Ain't Talkin'

Above all the low buildings, tin-roofed and an even shade of khaki, there stood a pair of metal towers the shape of shelving brackets. Old mine shaft toppers for winching out carts and drawing up loads of ore-filled stone. Atop the two shaft towers were crow’s nest baskets where lookouts with long-vision scopes watched the horizon. Between the two towers, maybe a distance of ten or twenty meters, someone had strung a length of old telephone wire. Three bodies hung from it.

“Who’re they?” Roche asked nonchalantly of Kendall Miner.

“Corporation scout team that got too close to our perimeters. We caught them on sensors and brought them back. Boosts morale, I suppose.”

“Hm. Hanging a man who’s already dead?”

“I know the whole thing seems superfluous. And some of those men with families here have asked that they be taken down. Scares the children.”

“There are men here with families?”

“Of course. They’ve signed on with the Resistance to the Ethercorp and their ways, but that doesn’t mean that they signed away their lives.”

“What is your beef with the Corp, anyhow? Seems to me they offer men like you’ve assembled here a good days pay and consistent work.” Roche played devil’s advocate for the nonce while he walked slowly through the old silver mine with his host amid soldiers and those in the employ of the Res going about their business.

“Imagine you’ve frequented a casino for a long time, get to know the place, get to like it, but somewhere along the line you discover there’s a dealer who’s been cheating folk for the duration of his employment. He’s terminated and sent on his way but not before he’s made a holy mess of things, maybe he goes off and torches the casino that fired him out of anger or some such scenario. Everything is ruined, not only was the dealer a crook, now you have no place to enjoy your whiskey and women and cards. You’re shit out o’ luck. Years later, you’re gambling at a different locale, and you notice that the same man is dealing, albeit in a different casino. Do you tell the manager what he’s done in the past and hope that things will go well this time around? or do you take matters into your own hands and run the dealer out of town yourself to save your newfound casino that you’ve grown to like, knowing that you’re doing the right thing, albeit for subliminally selfish reasons, being that you enjoy casinos.”

“I’d just shoot him right there.” Roche grumbled.

“Ah, yes. Which is why we’ve asked you here. Our situation is similar. Men in the Ethercorp’s position hundreds of years ago blasted our world and caused the catastrophe that has mankind ferreting about the wastelands and scrounging for enough to make it through the next day. We kill each other and we’ve lost our sense of civilization and humanity. Men eat one another for lack of sustenance. Mankind was once the alpha predator, top of the food chain, we put men on the moon for god’s sake. We can’t let another catastrophe happen. It is our responsibility to ensure that it does not happen again, that people with power and influence don’t go messing about in the ether. Ever again.”

“And the selfish reason?”

“The hypothetical man enjoyed gambling, we simply enjoy not being dead. If the Ethercorp has it’s way, we may all be dead. Men, women, children. . .the first catastrophe caused the doors through the ether. The fallout from such knowledge led to a world war that saw a quarter of the population, nearly three billion people wasted away for nothing by nuclear wind and the spread of infectious poisoning. Radiation and civil war did the rest. What’s left is what we see every day.”

“And you need me?” Roche stopped. They stood near the center of the little mining village tucked away in the crevices of a great set of silver hills somewhere lost in the wastelands of the Mojave.

Miner rested his weight with both crinkled hands on the head of his cane. His eyes looked weary and lined with a lifetime of rigor and hardship and loss.

“We believe that the best fighters in this, the ones most apt to help us stop these constructs from ravaging across the land, to stop the Ethercorp from weaponizing the white and selling it to the highest bidder, is to combat their creations with the yin to their yang. A man made part of the white against the white made part of a creature.”

“Has a certain serendipity to it.”

“Doesn’t it though?” Kendall Miner smiled widely, a grin that touched his ears and made the wattles of his throaty neck tighten up across his chin. “I’m afraid it’s been some time since I smiled, Mr. Roche. Serendipity. Quite. Please to come have a drink with me?”

“You have a saloon?”

“What settlement in the wasteland would be complete without a house of ill-repute. Of course we do. Follow me.”

A smile spread across his own face, and Roche followed the old Lieutenant to the outpost’s saloon.