He knew where they had taken her. Why he would be drawn to follow it was hard to say. He hadn’t thought that he was made this way any longer, but that which had been stirred these last days led him to discover feelings like familiar strangers, at first approaching warily, kept at a distance. And now they consumed him, led him to decisions he didn’t want to make. It was so long since he thought of himself as even human. He had become a shell, a machine, he was conditioned by the world to be ruthless, the steel in his eyes matched only by the dry desperate emptiness in his soul.
It was dark now, where he lay. The ruins of the town no longer cast shadows, but the foundations rose around him, blacker shades of darkness in the bitter light of the stars. He looked upon the stars differently tonight. He implored something to come, to arrive and finish the job that had long been begun. The world no longer deserved its place in the firmament, riders were long overdue, the horsemen he thought that he had seen all those years ago, the harbingers of the end of an age; the warped earth and then the blinding flashes of billions of souls annihilated. Yet life had carried on. It seemed interminable to him, as he looked up into the sky. Life carried on to bring him this new source of pain.
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He had met her as he passed through one of the new hamlets that were appearing in the desert as a flicker of life in the West twitched even in its death throes. He was just riding through another slow, endless day, observing the world around him as if he truly belonged somewhere else, in the way he always did. Blank faced, eyes fixed, impassive and forever unsurprised and unmoved by the world’s cruel ironies. He was in between missions, waiting in the West, waiting for the call to come. A leat dug out of the desert by hundreds of desperate hands brought water from the Great River to the shadow of the vast dunes beneath which the fledgling settlement clustered. Tendrils of water, the new liquid gold, strung out across the valley here, a vast life giving arterial system which was reviving land scorched and shorn of life. Around the settlement that people called Temple, some sparse grasses could now be seen, and hopes were rising that soon food could be grown outside of the solar hydrophonic cells that they still used. There were few that did not wish for change, and yet fewer still who truly believed that they would ever live to see it. To survive so long, to procreate, to further the increasingly tenuous line of human existence they had no choice but to try, and to hope. Nobody killed themselves, people had become too tired for that. Their lives had been spared, after all.
The Bounty Hunter, he who spared no-one, rode into this town. Here, he was a man who inspired fear and caused the wary to draw back from the streets to their houses of blasted timber. As he rode in mounted upon his sturdy looking camel he saw a girl returning from the desert, pails of water slung across her back from the deep well nearby. He stopped and looked to the sky. Evening, he judged, was close at hand. The blinding daylight blaze of the sun now glowed a paler yellow, the waxing glare from the rancid atmosphere alleviated by the declining temperature. Sunset would soon come and darker things were stirring beneath the desert. Nothing threatened the Bounty Hunter, yet when he saw the girl returning he stopped, and sat up in his saddle. Maybe he should rest a while – he never knew when the call would come.
He told himself that he needed to rest, although he knew it was not true. There was a gaping hole where his soul used to be before he was hollowed out by time, before the blood that pushed through his hard narrow veins turned cold like liquid fluorine, before he ceased to love or care for anyone or anything. Before he would become a killer. Now, where he thought there was nothing, he felt an ancient primeval stirring, something that was not quite lost, something flooding into that emptiness and encroaching upon the rest of his being. For the girl’s face, he knew, would never leave him.
In a world of despair, hope blazes like sun flashing across the hulk of a circling aluminium airframe, or the muzzle of a gun flaring as the powder strikes and the charge explodes. It is startling, unexpected, lethal and glorious, a ripple in the dull march of time. This girl was beautiful beyond description. Not in a way that was open to interpretation, not equivocally, uniquely beautiful; each to their own. Not like that. She was stunning, undeniable, all consuming pretty – dusky golden hair bouncing off her shoulders and flowing down her neck, her strong delicately sculpted frame held erect and equal to all the burdens of the world, not bowed by them. With her strength, her elegance came too; an ease of movement which spoke of more than logic can comprehend, affecting in a deeply subtle way, a knowing way. You see her and you know, that you could want for no other should you ever claim her. That here in the form of this one fragile creature all dreams are answered. Her skin was tanned but not tarnished – a healthy glow unheard of in this part of the world. Her blue eyes invited all questions but revealed no answers, eyes you could look into forever until your mind became unhinged, fractal globes of purest knowledge, endless and timeless and utterly destructive. Her face once beheld was never forgotten, mobile and yet set, permanent in its beauty yet transparent with her moods; changeable, each circumstance opening new facets of her unyielding wonderfulness. She was knowing enough – you could tell from the way she walked, the way she held herself, that she was no blushing maiden unaware of the ways of the world. She was not brazen though, not proud or inaccessible or ever mocking in her manner. She was just so.
In this girl The Bounty Hunter saw hope, because she carried hope in her. She was unlike the cracked and broken remnants of humanity he saw every day, strewn upon this land as if seed scattered by a careless hand and left untended. She was full and blossoming and looked of this world, this new world that humanity had founded. The hope was not just in her beauty or her manner, but her very existence; that life would not be rank forever, that even in the hellpit of the West new wonders could be nurtured. He did not need to rest, he was not tired. He was taken aback by this hope, of that lost concept he had long ago given up; many people no longer even knew its name. She drew him because she was unlike anything he had seen since he was sent out into this wasteland long ago, by people he remembered only vaguely and with a mission that he still didn’t really understand. As light flowed into the darkness at the centre of him he knew, that this girl could bring meaning to his existence, define his being. She had that potential. For years he had done what he did best, because that was what he did, he knew nothing else. This change was what she brought, and he knew in his bones that he stopped that night because of her, whatever lies his mind wrought.
The Bounty Hunter sought no inn, rather he set himself in the ruins west of the town, camped under the stars, as he always did. He would build a smokeless fire in his own artful way, and hunt for whatever could be found in the brush. Mostly snakes and lizards, for not much better moved over these lands that could be caught easily, at least without wasting good ammunition. That evening he walked slowly back to where his beast of burden stood, having set traps out on the edges of his line of vision, out where he knew that creatures would dare to roam; he saw far. Swinging down the shotgun that he always carried across his gaunt shoulders he sat out under the great ragged vista of the broken evening sky to watch the sun set over the endless horizon of the desert. He thought, as he had not done for a long time.
