Wild Country

Chapter Two

Quantrill finished rolling the body into a standard bodybag, spat caliche dust, hauled Rawson's bulk to the cycle, and retrieved his own Aussie hat, flopping it on his head after wiping a film of sweat and dust from his face. The old 'droid in the front seat had been emptied of its innards and was soon stowed in back with Rawson.

After he disconnected the rear steering yoke, Quantrill stepped into the front cowl, then pulled a cold bulb of Pearl beer from the right-hand cargo pannier. With his other hand he toggled his VHP set. A moment later, he had Chief Deputy Stearns on-line.

The complaints began almost immediately. "Nope, I never got a chance to read him his rights," Quantrill replied. "He went for a Chinese sidearm; I'm bringing it as evidence."

He waited, pressing the earpiece with two fingers, meanwhile scanning the innocent horizon. Then, "It was Rawson's choice, not mine." Pause. "Sure. If my belt video was working, you'll see me with the chit in one hand and a handful of air in the other while he was drawing on me. I won't kill a man unless he forces me to." Pause; a flare of nostrils below his broken nose. "Well, I don't anymore, sir. You can tell Marshal Teague our Justice Department is still just. Anyway, you've got two more of Sorel's men for a nice showy trial. You'd never have gotten anything from Mike Rawson. Read his file."

This time Quantrill waited longer. He was shaking his head in disgust when he replied. "It's not my fault if they got sprung so fast. Did anybody plant a tracer bug on either of 'em?" Another pause. "I'm sorrier than you are, mister; Espinel was a friend of mine. Sometimes I think Teague is sorrier to see a fugitive come in horizontal than he is when one of us gets it. No, cancel that. I'm just hot and tired and pissed off — sir."

As always, the "sir" sounded insincere. Marvin Stearns, grown sleek with inaction, could list a dozen men he would prefer over Quantrill. Ted Quantrill could list several friends who'd become casualties through the inaction of sleek men.

Kent Ethridge, for example. Some men put the entire blame for that on Ethridge himself. Quantrill's reaction had been a deepening fury against those who had made Ethridge's death possible. Now he took a final pause and a gulp of Pearl before: "I'm near Dabney, just north of Zavala County. You want Rawson in SanTone Ringcity, or do I freight him back to you in Junction? Yeah, he's in a bodybag, he'll keep 'til tomorrow. Right. See you in Junction bright and early. A-a-and out," he drawled, putting away the tiny headset with relief.

Ted Quantrill hadn't had a mastoid-implant radio in his noggin for four years, but he still hated any comm set that reminded him of a mastoid "critic," however faintly. An explosive critic had executed his lover, Marbrye Sanger, on command of the murderous Young administration. The postwar excesses of Young's people had driven Quantrill to rebellion; nearly to madness as well. They drove so many good people to the rebel ranks that the elections of 2004 had cut across the lines of Mormonism and federalism. Now it was President Ora McCarty whose cabinet struggled to reconstruct America. As long as the ex-rebel boss Jim Street was attorney general, there would be jobs for men like Quantrill.

Like the American nation itself, old Jim Street had suffered systemic shock during the Sinolnd War. The grizzled, crippled old Texan rode herd on the Justice Department, including both the FBI and the Border Authority. Street had to let other folks wrangle over the new Capitol site, now abuilding in the District of Columbia, Missouri. He worried about foreign entanglements when they crossed American borders — for example, when the Ellfive colonies of New Israel helped Turkish drug merchants open conduits through Wild Country.

Street knew in his chalky bones that America could not survive another reign of unjust rule, of government by terror. As long as he could climb into a wheelchair, he would prowl the corridors of law and order. If Wild Country and Oregon Territory were to be parts of the nation again, they must get fair-handed justice. With deputies like Ted Quantrill, Jim Street's justice reached a long way into lawless regions.

On this day, Quantrill was far into the violent border region claimed by both Mexico and Reconstruction America. Here, whole families sometimes disappeared during a feud or a border raid from Mexican cimarrones, wild ones. It was truly no government's land, and it could not be reclaimed without rough justice. When it had to be, Quantrill's was as rough as it came.

Quantrill could have chosen a shorter route back, but his years in the region had given him Wild Country wisdom. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the Sinolnd War, Texas ranchers and hoe men had wrestled chunks of this sun-broiled land into submission. In less than ten years after the war, most of those chunks had gone wild again, returned to the kind of new-world savagery that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado had fought in 1541. A few places, chiefly narrow creekbottoms defended by grit and gunfire, were still cultivated. Quantrill did not relish a mechanical breakdown, not with a deader ripening under the tarp behind him. and he also went wide of the cultivated areas. Only fools and desperadoes took chances in the trackless wild regions over soil that, locals claimed, was "hard as a whore's eye."

Was Quantrill too cautious?

Item: During the first cattle drive east from the Pecos, Coronado's men were forced to build pillars of dung and bones to post the way. Not even their herd of cattle could mark the cactus-dotted hardpan enough to let a man backtrack their path. When those cattle stumbled forward toward water, usually it was deadly alkali water and those cattle had to be whipped away from it. Now it was still possible to find a remnant of a buffalo wallow or a dry hole where a Spanish buckle and bones might gleam, burnished by the dusty winds of five centuries. This was a timeless land, and it would kill you for the slightest miscalculation.

The most pitiless of that land lay far to Quantrill's left. His route was made interesting by deep, brush-choked arroyos and hills. Bit by bit. the stupefying violence of Texas weather had whittled those hills down from mountains to mounds. That weather was thought, by people who had never experienced it, to be just a part of Wild Country myth; but Quantrill kept an eye on his horizons. He knew that in any season, a hellbroth storm might fling hailstones the size of his fist so hard they dented the cowls of hovercycles, with a blazing cadenza of lightning tinted gold and mauve by dust hurled on gale-force winds.

To outlanders, it was all mythology to be taken in good humor. If it were even half-true, they reasoned. Wild Country would be peopled exclusively by the insane. To Ted Quantrill, it was taken for granted — and in good humor. If you lived out here and said you liked it, people figured you'd been too long in the sun without your sombrero. So Quantrill cursed it as necessary and told no one but Sandra Grange that he had learned to love it.

He put in a call to Sandy while sliding up into Edwards County but got no reply; expected none, really. Like as not, she'd be tending her truck garden, and there was no one else to take a call at her soddy. Nine-year-old Childe might hear the VHP beeper, but never answered. If you weren't standing in front of her where she could study your face, Childe saw no point in jawing with you.

Quantrill tried again an hour from the soddy, then shrugged and popped open another cold Pearl. He told himself he wasn't worried about the two sisters; though they lived on the edge of Wild Country, they were rarely more than a whistle away from a mind-boggling mass of four-hoofed help.

Reminded of Sandy's huge guardian, Quantrill slowed the cycle and began to scan overhangs of stone. Generally, Texas rattlers grew larger in regions with more rain. Quantrill knew the legend of Sowell's dragon, the nine-footer killed by mustangs in the old days, and discounted that legend by two feet. He was looking for any handy diamondback or prairie rattler that might serve as a snack.