Dustwalker

I wrote a thing! Holy balls. I actually wrote it quite a while ago and then forgot about it, but I was cleaning out my computer today, found it by accident, did a couple quick edits, and decided it was good enough to post.

“Well, folks,” says Rosie, slinging her pack over her shoulder, rattling the fresh shells in their cardboard box, “hinges fixed up good as new. Thanks for everything. Probably won’t be seeing you around, but you got enough water for a while yet, you’ll be fine. Keep an eye on that head wound.”

            “You be careful now,” the husband calls from the back room. His voice is thin with pain, dry with dust.

            Rosie tips her wide-brimmed hat, though she knows the couple in the back bedroom can’t see her, and reaches for the doorknob.

            From outside, something slams into the door. The sun-blistered boards, warped by the Arizona heat, crack like gunpowder.

            “Aw, you’re kidding me,” says Rosie, bolting the door shut.

            A leathery dried hand punches through the wood just to the left of Rosie’s head.

            In a series of movements smooth from repeated practice, Rosie takes a step back, swings her rifle up against her shoulder, sights down the barrel for an instant and fires.

            A howl from outside. The hand retracts abruptly.

            “Goddammit, Jerky, I just went and fixed this door!” Rosie yells. To be fair, she’s the one who kicked it down to begin with, but she fixed it up good after, so that’s all fine.

            There’s a bit of shuffling on the other side of the door. A stray beam of late afternoon sunlight slants in through the jagged hole in the boards. The light cuts into segments as more of them – how many more, Rosie can’t say – pass back and forth between the sun and the hole. In the back bedroom, the Japanese woman is sobbing quietly. Glass shatters. The woman’s sobs spike into screams.

            “Get in here, both of you!” Rosie calls without taking her eyes off the hole in the door. Funny how that late golden sun can still remind her of drinking sweet tea on the porch with her husband at a time like this. Maybe it’s his jacket, too, that calls up the memory. It’s big on her, the sleeves almost covering her fingertips unless she rolls them up, but the cracked tan leather is shiny with age and infused with the musk of his favorite tobacco. He’d have one of those fat cigars dangling from his lips in the late afternoon, the smoke shot through with gold as it ringed his head. She’d hated that smell, partly because it was vile, partly because she knew those damn cigars were killing him. But the smell is comfortable to her in its familiarity.

            Thank the Lord the cancer got him before the leathers came.

            The young couple stumbles into the front room, supporting each other. The husband cradles his bandaged head with one hand and rubs his wife’s shoulder with the other, trying to quiet her. She’s crying breathlessly, thick dark hair clinging to her wet cheeks, gasping over and over in lilting English, “We going to die, we going to die, we going to die…” over the sound of more breaking glass in the other room.

            “Jesus Christ,” mutters the husband, sinking into a chair at the kitchen table.

            Rosie lines up another shot and squeezes the trigger just before a shadow blocks that lonely beam of sun. A short, rage-distorted cry. “Reload this,” she says, tossing the rifle to the bewildered woman, who fumbles and drops it. Rosie strides past her and hauls the man upright by the arm. “Help me with the table. Lean it right up against the doorway – come on – and brace it with the chairs – come on!”

            He’s backing away, holding his sobbing wife, watching Rosie get a shoulder under the heavy kitchen table and wrestle it up on end. “Don’t bother,” he says, toneless, staring.

            She glances back at him, exasperated. “The hell d’you mean, don’t bother?”

“They’re coming in. There’s no stopping them.”

She sees another hand worming in through the hole in the front door. “Then reload my gun.” She can’t fortify this room on her own, not fast enough to save them. If they can just get both doors solidly blocked, they stand a chance. She starts shoving chairs against the table, but they’re spindly and don’t weigh much and the table still wants to lean inward. Someone’s gonna have to hold it.

“There’s no point,” says the husband quietly.

Rosie whirls on him, seizes him by the upper arm, and thrusts him bodily against the table, his back hitting the wood. She’s a good head and a half shorter than him, but he’s weak. Starving. “Goddammit, man, shut your mouth! You’re scaring the missus. Now make yourself useful and hold that table steady.”

The woman’s trembling and weeping in the center of the room, hugging herself, the empty rifle at her feet. Rosie sweeps it up, jams fresh shells into it from the cardboard box. “What is y’all’s problem?” she says, disgusted. These people are young and strong. They should be the optimistic ones in this situation. They have a hell of a lot of living to do. Here she is, a stumpy old lady in her late sixties, the dark skin of her face lined deeply with sun creases around the eyes and mouth, hair gone white and frizzy, pink palms rough with farm callouses. Her friends her age are all moving in with their kids or being shipped off to retirement homes. And here she is, tromping around the valley, apparently the only person with enough balls to beat off the leathers. She fires twice through the hole in the door, reloads, moving automatically around the crying woman in the middle of the room.

Here she is, trying to save lives because these are lives that can be saved.

She’d walked into the hospital in broad daylight with the rifle tucked under her husband’s duster. The dispassionate metal was a long bar of cold that chilled her through her clothes. She made it halfway down the cancer ward before an orderly noticed the gun barrel poking out the bottom of her coat and called security. They tackled her right outside her husband’s room. “Can’t you see he’s suffering?” she’d bellowed, swinging the rifle butt blindly and with such ferocity that they two burly security guards had been forced to duck out of the way. “Can’t you see he’s ready to go to the Lord?” She’d imagined she could hear him calling out for her from inside the sterile gray room – Rosie, save me, Rosie, set me free, it hurts, I can’t breathe, Rosie, I want to go home – and it made her furious. How dare they stop her from ending his pain? He’d asked her to. He was ready. He’d suffered enough.

In the end, it didn’t matter because he died later that night while she was in jail. The hospital called the warden, who sent the tiny town jail’s only guard down the short hallway to tell her, through the bars of her cell, that her husband had passed away about half an hour before. She’d said nothing, only rolled over on her creaky narrow cot to face the weeping cement wall.

Another hand claws its way through the widening hole in the door. Rosie slings her rifle strap over her shoulder, reaches out, grips the grasping hand above and below the wrist. She twists, quickly and hard. The wrist snaps. She lets it dangle by the tendons. “Well, if y’all ain’t planning on helping, at least shut the door behind me. And seal it up from inside. Block that hole with something. Bye now.”

“They’ll kill you,” the husband says flatly. “They’ll kill us all.”

She heaves back the bolt and flings the door wide, yanking the creature with its arm still stuck through the hole into the waiting butt of her rifle. She smashes its skull against the doorframe three or four times, until the weathered wood is stained gray with old brain matter, then kicks the twitching corpse down the porch steps. Steps outside. Glances over her shoulder. Neither of the young couple have moved, the man still slumped in his chair, the woman hugging herself in the middle of the room. With an irritated sigh, Rosie shuts the door firmly behind her.

She makes it almost to the front gate, striding through the fine shifting dust, blasting two more leathers on her way, before a shaky voice cries after her, “Wait!”

Rosie turns, one hand on the gate latch. The young woman hurries down the steps, clutching a broad kitchen knife in her white-knuckled fist, and skirts around the two half-decayed bodies in the yard. “I come with you. My husband, he not protect me.” Her cheeks are still wet, but her mouth is set and determined. Dust clings to her eyelashes.

Studying the woman’s face, Rosie hitches her pack higher and unlatches the gate. It swings open with the shriek of rusted metal, carving a quarter circle into the loose dust on the ground. “What’s your name, honey?”

A hoarse scream from inside the house. Wood shattering.

 The woman’s voice is firm even as her lip trembles. “Aiko.”

 “Well, Aiko,” Rosie says, leading her out of the yard. “I can teach you how to survive, but I can’t hold the knife for you, understand? You’re the one protecting you now.”

She nods, once, with a little affirmative noise. “Hm.”

Rosie tugs her bandanna up around her nose and mouth, partly to block the blowing grit, partly to hide her smile.

- KP


Quote of the Day: "If the foot goes, it goes. There are more important things than an old man's feet."