Across the Middle Desert

Chapter 2: A Meal for the Flies

Mayes crossed over to Grady, pistol aimed square at his chest. “I’ll have that shooter now.” Grady’s hands moved to his gunbelt. Maybe there was something in him that believed that he could draw fast enough. She noticed as much from the way his hand lingered between the holster and the buckle. “That’s a fine leather you got,” she said, gesturing with her pistol. “I’d hate to spend the bits on a cleaning kit.”

Grady set his face to a reddened scowl and unlatched the buckle. Mayes pressed the barrel to his temple and took the loosened ring of leather from his waist. She admired the handiwork at a glance, seeing the ringlets full of spare casings and the fine stitching holding it together. She draped the belt over her shoulder and took several long steps back to the center of the dining area.

Mac, the unfortunate cook, howled once again as the skinny young man removed the arrow shaft from his calf muscle.

“Calm yourself,” the youngster said. “It just caught the meat.”

“Hurry it up Yan,” Mayes said.

Yan unrolled a length of fabric twice as long as his arm and used his teeth to tear it, then wrapped it around Mac’s bleeding calf. “This will sting a touch.”

“As if it doesn’t already,” Mac seethed through grated teeth. “I’m gonna limp for the rest of my life on this.” Mayes saw the anger brewing underneath that pain.

“Who the hell comes in shooting a man with an arrow like bush meat, then patches him up?” Grady asked, still seated and still watching the shooter leveled at his chest.

“Can’t have him wandering off for help, can we?” Mayes asked. “Say he gets the best over my partner here and hobbles off to the mule or worse—steals my horse?”

With a final tug at the wound dressing, Mac yelped, then Yan took a seat nearby. He threaded an arrow onto his bow, then waited. “I’m all set here,” he said.

“On your feet, Mr. Grady,” she said. Grady stood slowly, taking a step back from her. With her thumb, Mayes pressed the button on the conical device in her left hand twice. Its beeping stopped. She swept her poncho aside and placed the explosive in a leather bandolier wrapped around a ragged pants leg. Grady gulped at the sight of six more explosive devices, as well as the knife at her waist.

“You got me standing, which leads me to believe you want us to go somewhere,” he said.

“Nothing gets past you,” she fixed him a sweet smile, “just the two of us. Who know, I may take in the beautiful scenery along the way and treat you nice.”

“If it’s all the same, I’d rather you leave,” he said.

“Then you know how to make me. Take me to where you stashed it.” She gestured to the back door with a flick of the gun barrel. “Any funny business I’ll be cashing out these bullets on your ass.”

Grady and Mac exchanged worried looks, but neither spoke. He regarded Mayes with a look of disdain and spun to the back door, with her keeping pace behind him.

They hiked along a dirt road that took them over a small creek. Mayes made a noise when the water soaked into her boots and swore under her breath. If Mac did something to her horse and she had to hike it back to Calla, there would be blisters on her feet before sundown. And if Grady sent people after her, well-blistered feet wouldn’t give her the advantage in maintaining distance. Even if she and Yan took turns on his horse, she knew the going wouldn’t be easy.

“It’s down this road,” Grady said.

If he was trying to start a conversation to keep his mind off the shooter at his back, she was in no mood. “Do I strike you as a tourist?”

“I’d call you something else,” he muttered.

“I’m touched. Shut up and lead on.”

The road narrowed on the approach to a thicket of woodland. Tallgrass wavered in the breeze on either side of the dirt trail. Mayes kept her ears perked for any footsteps, cracking branches, alert for any such ambushes that may await her. Perks of the job, she thought with a humorless grin.

In the woods, Grady stepped off onto an overgrown footpath that led up a slight hill rise. Mayes scanned ahead and saw nothing but scrub brush and gnarled tree roots. No hidden tripwires or stashed weapons. She followed him up the gradual slope.

The footpath wound right around a rock outcropping at the top of the hill. The old stones were well hidden by the flora and carpeted by yellow and blue moss. Bloodflies buzzed in chaotic patterns, their blue and white-striped exoskeletons zipping by in a flurry of color and sound. Both she and Grady swatted at the ones daring enough to take a bite at their exposed arms and faces. Sometimes Mayes wanted to burn a forest down in the hopes of killing all the critters that saw them as nothing more than walking meals.

“Interesting way of deterring wandering employees,” she griped. “You know they hate the sunlight.”

“Isn’t there an off-world saying about flies being drawn to beauty? Take it as a compliment,” he said, wincing at a bite on his wrist. He slapped at it and his palm came away with a crumpled set of twitching legs and tiny drops of his blood.

“Uh-huh, you got your sayings mixed. Flies are drawn to shit. You’re thinking of smoke.” She wrapped her poncho around her face, leaving her eyes exposed, then shoved her straw hat down firmly over her head. Her shooting arm may get bitten, but that she could handle. “We better be close Grady.”

He led them on without a reply, circling the outcropping of stones until they arrived at a small hovel. Mayes saw that it was nothing more than a natural path into the rocks based on how they wound up so many millions of years ago. She kept a wary eye on the boulder which served at the hovel’s ceiling, hoping it wouldn’t take to falling at random.

Grady moved aside a patch of weeds and pulled out a rusted shovel. He stood at the spot and measured his steps in six strides. “It’s here.”

“Dig then.”

“If you don’t mind my saying, when we learned what it was, I buried it for a reason,” he said. Mayes studied him. That statement held none of the bites his previous comments had. A moment’s hesitation caused her to regard Grady as genuinely warning her, as calmly as possible.

Mayes shrugged. “I care for your reasons as much as I care for these blood-biters. Set your ass to digging.”

He glared at her a final time and bit the shovel blade into the soft patch of earth. Mayes paced along behind him, keeping her limbs underneath the poncho. If Grady had the mind to swing that shovel at her, she could always patch the hole the bullet caused.

Time passed slow and Grady’s digging was interrupted by swatting away the flies. He must have buried it deep. Soon an ankle-deep dent in the earth turned into a knee-deep hole. Dirt piled around the hole. As attentive as Mayes was, she wasn’t one to pass the time in silence. Judging by Grady’s cooperation, there also must not be a security team scouring the woods for them either.

“I have to admit Mr. Grady,” she said, “this is well put-together place.”

“Uh-huh,” he grunted. “Cost a fortune to set up. You know how expensive it was source the genetics for the rice?”

“I imagine you got debts to pay,” she said.

“Paid,” he said, “thanks to the kaat.”

“So the rice is genuine?”

He tossed another clump of damp earth onto the dirt pile. “Gen-u-ine sourced off-world genetics. Somewhere up there, across all that empty darkness, there’s someone eating the same rice my customers do. Hell, if there’s a mother-world still left, I imagine they are too.”

Mayes scoffed. “I heard merchants from the coast to the outer provinces talk and hawk about their genuine goods. Most I figure, it’s bullshit. There’s something in a hapless hooplehead customer that hits on nostalgia for the mother-world, so I imagine their profits don’t suffer because of it.”

“Figure all you want,” he said, shoveling more dirt, “I did my research.”

“I had off-world fruit once,” she said. “It dried out my mouth.”

“Heh,” Grady snorted, “maybe you were nostalgic and got swindled.”

Mayes smiled beneath the poncho covering. “Guess so. But my sense of nostalgia is deeper than what’s being sold at the market. Call me enthralled.”

Grady had no comment on her last statement and dug deeper.

By the time the hole was hip-deep, the shovel clanked off something metallic and dense. Both perked up at the sound. Mayes approached and peered down to see a dirty rectangular shape with flecks of silver showing through the caked dirt.

“This is it,” Grady said. “I’m telling you that it’s better for it stay here.”

“I’m sure.” Mayes said.

Seeing that he had not convinced her, Grady dropped the shovel aside and said, “Well help me lift it out then.”
“Use those farmhand muscles you built Mr. Grady.”

He let slip a harsh rush of air through his teeth and glared up at her, then set about digging around the length of the box, four feet in length. Grady tilted the box up against the lip of the hole with a grunt, and then he pushed it out. It settled to the ground before her with a solid thump. Mayes licked her dried lips, looking down it as if it were a meal, something she hungered for in endless daydreams and frail hopes in darker days.

Now’s not the time to get sloppy. Grady tensed as her arm and shooter reappeared from underneath the poncho. “Open it.”

Grady clambered from the hole and took the shovel with him. He leveled the shovel blade several inches below the top of the metal box. If there was a seam, Mayes could not see it. He pried the box open after a moment of fighting against it. She saw as much in his arm muscles straining to force the seam apart.

Then it cracked opened in a hiss of musty air. Grady gripped at the loose box top and forced it open further, and let it fall to the ground behind it.

“Get yourself on the other side of that hole and sit down, cross-legged,” she said. Grady obeyed and eased himself down a small distance from her. Mayes bent down and took the shovel and hurled it farther into the woods.

When she looked down into the box, a simple black cloth pouch lay there. She reached in, pulling out several large rolls of paper. She did not recognize the many diagrams or the language splashed across the pages. She set them aside and reached back into the punch and pull out something else.

Mayes looked down at a heavy, cylindrical black metal object. The shape narrowed at the ends, tapering down to a flat circular top and bottom. There was an unfamiliar symbol carved into the front of the object. When she reached back into the bag, her hand came back empty.

She stared down at the papers and the object. The hunger in her dwindled and it must’ve shown in her eyes.
Grady laughed at her deflated look. “You don’t know what you’re looking at, do you?”

“But you can tell me,” she said.

“I was told to hide it, not decipher it.”

Mayes took a moment and breathed in deeply. She stuffed the paper and the object back into the bag and stood. “Mr. Grady, you ever go visit a town you grew up in as an adult?”

The question caught him off-guard, his brow furrowed, and he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever gone back, no.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” she said. “You have all the memories of it, back it when it was larger than life. A mystery even. But you go back and it’s smaller. It looks worse for wear. You start to see the cracks in the foundations. There’s a reason you left. A sad one for certain, but reason enough. You start seeing lies living there. How can anyone get by living in such an awful place, and how could any future be found there?” Grady looked up at her, more confused than informed by her answer. “Stand up, Mr. Grady.” He rose. “Let’s get back before Mac starts to worry.”

He gave her a nod and stepped around the hole, leading her back to the footpath. That was when he felt her arm around his neck. His next breath was a gargling rasp. Every muscle in his body seized at the pain in his back.

“I want off this fucking rock, Mr. Grady. Damn the consequences and damn the fool who tries to stop me.”

Mayes slid her knife out of his back and watched him tumble into the forest overgrowth. The bloodflies took to their meal in a swarm, smelling the copper tinge of blood in the air. “A parting gift,” she told the flies, “you’re welcome to the rest of this lonesome world. I won’t be in it either way.”

Mayes sheathed the knife and walked downhill.