The Bleeding Tower

Chapter Thirty Two, Part Two: Maybe When It Rains It Pours

Tanner Ray Lewis has been to both worlds, and although he wasn't a self made cartographer by any means, he's seen what he would deem to be worth seeing. His adventures with Carrie, and those with Lorna, saw to that. But where he was now was just beyond strange. He stood on an island of pink sand, in the void of starry space. "What kind of Hogwarts shit is this?," he asked aloud.

"I find it amazing that although I've been living here for your whole life, we've never spoken until now."

The gunslinger reached down for his weapons, but nothing was there. He wasn't naked at all, but disarmed. "Oh there's no need for that," that same mysterious voice again, from behind him this time.

Tee spun to face the speaker, only to find a spitting image of Carrie standing before him. "Carrie? What are you doing in my head?"

Carrie shrugged. "Oh, I'm not Ward Number 8 of Cromag. I just thought his form would be more comfortable to speak to you in, of course."

Tee grimaced a bit now. "So who are you?"

"You took to naming me 'Orange 99'. I don't know why you'd choose such a silly sounding thing for me, but it is what it is."

He frowned at this. "Well then don't take Carrie's form. I associate him with purple anyway."

In a split second, the Orange 99 obeyed. Now he stood before Tanner Lewis of Ogden as the bushy brunette with white camellias in her great bushel tails. Her hair was never that manageable. She stood before him in a simple white and brown dress, holding a spear of solid gold that seemed to brighten and chase away the surrounding darkness. Why his own psyche looked like something out of a Hubble telescope finding was beyond him. He sighed in annoyance. "You're missing the sheep, Ginny."

"I'm not exactly a miracle worker, even inside your head," she argued in a high pitched voice almost to the point of squeaking.

Her voice used to unnerve a lot of guys. Bardock Merlinsky was overjoyed that Tee would take her hand in marriage, all because of that voice. The voice he loved. "At least you've got everything else right. Christ, even that mole on her nostril."

Lorna 99 smirked. "Tanner, we don't have too much time before hypothermia kicks in."

The gunslinger frowned. "It's simple. You're magical in nature, but you're alive, like a bacteria. And from what I gather, nobody's ever frozen you before. Or boiled you alive."

She frowned and rolled her eyes. "Well at least talk to me about this. If we work as a team, we can do this much more easily and with far less drawbacks."

"A.) I didn't know you were intelligent and B.) Literally everyone in recorded history to have your particular flavor of eight-hundred-pound-gorilla on their back didn't hardly make it to age 5. Even if I somehow knew ahead of time that you could be spoken to, I still wouldn't trust you."

She pouted. "Not my fault humanity fell from grace and their physiology declined like the value of hard cash. Besides, you're doing well for yourself."

He frowned deeply at her. "I wouldn't make that particular claim but I am alive, yes."

This avatar of the strange power in him just smiled at that, indulgently, like a teacher recognizing when some teen boy who doesn't have any real goal or vision deliberately gets a zero percent score on a true or false test. Such is impossible, unless you know all the right answers and choose the wrong ones anyway. "Tanner, I'm not at all pleased with any of this. My life is tied to yours, this doesn't follow Ebola rules. But you're not trying to kill us, are you?"

"I thought you knew I'm not."

"I do. But I want to hear it from the donkey's maw."

"Horse's mouth," Tee corrected.

"You're not a horse, you're a jackass." Lorna 99 tittered a bit at this remark. "I'll tell you something though. No matter how powerful the ice binding is, I can tunnel us out of it, long since before we freeze to whatever end you have. If you want to continue this experiment of yours, I need something from you."

The gunslinger frowned. "And what is that?"

"Five years ago, you ate something. And I can't hardly digest it myself out of fear of your psyche breaking and your senses following suit to the point of suicide. You're going to help me work through this blockage in our guts."

He scowled now. "Lorna."

Resting now in the middle of this pink island was Lorna Merlinsky, without Ginny the sheep. He looked at her, now angrier than he thought possible. She was untouched, neither injured nor mangled, not even her hair was messed up. She looked like a picture of life, just sleeping. "Lorna Merlinsky, yes." Now the Orange 99 was speaking in Vall's voice, assuming her form when disguising herself as a human. "Daughter of Bardock, sister of Joshua Merlinsky, and adoptive sister of Carrie of Cromag," she let the words hang for a moment, in whatever passed for air here. "I have suffered her taking up so much of my capacity for five years now."

He should be angry, and he should take advantage of this mind space to bring out a mind gun or some shit. But looking at Lorna's well preserved corpse made him infinitely sad. The Orange 99 was right in this one regard, he didn't so much preserve her as hoard her. There was no way to bring her back to life now. The old business was still on paper, and paper had a long memory. "Can't hardly do anything with this space island shit."

The space around them changed in a fashion to remind him of a side window view of the world outside a car moving at above 75 miles per hour passing him by. Now instead of an island in space, they were inside a forge he remembered all too well. The great forge of all gunslingers' Mark of Mastery, underneath the Ogden Utah Temple. And now, once again, he had to hand cast the minerals. And now, he had to put being Tee of Ogden, everyone's buddy, on hold. He needed to be a gunslinger. "I need to be alone," he declared, trying to sound stronger than he was. "This is personal."

"I'm aware," Vall 99 told him, "and will keep my side of the bargain."

And like that, she was gone. And Tanner was alone again, alone with Lorna. For long minutes, he just stared at her and remembered it all. Late night ice cream sessions, helping her as a volunteer farmhand in order to try and look good to her father, the first time he took her to the Malta Fireworks Festival and stole a first kiss from her under the lights in the sky. Carrie lived with them, helped good old Bardock with the money he earned as a Black Hat assassin, though he'd lied about that part and claimed he was just a bouncer for Baby Black Cap's titty bar.

Tanner saw himself getting drunk with Bardock one Tuesday night after a long harvest afternoon, asking his permission for Lorna's hand in marriage. He remembered like it was yesterday how awkward it was when he'd proposed to her, in a suit and everything, and Ginny ate his sleeve when offering the ring. Even that was a good memory. He began to cry, but didn't sniffle or hiccup, as he cast a gentle husband's hand forth and enveloped her in that wicked orange. And he picked up a smithing hammer. "I'm so sorry," he told her.

Cath had done this to her, to him by association. And he swore on Lorna Lewis's bones that he would have his revenge on the creature that murdered his wife. No one, neither husband nor wife, friend or partner, brother or sister, should ever suffer what Tanner Ray Lewis of Ogden is at this moment. It's one thing to lose someone dear, and for the mind to desperately cling onto that person's presence by keeping an iron grip on all of their stuff. That is hoarding, and it is a problem that can be solved.

No one should have the power (and with that power, the compulsion) to debase someone to the core elements of their existence and turn them into a weapon of sheer power and mass destruction. But Tanner's way is the way of the gun, and even worse, the way of Orange 99. His way was death, and weaponization of all things, which includes people. As he separated flesh and skin and hair from the most useful elements that were her bones, he wondered to himself, in a fashion too horrible to label under a singular word such as misery, if when they kissed and made love, she tasted death. "Death," as Stephen King wrote, "but not for you."

And now, the gunslinger out of Ogden did as all gunslingers must do when in need of another weapon in their arsenal. He forged.