Some months prior, Lead halted his mule at a road sign proclaiming ASH FORK. The sign was twisted with rust and shown a shade of green no longer produced by man. A boar’s head was skewered on top of the sign; all but the snout concealed by a cloud of flies and coagulated blood. Lead escorted his mule past the sign. Pieces of tar and rock popped under the beast’s hooves, startling birds who were otherwise accustomed to the desert silence.
After a time, Lead heard music emanating. It was an ancient, forbidden song, something from the Broken Times. Lead stopped. Like many of his time, he was fearful of old things; music, books, reminders of times when men were soulless. He contemplated what hearing such throbbing lustful music would do to his soul. What forms of tarnish and stain would he have to endure?
Lead walked his mule to a sign adorned with pictures of a dining plate, a gasoline pump, and a bed. The sign pointed to a tar lot with two leaning structures. One structure was broken down and crumbling into scrub brush, the other vibrated with music. It was a building with a pulse neither man nor animal, but visceral and wrong.
The Radioman’s directions had been precise.
Lead’s mule brayed and twitched its ears. Anxiety built in Lead’s chest. The music was not gospel. A cleansing would be required upon his return.
The vibrating structure was a single story rectangle coated with mud and dust. One side was made of glass entirely, a craft lost to man. Inside the glass wall was lined with plastic shopping bags whose presence in the desert was constant and plentiful, like bones and scrub. Portals shaped as stars and moons were cut into the bag layer.
Lead tied his mule to a water trough and pulled a rope and blanket from his saddle bag. He adjusted the heavy pistol resting against his chest. His finger traced the outline of the barrel, cold against his skin.
Lead opened the door to an assault of the forbidden music. Gas lanterns and star shaped sunlight illuminated interior dust and smoke. Men and women the color of dirt laughed and shouted over the din and haze. They grew quiet as whispers announced Lead’s entrance. Lead thumbed his straw sombrero back. He looked to the inhabitants, eyes lingering on each face. The owner, a man of indeterminate and forgotten race, turned switches and gears behind a stained pine bar. The music stopped. The room grew silent in a way both frightening and impressive. Some inhabitants returned Lead’s gaze, some didn’t.
Lead withdrew a silver crucifix from his pocket and held it forward as his badge and ward.
“I’m here under the authority of our Lord and Savior to speak with the one who calls himself Aaron Century,” Lead declared.
Whispers stopped. The inhabitants stood still. One spoke.
“I’m he.”
A middle-aged man dressed in brown jeans and a leather vest stood up from his table and gestured to an aluminum and canvas chair. His skin was darkly splotched with layered sun damage. His hands were thick and heavy indicators of lifelong labor. His eyes sparkled with intelligence. Lead pulled the seat out and sat down.
“I got no qualms with the Church, Preacher.” The man said. He sat behind a dinner arrangement of roasted pork. He kept his eyes on Lead.
Lead laid the blanket and rope on the table.
“Your violation is between the Almighty and thee. I’ll hear no appeals.” Lead recited by rote. Anxiety pierced his chest with a thousand little flames. He steeled his face against the fear.
“Choose.”
Aaron contemplated the items on the table in a manner both slow and deliberate. He picked up a piece of pork and chewed it, as though mastication assisted the decision making process. Lead stared at Aaron’s face, watched the jaw muscles flex with each chew. Sweat slipped past Lead’s eyebrow and stung his left eye. He kept both eyes on Aaron, but his ears pricked for sounds of rear ambush. Aaron’s chewing and smacking lips echoed in the breathless room.
Suddenly, Aaron leapt from his seat and over the table with a dinner knife clutched in his fist. The larger man knocked Lead and his chair to the ground in a sweeping tackle. Aaron’s fist flashed, Lead felt a sharp, quick pain in his side. He smelled the meat on Aaron’s breath as the man’s face loomed enormous. Aaron tore the knife from Lead’s side and swung out. Lead caught the blade in his left hand, and twisted it, but failed to free it from Aaron’s grasp. Aaron shifted the blade and forced the tip into Lead’s chest. Metal dug into Lead above his heart, the knife’s tip scratched bone. He kept his grip and the two struggled. The room was occupied with grunts and screams from both men, though no inhabitant could tell one from the other. Blood ran down Lead’s left hand, coating the blade protruding from his chest.
All the noise of man was cut-off by a sharp pop.
Aaron’s grimace turned into a look of surprise, a cloud of pink mist hung suspended behind his back. Lead rolled him off. The knife snapped in Lead’s chest, leaving a shard buried deep.
Lead’s shirt smoked from the discharged firearm, an old six-shooter tied with rawhide loop around his neck and hidden under his shirt; a rig some called a Van Cleef.
Aaron clutched his chest with both hands, the knife clattered to the floor. The inhabitants continued their silence.
Lead pulled himself up with the edge of the table. He levered his weight against the table and wrenched his right arm, tearing his shirt and freeing the Van Cleef.
Aaron convulsed on the floor. He opened his mouth wide and tried to fill his lungs, but the hole in his chest issued a sucking wheeze. Blood bubbled out. He had neither the strength nor the ability to consume air.
Lead swung his gun in a wild parabola at the other patrons, an unnecessary warning.
Aaron died with a crimson face. His hands slapped his body in search of air that would never be found.
Lead unfurled the blanket with one hand, the other clutched his pistol. Blood from his chest and hand speckled the floor.
“What was done here was the Lord’s work.” Lead said to the inhabitants. “If any of you seek appeal on behalf of Goodman Century’s soul, you will be heard at the Flagstaff Parish.”
Lead laid the blanket over Aaron’s body and backed out of the front door, pistol waving at man and furniture alike. He rode his mule out of Ash Fork with the .38 clutched to his wounded chest. The heat of anxiety burned worse than the stab hole.
Halfway to William’s Town Lead let go of his pistol with stiff, bloodless fingers. No one was coming for him. Lead slumped off his mule and gathered dead wood and kudzu for his campfire. His wounds burned cold. A straight line had been cut across his palm through what the heathens called the head and life lines. Lead wrapped his hand in strips torn from his shirt and said a quick prayer of healing. He pressed cloth bandages against the puckered wounds of his chest and side. He searched for the broken knife tip with clumsy fingers but could not venture deep enough. He said another prayer.
Lead’s anxiety reduced with time and quiet in front of the fire. He felt soiled, worn, an old man in his middle twenties. He turned to the heavens and gave a prayer of attrition.
“Lord God, my Father. Lord of Earth and Heaven. Forgive me for breaking a commandment you set forth clearly. Forgive me for spilling the blood of man onto the Earth. Forgive me for all was done in your name and on your behalf. All was done to cleanse the Earth which we the meek and unworthy have inherited. Forgive me and if you have any dispute with my actions please give me a sign or smite me where I sit if thou finds me unworthy.”
Lead listened to the wind rustling through dying pine trees and dried jungle vines, to the crackling of the fire behind him, to the distant coyotes howling at the moon, to the humanless nothing of nature. He hunched near the fire and wrapped himself in blankets, a guard against the curious, hungry insects. Lead took a flaming branch from the fire and lit a paper of tobacco to ward off spirits, to pass the time. The stars above rotated in shapes named and renamed and named again by the variations of man both civilized and barbarous. Lead ignored the infinite and changed the dressing of his wounds.
He drifted into sleep, his mind drifted to dreams, which turned to the Storms, death and, as always, the Broken Times.