Jen sat with a blank look on her face, staring at Carol. The awkward silence growing deeper as the gears turned in Jen’s mind at the audacity of the offer.
“Oh fuck that shit, I’m not leaving you.” She scoffed.
“Guys, I can’t put you all at risk. I can’t take the offer. I can’t risk my life trusting that asshole and being his personal servant for building future weapons at the price of what little mobility and freedom I have left, and I won’t risk your lives to do that.”
“So you’ll risk Hudson’s life but me and Tom can fuck off and be safe? No. I’m your best friend, and your only friend, You’ve always been there for me, I’m not playing safe by letting Hudson fake kidnap you and run for it. Primavera can stick his offer up his ass, we’ll fight it out. Out of the two of us, I’m the one who stays and fights and does the dumb shit instead of the safe options, you think I’m going to just let you go alone now? No. And why is Hudson allowed to die for you?” Jen asked as the gang gathered around the table.
“Cuz I’m in love with her.” He said proudly. Jen chuckled at the notion.
“No you’re not. You’ve been sneaking looks at MY ass since we got here, you’re not in love with Carol.”
“Well that was my only good bluff, truth is I just too much stubborn pride and chivalry in me to pass an opportunity to kill some of these rich dicks before I die of old age. You two kids have a life left, go live one. Let the old bastard die a hero and a martyr and get all the glory.” Hudson smirked. Tom looked at him with an annoyed squint.
“Starin at her ass?” Tom grumbled.
“Oh hell I’m old not dead, like you’re any better?” he scoffed.
“Guys, chill. Hudson, of course you were. Tom, get used to that, everyone stares at my ass. Either make a move or don’t, but regardless, everywhere we go people are going to be looking at my ass. That’s just a fact. Now I’m not saying or hinting that you can claim this ass, but this ass is following Jen to hell and back, unless we’re already here, and not going back. So you can either follow it or leave, and do your thing. Nobody will blame you or think less of you for living your life. I’m not going to act like if you risk your life for the team I’m just gonna marry you or anything, so don’t be stupid unless you wanna be part of this team. There’s a lot of women out there who would be happy to have a guy like you, and settle down and have 20 kids or whatever they do here, so the smart thing would be to go find that.” She made very clear.
“Respectfully, Jen there ain’t nobody like you and what I do with my life is my decision, stupid or not. Now you aim to get yourself killed with your wild ways and your stubbornness and frankly that’s what makes you different and why you need someone watching your ass, I mean guarding your, watching out for you when you…do something stupid. So nobody’s leaving the team. This team is all we got and we all stick together and fight together. Cavalrymen ever leave a man behind enemy lines, never run from a fight to save their skin when a friend is down and bad. So saddle up, We’re all in this war till it ends us or we end it.” Tom said firmly as Billy plopped his rifle down on the table.
“And I will pretend I never met you when you leave, and not get killed over something stupid, when I have a wife and home.” He said looking at Hudson. “So I carved another gunsmiths name on my rife and removed my brass stock plate. This was never my gun, I’m insulted you would think I do such terrible work, look at all these file marks on the tusk. Whoever made this did not have pride in their work.” Billy finished, sliding the freshly scuffed and altered rifle across the table at him.
“You givin me your gun, Billy?” Hudson asked. “Why, because mine got shot?”
“No. Hudson you are a liar and a thief who needed a good gun and took it from someone while they slept. Probably the same man you robbed of these scopes and these boxes of shells. The nerve you have stealing from a man letting you stay in the safety of their home. It’s shameful. I hope the man you took this from is rewarded and prosperous for the inconvenience you’ve caused him. But if you use that rifle to Kill rich white men, and one of them happens to be Lee Buchanan, someone should let me know. That gun is worth a thousand dollars. Some people would pay that money to hear that he was dead. I would love to inform them.” He said coldly.
“There’s some backstory there ain’t it, Billy?” Hudson asked.
“No. Why would there be?” I don’t know any of you or him personally. I just like the idea of rich white men getting shot by poor people, and that man in particular just annoys me.”
“Cant repeat a story I don’t know, from a man I never robbed. Can’t tell you who I stole the gun from, cuz he was asleep when I stole it from his wagon. Gotcha.” Hudson winked.
“Stop acting strange, please leave my house and do not steal any of my horses on the way out. The two striped in the back of the barn are too young to pull a wagon so nobody in town has seen them pull one. The young stallions get out and run all the time. Wolves get one every season. They would be easier to lose then my valuable red mare. And take this terrible smelling alcohol with you.” He said tossing the bottle to Hudson. “Whoever made this should be ashamed to sell it. It smells like wolf piss and hair. Probably strong enough to either scare them off or attract them.” He said with a stern look, Hudson admiring the brown liquid the color of Jen’s hair, which seemed oddly more blonde that night. “Leave. All of you fugitives. Take your stolen gun and your rotten liquor with you and never come back, or I’ll be ready with my gun.” He said nodding and heading to the bedroom.
“So this is what you people in timber call Horses?” carol asked, riding behind Hudson on the saddle of a lumbering 4 legged animal twice the mass of a horse and covered in thick wooly fur. A sort of trunk dangled from it’s face, under the 4 reflective yellow eyes.
“Only horse I ever knew. They different where you come from?” Hudson asked.
“Just slightly.” Carol sighed nervously as the animal growled and yawned, baring its 3 inch fangs and jet black tongue, strange trunk still sniffing the snow for predators or food.
“So why are we going to the ball of we’re not taking the deal?” Jen asked as tom nervously guided the animal.
“Because Prima’s got eyes on us if we run. We run we die, So I wanna die on a full belly standin over Fredric Prima’s shot up corpse in some fancy warm mansion, not shot in the back in the cold. We’re takin the deal. We’re just changing our minds after that when he don’t expect it as much. It’s called bullshittin, honey. You look em in the eye and smile and say yes sir, and grin like a good bitch, easier to shoot em in the back when they walk away thinking they own ya. See these rich pricks Like Prima think Honor and your word is golden, and only people with gold can break their word. Poor folks like me have a code. He just don’t know my code has a part in it where you get to lie to your enemies to get the upper hand. I like it when they’re stupid and think I’m honest. So we’re sure as hell goin to the banquet dinner and makin deals. And then when we got all our enemies under one roof who happen to be each others enemies too, we just start changing the rules and maybe take down a couple of them on the way. I don’t like being hunted by every asshole with a 5 thousand dollar gun one at a time, never knowin when they’ll show up. I wanna get em all in the same place and take em head on, maybe get some of them shooting at each other, just get the whole place a-jumpin. That’s how you throw a party.” He grinned.
“We’re all gonna die at this party, aren’t we?” Jen asked.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Definitely.” He nodded.
“Tom, I lied. Next time we stop for the night we’re having sex, get your head in the game, I want good sex before I die, and you’ll fight better for me after that.” She muttered.
“Yes ma’am.” He nodded, trying to suppress the urge to grin before remembering he would die shortly after and the suppression became easier.
A dark room echoed with the sound of screams and the hiss of steam. Lee Buchanan sat on a wooden throne-like seat, his leather jacket covered in copper inlay as a flexing statement alongside the statement of the screaming prisoners. His spiked and frosty grey beard and hair meticulously evened as a man holding a tusk needle carefully applied more ink and began touching up the tattoos around his face in an almost metallic gunmetal grey and black. He took a casual drag from his pipe and blew 2 jets of smoke from his teeth, like an angry bull in the cold, snorting steam before a charge.
Two nervous looking figured stood before him like jesters for a king.
“Love what you’ve done with the place.” Said a scruffy bearded man, a foot shorter, skinny and tattooed everywhere visible except the face, he adjusted his glasses under the hood and looked to the side at his woman, a scrawny blonde with sunken eyes and equally tatted up, her uneven pigtails and nervous look frozen in place as the screams continued and she tried to dissociate.
“Buck Renic and the always lovely wife Clara. Do ya like the torture rooms, or are you just kissing ass?” asked a skeptic Buchannan.
“Neither really, just playfully joking. We’re friends and friends joke, don’t they?”
“Friends…” Lee chuckled as the artist paused to let him move. “I don’t have friends. Friends are for the weak who rely on others to survive. Kings don’t need friends, and I don’t need you. Keep that in mind Renich. You’re disposable. An inconvenient to replace but replaceable servant.”
“Yea, I get that, you made that clear when you summoned me and my wife to your…basement to discuss things. You could have picked any meeting room or place, but you chose a torture room, and brought my wife into this, with a naked woman being steamed alive as ambient background music. I’m not stupid, the message was clear. The new plastic is still in progress. Miracles take time, Lee.”
“I’m not calling you here to press your nose on the grindstone and tell you to rush the new plastic. I’m letting you know that very soon I won’t need it. Take a look at that table.” Lee insisted. Renich opened the box on the table and looked impressed and concerned.
“That looks an awful lot like a bar of iron.”
“It is. That is every bit of iron in Timber, priceless. Currently useless and raw but I’ve been assured the refining is under way.”
“Do I even want to ask where you got iron?”
“This discussion does not leave this room. I want you to understand how serious I am. I’ve heard rumors that you have been supplying Fredric Prima with advanced plastics unavailable to anyone else, and that wouldn’t happen to be MY plastic would it?”
“Firstly whoever told you this, You should bring them down here and show them how serious you are about liars. Everything Prima has bought from the plastic industry I own, is on the record and publically available, there’s no special plastic in production of any importance except the one you made a deal for, and it’s in the final stages. Nobody outside this room knows the full details, even the workers just know parts. They know if they break silence on confidential matters involving you, that YOU will be dealing with their sins, not me. They fear you more. If Prima has some advanced new plastic, which I seriously doubt, he made it himself or assembled a team, and everyone in the plastic industry works for me.”
“Buck, if you are lying to me, your wife will suffer first. I want all your top scientists brought here to witness the extent of my fury.”
“If you torture or kill my scientists you’ve killed your own project and broken the agreement. That’s war. You know that.” Buck said
“I decide what’s war. We don’t share this world, This is hell and I’m the devil. You just work for me. People sometimes forget that the big ten who run this world don’t share it evenly. Moses Udo is dead, word has it that he carried one of your creations in his holster. Prima claims to have a gun now that can kill a man from 400 yards as fast as he can pull the trigger. As the man promising a polymer that would replace tusk entirely there seem to be a lot of automatic weapons showing up, and not at my feet with a display of pride. That iron is the first of an entire industry. Buchanan Brass is about to become Buchanan Brass and iron, and your plastic will be a secondary product.”
“Then you brought me here to tell me the last 6 months of my life’s work are for nothing, and you want to threaten my wife and workers purely to show who’s the boss?”
“No, I want you to understand that your plastic may be done and ready before I have enough iron to make it no longer necessary, and if you are supplying my enemies with repeating weapons and something you’re hiding from me, this dominance move is temporary and the war will be very personal. It may still be valuable, and it may even surpass Brass for a while, but not long enough to overthrow me. Long enough to infuriate me, slow me down, make me very desperate to move quickly and brutally to avoid losing a lot of money, but there is no defeating Buchanan. You know who that woman is up there, skinned and being slow-cooked for my amusement? Do you know what she did to deserve that fate?” he asked.
“Some for of betrayal, equal to that of me siding with Prima in this imaginary overthrowing plot you have heard from someone?” he asked.
“Nothing. I don’t even know her name. I picked her randomly from the new mines. People are flocking to the new Buchanan mines to make a living and a lot of them are dying, the conditions are very rushed. They mean nothing to me. She means nothing to me. I needed the display to make a point. This is what I do to send a message, to someone I don’t even know, for no personal feelings at all. Now imagine what I do to my enemies who cross me. What I do to their families and their loved ones before I do it to them.”
“All those old mines were abandoned years ago, sold cheap. There’s no metals anywhere, no iron. How did you manage to squeeze enough iron from them to display a priceless bar on this table?”
“I have my ways and my secrets too. But Iron will flow soon, and you don’t want to be starting a war. Anyone who wants to start a war with me will find themselves facing cold iron guns very soon, and anyone on my side of that war will be the ones left to run this world. Prima will be on the losing side. Just remember that choosing his side may seem like hope for a while, but very soon the tables will turn and these rooms will be filled with screams. Families are flocking from Prima owned jobs and signing up for the Buchanan mines, I will have the manpower and the metal to make plastic and tusk obsolete. If you are working for him, I suggest you take that secret to your grave and suddenly discover the secret to the new plastic for me.
If you’re loyal, I suggest you hurry up and produce it anyway, and it better be more impressive that whatever prima has. Because someone is making automatic weapons, which I believe is YOUR dream, and if Prima has his own super-plastic already, then I could just kill him and take it. What do I need you for? So you better hope the rumors are just rumors, bold claims of desperation, and you better hope you have not betrayed me. If your plastic becomes an obsolete second option, your industry and power is over, and so is your usefulness to me. If you fail me I’ll kill you both. If you lie to me and betray me, this display of flesh and suffering will be a joke and you’ll deeply wish you killed yourself and the wife. You can leave.” He finished, returning to his grooming and the music of screams.
Buck and Clara stormed out into the snow to the carriage, he nervously began removing the string of grenades he was wired with, in case things went poorly.
“We need that goddamned woman with the titanium leg.” He sighed.
“You think one automatic gun is going to make a difference anymore, of Buchanan has iron ore?” she nervously shivered.
“He’s dangerous enough right now, He’ll be invincible soon. If he gets that leg, he’ll be invincible tomorrow, and still grow that iron mine. We have a narrowing window of opportunity to kill that prick and he just showed us why we need to act now and not play the waiting game anymore. The plastic isn’t ready, Prima may have something better, and nothing will convince that psychopath that we’re not on prima’s side. That woman with the titanium leg isn’t just his quick rise to being a god, she has future knowledge we need. Where she’s from, they have phones that fit flat in your pocket. That’s decades beyond what we used to know. We also need to take down that mine.”
“How many people are down there to die when it caves in?” she asked.
“Less than would die in a war where Buchanan has iron and an excuse to kill people. We lost 3 workers last week to go to the mines. One of those bastards probably stole my Renichlyte paperwork. If he stole my plastic and sold it to everyone, we have nothing. We won’t even be giving orders in this war. We’ll be fighting beside the peasants, broke and fucked. I got yanked from Nam, to come here, I’ll be damned if I fight another war. Get the meanest fuckers you know. Buchanan needs to die and those mines need to be buried."
