Cowboy necromancer 4 nov.., p.35
Cowboy Necromancer 4: Novella Compendium: (A LitRPG Apocalypse), page 35
Sterling was pretty sure no one saw them, but if they did, it would look something like Santa and his reindeer gone horribly wrong. This thought spawned another hollow memory: Sterling wished that he knew what Christmas was like.
He had seen the decorations, the lights, the books, and the stockings. He had heard the music too, but didn’t understand its appeal. Theoretically, he could experience Christmas again if he wanted, but there wasn’t really anything to celebrate any longer aside from the fact that everyone was still alive. And that was blessing enough.
Maybe that was something he could do after they dealt with the Godwalkers and December rolled around again. A real Christmas, one with presents and a tree, maybe even some mistletoe.
As he continued on, Sterling wondered what he had given the Sunflower Kid back when she was his son, back when she was named Angel. He imagined that Isabelle would have encouraged him to get a good gift, that he would have liked seeing Angel open them beneath the Christmas tree. Sterling probably liked the Christmas cookies, and he probably went to church on that day as well, not by choice, but to please his wife and encourage Angel to have faith.
Faith in what?
“No telling,” he said as he ashed his cigarette. Manchester touched down onto the beach, the horse transitioning smoothly from the sky to the ground. “Good boy, Pingo.”
It was clear that the sun would set somewhere over the water in the coming hours, but it would be bright. It was already heading that way, rays of light reflecting off the frothy waves as they lashed against the shoreline. They stopped occasionally just to take in the sights. It was nothing like the desert here, where there wasn’t anything like crabs, starfish and kelp scattered across the jagged shoreline, a stark beauty when coupled with the dramatic rock formations that jutted out of the water.
“I could get used to this,” he said at some point, a little too loud. “I really could.”
Somehow, Zephyr heard him. “Did you say that about New Orleans?” she called from above.
“Hell, I could’ve gotten used to that, too.”
“It sounds like someone’s ready to leave New Mexico.”
“Shee-it, Zee, best take them words back if you know what’s good for you.”
“You too, Rox? Damn, why is everyone ganging up on me? I’m just saying, the sound of that ocean, the breeze. Hell, look at them pelicans,” he said as he swept his hand out to a group of birds sailing over the water. “It sure is something else out here. Muy bonita. Sort of peace and quiet I can get used to. Now, the fish, maybe not so much. Unless someone is making fish tacos. So I would definitely have to go back for peppers.”
“Just because I’m going to live here on the coast in a little cabin all by myself don’t mean she will. Kid?”
The Sunflower Kid shook her head.
“See?”
“Now, you’re talking, living that good life. Dang, Rox, you really have me wanting to retire over here.”
The conversation was cut short when Zephyr suddenly lowered to the beach. She shuddered. “Everyone stop.”
“What is it?” Paco asked.
“I saw it up ahead, the centipede. It’s right where the trees meet that cliff.” She pointed toward a spot in the distance. “There.”
Sterling followed Zephyr’s finger to the cliff, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “You sure?”
“Why would I lie about something like that?”
Sterling summoned his grenade launcher. “In that case, y’all, bring out the heavy artillery. Let’s kill this damn thing, and find a nice place to camp on the beach tonight. Make a little fire, sing a little Kumbaya, and fall asleep to the sound of the waves. Kill shot gets the first roasted Big Jim.”
“I think it’s a song. Pretty sure I told you that before, right? Anyway, it don’t matter. And as for the kill shot reward, I’d give out something better than a pepper—not much better than a pepper—but it’s the best I got at the moment.”
“I have chocolate,” Maron said. “And bread from Madrid. We can make something from that.”
“Chocolate and peppers. And bread. Now, you’re talking. But let’s kill that damn centipede first.”
Roxie teleported the group to the side of a cliff, one that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, where waves continued to thrash against the shore. High tide. High tide had nothing to do with the fight that was to come, but Sterling still drew inspiration from the sheer expanse of the ocean and its power as he fired his first grenade into the woods.
Ka-thunk!
The explosion created a cloud of fire and smoke that swelled forward like the tide. It did exactly what Sterling hoped it would do as the centipede came raging out, the monstrosity slapping its body and its myriad legs onto the ground as it batted away bits of fire. It was a true horror, just as large as the serpent amalgamations Sterling had faced before yet with an added grotesqueness. The legs. Seeing them all moving, scuttling across rock and fallen trees, had Sterling’s skin crawling.
Goddamn that thing is ugly, he thought as he focused on its canine-skull. One of the redwood trees close to the shore came alive. It dropped down onto the centipede amalgamation and wrapped around the crazed chilopod’s body, holding it in place. The lower half of the centipede swooshed forward, its legs trying to free itself from being ensnared.
Ratatatatata! Ratatatata!
Roxie laid down cover fire as Zephyr took control of the wind and the flames from Sterling’s initial attack. She turned the fire away from the forest, where it may have continued, and used the fire directly on the insect amalgamations. This had a way of roasting the centipede, which didn’t seem to do anything until Sterling noticed a distinct smell.
“Shee-it, maybe let’s not burn it alive. We’re supposed to camp around here!” he said between shots from Roxie.
“I’ll handle it, then.” The Sunflower Kid took hold of another huge tree and wrapped its enormous truck around the centipede’s body. She ripped the creature in two, the force strong enough to shake the ground around them.
The centipede’s legs kept moving.
“The fucker is still alive?” Paco asked. “How!?”
While Maron and the Chronicler had remained on the beach, Paco had elected to join them in the fight against the centipede, the Hopi youth now with his hands charged and ready to fight.
Sterling aimed his grenade launcher at it again. It didn’t take much mana to use the weapon, but there was a cooldown. “Y’all want me to hit it again?”
“I’ll keep at it!” The Sunflower Kid took hold of the moss and the underbrush. It writhed forward, mirroring the movement of the centipede’s legs as it burrowed into crevices along the two parts of its body.
Soon, Sterling lowered his weapon as well. “Another one bites the dust.” He paused. That wasn’t a phrase he normally said, but he had no idea where it came from. “Welp.”
“Welp, indeed.” Zephyr landed near them. “That was easier than—”
The forest came alive as smaller centipede amalgamations rushed toward them.
They were still large, about twice the length of your average man, but compared to what Sterling assumed was their mother, the baby centipedes were miniscule.
Yet there were a lot of them, and they quickly overwhelmed his group.
Bang! Bang!
By this point, Sterling had switched to his revolver, which seemed to do a fair amount of damage. Roxie continued to gun them down and the Sunflower Kid shredded as many as she could. She also helped Zephyr by forming wooden spikes that allowed the aeromancer to impale several of the little monsters. Paco jumped into the fray as well by wielding heat waves that melted their exoskeletons.
“Goddamn, that’s hot!” Sterling said as he shielded his face. A centipede lifted into the air in front of him just as he sent his revolvers away and returned with his shotgun.
Click-click, boom!
Sterling hadn’t held the sawed-off shotgun properly upon firing it, which forced him backward, his legs spreading wide to stop from falling.
A burst of wind shredded past him, flinging the centipede up and back, where it landed on one of the Kid’s spikes.
“Torch it all, Dad!” the Kid yelled to him.
Pride. Even in the middle of a fight against centipede monsters, Sterling felt the pride rise in his chest from being called Dad, from knowing that in all the calamity of the Reset, the anguish and violence, he’d found a semblance of his life and they were able to work together.
It felt good. It felt damn good.
Sterling sent his shotgun away and went for his grenade launcher again. He fired at the central mass of centipedes and Zephyr took over from there, fanning the flames until the entire area was set ablaze.
His back to the cliff, Sterling glanced to Roxie and nodded. The two jumped off, hovering from there as the fire spread. They were soon joined by Paco and the Sunflower Kid while Zephyr continued to control the fire from above.
“We’re going to have to find another place to camp.”
“Yup,” Sterling told Paco.
“It reeks.”
“Yup.”
“But we’ll still camp on the beach, right? I’ve never done that before.”
“We sure will,” he told Paco. “We sure will.”
Later, after all the centipedes were torched and the fires were put out, they moved a few miles down the coastline and found the perfect spot for the night. Before they did so, Sterling sent a dozen of the dead baby centipedes to his list. Using Death Sense, he also found a number of human bodies, likely from the groups that had tried to take on the centipede before.
He sent these to his list as well. They would be useful in the future.
There was plenty of dry beach here, and the rocks surrounding it provided a great buffer from the winds. They made a fire after Paco dried out some of the wood. It crackled and illuminated the beach and a portion of the silky black waves beyond.
For dinner, they had chocolate that melted on pieces of bread crisped by Paco. Sterling tried to add some pepper to this, and while it had potential, he was the only one that seemed to enjoy it.
“So, who will be prisoner tomorrow?” the Chronicler asked after they had settled around the fire with blankets from their inventory lists. Only Roxie stood, the female gunner off to the side, guarding the group.
“I thought you had volunteered for that,” Sterling told the researcher.
“Me?”
“Kidding, Dusty. I’ll be a prisoner. Me, you, and Paco. Makes the most sense, right? Zephyr, Rox, and the Kid can stay back—”
“You are going to be a prisoner looking like that?” Paco asked.
“Shee-it, what’s wrong with the way I look, son?”
“You look too tough.”
“Welp, in that case, I’ll put my hat away, lose the duster, untuck my shirt. And thanks for the compliment.”
“What do we tell the Jeffersonites?”
“I don’t know. That we just decided to take a stroll through the Redwood National Forest? Kidding, that won’t work. That we were sent here by a Godwalker. That’s actually happened to us before,” Sterling reminded him. “We were just minding our damn business in Nuevo Mexico, and a Godwalker decided to gift us a vacation.”
“You will have to be a bit tamer than you normally are,” Maron pointed out. “No offense.”
“A bit tamer? What the hell is that supposed to mean, amigo?”
“We want them to take us captive, not kill us,” said the Chronicler. “Another thing. We decided that they would take mancers captive, but I’m not a mancer.”
“That part will be easy. You got info. Plenty of info, and if there is any threat of separating the three of us, we’ll kill the bastards then and there.”
“Or,” Paco said, “we’ll refuse to cooperate unless the Chronicler is spared.”
“Probably better. They’ll want the info on the Southwest. Who wouldn’t? They’ll want our mancer powers too. I mean, I don’t want to be forthright and say something like ‘take me to your leader,’ but maybe one of us should,” Sterling suggested.
“We could be the Chronicler’s bodyguards, like he is some sort of warlord in the Southwest.”
Sterling gave Paco a funny look.
“What?”
“Actually, that ain’t a bad idea.” He turned to the Chronicler. “You feel like being a warlord?”
The older man grinned. “I suppose that is something I could get into. I’m guessing I will need to dress a little differently. I do have some of the clothing I am technically supposed to wear around the Oracle, although I never do.”
“Robes and shit?”
“Sure, ahem, robes and shit.”
“I agree with Roxie,” the Sunflower Kid said.
“Zee?”
“Works for me,” Zephyr told Sterling. “We’ll follow behind you all back to their campsite and raise hell once we see you raising hell.”
“Shee-it, ‘raising hell’ is my middle name.”
Sterling looked out to the waves beyond. “A bath in the ocean? Sure, works for me. Sounds like we got ourselves a plan then, amigos. I’d say something like yee-haw, but I ain’t a cowboy.”
.Chapter Six.
Sterling gingerly stepped into the water the next morning.
“Goddang, that’s cold!”
He sent his underwear to his inventory list, took a quick look back to make sure no one was watching him, and moved waist deep into the water. Sterling equipped a bar of soap from his list and scrubbed himself. He used the same soap to lather up his beard, which he was going to shave. But then he remembered that most of the people in Northern California he’d seen so far had beards, at least the men. So he didn’t. But he did trim the beard up a bit.
Once he was done, Sterling lowered into the ocean, breathing deeply as he grew more used to the temperature. Sterling’s foot touched something slimy, a fish or some seaweed. He didn’t know. But he instantly moved his foot and shivered again.
“Damn ocean,” he said as he lifted his hand in the air. He held it up like this for a moment so it could dry, wishing that Zephyr was around to make the process a little faster. Once his hand was dry enough, Sterling summoned a cigarette and sparked it.
A haiku he had written earlier came to him, the words fresh in his mind, perfect now that he was in the water.
Camping by the sea,
Driftwood tales under bright stars,
California dreams.
Sterling knew he looked funny at that moment, up to his shoulders in the ocean smoking a cigarette. But he didn’t care. He was enjoying himself, and once he was done smoking, Sterling washed his hair with that same bar of soap. He slicked his hair back and returned to the shoreline. He came out backward, so as not to give everyone a full show. His clothes appeared on his body, then went away and appeared a couple more times, which was a post-Reset way to dry off.
He eventually returned to the others, who were all seated around a campfire, Sterling now with his hair slicked back and tucked behind his ears, no cowboy hat. No duster either. “Well?” Sterling did a slow turn, his hands out. “Am I the man or what?”
“Are you asking if you look normal?”
“Sure,” he told Zephyr. “Do I look normal enough?”
“Okay, that’s a ‘no’ vote. What about you, Kid?”
She nodded.
“Thatta girl.”
“You look like a regular person to me, at least from New Mexico. The people here seem to have different kinds of clothing,” Paco said. “Puffy jackets and vests. They look different, right? Or is it just me?”
“No, they definitely look different. Their hats too,” Sterling said. “Always wearing ball caps and whatnot.” He turned to the Chronicler. “Well? How do I look?”
“You look fine to me.”
“Maron?”
The technomancer shrugged.
“Okay then, what about your costume?” Sterling asked the Chronicler. “You gonna clean up first?”
“I suppose I could head down to the shoreline for a spell. I’ll be back.”
By the time the Chronicler returned, Sterling had eaten breakfast, which turned out to be a fried egg and a bit of chicken that they had gotten from the people of Crescent City.
“Look at you,” Sterling said to the Chronicler, who now wore white robes. “You clean up nice.”
The older man had combed his thin white hair over to the side, giving him quite the cowlick. It looked ridiculous, but the Chronicler was also dressed like someone who would consider themselves some sort of warlord. Sterling had met plenty of them before, and he wouldn’t be surprised to see a man like this leading a group of badland cutthroats.
The Chronicler cleared his throat. “I suppose I will have to speak in an authoritative way.”
“Do whatever you need to do,” Sterling said, “as long as we make this happen today. I’m guessing we will go ahead, Zee will keep behind us and she’ll be able to monitor us using the wind.”
