Peace in an Age of Metal and Men by Anthony Eichenlaub Page A

metal hand into the control panel, launched straight into the air, and blasted off into the night.
    Without her help, the job got a lot harder. There wasn’t time to visit Ben Brown at his ranch. A pang of guilt hit me at the thought of making him wait, but it was short lived. Ben could handle another day’s delay.
    That wasn’t all of it, though. If I was being truthful with myself, I’d admit that I didn’t want to have anything to do with Ben Brown or his brother Francis. There was nothing but pain there for me. My influence on their lives had brought nothing but pain. Sure, the situation in Swallow Hill was more urgent than a visit to the Brown ranch, but I was afraid. I was afraid of how he’d look at me and the feelings he’d dredge up.
    No, Ben could wait.
    It was time to seek help from a less reputable source.

Chapter 12
    With gritted teeth, I fought to ignore the pain all over my body, from the metallic aching rhythm of my artificial arm to the more organic discomfort in my ribs. The pain in my ribs had subsided some, but whatever Josephine had done hadn’t truly healed the wound. Pressing at it with my fingers, I was able to locate an area of numbness, surrounded by the pulsing ache and deep bruising.
    If there’s something that gets a man past pain, it’s anger.
    I held onto my anger, letting it simmer my blood. Outrage still bubbled: the slow, justified anger of the righteous man. Anger at the world was set deep inside my bones. It had settled down there since the war twenty-some years earlier. There is a certain kind of rage a man feels when he sees a loss of control coming. It was the city folk. It had to be. Who else would want to control the masses so badly? There must have been some new mind-altering tech and Swallow Hill was the trial. Austin lived in fear of an uprising, so experimenting with something that would subdue the population made sense in a twisted way. Maybe it was the folks at Goodwin Dairy, but there were half a dozen other giant faceless corporations it could be.
    There, on a ridge overlooking a ghost town, I looked down on the stronghold of a group that hated me just about as much as I hated them. Cinco Armas wasn’t an ally by any stretch. Might be they wouldn’t shoot me on sight, but what could I really hope to accomplish by talking to them.
    Anger at Zane was rolling around in my gut too. He’d shown me that murder. Maybe his intentions were benign, but the more I thought of that kid hanging on the hook, the more I thought Zane must be manipulating me. Maybe he was doing it because it was the only way to get the right thing done. Somehow I doubted that. Either way, he was playing me. He’d made me leave my people. The Hopi were my whole existence for four years. I was comfortable there.
    The knuckles of my fist cracked.
    One good sucker punch hardly counted as violence. It’d feel good. All of that aggression and fierce rage that boiled in my blood demanded satisfaction. It demanded that I pound that city boy in the jaw when he showed up.
    My shoulders slumped. No, I wouldn’t do it. With incredible effort, I took my rage and swallowed it. It burned in my belly, refusing to be digested, but it was under control. A few breaths of cool night air settled me, and I was able to manage a tip of my hat as Zane flew over in his sleek, shining car.
    He parked a short distance away, near where I’d left my skidder. In the moonlight, I could see him with perfect clarity. He was wearing a crisp, clean suit and his hair was swept to one side. In his hand was a walking stick, flashes of light playing off of its jeweled surface as he strolled up the slope to where I stood on the ridge. When I saw him, all of that rage in my belly melted, and I relaxed.
    He hit me hard with a sucker punch to the jaw.
    “Tucker Hale?” he said as I tumbled to the ground. “Tucker fucking Hale?”
    The stars of the spectacular Texan sky spun helplessly above me. My jaw stung and I flexed it to try to