Edge: Killer's Breed

The searing pain had begun shortly after that, and rode with him like a demon spirit across the southeastern comer of Colorado and into Kansas. The further north he travelled the lower the temperature dropped and Edge knew this, despite the fact that his own body was burning with fever, for as the sweat formed on his body it was immediately chilled by the brisk air. He was on the plains now, the great sprawling flatlands of the Middle West: cattle and farming country and the settlements and towns became more numerous as the land became richer. But Edge, ignoring them, sometimes drove the team through them, blind to the curious stares of bystanders; otherwise he skirted them. For his dream had been born. Created by lightheadedness and fed with involuntary, disjointed memories of inter-mingled peace and violence, it was a vision of home. A beautiful Iowa landscape peopled with wonderful parents and a hero-worshipping kid brother contributing to a rich and full life for a man named Josiah Carl Hedges. Although Edge struggled to hold on to this mind picture, the blood from a hundred gaping wounds kept washing across it to the sound of gunfire and the swish of a flashing blade. He saw his parents dead, countless mutilated men in uniforms of blue or gray, a man who was no longer a man swinging at the end of a rope, a woman's crumpled body at the foot of a cliff, another woman with bloodied patches where her young breasts had been, the head of a man with no body and no eyelids swinging in the morning sunlight.

Then, finally, as the blood was wiped clean, he saw the farm again, but not as it used to be before the war and the aftermath of violence. Now it was merely a burned-out shell of a house surrounded by vast expanses of fired wheatfields. This was a picture to which the tortuously sick Edge could cling, for he was determined to see it in reality. This was his dream, for he knew that the pain which rode the wagon with him was a messenger of death and before he died he wanted desperately to see the place where, in life, he had been most happy.

He did not trouble to eat or rest any more as he felt the time running out and it was an instinct, like that of a wounded animal, which communicated his desire to the team as it toiled due north out of Missouri and into Iowa.

The fever increased, spreading across the man's pale face a waxy redness out of which his blue eyes shone with a brilliance too bright, too intense so that those who saw the wagon roll past were certain it was driven by a man who was insane. With this sudden, dangerous rise in temperature, there came also a fire in his mind, at first flickering, then bursting into a raging flame. Edge was willing himself not to die and with this determination the dream became a nightmare, not springing from the past, but threatening from out of the future. He wanted to live because now he was certain that if he could get back to the farm, he would have a chance to start afresh. It seemed an eternity ago that he had last ridden towards the farm with hope filling his heart: an earnest desire that there he could forget the horrors of war and revert to the man he had once been. But violence had preceded him and he had gone forth to reap revenge with like violence. His lust for vengeance had been assuaged now and from the depths of his sickness he saw a chance to turn back the clock and grasp again at the opportunity for peace.

But the nightmare of death threatened to rob him and in a mind contorted by fever he was certain that death would be defeated if only he could reach the farm in time. He was unable to reason out an explanation for his faith but he had never been more certain of anything in his life before. When the rain came, gusted across the rolling plain by a north wind and lashing directly into his face, he experienced it only as a further weapon in death's armory and he urged the team into greater efforts, cursing at the almost exhausted beasts as they strained to force themselves and their burden through the mire into which the rain had transformed the grassland.

Edge wore no topcoat and the teeming, wind powered rain quickly soaked his black shirt and pants, pasting his underwear to his burning skin. His hat had blown off in the first gust and his shoulder-length black hair danced about his head in turmoil. But he drove on relentlessly through the gathering gloom of the storm, eyes blazing and teeth gleaming between lips curled back in a sneer which challenged the elements. And then, as a fork of lightning slashed across the grey sky and an instantaneous clap of thunder cut through the hiss of the rain, the horses bolted in terror and Edge laughed insanely, triumphantly, as the sudden speed strengthened his hand against the passage of time.