Spare Parts
Part Fifteen
There was something gnawing at him, something he had to do, something he was meant to do. All the loose thoughts about time not being of the essence and lying in wait for the raiders to come upon him there was just that, loose thoughts. Looking at the internal clock of the terminal in the power plant told him a date that by his best reckoning meant he was nearly two seasons behind the attack on his people. Nearly half of what those who drank it all up would have considered a year.
He would be up at night, talking with Sarah and something she would say would find him closing his eyes and seeing Winnie. Her body folded up on itself, her black hair nothing but a matt of bloody mud. It wasn’t just her, or his feelings for her. It wasn’t just her father, the chieftain, a man Garrett had come to respect and revere more than he ever had his own father. It wasn’t just finding him and the other braves mutilated and fed upon. It wasn’t just the horrors he found on the prairie by the painted rocks. The nightmares, the uneasiness. Winnie and two of her sisters were closest to the painted rocks, backed into a corner with the children. They didn’t fight like the braves but they fought all the same. Still Yinwa wasn’t with them, she was the youngest of the Chief’s daughters yet still old enough to be considered a woman. She wasn’t there, some other women were gone to. There was no reason to assume they were still alive. Most likely captured and taken along as a walking larder for the return to the coast. The practice was known among the coastal tribes Garrett had visited and traded with years before. Still, he had to know. He had to find the raiders and make them talk until he knew the full end of his people, then and only then would he be free to kill the rest until they sent him off to be with his people once and for all.
A few nights before he found the theater he and Sarah were talking and he found himself unable to stir the conversation back to Sarah or better yet away from himself. She asked him flat out what had him climbing the mountain, what was so important that he stumbled right into the trap that was her people.
Sarah had probably kept that question at bay ever since their escape. It was an obvious question after all. The girl wasn’t just damn smart, she was also patient, and empathetic. Garrett wanted to stand out side that night and curse the world for always birthing people with empathy to suffer the most. If that was nature, if that was the natural order, the whole thing was rotten and unfair from the start. No wonder it all ended in bombs and starvation.
Again, back to lessons learned. There was no lying to Melissa, there would be no lying to Sarah either.
“I was away, completing a task on behalf of an old friend, and my people were massacred. Just like what we did up on the hill, all of them right down to the children. Only it wasn’t poison, it was another tribe, raiders from the coast. I came out this way to find them and repay their brutality in kind.”
Sarah nodded. “Revenge, it’s how I felt about the Believers. Doing what we did. I’ve slept easier since. I hope you sleep easier when you’ve gotten yours.”
This is not revenge, it’s not that simple. Revenge has an after. You get vengeance on those who wronged you because the scales need balancing. Garrett has spent decades looking out on an unbalanced world that never improves. People and places that suffer and refuse to grow or change. He needs to know about Yinwa and the other women. He needs to close that final chapter and get away from all the horror once and for all, his way.
Telling Sarah any of that though, explaining to her that this was a one way trip from the moment he stopped hauling seventy three corpses up to the top of the painted rocks, laying them all out in funerary fashion so the vultures and the dogs could come to claim their customary dues, all the way until he finally slips up on the battlefield and one of the raiders gets a lucky shot.
No.
Garrett smiled and nodded instead, not quite a lie, merely an omission. Let her believe its revenge and not the last demand of a life lived hard and an end truly earned.