Work Text:
“I’ve heard that name before…”
The Divide, below them, jagged like torn skin and dried and barren by wind and the ceaseless sun.
“An old world general, leading an army of free slaves and freedom fighters, leading those to liberation that needed liberation. America in a precarious state, as two halves ripped it apart from within, splitting the nation, splitting the people.”
“Seems like it unified well enough.”
“Few things unify like war does, fewer still that don’t end in mutual destruction. An endless revolution of power and suffering, neither knowing the history of each thing. Not knowing how to break the patterns that kept them enchained.”
“Do we know how to?”
The courier rips his gaze from the Divide to look at the other man. His eyes are so dark, a depthless black, like looking in a mirror.
“We do not find out until the end.”
•••
There’s something on the border of the known Mojave. Found along the hills that hold fast against endless featureless desert that wants to return their small civilization to dust. Something draws him in through the cliff sides, broken hillsides turned to canyons that a road once snaked through. Heaps of broken down machinery rotting into red oxide clog the canyon; boxcars, buses, personal cars, and beneath that, bones and poisoned earth.
There’s something that draws him closer, catches his one good eye. Flat white paint upon the rusty pitted side of a bus, splashed up in a symbol he recognizes. A message half in agony, half in despair. An old world flag standing lonely, surrounded by the ruins of its country. He knows not what it means, recognizes it only as the emblem that had haunted him in the crater, left behind by something he didn’t understand yet. A trail, should the vandal get lost and turn back ‘round. A trail, should someone want to follow.
•••
He’d found out after his second girlfriend. Mary. The name still brings regret to his chest, a taste of copper in the back of his throat.
These things happen quite commonly, a doctor told him. Not your fault. Still, Jude felt as though he’d let her down. When a brahmin baron came into town looking for cowboys, he followed the other hopefuls after dark. She’d get over her broken heart, find someone who could give her children, and they’d scrape by with a happy life in California. He headed east looking for something else among the empty wastes. He found lonely nights and the wandering hands of his fellow cowboys. The dark star-speckled sky stretched on for eternity above them and he wondered how the hell anyone could damn something so beautiful.
•••
“First deadbeat we hired cancelled on the spot.” Nash tells him. “Hope a storm from the Divide skins him alive.”
Jude hadn’t understood the curse then, but he certainly does now, facing the wind storms and wayward tornados filled with electrical fires and shrapnel. The brown sky crashes with thunder and lightning flashes, briefly illuminating the dark undersides of the world. There are shadows of beasts set on tearing him apart. Pre-war creatures left behind with explosive temperaments. Some of them adapting to the wasteland, others lying in wait for activation.
And yet the hostilities are familiar to him, as familiar as Nash himself had been. He doesn’t recognize either but he thinks that they might recognize him.
•••
They’re awoken by the sound of gunfire. The guy on watch, DeSoto, is running toward them with his rifle in hand, screaming.
“Fuckin’ 80s-!”
DeSoto reaches their sleeping rolls and jumps behind a sitting log for cover. Brahmin are screaming into the night as their attackers pick them off, and machine guns pop in the distance.
Jude drags himself closer to the logs and gropes around the site for his own gun. There’s a shot from DeSoto’s rifle and he drops back down below cover. His curly hair is stuck to his face with sweat, his eyes are wild.
“Them animals ain’t worth dying for.” Jude shouts to him. “We needa split.”
DeSoto kneels up to shoot the raiders. “I ain’t leavin’ a job-“
A stray bullet takes half of DeSoto’s face with it, the inside of his head pouring out the back of his skull. Brain and blood splatter Jude’s prone form. DeSoto slumps to the ground.
“Fuck.” He whispers to himself, vomit burning the back of his throat. “Shit.”
Jude looks to the corpse of his friend in the dirt. His shaking hands take the rifle and loose ammo in his vest. The stocky sure body Jude had once been intimately familiar with is disturbingly still.
“Jude let’s git.” Another cowboy tells him, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him away from the gore. “We needa git.”
“DeSoto…”
“He’s fuckin’ dead. He’s fuckin’ dead.” The cowboy says, and he’s got his gun out but he has no intentions of fighting back. The whites of his eyes shine like the brahmins’: desperately searching for a way out of this hell.
They flee into the night, beyond danger, beyond responsibility, and beyond consequence. Their breaths are sharp in their lungs when they finally slow. Trees sprout along the flat earth, tall and naked of leaves. They hide behind a fallen log, the tangle of branches disguising their forms. The gunshots in the distance are petering out to silence.
“What happened?” Jude asks, finally. He coughs against the dry air. “I’ve never seen a slaughter like this.”
The cowboy, whose name he’s forgotten, grunts in response. “Don’t rightly know. Can’t take the herd back now. The boss is gonna kill us.” He grunts again in pain.
“We can’t go back to him.”
“No, prolly not, no.”
Jude looks to the cowboy, who has become doubled over. He’s holding his insides in with cupped hands. The light of the moon makes his bloody hands black.
“Shit.”
“Naw, ‘s fine.” The cowboy insists. He’s swaying in his feet now. “‘S all fine.”
Jude catches him when he collapses.
“What’ll you do?” The cowboy asks. Blood blots into the corners of his mouth.
“Crush them godforsaken 80s.”
His companion nods in approval, closing his eyes and tilting his head back, as if to rest his eyes. Slowly, Jude raises his rifle to the man’s forehead. If he heard, he made no indication.
•••
The Divide is an open wound across the land. He can see the silos lining it, each holding in their hearts enough power to destroy anything that’s crawled back to life since the first bombs dropped. It makes his fingers twitch, and it makes him sick to his stomach. How had the men pushing the button felt beforehand?
Men flayed of their skin inhabit the rubble, their language brutal and curt, their settlements crude and precarious. If one should fall two more will take its place, built of more rubble, more stone and twisted metal. These men have false idols fashioned from spent ammunition and sharpened blades, but their true idols hadn’t been much better. Ulysses tells him it’s a religion, and Jude can’t find any evidence to the contrary. The remnants of the bear and the bull still inside of them call for blood and conquest, as innate as any other need. They interpret that need as divine will.
•••
The first courier job he takes is across a pan of desert a hundred and twenty degrees hot. The sun reflects off the sand into his eyes and wants to render him plum blind. An isolated desert town accepts their letters with indifference and no word of thanks.
The next job isn’t any more glorious, nor the next, but he establishes a route eventually that allows him to move the most mail, and stop at the most watering holes.
“You okay, son?” An elderly woman asks him, a recipient of mail. She’s looking up at him against the sun, her clever eyes squinted and a flattened hand shading them. Her mouth is contorted with the squint, her remaining teeth poking out from behind her lips.
They’re in the outskirts of a quiet desert community, outside a mud shack with a tin roof who’s reflection could burn the sun back. She’s the first person he’s spoken to in two months of travel.
“Don’t suppose I have been for a while.”
“You look world-weary.”
He shrugs. He probably does.
The elderly woman grunts and drops her hand from her face.
“C’mon son, take a break with me, eh?”
She pushes her stout body from the chair and hobbles into the dwelling, beckoning him to follow. Her head is shaved near bald, a dusting of gray clings to the back of her scalp.
Jude follows her as she disappears behind the curtain made of old army tarp.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Jude.”
Inside the air is cooler, resting here between the sandstone walls. The air here is completely still; the inside is completely empty. The old woman is nowhere to be found.
“Miss?”
Fearing he’s missed something, he walks back outside into the heat. The chair out front isn’t vacant, instead a sun bleached corpse sits in it, halfway ghoulified before it had given up the ghost.
He finds himself looking into the eyes, wrinkled pits, alluring, haunting. There could have been something in the eye sockets once, placed there to make her an idol of worship.
“Miss?” He’s scraping desperation now, but the corpse has woken a strange anxiety within him and he can’t turn away now. There are voices in his ears, worming into his brain.
“What—?”
You got a broken heart, Jude?
“What’s going on?”
You can’t sire life.
“What are you?”
Instead you’ll take life. Thousands of them. The destroyer of worlds. Remember, Jude, what you gave up. Remember Mary.
The dead woman’s voice echoes in his head, humiliating him, accusing him of something he hasn’t done yet. Will not do. Jude flees from the shack in the desert, some kind of guilty conscience beginning to form around the rim of his mind. Well, guiltier.
•••
The skinned men pour into the compound, their shouts a choir of malice. They’re a ragtag army now, their last numbers swelling for a final front.
The temple, this temple, the poison behind Ulysses’ words is down to the last detail as dangerous as Jude pictured it. It seeped in each threat he made, made real the annihilation of the Mojave. Jude talks him down from slaughter, from his righteous revenge, his misplaced anger. Not razing the Mojave is a small mercy on Jude, not the inhabitants, and not Ulysses himself. It’s not forgiveness but it’s akin to surrender.
Jude talks him down, and after they crush the marked men underfoot, he returns to the consoles. The decision is so simple it’s no decision at all.
It’s easy, really, to rearm the warheads and send them instead to the hearts of the bear and the bull.
“What’ve you done? Back on your word?”
“I never claimed to be a peaceful man.” Jude tells him. “This’ll keep them away from my throat a little while longer.”
He’s found this temple; his idols as blasphemous as the skinned mens’, his worship as violent as every other that came before him.
“Claim the Mojave for yourself? Robert House came as close as any man ever will, and if radio waves are to be believed, dead inside his casino, elaborate tomb now. You are the first I cast suspicion on, though not the only enemy he kept.”
“I don’t want the whole Mojave. I want to protect what I already have from those who conquest.”
Ulysses seems to understand, for now, and backs off. Their temple shakes with the impact of the warheads, each leveling their impact sites, legions of troops evaporating before the grandeur of atomics. Factions severed of a leg, limping to Vegas, will bleed out as they arrive. A Vegas free of corrupting armies drowning them all in their own blood.
“Dead pile high for your free world. Are you certain of this cost?”
“I won’t find out until the end.”