Gunlaw

Gunlaw 44

Chapter 30

The locust plague took two days to pass. A train ran by them late on the first day. Jenna saved them, feeling the vibration when she stepped on the rail. They scrambled from the tracks and the locomotive rushed past, grey and hidden in the midst of the swarm, gone without leaving a gap in their number.

At the end of it the insects vanished within the space of half an hour, a high wind carrying the swarms east out over the dunes, leaving only the dead carpeting the ground so thickly that just the rails showed.

Mikeos shuffled on, Hemar and Jenna ahead though they had slowed for him and slowed again. His lower back throbbed with infection, the area around Walker's spike now a weeping ulcer. When he'd finally admitted that it troubled him and let Jenna inspect the site, the witch's face had told him more than her words. She kept her lips stiff to hide her shock but her nose wrinkled at the foul sweet stink of corruption when she peeled his shirt away where it adhered to the puncture wound.

"A thing like this can kill a man," he had told her. He'd see it happen. Taking a seat and waiting for the sect to show sounded preferable to how John Ames had died after cutting his hand on a rusty catch of the shithouse out back of the Bullet and Rye. The sect might not kill clean, but they killed quick.

"It wasn't but a thorn." Hemar measured his memory of the paper-spike out between finger claw and thumb claw. "How can a thing like that kill?"

"Bullets kill and they're only this big." Mikeos tapped one of the ones on his bandolier. He reminded himself Hemar might have twenty years over him but he'd left his pack when just a pup and spent most of the remaining decades pickled in whiskey in alleys across the 'Oh-Seven.

Mikeos hurried on, his pace little more than a brisk walk, mulching dead locusts beneath his boots. The fever wrung more sweat from him than his canteen could replace, every jolting step echoed pain up his spine, and the thin shade of each thorn bush they passed seemed more inviting than the last. A place to rest, and wait.

"Junction!" Hemar shouted, the first enthusiasm in his voice since he found they'd emptied George Ay's flask.

The tracks, curving away from the main line, looked as startling after so many straight and unbroken miles as Hemar had described them in his story. Jenna called a rest stop. Hemar went to all fours, ear to the rails. Mikeos flopped to the ground, suppressing a groan. He grimaced and wondered why he didn't just let the groan out. Who was he playing tough guy for? Did he still want to be Remos Jax, incorruptible, never afraid? Hadn't the years taught him everyone wears a mask, everyone tells the world a story of who they want to be, not the truth of who they are? Should he just groan and gasp at every shard of his pain, share it all, and find how little anyone cared? Should he spill his inner fears like water from a broken gourd? How long before the fever vomited out the unclean truths of the day his father died, how Daveos Jones met his end. How would Jenna look at him when he lay feeble in his own mess babbling about those horses in their corral – how they looked at him – how the boy that was him shot them?

"You're running a fever." Jenna squatted on her haunches beside him.

"I'm fine."

"Hemar says he can smell the sickness in you even when you're behind us."

"He should keep his nose out of it."

"He says he could get there in a day and a night," Jenna said. "And if there are kin there still they might help. It was always supposed to be a kin town at the end of the line."