Peace in an Age of Metal and Men by Anthony Eichenlaub Read Free Book Online

tech in it to handle the alcohol; Nanomachines would process toxins without much trouble. Still, that alcohol had to go somewhere, and by the smell of it she was either belching it out in a gaseous form or sweating it out. There was a slick look to her skin. Truth was, she was hard to place in my head. She seemed like a kid to my old eyes, but really, she was a grown adult. Maybe it was her oversized overalls that made me think she was younger.
    “I appreciate the ride,” I said.
    She looked like she had something else to say but chose not to say it. Instead, she silently ignored me and concentrated on the many screens around us. On them, the desert slid by. We weren’t going fast, but that was all right with me. We didn’t have a huge distance to go, in the relative-to-Texas sense. A couple dozen kilometers weren’t much in the grand scheme of the Republic of Texas.
    “You’re buzzing,” Abi said after a long stretch of silence.
    “What now?”
    She pointed at my pants. “Buzzing. In there.”
    I felt the ammo pouch and realized that she was right. My glow cube was humming pleasantly. When I brought it out, it stopped buzzing and flickered to life. A distorted hologram appeared above it, but I couldn’t make out the image.
    “Hello?” I said.
    The answer was a distorted string of noise. Abi shook her head and grabbed the cube from me. She opened the center console, revealing a square hole.
    “The shielding interferes with it, but it’s all Quintech,” she said. “It’s all compatible. It’s what they used to be known for, Auntie says.” Before I could protest, she jammed the cube into the slot.
    Francis William Brown appeared as a sharp, bright hologram above the center console. He stood there blinking at me for a long minute. His white hair had grown long and unkempt. It was hard to remember that the boy was only twelve. His set jaw and emotionless eyes made him look so much older. Francis was the kind of kid who always had a hard time with life but whom nobody ever felt sorry for. The boy wore the same thin white shirt he always wore and his eyes flickered with a purple light.
    “Sheriff,” he said by way of a greeting, “where are you?”
    “I’m where I need to be, son,” I said. “Where are you? Your brother’s looking for you last I heard.”
    “It’s just…” He licked his cracked lips. “I’d like you to see something.”
    There was a long silence. Seeing the boy always brought up painful memories, but it sounded like he was showing interest in something. That was a rarity for Francis and it would be terrible to fail to encourage that. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll stop by the ranch soon as I can.”
    His mouth opened as if to say something, but then he seemed to reconsider. A smile tweaked the corners of his mouth but didn’t touch his eyes. His image flickered and disappeared.
    Abi said, “What was that all about?” She popped the cube out of the console again and tossed it to me.
    “Francis Brown,” I said. “I killed the boy’s mama a few years back, and now he has an odd view of our relationship.”
    “Is he dangerous?”
    “Is anyone not?”
    She nodded. The ride passed in silence. Abi, after a while, turned to me and said, “You really live out in the wild?”
    “Something like.”
    “What’s it like out there?”
    “Hard.” The image on the monitor slid by like it was nothing but a model landscape in an old museum. “Every day’s a struggle. We scrape for food and water. We fend off predators, both human and otherwise. Worst is getting noticed. When you’re the littlest guy around it pays to keep quiet.”
    “But you like it.”
    “It’s better than the alternative.”
    Abi chewed on her lip. “Auntie Jo thinks you’re crazy for living out there.”
    “Fair enough. I think she’s crazy enough for living in that junkyard.”
    “She doesn’t leave it. Hasn’t since she took me in.” Abi’s eyes met mine and I could see a shadow of a painful past