My Blood Runs Cold: Part One: Lost Souls

By John Castle

Former lawman turned gun-for-hire Rock Dylan is a man haunted by a terrible past and troubled by a bleak future. But when the most unusual customer he's encountered yet gives him her business, the investigation of one man's murder may lead to all out war -- and the loss of everyone Rock has ever cared about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Castle
• Release date: Feb 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310683701

John Castle

John Castle is a novelist living in the American southwest.

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Castle / MY BLOOD RUNS COLD / 74

MY BLOOD RUNS COLD

John Castle

Copyright © 2015 John Castle

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781311940414

Smashwords Edition

For Mike, Trey, and Jacob

The human condition never changes. In the early 21st century, the sitting President of the United States of America was due to step aside for his successor. He refused. In the uproar that followed, the Congress initiated measures to have him removed from office. He responded with measures of his own.

Martial law descended. National Guardsman met United States soldier, brother met brother, over gun barrel and through sniper scope. Rural ranches and suburban neighborhoods became killing fields. Homes and places of business became abattoirs. It would be called the Last Great War.

At the end of its not insignificant pool of resources, outnumbered and losing soldiers to defection by the day, the United States government played its last card. Its trump card. A people besieged looked up in confusion at explosions high in the skies over their cities. The electrical grid vanished in a wink and a fizzle. The sickness and death took hold days later.

Tens of millions died. Only some 20 per cent were immune. To them fell the task of reorganizing. Rebuilding. Reforming.

The year is 2097; a pre-war populace could be forgiven if they mistook it for 1897. Electricity has returned. Some of the great technologies of the pre-war society have survived, but with a continental infrastructure suffering from decay and disrepair, there is no life of ease for the majority of the citizens of the Texas Republic and its protectorates Arizona and Nevada, the Confederate States of America, the New England Coalition, and the states of the Central Corridor.

The United Kingdom did not interfere; they were embroiled in a form of Civil War that had swept first the European Continent and then, finally, to the island nation.

The Crusade, as it would come to be known, swept from Europe in one short, terrible year a Caliphate that had its sights set on the entire planet. And the price Europe paid for its freedom from Islamic hegemony was thought a bargain. All they had to do was accept oversight from their newly emboldened benefactors the Russian Federation.

Man is an animal unlike any other. Man preys upon man. Where the salvager, the farmer and the lawman thrive, so too does the blackmailer, the thief, the murderer.

Where there is power, there is corruption. And where there is avarice, there are sharp knives on the scout for soft throats. It’s the way of man in this new frontier as it was before the war, as it’s been throughout our long and bloody history.

Because the human condition never changes.

I never saw it comin’. The storm was on the horizon, we all saw that much ready enough. But I never knew where the first lightning bolt came down until I saw the girl standing over the corpse. Just standin’ there with blood on her hands and no expression at all on her pretty face. Even then, that wasn’t the lightning. Just the thunder. The lightning had come a long time before, and the thunder was only chasin’ it home.

You see a thing like that, and what comes to mind ain’t the friendly way she looks at you. It ain’t the softness of her hand on your cheek. It’s how hard that fist had to be to do what you’re looking down at. To make a pulp of a human skull. To beat the brains out of a head she grew up with and probably loved once.

That ain't rightly how the tale begins, though. Let me take you back, then, for it started on the Rural Road, at the front end of an unseasonably warm afternoon. The air was thick and heavy on my skin as I walked north back toward home. It wasn’t terrible hot just yet, but the mule was taking his ease and slowing me up some for the humidity. It is always my habit when I lead an animal, be it two-legged or four-, to keep the beast to my left and my gun side unobstructed. It was just so on that heavy April afternoon as I made my course for home after laying in two weeks worth of meats, cheeses, bread, salt, nicotine juice in assorted flavors, coffee, four gallons of milk in iced buckets, whiskey, ammunition and sundries.

I was flush from a job just recently done, that of retrieving a business man’s prodigal brother back home to the house of his blood, and the four crisp Texas century notes still in my billfold amongst their lesser-denominated brethren would seem a sweet take for highwaymen, as would the laden mule. I meant to part with neither, and so kept my gun side clear.

My gun was a Garrison Armaments Model 1911A4 Custom Law Enforcement Operator. I called her Miss Cleo. I thought it was just a cute way to shorten up the official name; the man who gave her to me told me once that name fit her right another way, for her every utterance told somebody’s fortune. There was only ever one time when I damned her for being right.

I got to thinking on the past on that long walk home. A trace flavor of bitter metal in the air came along and told me of rain to be suffered that night, and that brought the past back double-down. I could feel the scowl on my face, and I tugged the mule a little trying to hurry him up. The stupid animal only pulled against me the harder for that.

They’d let me keep my Stetson, braid and all, and the modular duster, too. They’d even let me keep the gun, which surprised me mightily. All they took away was the badge. The scar it left behind, wish they’d taken that, too. Sooner or later, I hope, the Judge Of All Things will take that from me. The year that had gone by hadn’t faded it, nor whiskey washed it away, though I still pursued that avenue of redemption when I wasn’t too hungry or restless to lay stupefied in my bunk.

Tonight, the rain would bring it back again, but I had whiskey enough to make my sleep a mercifully black, dreamless thing.

You have to let it go, son. I could hear Savvy scoldin’ me in my mind. Seemed to me he’d said that to me many a time over the years I’d known him. Was just a lad when he found me, all of ten years old. He was Sheriff’s Deputy then, and though I weren’t a babe in a manger, I wasn’t much better off. He told me he was called Nundahar, Nundahar Saviprakesh, and what was I called? Rockford James Dylan. That was too much a mouthful for him, and his name was for me, and so he became Savvy and I became Rock.

He took me home to meet Mrs. Savvy — Priya, she tried to convince me — and there I was for the next seven years, until she died early one January morning of something that acted like influenza but just as easy might not have been, for it never touched Savvy or me. Like as not a gift from the damned coward Federals left a long time sleepin’ but out of nowhere woke up and took her from us.

Most folk, them as were left, were immune by then to the Scourge the Federals had unleashed. Most — not all. Even today, people still catch it all random-like and drop.

As I courted these thoughts of the past, my eye was drawn to the opposite side of the road. A lone dog, its ribs showing under its pelt, paced the mule and me. I loosed the strap holding Miss Cleo in place, keepin’ my eyes on the creature. It darted looks at me, too hungry to be sly about it. Wild dogs don’t come single. They come in packs. That meant more lurking. Odds were there was trouble ahead. My eyes narrowed and my breaths got deep and slow.

Please, Mister, somebody said in Spanish, and my hand reacted to the sound before my brain clicked to the words. I froze solid, my hand on the butt of the gun. Then my eyes