Ghost Book One: The Earth Transformed

– Chapter Two –

As soon as we stepped outside of Sleeper One my radio started hissing and squawking.

“—— hear me? This is ——— argas, from ra —— er — eam Alpha. ———— eperated fro —— team and —— rounded. Nee ——— ack—up.”

I got on the horn. “Vargas, is that you? This is——” I stopped. I still couldn’t remember my name. I couldn’t even remember my Team’s call sign. “This is… a friend of the rangers. We’re reading you. What’s your twenty?”

“—— ank — od! I —— ttlement of Whi —— esa. I repe ——— te Mesa. Do —— copy?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Did you say White Mesa? Where’s that?”

“—— oger! —— ite — esa! Three ———ks due so —— I—70 — idge. Wes —— ide ——— river. — ook for a — ig white — ock!”

I looked at Athalia. “Did you catch any of that? My ears are still ringing. I don’t know if I got it.”

“Three clicks due south of the I–70–something, on the west side of the river.” She grimaced. “As for that last part, I sincerely hope he said ‘Look for a big white rock.’“

“Me too. And it’s the I–70 bridge. Okay.” I closed my eyes and pictured the map in my head. Yeah, I could remember the map, but not my name. Maybe I could only remember the important stuff. Then I clicked in again. “We copy, Vargas. We’re on the other side of the river, about five clicks southeast of you. On our way.”

“Ten—F ——— be — areful. I —— surroun —— There are mult —— stiles in —— rea. I —— peat, ——ultiple hosti —— the area.”

“We read you. We’ll keep our eyes open.” I stood and shrugged into my pack. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

My old self might have grown up in what used to be Arizona, but my new self’s pink–and–newly–minted ass wasn’t ready for the reality of the Wasteland. Seeing it for the first time, laying down fresh memories over his old and faded ones, it took my breath away.

My first impression was red, everywhere. Halfway between blood and rust — from dust to rocks to mountains to sky. In a few places it trended toward blood–clot purple or corpse grey, but overwhelmingly it was red.

Then came the heat. It wasn’t just the sun baking me, but the rocks around me shedding heat as fast as they could. There wasn’t any getting away from it. The prickle of sweat would ooze out of me, then a hot wind would come and the moisture would vanish, leaving me no cooler. The world was sucking me dry and turning my newborn skin neon pink.

I did see some green here and there, but aside from verdigris stains on rocks where water had seeped out through a copper deposit, if it was green, it had spikes. Big nasty thorns longer than my thumb, and that wasn’t even the cactuses. Even the twisted old willows that whispered over our heads when we crossed the shriveled river had thorns.

Most creatures we saw as we walked north moved as little as possible. Rattlesnakes coiled in shadows. Lizards skittered up rocks, then froze. They raised and lowered themselves as if catching their breath, then moved on in another burst. Birds — buzzards and vultures — circled lazily overhead.

Athalia turned out to be a good traveling companion. She spotted trouble before we tripped over it, and found us some hidden pools where we were able to drink and refill our canteens.

As we were taking a sip and a breather in the shade of a tilted red boulder, Athalia wiped her lips and looked over at me.

“So, how much do you remember from before you, uh….”

“Before I died?” I shrugged. “Tiny bits of things. I remember I was a ranger. I remember the robot menace you mentioned. Death machines coming out of the desert, intent on wiping out everything that lives. Don’t remember if I ever knew why they were doing it, but I’m guessin’ I was probably on a mission to stop them.”

Athalia nodded and we started walking again. “Maybe you were. Before I left Vegas, I heard rumor of rangers meeting with Faran Brygo, helping him fight the robots in the sewers. Maybe that was you and your team.”

I frowned. It sounded familiar, but I didn’t get any flashes about it like I had in the room with all my dead friends. It didn’t feel like I’d experienced it firsthand. “Maybe so. I don’t know.”

“And this Vargas you talked to on the Radio? You seemed to remember him.”

A flash of a ranger with a black beard, laughing, stumbling out of a roadhouse with a bottle in his hand. There was a woman too, a redhead, reaching for me, grinning from ear to ear. I remembered I liked that grin, but I couldn’t remember the name of the woman it belonged to.

“He… he’s another ranger. I think we were friends. Not from my squad though. My squad is….”

“Back in the base, with the robots.”

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I changed the subject.

“So, seeing as you’ve got a functioning memory, what’s your story?”

She shrugged. “Not much to it. Miner’s daughter. Grew up near Kingman. Started looking for answers and ended up finding the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud.”

“Uh–huh. And did you find any answers? Do they have an explanation for how the world got like this?”

“Uh, the bombs fell and the souls of the good were consumed by the great glow. The bad were left behind and must work to purify ourselves so that we may be worthy of being consumed by the glow when it is once again ignited. Or… something like that.”

“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.

Viper looked from Athalia to me and back, angry and suspicious. “If this is a trick, you’re both dead, and not the easy way.”

Athalia gave me another dirty look, then dropped into her stance and raised her fists. “If it’s a trick, it’s on both of us.”

Viper squared up with her. “Alright, sister. Fine. You think you got god on your side. Prove i—”

She moved while he was still talking — a blur of grey robes — and caught him with a roundhouse kick that snapped his head around and sent a rope of spittle halfway across the settlement. Two teeth followed, but didn’t make it quite that far. Viper spun, his face bouncing off Vargas’s knees where he hung from the post, and almost went down then and there, but at the last second he caught himself and reset, fists balled. His pals hooted and hollered all around him, laughing at his pain and questioning his manhood, while the villagers backed away uneasily from the swirl of violence.

Which was just what I’d hoped would happen.

I looked around. Absolutely no one — not the villagers, not the raiders, not even the guys on the posts — was paying any attention to me. I edged back until I was out of the circle and drew the nine I’d taken off one of the dead thugs in Sleeper One.

I was almost tempted to let Athalia finish her fight with Viper, because it was a thing of beauty to watch her. The big man’s punches were like freight trains, there was no denying it, but Athalia was never at the station when they pulled in. A punch would arc for her head and she’d sidestep it or duck it and nail him as he stumbled past. Sure, her fists weren’t the cinderblocks of bone and scar that his were, but when one shot out, it hit him in his weak spots — throat, solar plexus, floating ribs. Her kicks caught his thighs and his knees, buckling them and making him bellow in pain. He was a mountain of muscle and fury. She was a grey cloud swirling around him, and I could see the lightning building up in her. But I couldn’t wait for the strike, because I knew we wouldn’t live long after he fell, no matter what Viper had promised.

I was between and behind two of the shotgun boys now, and had clean shots on two more. I raised the nine and fired, once to the left, once to the right, tight and controlled, like snapping my fingers. A nine mil may not be the biggest bullet in the world, but when it travels less than six feet to enter the back of a head, it makes a hell of a mess coming out the face. They both dropped to their knees, gobbling their own blood.

The rest were turning now, but still unsure what was happening.

I popped my third target as clean as the first two, then swung and fired at the fourth — and the old nine jammed.

“Shit!”

The last two shotgun boys raised their weapons at me. One–Eye and One–Ear drew their pistols. I cursed myself for not cleaning the gun more thoroughly before we’d set out. Of course those filthy mutants had shit quality weapons. Of course!

But just as all those street sweepers and automatics started pointing my way, Athalia leapt high and delivered a snap–kick to Viper’s ear that plucked him up off the ground and dumped him flat on his back ten feet away. The impact was enough to distract the others, and I racked the slide and cleared the round just as Athalia landed and charged One–Eye, shrieking like a banshee.

“Shoot her!” shouted One–Eye.

“Shoot the shooter!” shouted One–Ear.

I dodged left as gun barrels criss–crossed in confusion. Athalia corkscrewed down and swept the legs out from under One–Eye, taking them both below the line of fire as the guys with shotguns opened up on her. One blast blew over her head and cut One–Ear in half. His killer’s guilty look lasted for less than a second before I drilled his skull. It exploded like a blood sausage.

Another load of shot blasted my way and I threw myself down, but not before I caught a pellet or two. I ignored that shooter, since he was already digging in a pocket for another shell, and rolled up aiming at One Ear. I pulled the trigger.

Again, nothing.

Another misfire.

It would take me all of two seconds to clear that dud round, but that was about 1.75 seconds more than I had to live. Athalia was grappling on the ground with One–Eye. She couldn’t save me, and One–Ear had me in his sights, gloating at me with a smile that was more gums than teeth.

And then he just went away.

It wasn’t poof, vanish, like in a traveling magician’s show. No puff of smoke. Just a little red mist, and One–Ear folded in around his middle and flew sideways behind a rock. I cleared the bad round from my gun, stepped around the rock and shot him in the face, just to be sure, then turned to help Athalia finish off One–Eye. He was already finished. Athalia had him in an arm bar and was driving his nose out through the back of his skull with the heel of her steel–shod boot. One–Eye spasmed once, then lay there like wet laundry.

Then I remembered there was still one more guy with a shotgun, but as I turned to face him, he was done too.

Funny thing about bullets, especially when they’re traveling at mach something or other — the crack you hear isn’t the gunshot. That’s the noise they make breaking the sound barrier. The actual gunshot, it comes along slowly by comparison, about as fast as a little boy tracking a caterpillar. So I didn’t hear the gunshot that killed the shotgunner until the he was already on the ground with his jaw missing.

Athalia rolled behind one of the posts that held the raiders’ victims and peered anxiously in the direction the mysterious shots had come from. She looked at me.

“Friend of yours?”

I step behind the post that held Vargas. “I hope so, but I’m not going smile and wave until I find out for sure. Maybe they’re just a terrible shot.”

“Don’t worry,” croaked Vargas. “I’d know that shootin’ anywhere. That’s Angie.”

I froze.

Angie.

The name plucked my heart like a guitar string.