The Worldshift Chronicles: Monday

Chapter 2

If you missed reading Chapter 1, head here!

Chapter 2

Two days earlier…

Bard, a stargazer through and through, called the Darkheart a poetry of devastation.

For me, it was the same stretch of bleak nothingness I’d rolled through countless times. Blackened sheets of fused glass spread to empty horizons. Hummocks jutted out at odd angles. Sun rays danced along fissures caked with soot. Blighted hillsides rose and fell, in grades covered in cracked mirror and sickened earth. The warped terrain was a pretty sight to fools, a mortal reminder for seasoned travelers, killing or maiming at a moment’s indiscretion.

My hover bug shuddered over tarmac overgrown with irradiated weed. It had been years since the Citadel’s maintenance teams had come west to clear the way. House Cheyenne gave up servicing the western roads less traveled, leaving folks to take their chances across the coastal barrens. House Li only maintained their viaduct highway to their southernmost border. It was a waste of resources to tend the ruined byways of the glass lands. Too many nasty isotopes were strewn about the outlands, most of which ought to have reached their half-lives some seventy years prior, but the dark arcana from the worldshift spell had extended their longevity. How long those magically imbued poisons might dwell upon the earth, nobody knew.

I eased between a pair of twisted cypress trees, surviving despite themselves, two undead soldiers in a parched oasis of rock. The Darkheart was a feared expanse where few folks dared to tread. Remains lay about the route, yellowed bones picked clean, scattered among crags of obsidian and granite. Life remained, most of it nocturnal, predatory, and ravenous.

Ahead, a single figure walked roadside. I initially took it for a lone scree, out early for hunt. Upon closer examination, I saw it was an elderly man. I was shocked. He had no business crossing the wastes unaccompanied at his age. I assumed his transport must have broken down. More unsettling was the fact he wasn’t wearing any rad gear or wearing a respirator.

It was in poor taste for me to speed on by and leave him for dead. I was no Jackie-on-the-spot, nor was I pitiless. I angled the bug over to the side and keyed the engine off. Then I retracted the canopy, popped the driver door, and climbed out of the cockpit, keeping my left hand on the hilt of my twinkie.

The man stopped and smiled. “Hello. I’m no threat to you, traveler.”

“Nor I to you,” I replied. My voice was muffled, filtered through my ventilator mask. I didn’t actually need one. I liked to keep up appearances.

He had a wild mane of hair the color of brick, a long, peppered beard, and wore a patchwork cloak and a wide-brimmed sombrero bristling with scrubby feathers in its hat band. He plodded along in battered boots and steadied his gait with a knobby walking cane. An enormous pack was strapped to his back, jangling with camp gear. His face was riddled with scars, his hands a tangle of swollen joints and knuckles. A trader, surely, yet how the man was traversing this part of the world alone, and on foot, was a mystery.

“Now that we’ve established our pleasantries, shall we?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” I replied, and unlatched a small canteen from my belt. The man set aside his cane and reached for a flask at his hip. I removed my respirator and we raised our vessels to each other and drank, a custom practiced by too few outlanders who hadn’t ill will toward one another.

“I’ve heard songs sung about a striped pistolera in the outlands,” he mused, looking at my long, tousled hair. I was recognized on occasion because of the blazing blonde streak parting my otherwise dark mop top.

“Have you now,” I replied.

“They say she’s the fastest gun in the new west, that she can’t be hunted nor tracked, that she strides proud among bears and beasties, a scourge of mutations and marauders alike.”

I chuckled. “Outlander fables.”

“Courier?”

“Yessir.”

“En route to Bard’s, then?

“Exactly right,” I replied.

“And afterward?

“Probably the Citadel.”

“I don’t often head inland. Unless I’ve got a date in the Famine Lands.”

“You have visited the eastern wastes then?”

“Oh yes, when winds or fortune take me there.”

“What are you doing out here? Where’s your ride?”

“As to the first question, I’m walkabouting, same as ever, and believe you me, ever is a long while. As to the second, I don’t have nor want one. If you can’t feel the ground under your feet, you can’t know what’s coming. It’s always good to know what’s coming.”

Great. Another nutter-butter.  

“What about screes? It’s almost dusk, old timer.”

 “Oh, they don’t mind me. I’m not good eatin’.’”

“You’ll have to tell me your secret.”

“For now, I’ll ask you this. Ever been seaside?”

“Sure, I have.” I replied. I hustled jobs to Half Moon all the time, where strong currents and frequent squalls carried radiation away from the mariner port. I’d learned to swim in the bays outside House Arroyo’s desalination plant. I’d delivered goods, travelers, and messages to the Ditch, where the oceanic waters (Bard called them a blood-red tide) were a black, gunky sludge so heavy with radio-metals and decay, the waves rolled in ripples like molasses.

“Here in the Darkheart?” he went on.

“Of course not. Nobody crosses the mountains. It’s a dead zone there.”

“Naw, naw, it ain’t dead. Very little on this planet is dead-dead. Life is always here. Sometimes it hides, sometimes in plain view, sometimes it sleeps deep. Never all the way gone. You, you’re New Gen, aren’t you?”

I shrugged.

“I’ll bet you don’t even need that ride, do you,” he said.

“Takes me longer to get where I’m going without it.”

“But you don’t die without it. No, you’re radio-proof. Good for you.”

“You don’t seem to be dying yourself, sir.”

He tittered. “Always dying, kid. But I’ve learned a few cheats. With you, however…that’s not all, is it?” He peered close at me and stepped forward. I grasped the butt of the gun. “Easy. I’m just getting gauge of you,” he assured me. “What treasures lay about this wicked land!”

“How’s that?”

He leaned in and whispered, “Enchanted much?”

For reals?

Who is this guy and what’s his angle?

“Pardon?”

“Don’t fret, young one. I just know things for themselves, not all of the time, but most of the time, and you are an iceberg, much more underneath the surface, yes! It is my esteemed pleasure to make your acquaintance. But listen close. With our salutations to each other, I offer a window of recent yesteryear. Will you hear it?”

I relaxed my grip on the twinkie’s hilt. He wanted story time.

Lots of older folks needed to chat. The old man didn’t feel like a threat. Mad, perhaps, but not an opportunist, though I’d been wrong about that before. Still, how he’d managed to out me as a sorceress, half-baked as I might be, was vexing. He didn’t seem like a fellow mage sort, but I had no adequate standard for sussing out magicks. I’d met only one other of my kind.

“Make it quick, please. I have to make the outpost before nightfall.”

“Quick it shall be, good lady.”

Then he recounted an outlandish tale. After making an impossible jaunt over the western mountains straight into the hot zone, he’d come upon a dilapidated concrete bunker jutting into the sea. It had a cylindrical tower overgrown with mutated canopies of thorns, shining in yellowed light at its peak. It was a story well told, I had to admit: melted stanchions of wire and steel, a once proud fortress reduced to rubbish, sheets of glassy sand piled high with heaps of maritime garbage, haunted beaches littered with whale skeletons, rotting shipwrecks, tribal totems, smoldering pieces of neon circuitry from across the world. Most intriguing was his distant observation of a creature half submerged in the waves, a humanoid figure, clothed in wet rags the color of sea grass, raising its arms to heavens unknown.

I appreciated a good story, same as any outlander. I’d heard some whoppers in my time. Campfire yarns were the bread and butter of my trade. But there was no chance the elder had crossed the Ventana Range, much less witnessed a living being thereabouts. Not even the most resilient scree pods survived in the hot zone. All four factions of the major cities had attempted recon explorations there, teams equipped in full hazmat gear and lead-reinforced transports braving silent, maximum rads. None had returned.

“It’s fair telling,” I ceded.

“Ah! And that’s all that needs saying.  I’ll be off now, there’s a hidey-hole a-ways up I can bunk in ‘til morning light.”

I was aghast. Pressing deeper into the Darkheart at that time of day was suicide. He was going to be something’s dinner.

“It’s death on a stick out there after dark. Are you sure you don’t want a ride back to Bard’s?” I implored.

He grinned. His thick lips were cracked and he was missing a few teeth. “I’m good, thanks much. These harsh lands, they grant me passage. But I’m glad we’ve come to understand one another. I didn’t catch your name?”

“I’m Monday. And you?”

“Those who come across me more than once, and that’s a rare event, call me a wanderer. I’m privileged to discover a daughter of the moon! Now that we know each other as we are in the ether, that is enough. Safe travels, Monday, all the way to the end.”

“All the way to the end,” I echoed back to him.

It was a strange swan song.

I liked it.

I watched him shamble away, still wondering how he was carrying his oversized pack and how he wasn’t dead yet. He was a contradiction of reality, but there he was, alive and upright, defying odds and all the good sense there ever was.

I returned to my vehicle and checked the car’s filters and pressurization levels. I rebooted the canopy, kicked the mag plates live, hit the accelerator, and resumed driving, sucking in stale, filtered air inside the bug.

I was hungry. It had been a stretch since my last meal. I hoped my dinner might be worthwhile, perhaps a rack of threaded sheep ribs, a half loaf of cornbread and salted butter, a mug of bitter ale. It mattered little whether ground rat burgers or contraband New Angeles rations were on the menu of the day, because Bard’s place was the sole game in town when it came to hospitality in the Darkheart. More tantalizing was the prospect of landing one of the beds upstairs, above the common room. They came dear and were usually occupied. It was likely I’d take my usual accommodations in the stable behind the saloon. Only the uninitiated brought pack animals into the glass lands, so Bard turned his backyard livery into a gambling arena with a few card tables and a fighting pit. I liked to bunk on the piles of sawdust in its corners. It was a safe place to sleep, what with the saloon’s proximity sonics deterring most hostile wildlife.

I gazed to the north. There was a green light in the distance sweeping and circling – Bard’s lighthouse lamp. Storm clouds gathered above, crisscrossed by lightning. The glass lands were terrifying in wet weather. I increased the bug’s speed, making a beeline for the emerald beacon. Sunset crested as I reached the saloon’s outlying sunflower fields, painstakingly replenished and nourished by Bard and his right-hand man Custer. Their root networks helped cleanse the soil and lower rads about the road stop. As I pulled into the parking lot, twilight’s gorgeous hellfire fell over the shimmering expanse. The saloon’s sentinel lantern stood in the roadhouse’s front courtyard, a limestone obelisk fifty feet high with hundreds of initials, epithets, and testaments carved into its pedestal base. The monolith’s beacon provided a compass for anyone within ten thousand yards after sundown.

Personally, I thought a lighthouse was irrelevant, as only the most well-armed transports made it safe to the outpost after dark. Bard, ever an optimist, kept the lantern lit through the night. He paid handsome for its high-powered bulbs, crafted in the bowels of House Cheyenne’s factories. When I was young, I’d been conscripted to those same assembly lines. Maddy knew how to organize the needy, and I’d been among them. While monotonous gear-heading was no picnic, it was a far sight better than what most kids experienced in the Citadel ghettos above ground.

I circled the bug around the lamp and parked next to a club of rusted hover bikes, a high-end coach wagon loaded for bear, and assorted ragtag clunkers. The front area of the mercantile (his ‘lawn,’ Bard called it), was flattened, sculpted by folks short on funds. Over time, desperate hands had smoothed out a pit stop circling the lantern. Many penny-poor travelers were glad for it. There was always someone passing through who’d trade hard labor for a meal and a few liters of water. A few days of back breaking work might buy room and board, or a bottle of cactus whiskey. Picks, chisels, carbide hammers, and other stone-working tools lay against the south side of the main building.

Bard was a fair man. Outlanders liked to pose wild theories about his true origins. He’d been a paladin guard in the Subterranea of House Li. He was a disgraced criminal who’d escaped from the Ditch’s rad warrens. He was an expat of House Gammon elite. He was a former enforcer for one of House Arroyo’s rogue water mafias. Too many rumors, each more fantastic than the last, and I never knew which was true or if all were lies, because Bard, while friendly to a fault, rarely spoke of his history before he’d acquired the saloon.

I shed my bulky rad suit, tossed it on the passenger seat, and dusted myself off. I wore a simple, black jumpsuit underneath. I pulled my fingerless gloves tight and wiggled my toes inside my trek boots. I hit the locks for the bug, cinched my twinkie’s gun belt around my waist, and cross-strapped my twin eagles across the back of my shoulders. I paused, taking a good look at the weathered roadhouse. Repairs of its outer walls spotted the structure in ironwood lumber, brickwork, and masonry caulk. Its walls and roof were overlaid with pressurization tech, filters, vent systems, and power-celled generators. One vanity Bard begrudgingly allowed himself was a blinking neon sign emitting an ocher-shaded light above the entry door with a basic script: Bard’s Saloon. Lit torches lay in iron sconces on each end of a lengthy front porch. Patrons loitered beneath a wooden awning.

I looked for familiar faces and found one, a fellow courier leaning against the porch rail. His name was Viz. I first met him two years back at a trading post in the foothills of the Sierra. We’d broken bread and talked shop. He was a decent guy, another New Gen kid. He regarded me with steely eyes, twirling a long, wooden staff. He wore a rad gear suit emblazoned with House Cheyenne’s raven logo on its breast pocket. Unlike the rest of the crowd, he wore no re-breather nor respirator.

“Hey there, Monday,” Viz said.

“Hey Viz,” I replied. “Where you headed?”

“On the flip flop ‘tween Cheyenne and Arroyo.”

“The long way? Why didn’t you just take the bullet?”

“’Cuz Maddy’s cheap. I got a new ride anyhow, wanted to see how she glides in the glass. Whatabouts you?”

“Coming back from the dome, escort job. Couldn’t find a return gig.”

“On your way to the ‘Del, then?”

“I guess so. Come inside, let’s brew and stew.”

“In a bit. Custer’s got a prospect, wants to pay decent metal for a kiddie rumble and I volunteered, but first I’m gonna see if those hacks over there are headed south, maybe pick up extra coin.” He motioned to three outlanders nearby, two men and a woman standing in a circle around a heartless barrel fire, shivering and mumbling, first time visitors in sore need. I held little hope for them to make their second leg, whether they were headed north or south, not without assistance.

There was only one reason why people took the road through the Darkheart instead of taking more favorable chances along the bullet’s causeway in the east; they were in a powerful hurry to reach sanctuary in one of the two free houses at House Cheyenne or House Arroyo, usually without adequate means to set up camp for themselves. The cities of San Francisco and New Angeles, the bastions of House Li and House Gammon, were strictly invite-only, transgressions usually accompanied by penalty of death.

A trio of House Li paladins leaned against the building. Their eyes were shadowed beneath black hoods. House Li’s silver cross insignia was emblazoned on the chest plates of their slithering nano-armor. They sized me up, fingers tapping pulse pistols in metallic holsters. I flipped my goggles, letting the templars see my eyes. They nodded, and I returned the gesture.

Then I hopped up the steps and pressed a button on the wall to break the hermetic seal on a sliding, alum-steel door. It opened with a hiss as I stepped into the saloon’s de-con chamber. A burst of electrostatic spray fell over me, followed by a quick suction venting, then the main door lock was released. 

I headed inside.

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