Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  The hem of her nightgown bunched in her left hand, Lizzie crawled across the porch floor, toward the open front door. Peggy was just ahead of her. Lizzie’s bare knees ached against the pressure of the hardwood floor. The holsters at her hips slapped lightly against her as she moved. The Winchester 94’s buttstock regularly tapped against the floor with each movement. All in all, crossing from the porch to the central room with their late-twentieth-century conveniences was arduous in the extreme, but she dared not stand and make a run for it. Jess Fowler’s men were dismounted, had taken what cover they could, and so far their indiscriminate gunfire had shattered windows at the front of the house, ventilated furniture and pockmarked the wall over the large mantle against which her father had leaned when he’d spoken with Titus Blake.

  But neither Peggy nor she had been hit, and Lizzie intended things to remain that way.

  At last, after what seemed an eternity, they reached the doorway leading into the hidden room. Beneath a rug was the trapdoor entrance to a tunnel. The tunnel’s main purpose was to obscure from view the water pipes leading from the stream and the electrical cable leading from the waterwheel that served as their generator. But the tunnel led to the stream, and there was a means of egress before actually reaching the water. Her mother had put it best. “I don’t think your father is expecting an Indian raid or anything, but it would be silly to have this perfectly nice tunnel and not be able to take advantage of it, just in case something happened.” Knowing her father, Elizabeth Naile figured that he might very well have fantasized a group of “renegades jumping the reservation and out looking for scalps” or something like that but now, she was quite thankful for the tunnel.

  As soon as both she and Peggy were inside the secret room, they were able to stand. Once the seriously heavy door was closed and bolted behind them, she put down her rifle and the boxes of ammunition she’d carried basket-fashion within the fabric of her bunched up nightgown. She set to work pulling the rug out of the way and prying up the trapdoor.

  ***

  Lizzie crouched in the down-pouring cold rain beside the tunnel’s escape hatch. Bricked around to form a frame, the actual door was crafted of teakwood, so as to be resistant to weather. The doorway was about twenty yards from the stream, well below the level of the house, out of sight of the men Jess Fowler had brought with him. Peggy crept out next, proclaiming the obvious in a loud stage whisper. “It’s raining!”

  “Come on, Peggy.” Lizzie was no more enthused about getting soaked to the skin than was the girl she considered a sister-in-law, her cousin’s wife. But there was work to be done before they could come in out of the rain. Liz had already decided that if they survived, Peggy could have the first hot shower, but she promised herself she’d beat Peggy to death if she used up all the hot water. “Keep the muzzle of your rifle out of the dirt so you don’t get a bore obstruction.” Her father would have been so proud of her, she thought.

  Liz had appropriated a linen tablecloth from the large round table on which incriminating late-twentieth-century framed family photographs were displayed in the secret room. Tying the ends together, she’d formed a sack in which she could more easily carry the spare ammunition for the rifles.

  Creeping along the base of the drop-off that paralleled the stream, Lizzie issued orders sotto voce. “I want you to find a good spot and stay there. I’ll be moving. All you need to be able to do is keep firing in the general direction of the bad guys. Don’t expose yourself trying to get an accurate shot. I want them firing toward you. They’ll have to expose themselves in order to do that with us being behind them. As they do, I’ll pick them off and keep moving. You’ll be the only fixed target, so you have to stay well within cover. Just shove the muzzle of the rifle around or over whatever it is you’re hiding behind and keep firing. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do the rest.” As a whisper only she herself could hear, Lizzie added, “God willing I don’t get shot.”

  The volume of gunfire pouring toward the front porch had largely subsided, which meant Fowler’s men would soon plan on advancing against the house.

  That would make things even better—maybe.

  Peggy was well hidden behind an outcropping of rock above the embankment leading up from the bank of the stream. Only the most impossibly ricocheting shot could have a chance of hitting her if she stayed down and fired from one side of the outcropping or the other, but not from over it.

  Leaving Peggy with an extra fifty or so rounds of .3030 Winchester, Liz went farther along the base of the embankment in order to come up well behind and to the side of Fowler’s men. Her father’s pet rifle with the pretty walnut stock and the gleaming Metalife finish was just inside the front door of the house, unceremoniously stuffed under a chair. The wiser move had been the one she’d chosen—take the rifle that fired a rifle cartridge rather than a revolver cartridge. One of the ordinary blue steel Model 94s in her hands in what her father would have called an “assault position,” she slogged her way onward through the increasingly sticky mud. Water was washing down over the embankment, the rain so heavy that she could barely see.

  But that was also good.

  If she was able to shoot a few of Fowler’s men, considering the cold, the rain and the darkness, only the most dedicated of Fowler’s minions would elect to continue shooting it out.

  The toe of her shoe caught in the hem of her ruined, soaked-through nightgown, and Liz nearly fell. She stopped, stood, caught her breath and told herself that it was time to get up the embankment and get to work.

  With visibility as limited as it was, the darkness nearly absolute in the downpour, Liz more carefully inspected the embankment as she walked slowly onward. After another minute or two, she found a spot less steep and with outcroppings of rock that might provide some sort of purchase for her hands and feet.

  The rifle had no sling, and she could not hold it and climb at the same time. But the pistols she wore would be useless at any true distance, at least in her hands. “Think,” Liz exhorted herself. She had to make a sling. There was a ruffle at the hem of her nightgown. Unsheathing the knife from her gun belt, she cut into the ruffle where it was sewn to the gown, found the seam and tore.

  The ruffle came away relatively cleanly. The knife resheathed, Lizzie tied one end of the ruffle to the muzzle end of the rifle just forward of the handguard, the other to the butt just behind the lever. If she had to, before removing the improvised sling, the rifle could still be fired.

  Adjusting the sling to be a tight fit across her back, Liz Naile attacked the embankment. With the first step, she fell, slid, soaked her upper body in mud. On her feet once more, pulling the shawl more closely around her, she tried again. By almost digging the toes of her shoes into the mud, she was able to reach the first outcropping, clinging to the cold, wet, slippery rock for an instant before going on.

  It seemed an eternity, but was probably less than five minutes, and she was just below the top of the embankment, wedged against an outcropping lest she slide downward. Slowly, cautiously, Liz peeked up over the lip of the terracelike mound.

  She was about fifty yards or so from the house, Liz guessed, realizing full well that she’d never been very good at eyeballing distances. It could have been a hundred yards.

  At about two-thirds that distance, whatever it was, Jess Fowler’s men, backs obligingly turned, crouched in muddy depressions, behind tree trunks. One of them was behind a horse that looked dead.

  Before leaving the porch for the tunnel, Lizzie thought that she might have killed or wounded two of Fowler’s men. Her initial observations indicated that instead of thirteen men, Fowler included, there were only nine. That could have meant that two healthy men took two wounded men off for medical attention. At least, she hoped that accounted for their absence and that they, too, had not thought to come up on their opponents from behind.

  There was no way to know.

  Her eyes scanned along the ground. If she could make it into the pines, the trees would disguis
e her position and provide some cover as well as concealment.

  Running twenty yards or so across open ground wasn’t something she wanted to do, but to climb back down the embankment and walk more of its length, then climb back up again would take too long and was just more than she wished to attempt.

  Crawling up over the lip of muddy ground, she lay perfectly flat, barely raising her head to peer along the expanse. She spat muddy water away from her mouth. As far as she could tell, she hadn’t been noticed.

  Lizzie got to her feet in a crouch, caught her tattered nightgown up to her knees and ran. Twice she slipped and nearly fell on the wet ground, but she reached the tree line without incident, collapsing behind a pine trunk. If she’d been one of those ninety-eight-pound girls who looked like walking corpses, the tree would have fully protected her from returning fire. As it was, it afforded partial cover, probably adequate. She was about to test the hypothesis.

  Undoing the improvised sling and stuffing it into the corner of the tablecloth with the sodden boxes of ammunition bound inside, she thumbed back the hammer of the Winchester, a round already chambered. Bringing the rifle to her shoulder, she found her first target. In her father’s and mother’s books, whenever the good guy was in a fight with more than one bad guy, he always shot the bad guy closest to him, the one with the greatest chance of returning an accurate shot.

  It was Lizzie’s intention to do the same.

  There was a man with a dark hat, high crowned like something out of an old movie. He wore chaps, a belt with two six-guns and a knife, and he clutched a rifle in his hands. He was crouched behind a rock. His left shoulder blade was a perfect target.

  Despite the rain and the darkness, she could make him out clearly enough. Water was beaded in her rifle’s rear sight. She blew it away like blowing out a last candle on a birthday cake.

  The rifle’s sights were lined up. Tears were welling up in her eyes, and her nose was running. This was more murder than self-defense, at least in a way. Sniffing, correcting her sight picture for the last time, Lizzie opened fire.

  The man fell over in a heap.

  In the next instant, gunfire came toward the trees. Lizzie was already in motion, running along the length of the tree line, just deep enough inside the woods to keep trees between her and the men trying to kill her. She slipped on pine needles, fell to her knees.

  Crawling up behind the nearest trunk, she raised up to her knees, worked the rifle’s lever. Lizzie found another target. He wore a lighter-colored hat, low-crowned, and had a big, light-colored wild rag tied around his throat. A rifle was up to his shoulder. He was turned a quarter of the way away from her.

  Lizzie fired, and must have hit him somewhere, because he fell down and dropped his rifle, which discharged before it left his hands.

  At last Peggy’s rifle opened up.

  Lizzie ran for a fresh position, just like Anthony Quinn had done while shooting it out with Nazi soldiers in the movie of The Guns of Navarone, which her father had convinced her to watch. Quinn’s character’s purpose had been to create a diversion. Hers was more deadly.

  As Peggy’s wild shots kept coming, rapidly at last, Lizzie found another position. She fired, missed, fired again. Whether she hit or not, she didn’t know. Return fire slammed into the tree trunk inches from her eyes.

  Startled, she fell back, nearly dropped her rifle.

  Shaking her head, sniffing back tears, Liz dug into the tablecloth sack, tore some cartridges free from their sodden box and reloaded as she drew deeper into the trees.

  Two of Fowler’s men were at the edge of the tree line.

  There was no time for anything but to shoot and hope to hit them. The rifle to her shoulder again, she knelt beside a tree trunk and fired at the nearest man. He had a shotgun, which discharged into the ground at his feet as he fell back and didn’t move. Two pistol shots rang out toward her and missed. A good thing, she thought absently, since there wasn’t any time to move. She fired, levered the action and fired again, the body of the man with the pistols in his hands jerking twice. As he fell back, the Colt revolver in his right hand jackknifed upward and discharged.

  The tongue of flame from its muzzle was enormous and bright as the sun, it seemed to her. And the pain that suddenly consumed her left side burned like fire.

  “Holy shit! I’m shot!” Lizzie exclaimed aloud.

  In the movie, Wyatt and Doc had lain quietly, resolutely it seemed, awaiting the inevitable attack, staying awake into the early hours of morning, their campfire nearly out.

  The real campfire mere feet away from Jack still sizzled in the heavy rain and he felt anything but calm. The phrase “scared shitless” came to his mind more than once, but there was nothing for it but to wait and see who tried to kill him first, the marshal he somehow had suddenly come to distrust or the kidnappers who had left a trail a blind man could have followed.

  Despite the chill, his right palm sweated on the butt of the revolver he held clenched beneath his blanket. His back was sore from the hard ground. Everything was damp or plain wet.

  With the crackling of the burning log and the thrumming of the rain, every sound, however slight, was somehow different, ominous.

  He heard one of the horses whinnying. Perhaps the horses were just as disgusted with the weather as he was. Or perhaps the moment had come.

  When a Colt Single Action Army was cocked, there were four distinct clicks.

  Jack heard one, then another. Two more remained. The clicks had come from where Titus Blake lay. But, Blake could have sensed an impending attack and might not be intent on betrayal and murder.

  The third click.

  There was no way to know Blake’s intentions.

  Jack had to give Titus Blake the first move.

  With the fourth click, Jack rolled from under his blanket, knocking down the tiny lean-to, the hidden Colt’s hammer drawing back as Blake fired into where Jack’s body had lain a split second earlier. Jack jerked the trigger, let it fall over the second empty chamber and held the trigger back, slip-cocking the revolver, almost like fanning it, but using only the shooting hand. At this range—fewer than ten feet—it would be hard to miss.

  Jack’s gun fired and he threw himself left in the next instant.

  Blake’s revolver fired, a spray of muddy water assailing Jack’s face. Blake lurched back, hit.

  Jack thumbed the hammer back on the Colt and stabbed it toward Blake, firing and striking Blake as Blake fired again. Jack felt something warm against his right ear.

  Jack fired the third shot from the revolver. The bullet visibly impacted Blake’s chest, snapping Blake’s body back. As Blake fell, Jack could see his face clearly in the firelight. There was shock, what might have been disappointment—and there was terror.

  Soaked to the skin, a hot trickle of blood along the right side of his neck, Jack shoved the almost-empty revolver into his waistband, reached under what little remained of the lean-to and snatched his long-barreled, hand-crafted Colt from its holster.

  Jack dropped to his knees beside Blake and grabbed the man as roughly as he could, fingers knotted into Blake’s shirtfront. It was wet, and Jack could not tell if the moisture was blood or rain—but it was probably both.

  Cocking the revolver and shoving it toward Blake’s face, Jack snarled, “Why!? Tell me now, Marshal—tell me now or there’ll be no help for you. Back at my house, there’s my nephew’s wife. She’s a doctor, more skilled than any doctor in the country. She can save your life,” Jack lied. Blake was nearly bled out, the color drained from his face and the clear sound of a sucking chest wound in the man’s labored breaths. “Tell me now, or the muzzle of this revolver is the last thing you’ll ever see.”

  “The Bledsoe girl—really took her. Suckerin’ you away from your place so they can kill the women. They was gonna hit ‘em hours ago. Count ‘em dead.”

  The dialogue wasn’t crafted for effect this time. “You fucking bastard!” Jack Naile almost pulled the trigger as he s
tabbed the revolver toward Blake’s face.

  “Figured if’n I killed ya’, Jess Fowler’d pay up more than just’ the gettin’ ya out here. Mebbe ya got me, Naile, but them women is goners sure ‘nough by—” And he died.

  Marshal Titus Blake’s head lolled back, rainwater falling into eyes that would not shut. Jack let Blake’s body slump to the ground.

  On his knees beside the dead man, the long-barreled revolver, rain glistening from its metal in the firelight, balled tight in his right fist, Jack Naile shouted into the darkness above. “Why, God?! Why?!”

  In his old life, Jack had written of violence, never really tasted it, never felt the hollowness inside that a killing bred, that every killing nurtured. He had, at last, become the fantasy role model of his childhood, the triumphant gunfighter on the side of goodness and right. But death was death, and Jack had neither the taste nor the stomach for it; and, perhaps, neither had the real-life gunmen, the counterparts of the fictions spun from imaginations like his own. It started, it went on. It was a trap. And nearly all that was precious to him might already have been sacrificed because of his passion to play cowboy.

  “God! Don’t let them die! Please, God!” Jack rose from his knees.

  Like the fictional heroes of his boyhood, there was a clarity within him, and he knew what he had to do. If his home had already been attacked, what had happened had happened and he would not rest until he found those responsible and took their lives.

  But there was a terrified girl, a girl the same age as his daughter, less than a half-day’s ride, perhaps only hours, away. Any way he judged it, she was closer to get to than his own family. Her life could still be saved, because she was being kept alive to trap him. That was obvious.

  Jack partially lowered the hammer on his revolver, rolled the cylinder, then lowered the hammer onto an empty chamber. He buckled on his gun belt. If he left Blake’s saddle, but took the dead marshal’s horse, swapping mounts every hour or so, he could catch the men before they would expect him. It would take more than twice as long to reach his home. If his wife and daughter and Clarence’s wife were dead, they’d still be dead when he got there, and the Bledsoe girl’s death would be on his conscience as well.