Peace in an Age of Metal and Men (2 page)

The little town we called Overpass was a cluster of several dozen stone buildings. These limestone houses were rammed up into the shadow of the great structure that had once been a crumbled section of road and bridge. The ruins of the overpass cast a sharp shadow over the little town that bore its name. In the center of town, tall grass surrounded the Kiva, a mostly underground rectangular structure used for ceremonies and meetings. The vegetation around this little pit of a town was dry and angry; bones of trees clawed at the sky, as if trying to slow it down. Smaller shrubs still grasped at green in a painful attempt to stay alive in this last refuge against the punishing sun. East of town, small fields held the community’s agriculture, which consisted mainly of millet, potatoes, and p
iñ
on. This was not so much a safe place as a secluded corner in a vast, untamed wild.

Zane had dropped me a few kilometers from town. He’d laughed at the idea that I didn’t want to be seen with him, but he respected my need for privacy.

By the time I drifted back into town, night had fallen and the waxing moon had risen with an army of stars at its back. Cool night air tickled the raw skin on my back, the flesh already tightening in places where it was damaged. The nanomachines in my bloodstream were doing their best to fix the damage, but the nannies did nothing to help the pain. The night was quiet and had an empty feel, like there was nobody from one horizon to the next.

But I wasn’t alone.

“Hey,” said a voice not far off. “What’re you doing here?”

Squinting at the dark, I was able to make out the woman’s shape as her eyes flashed with lavender light. I powered down my skidder and hopped off. The machine would do just as fine here as anywhere. Nobody would take it, and if they did they sure weren’t going very far very fast.

“Mina,” I said, recognizing her voice. “You walking rounds?”

“Just started.” Mina Honanie came closer and I could see her in the moonlight. Dark hair fell in piles on her shoulders, unkempt and wild as the woman’s soul. Deeply tanned skin showed the creases of smiles at the corners of her eyes. Mina always had laughter in her eyes, but when she thought you weren’t looking there was sadness too. To a man interested in women, she’d be quite the catch, but that’s not my deal. She was probably the closest thing I had to a friend. “Wanna join?” she asked.

We made our way to the edge of town, following a path that someone from our tribe walked every day and every night. The desert was a dangerous place. There were animals that’d rip you apart and people who were worse. We Hopi followed the old ways as best we could and kept things low-tech, but we weren’t stupid. We were well armed and well prepared. Mina’s rifle was slung across her shoulders with a loose strap.

“No horses?” Mina asked.

“Next time.”

She nodded. “Never met a horse stubborner than you, J.D.”

“You ever met a horse?”

“Once. When I was little.” She smiled. “And there’s Vincent.”

“The donkey? That’s not the same thing.”

We worked our way up a steep slope, picking our way over the broken stone of an old wall. Moonlight cast sharp shadows under the clear sky. A million stars stretched across the night sky in a great, broad brush-stroke.

“People still kept horses back when I was little,” Mina said.

“Some still do.”

“There wasn’t a use for them back then. Not really. Still, my papa knew a woman who had a few. She said she loved them like her own kids. She said they were the sweetest things she’d ever known.” Mina grinned. “One of them bit me.”

“Maybe it thought you were an apple.”

Mina barked a quick laugh and quickly tried to stifle it. Her face flushed and her laugh lines dug deep. I tried to scowl to quiet her down. It wouldn’t do to draw attention ourselves while we were walking rounds. Soon her laugh was tugging at the corners of my own mouth. Next thing I knew, we were both howling with laughter. It felt good, like a huge weight coming off of my chest.

We moved on along the path, silent for a while. The air grew cooler, gently tickling me where my clothes were ripped.

The wind changed direction and brought a heavy musk, warm and thick.

Mina must have sensed my tension because she stopped.

Long moments stretched on. We were up on a rise, overlooking Overpass. From this angle, the town was nearly invisible. Scrub bushes and dead grass made for plenty of cover for critters up there. A layer of dirt and dust had covered and reclaimed the asphalt of the ancient highway. My ears strained against the constant whisper of the wind.

Nothing moved for several minutes. I motioned Mina to follow and saw that she’d already pulled out her rifle. Good. There wasn’t likely going to be any trouble, but it was better to be ready for it.

Crouching low, I sniffed the air. The musk hung on the wind like a piss-soaked blanket, moving heavily in from the north. Slowly, I crept closer to one of the thicker patches of grass. Something had rested there; something big had trampled the area. Starting there, I crept in a circle, looking for more signs of disturbance. Some grasses were crushed. In another place, there was a branch chewed down to bare wood. I took it and stuck it in my duster pocket. The teeth marks might be interesting, but in the moonlight there was no way to properly look at it.

One fat, well-formed print sat perfectly formed in a section of soft soil several meters away from the trampled grass. It had four small pads and marks of long, wicked claws.

“Coyote,” I said.

Mina moved up behind me and peered at the print.

“Big coyote. Probably more than one.” I bit my lip. “They bedded down over there for a bit. At some point one of them pissed right here and another one stepped in it. That’s how we got that print.”

“It’s not a wolf?”

I shook my head. “Not quite right for wolf. Size is right, but the claws are wrong. It’s coyote, but probably bio-engineered. Maybe escaped or something.”

“We walk this path all the time, though. We’d have noticed giant coyotes this close.”

Coyotes coming this close meant there was something odd about them. A coyote was likely to see just about anything as food, but they were smart enough to fear humans. Maybe whoever was walking the path hadn’t noticed them, but those coyotes had been there a while. The grasses might have concealed them, or maybe the creatures had moved away when they heard people coming. It was like a coyote to be cowardly.

“Folks ought to walk in twos for a while,” I said. “Might be safer.”

Mina nodded. “You think they’ll come back?”

“All that noise we made might have scared them off. If they like it here, they’ll come back.”

“You can tell Broadfeather what you saw when you go see him tomorrow.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“Elder Broadfeather said that you should speak with him when you get back. It’s very important.”

“Thanks for the message.”

She slung her rifle back over her shoulder. Her expression got deadly serious. Mina put her hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eyes.

“J.D.,” she said. “There’s just one thing I’m gonna ask you about today and I want a straight answer.”

“Sure.”

“Can you please tell me the reason that your ass crack is showing out the back of your ripped-up pants?”

My back creaked in protest at the mere thought of movement. Bruises lined my legs and arms, tying the muscles into rock-hard knots. My very bones ached, like maybe coyotes had chewed them on. It was luck that kept those bones from getting broken in my fall off the skidder, but I sure as hell didn’t feel lucky.

One advantage of a metal arm is that it doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities as the rest of my body. It could drop from the sky into an active volcano and not show so much as a scratch while the rest of me lit up like a bonfire. I had some tactile feeling in the hand, but it never hurt, no matter how hard it got hit.

That morning, the arm throbbed with dull pain. It had a low battery, which was not surprising, given that I hadn’t charged it in a month. The low-battery warning presented as a dull, irritating ache in my elbow.

It was still dark. Why was I awake so early? Sure, pain made it hard to get a decent night’s sleep, but why was I sitting up looking around at my dark room?

A gentle rap at the door gave me the answer. A visitor. How long had they been there? Who was it? My heart raced. Where was my gun?

The gentle tap came again, slightly more insistent.

Light. I needed light.

A sweep of my human arm knocked my glow cube from its position on the little table by my worn-down cot. I swore out loud.

There was another gentle tap at the door. In my experience, death didn’t knock. I forced myself to calm down. Deep breaths.

“Just a minute,” I said, though it might have come out as a rhythmic cadence of grunts. I rolled off the cot and landed on my knees on the earthen floor. The cube had to be close. Crawling, I carefully swept the area for the device, finding it after only a few seconds.

My thumb found the indentation on the top of the device, and a blue glow filled the room. A red light on the top of the device indicated some kind of message, though I couldn’t figure who it might be from. There wasn’t time for it. I stood up and opened the thatch door. Only once it was open did I remember that I was wearing only an old pair of long underwear, one of the few remaining intact items of clothing in my possession.

Isi Broadfeather was the tribe’s chief by the simple authority given a brilliant, charismatic man of advanced age. Like many folks of his years, he was not of a mind to sleep much more than a few hours a night. Maybe his body didn’t require it, or perhaps he felt the looming end of his long life pressuring him to make the most of those final days. Even my sleep-addled brain should have figured it was him at the door.

“Morning,” I said. “C’mon in.”

Elder Broadfeather’s eyes twinkled with amusement when he saw me. His gnarled wooden cane tapped the earthen floor as he waddled past me. There was only one chair in the place, and he settled comfortably into it and folded both hands on the end of his cane. The old man wore tanned leather and a modest assortment of feathers. His gray hair was pulled back and tied neatly away.

I sat on the cot across from him, and there we stayed for several minutes. My neck and arms benefited from a good stretch, and soon felt like they could move as reliably as a person could expect.

Broadfeather spoke first. “Good to see you walk back to town last night.”

I nodded, wondering if he saw me come into town or if Mina had told him.

“Didn’t want to come back on horse?”

“Not badly enough.”

“Maybe they would rather be free.”

“Wouldn’t we all?”

Broadfeather smiled at that. He had always supported my attempt at taming the horses, but I couldn’t help but feel like he’d been betting against my success. Yet, every time I came back he’d lay out a new ploy to try to catch them.

“It almost worked,” I said. “Had them running right for the canyon, but the skidder failed and they got away. That black’s a smart one, I think. She had an eye out for me.”

“I once heard a story of a man who wanted horses, but all he had were apples. The man would walk out into the field with apples each day, leaving them for the wild horses that roamed the area. Soon the horses started visiting that location each day, and each day the man would get closer to them. One day he fed an apple directly to a beautiful mare.”

“He made friends with it?”

“No, of course not. He tricked her and broke her until she would do his bidding.”

“Seems a broken horse wouldn’t be as good.”

Broadfeather shook his head. “Nonsense. A horse must be broken to be ridden. That is how it’s done. The horse is no good if it’s too free. It won’t obey orders or let its rider ride. If it can’t be broken, then the horse is no good to its owner.”

I grunted.

Long minutes passed in silence. The sky eased from the gray of predawn to a stunning mix of reds and yellows. There was movement outside and somewhere a rooster crowed. The tribe was waking up and my head was starting to clear. The ache of fatigue and injury faded into the background of a life lived hard.

“The tribe needs you, son,” said Broadfeather quietly.

I raised an eyebrow.

“We do our best to follow the Hopi Way, from before the land was ruined.” The twinkle was gone from his eyes, replaced by a grim expression. “It guides us in how we live and how we care for the earth. How the earth cares for us. Few of us remember anything. Stories of the Hopi have passed the generations by, and most of what we know is from the books. Word of mouth is much better, but there isn’t much left.”

“Agreed.”

“No doubt, you know of the Navajo.”

The Navajo and Hopi traditionally were rivals, but little of that rivalry had survived the ages. When America fell, the Navajo Nation asserted its own independence. They rejected the technology that changed Texas and since they lived so close to the Yellowstone caldera, Texas left them alone. Even the desert-dwelling Texans considered land too close to the Yellowstone supervolcano to be uninhabitable. Not the Navajo. When the supervolcano brought Americans to its knees, the Navajo survived. Then they thrived. The Navajo Nation was notoriously independent, even hostile to outsiders. Their people were spread thin along the Rocky Mountains, loosely organized but very powerful due to a fierce loyalty. With all its technology and power, Texas had never been able to stretch its borders too far to the northwest. Not that there was much will to do so.

“We need you to be our ambassador,” Broadfeather said.

I blinked.

“They will visit with a spiritual man in two days. They are bound by the word of this two-spirit and they would like us to send our spiritual leader.”

My jaw opened like I had something to say, but nothing became readily apparent that needed saying. The Navajo never visited Texas. They stayed to themselves and expected Texans to do the same.

“You’ll negotiate an alliance. We don’t need trouble.”

My head was starting to hurt again. A dull throbbing pounded on the backs of my eyeballs. Broadfeather’s walking stick tapped out an even rhythm as he made his way out the door. The laughter had come back to his eyes. Was this a joke?

“Spiritual leader?” I asked dully as the old man stepped outside.

He turned around and winked at me before hobbling on his way. It took me nearly an hour before I stood up. I dressed in some old jeans and a button-down shirt. My duster was ruined. Huge sections had been worn clean through, and a tear ran down its length. Tossing it onto the chair, I grabbed my glow cube and tried my best to find room for it in the pocket of my jeans. Eventually, I gave up and tossed the thing on the table. It was still blinking red, but that could wait.

My Smith & Wesson Model 500 hung on the wall. Heavily modified, but without an ounce of tech, it had always been my go-to problem solver. It was a big gun—a revolver with significant heft and enough stopping power to give pause even to armored foes. I kept it well maintained, but it had been a while since I’d shot anything other than coyotes or the occasional armadillo. The services I provided my tribe were nonviolent and I liked to keep it that way.

The gun’s heft felt good in my hand. Its balance, perfect. I’d been a lot of things with this gun at my side: a Texas Ranger, a lawman, a hunter. It seemed like the gun had been my partner my whole life. It had helped me be whatever the world needed me to be.

But a spiritual leader?

I hung the gun back up on the wall.