Peace in an Age of Metal and Men Read Online Free PDF

landed. My jaw was set so hard that saying the words was difficult.
    “I’m in.”

Chapter 6
    Bad things happened in the desert. Corporations made profits on the backs of men. Bandits killed for upgrades. Most who’d be called innocent weren’t even close. A religion of pain grew like a cancer in the darkest corners of the wasteland. Injustice thrived everywhere from city to town.
    None of that put to rest my outrage at what I’d seen. Something had to be done. That man, that horrible man who had murdered a kid, he had to be stopped. Killed.
    What did I need? I grabbed my gun and clipped the holster on. Plain, simple justice. That’s all this was going to take. The glow cube might be helpful. I stuffed it into an ammo pouch, which I hung from my belt. The ruined duster wouldn’t do me any good in the desert, so it needed to stay behind. A man can’t leave the house without his hat or a good knife. Knife, gun, hat. Yes, that’s all I needed.
    But I hesitated. The gun felt so heavy at my side. So awkward. How long had it been since I’d carried it on a regular basis? How long since I’d dispensed justice? How long since I’d killed someone? That wasn’t me anymore. A good sheriff could do that. Not me.
    I drew the gun and looked at it. My hand shook and no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t stop. The butcher wasn’t a bandit. He wasn’t a gunslinger. He was just a man. He could be stopped without a bullet. This was a test. Years ago I’d sworn off guns. Killing never did me any good back then and it wouldn’t now.
    Would it?
    Ben and Francis Brown could answer that. Were their lives better with their mama dead? Was that the justice they needed for her killing their pa? If I’d let it go from the start, they’d still be together. She’d have guilt eating at her, but guilty is a hell of a lot better than dead. The gun went back on its peg.
    My skidder was still a ruined mess, and getting around the desert on foot was a slow suicide of heat stroke and dehydration. Nobody deserved that, not even me.
    The aches in my body were easy enough to shake off, but the one in my metal arm still throbbed. It needed a half a day at a charging station, but since that wasn’t an option I opted for the next best thing: ignoring the problem. It wasn’t a great solution, but it was the best I had. The thing would last days on low battery. Experience had taught me that much. It took time for my eyes to adjust to the black of the moonless night. The scattered mess of the Milky Way stretched across the night sky.
    My skidder’s antigrav still worked, but propelling it would be a problem. I had no rockets handy, so my best idea involved pushing myself along with an old steel bar I’d picked up from a scrap pile. I got my bearings with the stars, pointed my skidder in the right direction, and pushed. It was just like poling a boat.
    Movement was slow at first, so I pushed again. Then again. Soon I was moving at a reasonable clip and the kilometers vanished behind me. Cool, dry air tugged at my hat and chilled my bones. It would take an hour or two to reach Dead Oak, but it was better than walking.
    The glow of that small town graced the horizon right around the same time that the eastern sky lightened with the impending morn. Dead Oak was a town of modernized hogans. They were lumps on the surface of the desert. Along the outskirts of town were some of the old structures: buildings constructed before the megastorms started scouring the land on a regular basis. Most of them were crumbled into ruin, but a few still stood, monuments to a time when Texas was a far friendlier place.
    A few stabs with the steel bar adjusted my direction. On the near side of town, over a short rise, was the junkyard. That’s where I needed to go. My skidder slid forward silently, taking a slightly sideways angle toward its destination. It slid effortlessly over the rise, cresting with a gentle leap off the top of a hill.
    The junkyard was closer