Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
As she made her way to where the crow perched, it was clear that Fallow was not the only equine casualty of the shootout. One other lay dead on the outrider’s side of the camp and the other two had panicked at the noise. The stranger could see the silhouette of one against the backdrop of the last of the failing light. It was looking back at camp, but seemed disinterested in returning. Of the other horse, there was no trace.
Dee was resting her back against the base of some mesquite once the stranger found her. She was pressing one hand firmly against her thigh, blood staining her fingers dark to match the growing shadows. Her other hand rested near the holster without quite reaching it. Her gun was not in the holster and it took the stranger a moment before she spotted the revolver in the gloaming, left almost under the wain.
If the stranger was bad weather, Dee had already decided she stood little chance of outrunning the incoming storm and laid there with a wry grimace for a smile.
“Figured you’d come around eventually,” she said. “That bird of yours has a habit of calling things out that might rather have remained unseen. It is your crow, isn’t it?”
The stranger remained silent, taking inventory of Dee. She put down her saddlebag in the sands a couple of good stretches outside of Dee’s reach.
“Fine. Go ahead and do your accounting.” Dee’s voice was even, pertinent. “I’m one outrider down a horse and up a hole in my leg. You already know I’m not drawing on you.” She nodded in the direction of the gun.
The stranger backtracked to the wain, leaned over and picked up the gun. She swung open the cylinder and emptied the chambers of both spent casings and the two or three rounds onto the ground. She looked in the direction where the gloaming seemed to draw the longest shadows and hefted the gun out into the growing dark.
She approached Dee and crouched to look at the wound in her leg. Dee even let up on the pressure for a moment and turned her palm so the stranger could see better. A clean wound. Bleeding would stop eventually.
The stranger eyed the shoulder. Likely dislocated, maybe broken.
“Well, are you gonna do me in, put me down like that horse of yours? Or do you reckon I might live still.”
The stranger frowned but did not reply. The frown could have been at the night, once taking its sweet time arriving, now arriving faster than she wanted for all the frown said. Her face gave no other sign as she stood back up.
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were the type.” Something shifted in Dee’s tone, her high cheekbones losing some of their sharp edges, softening into a kind of relief. “Nah, you ain’t the finishing kind. Not with folks you don’t think hardly worth the bullet.”
She watched the stranger’s face for a reaction and found none.
“That mark you wear on your cheek,” Dee said. “Seen it before — well, seeing as we’re having a frank discussion and all, like civilized folks — heard ’bout it at least.”
The stranger picked up her saddlebag and hefted it onto her shoulder.
Dee saw the stranger pull out a compass to take its measure. She figured someone like her probably had one of those witched ones, the kind that still worked as intended where the Dusk had taken hold. Like the gun, they did not make them like that anymore. If so, it was a relic of a world that were less far gone than this one.
“He said the shape meant something — said a complete one meant something different than an incomplete one.” She tilted her head. “Yours is incomplete.”
The stranger’s eyes stayed on the compass, but it did not take much to know that the stranger wanted to glare at Dee.
“He said to be wary of the gun more than the woman carrying it. Said the gun had an old name and belonged to someone who’d earned it.”
A pause. Some desert creature screamed in the darkness, hunter or prey.
“Said he wasn’t sure you had.”
Nothing from the stranger, she snapped the compass closed and slipped it into a pocket.
Dee pressed forward.
“That piece would fetch a price with the right party. News of where it is might fetch nearly the same.” She watched. “You understand what I’m telling you? You so sure I ain’t worth that bullet of yours?”
The stranger turned away from the camp, into the desert wilds. Folks with any sense at all stuck to the roads. This told Dee what she already suspected — the stranger was a Walker.
“Walking away,” Dee said to her back, louder now. “That’s what you do. You walk away and leave things half-finished. Well, I ain’t one to leave things that way.”
The stranger kept walking without looking back.
“That bird of yours — you know what it is, doncha? That, there, is a death-marker. You done crossed over, it brought you back, but now you got yourself a debt to pay back, am I right?” Her voice rose slightly, her performance thinning. “Those kinds of debts ain’t the kind you just leave behind cos’ you keep moving. They’s the kind that follow you until the old man collects his due. Y’hear?”
And still the stranger kept walking, heading towards the badlands of the wastes. The place where hungry and broken things roamed over shattered stone.
“I’m thinking I’m gonna collect on that debt of yours,” Dee said, flatter. A promise less to the stranger and more to herself. “You fuckin’ hear me, Walker? I aim to be the one that comes for it. That’s what I’m telling you. You won’t see me coming ’til it’s too late.”
The sand broken gravel crunched under the stranger’s boots.
“I know where you’re headed.” Dee’s voice dropping now, spent, but still loud enough to carry over in the desert night. “That Preacher was heading to Absalom. Whatever business you’ve got there — he’s done got there first.”
The stranger’s pace neither slowed nor quickened. A boot toe caught one of the stones, setting it skittering away.
Dee watched her go until the dark took her.
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