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."
Mikeos thought of the woodkin doctor back in Ansos, his wide green eyes, the touch of his fingers ... like roots. "Kin are past helping us now. Know we're coming. Know what we're after. Could have laid a train on for us if helping was on the list of what kin want."
"James Purbright will have arrived there already." Hemar came across, holding his belly as if remembering Bright's knife. "We'll find nothing good there." The dogman spasmed, just one quick convulsion of his muscles. Mikeos' Grandpa Ray used to say that was the last sign of the thirst, the claws of it being torn out of drunk gave them spasms. He saw it time and again did Grandpa Ray, whenever a proper boozer ended up in his cells for more than a week. "It hurts them something rotten," he'd told Mikeos. "And then they're free of it?" Mikeos asked. "Hell no. But it stops beating on them every minute of the day after that. Stops shouting at them and starts a-whispering. The whispering is what brings them all back to the bottle in the end. Whiskey never lets go once it's got a hold. No siree!"
"We'll have to hope," Mikeos focused back on Hemar, pushing memories aside. He tried to imagine it. A town built of a boy's imagination. Or the ruins of it, and Jim Bright standing over Eben Lostchild's corpse. He wouldn't wait though. More likely they'd meet him coming back along the tracks, the deed done. "Just have to hope."
"You don't have to hope," Hemar snapped, yellow teeth clashing close enough to Mikeos's face to feel the dogman's breath. "You're here for Bright and you'll get him. One way or the other. You couldn't give two beans for Eben, could you?"
"I went down that pit hunting Walker for miners that I didn't know from the first man." Mikeos wiped his sweating face and realised that the mythical 'first man' people swore and cursed by was actually Sykes Bannon. First man off the first train. A good man twisted into something wicked by the years that wouldn't let him die. Mikeos straightened up, wincing at the tenderness around his left side. He didn't feel dying would prove particularly difficult in his case. Catching sight of Hemar again he tried to reel in the strand of conversation that had escaped him. "I'd go out of my way to protect Eben Lostchild whoever threatened him. The fact that it's Jim Bright is just a bonus."
Hemar licked his teeth. It wasn't just whiskey he was short of, their water had gone and the next tower lay ten miles off, maybe more. How the dogman had managed the first time without a canteen Mikeos couldn't begin to understand. What he did understand was that he was slowing the others down, letting the Dry in under their skins, letting it desiccate them.
"You think—" Hemar shook as another spasm ran through him. "You think Jim Bright shot your father? You don't know much about hunska, do you?"
"What have hunska got to do with anything?" Mikeos wondered if the heat had got to Hemar, or was it fear of the pursuing sect, so close now the wind carried their taint whenever it blew from the south. Even a human nose could smell it. What horrors it might speak to Hemar Mikeos couldn't say.
Scent pulls you back through the years, takes you to a moment, puts all those emotions right back in your lap. The tracks might mute the sect-mind, reducing its screams to whispers, but their stink would be shouting at Hemar, dragging him back to the slaughter of his pack. Mikeos sniffed and tried to remember what they were talking about.
"Hunska? You're not making sense, Hemar." Terror makes a man talk crazy. Perhaps it was terror. Either way Hemar had a sharp edge to him. Grandpa Ray always said the only thing meaner than a mean drunk is a mellow drunk sober. Hemar had always been genial as he eyed the bottom of a bottle but even the friendly ones got vicious when drying out.
"You shot nine men in the street, Mikey, Nine! Quick men among them. Nobody's that fast. No man at least."
"Well this man here is." Mikeos thumped his chest. Hemar was working up to something but he couldn't figure what. Some paranoia that both kinds of thirst had put into him, most likely.
"Mikeos." Jenna waved to draw his attention from Hemar, as if he were the drunk needing steering. "Mikeos, how come your father ended up in the Five-Oh-Seven same as Sally Hunska? Both of them survivors of Sweet Water. It's a long way from Sweet Water to the Fives."
Mikeos frowned. "He used to tell it that a bunch of folks came to town with Miss Kitty on account of her turning out to have her own fortune stashed away from her time in Sweet Water. His pa, my Grandpa Ray, went along as a gun-hand to watch her interests. 'Came a lawman later, did Grandpa Ray. Miss Kitty bought a stake in the Bullet and Rye, some kind of partnership with the owner. Moss Evans it was back in those days. And she found jobs for the ones that came to town with her. Paid their fares for all I know. Brought Hemar over too I guess?" She must have thought he'd be useful for something besides emptying bottles.
"And Sally would have been in ska," Jenna said. "All that time in Sweet Water and then the early days in the 'Oh-Seven."
Mikeos shrugged. The cycles of female hunska weren't ever a speciality of his. Male hunska almost never came to towns and always tried to leave the same day. Females, they'd come and stay if they were in ska – sometimes for a few months, occasionally a year or more. A hunska woman in her receptive phase would tolerate company, even enjoy it maybe. They always left to have their baby in the wilds though. Grum used to say a hunska woman in ska was half-pregnant, just busy finishing the baby off, and that each hunska child needed a dozen fathers. But then Grum was full of shit most of the time. Even for a taur.
"Sally Hunska was in ska ten years," Hemar said. "When the baby came she gave it to a local couple."
"Never heard of a hunska in ska that long. Nowhere near." Mikeos struggled to his feet. Painful as it was to move he felt the need to be on his way, the need to leave this conversation behind him at the junction.
"Well she was. And at the end of it all she squeezed out a child. And his fathers are some or all of the men she took to her bed for money in those ten years. She didn't come in pregnant off the Dry, not and hold on to it ten years." Hemar turned away, head lowered as if suddenly realising he'd said too much. Much too much.
"Wait. No." Jenna shook her head. "A hunska's child would be fathered by the hunska males she knew in the wild."
"She gave him to humans because he looked human. Gave him to a girl who worked with her at the Broken Horn in Sweet Water and then worked for her at the Bullet and Rye. That girl had a young man who was sweet on her. She left the 'Bullet and took up with him in a house down on Maynard, by the corrals." Hemar kept his gaze on the tracks arrowing off southward into low hills.
Jenna shot Mikeos a glance that reminded him of those she reserved for the objects of study in her Ansos cell. "No hunska ever fell pregnant to a human." That was probably the only fact many people knew about the hunska.
"You're saying my pa wasn't my pa?" Mikeos tried to remember Daveos Jones' face. The details escaped him as always, just glimpses from a dozen scenes crowding in. Blonde hair in the sunlight, the time they found that broke-wing hawk, his laughing when he teased Ma about her cooking and she chased him with the ladle. Mikeos was older now than Daveos when he took his bullet, but that truth had no place in his memories. "You can't take a person's pa away just like that. It doesn't work like that." The fever had him shivering now, sweating too.
Hemar walked on, up the track, one hand on his belly. "Jim Bright shot my pa down!" Mikeos shouted it at the dogman's back. A sour taste filled his mouth. He tried to spit it out but found himself too dry. Memories still crowded at his shoulder, unchanging but seen with new eyes year upon year. Daveos Jones had spent his life trying to live up to examples set by Grandpa Ray who brought him out of Sweet Water and his childhood friend, Remos Jax, who came with them. Mikeos felt closer to those two men than to his own father. He understood their bravery, their competence better than the weakness and fear that had haunted Daveos. Daveos Jones had known himself lacking the steady hand, the quickness, surety and nerve of gunslinger or lawman. Mikeos had always lived with a kind of shame at that, a rottenness running behind all those memories, the knowing that his father wasn't like the men he idolised, wasn't like the men Mikeos wanted to be. And the years had turned that shame from one kind into another, always changing, but never gone. Shame at being so shallow, at not being able to recognise and truly accept at the core of himself the worth of a man not made to fight. Shame at the thought his father might know how he felt. Shame now, this minute, at the tiny flicker of relief that ran in him at the possibility that Daveos Jones wasn't his true father, wasn't his blood.
"Ain't no cure for guilt." Mikeos set off following Hemar down the new track.
"What?" Jenna walked alongside him, matching his pace.
"Rayeos Jones ... my grandpa. He always used to say there ain't no cure for guilt." Mikeos clamped his mouth shut, before the fever ran any more foolishness out of him. Mikeos looked at his right hand as he walked, his quick right hand, holding it palm up and empty. Hemar had just told him he was a freak, a half-breed hunska, no claws, or tail, or fur, just the preternatural quickness. The dogman had taken away his humanity in a stroke and all Mikeos had felt was a moment of relief that a good man, whose only weakness had been in being weak, was not his father... There ain't no cure for guilt, a man's just as guilty on the end of the rope as he was before the fall, but there are plenty of sure-fire cures for shame. The dead don't know shame, and with an army of sect behind him and the open desert and Jim Bright up ahead, the cure looked to be on its way.
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