The Zona Read Online Free

 “When man loses his knowledge, he starts over again. We call this a Dark Age.”
    Terence reached into the front pocket of his shirt.   Lead took a step forward, pistol muzzle inches from Terence’s face.  Terence withdrew a Preacher’s cross from his pocket.  He held the tip against Lead’s firearm.
    “You’re a Preacher!” Lead said.
    “I didn’t mean anyone harm, but I cannot do the Church’s work anymore.  They’re not good.”  Terence pushed the muzzle down with his cross, Lead let the gun drop.  The Van Cleef swung to his chest.  Terence set the cross down on the table and stood up.
    “I don’t know anymore if there is an afterlife, but I know there is this life, despite all, I wish you well. I forgive the threat.”  Terence turned and walked out of Cibola.
    Lead stood frozen in place.  His body shook uncontrollably.  Sweat ran down his face and arms.  He looked at Terence’s cross; the edges were rounded with time and use.  Lead grabbed his pistol and fired twice into the couch, frightening critters living within and beneath.  Lead’s anxious paralysis broke, he ran out of Cibola.
    Terence’s short trail was marked with dust.  He’d mounted his nag and beat a hasty retreat across the hardpan.  Concealment was impossible in the open Mohave and Terence and his mount rode freely towards a sun both radiant and deadly.  Lead fired his Van Cleef into the air.  Terence did not pause or look back to the young Preacher.  He rode on.
    Lead let go of the Van Cleef and bit his trigger finger hard.  Blood ran over his teeth.  He yelled into the sky.  His yell was primal, without words or form but true to the yell of all creatures consumed with frustration and indecision and the knowledge of what he set out to do had to be done, consequences be damned.     

    Radioman Smith smoothed out a burlap blanket on the ridge overlooking Yucca Valley.  His binoculars focused and flashed.  The mark rode west, the Preacher stood as witness to his retreat.  The Radioman’s mind wondered and speculated.  He filled in the blanks and formed a story.  There was always words and news to transmit. The Church’s appetite for bad news was both profitable and insatiable.
    Smith got up and rolled his binoculars into his blanket.  He packed them into the saddlebags of his Lead’s mule, which he’d stolen as equity for yesterday’s loss.
    “That boy will pay for what he took, by desert or by Church,” he said, and spat into the sand.

III. Topock, Crystal, and an account of savage peoples
    An ancient street sign proclaimed TOPOCK.  Lead looked to the depths of a dry riverbed.  A rail bridge of the Broken Times stretched halfway across before crumbling to rust.  It hung in the air, connected to oblivion.  Under the rail bridge hung a child’s swing, impossibly high for the dry riverbed, put there for the amusement of children long gone and over water that would never return.
    Lead opened the old man’s canteen and drank the last of his water.  He remembered the river.  He remembered how this place had once been cleared by a brush fire.  His mind saw young men and women swinging into the river, playing.  There was once a young boy in pink shorts and a younger girl with a sore on the corner of her mouth, holding each other, staring into the water. He wished the water was still there.  He wished the children were still there and that he was again one of them.
    Lead had spent the day walking to this riverbed with the promise of fresh water.  He dared not go to Kingman.  He had not done his job, to report failure was a sin.  If the Church declared him a sinner, he would be purged.
    Lead spent the evening before in Terence’s shack.  He’d found the overturned car and hoof tracks leading to Kingman.  His mule and provisions were gone.  No supplies in the desert meant death, Lead held no optimism in that regard.  Yucca contained nothing but abandoned fugee trailers, empty save scorpions