As Lenny guided Jackmaw Yapyap’s spirit, Krav was miles away over the horizon in a tent with a raider and a warlord. Greenblatt turned down Mac’s offering of mock root slivers and produced an intoxicant native to his home territory of Kiva Noon. It was some sort of plant that had been ground down and processed into a dense puck. Greenblatt unfolded it from a cloth and passed it to Mac to inspect. She seemed pleased, if not eager to try it. Krav flipped it over in his hand, trying to understand how to ingest it. He went to take a bite.
“I wouldn’t eat it,” Greenblatt warned. He was setting up some sort of machinery, presumably for the puck. “It won’t taste very good, and you’ll be too high to move for a few days.”
Krav shrugged and passed it back to the warlord. Greenblatt screwed a hose to the contraption. It looked like a vase with a small slot for the puck at the bottom. Greenblatt stuck the puck into the slot and lit it. It burned evenly, releasing the smoke in a slow stream. It travelled up the vase, collecting at the top.
“They call this downer back in town. Let it burn for a bit, then we take turns smoking from the hose.”
The downer burned until its green and brown colors turned black and ashen grey. For the first time, Greenblatt removed his leather mask. The other two understood why he kept it on, now. It was hard to keep a low profile with looping tribal tattoos covering your cheeks and chin. He sucked from the hose with dry lips, held his breath for a moment, then blew out a thin plume of smoke. He passed it to Mac.
The girl did the same, but she was much greedier with her intake. She inhaled until her chest rose and her stomach thinned back into her spine. The smoke caught in her chest, and she ripped the hose from her mouth as she coughed it up. Bursts of smoke escaped her lips and nose as she threw the hose to Krav.
Krav started by wiping the spit from the mouthpiece. He didn't like the way Mac was sputtering. As her face turned red and her breath grew more hitched and labored, he had some second thoughts. “Is this safe?”
“I should have warned you two not to take too big of a hit for your first time. She’ll be fine,” Greenblatt said. He offered her a skin of water and she drank it in small gulps between coughs until she was able to calm herself.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I think I’m feeling it.”
That was a good sign. Krav still had his doubts that Greenblatt wouldn’t smoke them into stupidity so that he could fashion them into models 003 and 004 while they were too high to protest. He watched the warlord and Mac sink into themselves and relaxed a little.
The downer tasted like sweet corn. Krav filled his lungs with it slowly, the way Greenblatt had. When it started to burn his chest, he copied him again, letting it out in a calm and collected manner.
“There you go,” Greenblatt smiled. He took the hose and had another hit himself.
Krav didn’t feel it at first. He took the hose again when it was passed back and he chanced another hit. The regret was almost immediate. As he exhaled, he could feel the edges of his eyes dim and blur. His mind slowed until he felt himself detach from reality. The thoughts in his head took all of his focus to sort into anything deemed coherent. He slumped into the sand, readying himself for the increase in intensity.
Greenblatt was laughing as he took the hose back and took his third hit. He didn’t even bother offering it to the girl again. One look into her squinting eyes and he knew she was wasted. She was staring off at the ceiling, her face full of concern as if she was lost in thought. “You alive over there?” Greenblatt asked her.
“Yeah,” she smiled. She sank back into the sands, taking another leg from the carpet beast when the warlord offered it to her.
Krav felt the room shift and spin. He knew it was all in his head, but it felt like a constant, rolling earthquake with a miniscule magnitude was rumbling the tent. The flickering flame didn’t dance, rather pulsed and ached. He couldn’t take in a full lung’s worth of air, and it began to worry him. He snatched the bundle of linens that contained Rufus's head and hugged them to his chest. To his increasing anxiety, the bundle stirred in his arms.
Greenblatt and Mac were chatting about something. Krav couldn’t hear them over the ringing in his ears and the voice calling his name. He was too high, and paranoia was taking hold. The linens shifted again, this time audibly churning its linens into Krav's robes. Krav snapped to look at it, sick to find that one of Rufus’s blackened ocular orbits was staring out at him from beneath the fabrics.
“Rufus?” Krav asked. He touched the wasting skull, felt the jagged growth in the eyes. They were warm, but he didn’t know if it was due to the effects of the downer or if the skull was actually occupied. There was a rhythmic heartbeat in Krav’s fingertips, and he imagined it might be the master’s trapped within the bone. Images of Rufus’s soul left on earth and clinging tightly to his physical form filled Krav’s head. In life he had been so wise, and wisemen were often detached from this world in ways that didn’t require them to rely on their flesh. He wondered if Rufus was so beyond this place that he’d leave Lenny and Krav alone in the world. Maybe not. He rubbed his thumb over the eye socket.
“Krav.”
He turned and saw Mac was showing something from her satchel off to Greenblatt. It was a pouch of something, and he took it and smelled it, making an unpleasant face as he did so. They were wrapped in conversation, unwilling to call out for him.
“Krav!”
He didn’t want to look at where he thought it was coming from. He felt the black orbits on him, could almost even feel the ghostly eyes within them as well. His intoxicated brain led him to dark thoughts of his master’s undead soul come back to haunt him for getting high rather than finding his brother, and a wave of guilty nausea caught in his throat. It called his name again, and there was no denying who the voice belonged too. Krav fully unwrapped the skull. “Rufus?”
“I knew you could hear me. What have you gotten your hands on?”
Krav looked back at the other two again. He was having a bad trip, but it was worth it to talk to Rufus again, even if it meant he was hallucinating it. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “It’s called downer. It comes from Kiva noon. What are you doing here?”
“You have my skull, you fool!” It bothered Krav that the jaw didn’t move. It was like the voice was thrumming from within the bone itself. “I can’t move on without my remains being destroyed or buried. What the hell are you doing?”
That was a load of horseshit. Krav knew that because it was a superstition he himself believed in. He had heard tales of ghosts unable to move on because of the pettiest reasoning. An unfinished task, a violent death, even something as stupid as leaving a campfire burning could prevent the soul from moving on in many superstitions. The fact that Rufus was affirming something as foolish as that was proof enough, this wasn’t real. But it kept talking.
“You’re getting high while Lenny’s being held captive by that psychopath. I raised you better than that.”
“It’s one night. I’m going back to Agua Fria in the morning, and I’ll find him.” Krav massaged his temples and tried not to look Rufus in the eyes.
“He isn’t in Agua Fria. Didn’t you hear me when I said captive? Jackmaw Yapyap took him.”
“No, he didn’t. That scab head killed you. If Lenny ran into him, he’d be dead too.” He wanted to promise Rufus that he’d bury his little brother if that was the case, but that meant admitting to the possibility that he was also dead, and he wasn’t prepared for that. “Once I find him, we’re going straight to the Gordo clan and I’m going to be the one to cut Jackmaw’s head off.”
“He just guided Jackmaw’s soul. He’s enduring so much pain, and he doesn’t know why. If you’re really looking for him, your best bet is to head west. Take the girl and have her guide you to her clan.”
Krav shook his head. “Don’t be stupid to me. The real Rufus would have a plan. If you’re some sort of desert demon or whatever, you can get lost.”
There was a long pause before Rufus spoke again. At first, Krav was pleased to believe that he had banished some sort of spiritual deceiver. He sat back with a smile and listened to Mac and Greenblatt talk about their various chemical concoctions and growth strategies, the voice of the damned returned. “Where do you think you are?”
Krav looked around the tent, the canvas walls and flashing flame swirling like a muddy riverbed as he did so. The downer was earning its name. It made him feel trapped in his own body. muscles in his back and legs refused to move and his impaired vision was worsening. The other two in the tent were swirling monstrosities that giggled and crunched on the feast of carpet beast legs. The only thing that didn’t curve and distort was that terrible skull, and Krav avoided looking directly at it. “I won’t lie to you, Rufus. I have no idea.”
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“You are a terrible anchor, Krav. Your soul doesn’t possess the weight to hold another person in place during their readings. It’s why you could never become a seer.”
“Thanks.”
“But…” the voice started. Its matter-of-fact tone was uncannily reminiscent of the old master. Krav hated how much it sounded like him, overbearing and all. “You can reach depths most are incapable of, even after years of meditation and training. You don’t just reach the veil of souls. You’ve pierced it, poked a finger through the other side and found me staring back.”
That wasn’t possible. It was the remains of a conversation they had recently had, one that barely weighed on Krav’s mind. Something smacked him hard in the face and fell to his lap. It was a spiny leg.
“Who are you talking to?” Greenblatt laughed as he chewed his food. The shape of him was a horizontal blob that stretched across the floor and roiled with the dance of cast shadows.
Krav fought to pull himself back to reality. The skull was still talking to him, and he found himself caught between conversations. “It’s nobody.”
“How do you like the downer? Better than mock root?” He asked. Krav didn’t know which one he liked better, but he knew which he preferred right now. Mock root didn’t make the dead talk.
“How long does this last? I think… I think Mac and I are heading west once we sober up.”
Mac’s blobby shape stood, and Krav had to look away. As she rose, she was shaped into the form of a monstrous entity that bent and curved at inhuman angles. His stomach swirled, and suddenly he didn’t want to see another carpet beast for the rest of his life. He could hear the girl’s footsteps, feel them shifting through the sand as she approached. “West? You’re ready to join the clan!”
She touched him, and he flinched. The skull fell to the sand and stared up at her. The black orbits were like those of a gorgon, and she froze beneath Rufus’s gaze. Maybe she could hear him too.
The effects of downer seemed to be negative on everyone but the warlord. Mac dropped to her knees and covered her head as if to brace for an explosion. The form Krav saw made his skin crawl as she shivered and writhed. Then he realized she was crying. Whatever she saw in Rufus turned her trip into a spiraling nightmare, and it was contagious. Krav looked at the skull again. It shifted, moving to stare at him. He jumped back, “Shit!”
“What’s going on?” Greenblatt said. His shape was climbing the walls of the tent as he rose to his feet. There was a sound at the flap of the tent. One of Greenblatt’s bodyguards had peeked inside to check on their master. Krav nearly leapt out of his skin when he saw him.
The bodyguard didn’t meld with the desert behind him. Instead, Krav could see him for what he was. The cloth bandages that wrapped him were still on, but the camouflage allowed Krav’s sight to pierce them and reveal the blasphemies beneath. Flesh knitted together with wires and plated metals. A head without a jaw, its skin flayed off with blank eyes staring out. Two yellowing plastic bags inflated and deflated. Internal organs were replaced with switchboards and fuses. Whirring gears and hydraulics moved the body like a puppet. Still, those eyes moved, found their master, flicked to Krav, and stayed on the boy, piercing him with cold intensity as they waited for an order.
Krav pushed himself away from the creature. He wanted to avert his gaze, but he couldn’t. It was staring right at him. He was backing away through the tent, knocking aside Rufus’s skull and Mac as he went. When his hands touched the burning coals of the campfire, he still didn’t stop. Something scooped him up and held him away from the embers. His hands pulsed with pain.
“It’s alright!” Greenblatt was laughing as he laid him on his back. “It happens! It’s just a bad trip. I have the remedy, don’t worry.”
Greenblatt was fiddling with something. Krav saw it once as a pouch, then again as a vial, and at one point a stone. It changed form in his hand. Mac was still holding her knees to her chest and sobbing. The boy stared up at the warlord, the tattoos on his face wriggling out at him like tendrils. He smiled down at Krav as he hooked a finger in his mouth and dripped something down his throat. Reflexively, the boy swallowed.
“There we go! It’ll be all over soon.”
Krav tried to burp it up, to spit it out, but he was slipping into sleep. First the muscles in his face went cold and numb, spiderwebbing down the nerves in his neck and throat. Soon his body went limp beneath him. As his vision darkened, he watched the smile on Greenblatt’s face grow, and Mac’s screams grow louder. Rufus was calling to him somewhere distantly, then he was asleep.
The sun had risen by the time they woke up. Krav was safely bundled near one tent wall, Mac on the opposite. The fire had died out, but its warmth persisted into the early morning. The warlord was outside somewhere, talking to his bodyguards and ordering them around like laborers. Krav could hear them now, their mechanical bits grinding and whirring as they moved. He hadn’t been able to hear that before. Had the downer deepened his perception?
He didn’t care, either way. He was just happy that Greenblatt hadn’t gutted them and added to his collection of corpse puppets. With the high long behind him, he felt much better about the world. The experience felt cleansing, even if painful, like a hot shower in boiling water. He patted himself down, just to be sure no new augmentations had been forced in place while he slept. His hands felt a lump within his robes, and his heart ached all over again.
Rufus’s skull didn’t say a word to Krav, and he wasn’t sure he preferred it that way. Under the effects of the camouflage, he felt ridiculed, seen in ways he didn’t want to be perceived in. Judged. Lenny was his top priority, it always had been, but a night of high spirits and tasty food had momentarily blinded him. It must have been the feeling of inadequacy within him that triggered an underlying anxiety, personifying the skull and sending an evening of pleasure into one of nightmares.
Or…
Krav shook the skull for good measure. Perhaps he could wake up the spirit within like a genie in a bottle. He rubbed the forehead, slapped the cheekbones, even stuck his fingers into the rough, blackened crystals of the eye sockets. Nothing. It was all a dream, and a terrible one at that.
Mac stirred, but she didn’t awaken. The girl was curled up, the fabric from her torn robes sticking out of her satchel. Krav figured since she was partially responsible for the raid on Agua Fria, the least she could do was give Rufus a home. He snatched the fabric and used it to secure the skull to his waist, then nudged her with his foot.
“Wake up. We’re leaving.”
The girl grumbled and tightened into herself. For a moment, while she was stuck in peaceful sleep, she reminded him of his brother. When she wasn’t awake, her features softened to a point she was almost endearing. It was only for a moment, though. Krav noticed, shoved the thought from his mind, and gave her another kick.
“Come on!”
“Why?” she asked. Her eyes struggled to peel halfway open, then they flitted back shut. She tossed herself onto her back and splayed her body out like a starfish. He saw her muscles tensing like she was about to get up, then she relaxed again.
“We’re going west, remember? You’re taking me to the Gordo clan so I can kill Jackmaw.”
“Okay,” she said. The mention of her clan brought a smile to her face. “Five more minutes.”
Krav took one of the coals from the fire. It still smoldered with an orange glow, and it was hot to the touch. He placed it on one of her open palms and waited. At first, she squeezed it like it was loving hand of a mother, smiling her sleepy ecstasy and curling her fingers around it gingerly. Then her eyes popped open as the heat began to burn her palm, and she flung the coal at Krav.
“What the hell! I said five more minutes. You can’t wait five minutes to go west?”
Krav snatched her wrist. Mac’s sunburned skin was a darkening pink in her hand where the coal was. He pulled her so close, their foreheads and noses collided with each other. “I can’t wait another second. Your clan kidnapped my little brother.”
Mac pulled her arm away, and they stared at each other for a second. Her eyes burned with something like anger, and Krav thought for sure that she’d smack him in the face. He braced for an open palm, or even a fist, but only her nostrils flared, and she turned and grabbed her bag. She stood, slinging it over one shoulder and bolting out of the tent.
In the midmorning brightness, Greenblatt was watching as the two bodyguards loaded up his pack beast with their travel supplies. The only thing missing was the tent, but now that the other two were up, that too could be secured. The warlord waved to them as they stormed out of the tent like an angry couple. First the girl, stomping across the sand and holding her satchel tight to her hips like it might be stolen. Then followed the boy, who was slower, more methodical. He let the tent flap close before catching up to the girl. They both approached Greenblatt, annoyance on their faces already.
“We’re going west,” Mac said. She tossed her bag up onto the pack beast and began to climb it.
“Kiva Noon is another day east. I think we should at least make a stop there for any supplies we might need.”
“No,” Krav said. He looked to the two bodyguards, waiting to see if their innards might reveal themselves as they had the night before. The downer had apparently given him some sort of temporary sight, but the machine-spliced limbs and organs were tucked away beneath the thin bandages. He could still hear their whirring gizmos within their spidery bodies, and it sent a chill up his spine. He wanted to make it up the pack beast as quickly as possible, away from the defiled flesh. There wasn’t a spot for him, so he took Greenblatt’s plush cushion between its shoulders. “Jackmaw Yapyap is west.”
“And do you think the Gordo clan will just let you walk into their territory and cut the head off of their warlord? You’ve seen their weaponry. You and your axe don’t stand a chance.”
“What axe?”
Greenblatt moved to a trunk located on the back of his pack beast. It was a large wooden crate that looked like it would take two men to lift. Inside, a jumbled arsenal of rusted and sun-bleached weaponry threatened to spill out. Sitting on top of the scrap weapons was the saw-tooth axe that Krav had used to murder the two merchants in Agua Fria. The Greenblatt tossed it to him, and he caught it awkwardly.
“Mac said it belonged to you.”
Krav held it, looking over the craftsmanship. It still had dried blood on it from the battle two days prior and it stank of carrion flesh. The hungry teeth were like the torn away jaw of a monster. Holding it in his hands, he didn’t miss his stick.
“If we stop by Kiva Noon, I bet we can fashion you a scabbard for it. It’ll make it easier to travel with.”
“It doesn’t have to be easier to travel with,” Krav said, but when he tried to find a spot to rest it on his garb, he realized it was too big to pocket, too long to tie to his waist, and too uneven a weight to drape over one shoulder.
Greenblatt watched him. “An easy journey makes for an easy arrival. You need to spare as much energy as you can before you meet with Jackmaw, otherwise you’ll find yourself winded upon your first confrontation.”
There was some wisdom in his words. It reminded Krav of something Rufus might say. He was going to agree with Greenblatt, tell him the journey to Kiva Noon might be worthwhile after all, then he smelled something. It was a sickly-sweet aroma that stuck to the back of his throat. From atop the pack beast, Mac was enjoying a rolled cigarette full of something Krav had never tried before. She was sinking into the back of the pack beast, and her eyes looked far away from either of the other two.
“What is that?” Krav demanded.
“Not for you, that’s what it is.”
Krav clawed over the back of the beast, riling it up and demanding some of the mystery drug she had. Greenblatt gave the order, and his bodyguards began to disassemble the tent. The journey back to Kiva Noon would be remarkably uneventful, but when they arrived, the warlord Albert Ibram Ao Dominus-Greenblatt would be welcomed with a concerning surprise.
