Chapter 5:

Red Wing

The Mark of Cain


She loved a warrior bold,

this shy little maid of old,

But brave and gay, he rode one day

to battle far away.

Grant Herrera sang quietly to himself as the first morning glow appeared over the rocky hills west of Austin, Texas. The airplane mechanic from a family of horse ranchers sat down on a ridge, his silhouette concealed by a row of juniper trees behind him, and pulled a pair of binoculars from his leaf-print camo backpack. It took a moment longer for the morning light to permeate the creekbed below him, but once he could see into the brush, he scanned up and down slowly, looking for any movement or for a patch of brown in a very particular shape.

Inside of fifteen minutes, he saw one. Mule deer, big five pointer buck, a little to his left on the other side of the creek. Moving slowly now, he slid a laser rangefinder from a side pocket of his pack, and tagged a tall boulder right behind it. Hundred and eighteen yards. He smiled, squeezed his legs tight around his backpack, and rested his rifle across the top of it. It was a small, handy thing, a bolt action in a light brown polymer stock, sixteen-inch barrel, x3-9 magnification scope, chambered for the supremely accurate 6.5mm Grendel cartridge. As the buck walked down closer to the creek, Grant planted his crosshairs near the center-front of its chest, and squeezed the trigger. The Grendel round did not have a particularly harsh recoil, but he still had to search through his scope again after the shot to find the deer, where it had dropped like a sack of potatoes.

Grant pumped his fist in the air, then rose, gathered up his backpack, and pulled out his phone. He shot his father a text simply reading “got one”, then started climbing down the ridge. As he eased himself into a slide down a rock on his backside, he felt his belt catch, then something snapped loose. While the rifle was his hunting weapon, he carried a pistol for protection against predators and the like, and now that gun was sliding past him down the rock face. No problem, he’d scoop it back up below. Except he remembered reading an article a buddy had sent him about that model of pistol. He had bought it about the same time the United States military started purchasing it en masse, but lately they– along with numerous police agencies and civilians like him who had copied them– were discovering the thing might not be as drop-safe as one would expect of an issued weapon. If it hit a hard surface at the right angle, it would sometimes–

He saw a flash, but never heard a bang. A 9mm Parabellum bullet traveled faster than sound.

His feet landed, not on a creek bank of tumbled boulders, but on dry grass and loose dirt. The dawn light now cast over what looked almost like the Texas Panhandle: flat, brown, barren grassland with all of the least appealing qualities of both desert and prairie. Well, after seeing the Panhandle for the first time, he had decided that was as good a reference as any for what Purgatory might look like.

He turned to look around. If the sun still rose in the east and set in the west here, then there was a massive moon or planet hanging in the southern sky, with a surface like a cross between Jupiter and Uranus. If this was Purgatory, that was a strange aesthetic touch to give a land of waiting and penance between Earth and the gates of Heaven, but there was an otherworldly regality to the sphere that hung in the sky, so maybe it was to remind people here that purgation was not eternal. Still, if that’s where Grant was, he regretted not praying more rosaries with his abuelita. And getting into as many bar fights as he had.

The treacherous pistol that sent him here hadn't seemed to follow him, and his phone seemed to have gotten lost in that slide as well, but he still had a rifle with nine rounds in it, and a backpack with binoculars, firestarters, a rangefinder, a bit of food and water, a coil of nylon rope, and a couple different styles of knives for field-dressing a deer. Again, odd but not inconceivable, if this was in fact Purgatory.

As he dug through his backpack to check what else he had stuffed in there, he noticed a symbol on the back of his hand in a dark, nearly black shade of brown. His mix of mestizo and gringo heritage meant his skin could vary from ghostly pale to fairly dark, depending on how much sun he'd been getting lately, but the impression he got looking at it was that the skin had been somehow made to tan well beyond its natural limit. It was a single symbol, complex, made of several long, overlapping wedge-shapes.

He noted he also had a simple charcoal water filter; a basic first aid kit with gauze, butterfly bandages, a tourniquet, those sorts of effects; a compass, which confirmed the great turquoise sphere was in the south of the sky; a topographical map of the Texas Hill Country area; a plastic whistle; a case of nicotine pouches, which he reckoned he would need to ration carefully here if he wanted to keep the withdrawal to a minimum; and a spare pair of socks. The food was all jerky, trail mix, and other snacks that wouldn't keep him sated later than mid-afternoon, and he would certainly like to find more water before sundown, with the warm, dry air in this grassland.

He fished out his binoculars, and scanned the horizon in all directions. Way off to his northwest, there was a low string of mountains, and due south was a dust cloud that spoke to a herd of grazing animals. Or maybe people on horseback. In either case, nine 6.5mm rounds would probably be enough to deal with whatever happened next. Grant rose, slung his pack and rifle across his back, and set off south, his song resuming to rise to a new sky.

“Now the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing,

the breezes sighing, the nightbirds crying,

For afar ‘neath his star her brave is sleeping,

while Red Wing's weeping her heart away.”

Samogitius
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