Ain't Talkin'

The 80 West proved to be more passive than Roche had believed. Somewhere along the line enough caravans and travelers had gone through this road that the way was clear enough. Maybe a smarter man had brought a plow and pushed most of the wrecks into the ditches and gullies along the road. Maybe.

The desert of the Mojave skated by, and Roche knew he would be making better time if he’d just shifted through the white, but that would leave the rest of these men in the dust. It was still an option. He knew a number of doors near here that allowed for passage under and through Terra 1, rather than from one plane to another. Maybe he’d bring the idea up tonight when they stopped. Maybe not.

The mountains did not appear as if from thin air, though they might as well have. One moment the desert seemed as nondescript and endless as the white, and then there were mountains.

The Sierra’s came and went. It all seemed to float on by like it were nothing. Roche supposed he spent most of that day and evening in his head, feeling Lucky sway and trot beneath him. They made good time, but it was the eleventh of December, and they’d only just entered the Sierra’s. If they made good time the rest of the day, they’d be most of the way through the mountains. Then came Sacramento and New San Fran.

Twilight in the Mountains, through the passes and high roads was different than it was in the desert. It seemed like the sun was a good deal closer, and it was that much more daunting when the orb disappeared from the sky. Night hit like a gloved punch, and the caravan trucks hit their headlights, the motorbikes too, it was the men on synthetics that had to take time for their eyes to adjust. They fell behind a step and caught up.

The mountains used to be covered in snow, the books said. In winter months like December the slopes and stones would be coated in fine, white powder. The old books had pictures, but they didn’t do it justices. Roche had seen snow a few times in all of his years, and even the color photos could not capture the crispness and sparkle of newly fallen snow. The kind of twinkle that it had before boots and mud and blood tainted the color and washed it out to that terrible beige that permeated the entire planet after the catastrophe.

The heat died and it may well have been cold enough for snow, but the moisture wasn’t there anymore. There was no water in the air, no humidity, nothing to freeze and sprinkle and fall to the earth below and cover up all the shit.

If nothing else, Roche thought the lack thereof was a little poetic. Just a hair appropriate.

The caravan stopped at a rest area, just a wider expanse of pavement that lurched off the edge of the 80 like a slow punch.

Again, they rolled into a pair of wide circles and the soldiers took their turns on watch and eating. Roche found Lucky a few sprigs of dry grass in a small stand of mountain trees and fed them to the mare. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth while he scrounged up a bottle of whiskey from one of the trucks. A crate tucked under one of the benches beneath some sleeping blankets held two-dozen bottles for the men. Roche took a pair and stuck one in his saddle-bag. He wandered through the camp.

Men oiled their guns and checked themselves, their clips, their belts, their bloused pants. They might well have been gearing up for a war. Soldiers for a cause. There was nothing more depressing and terrifying.

“Hey.” Markus sauntered up with a tin tray of unconscionable gray glop, a smoke between his fingers. “Want anything to eat?”

Roche swigged on the bottle in response.

“No, huh? Don’t blame you. If I was the kind of man who didn’t need to eat more than once or twice a month I wouldn’t pick this crap. Filling though.” The kid jammed a spoonful of the stuff into his gob and sucked on his cigarette like it was a pacifier.

“What do you want, kid?” Roche watched the stars through the veil of the light pollution from the trucks lamps.

“Nothin’. See you kept it in mind to make the trip.”

“Didn’t have much choice, did I?”

“Guess you didn’t, no. Something you did spooked Doctor Weaving though.” Markus turned and looked back a pack of soldiers around the bound doctor, eating with his wrists tied together.

“Yeah. Told him I got cancer.”

Markus nearly choked on his food. “You what!?”

“Yep.” Roche drank.

“How? You’re a walker. You body doesn’t age or need things the way the rest of us do. Shit I never even seen you take a piss. How do you have cancer?”

“No idea.” Drink.

“Were you lying?”

“Nope. I don’t lie, kid. Haven’t figured that out yet?”

“Then how?”

“Dunno. Luck of the draw? Age and beauty can’t be my only assets, might as well throw in some cell mutation to boot.” Roche sniggered and drank some more.

Markus was quiet, chewing on the gray, soldier-glop like a cow, smoking occasionally out the corner of his mouth.

The night stretched on and the first group of soldiers turned in while the others took a four-hour watch, lining themselves around the caravan and scanning the edges of the mountainside and over the length of the ravines to the east.

“It was the white wasn’t it? it did that to you.”

“How could it? The white ain’t anything. It’s the building blocks of all things, you said it yourself. You understand the science of it, don’t fuck around about it. It’s the drink and the smokes and the rotten luck I’ve been dealt. Nothing more.”

“Did you know before you picked me up?”

“Awe, don’t get all mushy on me, dipshit. But, no. I didn’t. I’d been smelling that same smell for a while at that point. Guess I just needed you to paint me in the direction of it being something medical. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind really until then, seein’ as how everything else pretty much stopped once I started walkin’.”

“The smell. The-, you think it’s in your brain don’t you?”

“Sure do.” Swig.

“Then it’s really uncertain. There may be help for. . .the Res has-”

“Kid.” Roche turned to Markus and looked him as dead-in-the-eye as he’d ever looked anyone before. “I ain’t looking for any fix-me-ups. I ain’t tryin’ to be saved. I’m just doing what I do. I got one more walk in me for tomorrow and maybe the next day. I do what I came here to do. Help you idiots get your chaotic peace or whatever it is set in motion. Stop the Corp from bastardizing the ether any further, and save a little girls life in the meantime.”

“And what happens to her after? With this on your plate now?”

Roche smoked an entire other cigarette before he answered, watching the cool blue clouds that flowed out of his teeth rise into the night sky and dissipate into the replete black nothing that was space.

“I haven’t figured that one out yet, cowboy.” Roche snubbed his smoke against the side of a truck and left Alex Markus feeling very, very alone in the Sierra’s and the world.