Excerpt
"No Mercy Down in the Mine" by Lauren Scharhag
I'd managed to give Emmett and the boys the slip. I ended up nine days in the wastes because of it, but I done it.
I'd never been so far in before, or gotten so lost. I was starting to worry I was gonna end up chow for the desert dogs, no lie. All my life, I'd been pinging around between the towns nestled in the Sasing River Valley, between the river itself—that thin, gunmetal-gray ribbon that separates civilization from the vast Carcosan desert known as the red wastes—and the Shadow Mountains. I knew them all, from Corralejo all the way down to Stull.
On the fourth day, my compass started to go haywire. It was the damnedest thing. I didn't have nothing stowed in my pack that might throw the needle off. For a while, I tried to navigate by the stars, but somehow, those didn't seem right either. I thought maybe it was the heat getting to me. That same day, my water skins ran empty. I did what I could—traveled by night, laid my shirt and bandana out to catch the morning dew, squeezed the juices out of cactus and their prickly fruit. But my old mek, Reina, had only the desert grasses and scrub. She was usually good at finding us water—Sergio always said meks can smell it, even underground. But I didn't have time to be digging no wells. Emmett and the others were probably on my trail already. Emmett's a mean sonofabitch, but he's not stupid, and he's one of the best trackers I ever saw. So, eight days in, my poor Reina up and croaked on me.
By the ninth day, I damn near gave up the ghost myself. I thought I'd been heading south. Instead, I stumbled into the town of Mobley, parched and dizzy. I didn't spare a moment to wonder how the hell I'd wandered so far afield, nor did I worry about being spotted by Sheriff Rudolfo de Castro—I knew for a fact that my wanted poster was hanging on his wall. Last I checked, I was worth 80 argentos. That's a lot for a woman outlaw. (On the other hand, a jail cell wasn't sounding half-bad. At least there'd be water to drink and a bunk where I might find me some repose.) Instead, I saw the trough outside the saloon and went right for it. Tripped over something and went sprawling face-first in the dust. Crawled the rest of the way. Gripping the steel edge (if it had been noon instead of morning, it would've blistered my fingers), I used the last of my strength to haul myself up.
Empty.
I sank back down. It took my addled brain a minute to notice there weren't no meks tied to any of the hitching posts. The street was deserted, covered in shotgun shells, drag marks, blood, and some kind of oily black stuff. The blood looked pretty fresh too. And carcasses—what I took at first to be meks, but the sun and the sand puppies had been at them, so it was hard to say for sure. My thoughts were like sludge. I couldn't make sense out of none of it. That's when I noticed what it was I'd tripped over.
It was a head. Sheriff de Castro's head. His dead eyes stared at me, mouth slightly agape, gray tongue protruding. His cheeks and mustache were dusted with sand from rolling along the ground. My own head, while still firmly attached to my shoulders, had never ached so. The pain was like the glint off a very sharp knife, bright and cruel. Was I really seeing this, or were my eyes playing tricks on me? The last thing I heard was footsteps on the sidewalk boards coming towards me, voices. A man: "Well, I'll be damned! Iffin' it ain't Bootheel Sally."
And a woman: "Yep. Poor ol' Rudy—coulda had the chance to slap her in irons and he missed it. Again."
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