In This Red Country

By JP Lantern

In the frontier town of Trunkdown, Clay does his best to maintain the grip on sanity that his mother and father both lost. Clay’s young wife, Maggie, is pregnant, and on the frontier of Mars, that's a death sentence. Even for a surgeon like Clay, medication for a birth is inaccessible. Without medication, every pregnancy on Mars ends with an abomination ripping out of the mother’s body.

Abandoning Clay’s surgeon practice, the two set out to the nearest city, hoping to find a solution. There are no cars, no planes. They must walk through the land, but the land is littered with danger. Rain storms attack the ground like artillery fire. Mutated beasts populate the nights. Natives—adult versions of the inhumans that burst from unmedicated wombs—attack travelers at will.

The two decide the only way they can make the trip is with a guide named Abram. The bad news is that Maggie and Abram used to be lovers. The worse news is that Abram is a native himself.

When each traveler is unable to let the past stay past, old resentments begin to boil among them, irrevocably pushing all three toward a shocking, violent conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JP Lantern
• Release date: Nov 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311359049

JP Lantern

J.P. Lantern lives in the Midwestern US, though his heart and probably some essential parts of his liver and pancreas and whatnot live metaphorically in Texas. He writes speculative science fiction short stories, novellas, and novels which he has deemed "rugged," though he would also be fine with "roughhewn" because that is a terrific and wonderfully apt word.Full of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in situations fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly violent and complicated worlds.

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In This Red Country

by J.P. Lantern

Copyright © 2013 by J.P. Lantern

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Clay walked into their little cabin and saw Maggie where he left her hours ago, before work. The way she looked, he knew they both were thinking about the enormity of the tiny mess they had made in her belly.

It would kill her if they let it.

She was sitting on the little sofa chair across from their table, across from the voicebox, her hands going back and forth between holding each other and tugging at her knees. She had on a long, thin blue dress—the most amount of color anywhere in the small cabin.

He looked at this girl, his wife for coming on two years now. No more than seventeen and pretty as the land allowed. Prettier. Golden hair—the whole settlement lauded her sunny curls—and bright eyes and a nice firm figure. Her skin, paler than most, almost as pale as a native, added to her beauty. Clay’s own skin was darker than most, several tones past the normal olive, brown and leathery.

With her being so young and coming from a proper family in a proper clan, he couldn't help but feel she was better than him even though she only knew half of the world that he did. He wished everything was nicer for her. Everything. All their things and all her things.

Oh well. He hung his breather on its hook on the wall next to hers, its thick rubber bands looping into a hard plastic shell for the bottom of his face. The hooks for the breathers were underneath a long shelf with the spare letter jar and the dish where Maggie stocked little red candies. He took one candy every morning and then tossed it out on the path to work, deep into the dirt. He did not like them, but she liked believing that he did.

Once, he firmly believed that he would make it all as nice as she would want and then even nicer than that. Sometimes she would tell him how she was happy with how things were, but of course he didn’t believe her. Clay had a hard time believing anybody when they said they were happy, really happy. He felt joy was a kind of construction, one he didn’t have the patience to operate.

Still, they got along. They had good times; he felt they leaned on each other in a fair share. She had seen him come in but didn't say anything at him, and he walked into their tiny corridor kitchen and pulled out a packet of coffee from the wall cabinet. Everything in the cabin was part of the walls—the cooker, the washer, the basin—and everything hard to replace. All it took was one malfunction and the whole home had to be put out of order to fix it. Wires and machinery strewn about like frog innards, the thick metal-cast wood blocks stacked on each other haphazardly. This had happened more than a few times. Theirs was a nice place, but not a great one. Nobody in the town of Trunkdown really had a great place.

Clay wore dark overalls and a dark jacket, his shirt underneath off-white and stained with red dirt. He picked up a cup and mixed the coffee and some water and started sipping. Thinking. She might have made fun of him, drinking it cold with his low class, but she couldn't see. Better than coffee would be a little substance, something to get tight, but now wasn’t the time for it. Maybe later, after they talked. He finished the coffee and came into the living room and put his hands on his hips.

We can't have it, he said. No way around that. The money just ain’t there.

She didn't look up at him. Her hands tightening, untightening. My parents could help. The family.

This was a well-matured topic of conversation. He put a hand on the wall.

They won't.

I could take on some more work.

What, here? In Trunkdown? There ain't enough to go around. We can't keep it. Not this one. We know it, doll. We do.

She still wouldn't look at him. I know. There's no way around it. I just hoped you might've thought of something.

Same thought as this morning. We go into the city, take care of it, and that's all. I'll talk to Miss Cotton and let her know we’re going. Get the rent squared.

She sat back in her chair, her head pushing to the side. He walked up to her, leaned down and took her hand.

Maggie, he said. I know it don't seem easy. Or right, maybe. But that's all we got going.

Finally she looked at him. Damn, those eyes. Look at those eyes, pouring out all the sun of the world.

Let's leave, then. Tonight. Get it done, you know.

He squeezed her hand. It's two weeks to city. We can go in the daylight easy enough. Supplied. We can run over to Booker's tonight and gear up.

Gear up, she said, nodding. Then we go. Tonight. Her look hard, whittled and almost old.

Alright.

* * * * *

Clay worked as a surgeon in a small wooden building that barely kept out the climate. If he was working hard inside, or there were lots of folks present, he and all the rest would have to wear their breathers to take in the thin air at a comfortable volume.

In his office, on the bottom drawer of his desk, Clay had a small box with a collection of slides. Every year, some new girl in town would be coming of age—around ten or eleven—and her family would have Clay sit the girl down in his office and put on the slideshow.

The first image, always, was of a husky brunette woman that he didn’t know. She was staring out toward the photographer, her hands playing with the orange fabric of her dress. Youthful, maybe, her mouth at a tilt. The next slide was the same woman, six months pregnant. Her eyes empty, mouth drooling. Her clothes hanging off her in rags. The third slide was of that same woman again with her belly burst open, surrounded by a puddle of her shit and blood.

There were fifty-seven more slides like this. Different women. Different pregnancies. Each one infected with the phage.

Pregnancies had to be medicated in Trunkdown. They had to be medicated everywhere.

Even if medicine was available for Maggie to bring a child to term, Clay couldn't do deliveries, not humanized ones. He didn't have the technology, the chemicals. He could do C-sections, sure, but not without killing the mother. Abortions, also, but still not without killing the mother.

He had found this out, trial and error. There was a mode to that kind of care on Mars, a specialty in medicine, and he did not possess it.

There was little point in learning. Lots of work could still be had. Trunkdown was a mining town—cobalt mostly. People broke bones, split their heads, tore their muscles. They had sprains, aches, pains, lamed themselves or worse. Clay could work at that sort of hurt. One point he prided himself on was that he was clean. A surgeon could be all sorts of things, but if he wasn't clean, then he wasn't worth a quarter of a goddamn.

Sometimes patrons of his died, for all kinds of reasons—blood loss, shock, the wrong bits getting nicked—but he did not lose his people from infections. It was simple to stay clean in a small town, with so few patrons, so he made sure he did.

He was okay at surgeoning; he knew this. He made no promises to his patrons. He would work at their bones, cut in their skin, sew up his mistakes. There were lots of mistakes—how did you not have mistakes? But for Trunkdown, he was what was available. Good as he could be, that's what he told everyone that came in. There was a chance with him, and if there was a chance without him, he would tell them how they might be better off.

This was a way to ensure return business. Nobody trusted anyone in medicine who prescribed treatments for every visit. His patrons were loyal because he did not bullshit them.

And maybe, yes, because he was all that was available.

Trunkdown was a small town, kept small because it didn’t have the raw income to employ a real doctor who could deliver children. Income was needed to finance doctors because of the complex, expensive requirements for their alchemical labs and medicinal tumors that kept the phage at bay. And if the phage wasn’t kept at bay, then children were not born at all—instead, natives were, busting through the bellies of expectant mothers like an insect out from an egg sac. If there were more children, there might have been a larger workforce for the cobalt mine and so therefore more money, but this was an endless loop.

Clay liked being in a small town. He got to know everybody a little bit, especially the women, since they had to come by for the birth prevention pills shipped in from San Rodrigo. If the women didn’t get their pills, they could get pregnant.

His first wife had gotten pregnant, once upon a time, and then she had died under his hand. He saw her face in his mind every day, first thing, and after twelve years he had started to hate the sight of it. The shock there, the total lack of peace. He had told her, promised her, how it would be okay.

What kind of