The Nothing’s Country

by Angus Burge

The dust always filled the air round here. Nothin’ of anyone had been anywhere, ‘cept a few scum that filled the timeless continuation of dry sand. Which, speaking of, you needed some real sand to make it round here. Not a lot of boot prints around ‘cept mine, in a way it was peaceful, but at the same time, eerily ominous. A constant horse-trottin' gust would flow evenly between roughly five, or should I say five and a half, silent towns. It’s quite tough to be in my neck of the woods, though actually, I think I'd prefer to live in the woods. The circle of ghost towns grows restless with the more living beings that decide to step in. Bandits, coyotes, disease-infested rats, sandstorms, these parts are for the abandoned and worthless trash that roamed here. Outsiders call this place the “Silent City”, or maybe even the “Drop Lands”. But only to those of whom that reside here will understand the reality and the name that drags itself across the dry, pitiless dirt. The rough and jagged cracks of the coarse roads whisper the name; The Nothing’s Country. The good ol’ land of America, land of the free. But what folks don’t understand and will never even compare to fathom in their spoiled minds is what it really means to be free, with no bindings, no home. “Sure, skip town if you’re up for it! just don’t you dare take a step towards The Nothing’s Country.” is what I'd imagine someone would say if they knew of the dangers. Plenty of “Brave” folks like to venture out in search of the Silent City. It would be nowhere on the map, a real grey area. Inexplicably vague. Can’t remember family, can’t remember comfort, all that I got is myself. Or at least what I think I'm supposed to be. I just hop from ghost town to ghost town until I round the circle of villages and then come to the center where the grand cathedral is to sleep. I call it the loop.

 I’d often rummage establishments to try and get some supplies. It’d be as if the towns had a soul of their own, hospitality would be provided regardless of the quality. It wouldn’t be ace-high, but you can’t complain when there’s nothing around. A roof to stay under for a day or two, some canned food, etcetera.  The stairs let out acheful groans from the rotten wood, creaking of lumber was a familiar sound to say the least. For a place that used to be full of people, I never could have expected it to be so deafeningly quiet. Bars like these are usually the quietest due to the absence of sound. You can fill your glass with whiskey and have a drink, but if your glass is kept empty, all you have is dry lips and a quiddity for a full glass. Turning back towards the swinging doors I noticed a poster lying hung like a noose above the trim. The figure dropped their gaze over me and an unbearable weight crimp onto my shoulders. Every exhalation of air felt more and more leaden. The Nothing’s Country has been deserted for over one hundred years-- wanted posters never showed up round here. I interrupted the silence with a cacophony of a screeching chair which I pulled to the front of the room and climbed to grab the poster. I laid it down and when I told you the next couple of words made my hair stand harrowingly, I mean it with every fiber in my scum of the earth soul.

              “THE PALE HORSEMAN. “
              How my heart dropped with the sound of that name ringing from ear to ear repeatedly and how much agony ensued as my eyes delved into the next sentences.

“Effortlessly evil, twisted, cruel, and dark. The grasp of the pale horseman holds hard, his bite sinks into you like an anvil to water. Brutally digging into your mind like a scalpel to flesh. Relentlessly and everlastingly following. Exceeding a pace of forward motion, The Pale Horseman stops at nothing.”

I stopped to have a double take and before my eyes met back to the top of the paper, I could feel the sweat glazing my flesh and sticking to my dirt infested skin while it quickly dried. A faceless figure somehow stared directly down my iris into the beating drum of my heart. A silhouette of what seemed to be a black, flat brim cowboy hat lazily drooped over his blacked-out face. My mind ran rampant with thoughts and guessings to his description. “The Pale Horseman”, a pitch white face possibly, with what I had imagined to be a lopsided nose, a girthy grin of purely yellow teeth. And his most telling feature, his unsymmetrical face that I could clearly see from the sharpness of his sickening jawbone. My pure thought of it all had turned me into a grueling yellowbelly. This wasn’t no wanted poster, this— was a warning. I immediately grabbed the paper and crumpled it up to dismiss this ever happening. I rushed out of the saloon and the swingin’ doors yelled behind me. As much as I wanted to exile The Pale Horseman from my mind, I couldn’t. My hands felt clammy, and the clouds became nauseous with a greyed-out tone of white, indicating that something was on its way. Generally, when it starts to get darker like this, I can make a pretty educated guess that the daily sandstorm was in the works. When the surrounding landscape of gravel, sand, and every other rough surface that occurs in nature is completely clear of buildings and tall structures, the upper atmosphere gets visibly angered. The dark undertone that bled into the sky opened the opportunity for my mind to take over. While the storm begins to brew, I’d begin on my way back to the cathedral in the center of the country. I was about two more towns away. I’d have to cross St. Richmond, a small town that was mostly occupied by Christian gold miners that ran out of gold to mine. And then the second town, Smithswell, which was a small agricultural society that focused on growing potatoes; however, the soil became too dry, and they abandoned it to move elsewhere. How humorous it is for those people to instantly get up and move away as soon as their needs were no longer met. I’d understand, though, hating this god forsaken place is my one and only hobby. I continued a long path towards St. Richmond that stretched for about an hour and a half. I couldn’t help letting my mind slip. His name wouldn’t leave my head. I couldn’t get the idea or thought of being pursued out of the range of possibility. “The Pale Horseman,” I’d think to myself as I mindlessly continued foot by foot and inch by inch toward my next goal which is the same amount of suffering and scourge of the earth sob story as the last town.

Why not leave and congregate in a different, and more occupied town? A question I believe I ask myself every single day. Driving an impossible goal into my head while I bide my time in an insufferable reality that is which my living damnation. You see, I can’t leave — well, at least I don’t think I can. It would be far too dangerous to even try. It is much better to make the loop and survive on vermin game and canned garbage than to make a futile effort and perish of dehydration and hallucination. But with how my steps became more and more delayed, I understood that I had been walking blankly and spacing my thoughts out for at least 30 minutes. It’s an incredibly treacherous process from town to town, extended for at least 4.3 miles. I looked up at the sky and the sun beamed down upon me like the might of God to a man who is full of sin. My lips cracked, my feet in holy pain. This all was a usual experience, but what heightened the effects were that god forsaken name. “Whack! Whack! Whack!”, I’d start banging my hand against my head the more that my soul dragged behind me and my brain stayed in the driver seat. “Where is he?”, I’d ask myself, panicked. I’d begin to bite on my nails and use the nail shavings as toothpicks to my unsterile teeth while I looked around with an owl-like gaze to the surrounding desert hills, cacti, and shrubs that filled the banished land plots. And if it were up to me, I would put my right hand on the book and tell you; a man would look out to me, and the voice in my head filled me with a scream of bloody murder that I had no energy to express. The voice in my head was working against me clearly, and it would tell me evil things. “He sees you.”. My eyes snapped back and forth. I could feel him feeling me with his eyes, I promise you that I see him behind the shrubs. I see him between the hills that break in the sand. I felt his presence behind the cacti. I could feel his breath in sync with mine. Every footstep that I dug deeply into the hot sand made a crunch that I felt right behind me, and at any moment he could grab my back and take me. He’d take me away. Would it be better than this living hell? Would the dawn that The Pale Horseman come provide as a micro-rapture or a limbo. What would a man of his stature do to pathetic rat like me? How far could my blood spray when he pumps a .44 round in between my two eyebrows? Or maybe my neck. Maybe he’d shoot me right in the jugular. And all my red fluids would pour out as I gurgled and coughed. I peered around me, I saw the mirage of him in the distance, high on his horse, I’d rub my eyes shut and peel my eyelids off of my parched eyeballs. I’d lift the weighted lids of mine and he’d surely be gone. ‘Cept remnants of him would linger still. Once again, behind a new shrub, between the passing hills, behind a brand-new cactus. I’d curse him because clearly— that damned son of a gun was following me. I swore by my heart that he was. I couldn’t stop the constant overflow of thoughts. It was getting to be too much. But a doomed man like me can only do one thing in this scenario and that thing is to continue. I could finally see the structure-rich horizon of the town that projected its abandonment the second you laid your eyes on the thing. Coming into town I would lie on the side of an inn. The sky at this point had a real grim look to it. And to me, the universe was speaking. The gust had grabbed me by the ear and told me to keep moving. The sun had been completely blocked out by the clouds at this point. Nothing but a darkened shade would lay flat across the sky, not much variation in the texture of clouds. A sandstorm was brewing further away. It felt as if it was going to rain. The air was timid. Shy of it’s humble humidity. The beautiful landscape around me gave me a picture to tell and something that is worth more than all of the money a man can have. But I have nothing. A man without money is the freest man there is. And with freedom comes impending and relentless doom. I diverted my attention to the path I had just come from. It was a late evening, and I knew I was beyond the point of exhaustion. I thought I was lying to myself, but surely, there he was. Riding into town on his horse. A slow horse, a strong horse that clearly has muscle on its bones that decided to wade slowly. And I had guessed it. Surely there he was with his yellow smile. There he was with his lopsided nose that bulged out. There he was with his crooked features and unsymmetrical face. I was too tired to move. Am I dreaming? This must be a hallucination. The man God has brought me to fear the most gallops slowly towards me. I must be seeing things! But I was not. By the will of God, The Pale Horsemen was here for me, for there was no one else he could be here for besides the pests that crawled St. Richmond. He stopped about 20 feet from me, got off of his horse, and his spurs jingled as he met the ground. He began walking towards me. My hands were sweating, I was numb with anticipated fear. He unhinged his crooked jaw and a visibly warm breath relinquished from his teeth. He spoke from the caverns of his stomach. “You are unworthy.” I breathed out as his last word escaped his oral cavity. “You are unworthy of The Nothing’s Country. For you look around you and take all of your surroundings for granted.” He then cleared his throat and somehow spoke from deeper within him whilst the air became cold. “I hate you. You don’t understand the gift that life has given you. You are bindless, you are genuinely free, and for what? Just for you to be unappreciative of what has been presented before you. What people yearn for and need you sit on this dirt that you don’t deserve and you call it garbage. You call the life that roams here garbage. You are the garbage. You are the good for nothing scum of the earth that you call yourself, and you know that.” My heart fell over. My blood was boiling with rage. “You have no idea how hard it is to live here! Who are you to tell me about my business in the Nothing's Country? I suffer day in and day out and your audacity speaks for you when you tell me that I am scum?”. It was the only time I remember I have ever spoken to anyone in my entire life. He arched down and towered upon me as his scowl became more and more tight and cruel. He grabbed me by my filth and pulled me up to the wall. I was too tired to do anything. He dragged out a revolver from his holster. The silver on his Colt Walker was as pale as he was. The Walker had artful engravings on the hammer of itself all the way up to the end of the barrel. There was etched out writing on the barrel. “End Of The Line” Is what it had read. My body was overwhelmed with a sense of nothingness as I stood frozen against the wall. He popped the chamber out and I was sure of what I saw; there was one single bullet. He flicked the chamber back in and spun it along with the next few words he spoke. “You are the pest, you are the creature, you are the filth, you are what makes The Nothing’s Country. You are, in the grand scheme of things, nothing. And you never will be anything. Your appreciation of the country has been far too scarce.”. Like the hammer on his revolver, his words struck me with a torturous weight. “Smack!”. He struck me with the grip of his revolver, and the frame of his hand. I fell to the sand and my knees were the only thing that held me. He pulled back the hammer, waved his gun up to my head. And at that very moment, I knew, I was face to face with death, the apocalypse, and the end of my time. Once his finger entered the trigger guard and I saw the pressure of his hand begin to tense up, I could already see myself wandering the 9 layers of Dante’s Inferno. His last words were my last words. “I’m not sorry.”. The hammer struck down and the Colt Walker had fired a bullet between my two brows, as I thought it would. 2 feet. 2 feet was the answer to my own question. 2 feet was how far my blood splayed across the sand-- of The Nothing’s Country.

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Edited by Mara Bech, Caty Childress, and Laura Sheikh