Full Version: Sharp's Farm
I'm posting a new piece of fan fiction below. Many of you will remember my entry "Carding Estates", from Tisoz's last fiction contest. Please feel free to post any comments, I'd love to see them.
Bill Sharp sucked on his lower lip and looked up at his daddy's roof. "Isn't that satlink still busted?"
"Sometimes," his daddy told him. "Most times. I checked the hardware, and that's just fine. Got to wait for a day that the satlink's workin' to check the software."
"How we gonna fix the truck if we can't get no schematics?" Bill asked. They were in the driveway outside his parents' garage, his daddy's quadcab Dust Devil out there with the hood up.
"Well, that's because I store all my own schematics, son, for times when the satlink's busted. Your Daddy ain't senile yet." His father's eyebrows went up and down twice.
"Course you're not. What you got there?"
"Ain't it great?" His daddy had climbed up on an industrial blue step-cart with knobby tires that pivoted in all directions. He showed him how it worked with one thumb on his commlink, going up to the truck, backing away from it, sliding left and right. "Raises and lowers ten centimeters, too. Saeder-Krupp makes 'em."
Bill smiled. "Christ Almight, you mean it ain't Japanese?"
"No, I mean it ain't no damned Japanese. Have you ever once seen a damned Japanese in these mountains?"
"I reckon once." Bill knew his father did not trust anything made by a Japanese company. Chinese maybe, because he thought the Chinese were like the West Virginians of Asia. But he bought North American, or German, or not at all. "You got one of those for me, too?"
"I got the old stepstools for you." When you were dwarves, you grew up with stepstools. It was March 30th, 2070. It was the day of Easter. Christ was Risen, and Bill Sharp had come to his folks place for dinner. His daddy worked for the power company. Bill grew dope.
The frame house with blue siding and white gutters had been built in 1989, and Bill's daddy, Noah Sharp, had bought it from the county in 2036, married just about eighteen months with a six months old son. The county had confiscated the house from the previous owner for unpaid taxes, and Noah, with a loan from his human father, had got the tumbledown place for not much money. Bill had seen the early videos many times - his mother Carol running the camera, panning from Bill in an infant carrier to Noah on the roof with Uncle Eaton, nailguns going bang.
Bill's folks and his daddy's brother, Uncle Eaton, had been among the very first dwarves born in the West Virginia mountains, born to human parents, with most folks thinking they were either defect cases, or sick, or devil's babies, or all three. It was the days of the VITAS pandemic, when the county clinic was full up with people who had the puking fever. West Virginia was still one of the United States of America, shortly to be one of the United Canadian And American States. In those days dwarves got together, and stayed together - you couldn't trust nobody over a meter and a half tall. Now Noah and Carol knew every dwarf in the mountains - their inboxes overflowed every Christmas with pictures of dwarf kids getting sturdier and dogs running in the yards. There were going to be lots of guests for Easter dinner.
"Did Uncle Eaton say he was coming?" Bill asked.
"I told him he was welcome," Noah told him. "Why don't you even up the tire pressure?"
Uncle Eaton wasn't as welcome as he had been thirty-four years ago, when he'd helped fix up the place, Carol laughing, videoing her husband and brother-in-law trying to make the Japanese paint robot Noah had bought used change out its own paint reservoir like it was supposed to. Uncle Eaton's hair had been cut short then, parted on one side, with a goatee. His teeth had been whiter. He had been a mountain hedge witch in those days, but not as much as he was now.
"A mountain hedge witch," Eaton had told his nephew more than once, "is different from any other kind."
Uncle Eaton believed in Jesus, but a Jesus of a different stripe from Carol's. Carol had joined the Christ's Hall Church when Bill was just a toddler, and in the last fifteen years had become more and more involved there, particularly since Haley's Comet had brought the tornado of '61 through the county, killing fourteen and causing a rain of frogs, and the Trents of Boone county had grown scales like fish all over their bodies and taken to swimming at midday in the old quarry lakes. Human Reverend Hogarth presided at Christ's Hall, and his Jesus, who was Carol's Jesus, was the type to stand in white robes holding the hand of an apple-cheeked blonde child. Uncle Eaton's Jesus was the kind who, running sweating at night hand in hand with Mary Magdalene through Gethsemane, could already see those nails. Bill's momma's Jesus looked tired on the Cross. His uncle's Jesus bared His teeth up there, and generally bled more.
The door from the garage to the laundry room opened up, and Carol leaned out of it, wearing her cream colored pantsuit, her fancy commlink strapped on the inside of her wrist. Bill could see the heat from inside the house glowing around her. "Anybody come yet?"
"No ma'am," her husband answered her, peering under the truck's hood. He called her ma'am when he wasn't really listening.
"Well, my one and only son," Carol said, her voice going firm. "Are you out here drinking beer on Resurrection Day?"
Bill didn't know what to say. He had the Coors in his hand. He should have remembered his momma was likely to come out and interrupt them before he'd taken it out of the cooler he kept in his truck. Nothing to do about it now but stand with a stupid look on his face.
"Drink that up right in front of your father. Oh...damn it. Here come the Tavishes. Bill, throw that thing away."
Bill tossed the beer at the garbage can, but it skipped off the edge and clunked to the floor. Coors was now glurping onto the cement. Bill tried to pretend it wasn't there, and Carol ignored her son ignoring it, because the Tavishes were getting out of their minivan - a dwarf family the Sharps knew through Carol's church.
"Happy Easter!" Carol said, going forward to hug Mrs. Tavish. Mrs. Tavish was balancing a dish of creamed potatoes in one hand.
Mr. and Mrs. Tavish were God-fearing Christians from God-fearing human families, the first generation of dwarves in their tree. Their daughter, Missy, was with them. She was twenty-four, worked at the QuickFill on I-64, and worked for Bill, too, because the QuickFill was where Bill brought his bales of sweet, stinky weed for pick-up by his out-of-town, high roller customers. Her brother, Bryant, was twenty-two. Christ's Hall had just cured him of being a homosexual about six months ago. He bought weed from Bill and sold it to the younger parishioners, and one or two of the older ones.
Missy and her folks went into the house with Carol. Bryant stayed out with Bill and his daddy, standing back from the truck to keep from getting his Easter clothes dirty. "What're you doing?" He asked.
"I was trying to equalize the tire pressure," Bill told him. He took out a mopcloth and wiped up the Coors, tossing the can in the garbage. "Sorry if this bothers you, Daddy."
"No need for your sorry," Noah told him. His eyes were bright and his hand, the one that wasn't inside the engine compartment, was animated. "I been sober twenty-three years. It's like all that happened to somebody else."
"I'll have one, if you've got a spare," Bryant said happily.
Bill looked at him, trying to get across the idea that he was already in trouble without turning it into a kegger, but Bryant just kept smiling because he didn't get it.
His daddy told him, "Give him one. What's the matter with you?"
Bill got Bryant a Coors, and while he was at it he furnished himself with a replacement. Might as well be hanged for a cow as a chicken.
A car went by on the road at the bottom of the driveway and Noah turned his head at it, squinting through the display goggles he was wearing.
Bill didn't recognize the car. "What is it? Is it Eaton?"
"No, I thought it was old man McGreely," Noah said. The car had gone by. "Are you just going to - "
"Old man McGreely's comin'?" Bill asked, his eyebrows shooting up.
"He's invited, and have you gotten to thinkin' that you're too old to get your ass whipped for interruptin'?"
"No, sir."
"Good. Do those tires."
Bill, as a matter of fact, did think that he was too old for his Daddy to be whipping his ass - which was not the same as to say that Noah couldn't do it. Bill was, he thought to himself as he equalized the tires, thirty-five years old, he'd paid cash for his car, and he had a bit more than 200,000 nuyen put away in a shadow matrix bank that provided financial services to outlaw horticulturalists like himself. And he sure had noticed that this I'm-the-boss show hadn't come out of Noah until Bryant had showed up. Noah probably knew that Bryant sold weed for Bill. Bill knew his daddy knew what he grew, but he didn't think his momma did. If she did, she prayed in secret for Jesus to cure Bill of it, which Bill did not calculate was a short time in coming. Did Reverend Hogarth at Christ's Hall do magic? He did. But so did Hindus in India and voodoo priests down in Florida. As Bill saw it, he'd never met Jesus personally, and he did not see where Christian folk had any better time of it than anybody else.
More family arrived, and some loose-ends friends who didn't have enough family of their own to bother with, or who were only stopping by before going on to dinner someplace else, or who didn't care themselves enough for Easter to do their own cooking. Carol invited anyone she thought she might convince to come, to get a portion of the Lord. Soon they could hear the voices from inside the house rolling out through the garage. Grown-ups and children both walked right past the dwarf-adjusted T-250 shotgun and M-23 rifle leaning against the garage workbench. Both weapons had palmprint safeties that only admitted four people in the world - Noah, Carol, Bill, and Uncle Eaton.
There were things in the mountains, and people, too, that inspired you to keep a gun handy.
Old man McGreely came, in his bright green open-topped jeep, wearing dark slacks with a white shirt and dark blue tie. When he climbed out of the jeep, he pushed his display goggles down around his neck. He had a rifle clamped upright between the seats.
"Oh, shit," Bryant said to Bill, smiling, as McGreely walked up. Bill frowned at him to shut up.
"Happy Easter, Mr. Sharp," McGreely grunted to Noah. "Ain't you supposed to be eatin'?"
"She'll let me know when she needs me. How are you, George?"
"Still sitting up by myself."
Old man McGreely was the patriarch of the McGreely orks, a pack of cousins, siblings, grandchildren, uncles and aunts who were known in the mountains for trouble and jail time, and the odd one with regular employment - one of McGreely's eight sons was in motorcycle repair, and one of his two daughters bounced at the Dewy Lily, the strip club off the same overpass that had Missy Tavish's QuickFill on it. McGreely was about as old as orks got, which was about fifty-five. It was figured, although no dwarf had gone that far yet, that dwarves could make it to about two hundred. McGreely had a scar on his chin and was missing the tip of one ear - one of his jutting lower canines was whiter than the rest of his teeth because it was a plastic replacement. Thirty years ago McGreely had done five years in prison for manslaughter, and Noah Sharp had been at the barbeque where the other man had died.
Old Man McGreely was right about everything, just ask him. In about two minutes he'd started an argument with Noah about how the Gaz P-179 was a better truck than the Dirt Devil. "This damned thing bleeds nuyen, and shits trouble," McGreely said.
"You keep it up right and it'll never fail," Noah told him. But Bill knew there was no hope of convincing him. The big problem with orks was they were dumb and they didn't know it.
"Why you working on it then?" McGreely wanted to know, meaning, if it doesn't fail?
"You've got to work it to keep it working!" Noah snapped.
They were always like this. Bill wondered why they ever got together. Old Man McGreely wasn't so bad, really, and the younger McGreelys seemed to pay him some mind when he told them the jailhouse was for dipshits. Old Man McGreely had had two brothers and two sisters, all from the same litter. Old age had gotten two of them. Disagreements had gotten the other two.
It was after five thirty, and supper was to be at six. The wind, which had started gusting the night before, was picking up now, driving a few needles of cold rain along with the dried and dead leaves of last autumn. Bill knew his daddy would stay under the hood of the truck as long as he could, and hold dinner up washing his hands while his wife's face got sourer and sourer. It was in this atmosphere that Uncle Eaton came walking up the driveway in his work boots, jeans, his Globetrotter camouflage jacket, and an animated t-shirt especially for Easter, with three white crosses glowing on a mountainside among the gently stirring leaves of oaks. "How y'all doing? Damn it, is that old George McGreely?"
"It is. God bless you, Eaton Sharp."
Uncle Eaton shook hands with everybody, including Bryant, who did it clumsily, and laughed for no reason. Bryant got nervous easily, especially with anybody older than he was. He asked Eaton, "Where's your car?"
"Sold it in '37," Eaton told him. "Happy Easter, Noah," Eaton said to his brother.
"Happy Easter," Noah agreed, holding up a filter and comparing it to the schematics displayed in his goggles.
"Boys," Carol called from the kitchen door. "Boys, come in and eat."
Uncle Eaton walked with angels, and brownies, mountain pixies, spirits of the earth and wood. They sped him across the mountains. He didn't need any car.
"Your hair's wet, Eaton," Noah told him, frowning.
"I didn't want to come to Easter without havin' a shower," Eaton explained.
*****
A few weeks later, on a day when the sun was shining brightly in May, even as it was starting to slip below the western mountains, Bill was pulling into the Stuffer Shack on the south end of Rollins. He was going past a minivan to find a parking space when someone suddenly came out from behind the other side of it, and Bill tapped the brake before he saw that they weren't going to run right in front of him. It was a McGreely ork in a sportsman's vest. It was a fact of life that were there was one McGreely ork there were about three more, and that fact was as true today at the Stuffer Shack as it ever was. Bill had just stumbled into a pack of them.
"Shit," he muttered as he pulled in two spots over from Cameron McGreely's Gaz pickup. "Shoulda scanned for commlinks." On the way by his commlink had showed him that the Stuffer Shack had Coors twelve packs for nine nuyen, and that had gotten so much of his attention he hadn't checked to see who else was there.
He got out of the car smiling. He said, "You'll run into damned old anybody at the Stuffer Shack!"
"Bill Sharp!" Cameron McGreely growled. "Lookit what we got!"
Cameron was wearing mirrored aviator glasses, and a cowboy hat that curled up on the sides. He was smiling his shit-kicker smile, with which he had been born, and had a spear longer than he was tall cradled in his elbow, the titanium head lit up by the afternoon sun, the etched name of the manufacturer in Detroit easy to see. One of his relations had an identical one.
"What have you got?" Bill put his feet against the rear wheel of Cameron's truck and hauled himself up with his hands to look over the edge of the bed. The McGreely orks all laughed. Bill thought, Ain't that just funny as hell? Keep on laughin', you shitheels.
They had a pig laid out flat in the back, easily a hundred and fifty kilograms. A strong smell of blood rose up. Blood was thick and red going black in the corrugations of the bed.
"Nice hog," Bill nodded.
Cameron McGreely laid his big lump of a hand on the back of Bill's neck. He leaned his face close to Bill's, so that Bill smelled Cameron's breath, and saw himself reflected twice in Cameron's glasses. He tried not to flinch under the hand.
"That's a goddamned spectacular hog," Cameron told Bill. "That's a few kilos of meat."
"I bet it is." Bill stared back at the McGreely.
"Haha." Cameron thumped him on the back twice. "You ever hunt hogs, Bill Sharp?"
"Not with a spear," Bill answered. Cameron laughed out loud, showing all the teeth in his orky mouth.
Cameron let go of him, and Bill hopped to the ground. He felt the semiautomatic in his waistband bounce.
"Come with us some time. We'll see if you can keep up. You want a beer?" Cameron asked him.
Bill wanted out of this crowd of hillbilly orks, but a free beer was a free beer. "That's damned nice of you," he told Cameron.
The McGreely reached into a cooler in the bed of the truck and came out with a Busch that he pressed into Bill's hand. "How's your crop, Bill?" Cameron wanted to know. He slapped a mosquito that was biting his wrist. "Goin' to make some money this harvest?"
Bill was angry at the question. "I suppose you must mean my tomatoes," he said.
"I bet you're makin' a pile of dirty ole' money," Cameron said. He was smirking down at Bill, and Bill noticed how Cameron's had moved around to be on all sides of him. "And God damn it, why shouldn't you? Who doesn't want their own little tomato garden?" The McGreely's all laughed. "I know I do," Cameron said.
Bill said: "Yeah, but once you get one, you've got to keep the hogs out of it."
The laughter died. Cameron was nodding slowly, a man who liked to give the impression he knew more than he knew how to say.
Bill said, "Thanks for the beer. I've got to be on my way."
"Say hello to your daddy for me," Cameron told him.
"You too," Bill answered.
*****
There was a trail wide enough to be called a dirt road by people who didn't worry too much about scratches on their sideview mirrors. It ran off the road and through the woods for two kilometers, and then a tenth of a kilometer more, before another track turned off it that led to the three and a half acres of Bill Sharp's marijuana farm. But if you kept going along the main trail another 2.2 kilometers, it took you up on to the side of a mountain. There was a shelf of rock thirty meters wide up there, with a stream that went down through it, forming deep pools before it ran on down the slope, cutting a hole through the trees that gave a view of the valley and the lights of the town of Connors, six hundred, eighty-one meters down below, according to the GPS. The first week of that August, Bill Sharp and Missy Tavish were up there at midnight, swimming and fucking, the day they had seen Old Man McGreely's body committed to the earth. Bill and Missy had ridden with their parents in the funeral procession, which had taken the scenic route along the interstate to the cemetery where the McGreely's people were laid; a long parade of pickup trucks full of orks, led by a Mitsubishi Nightsky hearse, followed by friends and well wishers, and a few dwarves, like Bill, who went to see the Old Man lowered into the ground, and because if he hadn't gone the McGreelys would have nursed it as a grudge. The whole thing had traveled at a stately pace with a helidrone provided by the funeral home overhead, so the procession could be recorded for the family.
Bill and Missy were lying on a blanket on the side of the stream, still gulping air post-orgasm. Bill had a thermos full of margaritas and an FN HAR assault rifle within reach. They could see just fine with half a moon and a clear sky, and their heat sensitive eyes.
Standing on the hood of his blue Thundercloud ATV was an electric bug zapper, with its power cable plugged into a port in the control panel.
"I remember him when I was a little girl...I must have been 'bout seven." Missy laughed. "I remember my mom telling me, "He killed a man. He killed a man in a fit of temper!""
"Yeah..." Bill agreed. He took the top off the thermos. "My mother never liked him much either."
""Wrath is a sin, Missy! Wrath is a sin!"" Lying on her back, looking up at the stars, Missy quoted her mother.
"Hell, wrath is how I get by," Bill said. The top of the thermos was two cups nested together. Bill filled both, his more than hers, because he had the stronger constitution.
"He kept those boys pretty well in line," Missy said. She took her cup from him with her right hand, the one with the chain of rhododendron blossoms tattooed around the wrist.
"I guess. For somebody's definition of in line. The ork dictionary's definition," Bill laughed.
"I'm serious. He did. Now Cameron McGreely don't fear nobody but God, and God only on Sundays."
Bill said, "Cameron McGreely's one super weatherproof asshole." Missy laughed.
Bill refilled his cup. Missy was still working on hers.
"Jesus up above, they don't live very long," Missy said, shaking her head. "Fifty four years old, and they find him laid out on his back in the yard with the dog licking his face."
"They cause some trouble along the way, though." Bill drank his margarita down, tossed the cup onto the blanket, and waded into the stream, the water quickly coming up to his knees. He pointed up into the trees overhanging the other bank. "Look, look, there's a momma raccoon and two little babies. You see them?"
"Yeah, raccoons, that's just great." Missy sat up, drawing up her legs, resting her elbows on her knees. "Bill, I'm telling you, those McGreelys are goin' to come after you. That's how them orks are. Cameron's spent all his life lookin' around for what others have built up, so he could steal it from 'em."
"OK," Bill said. He sat down so that only his head was above the water. "Let's drive on down to Cameron's place and kill him. It'll save trouble later."
"Damn it, Bill!"
"Forget about it," Bill smiled at her.
"Am I to understand that that is your plan? Forget about it? Try to remember, not only is the screwin' one of my main forms of recreation, but you also represent a large portion of my income."
"I'm takin' steps," Bill told her. "I plan ahead. You know that about me. I plan ahead. I make plans to make plans."
He smiled, but he had the sense she was not buying it.
"You've got plans?" She asked.
"I've got plans. I've always got plans. I plan to drag you in here with me in another minute."
"You've got some kind of plan?"
"Plans on top of plans. And I ain't goin' to kill nobody, if it can be avoided."
She took a deep breath. "I'd hate to see you killed, you hillbilly jackass. And I think they're going to kill you. But OK...you say you've got a plan."
Bill smiled again, and shrugged, and kept smiling.
Shit, he thought. What am I going to do about those orks?
*****
By November, things had gotten worse.
Bill had messaged his Uncle Eaton online three times, with no reply. He had gone up to Eaton's place twice, even though he knew that Eaton didn't like unexpected visitors. The second time, he'd clenched his buttcheeks tight enough to give him the nerve to walk up to the door and slip a note into it, saying that he needed to talk to Eaton, and when he would return, and then got away again quick.
The third time he came back was eight o'clock in the morning on a cold Tuesday, watching his breath puff out in clouds as he left his car by the road and walked upslope the hundred meters or so to Eaton's RV. Up here, the woods got thick awfully fast. They closed in, left, right, and overhead, like a road coming quickly to the end. When he came out into the little clearing where Eaton's RV was parked, he saw his uncle standing in the yard next to his garden reflecting ball.
"Mornin', Nephew," Eaton called to him, but not cheerfully.
"Mornin', Uncle Eaton," Bill replied, a little faintly.
His uncle lived in an old RV that he'd driven up into this clearing on the mountainside more than twenty years ago, when the road leading up from the main road had been wider. Now the trees had narrowed the road, and small trees had grown up around the RV, too - at a quick guess, Bill thought at least four would have to be cut down to get the vehicle out and turned around so that it was pointed downhill. Only the tops of the trees nearest to the RV were kept trimmed back, so that the sun could get on the solar panels on the roof. Bill helped keep his uncle's place up, bringing his drone tool cart all the way up here to do it.
"I got your note," Eaton said. "What's bothering you?"
"Well," Bill said, and he laughed. "I've got some trouble at work, is the fact."
Eaton's yard was full of things besides trees. There was the reflecting ball, and there were the strings of yellow Christmas lights that went through the trees in a circle about seven meters wide, about ten centimeters over their heads. There were seven raw mountain stones delineating that same circle, each about twice the size of a basketball, and painted with symbols that Bill had never seen anywhere else, and which he did not care to look at. There were bundles of things hanging from the branches, and there was a cross cut from raw tree lumber, nearly two meters high, with red paint splashed at the positions of the wrists and ankles.
"You mean down at the marijuana farm," Eaton nodded.
"Old Man McGreely died," Bill said, feeling helpless about that. What could he have done to prevent it? "And now, well, you know, those orks have all slipped their leashes. Running around, getting arrested, getting let go again. They rolled over Frank Darcy's truck one night out of spite about an old loan...about four of them just got on one side and rolled it over on its roof. And now it looks like they've got a plan to kill me."
Eaton looked up at him. "How do you figure that?"
"They're growing weed. Cameron's been doing it about a year and a half now, started before his father died. I'm their competition, and they're fixin' to get bigger." Bill shrugged. "I got a little Flyspy drone hiding in the heating vent in Cameron's kitchen, so I hear some things. I got the day and the date they're plannin' on comin'."
"So you want me to kill a bunch of them for you?" Eaton asked, his voice rising to embolden the question.
Having been brought to the point, Bill answered, "Well, if it's not a ton of trouble, yes sir."
"Come and have a seat," Eaton told him, gesturing at a pair of folding deck chairs. Bill brushed leaves off of his, and sat down. The chairs were designed for dwarves, so he was comfortable. Eaton sat down next to him with a grunt. Then he sat up and turned around to look at the RV. A plastic tray with two plastic cups and a liter of Jack Daniels Whiskey on it levitated over from the RV to them, and set itself in Eaton's lap. It made the hair on Bill's neck stand up to see it. Eaton, though, was nonchalant as he poured double shots into each cup, and handed one to Bill.
"When's the big day?" Eaton asked.
"This Thursday next."
"Can't help you, nephew. Sorry."
Bill stared at his uncle as his uncle sipped his whiskey. Bill took a drink of his own, then asked, "Are you sure?"
Eaton did not hesitate. "Yes I'm sure. I'm goin' for a walk, nephew. I'm going to go up and down these mountains, walk through the valleys, walk through the towns. I'm going to climb to the peaks and breath up there. I'm taking nothing with me but my heart, and I'll find out how strong it is. I'm going to talk with the birds and the beasts...I'm going to look for the angels in these parts. And maybe while I'm out there, I'll come upon the Lord, and if I do, I'm going to take the chance to ask Him what He thinks of how I'm doing. I'm going to be gone a while."
"You couldn't move that to the week after next?"
Eaton said, "It's time to go when it's time to go. Not sooner, and not later."
They drank.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Bill said, trying to keep the anger out of it.
"You should just leave the mountains for a while. Head up to Ohio. Pretty country in Ohio. Land's so flat and low, you can see for kilometers."
"No," Bill said. "They fuckin' know where my farm is. I'd come back and it'd be gone. I didn't build it so I could move to Ohio and the fuckin' McGreelys could move in to my place."
"Hire some guns."
"Maybe I will."
Bill had not decided on what to do until his uncle had asked, so you want me to kill a bunch of them for you? He'd been trying to avoid it. But there wasn't really any other plan that he could think of. Cameron McGreely wasn't going to just agree to be friendly. And killing one or two of them would just piss the rest of them off. He'd have to get a whole bunch, and he'd have to do it all at once. It was not going to pay to let any McGreely get behind him.
He'd never killed anybody, and he liked it that way. But if he wanted to stay in business, it looked like he was going to have to kill more than a few. The thought turned the Old No. 7 sour in his stomach. He drank the rest of the cup to cure it.
He laughed, putting the cup back on the tray. "Mom's not going to like it if I shoot up all them orks."
"I don't think she will," his uncle agreed.
One last time, Bill asked. "You sure you couldn't help me out?"
"Sure I'll help you out," Eaton said.
"Really?" Bill asked, surprised.
"No," Eaton said with a small shake of his head. "Did you think the answer had changed in the last five minutes? Your little farm there, nephew, is about money. Pure and simple. And the Bible tells us that money is the root of all evil. I can't be killin' and maimin' over evil old money. Come on! You know me better than that. Besides, I've already got plans...plans I can't be cancellin'."
Bill clamped his jaw shut, and looked down into the empty cup. "Yes sir," he said. Very quietly.
After a minute, he got up. "Thank you for the drink. Will we be seein' you for Christmas? Mom wants to know."
"Tell her I'll be at the door Christmas mornin'," Eaton said with a nod.
"Well, then...I've got to be goin'. Goodbye, Uncle Eaton." I've got to be going to kill over evil old money, he thought. Or get killed. Thank you for the fuckin' help.
*****
He had only ten days, so he got to work. He bought some new tools, and he borrowed a truck and drove north on I-77 all the way to Canton, Ohio, to buy supplies at a big hardware store under a fake ID he kept handy. Then he stopped in the parking lot of a McHugh's on the freeway home and crushed the commlink with the fake ID with a two kilo hammer he'd bought, and threw the pieces in two different recycling cans.
He got one of his buyers to introduce him online to a supplier based out of Washington, DC, who shipped him some things.
He didn't want to involve anyone else in his trouble, and he didn't want to spend every nuyen he had. There wasn't any point in surviving just to be broke - that's not what he'd built his farm for. And he didn't want to get anyone killed on his account. That's not what he'd built his farm for, either. He'd built it to bring weed to the happy old world, and get rich doing it.
The day of the attack, he'd crept the Flyspy around inside Cameron McGreely's heating and cooling vents so that he could listen to the orks whooping it up as they got ready to come kill him. There was some talk about roasting him in a pit like a hog, or hanging him off the overpass where Missy worked at the QuickFill, so's the whole county would know who was really the boss in these mountains. Bill found it all very motivating. By seven in the evening it got to the point where Cameron's litter of three and a half year olds, Robert Lee, Sampson, and Ugluk, were wresting each other in the living room and shrieking, "Kill that dwarf! Get his money!"
"Go to your daddy's tombstone and ask for the dwarf's money," Bill muttered to himself as he set a tripwire. Then he felt so ashamed of gloating about the orphans he aimed to make that he had to turn on Confederate Telegraph on his commlink, so the music would distract him.
Under the tall trees in the mountains in November, night had come early. It had been dark four hours when the McGreely's had left Cameron's house. Bill calculated they'd go to his apartment, first, which was why he'd left the lights on and the doors unlocked, to make it clear he wasn't there. After that, they'd come to the farm.
They came to the farm at ten minutes to midnight.
Bill had an underground room at the farm, four meters by four meters, a hole that he'd rented a digging drone to cut into the ground, then had lined with interlocking concrete block and roofed with heavy construction plastic and ten centimeters of dirt. He was sitting in it waiting, with sandwiches and cookies and a twelve pack of Coors and the heater keeping him nice and warm - he'd made sure the roof was insulated enough so that the heater didn't give the room away to thermographic sensors. On his commlink he monitored his perimeter cameras, watching the feeds on the heads up display in his goggles.
Three vehicles came up the road, and when the lead pickup truck with big white teeth painted on the front came within ten meters of the farm, Bill detonated the bomb he'd buried in the road.
It was the biggest bomb he'd built, and it gave a pretty good boom. Shrubs on the left and the right were ripped out of the ground, and the black P-179's front tires bounced thirty centimeters up off the ground. Bill felt the control room shake with the detonation.
The teeth truck stopped then, its front windshield spiderwebbed with cracks and thick gray smoke rolling out from underneath it. "First thing," Bill said to himself. "Fuck you."
But then the teeth truck lurched forward, shoved into the farm by the vehicle behind it, and that second vehicle was a kick in the stomach, because Bill could see that the McGreely orks had gone over and stolen the Boone County Sheriff's Tactical Vehicle. It was a black and white SUV with Sheriff's markings, with a ram plate on the front of it and a turret on the roof with an automatic rifle sticking out of it.
"Awwwwww, shiiiiit," Bill groaned. "Sweet angry Jesus, you have got to be kiddin' me!"
The vehicles rolled forward into the farm, coming down the center lane between the rows of pot plants, bare now in the late fall. The teeth truck hit the first trip wire, and that bomb went off, shaking the ground and killing one of Bill's cameras. Bill winced to see his plants falling down in the blast, but they could be replaced. He'd replant in the spring.
A big cloud of dust and smoke had leapt into the air. One of the truck's front wheels was bent in at the bottom, and the hood had flown open. There was a fire in the engine compartment. The teeth truck looked pretty well done for.
The Sheriff's SUV and the green pickup behind it backed up. Bill had Steel Lynx combat drones in woodland camo, both with an FN HAR assault rifles installed, and now he used his commlink to order them both to open up on the intruders. Bullets whacked into the trucks by the dozen, and Bill was very surprised to see orks diving out of the teeth truck and the green one. Watching through his goggles in the control room, he said to himself, "Why in hot hell are you gettin' out - ? Aw, mother of fuck!"
He shouted the curse when he saw a sudden yellow-white stream of fire and smoke dart through the air, lighting up the night, and Kincaid Samuels, of the Samuels branch of the McGreely clan, drop the empty LAW tube as soon as it was fired. Then Kincaid Samuels dropped with a belly full of bullets when the second Lynx hosed him, but the readout from the first Lynx now read NO SIGNAL RECIEVED.
The three orks still on their feet ran behind their vehicles as the surviving Lynx ripped burst after burst into the trucks. The teeth truck was burning good now, and the green one had no windows left. The Sheriff's SUV had a few spangs in the paint, but didn't seem to be suffering.
Wondering how the McGreely's had ever managed to steal that tactical vehicle, and where they had gotten a LAW rocket, Bill ordered his second Lynx around to circle the green truck and kill the orks behind it. But as soon as it had a view behind the truck, it's video feed was filled with another yellow-white streak coming straight on. NO SIGNAL RECIEVED.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit," Bill started repeating. "How many of those damned rockets do they have!?"
He switched the view in his goggles to cameras he had among the plants. He jumped when there was a boom that shook the control room, but squinting through the smoke from the burning drones and the teeth truck, he saw that one of the McGreelys, in a fit of optimism, had run forward and tripped off a bomb Bill had built and slaved to a motion sensor. The ork was down and not moving. Bill thought it might be Jake McGreely, but he couldn't be sure. Jake had always been quick to act and slow to think. It's how he used to wind up in jail so often.
TNT was not hard to get in the mountains, if you knew how. The bomb in the road had been twelve kilograms of it with a remote detonator. For the ones in the plant rows he'd put five kilograms in biodegradable plastic shipping boxes, then alternated one box to the next pouring in either 00 buckshot or 7cm roofing nails, as an experiment to see how each performed. A Humanis Policlub matrix site he'd found with bomb building instructions had insisted on nails, but Bill thought buckshot would work, too, and figured he was at least as smart as those racist fucksticks, so he'd tried both.
"All right, all right," Bill said to himself. "There are seven more of those, so come on in, you hillbilly sons of bitches. I ain't done yet."
He watched through the cameras as the remaining two McGreelys on their feet - he supposed Cameron must be in the Sheriff's SUV - ran to the back of the police truck. "That'll teach you. Get the hell on out of here!" Bill shouted at them as the SUV's back door came open. He was confused at first when the McGreelys started pulling out soccer ball after soccer ball. He got even more confused when they started throwing them down the rows, one after the other, soccer balls bouncing through the pot plants everywhere. But he got it the instant one of those white balls set off a motion sensor, which then set off a bomb.
For eight minutes and ten seconds according to his commlink's clock, he watched the McGreelys kick and throw soccer balls, and jump up and down and howl like mental patients when they found a bomb that way. They found three of them. One detonation knocked over Bill's Coors on the folding table he had in the control room.
He clenched his teeth and got ready to rely on the double ring of razorwire he'd laid down fifteen meters out from the camouflaged control room. He'd done it yesterday in a cold rain by hooking the wire to the back of a Lynx and ordering the Lynx to drag it along, with him following behind and driving in the stakes that held up the wire. At the time it had been a cold, runny nosed job, but Bill had said to himself over and over while he was driving the stakes that it was going to be worth it. He was angry as he watched the McGreelys get their wire cutters out of the Sheriff's SUV and snip their way through.
It was grimly apparent that Bill had underestimated Cameron and his clan. "And you never mentioned any of this in your kitchen, did you, Cameron?" Bill asked as he watched the wire part and whip back. "No, no SUV, no goddamned LAWs, no wirecutters ever got mentioned at your house, did they? Maybe you are smart enough, you son of a bitch. Maybe you are."
Once they were through the wire, they kicked soccer balls down the row. The balls set off a tripwired 00 buck bomb that they were standing too near, and the two McGreelys outside the SUV threw their arms up in front of their faces as the blast made their braids fly. But they were on the edge of the explosion, and it didn't seem to hurt them much.
Bill knew that the intruders were now walking down a straight, bomb-free row to the control room. He figured they'd wander around some and find some of the remaining bombs before they found the hidden room.
Bill picked up his rifle and checked the round counter. He slung a bag on his shoulder with five more magazines in it. The ammunition was UCAS Marines Armor Defeating, Rifle, that he'd gotten from his dealer in Washington, so he had one more surprise for the ork clan. In his goggles he checked the smartlink readout for his Government '66 under his armored jacket. The heavy pistol was loaded with fifteen explosive rounds, and he had two extra magazines.
"I ain't done yet," he said to himself. Then he found out he was wrong when he checked his cameras again, and saw one McGreely standing over his air intake pipe with a 20 liter bio-eth fuel can, and Cameron himself, finally come out of his tactical vehicle, standing at the control room's camouflaged door with an AK-98.
"Come on out, Bill," Cameron called. The audio pickups on the cameras carried his voice to Bill's ears. "There's an easy way, and there's a barbeque way, you little sack of shit!"
The orks were all laughing their growling laughs when Bill swung the door open and came out with his rifle held by the barrel.
One of the McGreelys grabbed it from him, and then Cameron buttstocked him in the head with his AK. Bill's vision went black, and for a few seconds he went deaf, like he had cotton in his ears. Someone grabbed the bag with the magazines from him. Cameron McGreely kicked his feet out from under him. Bill rolled over onto his back. Cameron's boot crashed into his ribs. Bill's body armor absorbed most of the kick, but he got the message with zero signal distortion.
"Yeehaw, you halfer cocksucker!" Cameron barked, kicking Bill in the chest and side, scuffing his armor jacket with thick November mud. "What good are your booby traps now? What good is your razorwire now? You tell me!"
"Uugh..." Bill pulled himself into a sitting position. Cameron towered over Bill, and behind Cameron the mountain trees reached for the dark sky. Bill could see the thermal glow of the burning teeth truck and his poor Lynxes even through the rows of his pot plants. The rows had gaps in them where he'd sacrificed plants to bombs, hoping to get orks.
The four McGreelys were in a semicircle in front of him now. The two who'd been wounded by the buckshot bomb had stripes of hot blood down their legs and bare arms. All of them were wearing armor vests with interlocking plates.
They were in a semicircle around Bill now, each with their rifle in the low ready position, and hard grins all around. It was pretty clear they were going to fill him full of lead.
Bill told Cameron: "Why don't you go eat shit and die, you dumb trog throwback?"
Cameron McGreely shot bodily into the sky.
Bill at first thought that Cameron had left to go eat shit, but then he thought that probably was not the case. Whatever the reason, the evidence of Bill's eyes was that Cameron McGreely was flying straight up, and Bill was looking at the soles of Cameron's boots now, as they got smaller going toward the moon, twenty meters away and counting.
The other McGreely's had a fraction to look surprised. Then there was a rifle bang, and a bullet burst through the neck of one of the orks. His mouth flew open, displaying all his ork teeth in agony - his knees unlocked and he flopped to the ground. He and Bill were staring at each other no more than two meters apart, and the ork's face said, What the hell was that?
One of the two McGreelys still standing pivoted in place and fired two short bursts back toward the road, although if the ork could see something to shoot at, Bill couldn't.
No, wait, that ain't so, Bill thought to himself. He pulled out his Government '66. The aiming reticule lit up in his goggle view when he closed his hand on the grip, and he pumped four bullets as fast as he could at the downed ork's face, which was all burst and punched in afterward.
Bill looked up when the ork that had been shooting out toward the road spun around, and then shot him. Bill shook all through his body, and he felt something go wrong in his guts, like a microwave packet of beans with a fork through it.
The unseen rifle cracked again. The ork who'd just shot Bill threw his head back and closed his eyes, staggering forward a step, his hand coming off the AK's fore end. Feeling hot blood splattering out of him, Bill dragged his Government '66 up and tried to aim careful before squeezing off a shot. The semiauto barked, and the McGreely fell face down.
Then Cameron McGreely fell back to earth with an awful thump and a terrible cracking, and his scream of "Awwww shiiiiiit -!" as he'd come down turned into a wail as loud as Bill had ever heard come out of a metahuman.
Bill's vision was blurring, and his Government had almost come out of his hand with that last shot. Cameron's wail was filling his world. Even through the blurring, he could see Cameron only two or three meters away, screaming and dragging himself upright. But then Cameron's skull burst, accompanied by another rifle crack, and Cameron McGreely laid himself down, and was dead.
Bill collapsed backward, the back of his head in the cold mud and dry leaves. Was that all of the motherfuckers? Are they all gone? I ought to get up and take a look around before I get killed from some unforeseen direction.
There was a voice calling for him, and he knew he'd recognize it, if he just studied it another minute. "Bill? Bill? Bill Sharp? Bill? My son, where are you, my boy?"
He gathered his breath to scream, "Over here!"
He heard footsteps coming, and he turned his head. He tightened his grip on his Government.
His momma appeared. Dressed in an old camouflaged hunting jacket, and with some tall man next to her. A skinny human man, with a full beard. Reverend Hogarth, from Christ's Hall.
"O, Lord, hear my prayer," his mother said when she saw him. She put down her elegant Remington 950 bolt action in the leaves. She knelt in her woodland pattern pants and put her hands on the sides of Bill's head. He was embarrassed to see the tears overbrim her eyes and stream down her cheeks. "O, Lord on High, do not take my child today!"
"How did you get here?" Bill asked, in utter confusion.
"We knew every minute was a danger," his mother told him. "We went and asked Bryant Tavish where you kept your farm. He was willin' to tell us. The boy is torn up with guilt because he'd already told Cameron McGreely over there everything about the place." She let go of his face.
"God damn it!" Bill blurted. "Bryant sold me to the orks!?"
"Yes, honey, he did. He did. You know he's always been confused. He said the orks had said they'd burn his parents' house down if he didn't tell."
"I - I - oooh, hell, this is gettin' so it hurts!"
"Bill, Bill...little Bill, it's time you listened." His mother looked him in the eyes. "You have brought the vengeance of the Lord upon you."
Bill stared at her. When did she find out about my business?
"Yes, He has sent these troglodytes to do His Will. You have fallen into the sin of greed, my son, and you have tempted others to the sins of this devil weed. You have profited on their temptation. And the Lord has seen these sins, and the Lord has seen you go off the path, and the Lord has struck you down. Bill, please...if you want to live, if you want to go to the Paradise up above when you leave this earth and not suffer torment in the flames, you have to ask the Lord forgiveness."
Bill said, "Aww, damn it..."
"The Lord gives second chances! He's sent Reverend Hogarth and me to give you your second chance! I prayed that He would make me his instrument, and He has! But to have the Lord's forgiveness, to live in His mercy, you have to ask to be forgiven. You have to truly ask. You have to give up your wicked greed. And - "
"Forgive me, Lord!" Bill called out.
"Yes!" Carol clapped her hands.
"Hallelujah!" Reverend Hogarth held his arms out straight to his sides, his fingers spread.
"Lord, I need your help!" Bill yelled.
"Praise God!" Carol cried.
"Hallelujah!" Reverend Hogarth said, spreading his fingers further.
"Lord, I have sinned, but I want to sin no more!" Bill shouted. His guts felt like shit and sand and hurt.
"Glory, glory!" His mother shouted.
"Please, Lord, take me back!" Bill groaned.
Reverend Hogarth pounced, and put his long-fingered, human hands on Bill's head. They were hot in the November night. "Jesus, Our Savior," the reverend said, "Jesus, heal this poor lamb who has been lost! Restore the body of this brother who has wandered, but who now returns! Now, Jesus, show us your power!"
"Praise the Lord!" Carol cried.
Bill groaned again, and his jaw worked uncontrollably as he felt his insides pulse with heat, and slither around. His hands flopped open and he dropped the Government.
"We love You, Jesus! Show us how You love us!" The reverend implored.
"We love You!" Carol echoed.
Hogarth dropped his head. He said quietly, "Let us pray..."
Seconds ticked by. Bill's breathing regulated. The pain that had swamped him drained
away, until there was only a diffuse ache.
He knew Hogarth and his mother figured it was Jesus healing him. But he knew that over in Washington, or down in Atlanta, there were mages who did the same thing without having any god at all, and there were hippies who said it was the spirit of their cat, and Mexicans who thought it was the Flayed God. And he knew the pain had been put at bay. That was what he wanted.
There was sweat going cold on his face as Reverend Hogarth helped him up. Bill picked up his pistol and put it back in his waistband.
"Let's go home now," his mother told him. "And remember this second chance you've been given."
"We should bury these damn McGreelys," Bill said, still wincing at the pain that was left.
"No, son. We need to get out."
Oh, hell, Bill said to himself. Give up your wicked greed, she'd said.
"Exodus, 24:17," Reverend Hogarth intoned, standing straight and tall. "And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel."
And a column of fire appeared before the reverend, fifteen centimeters taller than he was. It burned without fuel or smoke. It had no arms or legs, but the way the top of it tilted here and there was almost like a metahuman tilting its head, and the tops of the flames were like wild hair in the wind.
"Go and clean Bill Sharp of his sin of greed," Hogarth told the column.
The column worked behind them as they walked. Carol had her arm around Bill, and Hogarth had his eye on the far horizon. Bill could hear plants going up, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, as the fire-thing embraced them, one by one.
"Today you're saved," his mother told him. "Today, you got your miracle."
"Praise Jesus," Bill told her. She couldn't see that he was using his commlink to check his credit balance at the shadow bank, and shop for new irrigation equipment.
"Sometimes," his daddy told him. "Most times. I checked the hardware, and that's just fine. Got to wait for a day that the satlink's workin' to check the software."
"How we gonna fix the truck if we can't get no schematics?" Bill asked. They were in the driveway outside his parents' garage, his daddy's quadcab Dust Devil out there with the hood up.
"Well, that's because I store all my own schematics, son, for times when the satlink's busted. Your Daddy ain't senile yet." His father's eyebrows went up and down twice.
"Course you're not. What you got there?"
"Ain't it great?" His daddy had climbed up on an industrial blue step-cart with knobby tires that pivoted in all directions. He showed him how it worked with one thumb on his commlink, going up to the truck, backing away from it, sliding left and right. "Raises and lowers ten centimeters, too. Saeder-Krupp makes 'em."
Bill smiled. "Christ Almight, you mean it ain't Japanese?"
"No, I mean it ain't no damned Japanese. Have you ever once seen a damned Japanese in these mountains?"
"I reckon once." Bill knew his father did not trust anything made by a Japanese company. Chinese maybe, because he thought the Chinese were like the West Virginians of Asia. But he bought North American, or German, or not at all. "You got one of those for me, too?"
"I got the old stepstools for you." When you were dwarves, you grew up with stepstools. It was March 30th, 2070. It was the day of Easter. Christ was Risen, and Bill Sharp had come to his folks place for dinner. His daddy worked for the power company. Bill grew dope.
The frame house with blue siding and white gutters had been built in 1989, and Bill's daddy, Noah Sharp, had bought it from the county in 2036, married just about eighteen months with a six months old son. The county had confiscated the house from the previous owner for unpaid taxes, and Noah, with a loan from his human father, had got the tumbledown place for not much money. Bill had seen the early videos many times - his mother Carol running the camera, panning from Bill in an infant carrier to Noah on the roof with Uncle Eaton, nailguns going bang.
Bill's folks and his daddy's brother, Uncle Eaton, had been among the very first dwarves born in the West Virginia mountains, born to human parents, with most folks thinking they were either defect cases, or sick, or devil's babies, or all three. It was the days of the VITAS pandemic, when the county clinic was full up with people who had the puking fever. West Virginia was still one of the United States of America, shortly to be one of the United Canadian And American States. In those days dwarves got together, and stayed together - you couldn't trust nobody over a meter and a half tall. Now Noah and Carol knew every dwarf in the mountains - their inboxes overflowed every Christmas with pictures of dwarf kids getting sturdier and dogs running in the yards. There were going to be lots of guests for Easter dinner.
"Did Uncle Eaton say he was coming?" Bill asked.
"I told him he was welcome," Noah told him. "Why don't you even up the tire pressure?"
Uncle Eaton wasn't as welcome as he had been thirty-four years ago, when he'd helped fix up the place, Carol laughing, videoing her husband and brother-in-law trying to make the Japanese paint robot Noah had bought used change out its own paint reservoir like it was supposed to. Uncle Eaton's hair had been cut short then, parted on one side, with a goatee. His teeth had been whiter. He had been a mountain hedge witch in those days, but not as much as he was now.
"A mountain hedge witch," Eaton had told his nephew more than once, "is different from any other kind."
Uncle Eaton believed in Jesus, but a Jesus of a different stripe from Carol's. Carol had joined the Christ's Hall Church when Bill was just a toddler, and in the last fifteen years had become more and more involved there, particularly since Haley's Comet had brought the tornado of '61 through the county, killing fourteen and causing a rain of frogs, and the Trents of Boone county had grown scales like fish all over their bodies and taken to swimming at midday in the old quarry lakes. Human Reverend Hogarth presided at Christ's Hall, and his Jesus, who was Carol's Jesus, was the type to stand in white robes holding the hand of an apple-cheeked blonde child. Uncle Eaton's Jesus was the kind who, running sweating at night hand in hand with Mary Magdalene through Gethsemane, could already see those nails. Bill's momma's Jesus looked tired on the Cross. His uncle's Jesus bared His teeth up there, and generally bled more.
The door from the garage to the laundry room opened up, and Carol leaned out of it, wearing her cream colored pantsuit, her fancy commlink strapped on the inside of her wrist. Bill could see the heat from inside the house glowing around her. "Anybody come yet?"
"No ma'am," her husband answered her, peering under the truck's hood. He called her ma'am when he wasn't really listening.
"Well, my one and only son," Carol said, her voice going firm. "Are you out here drinking beer on Resurrection Day?"
Bill didn't know what to say. He had the Coors in his hand. He should have remembered his momma was likely to come out and interrupt them before he'd taken it out of the cooler he kept in his truck. Nothing to do about it now but stand with a stupid look on his face.
"Drink that up right in front of your father. Oh...damn it. Here come the Tavishes. Bill, throw that thing away."
Bill tossed the beer at the garbage can, but it skipped off the edge and clunked to the floor. Coors was now glurping onto the cement. Bill tried to pretend it wasn't there, and Carol ignored her son ignoring it, because the Tavishes were getting out of their minivan - a dwarf family the Sharps knew through Carol's church.
"Happy Easter!" Carol said, going forward to hug Mrs. Tavish. Mrs. Tavish was balancing a dish of creamed potatoes in one hand.
Mr. and Mrs. Tavish were God-fearing Christians from God-fearing human families, the first generation of dwarves in their tree. Their daughter, Missy, was with them. She was twenty-four, worked at the QuickFill on I-64, and worked for Bill, too, because the QuickFill was where Bill brought his bales of sweet, stinky weed for pick-up by his out-of-town, high roller customers. Her brother, Bryant, was twenty-two. Christ's Hall had just cured him of being a homosexual about six months ago. He bought weed from Bill and sold it to the younger parishioners, and one or two of the older ones.
Missy and her folks went into the house with Carol. Bryant stayed out with Bill and his daddy, standing back from the truck to keep from getting his Easter clothes dirty. "What're you doing?" He asked.
"I was trying to equalize the tire pressure," Bill told him. He took out a mopcloth and wiped up the Coors, tossing the can in the garbage. "Sorry if this bothers you, Daddy."
"No need for your sorry," Noah told him. His eyes were bright and his hand, the one that wasn't inside the engine compartment, was animated. "I been sober twenty-three years. It's like all that happened to somebody else."
"I'll have one, if you've got a spare," Bryant said happily.
Bill looked at him, trying to get across the idea that he was already in trouble without turning it into a kegger, but Bryant just kept smiling because he didn't get it.
His daddy told him, "Give him one. What's the matter with you?"
Bill got Bryant a Coors, and while he was at it he furnished himself with a replacement. Might as well be hanged for a cow as a chicken.
A car went by on the road at the bottom of the driveway and Noah turned his head at it, squinting through the display goggles he was wearing.
Bill didn't recognize the car. "What is it? Is it Eaton?"
"No, I thought it was old man McGreely," Noah said. The car had gone by. "Are you just going to - "
"Old man McGreely's comin'?" Bill asked, his eyebrows shooting up.
"He's invited, and have you gotten to thinkin' that you're too old to get your ass whipped for interruptin'?"
"No, sir."
"Good. Do those tires."
Bill, as a matter of fact, did think that he was too old for his Daddy to be whipping his ass - which was not the same as to say that Noah couldn't do it. Bill was, he thought to himself as he equalized the tires, thirty-five years old, he'd paid cash for his car, and he had a bit more than 200,000 nuyen put away in a shadow matrix bank that provided financial services to outlaw horticulturalists like himself. And he sure had noticed that this I'm-the-boss show hadn't come out of Noah until Bryant had showed up. Noah probably knew that Bryant sold weed for Bill. Bill knew his daddy knew what he grew, but he didn't think his momma did. If she did, she prayed in secret for Jesus to cure Bill of it, which Bill did not calculate was a short time in coming. Did Reverend Hogarth at Christ's Hall do magic? He did. But so did Hindus in India and voodoo priests down in Florida. As Bill saw it, he'd never met Jesus personally, and he did not see where Christian folk had any better time of it than anybody else.
More family arrived, and some loose-ends friends who didn't have enough family of their own to bother with, or who were only stopping by before going on to dinner someplace else, or who didn't care themselves enough for Easter to do their own cooking. Carol invited anyone she thought she might convince to come, to get a portion of the Lord. Soon they could hear the voices from inside the house rolling out through the garage. Grown-ups and children both walked right past the dwarf-adjusted T-250 shotgun and M-23 rifle leaning against the garage workbench. Both weapons had palmprint safeties that only admitted four people in the world - Noah, Carol, Bill, and Uncle Eaton.
There were things in the mountains, and people, too, that inspired you to keep a gun handy.
Old man McGreely came, in his bright green open-topped jeep, wearing dark slacks with a white shirt and dark blue tie. When he climbed out of the jeep, he pushed his display goggles down around his neck. He had a rifle clamped upright between the seats.
"Oh, shit," Bryant said to Bill, smiling, as McGreely walked up. Bill frowned at him to shut up.
"Happy Easter, Mr. Sharp," McGreely grunted to Noah. "Ain't you supposed to be eatin'?"
"She'll let me know when she needs me. How are you, George?"
"Still sitting up by myself."
Old man McGreely was the patriarch of the McGreely orks, a pack of cousins, siblings, grandchildren, uncles and aunts who were known in the mountains for trouble and jail time, and the odd one with regular employment - one of McGreely's eight sons was in motorcycle repair, and one of his two daughters bounced at the Dewy Lily, the strip club off the same overpass that had Missy Tavish's QuickFill on it. McGreely was about as old as orks got, which was about fifty-five. It was figured, although no dwarf had gone that far yet, that dwarves could make it to about two hundred. McGreely had a scar on his chin and was missing the tip of one ear - one of his jutting lower canines was whiter than the rest of his teeth because it was a plastic replacement. Thirty years ago McGreely had done five years in prison for manslaughter, and Noah Sharp had been at the barbeque where the other man had died.
Old Man McGreely was right about everything, just ask him. In about two minutes he'd started an argument with Noah about how the Gaz P-179 was a better truck than the Dirt Devil. "This damned thing bleeds nuyen, and shits trouble," McGreely said.
"You keep it up right and it'll never fail," Noah told him. But Bill knew there was no hope of convincing him. The big problem with orks was they were dumb and they didn't know it.
"Why you working on it then?" McGreely wanted to know, meaning, if it doesn't fail?
"You've got to work it to keep it working!" Noah snapped.
They were always like this. Bill wondered why they ever got together. Old Man McGreely wasn't so bad, really, and the younger McGreelys seemed to pay him some mind when he told them the jailhouse was for dipshits. Old Man McGreely had had two brothers and two sisters, all from the same litter. Old age had gotten two of them. Disagreements had gotten the other two.
It was after five thirty, and supper was to be at six. The wind, which had started gusting the night before, was picking up now, driving a few needles of cold rain along with the dried and dead leaves of last autumn. Bill knew his daddy would stay under the hood of the truck as long as he could, and hold dinner up washing his hands while his wife's face got sourer and sourer. It was in this atmosphere that Uncle Eaton came walking up the driveway in his work boots, jeans, his Globetrotter camouflage jacket, and an animated t-shirt especially for Easter, with three white crosses glowing on a mountainside among the gently stirring leaves of oaks. "How y'all doing? Damn it, is that old George McGreely?"
"It is. God bless you, Eaton Sharp."
Uncle Eaton shook hands with everybody, including Bryant, who did it clumsily, and laughed for no reason. Bryant got nervous easily, especially with anybody older than he was. He asked Eaton, "Where's your car?"
"Sold it in '37," Eaton told him. "Happy Easter, Noah," Eaton said to his brother.
"Happy Easter," Noah agreed, holding up a filter and comparing it to the schematics displayed in his goggles.
"Boys," Carol called from the kitchen door. "Boys, come in and eat."
Uncle Eaton walked with angels, and brownies, mountain pixies, spirits of the earth and wood. They sped him across the mountains. He didn't need any car.
"Your hair's wet, Eaton," Noah told him, frowning.
"I didn't want to come to Easter without havin' a shower," Eaton explained.
*****
A few weeks later, on a day when the sun was shining brightly in May, even as it was starting to slip below the western mountains, Bill was pulling into the Stuffer Shack on the south end of Rollins. He was going past a minivan to find a parking space when someone suddenly came out from behind the other side of it, and Bill tapped the brake before he saw that they weren't going to run right in front of him. It was a McGreely ork in a sportsman's vest. It was a fact of life that were there was one McGreely ork there were about three more, and that fact was as true today at the Stuffer Shack as it ever was. Bill had just stumbled into a pack of them.
"Shit," he muttered as he pulled in two spots over from Cameron McGreely's Gaz pickup. "Shoulda scanned for commlinks." On the way by his commlink had showed him that the Stuffer Shack had Coors twelve packs for nine nuyen, and that had gotten so much of his attention he hadn't checked to see who else was there.
He got out of the car smiling. He said, "You'll run into damned old anybody at the Stuffer Shack!"
"Bill Sharp!" Cameron McGreely growled. "Lookit what we got!"
Cameron was wearing mirrored aviator glasses, and a cowboy hat that curled up on the sides. He was smiling his shit-kicker smile, with which he had been born, and had a spear longer than he was tall cradled in his elbow, the titanium head lit up by the afternoon sun, the etched name of the manufacturer in Detroit easy to see. One of his relations had an identical one.
"What have you got?" Bill put his feet against the rear wheel of Cameron's truck and hauled himself up with his hands to look over the edge of the bed. The McGreely orks all laughed. Bill thought, Ain't that just funny as hell? Keep on laughin', you shitheels.
They had a pig laid out flat in the back, easily a hundred and fifty kilograms. A strong smell of blood rose up. Blood was thick and red going black in the corrugations of the bed.
"Nice hog," Bill nodded.
Cameron McGreely laid his big lump of a hand on the back of Bill's neck. He leaned his face close to Bill's, so that Bill smelled Cameron's breath, and saw himself reflected twice in Cameron's glasses. He tried not to flinch under the hand.
"That's a goddamned spectacular hog," Cameron told Bill. "That's a few kilos of meat."
"I bet it is." Bill stared back at the McGreely.
"Haha." Cameron thumped him on the back twice. "You ever hunt hogs, Bill Sharp?"
"Not with a spear," Bill answered. Cameron laughed out loud, showing all the teeth in his orky mouth.
Cameron let go of him, and Bill hopped to the ground. He felt the semiautomatic in his waistband bounce.
"Come with us some time. We'll see if you can keep up. You want a beer?" Cameron asked him.
Bill wanted out of this crowd of hillbilly orks, but a free beer was a free beer. "That's damned nice of you," he told Cameron.
The McGreely reached into a cooler in the bed of the truck and came out with a Busch that he pressed into Bill's hand. "How's your crop, Bill?" Cameron wanted to know. He slapped a mosquito that was biting his wrist. "Goin' to make some money this harvest?"
Bill was angry at the question. "I suppose you must mean my tomatoes," he said.
"I bet you're makin' a pile of dirty ole' money," Cameron said. He was smirking down at Bill, and Bill noticed how Cameron's had moved around to be on all sides of him. "And God damn it, why shouldn't you? Who doesn't want their own little tomato garden?" The McGreely's all laughed. "I know I do," Cameron said.
Bill said: "Yeah, but once you get one, you've got to keep the hogs out of it."
The laughter died. Cameron was nodding slowly, a man who liked to give the impression he knew more than he knew how to say.
Bill said, "Thanks for the beer. I've got to be on my way."
"Say hello to your daddy for me," Cameron told him.
"You too," Bill answered.
*****
There was a trail wide enough to be called a dirt road by people who didn't worry too much about scratches on their sideview mirrors. It ran off the road and through the woods for two kilometers, and then a tenth of a kilometer more, before another track turned off it that led to the three and a half acres of Bill Sharp's marijuana farm. But if you kept going along the main trail another 2.2 kilometers, it took you up on to the side of a mountain. There was a shelf of rock thirty meters wide up there, with a stream that went down through it, forming deep pools before it ran on down the slope, cutting a hole through the trees that gave a view of the valley and the lights of the town of Connors, six hundred, eighty-one meters down below, according to the GPS. The first week of that August, Bill Sharp and Missy Tavish were up there at midnight, swimming and fucking, the day they had seen Old Man McGreely's body committed to the earth. Bill and Missy had ridden with their parents in the funeral procession, which had taken the scenic route along the interstate to the cemetery where the McGreely's people were laid; a long parade of pickup trucks full of orks, led by a Mitsubishi Nightsky hearse, followed by friends and well wishers, and a few dwarves, like Bill, who went to see the Old Man lowered into the ground, and because if he hadn't gone the McGreelys would have nursed it as a grudge. The whole thing had traveled at a stately pace with a helidrone provided by the funeral home overhead, so the procession could be recorded for the family.
Bill and Missy were lying on a blanket on the side of the stream, still gulping air post-orgasm. Bill had a thermos full of margaritas and an FN HAR assault rifle within reach. They could see just fine with half a moon and a clear sky, and their heat sensitive eyes.
Standing on the hood of his blue Thundercloud ATV was an electric bug zapper, with its power cable plugged into a port in the control panel.
"I remember him when I was a little girl...I must have been 'bout seven." Missy laughed. "I remember my mom telling me, "He killed a man. He killed a man in a fit of temper!""
"Yeah..." Bill agreed. He took the top off the thermos. "My mother never liked him much either."
""Wrath is a sin, Missy! Wrath is a sin!"" Lying on her back, looking up at the stars, Missy quoted her mother.
"Hell, wrath is how I get by," Bill said. The top of the thermos was two cups nested together. Bill filled both, his more than hers, because he had the stronger constitution.
"He kept those boys pretty well in line," Missy said. She took her cup from him with her right hand, the one with the chain of rhododendron blossoms tattooed around the wrist.
"I guess. For somebody's definition of in line. The ork dictionary's definition," Bill laughed.
"I'm serious. He did. Now Cameron McGreely don't fear nobody but God, and God only on Sundays."
Bill said, "Cameron McGreely's one super weatherproof asshole." Missy laughed.
Bill refilled his cup. Missy was still working on hers.
"Jesus up above, they don't live very long," Missy said, shaking her head. "Fifty four years old, and they find him laid out on his back in the yard with the dog licking his face."
"They cause some trouble along the way, though." Bill drank his margarita down, tossed the cup onto the blanket, and waded into the stream, the water quickly coming up to his knees. He pointed up into the trees overhanging the other bank. "Look, look, there's a momma raccoon and two little babies. You see them?"
"Yeah, raccoons, that's just great." Missy sat up, drawing up her legs, resting her elbows on her knees. "Bill, I'm telling you, those McGreelys are goin' to come after you. That's how them orks are. Cameron's spent all his life lookin' around for what others have built up, so he could steal it from 'em."
"OK," Bill said. He sat down so that only his head was above the water. "Let's drive on down to Cameron's place and kill him. It'll save trouble later."
"Damn it, Bill!"
"Forget about it," Bill smiled at her.
"Am I to understand that that is your plan? Forget about it? Try to remember, not only is the screwin' one of my main forms of recreation, but you also represent a large portion of my income."
"I'm takin' steps," Bill told her. "I plan ahead. You know that about me. I plan ahead. I make plans to make plans."
He smiled, but he had the sense she was not buying it.
"You've got plans?" She asked.
"I've got plans. I've always got plans. I plan to drag you in here with me in another minute."
"You've got some kind of plan?"
"Plans on top of plans. And I ain't goin' to kill nobody, if it can be avoided."
She took a deep breath. "I'd hate to see you killed, you hillbilly jackass. And I think they're going to kill you. But OK...you say you've got a plan."
Bill smiled again, and shrugged, and kept smiling.
Shit, he thought. What am I going to do about those orks?
*****
By November, things had gotten worse.
Bill had messaged his Uncle Eaton online three times, with no reply. He had gone up to Eaton's place twice, even though he knew that Eaton didn't like unexpected visitors. The second time, he'd clenched his buttcheeks tight enough to give him the nerve to walk up to the door and slip a note into it, saying that he needed to talk to Eaton, and when he would return, and then got away again quick.
The third time he came back was eight o'clock in the morning on a cold Tuesday, watching his breath puff out in clouds as he left his car by the road and walked upslope the hundred meters or so to Eaton's RV. Up here, the woods got thick awfully fast. They closed in, left, right, and overhead, like a road coming quickly to the end. When he came out into the little clearing where Eaton's RV was parked, he saw his uncle standing in the yard next to his garden reflecting ball.
"Mornin', Nephew," Eaton called to him, but not cheerfully.
"Mornin', Uncle Eaton," Bill replied, a little faintly.
His uncle lived in an old RV that he'd driven up into this clearing on the mountainside more than twenty years ago, when the road leading up from the main road had been wider. Now the trees had narrowed the road, and small trees had grown up around the RV, too - at a quick guess, Bill thought at least four would have to be cut down to get the vehicle out and turned around so that it was pointed downhill. Only the tops of the trees nearest to the RV were kept trimmed back, so that the sun could get on the solar panels on the roof. Bill helped keep his uncle's place up, bringing his drone tool cart all the way up here to do it.
"I got your note," Eaton said. "What's bothering you?"
"Well," Bill said, and he laughed. "I've got some trouble at work, is the fact."
Eaton's yard was full of things besides trees. There was the reflecting ball, and there were the strings of yellow Christmas lights that went through the trees in a circle about seven meters wide, about ten centimeters over their heads. There were seven raw mountain stones delineating that same circle, each about twice the size of a basketball, and painted with symbols that Bill had never seen anywhere else, and which he did not care to look at. There were bundles of things hanging from the branches, and there was a cross cut from raw tree lumber, nearly two meters high, with red paint splashed at the positions of the wrists and ankles.
"You mean down at the marijuana farm," Eaton nodded.
"Old Man McGreely died," Bill said, feeling helpless about that. What could he have done to prevent it? "And now, well, you know, those orks have all slipped their leashes. Running around, getting arrested, getting let go again. They rolled over Frank Darcy's truck one night out of spite about an old loan...about four of them just got on one side and rolled it over on its roof. And now it looks like they've got a plan to kill me."
Eaton looked up at him. "How do you figure that?"
"They're growing weed. Cameron's been doing it about a year and a half now, started before his father died. I'm their competition, and they're fixin' to get bigger." Bill shrugged. "I got a little Flyspy drone hiding in the heating vent in Cameron's kitchen, so I hear some things. I got the day and the date they're plannin' on comin'."
"So you want me to kill a bunch of them for you?" Eaton asked, his voice rising to embolden the question.
Having been brought to the point, Bill answered, "Well, if it's not a ton of trouble, yes sir."
"Come and have a seat," Eaton told him, gesturing at a pair of folding deck chairs. Bill brushed leaves off of his, and sat down. The chairs were designed for dwarves, so he was comfortable. Eaton sat down next to him with a grunt. Then he sat up and turned around to look at the RV. A plastic tray with two plastic cups and a liter of Jack Daniels Whiskey on it levitated over from the RV to them, and set itself in Eaton's lap. It made the hair on Bill's neck stand up to see it. Eaton, though, was nonchalant as he poured double shots into each cup, and handed one to Bill.
"When's the big day?" Eaton asked.
"This Thursday next."
"Can't help you, nephew. Sorry."
Bill stared at his uncle as his uncle sipped his whiskey. Bill took a drink of his own, then asked, "Are you sure?"
Eaton did not hesitate. "Yes I'm sure. I'm goin' for a walk, nephew. I'm going to go up and down these mountains, walk through the valleys, walk through the towns. I'm going to climb to the peaks and breath up there. I'm taking nothing with me but my heart, and I'll find out how strong it is. I'm going to talk with the birds and the beasts...I'm going to look for the angels in these parts. And maybe while I'm out there, I'll come upon the Lord, and if I do, I'm going to take the chance to ask Him what He thinks of how I'm doing. I'm going to be gone a while."
"You couldn't move that to the week after next?"
Eaton said, "It's time to go when it's time to go. Not sooner, and not later."
They drank.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Bill said, trying to keep the anger out of it.
"You should just leave the mountains for a while. Head up to Ohio. Pretty country in Ohio. Land's so flat and low, you can see for kilometers."
"No," Bill said. "They fuckin' know where my farm is. I'd come back and it'd be gone. I didn't build it so I could move to Ohio and the fuckin' McGreelys could move in to my place."
"Hire some guns."
"Maybe I will."
Bill had not decided on what to do until his uncle had asked, so you want me to kill a bunch of them for you? He'd been trying to avoid it. But there wasn't really any other plan that he could think of. Cameron McGreely wasn't going to just agree to be friendly. And killing one or two of them would just piss the rest of them off. He'd have to get a whole bunch, and he'd have to do it all at once. It was not going to pay to let any McGreely get behind him.
He'd never killed anybody, and he liked it that way. But if he wanted to stay in business, it looked like he was going to have to kill more than a few. The thought turned the Old No. 7 sour in his stomach. He drank the rest of the cup to cure it.
He laughed, putting the cup back on the tray. "Mom's not going to like it if I shoot up all them orks."
"I don't think she will," his uncle agreed.
One last time, Bill asked. "You sure you couldn't help me out?"
"Sure I'll help you out," Eaton said.
"Really?" Bill asked, surprised.
"No," Eaton said with a small shake of his head. "Did you think the answer had changed in the last five minutes? Your little farm there, nephew, is about money. Pure and simple. And the Bible tells us that money is the root of all evil. I can't be killin' and maimin' over evil old money. Come on! You know me better than that. Besides, I've already got plans...plans I can't be cancellin'."
Bill clamped his jaw shut, and looked down into the empty cup. "Yes sir," he said. Very quietly.
After a minute, he got up. "Thank you for the drink. Will we be seein' you for Christmas? Mom wants to know."
"Tell her I'll be at the door Christmas mornin'," Eaton said with a nod.
"Well, then...I've got to be goin'. Goodbye, Uncle Eaton." I've got to be going to kill over evil old money, he thought. Or get killed. Thank you for the fuckin' help.
*****
He had only ten days, so he got to work. He bought some new tools, and he borrowed a truck and drove north on I-77 all the way to Canton, Ohio, to buy supplies at a big hardware store under a fake ID he kept handy. Then he stopped in the parking lot of a McHugh's on the freeway home and crushed the commlink with the fake ID with a two kilo hammer he'd bought, and threw the pieces in two different recycling cans.
He got one of his buyers to introduce him online to a supplier based out of Washington, DC, who shipped him some things.
He didn't want to involve anyone else in his trouble, and he didn't want to spend every nuyen he had. There wasn't any point in surviving just to be broke - that's not what he'd built his farm for. And he didn't want to get anyone killed on his account. That's not what he'd built his farm for, either. He'd built it to bring weed to the happy old world, and get rich doing it.
The day of the attack, he'd crept the Flyspy around inside Cameron McGreely's heating and cooling vents so that he could listen to the orks whooping it up as they got ready to come kill him. There was some talk about roasting him in a pit like a hog, or hanging him off the overpass where Missy worked at the QuickFill, so's the whole county would know who was really the boss in these mountains. Bill found it all very motivating. By seven in the evening it got to the point where Cameron's litter of three and a half year olds, Robert Lee, Sampson, and Ugluk, were wresting each other in the living room and shrieking, "Kill that dwarf! Get his money!"
"Go to your daddy's tombstone and ask for the dwarf's money," Bill muttered to himself as he set a tripwire. Then he felt so ashamed of gloating about the orphans he aimed to make that he had to turn on Confederate Telegraph on his commlink, so the music would distract him.
Under the tall trees in the mountains in November, night had come early. It had been dark four hours when the McGreely's had left Cameron's house. Bill calculated they'd go to his apartment, first, which was why he'd left the lights on and the doors unlocked, to make it clear he wasn't there. After that, they'd come to the farm.
They came to the farm at ten minutes to midnight.
Bill had an underground room at the farm, four meters by four meters, a hole that he'd rented a digging drone to cut into the ground, then had lined with interlocking concrete block and roofed with heavy construction plastic and ten centimeters of dirt. He was sitting in it waiting, with sandwiches and cookies and a twelve pack of Coors and the heater keeping him nice and warm - he'd made sure the roof was insulated enough so that the heater didn't give the room away to thermographic sensors. On his commlink he monitored his perimeter cameras, watching the feeds on the heads up display in his goggles.
Three vehicles came up the road, and when the lead pickup truck with big white teeth painted on the front came within ten meters of the farm, Bill detonated the bomb he'd buried in the road.
It was the biggest bomb he'd built, and it gave a pretty good boom. Shrubs on the left and the right were ripped out of the ground, and the black P-179's front tires bounced thirty centimeters up off the ground. Bill felt the control room shake with the detonation.
The teeth truck stopped then, its front windshield spiderwebbed with cracks and thick gray smoke rolling out from underneath it. "First thing," Bill said to himself. "Fuck you."
But then the teeth truck lurched forward, shoved into the farm by the vehicle behind it, and that second vehicle was a kick in the stomach, because Bill could see that the McGreely orks had gone over and stolen the Boone County Sheriff's Tactical Vehicle. It was a black and white SUV with Sheriff's markings, with a ram plate on the front of it and a turret on the roof with an automatic rifle sticking out of it.
"Awwwwww, shiiiiit," Bill groaned. "Sweet angry Jesus, you have got to be kiddin' me!"
The vehicles rolled forward into the farm, coming down the center lane between the rows of pot plants, bare now in the late fall. The teeth truck hit the first trip wire, and that bomb went off, shaking the ground and killing one of Bill's cameras. Bill winced to see his plants falling down in the blast, but they could be replaced. He'd replant in the spring.
A big cloud of dust and smoke had leapt into the air. One of the truck's front wheels was bent in at the bottom, and the hood had flown open. There was a fire in the engine compartment. The teeth truck looked pretty well done for.
The Sheriff's SUV and the green pickup behind it backed up. Bill had Steel Lynx combat drones in woodland camo, both with an FN HAR assault rifles installed, and now he used his commlink to order them both to open up on the intruders. Bullets whacked into the trucks by the dozen, and Bill was very surprised to see orks diving out of the teeth truck and the green one. Watching through his goggles in the control room, he said to himself, "Why in hot hell are you gettin' out - ? Aw, mother of fuck!"
He shouted the curse when he saw a sudden yellow-white stream of fire and smoke dart through the air, lighting up the night, and Kincaid Samuels, of the Samuels branch of the McGreely clan, drop the empty LAW tube as soon as it was fired. Then Kincaid Samuels dropped with a belly full of bullets when the second Lynx hosed him, but the readout from the first Lynx now read NO SIGNAL RECIEVED.
The three orks still on their feet ran behind their vehicles as the surviving Lynx ripped burst after burst into the trucks. The teeth truck was burning good now, and the green one had no windows left. The Sheriff's SUV had a few spangs in the paint, but didn't seem to be suffering.
Wondering how the McGreely's had ever managed to steal that tactical vehicle, and where they had gotten a LAW rocket, Bill ordered his second Lynx around to circle the green truck and kill the orks behind it. But as soon as it had a view behind the truck, it's video feed was filled with another yellow-white streak coming straight on. NO SIGNAL RECIEVED.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit," Bill started repeating. "How many of those damned rockets do they have!?"
He switched the view in his goggles to cameras he had among the plants. He jumped when there was a boom that shook the control room, but squinting through the smoke from the burning drones and the teeth truck, he saw that one of the McGreelys, in a fit of optimism, had run forward and tripped off a bomb Bill had built and slaved to a motion sensor. The ork was down and not moving. Bill thought it might be Jake McGreely, but he couldn't be sure. Jake had always been quick to act and slow to think. It's how he used to wind up in jail so often.
TNT was not hard to get in the mountains, if you knew how. The bomb in the road had been twelve kilograms of it with a remote detonator. For the ones in the plant rows he'd put five kilograms in biodegradable plastic shipping boxes, then alternated one box to the next pouring in either 00 buckshot or 7cm roofing nails, as an experiment to see how each performed. A Humanis Policlub matrix site he'd found with bomb building instructions had insisted on nails, but Bill thought buckshot would work, too, and figured he was at least as smart as those racist fucksticks, so he'd tried both.
"All right, all right," Bill said to himself. "There are seven more of those, so come on in, you hillbilly sons of bitches. I ain't done yet."
He watched through the cameras as the remaining two McGreelys on their feet - he supposed Cameron must be in the Sheriff's SUV - ran to the back of the police truck. "That'll teach you. Get the hell on out of here!" Bill shouted at them as the SUV's back door came open. He was confused at first when the McGreelys started pulling out soccer ball after soccer ball. He got even more confused when they started throwing them down the rows, one after the other, soccer balls bouncing through the pot plants everywhere. But he got it the instant one of those white balls set off a motion sensor, which then set off a bomb.
For eight minutes and ten seconds according to his commlink's clock, he watched the McGreelys kick and throw soccer balls, and jump up and down and howl like mental patients when they found a bomb that way. They found three of them. One detonation knocked over Bill's Coors on the folding table he had in the control room.
He clenched his teeth and got ready to rely on the double ring of razorwire he'd laid down fifteen meters out from the camouflaged control room. He'd done it yesterday in a cold rain by hooking the wire to the back of a Lynx and ordering the Lynx to drag it along, with him following behind and driving in the stakes that held up the wire. At the time it had been a cold, runny nosed job, but Bill had said to himself over and over while he was driving the stakes that it was going to be worth it. He was angry as he watched the McGreelys get their wire cutters out of the Sheriff's SUV and snip their way through.
It was grimly apparent that Bill had underestimated Cameron and his clan. "And you never mentioned any of this in your kitchen, did you, Cameron?" Bill asked as he watched the wire part and whip back. "No, no SUV, no goddamned LAWs, no wirecutters ever got mentioned at your house, did they? Maybe you are smart enough, you son of a bitch. Maybe you are."
Once they were through the wire, they kicked soccer balls down the row. The balls set off a tripwired 00 buck bomb that they were standing too near, and the two McGreelys outside the SUV threw their arms up in front of their faces as the blast made their braids fly. But they were on the edge of the explosion, and it didn't seem to hurt them much.
Bill knew that the intruders were now walking down a straight, bomb-free row to the control room. He figured they'd wander around some and find some of the remaining bombs before they found the hidden room.
Bill picked up his rifle and checked the round counter. He slung a bag on his shoulder with five more magazines in it. The ammunition was UCAS Marines Armor Defeating, Rifle, that he'd gotten from his dealer in Washington, so he had one more surprise for the ork clan. In his goggles he checked the smartlink readout for his Government '66 under his armored jacket. The heavy pistol was loaded with fifteen explosive rounds, and he had two extra magazines.
"I ain't done yet," he said to himself. Then he found out he was wrong when he checked his cameras again, and saw one McGreely standing over his air intake pipe with a 20 liter bio-eth fuel can, and Cameron himself, finally come out of his tactical vehicle, standing at the control room's camouflaged door with an AK-98.
"Come on out, Bill," Cameron called. The audio pickups on the cameras carried his voice to Bill's ears. "There's an easy way, and there's a barbeque way, you little sack of shit!"
The orks were all laughing their growling laughs when Bill swung the door open and came out with his rifle held by the barrel.
One of the McGreelys grabbed it from him, and then Cameron buttstocked him in the head with his AK. Bill's vision went black, and for a few seconds he went deaf, like he had cotton in his ears. Someone grabbed the bag with the magazines from him. Cameron McGreely kicked his feet out from under him. Bill rolled over onto his back. Cameron's boot crashed into his ribs. Bill's body armor absorbed most of the kick, but he got the message with zero signal distortion.
"Yeehaw, you halfer cocksucker!" Cameron barked, kicking Bill in the chest and side, scuffing his armor jacket with thick November mud. "What good are your booby traps now? What good is your razorwire now? You tell me!"
"Uugh..." Bill pulled himself into a sitting position. Cameron towered over Bill, and behind Cameron the mountain trees reached for the dark sky. Bill could see the thermal glow of the burning teeth truck and his poor Lynxes even through the rows of his pot plants. The rows had gaps in them where he'd sacrificed plants to bombs, hoping to get orks.
The four McGreelys were in a semicircle in front of him now. The two who'd been wounded by the buckshot bomb had stripes of hot blood down their legs and bare arms. All of them were wearing armor vests with interlocking plates.
They were in a semicircle around Bill now, each with their rifle in the low ready position, and hard grins all around. It was pretty clear they were going to fill him full of lead.
Bill told Cameron: "Why don't you go eat shit and die, you dumb trog throwback?"
Cameron McGreely shot bodily into the sky.
Bill at first thought that Cameron had left to go eat shit, but then he thought that probably was not the case. Whatever the reason, the evidence of Bill's eyes was that Cameron McGreely was flying straight up, and Bill was looking at the soles of Cameron's boots now, as they got smaller going toward the moon, twenty meters away and counting.
The other McGreely's had a fraction to look surprised. Then there was a rifle bang, and a bullet burst through the neck of one of the orks. His mouth flew open, displaying all his ork teeth in agony - his knees unlocked and he flopped to the ground. He and Bill were staring at each other no more than two meters apart, and the ork's face said, What the hell was that?
One of the two McGreelys still standing pivoted in place and fired two short bursts back toward the road, although if the ork could see something to shoot at, Bill couldn't.
No, wait, that ain't so, Bill thought to himself. He pulled out his Government '66. The aiming reticule lit up in his goggle view when he closed his hand on the grip, and he pumped four bullets as fast as he could at the downed ork's face, which was all burst and punched in afterward.
Bill looked up when the ork that had been shooting out toward the road spun around, and then shot him. Bill shook all through his body, and he felt something go wrong in his guts, like a microwave packet of beans with a fork through it.
The unseen rifle cracked again. The ork who'd just shot Bill threw his head back and closed his eyes, staggering forward a step, his hand coming off the AK's fore end. Feeling hot blood splattering out of him, Bill dragged his Government '66 up and tried to aim careful before squeezing off a shot. The semiauto barked, and the McGreely fell face down.
Then Cameron McGreely fell back to earth with an awful thump and a terrible cracking, and his scream of "Awwww shiiiiiit -!" as he'd come down turned into a wail as loud as Bill had ever heard come out of a metahuman.
Bill's vision was blurring, and his Government had almost come out of his hand with that last shot. Cameron's wail was filling his world. Even through the blurring, he could see Cameron only two or three meters away, screaming and dragging himself upright. But then Cameron's skull burst, accompanied by another rifle crack, and Cameron McGreely laid himself down, and was dead.
Bill collapsed backward, the back of his head in the cold mud and dry leaves. Was that all of the motherfuckers? Are they all gone? I ought to get up and take a look around before I get killed from some unforeseen direction.
There was a voice calling for him, and he knew he'd recognize it, if he just studied it another minute. "Bill? Bill? Bill Sharp? Bill? My son, where are you, my boy?"
He gathered his breath to scream, "Over here!"
He heard footsteps coming, and he turned his head. He tightened his grip on his Government.
His momma appeared. Dressed in an old camouflaged hunting jacket, and with some tall man next to her. A skinny human man, with a full beard. Reverend Hogarth, from Christ's Hall.
"O, Lord, hear my prayer," his mother said when she saw him. She put down her elegant Remington 950 bolt action in the leaves. She knelt in her woodland pattern pants and put her hands on the sides of Bill's head. He was embarrassed to see the tears overbrim her eyes and stream down her cheeks. "O, Lord on High, do not take my child today!"
"How did you get here?" Bill asked, in utter confusion.
"We knew every minute was a danger," his mother told him. "We went and asked Bryant Tavish where you kept your farm. He was willin' to tell us. The boy is torn up with guilt because he'd already told Cameron McGreely over there everything about the place." She let go of his face.
"God damn it!" Bill blurted. "Bryant sold me to the orks!?"
"Yes, honey, he did. He did. You know he's always been confused. He said the orks had said they'd burn his parents' house down if he didn't tell."
"I - I - oooh, hell, this is gettin' so it hurts!"
"Bill, Bill...little Bill, it's time you listened." His mother looked him in the eyes. "You have brought the vengeance of the Lord upon you."
Bill stared at her. When did she find out about my business?
"Yes, He has sent these troglodytes to do His Will. You have fallen into the sin of greed, my son, and you have tempted others to the sins of this devil weed. You have profited on their temptation. And the Lord has seen these sins, and the Lord has seen you go off the path, and the Lord has struck you down. Bill, please...if you want to live, if you want to go to the Paradise up above when you leave this earth and not suffer torment in the flames, you have to ask the Lord forgiveness."
Bill said, "Aww, damn it..."
"The Lord gives second chances! He's sent Reverend Hogarth and me to give you your second chance! I prayed that He would make me his instrument, and He has! But to have the Lord's forgiveness, to live in His mercy, you have to ask to be forgiven. You have to truly ask. You have to give up your wicked greed. And - "
"Forgive me, Lord!" Bill called out.
"Yes!" Carol clapped her hands.
"Hallelujah!" Reverend Hogarth held his arms out straight to his sides, his fingers spread.
"Lord, I need your help!" Bill yelled.
"Praise God!" Carol cried.
"Hallelujah!" Reverend Hogarth said, spreading his fingers further.
"Lord, I have sinned, but I want to sin no more!" Bill shouted. His guts felt like shit and sand and hurt.
"Glory, glory!" His mother shouted.
"Please, Lord, take me back!" Bill groaned.
Reverend Hogarth pounced, and put his long-fingered, human hands on Bill's head. They were hot in the November night. "Jesus, Our Savior," the reverend said, "Jesus, heal this poor lamb who has been lost! Restore the body of this brother who has wandered, but who now returns! Now, Jesus, show us your power!"
"Praise the Lord!" Carol cried.
Bill groaned again, and his jaw worked uncontrollably as he felt his insides pulse with heat, and slither around. His hands flopped open and he dropped the Government.
"We love You, Jesus! Show us how You love us!" The reverend implored.
"We love You!" Carol echoed.
Hogarth dropped his head. He said quietly, "Let us pray..."
Seconds ticked by. Bill's breathing regulated. The pain that had swamped him drained
away, until there was only a diffuse ache.
He knew Hogarth and his mother figured it was Jesus healing him. But he knew that over in Washington, or down in Atlanta, there were mages who did the same thing without having any god at all, and there were hippies who said it was the spirit of their cat, and Mexicans who thought it was the Flayed God. And he knew the pain had been put at bay. That was what he wanted.
There was sweat going cold on his face as Reverend Hogarth helped him up. Bill picked up his pistol and put it back in his waistband.
"Let's go home now," his mother told him. "And remember this second chance you've been given."
"We should bury these damn McGreelys," Bill said, still wincing at the pain that was left.
"No, son. We need to get out."
Oh, hell, Bill said to himself. Give up your wicked greed, she'd said.
"Exodus, 24:17," Reverend Hogarth intoned, standing straight and tall. "And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel."
And a column of fire appeared before the reverend, fifteen centimeters taller than he was. It burned without fuel or smoke. It had no arms or legs, but the way the top of it tilted here and there was almost like a metahuman tilting its head, and the tops of the flames were like wild hair in the wind.
"Go and clean Bill Sharp of his sin of greed," Hogarth told the column.
The column worked behind them as they walked. Carol had her arm around Bill, and Hogarth had his eye on the far horizon. Bill could hear plants going up, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, as the fire-thing embraced them, one by one.
"Today you're saved," his mother told him. "Today, you got your miracle."
"Praise Jesus," Bill told her. She couldn't see that he was using his commlink to check his credit balance at the shadow bank, and shop for new irrigation equipment.
I gotta tell you, this is awesome. Very descriptive, very funny, and I don't see why Bill doesn't just take his Uncle's advice and move his work out to Ohio... 
I loved the Uncle by the way. Shaman?
I loved the Uncle by the way. Shaman?
Hedge witch (SM 41), with Mountain mentor spirit and some Christian symbolism I threw in.
Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks for the kind words.
Another well written story. Good job! I liked the Southern twist on this one as well.
Great Job!
I saw the post this morning but waited till this eve to read it so I could focus my full attention on it.
Well done Zenshooter01!
I saw the post this morning but waited till this eve to read it so I could focus my full attention on it.
Well done Zenshooter01!
Glad you liked it, Kanislatrans. I'm encouraged to see how many views this thread has already.
I know the setting is unusual for Shadowrun, but I there's a lot more to the 6th World than mercenary teams of covert operatives in the Pacific Northwest. That's what I love about it.
In fact, one of the things that was attractive about SR in the beginning was the originality of the Pacific Northwest setting, with its Asian and Native American elements, instead of some generic dystopic urban canyon. Now that we've all done Seattle more than once, there are infinite new possibilities out there. It keeps bringing me back to the game.
I'm encouraged to see how many views this thread has already.I know the setting is unusual for Shadowrun, but I there's a lot more to the 6th World than mercenary teams of covert operatives in the Pacific Northwest. That's what I love about it.
In fact, one of the things that was attractive about SR in the beginning was the originality of the Pacific Northwest setting, with its Asian and Native American elements, instead of some generic dystopic urban canyon. Now that we've all done Seattle more than once, there are infinite new possibilities out there. It keeps bringing me back to the game.
I liked Carding and I like this one. Great range, well paced, both stories kept me reading till the end. I have to agree the infinite possibilities helps SR stand out from a story tellers perspective. Would love to see an anthology of stories like this, just life in SR without the shadows, maybe make a good theme for the next fiction contest.
Without the shadows? It's a shoot out between rival drug manufacturers that kills five metahumans.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the comment. It's always fascinating to hear what people thought of it.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the comment. It's always fascinating to hear what people thought of it.
I just finished reading it. It was a great story.. It was a good story about home people "not in the shadows" deal with things... even when they are outside the law...
keep up the good work...
keep up the good work...
Thank you, dog_xinu. It's very kind.
I enjoy writing SR fiction, but this will be the last for a while. I've been neglecting my new novel, and now I'm working for Across The Pond Studios, the comic company, on their upcoming title EARTH LIBERATION FORCE.
I enjoy writing SR fiction, but this will be the last for a while. I've been neglecting my new novel, and now I'm working for Across The Pond Studios, the comic company, on their upcoming title EARTH LIBERATION FORCE.
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