A HERD OF ANGRY TRAINS

I was sitting out on a cliff along the trailing edge of the Rockies, watching a storm roll in from Nevada like a herd of angry trains. No buffalo left on this hardpan, but now they gathered in the sky, fat and furry. They were darkness, the eclipsing shadow, and the roar of their hooves beat the life from the air as they arched stampeding towards me.

I was armed as usual with my twin sticks, hardwood shaved thin and fired for strength. They once flashed blows at foes right and left, now they are both prone to be held for support as canes.

Before me half of Utah stretched, across alkali flats and that undead soup of the Great Salt Lake, over cragged-toothed mountains and Restricted Military Airspace. Somewhere beyond the basin and range was an imaginary line, drawn flat in the sky, surrounding testing areas and unseen installations.

The thundering mass of steam-engine beasts trampled overhead, tearing their own darkness with the flickering lick of light. They had come straight across that no-fly zone without notice, pushed by a migratory drive more magnetic than atmosphere. As it should be, really; the gods of those braves we put in reserves were set to return any day.

Any other day I would welcome the storm, dance in the rain with my sticks over the six mile hike to this place.

I needed a clear view.

The launch was at dusk.

APACHE TEARS

The air seemed thicker those days, like space was a lens, magnifying and distorting everything in sight. It was hot and it drew something vital from those caught in it.

My brother and I were two such bugs trapped in the amber of that burning summer.

Some days we struggled against the gummy stuff, trying to move without much luck. Occasionally we quickened and the tar-pit air would crystallize around us.

That’s where the story begins, in the apache tears of clarity pressured from passing time, invisible gems found in friendship’s night.

The Brothers Black, Part One

The sedan carried five dead men through the dark.
They went to their graves at 75 miles an hour, swerving as the road did and once avoiding a dog that had unknowingly stepped between death and his nightly meal. All of the men in the black sedan were in good spirits, shown by this uncommon mercy for strays.

Most nights they’d have swerved the other way, taken out the dog in a spray without changing expression. They had taken so many lives to date that animal life, really any life, meant nothing.
These were men who solved things; human things, usually. They were called in at great expense to those who summoned them. They arrived from shadow and never seemed equally lit.

They found their target and without emotion dispatched whatever their contract required. Fear was often enough; after sufficient torment many of their targets were more than happy to do anything else.

The First Two Shadows specialized in prolonging the moment before actual death without going over. They could take a man to the edge of his life and hold him there, all the while pulling parts off with hot pliers.
Sometimes a more direct demise was required, and for that this team had an answer. The Second Shadows were experts in fast, silent and faceless killing. They came out of the night without a whisper, ultimately invisible, and left cleanly, not splashing the walls. Examiners are later unable to pinpoint a source of death.
Then there was The Master Shade.
This Warrior-Monk of Darkness possessed several skills of note. None were so feared as his thought-killer; he could literally wish you to death. It was said his thoughts were so dark they drained whatever they fell upon. Some thought it was partly the dark gaze of his eyes, whose very attention could cause weather to cloud, milk to curd and even tears to run red.
They claimed no name, but those few who knew that they even existed knew them as The Dark Wheel or the Brothers Black.
This night they had just made a stop that had engaged all their talents equally, a rare moment indeed and one they did not take lightly.
Their target was held at the top of a The Sharp Scraper, an all-glass high-rise that was narrowness at its best. The structure was deep in the heart of Dark City, a hub between worlds that appeared as a steaming clockwork of perpetual motion, a roaring metal cyclone of tall buildings and acid rain.

Baby Garth is Orphaned, Part Three

Outside the sky had begun to change, first over the forest where the clouds usually formed but rapidly spreading to the limits of vision.
Miles of storm was coming.
Elder Garth could see it hammering the door of the empty hut the rainmaker had vacated. She must have seen the flood, and moved on without a warning. “Rain,” she had predicted. “Run,” would have been much more useful.

Garth could feel the air pressure come at him like a wall. He was a man of nature, once an adventurer of sorts, and his retirement from that practice did nothing to dull is reflexes. He sprang, reaching the door to his hut before the shovel had hit the ground.
It seemed like he folded time or space, winking into being on the upbeats of a mystic rhythm only he could hear.

He pulled on the handle and was already giving orders when he stepped inside.
“Get the brundle,” he said, taking his son into his arms, noting how Baby Garth was signaling danger as well. Skara, his princess wife, grabbed at a backboard wound with leather strappings.

“What is it?” she asked in a voice that needed no answer to continue evacuation. “Morugrund? Has it returned? The Brothers swore to us-“

“It is no Beast,” he stated flatly. “Flash Flood. From the range.”

Skara hastened her preparations at this, putting the baby to the board and strapping him into place. As she tied the last, the sound of thunder could be felt in the ground as the rushing water gained every uproot and stone in the forest.

This increasing mass made a sound like a storm giving birth, a tornado spinning off cyclones like a tree loosing leaves to the wind.

Baby Garth was strapped in and bound onto his brundleboard, which in turn was tightened to Skara’s muscular back. All three left through the door at the same time, staring out across their acreage into the dark maw of a massive stormfront.

Rows upon rows of clouds formed warriors astride flame-hooved horses, each one only part of a legion that walled in their escape.

“Bab Drubble,” Baby Garth restated, his eyes on the storm.

Baby Garth is Orphaned, Part Two

Outside, Elder Garth stopped turning soil. He stooped with an arm propped on his shovel grip, his weight put on his right foot and his focus on the distant treewall. Was there something there? He could have sworn he saw it, a patch of darkness moving, or a tree swaying back against the wind that bent it’s brothers forward.
That he stopped his toil at all was no small occurrence. Since the day the Rainmaker showed up, espousing a coming deluge, he had rushed to plant before the clouds began to gather. There was no time to waste.

There he stood, however, a man run thin and hard by years of harder times, silhouetted against the receding forest as he stopped to listen. He was a thin father, not long for the world. He would pass on nothing to his new and strange son.

Baby Garth shook his fist and uttered a low series of grunts and unintelligible rumblings.

Again he stuck his finger out towards his unseen father. “Mad rackle bab drubble,” he noted, and looked back where his mother hung clothing on a line that was hooked to nothing at either end. This impossibility, this magic, was lost on one so young.

“Bab Drubble,” he repeated, still pointing backwards.

Baby Garth is Orphaned, Part One

Baby Garth stopped crying and abruptly sat up his crib. His chubby hand went out with fingers splayed, then tightened into a vague, pointing shape. He gestured in the unsteady way of the very young and old, hand shaking as if the motors and levers were not quite in sync.

Barely a moon old, any gesture by one so young was cause for concern. The fact that he was pointing straight at his father, unseen through two wooden walls and three hundred yards, went unnoticed while his mother toiled at the sink.

Noticed or not, this was homing; like a compass to magnetic north the son was aware of the father, was drawn to his location. The urgency behind the motion meant DANGER, meant BAD was on the way.

His eyes, however, revealed none of this. He was a baby, with drool on his chin and heavy pants, and the continuous lack of concern for anything not causing direct pain. His earthly stare was unfocused and happy, darkening only slightly when he saw into the future, and watched his father die.