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He knew when the stranger arrived. Perhaps the others did not, for he did not hear the muted murmurs of dissent, but perhaps the stranger was simply good at appearing without being seen. He heard the strike of hammer against spike, one more than usual—the latter, then, if the others were so quick to accept the stranger into their fold.
He heard the soft fall of hooves on the endless dust of the desert and he knew it was time. The two gang bosses were talking, inconsequential things. Soon, the stranger would reveal his true face and ask for guidance. He was looking for someone. A girl, who he had been separated from recently enough that the sting of losing her still peaked fresh, but long enough that his memories of her hung glittering, scattered, in the stretching plains between them. Long enough for her memories of him to weather and fossilize, half-sunk into the soil of her mind. He would not tell the stranger this. It was not his place. His place was to provide guidance in the stranger’s journey, to keep the stranger breathing as long as he was alive. As for after his death, he could not say. He could not see the stranger’s end as he could so many others—a man out of bounds, he will tell him soon. All this he had known as long as he could remember. He would guide the man out of bounds until he could not anymore, until he felt the touch of a knife through the smooth bones of his ribs and the soft meat of his stomach and it would be time for the man out of bounds to run and search in solitude again. But that would not be for a while yet.
He listened, just on time, as he knew he would be, when the man out of bounds called out to the gang boss—Ellis, he heard, though the name was already slipping from his mind—and the dark stain of fear seeped into the ground. He felt it, wet and warm and metallic. It was not something he was unfamiliar with, not with the heavy aura of it clinging to the metal tracks torn into the land, but now from the gang boss it came pure, undiluted, altogether different from the exhaustion-tinged fear the others lived in. Repetition wore all things out, even as the memory of it became ingrained into the body. It was the memory that made it staler each time.
But in the gang boss, fear was fresh, raw without the filter of time. He could not see it, and he could not hear the shots drowned out in the ringing of hammers, but he knew all the same when the man out of bounds unholstered his gun and fired a single deadly bullet into the back of the gang boss’ throat.
Now it was blood instead of fear that colored the ground, fear instead of breath filling the throats of the men around him. He thought of the gang boss’ corpse, soon to be dragged away. It would be found by a junior officer who would howl and fall to his knees as if he were the one with lead wedged between the plates of his spine. It would be buried in a marked grave, a privilege borne to very few. Rot had already clung to its bones when it was inhabited but now it would consume flesh, the soft innards of the body, stringy muscle clinging to bones. It would calcify and sink into the crevices of the earth and when the land flooded over again it would splinter into a thousand shards of white stone and settle on the lakefloor as ancient dust.
He was not happy about this, nor sad, nor angry as some of the men around him were. The gang boss’ death had been inevitable. He had known this for as long as he’d known of man out of bounds’ arrival. He had waited for what, to him, was a lifetime. And here he was.
“Where’s the prophet?” the man out of bounds asked. The others were still. “Prophet, it’s me.”
The prophet smiled and made his way out of the crowd. “My child,” he said, the words as familiar in his mouth as they always were, would be. “You’ve come at last.”
“Bring him here,” the man out of bounds said. Silence cloaked the group. They were afraid, the prophet knew, of this strange man, similar to them and yet not, who had killed someone as easy as breathing. The prophet was not afraid. He was a guide, and he would not meet his end until the journey required it.
“Bring him here,” the man out of bounds repeated. The prophet felt fear fold thickly around the others and he understood that the man out of bounds had drawn his gun. Hands, rough with labor but soft with youth, grasped his elbow and though he did not need the help he let the young man they belonged to usher him forward. When they drew close he held his hand out and the man out of bounds took it in a warm, worn grip and said “Prophet, do you remember me?”
“No,” the prophet replied, for he did not. His only memories were of things yet to pass and things physical enough that he could feel the marks they scoured into the world. The faces of men were too ephemeral to grasp. “But I know why you’ve come. I am to guide you, yes?”
“Will you go?” The man out of bounds asked as if there was a choice. Perhaps there was. Perhaps the prophet had already made his choice when he first knew of the man of bounds’ arrival and the future had simply solidified to reflect that.
“I will,” the prophet said. The choice he may or may not have made did not matter. He was a guide, and the man out of bounds was on a journey.