Badlands Cursed

Chapter 1
Everything was fine until their deader broke.

Their stolen ‘thopter shook and lurched sideways. Jasmine braced herself in the cockpit’s seat and against her better judgment, looked over the side. The desert scrub raced underneath them, too fast to make out individual bushes, and getting closer.

Jasmine shouted over the whining twin turbines, but Helgo didn’t hear her. She reached out and tapped Helgo’s shoulder and pointed to the ground. He screamed something she couldn’t understand as he fought the ‘thopter’s control yoke with his right hand and rubbed the instrument panel with his left like a cowboy settling a spooked horse. Her stomach flipped as Helgo over-corrected first one way, then another. Finally, he brought them back under control, though the ground still grew closer with every passing second. He pushed the throttle forward and the ‘thopter surged higher.

Helgo let out a breath and shouted over his shoulder. “The power’s fading. I’m coaxing what’s left in our deader and trying to keep the flow even, but I don’t know how long it’ll last.”

Jasmine looked over the side at the ground pulling away and let out a breath. Then the right engine’s pitch changed and dissonance twisted her eardrums. The ‘thopter shuddered and the engine began spewing smoke. Helgo adjusted the throttle, then the left engine burst into flames.

“Fuck!” Helgo shouted, and Jasmine cinched up her seat’s harness. Helgo pulled the throttle back and the engines went silent, though still smoking.

“Can we make it down?”

“I’ll try feathering it, but this ground’s shit for landing,” Helgo muttered, then punched the fuselage. “Fucking Caliphate deaders!”

Jasmine put a hand on his shoulder. “Focus, Helgo. You can do it.” He nodded and leaned forward, concentrating.

Jasmine craned her neck and looked from side to side. The ground filled her vision with endless jagged rocks, low hills, treacherous bushes, and shards of tree trunks ready to smash, snag, or spear them. Then a path appeared, no more than a dry stream bed. Jasmine pointed over Helgo’s shoulder, and he nodded, wresting the control yoke.

“Almost there. Hang on,” Helgo said and made quick jerking movements on the yoke as the ‘thopter slewed from side to side. The stream bed disappeared, and a giant invisible hand threw her forward. In slow motion, the ‘thopter spun on its belly, throwing up a wave of fine white sand. The scent of burnt flesh filled her nostrils. The light went dim and metal screeched. She closed her eyes and waited for a sudden pain to pierce her. Then everything stopped.

She cautiously opened her eyes as the light grew brighter. Her heart pounded, and she suddenly couldn’t breathe fast enough. She mashed at the seat release and threw back the canopy. The ‘thopter was partially buried in the sand, but the engines had stopped smoking. She gathered herself to jump from her seat, then stopped as she remembered Helgo. The necrosonic engineer hung in his seat’s restrains, head slumped.

“Helgo!”Jasmine shouted. His head lolled, and he let out a moan.

Jasmine reached down and fought with the release, catching his weight before his head could smash into the instrument panel.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said. Jasmine got her arms under his and pulled him out, the little man surprisingly heavy. She dragged him from the cockpit, collapsing beside him and shivering as the adrenaline wore off. From the ‘thopter, the deader mumbled and knocked against its restraints.

“Sis-taaah … Sis-taaah.”

Helgo coughed and rolled to his side. “Never heard them talk before.”

Jasmine shrugged. “Fucking Caliphate deaders,” she said and turned back to the ‘thopter.

“It seems to know you.”

Jasmine sighed and looked back at Helgo’s dust-smeared face. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

She rummaged through the ‘thopter, searching for food, water, and weapons. Helgo braced himself against the fuselage and levered a panel open. Jasmine glanced over at him and the blackened, dessicated deader’s body writhing within the ‘thopter’s engine compartment. Helgo twisted and jerked at cables running into the deader’s torso and skull.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Jasmine said.

“What? It can’t feel anything.”

“You know that for sure? You hadn’t heard one talk before either.”

Helgo shrugged and tapped a tattoo on the deader’s forehead, then put his ear close to the deader’s chest. Jasmine shook her head and went back to scavenging items from the cockpit. She grabbed a cloth bundle speckled with blood and carried it into the sunlight before opening it. The bundle was made from a yellow party dress and held two guitar strings plus a plastic bag containing an off-white oily lump. Jasmine pocketed the strings, smoothed out the wrinkles in the dress, and left the baggie on a rock.

Somehow Cally had managed to keep her yellow party dress after the Caliph’s men captured and brought them both to the hareem. Cally, who fought off deader hordes in the Badlands for months and taught Jasmine how to survive, accepted her new role as concubine as easily as putting on a new pair of slippers. Yet she saved the dress, her last tie to Jasmine’s brother Ryan, and the guitar strings, their only memento from Bishop, who died getting them out of the Badlands. The oily ball in the plastic bag, well… Cally took to a concubine’s life a bit too readily and got herself addicted to the hookah. She had been the ultimate survivor right up until she found herself looking at the Blood Weeper’s sword poking out from her chest.

“Fuck a duck!” Helgo shouted. “There’s nothing left in him!”

Jasmine looked back at Helgo putting a hand to his back as he straightened. “Induced noise from somewhere burnt him out, either bad cable routing or a strong nearby power source? I don’t know. It’s no bueno. This deader’s out of juice.”

“Meaning what?”

He wiped his brow. “It’ll be a corpse soon.”

“I thought deaders couldn’t die.”

“Who told you that nonsense?” He waved his hand. “Deaders are just batteries with an appetite for flesh. Whoever installed this sad bastard in a ‘thopter engine ought to be shot.” Helgo shook his head. “Should have been matched pairs, or an over-sized single body at least.”

“Well if he’s a battery, can’t we recharge him?” Jasmine asked.

“With what? They only eat humans, and I ain’t volunteering.”

Jasmine walked over to the ‘thopter and peered into the engine compartment. The deader looked at her with filmy eyes. Black cracked lips and a swollen gray tongue hissed at her. Beneath the restraints and wires, the deader’s skin stretched thin over limbs little more than sticks with knobs for joints. Even the deaders in the Badlands looked better than this poor thing.

“Maybe I can help,” she said.

“I wouldn’t–” Helgo said but before he could say anything further, Jasmine had drawn a small scalpel from her belt. She winced against the quick bite and held her bleeding thumb over the deader’s mouth. Her blood spattered on its blackened teeth and the tongue swept it away. Then the deader jerked with a sudden breath and surged against its restraints. Electricity flared a split second before a sound like a shotgun blast sent her ears ringing.

Helgo’s arms hooked under her shoulders and pulled her from the compartment, sending them tumbling to the ground. Jasmine put an elbow into Helgo’s stomach and he let go with a grunt. Smoke began pouring from the hatch.

“Are you daft? Loco? What did you do to it?” Helgo said.

“I tried bringing it back to life,” she said.

“You can’t—” Then the deader screamed. Through the smoke, the deader’s blackened head and torso turned pink though the limbs remained leathery and dark. Brown eyes bored through her as the deader screamed again, then abruptly fell silent. The flesh withered and turned black before her eyes until it was just a deader again, or rather a mummified corpse, since its chest no longer rose or fell.

Good one, Jas.

“Dammit,” Jasmine said.

Helgo’s stare alternated between her bleeding thumb and the corpse. Jasmine stood, waiting for him to tear into her for fucking up or else run away screaming.

“Well, it wasn’t like it was going to be useful anyway. Lucky thing it didn’t catch on fire,” he finally said.

“It worked on trees and bushes in the Badlands,” Jasmine said. “It worked on you.”

Helgo rubbed his chest where Jasmine had healed him on the Caliph’s airship. He noticed her gaze and quickly went about waving away the residual smoke from the engine compartment before peering inside. “Deaders are too far gone to be changed back to anything human.”

“But I’ve…” The words died on her tongue as the memory came unbidden. Her blood-smeared thighs. The Caliph’s naked body. The drugs clearing from her mind as the cruel man standing over her morphed into a confused and shocked Ryan.

“What?” Helgo asked.

“Nothing. Forget it,” she said.

Helgo didn’t look like he believed her, but he only sighed and poked at the deader with a finger.

Jasmine pushed past him to gather up the things Cally had left behind. Cally dead. Bishop dead. Both killed trying to help her and nothing left to remember them by but two guitar strings and a party dress. Of all the useless things to have in the middle of a desert! Jasmine coiled the strings around her wrist and tied the loose ends together with a length of yellow ribbon from Cally’s dress. It wasn’t much as memorials went, but it was portable. She gave her wrist a shake and the bracelet settled comfortably against her skin. The sun hung low in the sky, turning the sand around them burnt orange while the sky darkened to cobalt.

She wiped at the sweat streaming down her head, surprised for a moment as fingertips touched stubble, a reminder of her attempted rebellion in the Caliph’s harem. She quickly re-wrapped her headscarf.

“Let’s go, Helgo.”

The necrosonic engineer squatted before a pile of wires and junked metal. He poked at some pieces before wiping his hands on his t-shirt and giving the pile a kick, sending a metal scrap tumbling across the sand.

“Might as well. Hopefully it ain’t much farther. Any more than a week and we’re shit outta luck.”

Jasmine rubbed at her bracelet. “One problem at a time, Helgo.”