Desolation Row

There was one shell left, and that meant two things.

Firstly, my new destination was the Apothecary Bar, a shingled, shady joint on Desolation Row, where the air was kept cool and damp on account of all the stiffs- stiffs like me, I thought, gritting my teeth. I'd be able to find it by homing in on the sunset, even if I wasn't sure about my exact location.

Secondly, this wasn’t my gun. I would have known as much from looking at it, but my eyesight was still fuzzy. Soft tissue decays the fastest, and it takes time for resurrection to get things like eyes working again.

I ran semi-numb fingers over the handle of the weapon, feeling rough texture like a cow’s tongue where the delicate embossing would have been on my own revolver. I had my suspicions about where that might have gone. After all, there would be quite a market for a pistol bewitched to never run out of ammunition- it had taken me a lot of effort to get mine, and I'd never heard of another one like it.

Theoretically, that meant the gun could have been anywhere, but I knew that the man who killed me wouldn’t part easily with such a rare treasure.

He was a hoarder.

It made me livid to think about him handling my gun, even more than it disgusted me to think about him hacking apart my old body, and maybe lugging the bits away like freshly chopped firewood. My gun was like another limb to me. It was my best limb.

I would have it back shortly, I assured myself. My opponent might be armed with unlimited shots, but one was all I needed. My hands would have stopped shaking and my vision would be returned to normal by then, I hoped. Then, I would have my revenge.

The barren landscape was cooling, but my clothes still stank of decay, like it was knitted into their flea-ridden fabric, or kneaded into the thick felt of my coat. I supposed the heat had coaxed it out while the sun had still hung at its zenith, suspended like a golden pendulum designed for slicing days off the calendar. I had been careful to stick to the shrinking patches of shade during those hottest hours, lest my flesh melt and dribble off my bones like wax.

Nevertheless, my skin felt cold and clammy where the day’s sweat was turning crusty. I was dripping because my skin was learning to sweat again, and oozing out the toxins from death’s hangover. Part of the sweat, I knew, would be from the fever. My corpse still convulsed from time to time as it battled the remains of whatever disease had finished it off.

My sore shoulders protested as I peeled off the heavy coat. Several maggots fell out, and I caught a whiff of foul odour like I had just been exhumed from a coffin, not a layer of clothing. I was still so hot. At least that meant my nose was working. My fingers made agonising work of the buttons as I removed the smart vest my new body had been buried in. I threw that in the dust as well. Then, having learned my lesson, I tore off the soaked linen shirt underneath, using it to mop at my brow before discarding it.

Rid of all burial clothes except the trousers that were too plastered to my legs to itch and the boots I needed to prevent my newly undead feet from shredding, I felt refreshed and slightly less nauseous. I still had a pounding headache, and every fibre of my being burned with sickness, but I was free from my most soiled coverings. The breeze even restored sensation to my bare arms and torso, while the swollen sun revealed details I had previously been unaware of.

I had died a woman, and I had woken up as man.

I wasn’t used to this type of body, but I was pleased to see that I had been a healthy specimen. Hard, wiry muscles bulged along my arms in tight knots threaded with thick veins. My chest and stomach were neither inflated nor washboard lean, although I was still slightly bloated from decay. I had a decent store of fat, which would come in handy, and packed abdominal and pectoral muscles that rippled underneath it with suggestions of strength. I guessed that I might have been thirty years old; although in places my skin was weathered and tanned like rawhide, and so it looked much older.

I wondered how powerful I would be when I adjusted to my height and weight, and my illness had been purged. I also wondered whether I would be recognised.

The Dry Frontier wasn’t a large string of settlements. Or, at least, it was sparsely populated by the types of people who showed their faces in the daytime. Nothing grew here –not corn, or wheat or grass for farming livestock. The central town of Desolation was founded on the site of a hornbeast graveyard, of all things. It was a catchment for heat and mirages, but not for rain.

Lots of things came here to die, or to be buried, but only one thing really grew. The land, with its long days and dry basins perfectly sculpted for black magic, was only really suitable for one kind of farming. When dew beaded on the rocks by evening, corpses were harvested. Traders would plant them in the dirt of the magic basins, so that they might waken and walk again, or else reap and trade them in other ways.

Travellers disappeared, and turned up later in pieces sewn onto different bodies, or with different names and unfamiliar expressions on their faces. The Frontier was an awful place to go missing- the long, lazy days were nothing compared to the frantic portions of darkness squeezed between aching sunsets and searing dawns.

Most of the Traders operated by night. They dug around the parish graveyards, and bartered with the funeral parlour operators. They patrolled the wastelands in gangs, hunting the able-bodied to retire for parts. They warred with one another.

All of this happened in the shadow of the Civil War, by which the wandering scuffles were eclipsed. Most folks didn’t know about Desolation. If you wound up here by mistake, you wouldn’t be leaving to tell anyone about it, and if you came here on purpose, then you were as good as dead to begin with.

I was in the latter category. I didn’t know who the poor sod whose body I inhabited might have been. Certainly, I didn’t recognise him, but the few occupants of caravans winding through the settlements might have done. It was also possible that the sheriffs and the rangers, few though they were, were on the lookout for somebody who matched my description. My body’s early death of illness was certainly consistent with the kind of thing a Trader might catch man-handling festering corpses and butchered parts in a dank cellar somewhere.

I would have to be careful, but evading the police wasn’t my top priority. Fever still pounded in my veins, so that despite my new body being significantly bigger than my old one, it felt too small. My heart pounded so heavily that the desert seemed to throb with it, and the sky breathed the same rank, hot air that leeched out of my lungs.

I was glad that the long shadows had arrived, and the dim hours would shortly follow before true night fell like a velvet curtain and painted the desert with lunar craters and heaving oceans of sand. Up ahead, the town of Desolation loomed, flat and low, crouching in a moat of darkness. Still stumbling like a wounded man, I dragged myself into town, keeping my dead fingers clasped around the pistol on my hip. Beads of sweat dripped down my forehead with the effort of moving those last few hundred metres.

Shuttered windows ignored me like lidded eyes beneath sloping eaves like the tilted brims of hats. They were quiet, but they were not asleep- I knew that those houses and shops were listening for me, as they always listened for anyone who was like me. The town lived under a blanket of fear, surviving only by virtue of caution.

A sign creaking on rusty chains announced the presence of the Apothecary’s, which dominated the main-street -Desolation Row- in an underhanded sort of way. Its windows were boarded up and its porch was falling apart, but everyone knew that the basement of that ruined building was where most of the town’s money changed hands. The potions, ointments and embalming materials it sold preserved the heartbeat of the economy much as they stopped and started heartbeats in human bodies, both living and dead.

Beside the Apothecary’s was the Apothecary Bar. It served a similar, if less admitted, purpose to the exchange point itself. The bar was a place for making deals, and for discovering what might be bargained for that wasn’t officially on offer. Different toxins were for sale here- agents that numbed a man’s nerves and pickled his brain.

Everyone was drunk. A band was playing in the corner, and even the guitars sounded drunk. Notes slid up and down on scales like lightweights leaning on the slippery bar top, and chords swaggered surly and uneven, twanging in the thick, oppressive air. The acrid stench was of booze and vomit, but it didn’t put me off- I quickly found what I was looking for.

He was sitting on a stool in the corner, surrounded by three pale women whose stockings barely concealed the coarse stitches and staples that crossed their thighs like railroad tracks; maps of where the scalpel had been driven. He was still missing his jaw where the shotgun had blown it off, and the remaining half of his tongue dangled freely through the hole where it should have been. He always hung about apothecary’s places because he relied on a number of expensive agents to keep the rot and infection from spreading. As it was, he wasn’t easy to look at.

My heavy footsteps alerted him to my presence and I smiled, because he couldn’t. He hadn’t bothered to fit himself with fresh parts yet, and that kept him anchored in Desolation.

Big mistake.

‘Billy Coyote. I thought I might find you here,’ I drawled, or rather growled, in a voice that I discovered was rough like gravel.

There was a sick gurgling sound as he attempted laughter, which was echoed by shriller giggling from the women around him.

‘Egliza gLee,’ he garbled, and his blue eyes twinkled with light refracted through stolen irises. ‘My, do ygou glook pretty!’ His throat rumbled some more. A bubble of saliva burst on his tongue and slid down in a thick, slimy globule. ‘I waz jgust sayin’ how pretty ygou glooked. It waz a shame I hadda kill ygou, but you weren’t usin’ those parts in ygour gline of work, an’ I hate to see good bits goin' to waste!’

I glared, fingering my holder, and let him continue. He didn’t seemed concerned about my being there for revenge. Either he didn’t care, or he didn’t think I had the guts to shoot him in a room full of people. Perhaps he thought he was popular.

‘I galways thought ygour hands wazza real pretty part of ygou. Elsie agrees.’ One of the women, whose hair was the colour of corn silk and piled up in an elegant mess, fanned out a pale hand whose delicate fingers were adorned with mismatched rings- my hand, and one of the rings was mine too. I set my jaw, enjoying the fact that I had a jaw to set.

‘’Course, I gliked some other bits of ygou tgoo,’ he managed, slyly. ‘I helped myself. Hope ygou don’t mind, Egliza.’ He had his fat hands on either side of his belly now, he found that so damned hilarious.

Well, that was enough for me. ‘I never much liked that name,’ I said evenly, and braced my tired arms for the recoil as I drew out the revolver and fired my last shot. They didn’t even tremble- I was stronger than I thought.

Billy Coyote, so called because he was a scavenger, slid off his seat, his final, dumbstruck expression frozen on his mutilated face.
The thud! when he hit the floor was drowned out by the sounds of scuffling chairs and shrieking from his companions. They didn’t care much about him besides what he could do for them, but I guessed they were afraid they might be next; worried that I might smash up those little bodies they had spent so much effort compiling. They needn’t have been. I wasn’t going to.

I threw a last, scathing look at the blonde woman who had my hands. They might not have been much, in my opinion, but there was only one body you were born in, and nobody stole from me. Still, I told myself, she wasn’t important. People expected you to shoot guys like Billy, but there would be more of a fuss if I took out a pretty girl along with him. Bars love pretty girls, even when they’re made of parts.

Instead, I rummaged through my killer’s coat for my own gun. It wasn’t difficult to find. When I was done, I turned the corpse over with the toe of my boot, so that his gruesome face was pressed into the floor, and aimed my magic weapon at his head. The second gunshot froze time, and when it resumed, there was nothing left of his brains but a smear on the floor. I was determined not to leave anything that could be resurrected.

‘That’s the last time you’ll be dying,’ I muttered, and strapped the gun into the holster the other one had occupied. It didn’t fit great.

The women withdrew, clutching at each other, and flew away upstairs. The men regarded me indecisively. Some had their hands on their pistols, but in the end, nobody stopped me when I shuffled out the door.