Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name by Edward M. Erdelac Page A

it on, passing like a ghost through the wreckage and
through the scattered hovels. He reached the open desert and went galloping
across the sand, when suddenly there was an audible crack as of a gunshot, and
the horse disincorporated between his knees. Instantly he was soaring, and his
etheric self tumbled to the ground.
    It
was a stunning sensation. He wondered what had disrupted the horse’s field. He
picked himself up, and twice more heard the jarring crack sounds. Pain—actual
pain—ignited in his leg and side, or, more correctly, in the parts of his
astral form corresponding to those physical areas, and he fell once more.
    He
lay on his back, staring up at the black sky and its currents of energy, and
then looked at his own body. There was a neat hole in his left leg, just above
the knee, bleeding a blazing blue and white light. It was such a hole as he had
seen appear when he attacked a person’s latent defenses on this plane with his
mystic Volcanic pistol. There was another such hole in his left forearm,
bleeding light. What could have caused it?
    The
Rider sat up slowly, propping himself on one elbow. There, striding towards him
across the green desert plain, was a slight figure in
blinding white, smiling at him beneath a toothbrush mustache. In the real world
he was effete and unassuming. Here, with his blazing greatcoat billowing behind
him and the weird etheric light playing along the long barrel of his
outstretched forty five, he was imperious and menacing.
    “Where
were you off to in such a hurry, Rider?” asked Sheardown.
    The
Rider stared as Sheardown ambled over, covering him the whole time with his
pistol. It was too dangerous to snap back into one’s physical form without
returning the astral self to the body. There could be terrible psychic side
effects. Dementia, or worse, the self could be dislodged. He was trapped.
    Sheardown
would shoot him if he went for his pistol. He turned slightly, slid his Bowie
knife from its sheath, unseen. He considered trying to throw it, but he’d never
been much good at throwing a knife. He thought for a second, then pressed the keen knife into the palm of his left hand.
    “Sheardown!”
he rasped.
    “Doctor
Sheardown,” said the doctor, a cross expression momentarily spreading across
his face. “I bet you’re surprised,” he said, instantly smiling again. “This is
just something I learned…from one of your teachers.”
    “Adon,”
the Rider murmured.
    Sheardown
nodded.
    “He’s
going to be so tickled. It’s just blind luck I even ran across you, Rider. I
was only supposed to deliver a scroll. Now I’m gonna bring him your head too.”
    “Where
is he?” the Rider demanded.
    “I
guess you’ll never know how close you were,” Sheardown said in mock regret,
cocking his revolver. The Rider noticed it was a Frontier double-action, the
nickel surface etched with symbols, just as his own Volcanic was. They weren’t
Judaic, though.
    The
Rider held up his right hand imploringly, as if to catch the bullet.
    “Wait!
I don’t understand! Who are you, Sheardown?”
    “Doctor
Sheardown!” the slight man spluttered. “Doctor!”
    “Doctor…,”
the Rider agreed, placating.
     
    * * *
*
     
    Another shell struck Varruga Tanks, another shack disintegrated, and
Gershom listened to the patter of debris on the remains of the roof over his
head. He worried that the random shelling would strike the hovel in which the
woman and her boy and the two wounded men were hiding. He wanted to go to them,
get them to some semblance of safety—but where was there to go? And then there
was his charge.
    He
glanced back at the Rider, motionless in the circle.
    He
was about to turn back when he noticed a splash of red on the man’s leg.
    He
crept over and cautiously dabbed at the red stain on Rider’s leg. It was blood,
and it was spreading, yet Gersh couldn’t see any kind of hole in the fabric
that would account for a wound. He started at the sight of blood trickling