by David Boop
Table of Contents
Foreword
David Boop
The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train
Joe R. Lansdale
As Long as Grass Shall Grow
Mercedes Lackey
A Simple Pine Box
James van Pelt
Fang for Fang, Fire for Blood
Ava Morgan
Junior & Me
Harry Turtledove
The Dead Can’t Die Twice
Samantha lee Howe
The Adventures of Rabbi Shlomo Jones and the Half-Baked Kid
Eytan Kollin
Rara Lupus
Julie Frost
Stealing Thunder from the Gods
Kim May
Kachina
James A. Moore
Finding Home
Irene Radford
The Murder of the Rag Doll Kid
David Boop
Hell-Bent
Tex Thompson
Ghost Men of Sunrise Mesa
Jonathan Maberry
About the Contributors
STRAIGHT
OUTTA
DODGE CITY
Edited by
DAVID BOOP
Straight Outta Dodge City
Edited by David Boop
Baen’s Weird Western Fantasy and Horror Anthology Series Becomes a Trilogy!
It’s the final showdown between heroes and darkness in the Old West. And boy, howdy . . . it’s a doozy! Humans versus monsters. Supernatural beings versus greater evils. We even throw in a dinosaur or two for fun. Come explore the untold myths of the west, one more time!
Joe Lansdale [Bubba Ho-Tep, Hap & Leonard] takes us on a train ride of the dammed in hopes of rescuing one innocent soul. Mercedes Lackey’s [SERRAted Edge series, Valdemar Universe] duty-bound man races to claim sacred land. Jonathan Maberry [V-Wars, Joe Ledger] introduces us to a half-Comanche hired gun running out of time against some murderous ghosts. Alt-History legend Harry Turtledove [Videssos Cycle] gives us a West . . . slightly askew from our own. And James A. Moore [Predator: Hunters and Hunted] pits skinwalker against kachina in a Western anthology any historian would love!
Plus Irene Radford looks for a new home for a house demon, Eytan Kollin raises golems, Kim May battles a mythical creature while dangling from an airship, and much, much more!
Just when you thought it was safe to go West again, comes the third anthology in the Straight Outta series!
Contributors:
Joe R. Lansdale
Mercedes Lackey
James Van Pelt
Ava Morgan
Harry Turtledove
Sam Stone
Eytan Kollin
Julie Frost
Kim May
James A. Moore
Irene Radford
David Boop
Tex Thompson
Jonathan Maberry
BAEN BOOKS edited by DAVID BOOP
Straight Outta Tombstone
Straight Outta Deadwood
Straight Outta Dodge City
Straight Outta Dodge City
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Straight Outta Dodge City copyright © 2020 by David Boop
Additional Copyright Information:
Foreword copyright © 2019 by David Boop; “The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train” copyright © 2019 by Joe R. Lansdale; “As Long as Grass Shall Grow” copyright © 2019 by Mercedes Lackey; “A Simple Pine Box” copyright © 2019 by James Van Pelt; “Fang for Fang, Fire for Blood” copyright © 2019 by Ava Morgan; “Junior & Me” copyright © 2019 by Harry Turtledove; “The Dead Can’t Die Twice” copyright © 2019 by Samantha Lee Howe; “The Adventures of Rabbi Shlomo Jones and the Half-Baked Kid” copyright © 2019 by Eytan Kollin; “Rara Lupus” copyright © 2019 by Julie Frost; “Stealing Thunder from the Gods” copyright © 2019 by Kim Mainord; “Kachina” copyright © 2019 by James A. Moore; “Finding Home” copyright © 2019 by Phyllis Irene Radford; “The Murder of the Rag Doll Kid” copyright © 2019 by David Boop; “Hell-Bent” copyright © 2019 by Tex Thompson; “Ghost Men of Sunrise Mesa” copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Maberry.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2436-6
eISBN: 978-1-62579-754-4
Cover art by Dominic Harman
First printing, February 2020
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boop, David, editor.
Title: Straight outta Dodge City / edited by David Boop.
Other titles: Straight out of Dodge City
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2020] | “A Baen Books original.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2019048645 | ISBN 9781982124366 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Western stories.
Classification: LCC PS648.W4 S76313 2020 | DDC 813/.087408—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048645
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
To the Daves (Summers and Riley)
This is all y’all’s fault, you know?
FOREWORD
DAVID BOOP
Many things that bring us joy in our lives came about by happy accidents. Coca-Cola, for example, started out as a headache medicine and, instead, became our remedy for sleepiness, the “solution” for cleaning pennies, and go-to for children who want to burp loudly, thus annoying their parents and grossing out their younger siblings. Thank you, Coke!
I never set out to write or edit weird westerns. I came by it quite by accident. I wanted to write mysteries. Specifically, amateur sleuth mysteries. I hoped to be the next Dick Francis, my favorite at the time. Even though I was a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, I considered them beyond my reach. How could I ever compete with Alan Dean Foster or Jack L. Chalker? And westerns? I hadn’t even considered them…yet.
In an attempt to break in as a mystery writer, this being ’bout 2003, I regularly searched for mystery publications and contests. The Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest required a western-themed mystery. On the surface, this seemed easy. Westerns are just a blend of tropes, right? White Hat. Outlaw. Murder. How hard could it be?
There have been many examples of that type of western writing out there, but good westerns, the type that stick with you, are far from cliché. Movies like Unforgiven, Tombstone, 3:10 to Yuma, and Silverado. Fiction such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Ox-Bow Incident (both turned into great movies), or the short story collection Bad Dirt by Annie Proulx (author of Brokeback Mountain). These are all examples of westerns that defied formula.
And yet, I have never done anything the easy way. Thinking I could set myself apart from other contestants, I dreamed up a story about an outlaw who wakes up dead and, as a ghost, has to solve his own murder. I bet no one had ever thought of that: a ghost solving his own murder! (He says naively.)
William Ragsdale, once a lawman, lives in the desert outside the Arizona town he once terrorized. Unmolested for many years, he’s murdered by someone holding a grudge. As he passes through the town
, looking for clues, the “Rag Doll Kid” must face his own sins as he looks for final redemption.
Print. Send. Wait.
Whether it was that the supernatural aspect was too much, or that there were waaay better-written stories submitted, “The Murder of the Rag Doll Kid,” did not achieve any recognition. As disappointment washed over me, I wondered if I would ever break into the industry I longed to be a part of? The answer was…
Sort of.
The story was rescued by a small indie spec-fic magazine called Tales of the Talisman shortly after losing in the contest.
Let me digress for a moment.
I get it. As a reader, you only have so much time in a day/week/month/year for reading, and you want to make sure every story you set aside time for is gold. Maybe you stick with only the well-known magazines, like Asimov’s or Analog, but, in doing so, you miss an opportunity to discover the next big name. There are many famous authors who got their first sale in a micropress ’zine. There are whole magazines dedicated strictly to the genre you love. Like cross-genre detectives? Try Occult Detective Quarterly. If slipstream fantasy and horror is your thing, Three-Lobed Burning Eye is for you. Want more weird westerns? Try Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
All you have to do is look and you will find.
Tales of the Talisman (originally Hadrosaur Tales) was the passion project of writer/editor David Lee Summers (whose story, “Fountains of Blood,” you might have read in Straight Outta Tombstone). It ran for twenty years and published short stories by the likes of Neal Asher, Beth Cato, and Marsheila Rockwell.
I happened to be at a convention with Mr. Summers, and I bemoaned my loss in the Hillerman contest. Curious, Dave asked for the plot of the Rag Doll Kid. After I explained, he said, “Well, that sounds like the type of thing I publish. I love weird westerns. Let me look at it.”
“Weird westerns?” I asked, “What’s that?”
“Any western crossed with another genre. By adding a ghost, you wrote a paranormal western, or…weird western.”
He definitely knew more about it than I did, so I sent the story to him. He liked it enough to publish it. He gave me my first check as a semi-pro author. This was a huge deal! With that sale, I learned I could submit and sell my work—something I wasn’t sure of before that. And this all happened with a genre I hadn’t known I was writing in. Happy accidents, right?
It should have occurred to me though. I’d grown up with The Wild Wild West reruns and TV movies, and loved shows like The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. I read Jonah Hex comics and watched The Valley of Gwangi and other cross-genre western serials on Saturday afternoons. My geek cred was there, but I hadn’t considered these types of westerns anything but westerns.
[Baen has allowed me to include an updated version of “The Murder of the Rag Doll Kid” in this volume, for your potential enjoyment.]
A funny thing happened right after my first weird western hit the stands. I got an email from another editor asking if I would write him a weird western story for his indie press.
David B. Riley is editor of Science Fiction Trails Magazine, a long running cross-genre publication that has gone through many incarnations over the years. At one point, it had become Steampunk Trails, then Story Emporium, and finally back to SFT. “Grismel Guffyfeld’s Quickdrawatorium” involved an alien presence setting up a virtual reality game to see who was the fastest gun in the galaxy. I continued to write more tall tales set in Drowned Horse, Arizona, and these would form the basis of my Drowned Horse Chronicle, of which twenty-some stories have been published to date. I’ve come to know the genre intimately as I’ve read the other stories I share anthologies with. My experience is partially why Baen trusted me to present you with three volumes of fantastic westerns. (Thank you, Toni!)
So, why tell you all of this? You were, most likely, drawn by the names on the cover and hoped to immerse yourself in their vision of an alternate world infused with dinosaur gunfighters and alien-altered werewolves. Maybe you longed for zombies, and ghosts of the past, and demons attacking Dodge City? Certainly, my origin story was not what you signed up for. But I do have a point (thanks for waiting).
If you are a writer like me—and many of you are—somebody will be the first to believe in your words. David Lee Summers not only published my first weird western story, but also my first science fiction story. David B. Riley has published more of my weird western and steampunk stories than anyone else, and I will continue to send him those stories as long as he is willing to look at them. They both believed in me, even when my craft wasn’t smooth and my endings weak.
And I’ve tried to honor their belief by paying it forward myself.
I’ve always looked for new voices, authors hitting their heads on the semi-pro ceiling for a long time, and then giving them a chance to prove they’re worth reading, too. You’ll find them in all three volumes of the Straight Outta series.
They deserve the same chance to be read that the Davids gave me.
Sadly, Tales of the Talisman and the Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Contest are no more. Summers continues to publish novels, many of them weird westerns, through Hadrosaur Press, and Anne Hillerman continues on with her father’s traditions over at WordHarvest Press. Fortunately, though, Science Fiction Trails lives on! Another Drowned Horse Chronicle appeared in their pages recently, as of this writing. I recommend you give them a read, and, if you fancy yourself a weird western writer accidently or on purpose, it’s a good magazine to get started with. Riley will do right by y’all.
Let me end with this dedication.
To David B. Riley and David Lee Summers.
I owe you both so much for leading me through the world of weird westerns. You’ve had patience with me, as I’ve struggled to get the story right. You’ve supported me as an author and as a person. We’ve laughed together and grieved together. Your faith in me is why there are these three volumes of weird western tales. You are great writers, editors, mentors, and friends.
I dedicate this anthology to you.
Thank You!
DB 02/16/19
The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train
JOE R. LANSDALE
There’s people don’t believe in booger stories, as my grandma used to call them, but that don’t mean there isn’t strange stuff out there in them dark woods or, for that matter, on the streets in town, out there on a buggy ride down to the river for a picnic, or coming through the woods spitting black smoke and carrying hell and damnation with it.
Thing is, once you know the world has a sliced sky from which things leak, well, you can’t never lay down at night without your protections.
I work in a gun shop and I live there too, but it isn’t just any gun shop. Zachary, who prefers to be called Zach, repairs and even makes guns, but he’s got another kind of job that don’t always pay and sometimes does, depending. But it’s a job he will take on either way in the end. If he tries to dicker and fails to get some money out of the deal, he just sighs and goes on with it.
Zach had owed a hundred good deeds on account of a bad thing he did, and on the day the old man came in, his black skin graying, his black suit graying, as well, thinning too, a wide-brimmed black hat on his head with a white feather in it, I seen Zach perk up. Zach had done ninety-nine good deeds and still owed one more. That was the only way he could get rid of the baggage. He thought that old man might be the last deed needed for him to get shed of his little problem.
Now, when I say good deeds, I don’t mean help an old lady across the street so she don’t get run over by wild horses. A thing like that is damn sure a nice thing to do, but it don’t go on the ledger, so to speak. It’s got to be bigger than that. Something real special.
I guess Zach’s around fifty or so, though I have heard people comment on how he seems to stay at an age and not move away from it. Zach is a stout man with a gleam in his eye, and his skin is dark as the bottom of a well, and always shiny, like he just ran a race in the hot sunshine. He’s alw
ays bent forward a little, like he’s considering tying his shoe. If he wore shoes.
Zach not only makes and repairs guns, he can shoot them right smart, as well, and has a fast draw. And then, of course, there are all the magic books and talismans. He knows that stuff. That’s his side business, and all the business he does, he does well.
I was sold to him when I was young by my folks who didn’t want me. They were going through town with a traveling medicine wagon. They sold a few bottles of this and that. All of which my mama made, and nearly all of them a mixture of water and whisky and berry juice, but nothing that would do anything for you but make you slightly drunk and loosen your bowels.
Cure-all my folks called it, but it didn’t cure much. I didn’t miss them any. My pa beat me, and mama didn’t love me enough to even hit me. I don’t know it for a fact, but I heard they was hung from an oak tree for selling something that made a child get sick and die. Mama probably put the wrong berry juice in a bottle or some such when she was drunk. She could be a bad drunk. It was the parents of that child and some townsfolks that did them in. It wasn’t the law, but it was justice, no doubt.