The last gunfighter….. (WoD)
Judah Elijah Walker stands and watches the sun set, the smell of black powder as strong in his nostrils now as it was long ago, combined with the metallic tang of blood. He blinks, shaking the image from his thoughts, but it refuses to leave, an afterimage burned into his retinas after staring at the sun. Lifting a hand-rolled cigarette to his thin lips he turns his gaze towards the motley collection of vehicles and people camped in a nearby field, circled like a wagon train. Sentries walk their paths through the camp as telepaths sit calmly, stationed on four sides, covering the camp with psychic static. The Black Storm was formidable, at rest and in action.
He felt trapped, stifled. It was a sensation that angers him, but the anger only lasts briefly before fading. He was too damn tired to stay angry. Too damn tired to keep up any emotion at all, really. He stares at the setting sun, his deep-set grey eyes dark and his lean face somber as he smokes. How had things fallen this far? It was a question he had asked for months but never seemed to get a satisfactory answer to.
What had he ever accomplished? A tall, stooped man with greying brown hair and a handlebar mustache, clad in a faded blue chambray workshirt and jeans, smoking as the sun sets on a world that had long ago given up the ghost. Moved on, he’d heard it said once. It was the most appropriate term he’d heard on the subject.
The world had moved on.
A figure in the camp catches his eye. Small and slight of stature, unassuming, she moves among the slaves, talking quietly and administering aid if needed. To a man, they defer to her, thanking her with words and gestures. He feels a tightness in his chest as he watches her work. What the hell had any of them accomplished? He turns his gaze back towards the west. How much of it would last past their last breaths?
Frasier was mad. Walker knew, it, had known it from the first moment he’d laid eyes on the man in a broken-down cantina on the Mexican border. Frasier was a big man, larger than life, a towering six-foot-six with a mane of unruly black hair and icy blue eyes that never warmed. He’d taken one look at the massive Scotsman and could already feel the madness lurking beneath the surface, dark currents swirling and pulling. Frasier had hired him for a routine job which Judah had taken and performed professionally, and thus their business relationship had begun.
That had been in ’01. Walker was a gun-for-hire; as fast as he was he’d made a name for himself and Frasier had a liking for being the best and hiring the best. Their relationship had stayed on a strictly employer/mercenary basis until the bombs fell, and the moment that happened things got weird. Really weird.
The tall gunslinger takes a drag from his cigarette, his dark eyes unfathomable. He remembers the night Frasier told him of his plans, of his goals, of what he called his ‘purpose’. And for the first time, Judah began to realize what had drawn him to this madman. He’d told him of being born to a family of monsters, of what he’d endured at their hands, and it had struck a resonance in Judah’s gut. It was the first time anyone had touched what Walker had buried, so very long ago.
His mother had been mad, that he’d known from the first. It seems to Judah that most of his life has been spent in the company of the insane, and he chuckles drily at the thought. She’d been stark raving, and after the third time the county had stepped in and taken him away from her for doing things like sealing the whole apartment in aluminum foil to keep out the alien mind rays and forgetting to buy groceries to feed him and his sister, Judah had given up hope of ever living a normal life.
The night she tried to kill them, to ‘save them from the monsters that would find them’ and ‘rape them to death’, was the night that he’d realized he couldn’t handle it anymore. She’d been raving on about something called ‘Gaia’ and about how the ‘wolf-monsters’ would ‘step out of thin air and take their souls’, and then she’d fled screaming and muttering into the bathroom and locked the door. Ten-year-old Judah had ignored her, gotten six-year-old Jezzie into her Care Bear pajamas, put her to bed, and was using the kitchen sink and a dishcloth to brush his teeth when his mother burst out of the bathroom with a wild gleam in her eyes and a kitchen knife in her hand. She was crying, swearing that it would be a ‘cold day in hell’ before his father, ‘that raping bastard’, would be able to come and take him and Jezzie away from her. That she would kill them first, to ‘put them out of their misery’. He’d grabbed a frying pan off the counter and swung in self-defense towards the gibbering woman and when the pan connected it made this godawful sound, like a baseball bat striking a melon. She’d dropped without a sound and Judah hadn’t wasted any time gathering up his baby sister and running next door to the elderly couple who lived there. They’d called the police and soon the ambulances were there with all those somber men and women, talking quietly as the sheet was drawn up over his mother’s face and the sirens wailed.
He and Jezzie had been sent to the county home, and once separated he’d become sullen and withdrawn. He never heard from his sister again. By the time he was fourteen he’d become brutal with fists and feet, and he’d run away by fifteen. He fell in with a group of migrant workers who needed extra hands and protection, and he stole his first gun from a crew of bikers that had stopped at a bar where the young Judah had been doing some odd jobs. He’d spent hours teaching himself how to use it, how to make the ammunition, practicing, practicing, practicing….
He shot his first man when he was sixteen. He lost count not long after that. Always on the move, one step ahead of the law and other people who wanted him dead, Judah Walker had grown up fast and rough, and by the time he was in his twenties was in high demand by the criminal element for his skills. He’d met Frasier in that run-down cantina and the rest, as they say, was history.
As he drops the remnants of his cigarette and grinds it out with one booted heel, he wonders briefly what ever happened to Jezzie. The thought saddens him, but, tired, he lets it go. Better to think about the here and now, not the past. The past was past you, someone once told him, and it was a true thing. He looks back at the camp, darkness settling and the torches now lit. How much of what he’d worked for here would outlive him? He sighs. None of it. Not if he had anything to say about it.
Walker turns back towards the camp, his steps slow and measured and somehow sad, and as he enters the torchlight the futility of it all hits home. Without speaking to anyone, he walks through the camp and disappears through the flaps of his tent as the sun rests below the horizon and stretches long shadows across the earth.