on the
bench, and right on the table before him, a leather tube with a carrying strap
that made Amonson’s pulse flutter beneath his kerchief.

“Oh
that’s for his gang,” Amonson said.

“Too
bad they ain’t here,” Ocobock remarked.

“A
thousand dollars…” said Dorado, his eyes flitting to the ceiling for a moment
as he rapidly divided in his head. “That’s more than…three hundred dollars
apiece, if we bring him in alive.”

“What’s
it say, Amonson?” said Ocobock. “What’d he do? Kill a rich fella?”

“Killed
a whole lotta fellas,” Amonson said, squinting at the poster.
“’Manasseh Maizel, the Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks.’
Killed
seven men and dynamited a waterin’ hole in New Mexico.”

“He
don’t
look so tough,” Dorado said.

It
was true. The man slumped over the table looked anything but a hard case. He
was thin as a rail, grey skinned and sickly looking. His odd black frock coat
was patchy and covered in trail dust, and the brim of his black hat was beaten
and frayed. He had a bristly, dirty beard and two scraggly black curls on
either side of his face. His thin, bony wrists were crossed as a cradle for his
head, and poked out of the sleeves of his coat. A tarnished silver ring caught
the light on the third finger of his right hand. He had some kind of a pistol
on his right hip, and a big Bowie knife drooped on the left side of his cracked
belt, but he didn’t look like he had the strength to pull it, let alone use it.
His eyes were half-lidded and shaded by deep dark circles, and a pair of blue
glass spectacles rested upside down on the table.

He
looked like a starving bookkeeper or a down on his luck medicine peddler.

Still,
you never could tell about these killer types. He might look like a scarecrow,
but somebody wanted him bad enough to pay out a fat lot of cash for him.

“Well
let’s go palaver with the man,” Amonson whispered, shifting his pistol forward
from where it had wandered to the small of his back.

The
three of them got up in unison and stepped over the long bench.

Long
George, the rawboned, one-eyed proprietor called to them from the counter.

“You
ain’t paid yet.”

Amonson
looked back at the man. Long George kept this place way out on the trail as a
kind of haven for outlaw types, having reputedly been an outlaw himself once somewhere.
But the bullet holes in the walls and the torn reward posters attested to his
standing non-interference policy. The badge-toting law wasn’t welcome in The
Senate, but not every man who came to tear down a poster was on the side of the
law. When dollars were concerned, an outlaw could take the law’s side for a
little while.

Case in point.

“We
ain’t leavin’ just yet,” Amonson said
,
winking at Long
George, a gesture he realized might be misconstrued by a one-eyed man.

He
turned and led the way to the Killer Jew’s table.

The
three of them stood over him for what seemed like a long time before Amonson
finally cleared his throat and the skinny man stirred and blinked weary eyes up
at him. He was a hell of a sight up close. There appeared to be a slew of faint
crisscrossing scars all over his face and hands, as if he’d tumbled through a
briar patch or something.

The
thin man took them in with half-lidded brown eyes that hung in the midst of
bloodshot webs, and slowly raised his head. He looked like he was about to pass
out.

“Manasseh
Maizel,” said Amonson, folding his arms, while at either elbow, Ocobock and
Dorado rested their hands on their guns.

The
man blinked slowly. Did he even speak English?

Amonson
nodded to the poster hanging behind the man’s head.

“How about it?
That’s you, ain’t it?” he pressed, the
cigarette bouncing in his lips as he spoke.

The
thin man slowly straightened, palms flat on the table, and turned to look back
over his shoulder at his own face. The only sound was that of the flies buzzing
about his untouched repast.

He
turned back and nodded, not looking at them any more.

Dorado
and Ocobock exchanged a look and took out their pistols, cocking them.

Amonson
reached down and picked the leather tube off the table, turned it over in his
hands.

The
Killer Jew made no move, but seemed to waver with the effort of sitting up.

Amonson
popped the top off the tube and peered inside at the roll of old paper or
cloth. Satisfied, he snapped it shut again.

“What’s
that?” said Ocobock.

“
Nothin
,’” Amonson said offhandedly.
“Thought
it might be a shotgun or something.”

He tossed it over his shoulder, making a note
as to where it landed.

“Well,
I guess you’re comin’ with us,” Amonson said. He pulled out his own pistol and
flicked his cigarette at the man. It bounced off his arm, trailing a momentary
shower of flaring ash. “Get up.”

“Leave
him be,” said a deep voice from the doorway to the café.

In
the doorway stood the silhouette of a man, pitch black with the desert sun
behind him. He was the strangest figure Amonson, Dorado, or Ocobock had ever
seen in all their lives between them.

He
was a tall Negro, broad shouldered, and dressed like something out of The
Arabian Nights. He wore a blue and white head wrap that draped across his
shoulders, a long white shirt beneath a sheep hide tunic, and white cotton
pants like a peon’s. His feet were sandaled, and he had what looked like a
long, curled ram’s horn strung over his shoulder resting at his hip. He carried
a pole with a knotted top and there was a curved knife in a golden sheath
tucked into a green sash wound around his waist.

Amonson
broke into a grin and looked to Dorado in mock disbelief. Dorado shared his
bemused, dubious expression.

“What
the hell are you supposed to be, boy?”

The
black man in the doorway said nothing.

Ocobock
sniggered.

“Hey
boy,” Amonson said, “you talk to a man like that, you best have a pistol to see
it through.”

It
was on the word ‘see’ that the man in the doorway began to move. He darted
across the threshold and halved the distance between the entrance and the
table, moving faster than a man of his size should have been able to move. The
staff hissed through his palm, and lashed out in a wide arc, striking Ocobock
in the left temple. Ocobock went down flailing but without a sound. He crashed
against Amonson, whose pistol went off like an ear ringing cannon burst in the
closeness and lodged a bullet in the door frame.

He
shrugged the falling Ocobock aside, but before his body hit the floor, the hard
wood of the staff shot back and forth again like a billiards cue in the Negro’s
hand, and bashed Amonson full in the face, mashing his lips bloody and cracking
his right front teeth off with an unsettling ‘crump.’

Amonson
fell backwards, hearing Dorado cuss in E’spanish. He landed flat on his back,
both hands clapped to his bleeding mouth, and in an instant Dorado was beside
him, clutching his purpling wrist and groaning.

The
Negro poised over them for a moment, knees slightly bent,
the
dark wood pole in both hands. Amonson could see that the butt end was sharp
like a spear, and he counted it a blessing that at least it wasn’t that end
that had come at his face.

The
Negro relaxed then, and straightened. He turned to the man he had saved, but
the Killer Jew had his pistol out, a boxy, brassy looking thing, and appeared
to be pointing it straight at him.

“Move,”
the Killer Jew rasped.

The
Negro pivoted deftly, as if to let a man pass, and the Killer Jew’s gun barked.

There
was a crash from behind them, and Amonson looked over to see Long George
Lamartine (who welcomed outlaw and bounty hunter alike into his place but did
not abide Negroes) tumble back against the stove with its bubbling pot of
beans, squeezing his bleeding collarbone with one hand and struggling to raise
his Colt Navy with the other. There was a terrible hissing as the hot stove
burned through his shirt and scorched his back, and he screamed, gave up the
pistol, and fell behind the counter, overturning the hot pot of beans and
wailing again as the contents spilled over him.

Then
Amonson saw how the Killer Jew might have been at Varruga Tanks, just for an
instant. He looked down on them with hard eyes and levered his weird pistol. He
looked to Amonson like a corpse animated by hate just then and only held
together by his frayed clothes, an evil scarecrow that had jumped down from its
pole in the Devil’s alkali fields.

“Shuck
your guns,” he croaked in a hanged man’s whisper, undercut only by the flies
and Long George’s moaning.

They
did as he told them, slinging their pistols into a far corner. Amonson had to
get rid of Ocobock’s himself, as he was out cold and bleeding from the nose, a
big, mad welt rising on the side of his head. Dorado’s wrist was twice its
normal size.

“Get
out,” he said then, and Amonson and Dorado picked up Ocobock between them and
dragged him out of The Senate, his boot heels hissing in the hard packed earth
and bumping over the rocky ground outside as they fled into the sunlight.

* * *
*

The Rider was dying.

He
had not been able to eat a thing in nearly forty days, and for the last three
days he found himself unable to even drink water from a canteen. He was
succumbing to Lilith’s unseen persecutors at last. His food was unpalatable—he
couldn’t even get it down his throat, and his water tasted like blood mash. In
the Yenne Velt, they had poisoned him steadily. More than that, he had given up
hope.

Since
the well beneath Red House, since Mauricio and Chaksusa’s revelations, he had
felt his reserve strength and all his resistance crumble. The world was not as
it seemed. The universe was not the abode of a just God. It was populated by
insatiable, indescribable monsters that were gods themselves, and cared no more
for their devoted worshipers or for the soul of unwitting man then a man cared
for the life of a tick. Dark and alien thoughts had poisoned his mind in the
interim, even as the ruahim had nightly envenomed his body.

What
if the Lord he had gone his whole life serving was just another of these
things, these Great Old Ones or Outer Gods or whatever? How else could they be
allowed to exist? He often deflected his concerns about evil with what The Sons
of the Essenes had taught him; that the world was the crucible of the soul and
evil a necessity. That it was the duty of a righteous man to perform tikkun—to
scrape away the kelipot, the husks of evil encasing all things; to uncover and
return to its origin the inner light of scattered Creation, the inherent
divinity in all things ill or benevolent to the Creator.

What
part of Creation was Shub-Niggurath? What part the Great Old Ones? Even facing
the vilest demons he had always felt the presence of God, even in the Sitra
Achra, where no heavenly light penetrated, he had been assured of God because
he had known that the beings he faced were but emanations of Him.

He
had felt none of these things beneath Red House. He had torn at the husk and
found nothing beneath, only ash.

Something
nagged him, whispered in his ears, interlaced with the incessant chattering of
the demons which he had grown used to. There was another voice, relentless and
unendurable, a single, calm, listless voice among the gibbering. This voice
said death was the only release. It said that the Hour of the Incursion was
coming, that it was inevitable. It had been ordained long before Creation.
Heaven and hell were but transitory states, sinking islands that would be
enveloped by the black waters of chaos in which the Great Old Ones swam.
Best to go swiftly to Eden and study the Torah, while it was still
there.