Trigun Fan Fiction ❯ Midvalley's Serenade ❯ Dead Letters ( Chapter 25 )

Dead Letters

There was mail waiting for me at the post office, two packets from the academy. The first had Chapel the Evergreen's return address, with the information I'd requested about Nick's assignments. I scanned it quickly to find the list of dates and estimated times, but saw only a column of names and beside it another column that listed the requested action.

The one thing that caught my attention immediately was that the second column had only the word execution repeated over fifty times. I'd never seen a list before that held only executions. It was the only action requested. I scanned the first column and saw there were women's names on the list, as well, but where were the dates and locations? Without that how in hell was I supposed to get in touch with Nick? I flipped the page in exasperation and saw that on the back of the page the list continued, with the only action requested, execution. I reopened the envelope looking impatiently for a letter of explanation from Chapel the Evergreen and saw a half sheet of paper I'd missed the first time.

It read,

To Whom it May Concern:

Due to a security breach, we are unable to process your request for dates and locations at this time.

What the fuck was this all about? I felt a surge of anger and frustration. I had been hoping that I could compare the band's tour dates with the Nick's assignment list and arrange a rendezvous. Now that appeared to be out of the question.

I stood engrossed in thought, tapping the envelope nervously while I thought of the ramifications for Nick. Executions only and women on the list. I'd never had to kill a woman before. The image of finding my mother's murdered body flashed through my head and I thought of how difficult it would be for me to harden myself to perform a deed like that. I remembered Nick's mother had been murdered too.

Was I questioning Master Knives? Of course not. Still I felt queasy but reassured myself, "There must be a reason."

The thought of Master Knives reminded me of my second envelope. I walked out to the van, got in and opened the letter in the driver's seat where I would have more privacy to read. Inside the envelope was a second envelope, marked MTHEO. I opened it, pulled out the letter and read. It was very short.

Midvalley the Hornfreak,

By now, you will have met with McCoy. He will act as your mentor and train you for a new long-term special assignment. Trust him as you would trust Legato Bluesummers.

Knives Millions

The letter was written and signed in Master Knives' distinctive scrawl.

Well, that appeared to be that.

I was beside myself with frustration and cast about in my mind trying to find a way around the security lock-down at headquarters. After ten minutes of staring out the window, I came up with nothing, sighed and drove back to the studio to see if McCoy had any ideas. It was a long shot.

When I got back to the studio, the band was still on a break for lunch. I looked around for McCoy and saw him chatting with Dixie while Toby was off in a corner by himself, picking some bass runs on his instrument and the rest of the crew were clustered around Randy, Dave, and Jason in the sound booth. McCoy looked at me, and Dixie greeted me.

"That was a fast trip," she said. "Did you get a letter from Chapel?"

For a moment, her question threw me. I think it was because of her sitting with McCoy. Things were a little confused in my head because of the two letters I'd just read. I must have gotten an odd look on my face, until it dawned on me that she meant Nick, not Chapel the Evergreen.

"No," I said.

"Well, cheer up, Midvalley. I'm sure he'll write soon."

I guess my mood must have shown on my face. I was a little downcast at the thought of not seeing Nick for two months and truth to tell, I was beginning to be worried about him. The work load he was taking on was ten times heavier than average. On the plus side, the executions represented a substantial amount of cash. I could only think of a very few assignments that paid better. Executions were lucrative. Nick had maybe 75. The lowest rate was $$2500. So figuring conservatively, in two months time my friend would have earned close to 190,000 double dollars. That had to be enough to pay off the debt.

The thought of Nick with no money worries, well, it was one of the reasons I had favored breaking up the partnership temporarily. And then Legato had given me the impression that my getting together with Nick for consultations or other mission assistance would be no big deal. Now it appeared that things were not quite as they had been represented. Nick had taken on a dangerous work load, and my vacation was anything but. I was going to be back to working two jobs again and wondered how long Legato had known of the plans to groom me for a long-term assignment. Probably before I even returned to the academy.

From the look of Nick's list of executions, it was clear to me that Nick was probably being groomed for something too. If it didn't get him killed him first.

I had a lot on my mind and jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lenny's.

"Time for another round of recording," he said.

I was glad for the interruption. My thoughts had grown increasingly dark with worry. Just the routine of taking Silvia from her case and placing her strap around my neck was comforting. The thoughts I had were about things I could not control. All I needed to control for now was my lips and my breath on the reed, my fingers on the keys and letting the music flow through me, hollow as my horn itself.

The week was flying by. Dixie had an artist friend in town who drew a great picture of us when we were jamming at the May Queen club. The colors were brilliant. She captured the sweat on our foreheads, the smokiness of the room. McCoy in his pinstriped suit and me in my crushed velvet with the lights shining on our horns. We decided to use it for our mini-album cover. The title we finally picked was "Jamming at the May Queen--the Midvalley Seven with Kenny McCoy."

I wrote the liner notes myself. Lenny lent me the van again and I brought the picture and the notes in to be copied at a printer's office in town. Lips McCoy came with me on the trip. I had been hoping he would.

As the van rumbled down the road towards town, I said, "I got a letter from Master Knives. He told me you would be mentoring me and training me for a special assignment. What's the assignment?"

"I don't know yet," said Hot Lips. "There is a network in place to relay information to Master Knives, and I need to show you how the network works and introduce you to the key players and contacts who provide the information and help it flow smoothly."

"The Mouth of Gabriel?" I hazarded a guess.

"That's right."

"Have you ever seen a picture like the Gabriel picture before?"

I blushed.

"Why are you blushing, Hornfreak?"

"Well, some of the graffiti in the toilets at the clubs I've played…well, I've seen the mouth poised to blow something, but the mouthpiece is a cock, not a trumpet," I finished with a snigger.

McCoy smiled and said, "It may be hard to believe but you just started your first lesson. That isn't graffiti. It's information about the location of a meeting place Did you ever notice the placement of the picture in the stall?"

I shrugged my shoulders, "No."

"Facing the toilet is North, the door in back is South the right wall is east, the left wall is west. The chamber also serves as a clock, Straight ahead is 12 o'clock. Getting the picture?"

"It seems pretty straightforward. I've seen the messages then already, but didn't know they were messages, right?"

McCoy nodded and continued, "High on the stall means AM, low on the stall means PM. It's not fool-proof, but it's subtle and we have had great success with it. I'll tell you more about it later. Any more questions?"

"Did you hear anything about a security breach at headquarters?"

"I heard there was one, but that's all I heard."

I hesitated. I wanted to ask him if he could use his network to find Nick, but if there was a security breach, I sure as hell didn't want to put my partner in danger, so I thought it was better to avoid the subject altogether.

"I'd like to ask you a question, Midvalley."

"Shoot."

"Have you ever had those sick spells before?"

I took time to consider the question then answered, "I got sick the first time I used Silvia to kill a man."

"The one who murdered your mother?"

I nodded, because I was speechless. How could he know so much about me?

"Any other times you've felt weak or drained?"

"Last week. I haven't been sleeping much."

"Do you recall what you were doing before you got sick?"

I searched my mind, trying to recall the morning of the picnic, but I came up blank. It was almost as if there was a hole in my memory.

"I was drinking coffee, and I had a bad headache. Leonof was there and my friend, Chapel, and…"

"Legato Bluesummers, was he there as well?"

"He and Chapel helped me up. Why?"

"Could be nothing. You haven't been getting much sleep. Take better care of yourself, Midvalley, but if you have another of these episodes, I want you to let me know."

He wasn't asking me, he was telling me.

We got back to the studio and joined the band. We finished recording all the tracks we planned to use at 5 that evening. The playback sounded great. We were ready to start cranking out copies We popped the cork on a bottle of chilled champagne to celebrate and got happy toasting each other and the mini album.

"Don't get too complacent," Lenny reminded us. "We still have a couple of gigs to play at the May Queen and rehearsals again tonight.

Dave decided to stay back and continue making copies.

"Thanks, Dave," I said. "Tomorrow we'll pick up the cover art and notes from the printer, and with just a little assembly work, we should be able to sell our first copies tomorrow night at the club."

We picked up the finished print job the next morning and we all spent a few hours placing the cover art , liner notes and the disks in the mini album cases. It didn't take too long to produce a thousand of them.

The music we made that weekend showed us off at the top of our form. We sold over 100 albums the first night and 150 the next at $$15 each. $$3750 for two nights alone and that didn't count the money we got paid for playing the gig. The mini album was going to make us some money, which was a good thing. I wanted to recoup my investment in the equipment and fatten my bank balance again.

We were to start our road trip the following day. Although Dave was doing a great job copying the disks, he was invaluable as a roadie. He took over most of the driving duty and was a strong back to help with the chore of moving Dixie's piano into whatever club we were playing at. We needed to hire someone to keep producing the disks.

Sunny's wife, Kima, a short pretty woman with lustrous black hair and laughing brown eyes volunteered to do the job. She picked up the skills with minimal training. It was agreed that we would wire her when we were running out and tell her where to send the next shipment for us to pick-up.

We set out for a town called Felnarl. When we sold 300 copies of "Jamming at the May Queen," we knew we'd need more soon. We wired Kima and asked her to send 5000 disks for us to pick up in Augusta. It took us the rest of the week to get there and we ran out of disks two days before.

All I can remember about the gig in Augusta was that the music was great, the crowds were enthusiastic and Hot Lips introduced me to a lot of contacts and informants from the Mouth of Gabriel.

What I hated most about the trip was the dust from the road trip. Through the open windows of the van, dust seeped in. The slow persistent wind blew grit in my eyes, in my hair, even fine particles in my ears and nose. I crunched sand between my molars, blew sand from nostrils when I sneezed, poured sand from my shoes, found it in the pockets of my trousers and my jacket. The heat in the van would have been unbearable but for the open window.

We had to drink water frequently. Dixie, with motherly concern, reminded us if we forgot. Her past experience with a bad bout of dehydration on a road trip made her vigilant for us. The amount we sweated playing a gig, it's just as well she hounded us.

I had several more fainting spells, none quite as severe as the first two that I experienced and on Dixie's prompting, went to visit a doctor in New Junction. It cost me a $$1000 to find out that in the doctor's opinion there was nothing organically wrong with me.

I reached out for Nick through my empathic link from time to time, when the loneliness and temptation grew too much for me to bear, but what I felt through the link was almost always grim determination and cool detachment. I missed him, missed his warmth. I hadn't had to deal with the propositions of sax groupies when he was around. But with the success of the tour and mini album there seemed to be more of them than ever.

Most of the time I had no problem turning down their offers. In the heat of a concert or practicing alone on Silvia I could remember the tenderness of his lips and his passion for me and put those feelings into my playing. Perversely, though, the more emotion I put into my playing , the more admirers I got.

We spent a week in the city of September. Lenny had used his music contacts with the satellite broadcasting system to publicize our tour. We played to sold-out crowds in fairly large auditoriums in day-time concerts on the weekend. Each evening, we were booked to play at a different night club. Benny's Hot Spot, Eve's Pair-o-dice, Jazzoline Alley, and The Night Bird. We sold mini-albums hand over fist, especially after the satellite broadcasts started to cover the tour and aired some tracks from the album.

The trip to October took place in the midst of a sweltering heat wave. We had two flat tires on the way and I got so much sun helping with repairs, that I wound up with a pounding headache. Bad luck hounded us. An hour or so later, we encountered a sand storm that brought visibility to zero. The van finally limped into October City, six hours behind schedule but just in time for the gig, We went up on stage with the road dust still on us, but gave a great performance. The groupies afterward were insistent pestering me for autographs and personal contact, too personal.

I can't even recall the name of the club we were at, but I remember going outside into the alley to get away from the eager hands and faces, to find some air and privacy. I wanted to link with Nick. I felt at that point that any contact would be better than nothing, but maybe because of the sunburn and the headache that persisted, I couldn't find the slightest trace of him. I don't remember fainting, but I came to hours later lying in a bed in a hotel, wondering vaguely how I got there, and feeling as sick as I have ever been in my life. When I tried to get out of bed, my legs wouldn't hold me. Hot Lips brought me some medication and somehow nursed me through it so I was ready to play the next evening.

My bout of illness left me with a hollow feeling, but I was on top of the world while the music filled me when we played our gig that night. When the music ended and the fans closed in afterwards to claim their pound of flesh, I felt an emptiness that frightened me.

I didn't have any more to drink than usual, but I guess because I had it on an empty stomach, it hit me harder and I got a little drunk. Just before the bar closed, Dixie and Randy slipped off to their hotel room. Dave and Lenny, I couldn't help seeing had started some hot and heavy foreplay when the club was nearly empty. I saw them tongue-sucking in a dark alcove of the club and was turned on by the sight and more than a little jealous and lonely.

A bar boy who looked a little like Nick saw what I was staring at smiled at me. I don't know what came over me, but when he asked me to spend the night with him, I said yes.

His name was Alan. He took me upstairs to his room and kissed me sweetly. He had a nice mouth, with a lower lip that looked sad like Nick's. He was nervous, I think, and put a disk in his portable player to relax and get him in the mood before we went on to anything more strenuous. He went in to use the bathroom. I was waiting for him to come back when the music began to play. The track was "Serenade" from Jamming at the May Queen. As Dixie's voice sang the words of my love song to Nick, I closed my eyes on tears.

"What are you doing, Midvalley?" I whispered to myself.

I got up and left the room. Under the light of the moons, I walked back to my hotel still lonely for Nick.

I felt better when I woke up late next morning. I ran into Hot Lips over brunch in the hotel dining room and afterwards, we went to check the post and see if there was any information from headquarters.

Hot Lips picked up an assignment packet, and shared the contents with me.

"Master Knives wants us to locate a man. This fellow moves around a lot and it ought to be easy to find him--just follow the path of destruction, but there never seems to be any logic in the pattern. He's more erratic than a tomas in a patch of goonweed.

"Vash the Stampede?" I hazarded a guess.

"The one and only."

"I've seen the poster but never laid eyes on the man."

"No more have I, but if any one can find him, our intelligence network can."

There was a fairly large cell of Mouth of Gabriel agents working in October. Hot Lips introduced me to them as the new district supervisor. Given my cue, I acted the part and asked what progress they had made on locating Vash the Stampede. They told me he had been sighted in Inepril City but dropped out of sight. A caravan group near Demislade Hot Springs, near the town of Fondrique had reported him in their area a couple of weeks ago, but there was no other current news. I told the agent-in-charge to forward an encoded interim report to me and that I would pick it up at the November post office.

We played a few more gigs in October and headed for November late Sunday morning. McCoy and I met with the Mouth of Gabriel cell as soon as we could. We got a number of reports about the whereabouts of Vash the Stampede. The one that surprised me most was that he'd been seen in May City, of all places, in the company of two women. The coincidence astonished me. One of his traveling companions appeared to be a priest. The two men had taken part in a quick draw tournament. I immediately wondered if the priest was Nick and was more worried than I can say. I have personally never seen anyone with the equal of Nick's weapon skills, but Vash the Stampede had a bounty of $$60 billion on his head and caused more death and destruction than any man alive. The thought of Nick taking on a man like that curdled my blood. The only thing that eased my worries was that I hadn't seen the name of Vash the Stampede on my friend's list of executions.

I'd seen pictures of the devastation the outlaw caused to the lost city of July, the thousands and thousands of men women and children left without food or water with the nearest town over 100 iles away. So many died of dehydration on the walk through the desert. I had passed through the Valley of the Dead with its thousand crosses on a bus trip to Augusta. The sight of the many small crosses marking the graves of children, chilled me to the marrow. The few who made it out of the desert alive told tales of greed, violence and cannibalism. The strong survived at the expense of the weak. I heard that some stayed alive by drinking the blood of the dying. It would have been kinder to kill them all outright than to drive them to acts of such desperation. The man was a monster. I'd be doing the planet a favor by helping to track him down. A sense of righteous anger grew in me and I started to feel proud about my new job.

I'd had nightmares as a child after seeing the newspaper stories with the graphic pictures of the dried out corpses mummified by wind and sand. In one dream, my mother and I are alone in the desert. I get so weak that I can't walk. My mother picks me up and carries me until she can't anymore, then sets me down and tells me she'll be back when she finds water. All alone under the starry sky, I shiver from the cold. I would weep, but I have no tears left to shed.

The ghosts come then. The ghosts of dead children. They know my name. "Come and play, Midvalley. It's nice here."

They lie. I can see the bones beneath their skins. All they offer me is death and I want to live. I hear my mother's voice call, "Midvalley, I can't find you, come to me. I have water."

I follow the voice and it leads me closer and closer, but as I walk a feeling of dread overtakes me. Heavy footsteps follow me. I start to run. The sound of footsteps gets louder and louder until they match the tempo of my pounding heart. I don't want to look behind me but I do and see him tall as a giant with the pitiless eyes of a demon, the tails of his red coat whipping in the wind. His hands close around my neck and I wake up screaming.

The memory of the nightmare put me in a melancholy mood for the rest of the day. I've come to think over the years that the thing that bothered me most about the dream was that I never did find my mother.

My only relief was in the music I played that night. For the space of the evening, I felt my burdens lift and went to bed with a sense of peace.

But that night I dreamed.

In the Valley of the Dead I walk. I can see no end to the crosses that extend to the horizon. The sun is at the zenith, burning my pale skin, sucking the moisture from my body. Slower and slower I walk. With every step, I feel another bit of strength leave me until finally my walk is a shuffle. Then in a slow slide that seems to last forever, I fall onto the sand and into oblivion. I wake to see the moons and stars above me and I hear the whispers of the night wind.

"I don't want to die," I whisper back, but when my eyes close I hear them coming, the drinkers of blood. Their voices weigh my fate.

"Here he is, so close to death. It would be a mercy to finish him off, don't you think? I am thirsty. Give me a drink," says a petulant voice.

I feel tender lips on my neck and nearly swoon from the sensation.

"Nick," I say.

"Yes, that's where you were nicked," says a voice like honey. A ring of fire blooms around the scar that lines my throat and I feel warm fluid dripping. A mouth closes on my neck and begins to drink. My heart beats in fear and I struggle

"It's only a little blood, Midvalley," the voice reassures me. I grow quiet as the lips suck and the tongue laps and when it stops, I look up and see two lovers kissing. One breaks the kiss and I see his face, like silver in the moonlight, my blood on his smiling lips. It is the face of Vash the Stampede.