“So, you’re fairly new to the church?”
She looked around. “It shows?”
I pointed to her forearms, exposed where she had rolled up the sleeves of her habit. “Your tattoos. They didn’t look very religious. Or very old. Guessing there was a phase between “miner’s daughter” and “Sister Athalia.”
She folded her arms like she could hide the skulls and tigers and dragons. “There were a lot of wrong answers before I found the right one. It took a while, but now I walk the path of righteousness. I’m as new to the world spiritually as you are physically.”
“Well then, happy birthday to us.”
Despite my flip answer, what she’d said started me thinking. From what few memories I had to go on, my former self wasn’t a church–going man. I remembered enough about religion, though, to know that most godly folks believed that people had souls, and that souls entered the body somewhere between conception and birth. At death, the soul was supposed to sail off again, either to heaven, hell, the happy hunting grounds, or whatever.
So what did that mean for a man who had died and been born again? Where was my soul now, if I’d ever had one?
The only other story I knew about a guy who’d managed to get himself resurrected didn’t have a happy ending — and he’d been the son of God.
Just before dusk, Athalia brought me out of my pondering by stopping dead in front of me and squatting to look at the ground. I pulled up short, then stepped around beside her.
“What’s up?”
“Tracks. And if this one is your friend, then it looks like the hostiles he was talking about might have caught up with him.”
I knelt beside her and had a look. A half–dozen or so people had come up from the southeast, then headed off west, but one of them hadn’t been walking. A long, thin channel came off the toes of the set of boot prints she had pointed to, suggesting the person wearing them had been dragged along. More importantly, though, the heel had wedges cut out of it on the inside and back. Most people would have put those notches down to wear and tear, but the boots on my feet had similar modifications, and seeing them now lit up another corner of my brain. They were deliberate markings, a way rangers could let others rangers read their trail. I looked in the direction the ranger had been dragged. A tall, flat–topped rock jutted up from behind the intervening hills. It glowed pink in the setting sun, but the stone it was made of was as pale as beach sand.
“That look like a big white rock to you?”
She nodded. “White Mesa.”
“Looks like they headed that way, and you’re right. They’ve got one of mine.” I stood again. “How long do you reckon before we get there?”
“Maybe an hour if we walk straight in, two if we’re safe about it and reconnoiter as we go.”
I grunted. “Might not be anyone left to save if we’re safe about it.”
“Might not live long enough to save anyone if we aren’t.”
She had a point, and the first rule of ranger training was to take care of yourself so that you can take care of others, but somehow self–preservation didn’t feel like a priority just then.
“Sorry, I gotta go with my gut. I’m going straight in. No obligation for you to follow, though. You already saved my life once today.”
She shrugged. “And maybe I’ll save it again. Lead on.
Just as the sun was bisected by the horizon, the trail came out on an overlook that gave us a clean view of the settlement — a dozen shacks huddled in the lee of the mesa, all cobbled together out of car parts, mobile home pieces, recovered lumber and scrap metal that had been welded, riveted and hammered together into rusty sheets. The shacks surrounded a big lozenge–shaped depression that served as both communal garden toward the back where it butted up against the towering white rock and town square on the end closer to us.
And it looked like I had been right to hurry, because things were looking pretty fatal in the town square area as we watched from cover. Torches were lit all around, and three ten–foot–tall posts had recently been sunk into the ground in the center. Three men, their hands tied over their heads, were bound one to a post while a laughing pack of raiders circled them menacingly. Hanging from the center post was my old pal Vargas — well, my former self’s old pal — a lean young ranger with long black hair and blood from a battered nose and a cut on his cheek glistening in his scruffy beard. From the way the crowd of townsfolk who huddled at the edges of the square called their names, I guessed the two men who hung on either side of him were local boys. They seemed barely conscious, but Vargas was still struggling.
I counted eight raiders in the pack. Five with shotguns, working crowd control, while the others, a trio of shave–skulled muscle–heads, put on a show, pacing around the posts, taunting their victims, screaming in their faces, punching them as hard as they could in the stomachs and ribs. The victims all puked and groaned and shouted, which the raiders seemed to think was the funniest thing in the world.
Athalia looked at me. “Why aren’t they looting the village?”
“They’ll get around to it.” I swallowed, recollecting things I’d learned long ago. “They gotta prove they’re men first, and let the rest of the village knows what happens when anyone tries to fight back. Once Vargas and the other two are dead, then they’ll start pillaging.”
“Any idea how to stop them?”
Again, I should have been cautious, thinking about plans of attack and exit strategies and who to attack first, but looking at those men bleeding and broken on those posts and the terrified townsfolk looking on, none of those things seemed to matter. For an answer I started down the hill.
Athalia hissed behind me. “Ghost! Revenant! Wait! I… Shit. Okay.”
I heard her start after me.
The torchlight made it easy to spot the path into the settlement. I brought us in between a gap between two shacks, then stepped through the ranks of petrified villagers with Athalia following uneasily after me. At the edge of the circle I whistled loud and high, like I was calling a dog. The guys watching the crowd all whipped around and leveled their shotguns at me, while the three in the middle turned to stare.
I held my hands up. “I see you’re playing who can punch the hardest. You let anybody in the game?”
The three contestants looked at me like somehow a cow flop had grown a mouth and started talking. The guy on the left had one eye, the guy on the right had one ear, and it looked like the guy in the middle had probably eaten the eye and ear they were missing. He was enormous, twice as wide as me and a head and a half taller, and he smiled when he looked at me. I wished he hadn’t. Filing piss–yellow teeth to points doesn’t make them look any better. “You think you can punch harder than me?”
“Me? Nope.” I jerked a thumb at a surprised Athalia. “But her, she’s going to clean your clock.”
Pointy Teeth looked past me, then smirked. “That true, nun? You gonna give me a beating? Put the fear of god in me?”
Athalia shot me a “what the fuck are you doing” look, but stepped forward and faced the big man. “My god is a nuclear bomb, so you should already be afraid, but no, I… I’m just going to offer you a wager. If I can knock you down, you take your friends out of here and leave these people alone. If not, you can put me on one of those posts and use me for round two. What do you say?”
The other raiders laughed.
“Come on, Viper! You ain’t gonna back down from a church lady, are you?” said One–Eye.
“Put her on the ground, Viper,” said One–Ear.