Wyatt’s voice had lowered to a harsh whisper, and every man in the room bent closer to hear. “Ever since that day, every one of these low-lives has come at us armed with the heaviest tech around. They’re wearin’ the armor, they’re packin’ the guns, and they’re ridin’ stolen Iron Horses as free as they please.” He waved a hand at the men, one of whom had opened his mouth to speak. “I know, they get a lot of their newest stuff from Carpathian now. But it was the plunder from that first job that gave them the stones to make a stand. Sure, they coppered their bets, they lit a shuck out from under James’ shadow first chance they got. But it was him that sent them through the mill, put some iron in their spines, and set this all in motion. And you know and I know, they still come together to kick up a big row every now and then.”
Wyatt stood up and stabbed each man there with a fiery glance. “Make no mistake, gentlemen, Jesse James is the root cause of almost every fallen marshal, sheriff, and deputy going on over a decade now. It don’t matter if he’s laying low now. Hell, he could be movin’ to set up a homestead with some grass widow out in the prairie for all I know, an’ I don’t care. We take him down, we settle the score on hundreds of souls demandin’ vengeance, we send a clear signal to the rest of those lawless bastards, and we take a big step towards cleanin’ up the territories from this point onward.”
He sat back down and held up the paper. “We have it on good authority that James is back in Kansas City. God alone knows how long he’s been there. Probably tossin’ back some tar water every night with the local mamby-pamby deadbeat sheriffs if they’re anything like you lot, and couldn’t be bothered to send in a report.”
Wyatt cleared his throat and then spoke with the full weight of authority in his voice. “We’re goin’ down to Kansas City right now.” He turned to the man in the leather robes. “Is yer Judgment wagon all set and ready to head out?”
The man nodded solemnly. “Fully fueled and armed. It’s even got the new wireless unit packed away.”
Wyatt grunted in satisfaction. “Good. We’ll also want a full squadron o’ Interceptors ready to go as soon as the afternoon takes the curse off out there. We’re gonna need everyone we can take along, if we want to bring down Jesse James.” He turned to Virgil. “We’ll want to bring all four of the UR-30s.” A look of discomfort passed over his face as he continued in a lower voice. “And we better let Morgan know as well.”
Virgil nodded. “Might be time you rethought your decision not to deploy one or two into KC permanently.” Virgil got up and moved to a battered sideboard to pour himself another cup of water. “They made good points when they first argued against it, but if they’re failing to call in a report on a sightin’ of the James ‘n Younger boys, might be time we sent a metal man their way, watch over their shoulders?” The jug yielded a drop or two of lukewarm water. “Damnit. Provencher, get in here!”
The dark haired young marshal stuck his head in the door. “Sir?”
“Go across the street and get some more water from the Cosmopolitan, will you?” Virgil sat back down, gesturing to the sideboard with one casual hand.
“Sir? But… the front office… and… the heat… “
“You’re makin’ some fierce shirker-like noises there, Provencher.” The elder Earp cocked a sardonic eyebrow at the miserable officer.
“Sir.” The look Provencher shot the older man was ripe with frustration and resentment. As the front door banged shut with a dull sound, rendered flat beneath the heat, Virgil smiled at his brother.
“I’m tellin’ you, Wyatt, that boy’s hat’s nine dollars and ninety five cents too big.”
Chapter 3
The gentle swaying of the old horse, liberated from a republican couple too afraid to fight for him several days back, was lulling him to sleep again. The old wound, lack of food, and the hot sun blazing down all conspired against him, but they were old friends compared to the true enemy that sat behind his eyes, mocking his every breath. Defeat, cackling away at the lofty pride of man, rode with him everywhere now, and leached all the color out of the world.
The boy looked up suddenly. Something was not right. The old nag, the dusty Missouri road, even the heat of the sun beating down upon his high gray hat was all familiar to him. Too familiar, for he had never ridden this way before, and he had only stolen the horse a couple days ago. The taste of defeat, though, that was new. He had forgotten over the years how that had felt, how his heart had ached at every beat, knowing that everything he had loved and stood for was passing from the Earth.
The boy felt his chest, where some strange ghost of a memory told him he should find a still-tender wound, only recently healed. The wound that had put him on the sidelines of the great war’s last moments, and stolen him from his brother’s side just when he was needed the most. The wound was there, but the pain was dull, as if only half remembered, or much more healed than it should have been.
He looked around him, starting to grow wary. The occasional clumps of trees were familiar, although they swayed gently back and forth in a breeze that he did not feel. The split-rail fencing along one side of the road echoed similar images in his mind down to the last splinter or scuff. As the road rose up and curved down into a shallow valley, he somehow knew what he was going to see before the old horse had even topped the rise.
A group of men in faded blue uniforms sat on exhausted horses across the road, but they were all staring straight at him as if they had been waiting for his arrival. An officer was in front of the group, with a sergeant at his side, both smiling wicked smiles. This all seemed wrong, but the boy could not have explained why. He remembered the heartache; he felt the thirst, the exhaustion, the despair. But at the same time, he felt almost as if he were in a dancehall show, acting out a part for the amusement of some unseen audience.
“We been waiting for you, Jesse.” The officer called, lifting his voice to carry over the wind in the trees. “You got something you want to say?”
The boy’s eyes tightened. How did they know his name? They had not known his name. That last thought, carried through his mind as a whisper from the shadows, concerned him even more.
Who had not known his name?
Jesse shook his head and tried to think clearly. He was on his way home. The men before him, though hated and despised, representative of everything he loathed in the world, were the very men he was searching for. In a young life full of adventure and pain, he was trying to do the right thing, trying to offer his surrender to the men he hated most, so that he could return home and try to salvage what was left of his life.
“I want to surrender.” Jesse tried to shout but his throat was dry and sore, and his chest was hurting worse now, as if the pain of his wound was intensifying with the thinking of it. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I want to surrender, like the flyers say.”
The Union cavalrymen laughed among themselves, and the officer nodded over his shoulder to them, sharing in their joke.
“Not sure we’re going to let you get away so easily, son.” The man’s face was twisted with hatred, looking less and less human with each passing moment.
This was all wrong. Jesse knew, on some deep, visceral level that he could not explain, that this was wrong. Those soldiers below were savage; they were fierce, but they were just men. They were tired and hungry, and they just wanted to go back to their own homes. It was not until—
“We know you’re one of the savages that rode with Bill Anderson, one of those that killed Major Johnson and his entire command back at Centralia.” The officer’s face began to writhe, its color burning with rage.
Reality seemed to snap into place around Jesse, and he knew what was about to happen. The brave words that rose naturally to his lips died without breath, and he began to urge the old horse backwards up over the hill. He raised his hands, desperate to alter the scene, knowing that it was hopeless.
“Ain’t no amnesty for savages like you, son. We only got one thing for you.” The man who spoke l
ooked like all the other soldiers, except that there seemed to be a flicker or reflection of red flame deep in his sunken eyes. The moment seemed to freeze in the young man’s mind. Those eyes. Those eyes had haunted him for years. Wait… what did that mean, for years? He could not remember ever seeing them before! Except…
Jesse’s head began to spin and he lowered his hands to the reins, desperately clinging to the worn leather, feeling their rough texture in his hands as he sawed them back and forth, trying not to fall. The old horse jerked beneath him.
The soldier with the flaring eyes turned to another and whispered something, his face twisted into a cruel grin.
Jesse, even as he swayed and shook on the horse’s back, saw the flare of red pass from the one man to the next. The new man, listening with a harsh smirk of his own nodded once and brought his carbine up to his shoulder.
Something was wrong with the gun. He could see the blued metal, the worn wood, as if he were holding it in his hands. It was old, antique, without any of the gleaming dials or indicator lights of a modern weapon. The boy’s brow wrinkled in confusion and fear. What had he meant by modern weapon?
The man with the fire in his eyes turned back to Jesse and nodded as they were old friends, his smile widening. “People die in war every day, Jesse. That’s just the way it is.”
When the carbine fired, it seemed to catch most of the cavalrymen by surprise. Horses shied and started, sending men pulling at their reins as the formation disintegrated.
But Jesse had no attention to spare on the milling, comedic scene. The bullet struck him right in the chest, as he knew it would. Bullet… not bolt. If it had been a crimson bolt he would be dead, but instead he was… what?
Jesse’s world tilted with the impact. The bullet had slapped directly into the old wound, redoubling the pain but reassuring him in one way at least: he had already survived an identical wound. That got his mind to thinking further, what were the chances that the scruffy Union bluebelly, taking a snap shot from the back of a shying horse, would hit that exact same place?
Jesse felt himself lose his seat as the old horse slid sideways and down, frightened by the sudden blast and the smell of blood. The shifting saddle tossed Jesse off, spinning dully into the dust, his world shrinking to the flare of pain in his side. The fall seemed to take an eternity, however, and he began to notice that the world around him was again not behaving the way it should.
The trees behind him, lush and green a moment ago, now presented a kaleidoscope of browns and yellows to his spinning vision, the emeraldclarity fading before his shocked eyes, the trees wilting and withering away. The color of the sky deadened, the deep blue of the Missouri summer fading to the stark iron of a hot desert noon. Even the smells were changing, grass, mud, and dust giving way to a sterile, dry suffocating emptiness.
By the time Jesse hit the ground, landing on his wounded side, naturally, the entire world around him had changed. He found himself lying on the desiccated sands of an empty desert. There was no sign of the road he had travelled or the horse he had been riding. The trees were gone, the fence was gone, even the Union cavalrymen were gone, although one figure remained for a moment longer, the strange, smiling corporal with the burning eyes. And then, with a swirl of sand, even he was gone. Jesse was completely alone.
The boy looked down to his side where his hand was clutching at his blood-slick shirt. Something about his hand seemed wrong as well, but the pain flaring from the wound denied him the luxury for further analysis. He looked around, not understanding how he could be where he was, and yet, the pain from his wound, the dust in his eyes and throat, and the sun beating down upon his uncovered head were all undeniably real.
He shielded his eyes from the worst of the sun with one upraised hand, searching the horizon for any sign of help. The desert stretched away all around him, featureless and empty, for as far as he could see. Tears burned tracks through the dust on his cheeks and he tried to sit up, gasping as the wound was once again wrenched open, spilling more blood into the hot, dry air.
At the sound of his ragged breath he heard a harsh, hissing croak from nearby, his searching eyes found an enormous black vulture watching him with beady black eyes that flashed with a reflected crimson whenever it bobbed its head from side to side. The vile bird gave another croaking bark that sounded almost like laughter, and Jesse felt a burning desire to throttle the beast if only he could reach it.
With more effort than he had ever been called upon to make, Jesse first got one leg beneath him, then the other. Kneeling in the sand, he paused to catch his breath, hand once again pressed to the wound. He could feel the slick heat of his own blood on his fingers, and something about that bothered him more than he could have said. He flexed the other hand, looking down at it, trying to force his mind to focus, but there was nothing there but the dirty flesh of his own hand. For some reason, that was not right.
Jesse looked up again, casting his eyes all around for lack of anything else to do. This time, however, where before there had been nothing but the emptiness and the vicious bird staring arrogantly at him, an enormous structure now rose up into the burning sky behind him. With another grunt of effort, he pushed himself to his feet, blinking away the tears and the pain, and looked up at the mighty edifice. Even through the haze of his throbbing pain, Jesse could sense that the thing was ancient. Shaped like some kind of stepped pyramid, its sandstone construction was covered with strange symbols and carvings. It was like nothing he had seen before, and yet something about the place called to him. He could sense there was something inside, something that cried out to him. It was an ancient power that seemed to make his bones vibrate with its immediacy.
Not far away the vulture hopped away from him, hissing a harsh warning call.
Jesse ignored the bird and took a single step toward the structure, then stopped. The hand clamped to his side had tightened of its own volition, digging painfully into the wound and driving him to his knees with a bright new explosion of agony. The desert, the ancient pyramid, even the sun above disappeared in the blazing pain that drove him down, growing more intense as his hand continued to squeeze the tortured flesh. The boy stared down through fresh tears, desperate to understand what was happening. When he saw his hand, time froze once again. It was not his hand.
Jesse was staring at a sleek metal construct, all wheels and gears and pistons, tubes and cables and brass fittings. It was entirely alien, unknown to him, and with a mind of its own it dug deeper into his wound, driving upwards towards his heart. Jesse rushed to grab the alien hand with his other, and screamed in terror to see that this hand, too, was an artifact of steel, rubber, and brass. The second hand heeded his commands, however, and grasped the first, attempting to pull it away from the wound. The two arms struggled, causing even further pain as they mauled the injury, and Jesse howled up into the empty sky, his raw voice rippling out across the barren sands, the only reply the raucous call of the red-eyed vulture as it launched itself into the sky.
*****
Jesse James was fighting for his life. Something bound his limbs as he struggled, wrapped tightly around his sweat-slick torso as he thrashed in the parched darkness. His mind was a panicking blank, visions of empty deserts, grasping metal arms, and flaring red eyes swirling in his brain as he desperately wrestled with an unknown assailant.
“Jesse!” A voice called out to him, sounding far away. “Jesse, stop!”
The words did not sooth him, but rather drove him to greater effort. Stop? When some damned sonofabitch was trying to kill him? Not likely! He thrashed from side to side, trying to hold his attacker’s arms back as he attempted to free his own.
His own arms.
The attacker’s arms.
“Jesse, it was a bad dream!” The voice again, but this time it was barely a senseless whisper as he realized where he was, and what must have happened. Suddenly, his tense body relaxed, lungs still heaving from the struggle, but shoulders slumped in a mixture of resignation and reli
ef. He was in his small attic room above the Arcadia Saloon in Kansas City, his body was wrapped in sheets drenched with his own sweat, and each hand firmly gripping the opposite forearm as tightly as the mechanical gears and servos would allow was his own.
Jesse forced his fingers to loosen their death-grip, wincing slightly as the rubber feedback pads on the inside of his grip peeled away from the hard metal of his forearm sheaths and pistons. He would not be surprised to see dents in the metal once he got a chance to inspect them in better light.
“Jesse, are you alright?” The voice was softer now, a mixture of concern and fear. “You were runnin’ wild there for a little bit. Growlin’, screamin’ an’ the like. Were you havin’ a nightmare?”
Jesse smiled a bit despite his roiling mind. There was nothing like waking up to a woman’s tender thoughts to set a man straight. He liked to fancy he knew more than most. He could just make out her shape on the other side of the bed, her skin glowing faintly from the ruby indicator lights along his arms and the spark from the bedside lamp’s lowered element. But the fear in the girl’s voice bothered him, and he reached out into the darkness in her direction.
“A humdinger of a nightmare, there Misty, an’ no mistake.” He tried to make his voice light, but even in his own ears he knew he was not entirely successful.
He felt the rubber pads graze the showgirl’s bare shoulder; felt her shy away from the touch, and his face tightened in the gloom.
He and Misty had been an item since his posse had come to Kansas City a few months earlier. At first she had been just another girl, a roaring good time in a long line of similar experiences. A very pleasant byproduct of his fame, he found many women were drawn to the rougher crowd, and him in particular. Whether it was some instinct to save a bad man, change him, or more akin the fixation of the moth to the flame, the more a woman knew about his past, the easier it was for him to monopolize her time. And he had certainly been monopolizing Misty’s. Women were fascinated by his arms, as well, mesmerized by their alien appearance, their hard metal armor, and the countless moving parts ticking away within. Thinking about his arms Jesse frowned again.
The Jessie James Archives Page 6