Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “Sir, I—”

  “You shut up now and listen hard and answer good. Where’s that goddamned Bigboy?”

  “That’s why you’re here! You come back from the dead for Bigboy.”

  “Where the hell is Bigboy? Was he off tonight? Was he in N’Awleens or Jackson, helling it up? Where is that man?”

  “Bogart, sir, I don’t know nothing. He’s here, like every night. He ain’t a goer. He’s here all the time.”

  “He worked over that boy Fish?”

  “He worked ’em all over. He done been hunting something for three weeks now. Working over colored boys every goddamn night.”

  Earl blasphemed something dark and evil.

  Then he said, “When’s last time you saw him?”

  “He’d have been in the Whipping House. That’s burning now, I can tell. He may be in that fire, sir. That’s where he’d be. If he ain’t there, sir, no telling.”

  “Goddamn,” said Earl.

  “Sir, please don’t kill me. I’s only doing what they’s telling me. We didn’t have no choice in the matter neither.” But he saw that he was talking to nothing, took a deep breath, and continued his slow crawl.

  EARL moved on toward the prison compound, but a noise came from an unexpected direction. He peered into the blackness of the piney woods and saw a small shed. Behind it dogs yowled savagely with fear. Something in their brilliant but tiny dog brains had picked it up, the vibration of disaster. They knew. Somehow they knew.

  He drew the Trooper and eased back. The shed was empty, though clearly men had been stationed there. Whether they took off at the first sound of shots, went in and were killed, or surrendered and crawled away stripped naked he didn’t know. But the place stank of cigarettes, so it hadn’t been abandoned too long ago.

  He looked out back. This is where the farm’s man-hunting hounds were kept, invisible in the aerial photo because of the tree cover. He remembered them nipping at his ass, driving him forward as he fought Bigboy on the levee road.

  They were even madder now. Blood was in the air, and fire and gunsmoke. They seethed and slithered against each other, piling up at the gate for a freedom that would never come.

  “You boys are going to die,” he said. “It’s the way these things happen.”

  He turned, but then turned back. Dogs scared him, ever since he’d seen them chewing up half-dead Japs in Tarawa’s bunkers. But some odd feeling of remorse came. The dogs only did what the humans trained them to do. They didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  He walked to the fence, lifted the hasp and opened the gate. If the beasts smelled blood on him or if their aggression would turn them loose on him, he would know in a second. But the dogs were hell-bent on survival that night. They sped out, gray blurs in the dark night, and disappeared.

  65

  THE two Irishmen had gotten in close. They crouched together under the legs of one of the machine-gun towers. Twenty feet above them, two unknowing guards shifted, spat, drank coffee from thermoses, groused quietly about the endless boredom of the duty, and one even pissed off the platform with a groan.

  Then the shots rang out from the Store and the Whipping House. They just started up, a staccato of gunfire, rolling over the fields that separated the two. Audie and Jack heard some scuttling about up top, and one voice said to the other, “What the goddamn hell is that?”

  Audie lifted his black German attack rifle, as it was called. He had no hesitations whatsoever, for all hesitations had been ground mercilessly out off him that day in Italy when his friend Lattie Tipton had been gunned down. He fired the whole long, curved clip, and above them, the slugs poured through the floorboards, ripping and splintering as they went, the noise shattering the sleepy silence of the night.

  For an old man, Jack moved swiftly. He got into the tower and didn’t pause to look at the two freshly killed men. He’d killed a lot of animals in his time, and death held few fascinations for him. Now it was time to shoot.

  He swiftly unslung his Model 70 and brought it to his shoulder, his finger flicking the safety off even as his hand guided the stock into the pocket of the shoulder, his knees and feet found a solid kneeling rested position with the forearm of the rifle resting pool-cue-like in the relaxed splay of his left hand on the ledge of the guard tower. His right index finger ran to the curve of the trigger, knowing it so well, so familiarly, and rested firm against it, feeling the slack just go out of it.

  It was dim through the Lyman 4X Alaskan scope, but Jack had no problem finding the guard tower one hundred yards across the way from them, over the roof of the Ape House. He made out the silhouette of a moving man and a searchlight came on in that same moment. He squeezed carefully, and had the hunter’s deepest pleasure of knowing that his shot had scored. He quickly threw the bolt, ejecting the used shell, lifting another .270 into the chamber, found the second target and put him down.

  “Got ’em both, old man,” screamed Audie.

  Jack shifted fast; the third tower was also one hundred yards away, and quickly enough he found a target there, fired and was rewarded with a cry. He hunted for a second, found none, rotated to the last tower but was too late.

  Next to him, Audie fired a long burst with his attack rifle. From the distance, Jack watched the slugs eat the place up. They danced over it, sparking oddly here and there, raising a spew of dust and wood chips. The hot shells rained on Jack, but he was salty enough to ignore the discomfort—pain, even, when one got down his shirt collar and burned the flesh of his shoulder—as he hunted. He saw nothing.

  He went back to the tower where he’d only hit one man, and sure enough the second was halfway down the ladder. Jack nailed him good, though he wobbled a few feet on shaky legs before he sat down and collapsed.

  “You are a hell of a shot, Mr. O’Brian,” said Audie.

  “I have shot an animal or two in my time,” said Jack.

  “Now as I understand it, you’re to stay here till them other fellows arrive and cover for them when they move through to free them coloreds.”

  “That’s it. I will hunt for targets as they come available.”

  “I believe I am to head over into them lean-tos and shanties outside the wire. That’s where them women and old men live. I’ll be getting them out of here.”

  “You take that big fast-firing gun.”

  “Well, sir, I am plumb out of ammunition for it and I can’t get no other. I had sixty and I done shot ’em all. Now it’s time for Colt work.”

  “Don’t take your cowboy gunfighting style too seriously, Audie. This isn’t the movies.”

  “Well, sir, it isn’t, but it sure seems like one.”

  With a pixie smile on his small and pretty face, America’s most decorated hero slipped out of the tower. He had a town to tame.

  AUDIE strolled the dark street. He was an apparition in gun-hawk black, from his black hat to his tight black neckerchief to his black shirt to his black pants to his black double gun belt. Only the two Colts, each tied with a thong to the leg, were not black; they were nickel-finished, polished up nice, not a night-fighter’s guns at all. But they had their advantages. The great Hollywood gun coach Arvo Ojala had honed and stoned their actions, so they were slick as hog guts. He’d rewelded the hammers on each, so they pronged upward another inch and were smooth there, the point being to draw the palm of the off hand along the top of the rising revolver while holding the trigger back so that no lockage was possible, and the hammer just reached apogee and fell of its own accord. Fanning, it was called, and it was much favored by movie gunfighters. You couldn’t get work if you couldn’t fan, and fanning took a year to master, for you had to build that callused toughness into the edge of the palm, and you had to build the muscles of the wrist and forearm. Most movie cowboys practiced with blanks, so accuracy wasn’t an issue. Audie, Texas-born and war-hard, saw no point in blanks; conceptually the blank made no sense to him. So he shot to hit with live .45s, and by this time was among the two or three fastest gunmen
in the world. He had made himself into a different kind of killer than the boy who had thrown grenades and shot men down with carbine, Thompson and Garand; he was the Kid now, not much older than the famous Kid of 1884, Johnson County, New Mexico.

  In ’ho-town, four men had gathered. They had enjoyed pleasures accessible to them by right of skin color and the guns they carried. This was no mission of rape; it was simply the way it was at Thebes, and one reason why only the best guards of the Mississippi penal system came to Thebes; its ’ho-town, and the relaxations available, were legendary.

  These four were neither braver nor more cowardly than their brethren, most of whom were already dead, the rest of whom had crawled nekkid into the trees; they simply happened to be the ones who were there, and they had gathered at one end of the street in the lee of a shanty as the gunfire and flames had risen all around them. They essentially had no idea what to do: Should they go back or should they flee?

  Having no ideas, they did what men in such circumstances will always do: nothing.

  They sat and waited to see what would develop.

  What developed was a cowboy in black strolling down the street.

  “Will ya look at that?” said one. “He stepped out of the picture show.”

  “He’s a little ’un.”

  “Them guns he’s carrying ain’t so little.”

  “If I had a rifle I’d shoot him and we’d ride on.”

  “You don’t have no rifle. You got yourself a revolver like him, and unless you can shoot it well a hundred yards in the dark, you are going to have to get through him to get your cracker ass out of this place.”

  “I say we run out shootin’, and sure enough one of our bullets will clip that feller.”

  “Yes, sir, but suppose he don’t panic, suppose he shoots as good as he looks, and suppose you’re so nervous you can’t hit nothing. Then what?”

  “Let him pass, shoot him from behind.”

  “That be a good idea.”

  “It be, but can you absolutely still your breathing and the noise as he passes by? Suppose he hears you? He turns and comes. Then what?”

  “What’re you saying, Vonnie?”

  “I am saying the onliest sure way is to get close up and face this bastard. He can’t take all of us. He just can’t. No, sir. We four, he one, that is what it be. We have our guns out. But we have to be so close it ain’t about aiming, it’s about speed. You got a better plan?”

  Nobody did.

  And so it came to happen that Audie saw them slough into the street. They had guns in their hands, sleeves rolled up, hats pulled low. A director would have handled it differently, and better. For one thing, he’d have lit the scene more vividly, as the odd flicker of a lamp from the close-by shanties didn’t bring enough texture out; and for another, he wouldn’t have let them carry their guns, because that violated the code of the movie West. They wouldn’t be clean-shaven, and their hats would have more character. He’d also have insisted on better dialogue, for even Audie sensed the banality of the exchange.

  “You go on, git out of here, Mister. This ain’t your place. You got no business here.”

  Audie, a fighter not a writer, could do no better.

  “This is my business. This is my best business.”

  “You one. We four. You put them guns down, boy, or you will be dog dead in the dust in two seconds.”

  “So will you.”

  “You ain’t got no cards to play.”

  At that point, one of the men fell dead. He dropped like a stone, a small geyser of blood pulsing from the side of his head, which had been crushed by one of Jack O’Brian’s .270s fired from almost a third of a mile away.

  “Odds are a little better now,” said Audie, whose best thing as both actor and real-life gunfighter was that in moments of high stress a little smile played across his tight lips and his not terribly expressive eyes came abloom in twinkle. So this was the best line, and the best delivery, of his career.

  From the three guards, the three guns came up, on the practical impulse that standing in the middle of the ’ho-town street was no longer a risk-free opportunity, and the faster this was handled the better it would be for all of them.

  They moved first, and it is practically true that in such encounters aggression pays dividends; nobody can catch up with a fired gun.

  Audie, therefore, could not catch up; however, the shots that came at him missed, not by much, but by enough—a tenth of an inch being “enough”—because the shooters were not practiced at the art of instinctive close-range shooting and didn’t realize that unless you’ve disciplined your trigger finger to come straight back, as if on a pivot, its yank will invariably misdirect the first shot; it comes then to correcting quickly.

  That’s the quickly they lacked.

  Audie drew and fanned so fast his shots sounded like a burst from the German attack rifle. He scored three hits in less than a second, and two were fatals; two men went down, a .45 Colt not being something a man can argue with. The third was gut shot and the big slug hit no bones. He was dead but would not die for another ten or so minutes, and he got his gun on Audie and would have finished the trick but for Jack’s finest shot of the night, which hit him in the neck, a split second before Audie recovered and fanned two more, heart and lung, into him, and knocked him askew for all time.

  Then it was over.

  Gun smoke hung in the air, and dust, too, from the fall of the four.

  Again the movies: slowly doors opened and women and kids and old men came out. They’d all seen it, but they knew nothing about Jack. It was just that the stranger in black had gunned four of the hated guards down in the street in but a second, after a dramatic exchange of words.

  “Who you be, sir?” an elder finally asked.

  “We come in from the river, folks,” said Audie. “We come in to serve this place some justice. You see the flames lighting the sky? We’re burning it out. So y’all have to clear out and find other lives. In the morning all this is gonna be under water.”

  “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.”

  “I am, sir. Texas born and raised. Proud of it. Y’all take your belongings now. Have courage. Be bold. This part of your life is over.”

  “Sir, they won’t nevuh let us leave. We owes ’em all money, so we have to stay. The Man work that way.”

  “Ain’t no more Man. Them debts, that’s them burning. All your debts are burned to ash. You get what few get, and that is a new start in life. I’d grab it hard, for there ain’t nothing here for you or nobody tomorrow.”

  And with that, the cowboy faded into the dark, a dream, a wish, a myth, but above all a man with a gun.

  66

  THE world exploded on Jack O’Brian. It just lit up. Suddenly he seemed in a wooden coffin while men shot the bejesus out of the thing, and as the bullets whipped into and through it, they yanked out shards of jagged wood, old chunks of nail and shingle, broken wire, bits of lead and jacketing and a sleet lashed at him.

  Jack slid down into the corner as the storm continued. He was aware that somewhere in the region of his lower left-hand chest, a numbness was spreading, though he had no memory of being hit. His hand flew to the spot, encountered something wet and dark and pulled back.

  Aw, hell, he thought.

  The firing stopped. Jack lay still. Smoke and dust filled the air. He was expecting to die, but death took its time. Oddly, he was not outraged at the world, for as he looked back upon his life, he saw that it had been a good one. Over six hundred game animals taken, the shots all good and true, on six of the seven continents. On top of that his wife loved him and he loved her, and following the advice of various wealthy sponsors, he’d invested wisely; no worries there.

  And he’d killed men, now, finally, after all these years, including a great shot on a fellow through a window in the Whipping House. That was a shot to remember. Then the shots on Audie’s antagonists.

  “He is fixed good,” he heard someone mutter below h
im.

  “We got that goddamn jackal but sure. You go on up and git that .30-cal., Ferris.”

  “You go, Nathan. He may not be dead.”

  “He is dead,” said Nathan. “Plum-jack dead, I tell you.”

  Jack’s numb fingers stole to the huge New Service he carried. He pulled it from its holster, amazed at how big it was. It was a big old thing. He knew if he cocked it, the click would set these boys to shooting him up some more, so he just lay quiet, feeling the slight tremble as somebody placed his weight on the ladder and began the climb up to the tower.

  A head appeared in the floor hatchway, pivoted as it sought information, revealing a face and a set of eyes that blinked when they encountered the muzzle of Jack’s revolver not three inches away.

  The muzzle flash blinded Jack as he sent a bullet the size of a robin’s egg into the face: the flash was vast and fired up the night. He did not see the effect, but heard, through the ringing in his ears, a loose thump of body striking ground in complete repose. Someone else scurried away.

  “He is still alive, boys. Give it to hi—”

  But the shots that followed came not from the sound of that voice but from elsewhere, and Jack recognized the boom of Elmer’s .44s and Charlie’s .38 and Bill’s .357.

  “Jack, you all right?”

  “Hit pretty bad, goddammit.”

  “You stay put,” came the call from Sally. “I will be right up to you.”

  “Sally, there may be more of them boys.”

  “These old farts down here will take care of them.”

  The shooting rang afresh, but no rounds came through the wood. Sally was up to him in seconds.

  “I’m a goner,” he said.

  “Only if you believe that, sir,” said Sally.

  She pulled his shirt open and saw him plugged cleanly; a through shot had taken out some lung tissue and opened a lot of veins.

  “I believe your poor old wife ain’t shuck of you yet,” Sally said. “You will be along for many a year to cuss and complain of her.”