[TCD]: The Pounds of Flesh - 1

The first installment of an anthology

Most people don’t travel the Red alone.

It was an unspoken rule, one written in blood and tragedy rather than law. The Red was a strange and dangerous place, and the people who traveled it alone seldom made it back. In the many years since Mars had first been colonized and the first harriers stepped foot outside the biodomes on the first supply lines, at least that much had become clear.

Death was no stranger to those who crossed the desert. To be a harrier of any caliber was to step foot in the domain of Death, and to know that one day its gaze would rest like a mantle upon your shoulders. The Red would take its pound of flesh, one way or another.

Carrying that weight today was a pair of pinpricks against the vastness of the desert — a lone man and his draconic mount, marching dutifully onward in the dying sunlight.

Behind them was something he could not explain, but similarly could not deny. There were five of them now, a small group of half-withered bodies fueled with unnatural life stumbling after them. He’d long sworn off looking back at them. Two were what remained of familiar faces.

He had not come into the Red alone. Not initially.

The man squinted into the distance, a monumental effort needed to sustain his concentration. The sun had already dipped below the horizon line. The light refraction would remain in the perpetual red haze on the horizon for a little while longer, and then it would be dark.

They’d survived the previous night through no small amount of sheer luck — luck that had all but run out by now, drained along with his strength, and his dragon’s stamina.

A small red light flashed intermittently on his suit, warning him that he was getting low on air. It had already been blinking for an hour by now. Silent, breathing slow and slumped forward in his saddle, there was little doubt in his mind that one way or another, the end was coming soon.

The only thing keeping him alive was his dragon, but she too was slowing down.

They’d been keeping ahead of them for over a day now — keeping up a strong pace and trying to lose the pack in tight rock formations and crevasses. It worked for a few hours, but never forever. As his energy waned, so too did hers. She’d hurt herself on the last attempt to make an escape. Her balance was off now as she limped, but refused to stop.

Her name was Molly, and she was a good dragon. A brave, stubborn dragon that had saved his life on more than one occasion in the decade he’d had her. This time though… there was no pulling through this.

He hoped she would be alright after he was gone.

Yeah… she’d be alright.

He wouldn’t be the first she’d lost, after all. Her last ranger had been a woman named Jenny. She was dead by the time he ever heard of her, but that was nothing new out here.

He never got a reason for her death. Raiders, equipment malfunction, accident… there were a million and one ways that it might happen. In the end, it didn’t really matter which.

They’d ditched saddlebags one by one as they’d been emptied of resources. No more bullets. No more extra air. Radio busted. The only bag that remained was a small pouch that contained his badge and her papers. A name and a picture of his face would soon be all that was left of him.

Of all things, he found himself wondering what might be going through Molly’s mind. She must understand on some level how far from the beaten path they’d strayed in their effort to get away. They’d crossed into the open desert — a stretch he’d never had reason to go in all his years of being a ranger. No supply lines ran in this area. No raiders gathered where there weren’t supply lines.

She knew this desert even better than he did. She must have realized by now what had happened.

Despite it all, it was beautiful in its own sort of way. The fading light cut gentle silhouettes of distant rock formations and cast long shadows off any rock or pebble that dared rise above the rust-red ground. For as much of the desert that had been explored, huge swathes were still untouched by human eyes. He had to wonder if he and Molly were the first to walk this barren plateau.

Or perhaps the last, at least for a long, long time.

He steadied himself with one hand in the saddle, a chorus of hissing roars ringing out from the undead behind him, as though sensing his fading life.

One way or another, his time would be soon. It didn’t matter much what would take him, but it was only natural to wonder what would get him first. To wonder if he, like his two companions and the other three zombies behind him, would be cursed to rise again as a restless thing, wandering the desert.

They hadn’t seemed as interested in Molly — not as much as they were interested in him. He entertained the thought that his death might give her enough time to get away, to rest. Maybe to even fly back to civilization now that he wasn’t at risk of falling off.

It would make his life worth something, at least.

His name was Henry, and truth be told, he wasn’t a good man.

Like most gray men his age, he’d spent a considerable chunk of his younger years deep in the mines beneath Mars, chipping away at the foundations of the planet. He’d married his first wife when they were both sixteen, but by his early twenties, he’d proven himself to be a lackluster drunk of a husband, and at best an absent father in the lives of his three children.

They’d cut all contact with him after the divorce.

He was in his thirties when ARNEN left and the whole of Mars seemed to sag under the weight of its own attempts at infrastructure. Instability and negligence seeped into industries until the mine shut down after faulty equipment left fifty men dead.

Many were strangers. Several had been friends.

Many people packed up and moved after losing their job at the mines. His town was small. It couldn’t handle the influx of displaced miners into the job market. They had to look elsewhere for employment, and one by one left on civilian transports for the bigger cities. Rumor had it there was work out east, in the Margan territories, if you were willing to make the journey.

Henry stayed. A job eventually opened up hauling cargo off of supply runner sleds, and any work was good work to him. It was mostly uneventful. Sometimes money would find its way into his hands so long as he turned a blind eye to what was going in or out of the gates, and Henry never saw a thing.

He remarried into a family with two children in their teens, under some misconception that he might be able to make up for his previous ventures into domestic life.

By his forties, he was twice divorced, and word about the affair and his drinking problem had gotten around town much quicker than it had any right to. It was about then that his eyes set themselves upon the desert.

They say everyone feels that call to the Red sometime, though most people aren’t dumb or desperate enough to follow it.

He took a transport to the nearest city, where he got trained and was given his badge — and Molly. He’d worked with several other rangers since then, partnered and split up many times over the years as work came and went, but it was always him and Molly.

He’d done his best to take care of her. He’d shared his food with her, always made sure the saddle wasn’t pinching, and told her folktales his grandmother had passed down to him when he was a boy. They’d seen thousands of miles of Martian desert together over the years.

He had never been a good man, nor an important one. If Molly had any way of knowing that, she’d never shown it.

Even now, when he was only slowing her down, she refused to leave him behind.

She was a good dragon.

Gathering up his concentration, Henry reached forward, slipping the bridle off Molly’s head. She whined softly but didn’t look back at him, continuing to trudge forward.

“Easy, girl…” he murmured, unclipping the reins and letting the rest of it fall to the ground behind them. With no small amount of effort, he wrapped the reins in a loop around the base of her neck, transferring the remaining saddlebag onto the loop and hooking it so it wouldn’t fall off.

Someone ought to know her name, wherever she ended up. She deserved that much for all her troubles.

As the sun’s light disappeared over the horizon, Henry reached the last of his air. His lungs tightened unbearably, and he knew this was it.

As a final act, he pulled free the strap that held the saddle on Molly’s back. He keeled slowly to one side, and he and the saddle slipped off, impacting the dirt with a dull thud.

Molly immediately turned around, frantically nosing his shoulder in an attempt to get him back up. The risen dead cried out with frenzied glee, picking up pace towards them. Their shuffling footsteps grew closer and closer before his hearing and vision began to fail him.

Go on, Molly. He thought to himself, no breath left to speak the words to her. Go home. They can’t get you too.

He reached weakly into the darkness, and Molly’s snout pressed into his hand one last time.

It’s okay. You’ve done everything you could. Thanks for trying, old girl.

With nothing more left in him, Henry slipped into unconsciousness on the endless red sands.

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>> Welcome everyone, to The Pounds of Flesh.

I hope you enjoyed the first installment in an anthology that takes place within The Cardinal Directive’s universe: The Pounds of Flesh! These small stories will be self-contained articles that will not impact the main storyline, but serve to add life and depth to areas of the world that don’t get explored often enough in the main story. I’m very excited to add this to the roster of free content available here, and I hope you all are too! Please remember to leave a like and comment if you enjoyed this story!