Your Servants and Your People

Book 2: The Walkin'

by David Towsey

Genres: Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

No one knows who will return as one of the Walkin'. But everyone agrees it's a curse . . . and there are those who will not suffer the wicked to live. Seven years after Thomas returned as a Walkin', the McDermott family are looking for a new life. Thomas has set his heart on starting a farm near the remote army outpost of Fort Wilson. But there are those who would see all Walkin' dead, and they are slowly closing in.

Release date: November 6, 2014

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

The Pastor adjusted his cassock. It was hot and itchy under the noonday sun. He knocked on the door again, harder this time. It was no surprise they hadn’t heard him, with all that was going on inside. He would wait before knocking once more.

His shaggie was tethered to a rail that ran the length of the house. There was a trough that the animal was drinking from. The sky was clear today, but Pine Ridge got more rain than Barkley. The house was on the outskirts of town. Half a mile or more between neighbours – a good, discreet distance. He pulled at his collar. He’d like to take it off but the Good Lord was watching. Always watching.

The Good Book felt heavy in the Pastor’s hand. He knocked again.

This time he heard movement from inside. Boards creaked and the door swung open. A large woman grimaced at him. She was sweating. Not just from her brow, but her arms were slick all the way from her rolled-up sleeves to her wrists. The sister.

‘You’ve got some nerve,’ she said.

‘I’m here to see Josie.’

‘I know why you’re here. Come to see if it’s got hooves?’

‘That’s—’

‘You’re not coming in. She doesn’t want you here.’

‘You can’t stop me,’ he said.

‘Oh yes I can.’ She planted a meaty fist on the doorframe. Her fingers were stained with blood.

‘If you insist on being unreasonable.’ He drew out a little pistol from his pocket.

She looked from the gun to his face. She went to shut the door, but he wedged his foot in the gap.

‘Go away!’ she bawled.

He pressed the pistol into her gut. Her eyes were as big as hay bales. If he fired, would she even feel it? He should have brought a shotgun.

She stepped back and let him in.

‘Carry both on you, do you?’ she said, nodding to the Good Book.

‘When necessary. Where is she?’

‘Upstairs.’

He got a foot on the first step before she pushed him out of the way. He followed her immense backside. A low moaning drifted down the stairs. The banister was broken. The wood had snapped there, and it bulged outwards in places. One of the uprights had broken off too. Looking at Josie’s sister ahead of him, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what had happened.

At the bedroom door she stopped. She opened her mouth. He still had the pistol and the Good Book in his hands. One or perhaps both made her keep her silence. She led him into the room.

‘Josie, girl, he’s here,’ she said.

Josie was lying in bed, the sheets pulled down below her knees. Her thin nightdress was coloured grey with sweat. It was damp against her; she was a slight girl. She looked up. Her cheeks puffed out and she growled at him.

He put the pistol in his pocket and went to her. He held out a hand, but she slapped it away.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Josie said. She panted between each word, dealing with the heat like a wool-wrangler.

‘I had to come.’

She stopped focusing on him. Her eyes glazed over and she cried out.

The sister huffed and puffed. She put a large pan of water on the bed. ‘If you got to be here, stay out the way,’ she said. She shooed him into a chair in the corner. It had one leg shorter than the rest, which caught him unawares every few minutes. He opened the Good Book. It was difficult to see the words in the gloom. The curtains were drawn, bathing the room in dull red light.

‘“Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to—”’

‘You can stop that right now!’ the sister said. ‘Last thing this room needs is more hot air.’

He forgave her her blasphemous words. There was no helping a soul such as hers. Josie had liked it when he read. She would close her eyes with her head resting on the pillow. He could tell from her breathing that she wasn’t asleep. But Josie didn’t seem to be hearing him right now.

He skipped back a verse. It took all his concentration to focus on the words and not the noises around him. Who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? A high-pitched scream made him look. Josie’s knees were hitched up. Her sister was attending, making soft sounds that weren’t words at all. Josie wailed again and he went back to the Good Book. Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Children. He hadn’t thought on twins. Josie was too small for that, surely? The Good Lord had blessed him in so many other ways it wasn’t inconceivable. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.

He closed the Good Book, his thumb marking his place. Perhaps he’d chosen the wrong chapter? Talk of shutting the womb was not appropriate. He took his thumb out of the book. He mopped his brow with the cuff of his cassock.

The heat was unworldly. With the light and the animal-grunting the room seemed to spin. He held his head in his hands, but it didn’t stop. The noises became worse: guttural curses, heavy moans. The Pastor tried to block them out. He curled in on himself, the Good Book wedged hard against his chest. This was a vision of his judgement. He should have known there would be no forgiveness for what he’d done. Condemned for a fiery eternity. Words he’d spoken so often in church were now his own fate. He begged for the Good Lord’s mercy. He was met with screams.

Piercing, hungry screams. He risked a glance. The sister was holding the child, smeared in blood, its little legs and arms flailing. She wrapped it in cloth and passed it to Josie, who smiled weakly down at her baby. He fell off the chair onto his knees. He clutched the Good Book between his hands and shuffled to the bedside.

‘I knew it would be a boy,’ Josie said. She ran a finger gently across his forehead and down his nose.

‘A boy,’ he said.

Her hair was flattened by sweat, the normal bounce of her dark waves gone. She looked beyond him. Her smile was not for him, or anyone.

The sister opened the curtains. Bright sunlight blinded him. Tears came but he didn’t weep as the Good Lord washed hotly over him. He’d been saved by his son.

‘He shall be called Obadiah,’ he said.

The sister snorted. ‘He’ll be called no such thing.’

‘Call him what you will, wench. Before the Good Lord, his name will be Obadiah. His servant.’

Bryn watched the other wagon crawl along the track. He was squinting, but he couldn’t see the driver, not properly. It didn’t get closer and it didn’t get further away. It stayed the same size. The roof canvas blurred into the ground as the yellow earth rose to the horizon. Bryn licked his lips and tasted salt. A speck settled on his hand, then circled, like it was searching for a good spot to sit. Won’t find one out here. Not here. Not in this wagon. That one over there, maybe.

He didn’t swat at the speck. He only had to wait, and not long. The wheel he was sitting over hit a rock and everything bounced. The speck flew out beyond the canvas curtain. Bryn went back to watching the other wagon.

‘There’s women,’ John said. ‘Two of them. Isn’t that something?’

It was, but it didn’t need saying. Saying it made it somehow less true. But John was staring at him. ‘Two of them?’ Bryn said.

‘Two.’

There were four of them sitting on crates in his wagon: Bryn, John, Silas and George. Four men, and two women in the other wagon. Bryn took a slug from his water-skin. The feel of it in his mouth quickly became a memory. He plugged the top, pushing until his fingertips turned white. John was still staring.

‘You’re married?’ Bryn said.

John’s face screwed up all sour. ‘Why’d you have to say a thing like that?’ He sat back, resting his head against the canvas. It stretched behind him, changing colour, making a dark halo. Saint John. He belched under his breath and loosened one of the buttons around his gut.

The other wagon disappeared as they went around a bluff. Bryn counted the seconds. At seventeen he could see their animal and at nineteen he saw the full wagon. The sun was sharp and his eyes started to water. The spring air was so thin the light cut right through, but he still looked out. He was bored of John’s face and his large gut, bored of the profiles of Silas and George, the patchy royal blue of their jackets, the tapping of their boots on the wooden boards.

For something else to count he marked the bushes they passed. Short and full of thorns, they seemed angry at being alive. They covered the ground in muted explosions, not the full covering of grass in a field. Bryn struggled to picture grass or ground that was anything other than yellowed and cracked; it stretched out for miles. The bushes were everywhere. When the land fell away from the track, so did the bushes. They clung to the bluffs, so high it hurt Bryn’s neck to count them, but he did. He was peering up, the count at ninety-two, when the Lieutenant pulled up behind the wagon on his courser, his pistol drawn.

‘Gentlemen, you are all dead,’ he said.

Bryn blinked. John didn’t move.

‘About time,’ Silas said.

‘If even a speck farts his way across this verandah of yours, I expect four trained muzzles on it. Clear?’

‘Yes, Lieutenant,’ they said.

‘Bryn, give me your water-skin.’

‘Lieutenant?’

‘Your water-skin, boy. Think of this as a hold-up.’ The Lieutenant grinned at his own joke. He tipped his hat up with his pistol, in the style of a bandit. Bryn didn’t grin. He handed over his water, suddenly thirsty. The Lieutenant turned his courser and headed down the track towards the other wagon. The courser’s shiny, taut rump became smaller and smaller.

Bryn picked up his rifle. The others didn’t. That was fine by him. If a muzzle did go poking out of the wagon it would be his and he wouldn’t be rubbing down the Lieutenant’s courser that night or any other for a while. That animal was a biter.

He had to roll up his sleeves – his uniform was too big. His cuffs had to be folded over three times before he could see his wrists. The jacket bulged down his body but not in the way John’s did. It was heavy, but Bryn didn’t get so hot. George had stitched up the hem on Bryn’s trousers for him. He had tripped in front of the Lieutenant when they were loading the wagon. The others didn’t laugh. They didn’t help him up either. The Lieutenant gave the order in between questioning the space left in the wagon and chivvying John to haul quicker: ‘Stitch those hems, George.’ Bryn couldn’t meet George’s eye when he handed the trousers over. Not trusted to stitch his own hems. Bryn returned to his bush-counting, this time ready for any ambush.

*

‘You know the best part about this posting?’ Silas said. He crouched between Bryn and John and draped his arms out the back of the wagon. ‘We won’t see another gun-toting prick the whole eight months.’

‘Just you pricks,’ John said.

‘Just you pricks,’ Silas said. ‘And it’s no great surprise. Who, being in charge of his faculties, would want to come out here?’

‘Someone must do, otherwise there wouldn’t be a garrison,’ Bryn said.

Silas scratched at his stubble. Everyone else had stubble and everyone else scratched their faces a lot. ‘Not true. Fort Wilson, if I can call it by its proper title, is pre–emp–tor–ary.’

‘Where’d you overhear that?’ John said.

Silas spat out the back. ‘When we was loading. We’re there in case something worth being there for turns up.’ Silas spat again. How did he have that much spare? ‘Which suits me. I’ve been doing just that my whole life.’

Bryn didn’t understand, but the wagon went quiet after that so it must have meant something. Three of them stared out the back as the sun went down. The land turned pale, almost white, and the stars came out. The Lieutenant appeared in the dusk a few hundred yards away. He took his time coming up to the wagon. Bryn let him get to within ten feet before thrusting his rifle forward. The Lieutenant came closer. Shaking his head, he tossed Bryn’s water-skin in the back and then rode ahead.

*

Their wagon stopped. Bryn rubbed his numb backside. Another day on the crate and there would be nothing but bone.

John woke up and stretched. ‘Think there’ll be a bar this stop?’ he said.

Silas whistled. ‘This ain’t no one-bar town. You got your pick. How do you like them, Bryn? Buxom? Blonde? Or like I do – cheap?’

John put his hand daintily over his heart. ‘Bryn Marvington is not the kind of fellow to frequent a bawdy tavern. He has a preference for farming stock. Isn’t that right, Marvington?’

The others laughed. Bryn was ready to punch John’s wobbling face, but instead he just said, ‘That’s right.’

It was his fault for telling John about Gloria. He and Bryn had shared a tent during their last posting and one night John had wanted to talk. Normally he fell asleep with his boots still on, but he’d started sharing and didn’t want to stop. All kinds of things about his wife and the women he’d bought and the places he’d drunk and the men he’d killed. John only remembered two men – both because they had red hair. ‘Do you think that’s unlucky?’ he’d said. Bryn hadn’t known. He’d felt John squirming beside him. It seemed to matter a lot to the burly soldier. John had been in battles. Bryn hadn’t.

‘All out!’ the Lieutenant called. They all stepped down gingerly. Bryn’s legs were so stiff his knees felt locked straight. The wind pushed his baggy uniform tight against his shins and ribs. The air was fresh, like ice in his lungs after the fuzz of riding under canvas with three other men. He gulped at it until he felt cold from the inside out. They were high up on a bluff looking out over miles of pearly scrubland. The track they’d climbed wound gradually down and out of sight. Bryn couldn’t recall going up. His head felt heavy and his eyes were gritty. He had to turn away from the view. He wasn’t good with heights.

‘Tents up,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Bryn, take Lester.’ He handed Bryn the courser’s reins.

‘But I—’

The Lieutenant was already walking away. Bryn yanked hard on the bridle, which Lester didn’t like. The courser stamped at the ground and flicked his head, wrenching Bryn’s arm. He almost lost his grip. He glared right into the beast’s big black eye. He led Lester away from the tents and dropped the reins. Someone had already unloaded the hobbling posts, so Bryn picked them up. Lester twitched with the urge to bolt. He was struggling against years of training; dropped reins meant a Lester-statue. No other option. Somewhere in that long head of his he knew he should be half a mile away.

‘Can’t do much about that, can we?’ Bryn said. Lester nipped at him, but it was half-hearted. If the courser had really wanted to, he could have taken a few fingers. Bryn dug two holes in the hard-packed dirt, drove in the hobbling posts, then looped Lester’s reins over. He went back to the wagon for the feed and the brush. The tents were up and a fire going. The breeze cooled the sweat on his forehead and he shivered. He busied himself brushing whilst Lester ate from the nosebag.

The man who drove the wagon, Travis, came over, leading their shaggie. He was shorter than Bryn but twice as broad. It was all muscle by the looks of it. Travis hobbled the shaggie and strapped on a nosebag.

Bryn was rubbing down Lester’s back legs when the courser decided to shit. The sound of it hitting the ground was like a series of quick slaps. He waited for Travis to make a joke, but the squat man just patted the shaggie and went over to the fire. Bryn finished up and followed him.

There was a pot over the fire with beans in it. Dried meat was passed around. Everyone except John and the Lieutenant were sitting as close as they could. It got cold out here, much colder than at home. Gloria would be at a hearth with her four brothers – her mother was bedridden. She would be warm. There’d be conversation and smiles and games. Bryn chewed his meat and took his bowl of beans without a word. George handed him an extra bowl and motioned to John. Another chore. Just because he was the youngest. Just because he didn’t sigh when he sat down or rub his back when he stood or complain about his knees. He took the bowl over, pretending that someone would do the same for him if he wanted to waste time staring at nothing. There was nothing to see but scrub and dirt and stars. And a camp.

Bryn passed John the food and stared down at the small orange light of the other wagon’s fire. His stomach suddenly dropped to somewhere around his ankles. He took a step back.

‘Long way down, isn’t it?’ John said. He hadn’t touched his beans.

‘Three paces and you’re gone.’

‘Easy as that.’

‘That’s what bothers me,’ Bryn said.

‘Still, two women.’

Bryn left him to whatever thoughts those women were conjuring. The others were rolling tobacco. Bryn didn’t smoke, but he joined them. He liked the smell.

‘Does this farm-girl have a name?’ George said.

‘She does.’

George laughed. Smoke came out of his nose.

‘Tell us about her,’ Travis said. Bryn looked at each of them, trying to find a smirk. But they were calm by the fire, loose faces and tired eyes. Even Silas was still. They just wanted a story. So Bryn told them about Gloria. Her brothers. Her sick mother. Her father, with his hands the size of spades and just as rough. Their farm.

‘What do they keep?’ Travis said.

‘Woollies mostly. And some neats for milk.’

Travis nodded.

Bryn explained what they grew. What was good and what was bad. How Gloria had a good eye for the weather. She was good with shaggies – they didn’t need a courser, though she’d always wanted to ride one. If he became an officer he would take a courser back and let her. No one laughed at the idea. They nodded as if that was a sensible thing to do. He described their house: big, with a lot of bedrooms. But it would never be his and Gloria’s – not whilst her brothers were still around. No, he wanted to build a house for them. And their children.

‘Where do th. . .