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Melody’s tiny feet had followed him from the ruins of the fort, across the fires burning low and out into the stretch of the desert.
The stars are brazened above them. The dogs whine and lick at Antony’s knees. He scratches his nails across his scalp, some of the dogs dropping on their furred bellies and panting. Most escaped the fires.
Antony looks across the sands. The Strip shines in the distance. The child catches up. Her teddy is tied to her hip with string. Her feet are bleeding. Lupa circles her, tongue rolling in her maw.
“The camp is gone,” Melody says. “I’m not a slave anymore.”
“Fine.” Antony turns away. He touches the smoking shoulder pads of his leather armour, the crimson rags at his belt. “Do as you please. I don’t care. I don’t want you.”
Melody’s dry lips push out, her bird bones pressing out of her chest. Her potato sack dress droops over her shoulder, bruises black and deep patterns across her collarbone.
She reaches into her hemp bag, fetches out a fat fistful of gristle. She thrusts it at Lupa, who quietens her rumbling, slurping it off her tiny palm, the red lather of her tongue licking the small fingers clean.
The sun is behind Melody. Her hands are on the dog. He watches her, silent, then ticks back his head, whistles high.
The dogs press into him, furred shifting shapes of all sizes, yelps and howls and whines merging into a single boat of sound, and he moves away with them, away from the smoke trailing toward the sky, with Lupa, and finally, the girl.
Tink has taken enough tumbles in her day to be able to roll over well and unfucked, body all tight and hard like a jerky stick but there’s a horde of these travelling marauders wearing torn rags like tutus and she takes down three of them - headshots, gah never gets old - before she trips backwards, over a fucking rock like a kid and her muscles twist and crack and Christ.
The Chosen One tits up over a rock and Chance’s small, dark shadow darts across the sand blasted over her face and she hears the soft cherry pops of his silent pistol.
Her muscle throbs, pain like springing needles down her leg and back again.
“Hey.” She raises her voice. “Hey, Chance.”
“Tink.” It took him a long time to use her name. “Where are you?”
“Taking a nap,” she sighs, sticking her cigarette at the corner of her lip. “Give me a hand.”
Chance’s shadow pools on top of her. The sun is a bitch heat today. The light stands against his black hair, wiled out to his ears, across the zigzag of acne scars around his cheeks and lips.
He doesn’t.
“You should stay still.” He speaks. “Your leg is bent.”
“I know its bent, I’m getting up.”
“No,” he clarifies. “It’s bent the other way.”
“Agh, fuck.”
“We’re going to need to take a break,” Chance’s voice is quiet, but it creeps into everything, like sand in a saggy ass crack. He lodges his skinny body under her, moving her up. She burbles, her muscles screeching under her weight, and she almost takes Chance with her. “We need to find supplies. You won’t be moving for a while.”
She humphs, Chance lying her flat on the thin linen of her futon. The Canyons are coming into reach within the horizon. Blessed shade, she reckons. Food, resources, water.
Even it is winter, it’s still warm in the day, minus the bluster of the wind. Stiff, discoloured cacti lining the dunes. Nights that could ice a deathclaw’s nuts off.
She’s had worse pain, but not so much this pain at her age, minus the arthritis in one knee (now in her good leg, be damned) and her fingers curled and clawed if she wakes from a bad dream.
Chance straps her leg. He’s brisk, pulls it this way and that. She smokes through the discomfort and from where she lies, she can see the skeletons of old hovels built into the sides of the canyon, shaking on the frames of an old, repurposed ranger station. The wind picks up, billowing the sun-bleached rags clung to the windows cut out like square, staring eyes.
“Hm.” Chance blinks up at the sun. “I need to find supplies. Stay here. Don’t move.”
“Smartass.” She scratches the end of her nose. Her leg, all ancient sinew, crunches with the strain, the pull and pulp of pained muscle. “Is it broken, Chance?”
Chance’s shadow has fallen away from her, reaching toward the Canyon. As far as she can tell, she won’t know for a while.
The clouds pass over the sky. She pushes herself up on her elbows, groping for the stimpak. She stabs it into her leg, misses the vein. The needle snaps.
Shit.
The skyline dims into blue lines. A coffee spill of black drowns the dunes. Cacti stuck up against the twilight stars like shapes and shadows from memory.
She begins to give them names. Tandi. Sulik. Hakunin. Rose. John.
John.
One has ringleted spikes that look like fat balled earrings. Heh. Chel.
Rolling agony stirs her from trance to wakefulness. She can taste blood, the chemical wash of watered Med X.
Pattering feet. Not bipedal. Not geckos. They can be evil little bastards, deadly in a pack. Scalped an ex-legionary with her shotgun, saw his skull skin flutter handsomely away in the breeze. Ends up gecko chowder. Hah. Fitting end for the Ch -
Lick.
Tink squints. One of the cacti had moved, only it isn’t a cactus at all, but a dog, fearfully large, licking and nipping at the toe on her bound leg.
Tink swats at it. The dog circles and comes back, pecking at her ankle, dripping muzzle nudging up her gauze.
“Gonna eat me?” she says. The dog - a pup, maybe, by the way the tail slopes side to side, worrying the dust - looks up at her, one ear perked up. “I’m tough.”
More feet, trotting. A swell of shadows coming out of the chilly dark. Chance, by his hair struck out against the moon, and beside him, a girl near the age she was when she was chosen, and behind them, a tall brick shape of a man.
And dogs.
Lots of dogs.
The man’s face’s is like a brick. Cheeks wide out to the sides, eyes like beans, mouth all tight. He has a vacant look, like he hasn’t got all his marbles shaking in one place, until Tink strikes her cane in the crack of the rock and his scatty eyes stall, intensify.
Tink smirks, braces her kneeling weight on it. The girl is beside her, crushing roots into fine dust, running baby fingers over the bulge of the bust up bone.
“Hey, handsome,” she chides. “You packing?”
He stares at her. He’s half starved, by the looks of him, and a tribal too, she can bet, by the wilderness of his clothes and just the sheer fucking strangeness, displacement, rolling off him like the stink of shit.
'So," Chance's voice was careful like the rest of him. Himself, the dogs, Tink, the girl, and the stranger. "What group do you run with?"
He says group, not tribe, although the question is there, injection thin between the gaps of his teeth. Just as sharp enough to scratch too, if he looked at you funny. Some people hated even being asked if they were ever tribe.
She wonders if Chance himself was a tribal - never thought to ask his dying mother. Never thinks to ask most people their business.
The hard eyes punch out at Chance.
"I'm a Hangdog," he confirms.
"There are no more Hangdogs," replies Chance bluntly. "The Legion saw to that."
“The Legion aren’t around anymore,” the girl says. She’s been collecting bundles of sticks for the fire, as if she was born to do just that. She’s so skinny she could be a lick of lime paint. Strong too, if the warp of muscle bristling above the bone is anything to go by. She keeps looking at Chance, who keeps looking at Antony, and the dogs keep looking at Tink.
Tink ain’t nobody’s dinner.
Tink whistles for the girl’s – Melody, is it? - attention.
“You a Hangdog, too?”
The pip of her throat swallows. Antony tips his head back, slithers of Chance’s meat broth rolling down his jaw and cheek.
“I guess,” she answers. “In a way.”
“In a way, huh?” Tink picks her teeth with a piece of bone. Whittled toothpicks, five caps for a tinbox of twelve. Useful when dentistry is a pair of pliers and a sharp, swift rip. “I’ll take that for a yes.”
She’s looks about fourteen but could be older if that’s the malnutrition talking.
“She’s a pup,” Antony’s scrawly voice breaks in. “But she’s a part of us.”
“By choice?”
“Yeah.” Antony answers, as if there was ever a question it would be anything else. Melody’s giggle is still childlike. Huh. “Couldn’t get rid of her.”
“There was nobody else,” Melody explains. “After the Legion went away.”
“You were Legion?” asks Chance plainly. “Loads of people were around here. You stayed away from Arizona.”
“We don’t need to be in Arizona, in Denver, to be the Hangdogs,” Antony says, proud, before his rough voice falls to a waver. “Although, it would be something, to see our ancestral lands.”
200 years. Not enough for ancestors. But here, history is short. It’s brutal. It comes around and goes away in decades instead of in centuries. The same stories, the same playthroughs, over and over again. A song that keeps getting sung.
By the look in Antony’s eyes, he seems ready to begin again.
Women in the Legion didn’t get old. Some did, like his great aunt. He didn’t know if she was his aunt, but he called her it anyway. She ‘d had a dog called Garl. Garl had no fur on his muzzle. He’d been pack leader even with his leg all lame and twisted and failing to fuck his puppies into the bitches around him.
He bit when petted. He bit when fed. He bit everyone except Aunt. She had a name, but Antony always called her Aunt.
Garl hadn’t been thrown on the fire like the others. He had sunk his teeth into Lanius’s wrist, wrecking all that powerful meat. Lanius had wrung his arm with a low bellow like a battle drum, but Garl had hung on. Even with his neck broken and the body dangling loose, his teeth had remain stamped onto Lanius’s skin, and it took one humungous hand to prise it off.
Antony had tried to roll the body away from the fire, to cradle his spirit animal in his arms. Vulpes had slit his skin open like a zipper, kicked his ribs until they cracked, rolled out Garl’s limp and wrangled body and cut the skin from the spine to the snout.
Vulpes had worn Garl like a hood.
He dreams of the dogs. Dreams of their figures, their burning fur, the smell of baking meat slithering out of the Canyons. Their whines and snarls breaking out of their open throats. Eyes yellow and weeping and brutal and black, peppered all over the Canyon wall like angry stars.
He himself is a dog. On all fours, whipped, tethered to the swaying neck of a massive bull. He pulls – the bull comes apart, as if made of dust, but where the specks fall, burn each part of him.
Antony wakes. A yank like the tug of a rope.
The old woman sits, her ruined leg lain in front of her. Her body is hard and old. She is like Lupa. A tough old bitch.
He stares until she tilts her head, smirking in a way he has seen some women do but doesn’t understand.
“Like what she see?”
“No,” he bites back, more from habit then intent. Then, he looks sideways at Melody, asleep amongst the dogs. The old bitch looks toward her, then back at him, and he curls his lips down. “You’re too old.”
She curls her lips up.
“You think an old bitch like me can’t fuck?”
Antony narrows his eyes.
“No.” He reaches out to Lupa, who pads to him. “You’re too old. You can’t have children.”
“I had one kid. One was enough.”
He frowns. He doesn’t like this information.
“Where is your kid, then?”
She shrugs.
“Around.”
“Not much of a pack mother, are you?” he sneers.
“Heh.” She chuckles. “Other people call me Tink.”
He looks at her blankly. This seems to please her, and she exhales, rubbing her leg back and forth.
“Antony.” He doesn’t like to offer anything, but dogs offer themselves to each other, to build bridges. Twitches of head and tail, offering smells. Rears raised, paws flat and open, nose to the ground. The word “Master of The Hounds” rises like smoke in his throat. He swallows it back and chokes. “I am a Hangdog. This is my family.”
“Yeah.” She smiles. For real this time, as if something from long ago has bled out between her lips. “I’m from Arroyo.”
That rings something. He remembers stories. Degenerate propaganda, as snarled by Oslo.
“That’s NCR.”
“No, it…” Her smile disappears, forms the familiar smirk. She shakes her head, lighting a cigarette. The dogs shift close to Antony’s leg, closer to them both, fattening out the spaces between and around them. “It is now. Wasn’t always. They flattened it out. Most of my family are there now. Went along with it easy enough.”
“Were you the only one you mourned?”
It’s a strange question, but he feels it. Here, with the dogs, with the old bitch with the lame leg. He reaches for his belt and winds his fingers through Garl’s pelt. A sign. A sign.
She stares at him sideways but doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look at him the way she first did.
They lapse into silence, but he watches her, rapt.
Women in the Legion don’t get old. That’s what Siri had told her after she had hidden beneath the table after one of the men had tried to put his fingers inside her. She’d cried about the coming years. Siri’s only comfort had been that there wouldn’t be many.
There had been old women. Well, some. Shadows in their late forties that kept house and gardened. But none like this woman. She is old in a way where she doesn’t have the luxury of getting doddery, of humming old tribal songs as she dug up dirt or did the dishes. She has a gun. She walks unfettered. The dogs don’t like her like they like Melody, but they sit near her and pant and form a furry cradle around her wrecked leg.
The leg is badly damaged. It will heal, but it won’t heal right. Siri showed her some tricks but it’s not enough. Her memory of that time is blotted by the smell of brahmin shit and keeping her body as a dirty rag and nothing else.
She likes Tink. Likes her stories, her rambles, as Melody stays with her as Antony hunts and Chance scavenges over the following days. She has heard of cars. She thinks Tink is lying, but in a good way, a fun way, in a way the funny man with the red hair and big hat who’d slipped her back Sergent Teddy told stories.
Tink coasts her eyes through Melody as if she is just another body in a faraway story. She hasn’t looked at Antony as if he’s a monster. Some people do, whilst others approve, until Antony snarls like a cornered coyote. He has never touched her, not even the ends of her hair. He has never touched anyone, minus his hands felling through the fur of his adored dogs.
As a Legionary, he had been vicious and a bully. He had stolen her bear and thrown it to Lupa with a ghastly laugh like a punched airbag. The other men thought she was Antony’s, so she was left alone. Antony never thought like that, so it saved her a lot of trouble.
Siri had said that terror made him cruel. Melody is old enough to understand, but she still doesn’t think she can fully forgive him.
Chance doesn’t snarl or react or even speak that much, just has a voice soft as ash and a habit of taking over things when you’re not looking. She had thought Tink was the leader, but minus complaining about her boredom and her bum leg, sipping her “hooch” and reading from old, stapled books with the pages falling out, she seemed more like a follower, casually shadowing Chance wherever the young man wanted to go.
“Is Chance your son?” She had asked. “He seems very fond of you.”
Tink had laughed like a shotgun.
“Nah. He’s far too sensible. Would be better looking, though.”
She’s not maternal. Her tongue is sharp, and her hands are hard. She slaps Melody’s palms if they wander, or if she’s too slow, or not bringing the hooch fast enough. It is a relief that there are other women that can get old or choose their bed mates and walk free and talk free, but sometimes, sometimes, she would like something – someone – maternal. Something she could seal herself against, like how she burrows her head in Lupa’s mangy stomach and folds her body around the ancient dog. She knows that Tink has a daughter, somewhere, because she’d lain awake with her head on the animal’s stomach listening to Tink and Antony talk under the Canyon wall.
Antony’s voice had become weird. Antony is weird enough, stranger and protector and pseudo brother, but she knows him well enough that when his voice hushes and hums, that his brain has become bright, anxious, bulbed with some new idea.
Antony stares at Tink as if trying to find the mother that Melody seeks, by herself, in silent sessions under the stars.
It takes days but her leg begins to heal. Chance fashions a support out of a branch, whittling a grove that fits her hand and provides grip without splinters. A smart kid, as always. He ain’t blood but he’s close enough sometimes.
He has bound the leg in a line straight enough, so the healing is consistent to stick her foot down. The stick of rags and messy hair called Melody has been massaging it daily, enough so the pain can be managed, and the muscles can breathe.
One more night on a dirty, thin futon and they can move on to whatever – or whomever – needs them next. Caps are running a little dry. They could always skin and tan the dog’s hides and sell them on for a few extras.
A lot of dogs. They bite and play and prowl around the camp, their own personal furry prison wall. They’ve had no troubles with geckos or coyotes. Some of the woofs have even brought back hunks of animals, Bighorners and fire geckos mostly. Antony hunts with them most days. There are more burns and blood on him then on his pack when he returns.
Tink can finally wobble back and forth across the gorge just fine, if she takes her time, Chance’s makeshift walking stick a steady anchor. Heh, shit. She took on a massive goliath with a minigun but one trip across some shit kicking rock and she fucks up her leg like a piece of taffy.
She watches the sun cool in the sky and settles herself down for sleep. The cold cramps her leg, and Chance has lain double the blankets over her, and she’d brushed it off until the cold really bit and Christ, it’s cold, she’s old and cold.
The cold gets into her dreams. The rush of an old car struggling up under her. John asleep in the back, the hot mound of his aging body stretched out like a large, fluffy –
Dog.
She opens her eyes.
Yeah, of course.
If the dog could be any closer, it would be sucking on her fallopian tubes. She presses it away, but the animal whines, soft and needy, and snuffles into her further.
There is another dog, curled up around her bad leg, and another, lain out from her hip to her cheek.
Antony is perched at the end of his own sleeping bag, cross-legged like a boy. He looks young, brutally young, in the moonlight, and if she could look in a mirror – thirty something years hence – she may even see herself.
Lupa’s wolverine head lifts, tilts, poaching her with her gaze. One old bitch to another.
“I’m not quite up for it yet,” she grumbles. “Takes me a bit of time. Little dry since I slimed my brat out but give me a bit of attention and we’ll get there.”
It’s a taunt. Any hint of bodily fluids that ain’t dog spit makes Antony shrivel up like a plum in the sun, but taunt or not, it isn’t working now, for the kid snickers, runs his thumb against his teeth. Between his canines are thick spats of meat. The same shared in Lupa’s mouth.
Tink slowly looks back and forth between them.
“What the fuck?”
Antony sticks his hand out. Dribbling blood between his fingers is the meat. Cooked, if barely, and the dogs beside her stir, excitable, touched with the smell.
Tink reaches for her hooch, tips it back until it burns, and wiping her mouth, reaches for the meat, gammy and warm from the fire, and taking it from his fingers, bites into it until the flesh breaks.
Hope ignites Antony’s face, not as the sad, starved pup she imagined, but something deeper, more alive, and in Tink there irks a world long gone, stampeded by marching boots and bureaucracy, of voices that hum and haunt in the shadows of caves and huts slated together by mud and prewar metals. Of them hidden under the downed giants of worlds long gone.
Of her family, of John.
Of a world in which one cannot go back. Of old songs that can’t be sung again, but one look at Antony, and they begin again, louder, louder, drumming from the histories that fills the space and falls away again, for Tink rolls over, her back to the boy and his dogs, and closes her eyes against the past.
The next morning, it’s colder. It gets cold even in the desert, now that they tip over December into January. Tink folds up her Mojave fiction and stuffs in her bag, lifts the cowl and winds it around her head. The brooch – beaten brass, lined with colourful beads – she attaches to her shirt.
Melody has wrapped strung broken shells and painted bullet casings, hanging them from her staff. They sway and clink together as she limps back to the road, a long curl of dust that swerves off into the canyons.
The dogs fly past her feet, their paws dashing up the sand in soft tangerine blooms under their paws.
Tink struggles over, shotgun holstered over her back. Chance rises, his brown skin shimmering colours in the sun, his grey eyes flushing as he turns back to her. The dogs, the boy, the girl, Chance. They melt into the road as one single group.
“I’m coming,” Tink mumbles over Melody’s shout and Antony’s laughter, cutting through the haze of the morning. Lupa slows to trot beside her. “I’m coming, damn it.”