by Thomas Hall
“You heard me boy.”
A moment of doubt, of hesitation, what if this wasn’t what it seemed? Were they going to kill him, or was this all some stupid game? If he killed the man then they would come for him, whether they were playing now or not.
He bit his lip but didn’t move the bead he’d drawn on the man.
“Are you gonna run boy!” the man shouted. The anger on his face looked genuine enough.
He squeezed the trigger and the man’s head was a mist of blood before the gunshot had finished echoing. The other men were slow to react; they hadn’t had their guns out before and they fumbled to draw them now.
The man who Kade had shot stood between them. It seemed to take an age for him to fall. Everything seemed to slow down. He couldn’t afford to wait for the others to react, however slow and clumsy they appeared to be. They still outnumbered him.
He fired two more shots but didn’t stick around to find out whether any of them hit. He heard one man cry out in pain, but it had been a clumsy shot and he hadn’t expected to kill another of them. It caused enough confusion that he could jump onto Heck and reloaded, while she started to gallop.
The men came after him but they were on foot and he was much quicker. He fired twice more and let Heck deal with getting them the hell out of there.
The streets were still dark but they felt anything but abandoned now. It had always been unlikely that the six men had come alone. It was no surprise then, when shots came at him from other directions. There was no time to stop and investigate, his single advantage was his speed and Heck was a master at that. She took him flying through the streets. The closest he came to getting shot was feeling the whisper of wind as bullets flew past him.
Kade looked around. The darkness was imposing and the people shooting at him might have been anywhere. He could see about five metres in any direction, but further than that and he was blind. Could they see him? He wondered. Judging by their guns they had a military cache somewhere. Night vision goggles weren’t out of the question. A shame for them that they hadn’t thought to wear armour.
Heck ran right through to the other side of the town and came to a stop. They both understood it when men with guns wanted to kill them, but the desert was even less friendly at night. Neither one of them wanted to come across a wolf, or something worse.
The laughter returned.
He looked around and wondered how many people were trying to kill him.
How many people would he have to kill before they let him leave.
Kade replaced the last two bullets that he’d used up and spun the cylinder. Waiting for his heart to slow down. Waiting for the men to reveal themselves.
Nothing.
He couldn’t tell whether time was still passing in that slow way of battle, or if the men had given up. They might have lost track of him, or were trying to draw him out.
He waited, confident that they would reveal themselves soon. This was their hunt; he didn’t get to take charge of how it panned out.
He continued to wait.
They came at him all at once. Too many of them to count. Some on horseback, some on foot. The gunshots tore through the wooden buildings either side of him. A single bullet nicked his left arm and he felt the pain he needed to continue.
Some men might have given up faced with such overwhelming odds, but Kade was not a man to go down without a fight.
As soon as he saw the first of them he started to fire.
Heck moved around to make him a more difficult target to hit. The space they had to play with wasn’t big, but there were ways of using that to his advantage. He shot at the one’s he could see first, sending men to their deaths on the dusty ground. Others came forward, stepping over the fallen as if they were nothing but dust themselves.
He lost count of the number he killed. Reloading his revolver as he went, hardly pausing to take a breath. His kill number went up and up.
The heat of more bullets flying past his head kept him going. Any one of them could hit him.
There was no sign of the flow of men stopping, even as he killed more and more of them.
If he didn’t get out, then the bodies he was leaving behind would block him in. He needed to leave the township, even the desert seemed to offer a better chance of survival. It was a massacre, and only a matter of time before the tide turned and he would be counted amongst the dead.
“Time to go!” he said and Heck started to move.
She was a quick horse and jumped over the piles of dead bodies that blocked their path. The men on foot fell away behind him as Heck galloped into the distance. After a few seconds Kade began to hear pursuing riders closing the gap between them.
“You’re tired girl, I know,” he said. They had travelled for most of a day and it was the middle of the night so she hadn’t been able to rest long. “But we’ve got to go, understand. You need to dig deep for me princess.”
He felt the strength of her muscles beneath him and the town sped past them. To stay in the saddle, he had to hold on with both hands and depend on her speed alone to get them away.
His arm throbbed where the bullet had entered, but there would be time to deal with that later. A more pressing concern was the men who were still shooting at him.
“Least they’re all behind us now,” he said.
A bullet came close enough to singe the hair on his ears. He ducked, wrapping his arms around Heck, and hoped that they would make it. He wasn’t ready to enter the passage yet.
A moment later they burst past the final buildings. After that there was nothing ahead of them except endless desert. The cold struck him at once but they couldn’t afford to slow down. Even if the men didn’t dare follow them into the dust, they would still be able to shoot them.
He allowed Heck to slow a little, he could feel her trembling beneath him as they continued to move. If anything happened to her...
A shot went off but when he turned back there was no sign that they were being followed.
“What’s the matter Preach?” a man shouted. “You not want to party?”
He wanted to ask them why they called him Preach but he wanted to save his skin more. He didn’t reply but kept moving.
Heck slowed to a trot.
“Well I guess we’re spending the night out here after all,” Kade said. They didn’t stop though, and they wouldn’t until he was sure they would be safe.
CHAPTER 3
THEY WALKED THROUGH THE NIGHT AND STILL DIDN’T reach the town until the early afternoon of the following day. Heck was close to exhausted and Kade wasn’t far behind. He had done his best to put the happenings of the last town behind him, but it was difficult to forget it completely.
A part of him wanted answers, but he knew he would never get them. It all seemed too strange, too elaborate, to be a game.
There was a rusty sign standing in the dust on the outskirts of the township. It was pockmarked with bullet holes and fringed with rust.
SWIFT CREEK
Kade could hear shouts and bustle and see the movement of people ahead. He tensed, as if they were going to come for him like they had in the last place. It was the lack of sleep; it did funny things to a man’s mind.
He dismounted and led Heck past the sign. She hesitated, but she knew her master and followed him without real protest.
There were a lot of people in Swift Creek and it made him uncomfortable. He tried to remember whether that was how he always felt after a time wandering in the desert.
A child in a red skirt and white blouse ran past him, calling out to unseen friends. She didn’t so much as glance in his direction and that helped. He wasn’t anyone to these people… unless it was another trap.
Kade shook his head. “Need to get some sleep girl,” he said. His mind was starting to play tricks on him. “Not as young as I used to be.” Although neither was he particularly old. Still in his thirtieth year, he wasn’t ready to fall apart yet.
As they got closer to the centre of Swift
Creek he began to hear music. Someone played a familiar song on an out of tune piano. Another person sang, but they struggled to keep in time with the music and had no talent for it. They sounded drunk, although it was not long past noon.
There was a market in the middle of the town. Wooden stalls lined the road but there were too many people for Kade to see what they were selling. He led Heck around the outskirts, not wanting to draw attention to himself. That could wait until tomorrow. The only thing he wanted to do now was bed down and sleep away the anxiety that the previous night had left him with.
He found the local tavern. The doors were open and he could see inside. It was where the music was coming from. The pianist and the out of tune singer working on a new song now.
As Kade stood there a man flew out the door backwards and landed in the dust a few inches in front of him. Kade looked down at the scrawny man; his face was blotchy and red from drinking.
Another man appeared at the door, this one fat and bald. He was wearing a black waistcoat and white shirt. “And don’t come back until you’ve got some money Shep.”
The man on the ground, Shep, mumbled something and managed to turn himself over so he could crawl away on his hands and knees. Kade watched it happen with a mixture of disgust and fascination. What sort of place was Swift Creek?
“Can I help you?”
Kade looked up, the man in the waistcoat was talking to him, but his tone hadn’t changed from anger.
“You got a problem stranger?”
“No problem,” Kade said. “Looking for a room.”
The bald man looked him up and down. “You got money?”
He took his coin purse from his belt and reached inside. There wasn’t much left, but it was easy to earn more. There was enough for food and rest. Kade threw the man a coin and he caught it.
“Leave your horse around the back,” the man said and then he disappeared inside the tavern with Kade’s money.
The room was smaller than he’d hoped. No space for a bath, only for the small bed wedged beneath the window. He dropped his bag on the dusty floor and sat down.
He started pulling off his boots but there was a knock on the door before he’d gotten the second one off.
“What is it?” he said, no energy left for manners.
The door creaked open. A young woman dressed in pink, her golden hair done up in ringlets and curls that sat on top of her head like a crown, came in. She was carrying a wooden tray.
“The governor thought you might be hungry,” she said. Her voice sounded false.
“Set it down on the floor,” he said, looking away from her to pull off his other boot.
The woman did as he told her and then stood up. She waited at the door with her hands behind her back, watching him.
“Was there something else?” he said.
“That depends,” she said with false coyness. “Is there anything else you want?”
Kade realised what she was and what she was offering. He wasn’t a saint, but he’d never had to pay for the company of a woman and he had no intention of doing so now. “I’m fine,” he said.
“As you say,” the woman said and then she turned around and left.
The food wasn’t much. The meat overdone and the vegetables missing. He ate without enthusiasm and then drank coffee that was so thick he could have used it to paint the walls. Then he climbed onto the bed. Exhaustion had claimed his thoughts and the only thing that called him now was the darkness.
Kade slept.
The floor seemed to shake beneath him. The music made the walls shudder and turned his small room into a loud speaker.
Kade opened his eyes.
It was dark.
How long had he slept?
He couldn’t be sure.
He reached for his boots and pulled them on. He raised a gun and confirmed it was loaded.
The door opened onto a landing. He was on the third floor but he could hear the shouting and stamping as if he was right in the middle of it. Kade paused and looked both ways, not sure what he expected to see. There was nothing there except a row of closed doors.
He wiped the sleep from his eyes and stepped out, keeping his gun raised but not cocked. There was a chemical confusion in his body and he felt as if he was still half asleep.
Was the tavern under attack?
He reached the next landing without incident and paused at the door. The music continued and the shouting grew louder. He wondered what time it was, who was out there and what was happening.
Kade opened the next door.
The second floor was where the whores plied their trade. It was open to the bar beneath and a more dangerous prospect because of it. The smell of perfume was strong enough to make him choke.
Three women stood with their backs to him. They didn’t seem like a threat so he looked further past them in each direction.
A man stumbled out of one of the rooms. Blind drunk and still buttoning his trousers. He gave up with the flies still undone and reached into his pocket for a cigarillo. He struggled to light it for a few minutes and then a girl came out of the room he had been in.
Kade took a step back. He felt as if he was going to vomit. The girl didn’t look older than twelve but she was wearing the same ill-fitting costume as the rest of the women. She put a hand on the man’s arm and he turned to look at her. The girl, no more than a child, struck a match and put it to the end of his cigarillo.
His finger tightened on the trigger. If he’d had a clean shot he might have taken it, but there seemed as much chance that he would hit one of the girls. Instead he watched the man lean down and kiss the child as if she was a woman and then walk over to the stairs. The girl went back into her room and the party continued as if nothing abnormal had happened.
Kade put his gun away and closed the door. He stood on the balcony while the girls paraded themselves up and down. Now that he looked at them again he saw several who were too young to be there, as well as several who were too old.
After a moment, he walked towards the stairs, his footsteps slow and unhurried. He knew that he held the advantage because he of all the people there was sober and clear headed. If it came down to a fight, then there was little question who would win. Spirits would hamper even the fastest draw.
The bar was full of people. Most of them men, but more than a handful of women who weren’t working. They crowded around tables, drinking unmarked spirits, playing cards, dominos and other games. A group stood around the old piano, spilling their drinks on the ground and singing along to songs that had been old when Kade was young.
Kade followed the man to the bar. He ordered a shot of something so strong that Kade could smell it from where he stood.
He had a bad feeling about these people. He was starting to think that there was something wrong about the place. He took a stool beside the man.
“The traveller returns, huh?” the bartender who had taken his money earlier said.
“Give me whiskey,” Kade said.
The bald man grumbled something but poured his drink.
“Busy night,” he said.
“Pretty standard,” the bald man said. “You looking for work?”
“I was talking to him,” Kade said.
A pale face with red rimmed eyes turned to look at him. The man beside him looked tired and underfed, but apart from that he seemed quite normal. Kade wanted him to look like a monster, but they rarely did. “Me?” he said.
“No one else here,” Kade said.
The pale man shook his head and turned away, not wanting to engage.
“Name’s Kade.”
The man didn’t look at him.
“You got a name partner?”
“Angelo,” the man said.
Kade picked up the glass but didn’t drink. He didn’t want to appear too interested in the man, but he needed to know how much resistance he was likely to face. “You from around here?” he said.
The man turned to look at him and smiled. The
few teeth that he had were yellow, the rest had rotted away. “Listen mister, I appreciate the interest, but I ain’t looking for a friend tonight.”
No, Kade thought, you’d buy one if you were. He nodded and then turned away. The bald man was in the kitchen behind the bar. He could hear meat hissing as it fried.
“Say, who owns this place?” Kade said.
“What?” the bald man called out over the rattle of pots and pans.
Kade shook his head. Of course, his first instinct was to protect the girl by gutting the man who’d raped her. But that wouldn’t fix the problem. She worked here, others would come. The only way to keep her safe was to go after whoever owned the place.
He sipped the whiskey. It burned his throats and cleared the last of the sleep from his head. Going after a landlord was always a risky move. They usually had money and money bought a lot of friends. The owner of a tavern would be better protected, his patrons might even raise guns in his defence.
Angelo raised his glass and the bald head appeared to refill it. When he went to take out his money, Kade raised a hand.
“Let me,” he said.
The bartender looked at Angelo and for a moment it seemed as if he would refuse. Then he shrugged and Kade handed over another coin. “I don’t owe you nothing though,” he said.
“A free drink is a free drink,” Kade said and didn’t attempt to start another conversation.
He listened to the sounds of the bar, to the conversations and the arguments, to the singing and the shouting. It seemed normal enough, but after what he’d seen... there was something unsettling about the place.
“You from around here?” Angelo said.
“You’re talking to me now then?” Kade said, not turning towards him.
“You want to talk, you’re buying.”
Kade shrugged.
“So where are you from?”
“Around.”
“Useful,” Angelo said. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a great conversationalist. It’s supposed to go both ways you know.”
“Who owns this place?” Kade said.
“Like that, is it?”