A Story of Hope
Amid Fairy-Tale
Darkness
from
Asby and Jones

     In a war-riven world of rust and runes…

 

          In the chilled and desert stretches of Tankwaste…

 

               In the silent, charred wreck of an isolated ranch…

 

A young woman lay on the cold ground. How much longer can I survive?

​

Tamping down terror, Psyche Kyteler stared mutely into the sky, reflecting on the emptiness of the hours since she had been abandoned. The aching afternoon. The long, cold night. And the unravelling hours since dawn.

​

How much longer do I want to survive?

 

Psyche lay on her back spread-eagle. She could not rise. By cruel rough rope, each of her four limbs was bound fast to a three-foot long iron spike. And each spike was hammered deep into the earth.

​

Psyche was staked out.

​

***

 

Where’s Ivan?

​

Psyche’s voice was gone. She regretted her futile cries for help this morning, which had chased Ivan away.

​

I’m done shouting, Ivan. Come back.

​

 Horses were such nervous creatures – even geldings like Ivan.

Through the night, Psyche’s eyes had busied themselves following the glow of sparks escaping from the burning stone-and-timber house.

​

 Since dawn, when Ivan had risen from beside her and ambled to the barn, her gaze had chased ghostly furls of hot ash.

​

Now the smoke of the half-burned residence was a dusty ribbon against a pale sky. Nothing more to tell the world she needed help.

​

A man would need goggles to see the smoke now.

​

The nearest road ran a few miles east. TW Guns had built their ranch far from their dangerous customers, far from everything.

​

And even if someone sees it, he won’t stop. Not in Tankwaste.

​

Except you never knew. “Someone might stop,” she whispered. “He might.”

 

All right, he might. But will he give aid? Or will he take?

Psyche had to admit it might be better if she were never found. Social empathetic types did not usually hang about in Tankwaste. That was the truth of the dangerous world she had joined, the hard work she had chosen.

​

“But a girl needs hope.” She whispered into the stale, sluggish breeze. “So if you’re out there – if you’re a giver and not a taker – please see the smoke. Please stop. Please find me.”

​

***

 

The bountyhunter had been riding his dual-fuel motorcycle across Tankwaste for hours, looking for water or diesel. His 1948 bifuel Radiant’s Charger would not go many miles further. “Hang in there, Destrier,” he muttered to his bike.

​

Improvident was not Sul’s way, but he had found his bounty farther into the frozen desert than he had been told.

​

It might be wise to discard the freshbox containing his bounty’s head, and lighten the bike’s load; but to Sul, the contract was law. His highest duty. He would get out of Tankwaste with his bounty or not at all.

​

At least he did not have to bring in the whole man. The bounty’s headless corpse (as well as his furious woman and weeping children) were left far, far behind.

​

What had that child shouted when Sul appeared? “Momma, a robot came!”

​

With his slim physique, his bronze mechanical goggles, his precise and steady movements, and his ever-calm face, Sul might well appear robotic to a child. But older people found him similarly off-putting. And their dislike only seemed to deepen when he removed his goggles and looked them in the eye.

​

“You’re empty,” the bounty’s rangy, six-foot tall woman had spat at him with streaming eyes. “You’re heartless.”

​

Sul had not been moved by her feelings or by her femaleness. But he was not heartless.

Not technically.

​

He did have a heart; but like his bounty’s head, it was separated from its body. Since the end of the recent world war, Sul’s flesh heart had lain in a runed freshbox marked “Captain George Sullivan”, stored someplace where he did not have to bear with its twisting, haunted responses.

​

Main difference was, Sul had a heartrune carved in rock – a rock implanted right in his chest – to keep him going while his ticker rested elsewhere. He had never heard of a rune that could keep a man going without his head.

​

And if his… condition… made him a bit unfeeling? That wasn’t all bad. The people he hunted were usually worse than him. Like this guy without a head. Maybe he had been taking care of this one woman all right, but he had killed another through drink-fueled neglect and abuse. The victim’s mother wanted her rightful vengeance. Men like that – true, their hearts were not working remotely, like Sul’s; but they were deadened by unrepentant cruelty.

Sul couldn’t feel satisfied with himself, but he could think it. “I’m not heartless,” he had answered that screaming, spitting woman. “I’m just good at my job. I live by my contract, and the contract is law.” Then he had roared away on Destrier with her man’s head in a freshbox, leaving her weeping in the wreck of her life.

​

He was indeed good at his job; but his job was not fixing things for people who had made bad life choices.

​

***

​

Please find me.

​

Psyche’s strong, oversized hands twitched uselessly, empty without a hand to hold, a tool to free herself – but especially empty without a gun. For comfort, she closed her eyes and imagined the tight grip of her TW .357, the slow pull of its trigger.

​

 I wish I’d died fighting, like the others.

​

She pictured the damage she might have done amongst those damned griefers, even with her little pearl-handled Moonhammer derringer.

​

She could not see the corpses of her dead friends lying strewn around the ranch, but she knew they were there. On the air, mingled with smoke, she could smell copper and iron and offal.

​

Psyche’s recurring flashback: her young friend Rachel, emerging from the kitchen just minutes before the fight began. Rachel had decided to carry out three hot loaves of bread at once, but when she put them on the table to cool, she had dropped one on the dusty ground. Psyche had seen her brushing it off, and going red-faced when twenty-year-old Adan teased her for trying to do too much.

​

Rachel’s consolatory smile at Adan, when Psyche scolded him, had been so wholesome and sweet – she had offered him a slice of bread, and dissolved in giggles when he had asked for a hearty topping of dust on his slice.

​

Then Rachel and Adan had walked off toward the center of the compound to see the guests – the biker gang – the prospective customers who had been negotiating with the Chief all morning. That was the last Psyche had seen of her friend.

​

Sweet but a little slow, Rachel had been the youngest person on the ranch – probably too young to be there.

​

 How did Rachel die?

​

 Quickly, Psyche hoped.

​

For some reason the bikers – or griefers, as they had turned out to be – had decided that Psyche deserved a different fate.

​

 Why?

​

 Psyche believed herself no great beauty. Most men found her uncomfortably tall. Her figure was almost bony, her hair an ordinary brown, her face long.

​

 A voice echoed in her memory. “We’ll stop by another day and see if you’re still alive. Hang in there, girly.” The speaker had been an especially oily and colorful griefer, the last of them, the one who had driven the final spike into the stiff ground. She recoiled viscerally at the memory of his moist lips curling around that deranged joke as he leaned over her. And there was that strange detail of the silver star braided into his oiled blond hair, hanging down and bumping rhythmically against his nose. She had distracted herself with it, but his mood had been unmistakable. He had drunk up her humiliation and anguish like water.

​

 Are they actually coming back? When?

​

Her mind backed away from recognizing the griefers’ return as hope. Once they came back she would finally die, and swiftly.

​

Alone behind the kitchen, clearing the garden of dead stalks when the fighting started, Psyche had not witnessed the battle. Just three bizarrely-dressed, greasy-haired, loose-lipped griefers surging around the corner, seizing her before she could get to her beloved TW .357 with the horn grip. Forcing her to the ground. Making her listen to her friends die, as she fought and thrashed.

And then the really bad part had begun.

​

Psyche jerked her thoughts away from that moment. Yesterday she had felt relief as, finally, the griefers roared away on their motorcycles to sell the stolen merchandise they had reaped from the destruction of the ranch, the desert home where Psyche had lived and worked for years. Relief, even though they left her helpless. Their presence was abominable.

​

But the silence since then!

​

A nearby water pump leaked a drop of water. She could just hear the water drop hitting the dust. Panic rose. Psyche knew that was dangerous even as she tugged instinctually at her bonds. The ropes tore into her raw skin. She closed her eyes, panting, and forced herself to stillness.

Panic had nowhere to go right now. And neither did Psyche. Nowhere but within.

​

Had she nothing to give thanks for? Even now?

​

“At least there aren’t any insects. I’d rather freeze to death than die by insects. Thanks for that.” It was hard to whisper these meager words of thanks, but they interrupted the panic. Settled her.

Psyche breathed. Then, belatedly, courage lifted her heart.

​

 Maybe I’ll start to feel warm as I die.

​

 She almost did.

​

 Maybe I’ll see Grandmom, coming to fetch me.

​

Unexpectedly, she smelled her grandmother’s scents of rose-water and camphor. Psyche smiled, eyes closing. Her cold lips cracked, hot blood smearing across them, and she instinctively licked up the coppery moisture, unwilling to lose it.

​

“I’m designing a gun,” she whispered to her grandmother’s fragrance. She was afraid it would fade, but instead the scent deepened and grew more complex. Gingerbread. Heavy, warm breezes by the riverside. Her grandmother’s bittersweet perfume.

​

Psyche pictured the gun design she had been working on just a few days ago. Showed it to Grandmom in her mind. “I’m good at this, and I’m getting better. I know I ran away from school and made Momma angry, but I’m good at this. I help people keep safe. You understand, right, Grandmom? Do you think Momma and Daddy have forgiven me yet?”

​

The camphor intensified.

​

Receding from her body’s suffering, Psyche drowsed.

​

***

​

Sul checked his fuel gauge and slowed down, looking around methodically to make sure he was not missing an isolated filling station. A well. A random wayside pump. Something.

Sul’s horizon sure looked empty, but he ought to stop and make sure. Taking off his soft, worn military hat, he scratched his head through his straight, dirty-blond hair, and cast about.

Tankwaste spread far and wide in every direction, stripped clean of life. Far off to the south, the rusting hulks of several tanks blotted the horizon. A tattered zeppelin rippled in a momentary breeze behind him, then slowly sank behind a small rise.

​

He studied the sky. The cold crystal expanse of blue offered no likelihood of rain or snow. Despite the nearness of spring, dry winter maintained a death grip on the broad desert.

​

Instinct dictated Sul head back toward civilization, but he had come that way and already knew there was nothing for him within reach. His only hope was to head deeper into Tankwaste and stumble on one of those unregistered ranches spaced around out here. Shady as hell, but he could pay for diesel.

​

Or fight his way out, if they wouldn’t sell it. Take what he needed, and leave. That was one thing he knew how to do.

​

Sul climbed back onto Destrier, pressed the steam lever and shot forward with a clanging hiss.

In his army days he would have cursed to alleviate the tension of uncertainty. He tried it now, shouting a curse word into the cold wind generated by Destrier.

​

Like he expected, it did not change a thing.

​

***

 

A sudden shock went through Psyche, bringing her back to consciousness.

​

 The air’s so cold. Guess I’m not dying yet. Where’s Ivan?

​

She listened for the slightest sound and thought she heard Ivan stamping in the barn, but it was hard to tell at that distance.

​

Ivan had saved Psyche’s life in the freezing, hollow night.

​

In their celebratory slaughter after taking over the ranch, the griefers had killed a horse – Psyche had heard the white mare’s wild whinny gurgle into silence – but they had missed Ivan, deeper in the barn. They had been too agitated and berserk to be thorough.

​

In the night, when the cold painfully seeped into Psyche’s bones, Ivan had seemed to know she was in trouble. He had whinnied madly in the barn on the other side of the compound, pounding his stall door with his hooves until the lock broke. Psyche had listened, electrified to realize that something else was alive on the ranch.

​

As Ivan had trotted toward her across the dusty ground, Psyche had flinched in her bonds, assuming he would trample her in the dark. Instead, Ivan had nosed about and lain down beside her, snuffling and sighing gustily.

​

His huge body had generated a surprising amount of heat, and Psyche had not frozen. As her cold ache eased off, she had wished she could stroke his silky coat. Instead she talked, even sang to him. He probably missed the white mare like Psyche missed the friends and fellow ranchers whose empty bodies their laughing spirits had left behind.

​

***

 

Sul cursed robotically as his motorcycle’s steam engine began to sputter and pop.

​

The words were still futile.

​

After a while he stopped again and magnified his goggles to the second-highest power. Now he methodically scanned the horizon, cataloguing the tan-and-brown emptiness of Tankwaste.

“I could actually die out here,” he told himself. “Do you believe that, you fool? Believe it. It’s true.”

​

 Wait.

​

 He inched his goggles back to the west. “Are you seeing things? Or – yes, sir. Pretty sure that’s smoke.”

​

He decided to double check. Make sure his eyes were not playing tricks.

​

A quick glance away, and then back to the western horizon.

​

He was certain this time. He saw a thin twisting ribbon of smoke. Sul automatically thumbed the switch on his goggles to the highest magnification.

​

 Click-click-click.

​

 The distant horizon leapt close.

​

“Smoke for sure. And buildings. People, then. But – that’s no campfire. Smoke’s too dark. Building burning?”

​

Under the sputtering and clanging of the bike, Sul hardly heard himself. But he muttered on with the familiarity of a man who rarely had anyone else to converse with. Talk to himself or talk to the head in the box. No real options there.

​

An unusual heat emanated from his chest. He straightened his hat, opened his coat, and unbuttoned his shirt. In his chest cavity, where his heart had originally beat, a still black stone lodged in a wrought silver setting. A rune was carved into its otherwise smooth surface. A matching rune was painted onto his flesh heart, far away in Zeptown.

​

Sometimes, when he ought to feel something, the stone grew warm.

​

“What should I be feeling, then?” he mused. Was it a warning, an unfelt dread telling him not to go up to the ranch? Sul had a long list of enemies, and in this unknown part of Tankwaste any of them might huddle around that fire to the west.

​

Sul pried the radiantly warm stone out of the metal implant in his chest cavity and looked at it a long moment while resting his other hand on his military-issue Crow .45 pistol. His extra magazines lined up on his belt opposite his holster, while under his leg an old shotgun lay strapped within easy reach. Sul pressed the stone to his chilled nose to warm it. 

“Nice feature when the wind’s cold,” he muttered. 

​

He popped it back into his silver implant, climbed back on Destrier, and eased her to life, then turned off the road, going west. Caution was all well and good, but he knew from the old days that fear could be a liar.  A closer look was warranted.