Teller, Banker, Stalker

After a night of hibernation, a meagre resupply of fuel, and a brisk morning walk across the street, the dirt already scorching hot from the unforgiving sun, the two stood by the doors of the bank. Buddy had briefed what little he knew to his newfound partner, and both were in agreement that it was smarter to track the man down, no matter how ‘impossible’ the AI priest made it seem, rather than wait for his possible arrival in town.

“You’re sure you can track through the desert?” Buddy asked, adjusting the strap of his hat, now hanging on his back, letting the black cabling constituting his hair, atmospheric electricity conductors, to dangle by his shoulders.

“Positive,” Hound said, “I caught your scent two miles out. And that was with no wind.”

Buddy nodded, impressed. The canine could prove to be very useful in the future, if all went well and it didn’t turn out to be a spy from the opposition, whatever that was.

“Well, let’s not dally,” Buddy said, and entered the bank with Hound in tow.

Like every bank he’d been in, this one was wide and spacious, with the tellers’ desks all the way at the back. Beyond that, down a set of hidden stairs would be the vault, and upstairs would no doubt house the administrative floor, where the head-honcho of this branch passed his time. On either wall looking from the door, long green vases were set against the pale weathered stone, reminding all who beheld them of the lost life of Earth.

Buddy and Hound strode across the sandy stone floor, footsteps muted by a rug worn down by the feet of countless destitute men and women marching in with empty pockets, then leaving with them full, actively avoiding the thought of the debt they had accrued until it was pertinent; sometimes, not until a limb was taken as collateral, usually with violence.

Though the bank had opened just five minutes prior to the two coming in, there already were a few confused elderly folk waiting their turn on rickety wooden benches. Buddy wasn’t in the mind to wait. Confidently he strode across to the lone teller behind a pane of ferro-glass, smiling his noble-metal smile, copper jaw glinting from the light filtering in from dusty windows. He earned a few nasty looks from the other clients, but it would take more than a few evil eyes to make a dent on Buddy.

“Howdy, Mr. teller. My name is Buddy Limbo, this here is my associate, Hound,” he said. Hound rose to lean on the counter with his front paws, nodding solemnly at the confused man beyond the glass.

“Sir. I’ve to ask you to take a number and—”

“Oh, no, we won’t take up much time,” Buddy grinned, “our finances are quite in order, thanks. We’re here looking for a certain someone, comes in about once a week.”

“Sir. Our automated defense weaponry needs but one thought activation from me, and you’re dead,” the teller said, hands disappearing beneath the counter.

Buddy raised his hands, palms facing forward, a surprised look on his face, “now, now, sir. I ain’t no robber nor kidnapper. I’ve been sent by your good Father up the street. He’s worried sick and, seeing as he can’t fit through the door, called me to go and check if everything’s alright.”

“I can corroborate,” Hound said, seeing the teller’s unsurety.

“I’ll need more than that. Show some proof,” the teller demanded.

Buddy lowered his hand to his thigh. A compartment snapped open, from which he produced a gold coin he’d nicked from one of the altars on his way out. “Got this from the good old Father himself,” he said, holding it out, letting the holy symbols minted onto the shining metal catch the light.

The dry-looking man looked with both eyes, biological and mechanical, the former a clouded mess, the latter a masterwork of engineering, both trained in the art of appraising. Satisfied, he nodded, then his thin hands rose from beneath the counter. “You’re looking for Jean, I take it. The rogue Grower?” he asked.

“Right on.”

“Hasn’t been here for two weeks. And he comes like clockwork. Should’ve been here yesterday,” the teller said, smoothing a bony hand across his shaved scalp, “is he in some sort of trouble?”

Buddy pocketed the coin and leaned on the counter, face a hair’s breadth from the glass, his voice didn’t mist the pane when he spoke, “well, good sir, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. Might you have anything that could hold his scent? My associate here has a keen receptor.”

Hound nodded. “Anything he might’ve touched or been in contact with for a prolonged period.”

The teller thought for a moment. “Hold on,” he said, and disappeared behind a door beyond the desks.

Hound looked at Buddy. “The priest never gave you that coin,” he whispered, “and we’re to find the Grower so we can go after the actual target, not see if the man’s safe, why did you lie?”

“Well, in a way, we are, just not in the way he thinks it. And how do you know he didn’t give me the coin? You weren’t in there with me.”

“Your inflection changed, almost imperceptibly, but enough,” Hound said.

Buddy smiled. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises, a lie-detector in addition to a tracker. And I have the sincerest intention of returning the coin once we’re done. But see, without a data-shard, or a warrant from officials, we have no way of proving our claims. I improvised.”

“You could’ve just asked the priest,” Hound said.

“He’s not going to miss a coin from some pilgrim,” Buddy sighed, raking his cabling hair with his long digits.

The teller reappeared with a rectangle of folded fabric, brown with green patterns woven in. “This is his. He left it here last time he visited. I should’ve known he was in some sort of trouble, he never forgets anything,” he said, and slid it beneath the slim opening separating glass from desk.

“Did he say anything out of the ordinary?” Buddy asked.

“Not really. He mostly keeps to himself and doesn’t chat with the locals, other than the priest and me; even then it’s just business. But he did seem more tense than usual.”

Buddy took the cloth, and showed it to Hound, raising one eyebrow in a nonverbal question: ‘is he lying?’ Hound shook his head a fraction in answer, then sniffed the cloth, pulling in the scent, huffing and snorting.

“I have it,” he said, and turned to leave, snout to the dusty floor.

“Mind if we hold on to this?” Buddy asked, turning to leave himself.

“Not at all, if it helps you find him,” the teller said.

“Thank you kindly,” the bounty hunter nodded, and left, placing the cloth in the same compartment as the stolen coin.

The trail took the two through tight alleys between houses, from bank to shops to church, just as the intel had suggested, all the way to the outskirts on the east side, where burning hot sand and ash packed down by centuries of walking, turned to the sands and ash, and powdered glass of the Great Waste, equally flesh-burning.

Hound stopped, “the scent fades here. The sands shift too much, and it has become this… faint blanket spreading out,” he said.

“I thought you could track through the desert?” Buddy drawled.

“I can pick up a scent from miles off. I didn’t lie. Didn’t you say he lives near a stone grove somewhere south of town? If we head that way, now that I know his scent, I’m sure to pick it up once we’re close enough,”

Buddy replaced his hat. “Well, let’s not waste daylight then.”

“I can see in the dark,” said Hound.

“As can I. It’s just an expression.”

Without further word to each other, the two entered the desert once more.

---

Jaques watched the strange man and the dog thing exit the bank. The small, rusted bell on the door jingled as the door opened to let them out. So, Jean was in some sort of trouble. He hoped not too much; the Grower was a kind man, though due to his nature, mistrusted by the locals, which Jaques always feared would lead him into some sort of negative altercation.

Not much he, a clerk, could do about it. He ringed the bell on his desk, summoning the first elderly in line to hobble to him with rusted back-jointed legs and cataract eyes. Midway through dealings with the confused man, Randy, who always seemed to forget just where and why he was, a summons pinged on the palm sized screen integrated into Jaques’ desk. The manager was calling him; how strange.

After going through a routine of reassurances and well wishes that had become a daily practice with his first customer every morning, Jaques flipped the sign on the ferro-glass pane to read, ‘returning shortly,’ and left up the stairs to the branch manager’s office.

He went up the narrow flight to a green corridor that led to the singular wooden door that in turn led into the manager’s office. He stopped and knocked. Twice, and twice only.

“Yes, come in!” came the jolly rumbling voice of the manager.

Jaques entered and seated himself across the massive desk by the windows overlooking the town street.

The interior of the office was as green as the corridor leading up to it, the dark stained shelves filling the walls were packed with ancient synth-plants of plastic and rubber. The smell within was a mix of sterilized linoleum and tobacco smoke, and the verdant coloring was lit by the early morning sun coming through the latticed windows. A light that should have magnified the colors of the plants, if only they were real, but instead, shone through the plastic, refracting in strange unnatural ways across the smooth surfaces of the room.

The fat branch manager stood by the window looking down, two arms crossed behind his back, while the third held a long cigar between two ornate fingers encrusted with jewels. Smoke coiled from the dry brown thing, catching on the expelled air of the many exhaust vents at the man’s sides.

“Ah, Jaques, how are you?” he asked, twirling his wrist as he searched for the name as though he had more than one clerk to remember. As though he cared for small talk.

“I’m well, Sir. How are you?” Jaques asked in return, nodding from the depths of the large chesterfield he sat in.

“All in all, Jaques, I must say, I am fantastic. Yes, fantastic. We’ve good connections with the hubs around the coasts and a steady flow of currency in and out. We’re in good standings, very good, even though we’re in the Territories, and if we play our cards right we might have this here shithole town turned into something bigger, pre-cataclysm bigger,” the manager listed off with his heavily pseudo-western accented voice, talking at Jaques rather than with him. Whenever a breather was needed he’d huff on the chunky cigar, instead of the recycled air coming through the vents up on the ceiling.

Jaques had learned to tune out the preliminary preamble of nonsense the manager let flow whenever they discussed, and to wait for anything at all to be directly addressed to him before giving his full attention. The moment finally came after a lengthy soliloquy about the rarity of the manager’s favorite tobacco, 

“… but needless to say, that isn’t what I called you in here for, dear Jaques, no, no it was not. See, I was here enjoying my morning when all of a sudden I see two strange folk come in then out from this here fine establishment, but they were not checked in or out of the system. Could you elucidate me as to their business?”

Jaques nodded. “Some sort of trackers, Sir. Looking for Jean, the rogue Grower,” he answered honestly. His cognitive implant was linked to the main pseudo-AI operating system whenever he was in the building, it would detect a lie within the nanosecond of its utterance, making lying useless. Not that he needed to or wanted to lie.

The fat man sat back on his wide chair, wider and deeper than Jaques’, yet still seeming small compared to the manager’s massive frame. He sighed and smoothed his moustache. Like many, the manager had retained his original biological face, no matter how small it was in proportion to his giant body, to retain at least some semblance of humanity, “Well, that don’t sound all too good, no it does not. Is the man in some sort of trouble, then?”

“That’s what they’re trying to find out, Sir. They were hired by the priest to find him. That is the limit of my knowledge on the situation,” Jaques confessed.

The manager puffed on his cigar. “Quit calling me ‘Sir,’ Jaques. I’ve told you, call me Tom. And as for these trackers, were you able to assist them in their search?”

“Yes, Sir, I mean, Tom, I gave them Jean’s scarf so they might track him by scent.”

Tom thought for a long moment, his face cooling from his usually jolly, plump smile, to a cold grimace reflecting whatever though processes fired behind those eyes. After an uncomfortable moment, as though he had forgotten Jaques’ presence, then remembered it again, he raised his eyes, smiled and said, “well, I’d like you to tell me as soon as they’re seen back in town, alright? Could you do that for me?”

“Of course, Sir.” Jaques nodded and left the room.

On his way back down to his monotonous job he’d been working for the past ten years, Jaques mused on this series of strange situations. He hoped nothing bad would come of it. Nothing that might disrupt his calm seclusion in this backwater town.

---

The search for the stone grove took the pair well past noon. Gusts of rad winds had at times slowed their pace to a slow walk, while on others, the sizzling heat of the sun had forced them to lurk in whatever shadows they could find in the deep dunes; it being near noon, there were hardly any. Buddy had oft spoken aloud during these trials against dead nature, of his wish to own a buggy for such expeditions, going on and on about all the specifics he would himself install when he finally got his hands on one. A foldable canopy was one, and a high power cooling system another.

Hound had been grim and silent for most of the trek, head low to the ground, focused as he tried to latch on to the scent of the missing Grower. It wasn’t until the eroded heads of the stones of the grove peaked beyond the crest of a dune a mile off, that he finally said something, cutting Buddy’s rambling off mid-sentence.

“We’re close,” he growled, ears perking up and forward, eyes scanning the tips of the megaliths.

Buddy came to a halt beside the twin-tailed Hound. “Right on que, I guess. Thems be the stone grove. Been here often before but never knew something lived out here.”

“Is it so impossible to imagine?” Hound asked.

“Well, yes,” Buddy exclaimed, “there’s nothing but sand around here, and the grove is sacred to some kooks, who have, at times, made minced circuit offerings of vagabonds found camping round there.”

Hound padded up the next crest, sand lapping down in gentle ripples with each graceful step, scanning the area beyond with his neon eyes once atop, “didn’t the priest say he lived nearby, not at the grove itself?”

Buddy followed, clawing himself up seven-fingered-hand and cup-foot, sand splashing and rolling across him and the face of the dune until he was beside Hound, spitting out dust and sour grains. “Like I said, there’s nothing but sand round here. Where would he live?” he asked once he’d shaken most of the desert out of his ports.

“A submerged bunker? Cave? Tent?” Hound offered, “I can list many more variables if you’d like.”

“Useless to speculate,” said Buddy, “for all we know the man is dead.”

“Then let’s go find out for ourselves,” said Hound, and slid down the dune.

Buddy followed, and after one more hour of climbing, sliding and wayfinding, they were at the grove.

Ten stone pillars, immense in height and width, stood atop a smooth stone face the desert eagerly tried to devour time and again. In the old world the area would’ve been measured in stadiums; this being half the width and length of one. Long lines of sand crept like cataract in irradiated eyes from all around, kept at bay by either the kooks Buddy had mentioned earlier, or something else entirely. The shadows cast by the noonday sun were only stubs at the bases of each worn stone, and the carvings set into the smooth base upon which they were erected were mostly worn away.

Buddy and Hound both felt a curious unease settle within their titanium bones, something the former had experienced before, though that experience did nothing to mitigate the present feeling.

The wind that blew through the pillars was somehow colder, and even the sun seemed to lose some of its killing heat when standing in that mysterious place.

“Do you smell him?” asked Buddy, as the two made way across the vacuous expanse between pillars.

“His scent is everywhere,” Hound replied, almost a whisper, “and these pillars, something is… off.”

“Not an uncommon reaction for people coming in first time. The priest says it has something to do with how the currents move through the hollow points at the top,” Buddy said, trying as hard as he could to sound calm and academic.

“It’s not that,” Hound said, “it’s as if this place is… I don’t know… vibrating.”

“I can’t feel anything,” Buddy said, nonchalant, though Hound’s words were making him nervous.

“Neither are my sensors picking up any seismic deviation, but still, in my bones, for the lack of a better expression, I can almost feel the place vibrate.”

Buddy said nothing, not wishing to go on speculating on the weird pillars and their phantom vibration. He almost convinced himself that he was beginning to feel it too. Moving his focus from the cyclopean monuments and their carved base, he snapped his thigh compartment open and produced the scarf.

“Here,” he said, “take a whiff, maybe it’ll help.”

Hound buried his snout into the musty cloth, huffed and snorted, then began to trace the ground in circles, searching. He raised his head now and again, until he was satisfied, and left toward east.

Buddy followed, his foot slipping in one of the deeper crevasses of the myriad carvings etched into the stone, a long line, part of many other long lines that formed a tri-pronged shape like a dagger without a hilt, layered, and menacing. He spat, and went on his way, eager to forget the ominous feeling of inevitability the grove imposed.

--- 

It watched the two fumble across the dunes, then the massive space of the grove; heard them speak, watched them track. Its eyes flicked through multiple sets of visual fields, scanning the capabilities of both in seconds. It did so repeatedly just for the lack of anything else to do, to the point that it knew the composition and armaments of both like its own.

From atop one of the ten pillars, high in the sky, crouched under a camouflage cloak, it waited until the dog-thing caught the scent it lacked the equipment to track. How perfect, it thought, that this thing would appear from nowhere to assist this foolish hunter. How perfect that they would lead it straight to the Grower. How perfect, that they were woefully unequipped.

Its hunt had been long, far longer than its master had expected. The clerical caste of the See in this region were mostly ancient mechs upgraded and grafted to immense, and often far too dangerous, proportions, making information retrieval next to impossible. The Cardinal had been the most difficult. The entire block of Habitation Central Delta-5 had burned down during their duel, and it had lost one arm to the surprisingly violent machine.

The other priests it had killed had likewise been a challenge, though nothing compared to the ancient Cardinal.

It was glad, something it felt rarely, that its final prey would be a no-name bounty hunter and a corpse-chassis dog. Less hassle that way. It also found it funny that its target had been here, so near that unnamed shanty town since the beginning.

It had come full circle.

Once the two were far enough back within the desert, the crouching form began to climb its way down like a spider across a wall, serrated fingertips gouging into the worn spongy rock. It grimaced as it beheld the image of the dagger shape on the ground beneath it and became confused as to why it had reacted so.

 No matter. Death waited. It was eager for blood.