Steel Melody

Chapter 4: Scared or Afraid?

 The gunsmith Judas was an old lean muscled man with a barrel for a stomach. A grumpy air always stunk around him.

"This from one of em scouts?" he asked, looking over Heartrik's pistol. Heartrik nodded, following what his father had told him.

"Feff, their crap's always cheap. Nowadays ya have a factory slap together an iron case with a bullet inside and ya got a gun. But that ain't the real stuff. It's the reason this troupe's survived so long, our guns come from my hard worked fingers. I get the art of smithing! I could forge this whole troupe the finest suits of armour and hand made revolvers you'd ever seen if I wasn't busy fixing bangered sights and who knows it!" Judas shouted from his forge tent, waving his arms. Heartrik nodded subconsciously to the old man's ramblings. "Springs are shoddy, and the trigger's already buggered. Gimme a minute boy." Judas withdrew to a device which he began to crank whilst lowering his visor, before seizing tools he held against the gun for several minutes. "That should do it." he announced. Heartrik nodded once more, and jumped as Judas fired a shot blindly off into the forest. Immediately the camp raced like they were under attack, before they concluded it was just the old smith. "All good boy, treat 'er with care.'' He placed the gun back in Heartrik's hand. Already it felt even sleeker.

He took a seat upon an old branch nearby. Some of his fellow crew took note of his new pistol gifted by his father. "Another gift hey?" Havi laughed. The young raider had his brown hair held back by his hair tie as he prepared for battle. "A fine pistol too. I hope it doesn't jam in the big battle coming up. Make sure to test it out somewhere far, far, away." he laughed and carried himself off with Tom and Lian. They murmured about him as they walked away, just loud enough for him to hear their harshness. He decided they wouldn't dampen his mood, and he chose to go shooting anyway. If he was suspicious enough, they might have been luring him into a trap so they could kill him. It wouldn't be the first time something similar had been tried. He didn't care, he could kill them all with ease if they ever tried it, just like he had in the past.

The weapon was sleek, far more suitable to his hands. It fit between the leather of his fingerless gloves as if it were meant for him. His eyes wandered until they fixed on a flock of birds perched atop a branch in a clearing. He took aim. Whenever he was sad he usually went out to kill birds. He remembered when he first started hunting birds, but as with everything he couldn't remember what feeling made him, but he did it anyway. Maybe it was because they woke him so early. Bang, bang, bang, three shots sounded at his targets. Each of them connected precisely. Once more his father was right, utilising targeting cybernetics made him more effective, even if he didn't want them. His neck where the targeting implants were began to grow warm with use. He prayed that he would miss the next. He took aim at the birds now soaring in the air to flee. Bang, bang, bang he fired again. Three perfect hits, even as the birds scattered. His breath hastened and his hands felt heavy. His brow flexed and his head ached. The shadows of his fathers fingers rose over the nodes in his neck. Bang, Bang, Bang...

Another three perfect hits. He threw the pistol to the ground, sending it bouncing off hidden roots and rocks and into mud. His father was right, he was always right. Ever since his first job his father had always seen to make him better. If he couldn't aim there was a way to fix it. If he felt pain there was a way to fix it. If he felt afraid, if he could feel anything other than devotion to their cause, he would be fixed. And the preferred way to fix it was through cybernetics. He had forgotten just how much of him had been fixed. His father was obsessed over it. He had been fixed of pain, he had been fixed of stress, he had been fixed of fear, of feeling anything from his past. Ever since he became a real Radier, he had been made a blank slate, anything he had felt about his youth had been removed. Anyone and everything from his past was a meaningless blur. The only thing he could feel was the present, trapped with the Raiders. It was a way his father controlled him. He had wiped out any emotion Heartrik had felt before, and therefore everything he knew about life before the Raiders was destroyed. Without a feeling to link to his memories, they were just unrelated stories which held no value to him. He yearned for those feelings, those feelings his father had robbed from him, those feelings said to be detriments. He was better, they said, he was stronger and more powerful, learnt quickly and picked up tricks as that was all he knew, and he wouldn't flinch when on a job. That's what his father promised when he forced him under a surgeon's knife. He never wanted it yet there he was, secretly wanting it all back. He only ever wished to be able to know what life outside of the Raiders felt like.

Hitting his targets successfully made him sick, like he would throw up, like his stomach coiled like a snake. It proved that he was still what his father had made him. All he had wanted, taking that pistol out to shoot, was to prove his father wrong. Maybe if he missed there was a chance what had been done to him could be undone? But no, it was over and he spewed his guts into the mud where his pistol had sunk. It blended into a swell of reeking colours. The thin barrel of his pistol loomed through the pallid colours. He tried to bury it beneath those colours of his own making and had failed. The smell of defeat burnt his nose. He gave up, retrieving the weapon and washing it off in a puddle and wiping off the remainder with a ragged part of his clothing. The sun began to dip, the sky losing its golden hue in turn for quite grey. The blues died and the shadows grew between trees. He wasn't far from camp. He seemed to find the cool mud and dew dripping from trees far more comforting than the humid smell of sweat and horse dung which peppered his camp. They would notice if he didn't return at night, but it was ok, because they could just check the trackers implanted in his neck to see he was close by. 

He felt eyes surface around him like bugs skittering across his skin. The dead were watching again. There was always the fear that one night they may stop their silent spying and step forward and cuff their hands around his throat in vengeance. He could remember the first, and the words they had said to him. "Oh God." They made a wet sound between a sigh and a gasp. "Take it out." and when he took out the knife they died. They stood there too, black snakes tumbling out their belly, black dried blood like frozen crystals over severed blue muscle.

The ghosts didn't bother him anymore. Just like those other feelings, the memories of grief and regret he once remembered when looking at their faces had been removed from him. No longer did he remember what he had felt when they had first appeared to him, so now they felt like nothing when they judged him. They each had wounds which opened like a second mouth. Stomachs, throats, armpits, faces. They were all dead and they all stared at him.

As the sun died, the blueness was greyed into a muddy aqua. It was nice and calm. His eyes grew heavy with fatigue. He acknowledged it. He immediately wished he hadn't. Thinking of eyes with the pale sky in view reminded him of that man, Lertz, with his undead eyes. The dead didn't scare him even when they circled him, sieged him. Lertz wasn't dead, but those eyes weren't alive. He couldn't be afraid, but he could be unsettled, and his skin tightened around bones as if the aqua sky were the man's was glaring at him from above. He couldn't be afraid, so why was he?