Ain't Talkin'

The A-Mat slung across the breadth of his shoulders, hat cocked low and scarf pulled high, Roche stood in the blowing dust. The gas station was an old-world graveyard, silent and thin. Oilskin and leather creaking around the length of his legs, Roche watched coldly the teeth of the grinning doctor.

“First off, let me acknowledge my true admiration for what it is that you do, Walter.”

“Walter?” Alex Markus asked.

“My first name, go ahead and forget it now, kid. Go pick up my money and keep yourself useful. Keep talking, doc. You’ve got my attention until I decide otherwise.”

“Of course. It’s true what they say about you walkers, isn’t it? You don’t age. Just. . .just fascinating.”

“Nope, not unless we keep out of our element long enough it seems. Fuck you too, by the by. Losing patience.”

“You don’t remember me then, do you?” Grin, grin.

“Should I?”

“No, perhaps not. Not that is unless you remember specifically every man, woman and child that you have ever met or seen in the entirety of all your years.”

“Nope.” Roche spat on the pavement.

“Then of course you wouldn’t. I was a boy of twelve when I first saw you. You’d come rolling into town like a true, brazen, old-world gunslinger with your hat low and your gunbelts high. I grew up in a remote part of the world once known as New England. You were in town on business and just stopped through to visit our saloon on your way through. Whatever adventure or hunt you were on made little matter, it was twenty-six years ago now and I doubt if you, I or anyone involved even remembers the circumstances or details. What mattered was the whispers that surrounded your coming and followed your going.”

Roche puffed on his cigarette, more irritated than he could remember being in some time, but this Cheshire-grinned doctor had said the only name that might have ever given Walter Roche a hairsbreadth of pause.

“Walker, planesman, hunter they called you. A man of repute who could bend the world to his whims because he had crossed the nether regions of reality and learned the trappings of existence itself. You looked the same, though you spoke less back then.”

“Spoke less before I met this dipshit. Afraid it may be contagious.” Roche looked from Markus back to the grinning Doctor Weaving.

“Yet you looked the same. Amazing isn’t it. Your breed of men, the genetic predisposition towards planewalking is as fascinating as it is perturbing. Reasonably speaking I was gooked on the idea of you from the onset.

I went to school and was trained classically. There are still universities and schools of higher learning in the northern places of the world. I fear it may have something in concurrence with the winters there. When the world is cold as it is some of the times in the hemisphere northern, it pays to remain indoors and educate oneself. Perhaps such attrition is why such schools survived through the catastrophe. Which is a fascinating subject in itself, is it not!?”

“Losing patience, doctor.” Markus had finished collecting the errant rolls of bank notes scattered on the ground and piled them in front of Roche.

“Yes, yes of course.” Grin, grin. “Yet, for all of my fascination with the ether and the men who found it within themselves to manipulate it through a higher learning of their own, I could find no quantitative data on the subject. Only vague sources and incomplete recounts of experiences men and women claim to have had in congruence with walkers like you.

Needless to say I was frustrated. Yet, being the kind of man I am, I turned my frustration into something constructive. I studied other subjects, and I became quite fluent in all manner of mathematical, physical, old-world contemporary, theoretical and biological sciences. A doctor many times over, yet of all things the ether vexed me, I could never find a man like you who was willing to walk me through the steps, who could bring me to the truth of what a walker is.”

“And you think I will?”

“You will help the Resistance and I will act as a casual observer, taking careful notes of course.”

“And in return?” Roche dreaded the answer.

“In return I will tell you what I know regarding genetic reconditioning through electrical signals. I will explain how I am going to bring your Mollie Groux back to you.”