Gunlaw

Gunlaw 30

Chapter 18 – Present Day

The creosote bush offered patchy shade at best, the diffuse and shifting shadows of tiny leaves amid an infinite criss-crossing of twigs and thorns. Still, when the sun is pounding your skull from a steel sky without pause or mercy, and a hangover is hammering back from the inside just as hard, any shelter is worth having.

At first the sounds went unrecognised, lost in the din of sun and aching head, but with time the pinging of rails became unmistakeable. The train started as nothing, then a distant blur became a closer blur, and finally a huge blur, green and gleaming, squealing to a halt and panting steam. Hemar knuckled fur and gunk from his eyes, blinked, and looked again. A vast engine in deepest green enamel, carriages strung back along the tracks, maybe a dozen. The Wayne. He'd ridden The Wayne once, long ago, with a dead man for company. He shook his head and whimpered, wishing he'd kept it still.

"Nothing good." His tongue made a wet sound parting company from the roof of his mouth where it had been glued.

Hemar drew in a deep breath through his muzzle, sniffed, and sniffed again. The flow of whiskey, year upon year, had eroded much of what he had been, but even dulled as it was, little escaped his sense of smell. Among the sharpness of char, the moist comfort of steam, and the exotic aromas of engine oil, came other scents, faint as memory. "Time to go." He rolled to all fours, wincing at the stabbing pains behind his eyes, and scrambled away, even as the last door of the foremost carriage started to open.

He hurried from the rails toward the clustered roofs and dusty stockades of the 'Oh-Seven. The enormity of the pillar, standing miles behind the town, dwarfed it even so. From the scrub he took the cattle trail up to the slaughter pens, tasting old blood on the air. It seemed the train's wet breath had followed him, leaving the air hot and heavy, each scent accentuated. Puffed and panting he found himself in the narrow alley between the assay office and Wawrick's Hotel, a dosshouse for labourers down on their luck.

Hemar licked his lips and slid into the good solid shadow of the hotel. To sleep a drunk off you want an alley. Permanence. Not the fickle shelter of a thorn bush. Hemar closed his eyes and for a moment he saw splintered devastation, houses tossed aside, timbers shattered. The train had come to Sweet Water and erased what had seemed to be written there for the ages. In moments it had erased the illusion of permanence. Thorn bushes grew back in Sweet Water now, the town abandoned, population scattered. Change. That's what the trains brought. Then and now. Back when Hemar was a pup the Wayne had brought George and Billy Ay to Sweet Water. Hemar was in no hurry to find out who it brought to the Five-Oh-Seven today.

Without Eben Lostchild Sweet Water hadn't lasted a month. In the year it took Hemar to find his way back there the Dry had taken Sweet Water. Not a board was left – the settlers left nothing as precious as wood. Only Station Rock remained. The rock, the grave mounds, and the brief babble of the Sweet Water itself running as far as the recklessness of water would carry before being reclaimed by the ground.

Hemar curled in the shadow, wrapped around the misery of his aching head and the memories he'd thought washed out long ago by a river of whiskey. The scents of the Bullet and Rye called to him, reaching across Main Street, fingering down the alley, but oblivion spoke with a sweeter tongue and he let her take him.

Hemar woke, jerked from sleep by a sudden convulsion running nose to tail. For the longest time he lay, trying to make sense of what he saw. Finally it came to him. Stars. A strip of stars offered between the dark and rising walls of the alley, a black mass of cloud swallowing them as he watched. A fractious wind tugged at his fur but offered no release from the heat, sweltering and storm-heavy. His fingers curled in the dirt, curiously oily with the residue of filth that dry air couldn't steal away. Thirst woke him, thirst and the need to piss. He lifted up and added to the alley's pungency until only thirst remained. With a half stagger, still drunk on sleep, he lurched toward the faint greyness of Main where the alley disgorged. Torchlight glinted on the tack of a passing horse and rider. Hemar licked his lips, tasting the whiskey already, feeling the warmth of it rolling down his throat.