Devil at Saint's Rock
(short fic primer - ambiguous canon)
The Devil died in Tucker’s Gorge. That's what the townspeople say at least. See, Tucker's Gorge was built on blood; that of the natives, that of the first settlers who died of diseases still unknown, and that of each other from infighting when the food didn't grow. Tucker's Gorge has a history of dead men – its very name comes from astronaut Otis Tucker who died of solar radiation hours after discovering a hospitable section of the planet that would become their home. They say that it's bad luck to name a town after a dead man, and nowhere is that truer than Tucker's Gorge where we found ourselves today.
They say the Devil died when the peace came; when there was no one left to fight over their chunk of the rock. But when an oil salesman rolled into town in the dead of night with a wicked grin and piercing eyes, chaos once again reigned in the poor souls of Tucker's Gorge. Fiends waited by open windows in the night to prey on sleeping victims, and the dead climbed out of their shallow graves to beat down doors and bring all the rage from hell. The townspeople, no strangers to violence and tragedy that they were, picked up their pitchforks and fixed to kill the Devil once again.
The townspeople did not succeed, of course. Guns and anger aren’t your typical weapons of choice against that which hunts in the night and doesn’t bleed. What you really need, something the people of Tucker’s Gorge sorely lacked, was heart. The only one of them who possessed that in abundance was little Minnie Fowler. Fowler Farm had once been run by her father, Old Fowler, but he died. He died twice, in fact. Once of liver failure, an ailment thought left behind on the Old World, and a second time when little Minnie Fowler split the head of his reanimated corpse open with the firewood axe. An axe could only do her so good, however. Her pops was dead twice over but the demon who raised him wasn’t. She escaped with only a wounded pride and a grazed leg, but that was all it took. Minnie Fowler did not find help in town, as by the time she got there from the old farmhouse, “town” had fallen to ruin. The sheriff was strung up, the farmer butchered and the butcher farmed. The only one left to help her was the Deputy.
Deputy James was not an ordinary boy. Some many years ago before the satellites had reached their proper positions, James had been a messenger between colonies. James, being a robot of albeit slapdash design, was the best at navigating the boiling days and freezing nights without food or resources. When messaging became instant and rovers became the common transport, James became the town’s Deputy. Rules came easy to his processors, but leading did not. James had been ignored for four generations, and hardly any remembered the old tin boy was a deputy at all. All that to say James’ job did not change much after the apocalypse. The living didn’t listen to him and the dead were hardly any better. The fiends didn’t kill him, that much he was thankful for, but neither did they follow the rules, something that drove him cross. So when the chance came for him to escape with Minnie Fowler to get help from the next colony over, he took up his old messenger bag and deputy badge with pride.
Clementine was their ride out. A rusty two-legged walker they used to water the fields. She was slow, but her doors locked and she kept them higher than the dead could reach. In the day, her visor kept them safe from the sun and her size was a shelter when Minnie made camp and slept. At night, Clementine walked. She kept walking across hills and valleys, rocks and slopes. That was, until the Glow. A wicked thing from beyond the horizon, a green malicious force behind the mountains that got closer with each passing day.
Hiding from the glow one night, Deputy James discovered a wreckage. The burnt-out remains of an ancient spacecraft with a survivor sitting inside. Only, this wasn’t just any survivor. Warped skin fused with the white garments of a spacesuit. Thick meaty fingers fused together as the boiling meat and melting composites congealed into clumps of hand. The mask remained intact; the transparent aluminium plate, near indestructible, kept the head safe enough. This, as the definitely dead man introduced himself, was Otis Tucker. Minnie shot the man several times to make doubly sure he was in fact a walking talking corpse.
Otis was not hostile as the rest of the dead were. Rather, he was incapable of their trademark ravenous hunger as his mask blocked his mouth from the world. It bore scratched from where he had bashed himself with rocks to open it, but it was unsuccessful. While he couldn’t do much as a composite meat-suit ex-astronaut, his knowledge of the planet’s surface from above was perfect, so along he came. Otis had nothing to gain from the expedition save for the sole fact that he was bored, and an adventure beat dying again.
And that’s where we find our troupe with heart: a robot, a corpse, a dying woman, and a mech off to kill the Devil.
