Straight Outta Dodge City

by David Boop

  What came at them was substantially smaller than a full-grown buffalo. Slate, who was good at estimating the size of the people he’d once made caskets for, guessed the hulking creature came close to a thousand pounds.

  The bullet Slate put through its chest staggered the thing.

  The ogre came to a stop and teetered for a moment, but kept its feet. The beast had made it closer to them than they hoped, by a good stretch.

  Crowley let out a soft whistle as he stared at the hole in the creature. Blood seeped from the front. He could not see where the bullet had left, if in fact, it did exit the body.

  Slate very calmly placed his rifle back in its scabbard and drew his Remington Army revolvers.

  Before doing anything else, he asked Crowley. “And did you intend to join in this battle, Mr. Crowley?”

  Crowley nodded toward the distant shape. When Slate looked again, the ogre had returned to its previous trajectory toward them and continued to pick up speed.

  “You should keep your eyes on your enemy, Mr. Slate. Doing otherwise could easily prove fatal.”

  As the beast charged toward him, it drew weapons of its own seemingly from thin air. In the left hand, it carried a massive club—a curved, wooden affair with several large spines running along one side. The other hand sported an oversized saber, rusted in places and all too well used.

  Slate’s heels struck the sides of his horse, and he drove forward, his coat fluttering behind him like dark wings.

  Crowley said not a word as the two came closer together. There was no one to hear his words, in any event, except the ghost that was watching beside him.

  “Why do you not fight?”

  “I will if I have to. This is a chance for Mr. Slate to test himself.”

  The ogre headed for Lucas Slate with powerful, thick legs and a body as wide as a horse’s ribcage. The face was a bestial thing, with a wide muzzle filled with overly large, wide teeth surrounded by blackened gums. Its nose was a mass of wrinkles with two broad slits and its eyes were small and half-hidden by a heavy brow. Ramlike horns adorned the forehead, long and curved and as black as midnight. The ears would have baffled many people, but Crowley had long since studied the creatures of the wild and understood that the shape he was looking at most clearly resembled the ears of some bats. Surrounding that oddity of a face was a thick mane of black hair that ran from the head halfway down the torso of the creature. Several stone beads and feathers had been tied into that hair.

  It wore clothes—rawhide pants, a rawhide vest, a heavy belt with a scabbard on one side and a loop on the other, and several necklaces adorned with bones and what looked like skulls of different creatures—and carried weapons. It was not without intelligence, though it hardly seemed to merit credit for civility.

  It was a simple fact: Lucas Slate was new at handguns and wasn’t very good with them. Give him a shotgun and he was dangerous enough. At long range with a rifle, he was decidedly terrifying, but with revolvers? His aim left much to be desired and doubly so when one considered he was riding at a full run on a horse, over uneven terrain.

  No one was more surprised than Jonathan Crowley when the bullets hit their target. Still, when one considered the size of the target, the challenge was lessened a bit. Round after round struck the charging creature and staggered it again and again. Any of those shots would surely have killed a man if he’d been struck in the same places, but the bullets had no more effect than the rifle did.

  The ogre—Nata-Aska—kept coming, and Lucas Slate urged his horse on until it rammed into the creature with its full weight. Horse, rider, and beast all fell together in a wave of violent force.

  Jonathan Crowley dismounted. He would step in if he had to, but one of the reasons he traveled with Slate was to assess what he was becoming and, whatever that something might be, it was offended by the very existence of the creature it now faced off against.

  He wanted to help Slate. He did. But first, he had to know if the man could take care of himself.

  Slate was taller than most, almost eight inches taller than Crowley himself, who was only average in height. Still, he seemed miniscule when compared to the thing that came for him as he threw his handguns aside.

  The beast was as big as four of the albino, taller by a head and shoulders as broad across as three of him. The mouth of the beast opened again and it roared, spittle blowing from that gaping maw and wetting Slate’s face.

  Had there ever been a time when he thought the pale man looked meek? Surely so, but not just then; there was murder painted on the man’s features, his eyes narrowed with fury and his teeth bared in a snarl.

  The creature swept its weapons back over its head, preparing to bring ruination down upon Slate. While the pale man watched that massive weapon waving in the air, the thing he was fighting brought its other fist up and smashed it into Slate’s chest like an ax into a log.

  Lucas Slate, a man who simply did not move if he did not want to, was knocked through the air, bloodied and dazed. When he hit the ground he did not move.

  “Well, damn me.” Crowley looked at his companion’s unmoving form and felt a nervous flutter in his stomach. He couldn’t exactly call Slate a friend, but he hoped the man had survived.

  Nata-Aska turned toward Crowley and roared. The sound was loud enough to deafen, and the thing raised its saber and stampeded in his direction, the earth shaking with each footfall the behemoth made.

  The blade was big enough to cleave him in two. The ogre tried to ram the point through Crowley’s body.

  Jonathan Crowley dropped under the saber and rolled himself closer to the charging monster. His leg swept up and the heel of his foot drove into the crotch of his enemy. He felt the testicle on the ogre crunch on impact.

  Any thoughts of how loudly the beast had screamed before were erased at the sound that came from Nata-Aska.

  Crowley rolled to his feet and stared at the ogre.

  The old man’s ghost laughed with pure glee.

  The ogre turned toward Crowley and threw the sword aside, its hands clenching and unclenching as it, doubtless, considered the best way to rip him into shreds. Crowley moved himself to the side, careful to make sure the beast didn’t have a clear line of sight to either the horses or Lucas Slate.

  The beast spoke. He had no idea what words were uttered, but the fury in its voice was impossible to miss.

  The old man’s ghost said, “He intends to kill you now.”

  “I expected as much.”

  Crowley stood his ground and prepared. Nata-Aska would come for him. There were many methods of handling the situation. He expected most of them would end with him recovering from several broken bones.

  The great beast came for him again, and Crowley considered whether to dodge the beast or topple it.

  Instead he watched Lucas Slate come from the side and crash into the ogre, driving an elbow into the thing’s eye.

  Lucas Slate, the mildest man he’d met in Carson’s Point, Colorado, had changed a great deal since they’d first encountered each other, but at that moment Crowley would have been hard pressed to state anything aside from skin color that the undertaker he’d known and the Skinwalker he traveled with had in common.

  He could clearly see where Slate had been struck by the ogre. His chest was broken in that spot, his ribs were in the wrong positions and the whole of his torso was bruising from the force of the blow.

  By rights the man should have been as dead as he looked, but he was moving, and screaming and there was a savagery to him that should not have been there. For one moment, only one, his eyes, so pale a blue as to seem nearly white, were the color of midnight.

  The ogre gestured and its saber was once again held in its grasp.

  Slate stood taller and as Crowley watched the broken bones in the Skinwalker’s chest moved back to where they belonged with several wet, cracking sounds.

  While Nata-Aska tried to recover from the damage Slate had done to his eye, which was bleeding now, Sla
te stepped in close and drove his hard fist directly into the thing’s throat with as much force as he could muster. The flesh under that furry neck rippled, and the beast did the only thing it could in that situation—it coughed hard trying to breathe. Slate’s hand reached out again, grabbing the hand the beast wrapped around the hilt of its weapon. The creature coughed again and leaned forward, hacking and gasping, trying desperately to take in a breath.

  Slate wrenched the saber away and, stepping back, clutched the oversized hilt in both of his hands.

  Crowley still did nothing.

  The ogre had come for Slate, and according to their dead companion, it was the very nightmare that had killed at least fifty people. Those people likely had blood on their hands. He’d seen what Slate either did not see or did not care to mention: He’d seen the box of Confederate gold resting near the bodies of three dead men. The likelihood was that the gold had not been given freely by the soldiers of the Confederate Army. It hardly mattered that the war was over two years past. He did not care that the very dead holding the gold might well have had good reason for taking it. The odds were that they had killed to get it and that made them both human and monsters in his eyes.

  They were mortal monsters, however, and so not his concern.

  The great beast shook its head and gasped, desperate to breathe.

  Lucas Slate slammed the ogre’s sword into its breast, the blade erupting from its back.

  There was no other sound. The creature dropped to the ground with an audible thud that Crowley felt from twenty paces away.

  Slate looked down at the dead creature and panted. For once the man truly seemed focused on his agenda.

  “Well done, Mr. Slate. I’m glad to see you actually concentrating on a task.”

  He looked back at Crowley only for a moment, but while he did so, the great form before him crumbled into a mass of black ash.

  Crowley said nothing about that, and instead saw the look of surprise that slipped over Slate’s face.

  “We should leave this place, Mr. Crowley.”

  Crowley looked around and saw the ghost was gone, too. Once avenged the old man moved on, which was what he should have done. Still, he found the lack of the old man’s voice left a void he did not expect.

  “Indeed we should, Mr. Slate. Jacobi is still out there.”

  Finding Home

  IRENE RADFORD

  Take me home, Katie. Kormos bit back the bitter taste of using his host’s nickname in his telepathic communication. How was a housegod supposed to know who was whom if they didn’t use their given name?

  When she’d been born, he’d searched the upper world for days, trying to find this girl’s true spirit. The quest went poorly. His search, as always, was limited to relatives who had passed above and not below. He’d never revive the spirit of one who had been found guilty of their evil ways. It was bad form to attempt to resurrect one who had been consumed by his mistress. The goddess of the underworld got a bit testy when you tried.

  On the other hand, all was not hidden. Ykaterina, Katie’s great-great-grandmother, had been an exemplary woman. Her name was worthy of this independent-thinking girl child, hopefully an accurate forecast of Katie’s true spirit.

  “Shut up. I’m concentrating,” Katie Murray snapped at him out loud—she heard his mind speech, but did not reply by the same means—as she ran her hands along the rubber hose that carried the steam condensate back from the powered looms. The rubber was a prototype from a friend trying to make it stronger and more flexible than other rubbers, and if it failed, the whole system could be damaged.

  Why do you build this thing of steam and pistons? Kormos asked. This place can never be home for me, or any of your descendants. We need cold winds and reindeer herds to be complete.

  “You’ve whined and complained about that for nigh on sixty years to one or another of our clan. When are you going to wake up and spit out the vodka? That home doesn’t exist anymore. Granny’s family was kicked out of Siberia by the tsar’s Cossacks. You’re lucky she survived to carry you here. Oregon is a great place to live. Besides, if she hadn’t come here, she’d never have met Gramps.”

  She found a man to love. That doesn’t complete a home. It takes more, said Kormos, pounding the inside of Ykaterina’s mind.

  “You can’t stand that Granny and Gramps were happy together because you have never loved anyone. Not even yourself. Now let me work. This is important.”

  He stomped his foot within the tiny carved fetish that imprisoned him. You need me to generate some chaos among you and your two first cousins. If you get angry enough with each other, you’ll abandon this thing you are doing. This horrible project that will be the death of me! Then you will know I am right.

  “I could cut my hair,” she said, but kept her focus on the myriad pipes and hoses that made up the boiler for the steam-powered loom. She lay under the apparatus fiddling with connections.

  No, he gasped, appalled. He couldn’t imagine existing without the sacred protection of a braid. Katie’s ancestors knew the importance of elaborate plaits and incorporated them into embroidery and carved designs.

  “I cut my hair, and you’d wind up living on a shelf. A dusty forgotten souvenir sitting out of sight with nobody to talk to. No contact with anyone in the family.” She squeezed the slight bulge in her thick black braid where a carved reindeer horn statuette resided. He’d been trapped inside the ugly representation since…since his people abandoned their hide-and-mud hut and accepted exile in the new world. The carved figure depicted Kormos accurately with bulging eyes and distended tummy. He had a domed head without a single hair, and spindly limbs—a fine figure of a housegod.

  Steam can’t warm your spirit like a good fire of reindeer dung, he pouted.

  “Steam comes from science and makes a much warmer house. And reindeer dung won’t power the loom. Besides, our house isn’t a one-room hide tent with three generations inside like it was in your day,” Katie said.

  Your science steals the ability to believe. Would you have me wither away to nothing? The goddess of the underworld would starve for a lack of evil souls to feast upon if that happened. It is my destiny to feed her with what I create.

  Katie smirked. The evil that Kormos recorded—or created—was of the petty variety. His goddess would starve if she counted on Kormos, and all the other Siberian housegods, and their version of evil, for food.

  Of course, Katie mused, if she didn’t find the problem with this hose, she might need reindeer dung to stay warm this winter.

  Kormos pressed his hands to his head. The girl was impossible. The current generation of offspring were so good intentioned and impervious to chaos as to be almost saintly. They even attended church, without the priest forcing them.

  And even worse, the Murray clan, how he hated that name, had diluted their fine Siberian blood by marrying outside the tribes. Their beloved Gramps.

  That was how it started. They wouldn’t respond to Kormos’s need for chaos, for the friction, the heated energy it brought. He thrived on violence. He fed the Goddess with volatile emotions. But now, he was weak. Only Katie could sense him, and she ignored his needs. She was selfish. She did not fear the Goddess, ignoring his pushes into anger and temper tantrums.

  Katie had the thick black hair Kormos cherished as a resting place for his fetish. It reminded him of better days. She wore it in two fat plaits that hung below her waist. Without a braid to cradle him, he’d be an invisible spirit drifting aimlessly, the family beyond his calling.

  It was no wonder he weakened. No wonder he slept more than he kept vigil. With a weary sigh, he peered into the gloomy interior of the brick building and shuddered with dread at the permanence of the baked clay. Was this his fate? Inert matter, with no soul, for a dwelling? A hide tent carried the soul of the departed reindeer, fulfilling its fate far beyond life.

  While Katie twisted and fiddled beneath and around the boiler, only the angle of the sun changed. Even now, Kormos could s
ee the sun, visible through the doorway, two small windows and a ceiling vent. His hostess still lay under the massive metal machine that spelled his doom and theirs. Her new housegod, he mused.

  I want to go home!

  Katie ignored him.

  You needn’t worry so much about the machine, he admonished Katie. The itty-bitty crack in the line will leak tiny amounts of steam. That will make the wood of your wool carding machine, the spinners, and loom wet. They will seek their original form, with unforced curves until they rejoin the cycle of life. What is the harm if the machine falls limp and useless? It would be a blessing. Without this mill to support you and your cousins, you will take me home to Siberia. You would find warmth within the tents made from reindeer hide. You’ll learn to love the aroma of meat cooked over a dung fire. He lost himself in a daydream of the old times.

  He wished he could whisper into the minds of the poets and artists and dreamers in the family instead of only the scientist. He blamed it in part on the fact that the magical chain of seven children broke with this generation. Not one of them had more than a single sibling. And all three first cousins working to build this mill looked to have no inclination to marry and breed. Who would care for him then?

  I’m doomed, Kormos wailed.

  “Seneca, do we have any more rubber hose?” Katie called to the cousin closest to her in age, eighteen months older than herself.

  “Let me look.” He set down his new repeater rifle—a weapon worthy only of Cossacks as Kormos had pointed out when he bought it—and scrambled through a pile of discarded materials and tools.

  “Rubber is expensive,” Isolde, older than Ykaterina by only three years, said from her post on the wooden step below the open doorway. “Starting this enterprise was your idea. You enlisted our help. You’re the reason Gramps loaned us any money at all.”

  “We got the land and the remnants of the buildings and the engine for cheap, so we could afford necessities we can’t make ourselves, like rubber,” Katie grumbled. “That’s what Gramps wanted us to do. Use the money wisely.”