Rust: One

Chapter 6

Fitch sat crosslegged in the back room of the Rosenfeld Mission and seethed.

The woman was a pain in the ass. He'd tracked her across town not once but twice, watched her drive into the Warren Brown Tunnel and emerge where she'd entered, and she still didn't believe. He didn't blame her, not truly. He'd been the same way when he'd first woken in Rustwood. Pushing at the edges, looking for an escape. All futile in the end, but how was he supposed to explain that? The woman had just died, after all. She was still trapped in... what was it called? Kubler-Ross, stage one. Denial. Waiting to wake from a world that wasn't a dream.

But that didn't help him one bit. She wanted proof, like Fitch could just draw it out of his pocket. Which he could, of course. But the chittering thing didn't like the light, and he doubted it'd like Kimberly even more. Whatever it was, it preferred privacy.

He had to find another way. Hence, the bombs.

He'd exhausted his batch of home-made napalm while burning down the sawmill on the east end of town. Some had fuelled the fire and the rest spilled when he'd taken a turn too violently, leaving the pickup stained from bumper to bumper. All he could do was hope it didn't ignite accidentally one day.

But there were other weapons, better than fire. Fitch knew it because he'd read it, and books didn't lie. Not like people, or memories, or Mister Gull. He knew the tactics of guerilla warfare. Strike where the enemy was weakest. Pursue them in small pockets. Never aim for the head, not when you were such a small force. Instead, bleed them dead from a thousand tiny cuts.

Just as they'd done to him, so many months before.

He was alone in the back of the Rosenfeld Mission, not because the room was his by right but because Mrs Rosenfeld knew that things worked out better if Fitch was left to his own devices. They had a grudging level of respect for each other; or at least, Fitch respected Mrs Rosenfeld. She had her head on straight, even if she was too damn scared to fight.

What she truly thought of him was impossible to tell. He didn't care, so long as she gave him his space.

With the shelter humming just beyond the doors, the afternoon rush of homeless and disenfranchised lining up for their stale bread and vegetable soup, Fitch got down to business. He'd retrieved a couple pieces of old steel pipe from a construction site just off Hardaway Avenue, and now he was inspecting the threaded ends, seeing how tightly he could screw down a cap. It was rare to see anything actually being built in Rustwood - more common for buildings to simply spring up overnight, like seeds watered and left to bloom. He didn't know whether it was because they worked fast in Rustwood or if he just wasn't paying attention, whether the town itself was less important than what parts of it he could destroy.

Either way, he had the pipes. The explosives had been slightly more difficult to obtain, but in the years since the mining operations had gone out of business he'd harvested enough black powder to pack into a whole box full of pipe bombs. All that was left were the fuses and blasting caps, along with an assortment of shrapnel - screws, washers, twists of wire, pennies...

Just the sort of thing to blow a nunnery apart. And when he dragged Kimberly Archer out of her safe little house and showed her the wreckage, showed her what actually walked around beneath those black robes, she'd believe. She'd have to.

He was screwing the cap on the first bomb into place when someone knocked on the door. Fitch froze. The pipe trembled in his hands.

Another knock. Then a whisper. "You in there?"

Fitch relaxed. It was Rosenfeld. Lot of people who slept there figured she was a saint but Fitch suspected she had other reasons. He'd never met anyone who did anything out of the goodness of their own heart. There was always a motive. A debt to be paid.