The Unknown - Part 1a

The Unknown - Part 1a

I liked this part of the world even though it was as alien as the moon compared to where I had started from. You could see for a hundred miles in any direction and the air had a clarity that still amazed me. Somewhere due west of me a patch of clouds were raining on some piece of lucky dirt. Over me it was blue sky and cloudless and had been for days.

I needed to move but I was reluctant to. More and more I just didn't give a shit. I probably should be trying to analyze why and fix it. Not giving a shit was no way to go through life in the best of times and today was years down the road from those times. Once in awhile I had thought it would turn around, life would be, maybe not better for me, but better for the world around me. People had tried, hell, I had fought with them more than a few times for it, but in the end we always lost. The wheel had turned and what was once was never going to be again.

I had made a career on not caring and taking insane risks for the sheer joy of it. I had never put much of a value on anyone's life except for mine and the few people I cared about. Now, now even that was slipping away and had been for awhile. I was losing it and I didn't care. I had fought it for a long time but I was tired. Really tired. Part of me screamed "You're losing your edge!" My response? A mental shrug.

I kept going through the motions. I had to eat. I still liked to get laid once in awhile. Hell, I needed to reequip, my shit was getting ragged from the boots up. Somewhere ahead of me was supposed to be a road stop and eventually, maybe in a week, I would be in Flagstaff where the call had gone out that there was a need for people like me. Someone needed killers to put out or start fires in yet another pointless border skirmish between yet another set of wannabee warlords.

My recruiter in Utah had wanted to give me the details about how the side that was going to hire me was the righteous one. I laughed in her face and told her "Don't worry about it. I don't." She had recoiled from like I had struck her. Her partner, he just looked at me and smiled. He knew. Their crusade, her cause, well, it was just another job in a long string of them for people like me. She would learn, I didn't want her too, but she would, of that I had no doubt, if she lived long enough.