[M] Reach for the Skies [IC]

[The Lifted Lorax]

It was always a thrill. Liz closed her eyes against the wind as she rode Bo at a gallop across the grassy foothills. Behind the bandana that covered her mouth she grinned and began to laugh. It started as just a chuckle and grew into an all-out belly laugh as the large black stallion carried her over grass and dust. This was freedom.

Bang!

"Fuck!"

Well, sometimes freedom was pain. Lead burned in her shoulder, still hot from the barrel, as Liz turned and shot over her shoulder at the law men in closer pursuit than she cared for. Of course, Liz reasoned, they probably hadn't cared for her holding up their only bank for miles, either. But she'd take her due from Johnny Law, no more no less. Wasn't her fault if the common folk suffered for the law's greed; it was the law's. What she took was only a system of balances, wasn't it?

When Liz shot over her shoulder again, she heard one of the sheriff's deputies yelp in pain. Glancing back she saw she hadn't killed him, which was good. She didn't like killing. Still he was bleeding a fair bit...but so was she. The system of balances had been restored...Then promptly knocked off-kilter again as a bullet grazed her thigh. She swore loudly, clutching at the rip in her jeans as blood began to trickle. It wasn't enough to incapacitate her, but it would've slowed her considerably on foot.

They'd been going at this for nearly half an hour, Liz and the law men. They were more persistent than most others she met; a quality she admired. When they began to slow, therefore, she frowned and wondered why. Then she realized...

She had wandered into Indian territory.

The outlaw didn't slow Bo, but instead turned him back northward, but west instead of east to avoid doubling back and running into her little friends again. She was pretty deep in savage country, but if her luck held she could get out again before being noticed. Adrenaline wearing off, her shoulder was beginning to hurt beyond just a sting and slow burn now.

[Preach]

Indian territory.

There were no clearly defined roads, no blatant markers. It was considered untamed and unpopulated, and few outsiders dared pass through it. The northernernmost tribe in the region was particularly blatant in their fear-mongering as they often hung up dead cowboys on trees near their borders.

"See it?"

"Yes."

"Coming to the woods now."

"Looks like it."

A silence.

"Looks like a white," the second speaker continues.

The first one laughs, "What, the stupid hat didn't tip you off sooner?"

"What should we do about it?"

"About the idiot hat?"

"No."

"Think I could shoot it from here?" He twirls his slingshot, feigns shooting it.

"No!"

"Pfft. Right, well, I guess we should go stop them. Do you have your-- ah." A quick glance at a horse's saddlebag confirmed what he was going to ask for. The two men lead their two horses down the concealed ridge and through some windy well-known passages. They would flank him in the woods.

The two were skilled riders. They knew that even after the white rider slowed, the pounding of his heart would not, which gave them even more time for an ambush. They rode hard at first, hard enough to cover the distance between them, but if the rider slowed enough to where the noise of a horse would be blatant, they would dismount. They didn't need horses for this, not really. Their plan was quite simple. Step one, flanking. Step two, fling a massive and heavy fucking net to tangle the rider and drag him down.

Through the brush, the second makes a hand-sign, seeing the blood. Wounded.

The other makes a loopy sign around his head as if asking if the other one is simple, then signs, Go.

There was no hesitation to their actions. Seeming to burst out nothingness, two men lunge towards the rider, a heavy net made of twine and bark-cords hurtling fast. The two are perfect mirror images of each other, everything from features and dark hair to leather leggings and moccasins and bare coppered torsos. One whoops loudly, ululating, but the other doesn't.

[The Lifted Lorax]

Of course there were skeletons in the trees. Should she have expected any different? These northern tribes were somewhat notorious for trying to scare people off by putting their enemies on display. Fucking savages. Liz breathed slowly and deeply, closing her eyes only momentarily. As she closed her eyes she heard the gentle clop of horses over the underbrush. Slowly she lifted her head and pulled the hammer back on her gun.

Even if she had seen them, she wouldn't have had time to react. Liz yelled in surprise, firing a shot into the air as she went down. Her foot caught in the stirrup and between that and the net Bo went down with her. The horse screamed as he fell on his side, onto her injured leg. Liz cried out in pain, but through the pain managed to wriggle out from under the horse as he tried to right himself. She pushed herself to her knees with her good arm but still was unable to get to her feet in the confines of the net.

"What the fuck?" she cried out as the two emerged from the forest. Liz wasn't entirely sure if she had hit her head and was seeing double or if there were actually two of them. "Let me go you fuckin'--argh!" Her vision was quickly going dark from pain and bloodloss.

[Preach]

The solitary bang rang through the woods and sent crows and songbirds skywards.

"Oh fuck," "Ah, shit," they said in unison.

"A woman?"

"Look at the blood, she's really wounded, I told you-- ah!" They had to shout to raise their voices over the screams of the horse as it tried to right itself. Brother 2, on foot, worked to tie up the captive more efficiently in his net-- but he was forced back. Her black stallion wasn't letting him approach. Messing with an angry horse was bad news. He couldn't get near her. That's when Brother 1 plucked a smooth stone from his pouch and slipped it into the sling and he began whipping it with expertise, apparently preparing to aim it at the terrified horse's skull.

"Don't kill it!" The other shouted,

"I won't! I just need to put it out! Stun it!"

Their clipped words made their language sound harsh, like shouts and stones scraping over each other. He raised the sling and his arm went back as if preparing to strike.

[The Lifted Lorax]

The net was chaos. One of the Indians was trying to bind her while Liz was still trying to scramble to her feet while fighting a blackout and Bo was busy trying to protect her. She heard them shouting back and forth at one another, but obviously she hadn't the first clue what they were actually saying. All she knew was that they sounded angry.

The blackness had almost completely clouded Liz's vision when she turned her head to see one of them with a sling, preparing to launch a bullet at Bo's head. Then, suddenly, things became clearer. Her hearing became sharper and while the black didn't recede the bullseye of her tunnel vision focused solely on the Indian threatening her horse. Amongst the chaos the click of her hammer seemed louder even than Bo's screams.

"Get that fuckin' thing away from my horse!" Liz's voice was loud, but somehow strangely calm. It didn't feel as though it was coming from her, but from some far-away fourth person. Even as that disembodied voice spoke, she felt the last of her strength ebbing as she used it to push herself to her feet. Her shoulders hunched in the net, but all she needed was her uninjured arm pointing a gun at the Indian.

"Now...now look..." she said slowly, trying to get her lips around the words. "I know you ain't unnerstand me, but I know you unnerstand guns. An' I...I dun like killin' folk. But listen here, Imjin. You...you try'n...'n do ol' Bo here harm an'...an' I..." Liz's tongue felt thick between her teeth. "I'll fuckin' kill yer iffin it's the last thing I do, swearta God."

It was the last her strength could manage. Liz stumbled back onto her knees, grunting in pain, as the strength in her good arm ebbed, sucked away by the pain of the wound in the opposite shoulder. Sweat glistened on her forehead as her face went ashen and clammy.

[Preach]

The objectively massive horse was rearing back and flailing with hooves the size of a human face, clearly quite willing to severely incapacitate one or both of the twins. Their own horses shuffled in place within the bushes, accustomed to these sorts of encounters.

The brother with the sling looked at the gun before he really reacted-- and his reaction was to stop what she was doing and jump back and away from the direction that the barrel was pointing. "What is the woman saying?" He shouted at his brother, the latter just stared in appalled amazement. He had instinctively picked up a rock-- attempting to brain the bandit who even dared to raise a weapon against his brother. But it seemed that she was basically on the verge of death. After a moment's hesitation he dropped the rock and stepped hard on her back, bringing her to a prone position on the floor and pinning her there. With his other foot he deftly stepped on her hand in a move to de-arm her. A gun was a gun, no matter how apparently injured a person was.

The horse continued to freak out but by this point the other brother had clicked and whistled for his own horse, and subsequently pulled out a rope from the saddle bag. He stood point for his brother, blocking the black stallion from getting to the woman on the floor.

Meanwhile, the brother with the moccasin on the woman's back crouched down low enough so that she would hear him. "Lie down. We won't hurt either of you."

"What did the white say? What did you say, Shotah? Come on!" He seemed annoyed.

"I said we were going to kill her and her horse. Can you shut that thing up now? Mother! Even the bats will hear us. Maybe draw more Whites over. Let's get out of this clearing. Oh, and she had said that if we touch her horse we die or something, then she called us 'imjins'" He laughed in a mocking way at that, then repeated it. "Imjin." The other brother chuckled too, muttering "imjin!"

The man called Shotah took his foot off her back and noticed that her shirt and pants were stained through with blood. He hmmed. As if to say he was done, he clicked for his own horse to come over and turned his back on the woman on the floor. Hopefully that would help shut the screeching horse up. It would indicate that no harm --no further harm-- would come to its owner.

But Shotah's hand stayed close to his own sling and bullets, and he turned three-quarters of the way, so that if she tried anything, he would be able to react.

He didn't think she would though.

The other brother still faced off with the wild horse.

"So what do you want to do?" Shotah called.

"I want to get this horse. It's spirited! I like it."

"What about that one?" Shotah tilted his head towards the woman on the floor, not that his brother would see since he was facing the other way. But his brother knew.

"Dunno."

"We should kill her." But he didn't mean it, and his brother could tell.

"Yeah, probably."

[The Lifted Lorax]

Liz fell to her knees but kept her gun trained on the Indian trying to hurt Bo. She felt a foot in her back and fell with a soft oof onto her stomach, face to one side and vision quickly fading. She felt a weight on her hand and slowly moved her head, trying very hard to keep her eyes open. She saw a moccasin on her hand and her fingers simply stayed curled around the weapon, pressed into the earth. The bandit laughed deliriously as she closed her eyes, exhausted.

"Ya think that hurts?" she laughed, finding the ground very comfortable. "I got a damn bullet in me." Still she slowly moved her finger off the trigger. Liz was stubborn but she knew when she'd been beaten in a fight. There was pressure on her back from one of the Indians leaning down with his foot still on her. She breathed out and her spine crackled satisfactorily beneath his moccasin. "Mmm thanks...been tryin' ta get that fer weeks." Liz laughed again as endorphins flooded her system.

"Lie down. We won't hurt either of you."

"Huh?" Liz lifted her head a little, but immediately let it fall back to the ground. She had been surprised, to say the least, to hear him speaking English. "I am layin' down. Ain't like I kin git up anyhow."

The two spoke a little more. She heard one of them say "imjin," imitating her accent. Poorly. Had her eyes been open she would have rolled them. But Liz was quickly losing consciousness and it took her a long time to get her mouth wrapped around the words she wanted to say.

"Haha...make fun...fun of uh...of whitey. So funny," she panted at length. "Shut up Bo!" Liz managed to shout at her horse, whose screams were giving her a headache. The stallion immediately began to settle down, though he still eyed the Indian brother watching him mistrustfully. "Good boy." Liz squinched her eyes even though they were already shut as she pieced together her next sentence. "Look here Squanto..." The words cultural sensitivity were not exactly in the bandits vocabulary. "I...I'm 'boutta uh...ta pass out here. Y'all jis'...jis' gemme on Bo there...point 'im the righ' way...we'll be outta y'all's um...uh...hair."

She had expended the last of her energy. Liz finally lost consciousness as she lay bleeding on the forest floor. Bo didn't begin to scream again, but did move toward her as he sensed something wrong.

[Preach]

Glancing over his shoulder, Shotah impassively watched the woman babble and eventually faint. But she had a great hold on the wild horse she'd ridden in here. It obeyed her unquestioningly.

"Dead," Shotah said as she passed out. His brother laughed. He didn't understand much English and hadn't taken his eyes off the beautiful Bo.

"I waaantt this hooorsseee soo baadddd, brother."

"Let it alone, the rider just died..." This spurred the other brother to leave his rope and the horse alone and check the body.

"Hmm... not dead." By this point the other one was just crouching over the woman and came close to poking her with his foot to check. The big horse dissuaded him from it. "Not yet. Guess we could just..." He squinted upwards. There were black dots circling them in the sky. The vultures could tell. "Leave her here?" He shrugged and went to his horse. "Then we won't have to do the dirty work. You know." He laughed.

Shotah scowled, "Come on. We're not Boar."

"Yeah but, Boar have been able to keep the whiteys out of their territory. Like, look at that." He gestured towards the entrance of the woods where strung-up bodies still swung. "I wouldn't want to get anywhere NEAR that if I was a white. Or, you know. In general."

"Fuck it, Toyamselah!"

The man named Toyamselah turned startled at the sudden angry outburst.

"Tomorrow's the blank moon!" Toyamselah just raised an eyebrow, but Shotah's voice was loud and distressed, face strained. "She's about to die. And if we're the last people who see her before she dies she'll haunt us."

"Oh no," Toyamselah's eyes widened, "she'll haunt the shit out of us. Mother!"

"This was your idea."

"No!"

They bickered like this for a while, not heeding the woman bleeding out. They determined it didn't matter whose idea it had been (even though each was convinced it had been the other's idea). They agreed that if they had known that she was that injured so severely they would have fucked right off and let her ride her way away.

"This is so inauspicious," said Shotah. "Do you have any bloodweed? Maybe that'll do it."

Toyamselah gave him a look while he cleaned the underside of his nails with an arrow. Shotah sighed and looked through his own bags. No bloodweed. But something... else. It looked like dried moss. He took a bunch and went to the body on the floor and cautiously tried to poke around it, at it. He showed the weed to the horse and mimed putting it in his mouth. Horses were smart, he knew. Toyamselah chuckled and crossed his arms to watch. Shotah would attempt to put the stuff in the woman's mouth-- it was much like a sleeping drug, it would keep her unconscious. The only downside being that it caused vivid dreams. But he knew that moving her otherwise was too risky.

Only after successfully putting the thing in her mouth would they attempt to put her on her horse and bring her with them to camp. Otherwise they'd have to try something else.

[The Lifted Lorax]

Bo turned his head a little to watch one of the brothers as he dug in his pouch and found something that looked like moss before miming putting it in his mouth. Bo stretched out his neck a little to try and eat the moss himself, but apparently that was not what had been intended. Instead the stranger went to his rider and pushed it into her mouth.

Liz was home. The farm was lush and green as it had once been, her own personal Eden. Bo galloped in the field without his saddle and for the first time in a very, very long time Liz felt truly content. She smiled a little in her sleep as a sweet summer rain began to fall and her Papa called her in for supper.

"Papa...we gotta....mfrff...turnips..." Liz drooled a little into Bo's mane as she mumbled a little on her way back to the Indian camp.

The rain fell harder. Soon the farm had been lifted off of its roots--despite being set on top of a storm cellar--and was floating down the long road into town. Papa sat calmly at the table while Liz watched worriedly as the countryside went by. Scowling she stood and went to the window as they floated past town.

"Sit 'n eatcher collard greens, Lu," Papa called, not seeming to notice in the least that they were floating down the damn road and, it appeared, across the country. Lizzy-Lu...that was what he'd always called her. "Safe 's houses, duncha worry none."

Liz frowned before hesitantly returning to the table to eat. That was when the house sprung a leak. No, not leak...leaks. Multiple little rivulets of water sprang from the cracks of their wood ranch house despite new chinking having been pushed in just last month. Still even as the water covered the floor Papa paid it no mind, assuring her again that they were "safe as houses" as the rain poured down even harder from a clear blue sky, seeming to flood the entire world and float them right on across to the far coast. Finally the rain stopped.

"Wait here Papa, I'll take a look see," Liz said, brow furrowed with concern as she led Bo from the kitchen to the door, intending to take him with her.

"We found our Mount Ararat, Lu," Papa assured her. "No need to go look."

"I gotta look, Papa," she insisted, "we ain't got no more crows; all out." She unlocked the door and saw that they were on top of no mountain, but the roof of a building ten stories high in the middle of what she somehow knew to be New York City. Liz turned to tell her Papa but all of a sudden the water that had leaked in all built up, washing over what remained of her family and pushing her with a scream out of the door, clinging to Bo's neck as she fell from the top of the building to the cobblestones below.

A scream echoed in the darkness. Liz realized a few seconds after it had stopped that it was her own voice screaming, and now she couldn't breathe. She gasped for air, finally finding her breath and feeling her chest heave. Where had her shirt gone? She tried to sit up, but found that she couldn't move much. Was she paralyzed? Trying to suppress the beginnings of panic she slowly wiggled her fingers and toes. They worked fine, and if they worked fine the rest of her body must have worked fine...it was just really hard to move right now. What she could move was her neck and she let her head flop to the side. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could see that she was in some sort of hut fragrant with the scent of various herbs, but there was no one in her direct line of sight.

"Hey!" Liz winced at the sound of her own voice as it made her head throb. Still she shouted, though not at quite the same volume as before. "Hey anyone out there? The hell am I? What'd y'all perverts do with my shirt?"

[Preach]

Warily the man had watched the horse, but it seemed calmer now. He had parted the woman's pink lips and placed the herb in her mouth-- thankfully she accepted it, the alternative would have been more brusque. Shotah then scooped her up easily -she was rather small, really- and put her on her waiting horse. He gestured and Toyamselah tossed him a rope-- Shotah tied her face-down on Bo, just to be safe. He took the horse's reigns and mounted his own steed - a pinto bay horse with a white blaze. His brother rode a buckskin. Together they took the fastest route through the mountain passes.

The settlement was quiet. Most of the men were out at this time of day, scouting or hunting, while the women tended to the crops. That didn't stop the children from gawking. At their shouts of, "what's that weird thing there?" a few of the older members of the community peeked out from their birchbark houses-- most looked alarmed or displeased.

"Toya, go tell the chief what's happening. I'll take her to Montala."

"But what--"

"I'll be leaving the horse by the medicine house if you want to bother it later."

"I'm not going to 'bother' it," Toyamselah grumbled, but he rode off just the same. "Make sure you join me soon. I'll try to put him in a good mood before then."

It had been easy for Shotah to take the woman into the dim and perfumed wattle hut. He had explained the situation. The medicine woman called Mantela had looked at him oddly, but, understanding that this stranger was close to death, set to work. When Liz started shouting, it was Mantela who sprung to action and pinned her down, pouncing from out of Liz's line of sight and holding her arms to the thatched mattress. Her dark hair was in sleek braids, parted in the middle. She had a narrow, strong face with some tell-tale wrinkles, but her hands showed her age most of all. She was easily in her forties or fifties. Her eyes were deep-set and dark. She was very strong, and able to pin Liz down with ease. Her ears were adorned with turquoise jewelry and a heavy beadwork and bone amulet hung on her chest while a beaded choker gripped her neck. She wore a simple square-cut tunic, but there was a burgundy and green woven shawl around her shoulders. Something about her inspired peace and deference.

"Shhh!" she commanded, looking at Liz fiercely. With one hand still gripping her tightly, the woman poked just next to Liz's multiple bullet wounds -now cleaned and patched by poultices- as if indicating that that was the cause for silence and stillness. "Sh! Shh." To drive her point home she she put her finger to her lips. Then she put her hand under Liz's head to lift it and straighten the pillow that she had somewhat dislodged in her flopping. The woman went to a contained fire at the other end of the tent, poured something from a kettle that looked settler-made into an earthenware cup, and brought it back to Liz. It smelled bitter. She gestured drinking, then drank a bit herself, then put it to Liz's lips. "Drink it."

There were amulets and herbs hanging on the walls of the hut, as well as bones and antlers, and a dead pheasant. The door-flap was closed, so the fire was the only source of light.

---

Shotah and Toyamselah had been chewed out by the chief. He was, in a word, livid.

"How dare you bring a stranger into our camp? And a white one? Are you stupid? Did you hit your head? Did you both hit your head?"

The twins shared a look, and the chief exhaled in exasperation as if assuming they were communicating in a twin-way. "No! Enough of that! You must take responsibility."

"It was me," said Shotah--

"No, Shotah said we should kill it," Toyamselah interrupted, "I agreed, but then he remembered the blank moon is tomorrow so--"

"What? The what? You what? It's not until three days from now!" The chief gestured wildly and Shotah blanched, as much as someone with copper skin could.

"What?"

Toyamselah's eyes widened and he hid a laugh by coughing behind a closed fist.

"You could have killed it and we wouldn't have a problem! What if others come looking for her? What then? I'm holding you fully accountable, Shotah. This is the worst mistake you've ever made in your entire life. You'll have to pay for it. Until it's gone it's your responsibility."

---

"This is the worst mistake you've ever made in your entire life," Toyamselah repeated as they both walked through the center of their town, chewing-out done. "He's so dramatic."

"Mmm." But Shotah sighed. "I can't believe I got the moon days wrong. No wonder Mantala looked at me so oddly when I told her."

"Don't be too hard on yourself, brother. You've been distracted lately. We can just kill it later."

"Yes, I know..."

"It's fine! It's fine. A totally solvable problem, even for someone as dumb as you. Then again Mantala might not want us to kill after she's already wasted medicine on the wounds..." Shotah started to say something, looking rather serious, but Toyamselah'd caught sight of Bo. "There's that handsome fellow. Sorry brother, we can continue later. He's far more interesting than you are." Toyamselah whistled at Bo and strode nearer. They'd given the horse some water and a bucket of corn, hay and grasses. Shotah sighed again and shook his head.

---

They were milling about camp. Both brothers tended to their horses before needing to head out to scout. That's when Liz started shouting. The twins shared a look. Shotah discreetly poked his head into the tent just in time to see Mantela giving the topless woman a drink. He looked at for a second until he registered what he was looking at-- then his eyes widened and his eyebrows seemed to shoot into his hairline.

"Get out!!! This is a women-only space right now, you fool!" Mantela shouted and gestured aggressively, beaded bracelets jangling.

Shotah tsked and closed the flap and started walking away, "Yeah! Alright! Sorry! I was just checking she wasn't dead."

"Just checking she wasn't dead..." Mantela muttered, putting the cup to Liz's lips. "As if the shouting wasn't a give-away..."

"Hey... hey, brother," Shotah said quietly, drawing nearer to Toyamselah, knowing exactly what he was doing. "... the white woman is naked, have you ever seen that before? It's weird. Like an animal that's been skinned."

Toyamselah eyes widened and left Bo alone, striding towards the medical hut. He threw the flap wide and looked with subtlety as if he was fully entitled to do so. As the twins had the same face, it seemed like the first one was coming in for a second look. Mantela gasped, "Get out you fool-idiot! Disrespectful! Fool Toyamselah!" Mantela shouted, flinging a wooden block at his face. He ducked and nearly fell over backwards. The woman muttered unintelligibly, looking exasperated and yet again trying to get Liz to drink.

Further away, a few others laughed and Shotah turned away to chuckle.