Guns of Seneca 6 Box Set Collected Saga (Chambers 1-4)

by Bernard Schaffer

  The fuel inside the tank ignited and set off waves of flame that engulfed the rear of the ship and shattered the observation windows. The fuel on the ground sparked and flames shot eight feet into the air, racing along the wet trails like fiery horses of the apocalypse. Jem had to shield his eyes from the intense heat. He looked for as long as he could while the valley below was cleansed by flames.

  Two men waited in the darkness at the base of the mountain. They sat on their destriers without moving, watching the party descend. Anna Willow leaned past Jem and said, "That's Billy Jack and Walt. What the hell do they want?"

  "We're not here for trouble," Billy Jack Elliot said. "Just to talk. It's time you learned the truth about a few things, Jem."

  "You wouldn't know the truth if it bit you!" Anna shouted.

  "That's enough out of the women-folk," Walt Junger said. "What we have to say is only for men. Not for women and not for savages."

  Jem turned to Bart Masters and said, "Take Anna and the Marshal back to camp."

  McParlan sat up in the back of his drag sled and said, "Don't be stupid, boy. This is a goddamn trap."

  "I agree," Jem said. "Those two just don't know it yet." He walked his destrier over to the Beothuk and said, "You saved our lives back there. Whatever you thought you owed me, we're settled up now."

  Osceola looked at Mahpiya, who spoke Beothuk to him and pointed at Jem, the canyon, and the werja fangs on Jem's neck. Osceola looked at Jem in confusion.

  "We're square," Jem said. "I did something for you and you did something in return. We're even."

  Osceola reached for the inside of Jem's wrist and grasped it firmly. He pointed at Jem's heart, then back at his own, and shook his head no.

  Jem smiled with understanding and said, "I like that much better, to be honest."

  They rode until the mountains ahead were silhouetted by the light of both moons. "I know you have hard feelings for us, Jem," Billy Jack Elliot said. "After we show you what's up here, you'll feel differently."

  "Is that right?" Jem said. He stayed back while Elliot and Junger rode ahead of him, wanting to keep them both in his view.

  "In fact, this looks to be about the right place," Walt Junger said. The road was dark and narrow from the thick, overgrown brush along either side. Jem recognized the path that led to the mountain pass where he'd seen Squawk for the first time.

  Billy Jack Elliot turned his destrier to face Jem. His voice was smoother than a rattlesnake's hides when he said, "It is time you knew the truth about your father's death. He was not killed by the Beothuk. We lied to you, and we are so very sorry."

  "Well, what happened then?"

  "We would have told you sooner, if you hadn't run off like you did. We figured it would be best to let the dead rest," Junger said.

  "You going to tell me or does this overture keep going for awhile?"

  "Old Man Willow shot your daddy," Walt Junger said. "That crazy old bastard got angry with your father when he found out Sam wanted to marry his daughter Anna. I know it's hard to hear, but it's the Lord's solemn truth. It was probably on accident, but Old Man Willow shot him. I swear to God."

  "It was an act of self defense, Jem," Elliot said. "Now, we both know that you idolize your father, but he was far from perfect. Just like the rest of us. He went to grab Old Man Willow and Willow's gun went off."

  "We should have told you the truth a long time ago, and given Sam a proper burial," Junger said.

  Elliot nodded, "We were afraid of the scandal it would cause both your families. You've already been through so much."

  "We admit that we were wrong," Junger said.

  Jem smiled at that. "Well, now we're getting somewhere."

  Walt Junger tapped his heel against his destrier's side and started moving it forward. His voice flowed with honey and sugar when he said, "I know this might be a shock for you, but I've been thinking that you could be my Chief Deputy. What do you say? Another Clayton in the Sheriff's Office of Seneca 6 has a mighty nice ring to it. Your daddy was Chief Deputy for years before taking over. You could do the same."

  Junger was blocking Jem's view of Billy Jack Elliot, and Jem stayed still, anticipating the moment to come. Junger yanked his reins to the side and Billy Jack Elliot came riding up behind him with a Winchester rifle ready to fire.

  Jem kicked his destrier in the ribs and it ran forward, crashing into Junger's steed. Jem grabbed Junger by the collar and held him fast, keeping his body between himself and Elliot's rifle. Junger tried to push away, but Jem grabbed the Colt Defeater from his right hip and stuck the barrel into Junger's stomach. He fired twice as Elliot rode past, splattering the Mayor with Junger's blood.

  Elliot's destrier stopped running and he turned around, wide eyed, still holding his rifle but too astonished to do anything with it. Jem pushed Walt Junger out of his saddle and watched him fall dead on the ground. He raised his pistol to Elliot and said, "When you see Old Man Willow, thank him for warning me about your little trick."

  Billy Jack Elliot dropped his rifle and spun in his saddle, leaping to the ground and running down the road on foot. Jem spurred his destrier and holstered his gun. Within seconds, the horse was beside Elliot, and Jem reached out to snatch him by the back of his coat.

  Jem pulled Elliot's collar against his knee and lifted until only the toes of Elliot's boots dragged on the ground. Jem yelled for his destrier to go faster, until the wind rushing through Jem's ears was even louder than the Mayor's screams.

  Birds took flight along the road at their approach and animals scattered out of the road at the sounds of the stampede. Jem rode close to a thicket of vines and barbed branches dangling from the rock wall and kicked Elliot into them.

  Elliot bounced and rolled into the vine's tangled lengths. He attempted to free himself and only snared his arms and legs more completely. Eliot's head hung low and he said, "Cut me loose, Jem."

  "Nope."

  "You can't leave me here."

  "Sure I can."

  "I didn't do anything wrong, Jem. I told you what happened…it was…Old Man…" A deep howl high up in the mountains silenced Elliot as he struggled to look for its source. "What the hell was that?"

  "That's your company for this evening," Jem said. "I'll go so you can all get acquainted."

  Billy Jack Elliot watched Jem ride off, and managed to get his head out of the vines enough to see the shapes of several large creatures coming down the mountainside.

  21. Heroes

  Seneca 6's main square was empty, except for Anna Willow and Claire Miller. Claire's husband, Frank, was curled up asleep on the Sheriff's front porch with his coat draped over him like a blanket. Claire had gotten tired of telling him to go home and being ignored. She finally told him he could stay if he laid down and stayed quiet.

  Jem rode through the gate and got down from his destrier to hug both women. Anna said, "What did those two skunks want?"

  "Just to discuss a few things. They decided not to come back once they heard what I had to say."

  "Well, good riddance," Claire said. There were shouts of laughter from inside the Proud Lady, followed by applause. Someone yelled out, "Tell that part again!" Claire shook her head and said, "See what you did? All anyone saw was Bart Masters riding back with Anna in one arm and dragging that Marshal in the other like he was some kind of storybook hero. They threw him up on their shoulders and carried him into the Proud Lady and we ain't seen none of them since."

  "He's had to tell the story so many times that the latest version is you killed a twenty-foot space monster with your bare hands and he blew up a fleet of space cruisers with a ray gun," Anna said.

  "Maybe it wasn't twenty feet," Jem said with a wink. "It was hard to tell with the armada closing down on us."

  "You should go in there, Jem," Claire said. "They'll want to fawn all over you too, I expect."

  "How's the Marshal?"

  "His wounds will take time, and he'll be pretty immobile for awhile, but he should walk normall
y again," Anna said. "As long as he listens to me and stays put and I can manage to keep Janet away from him."

  Jem opened the Marshal's bedroom door and walked into the dim-lit room. Jimmy McParlan was sitting up in bed looking at him. "I thought that girl told you to be quiet."

  "You must be feeling better," Jem said.

  "I'm fine and dandy after the stuff she pumped into me. Before you got here I was watching little pink bunnies dance around my room." Both of McParlan's wrists were bandaged and there were thick casts wrapped around his legs from his kneecaps to the tips of his toes. "Still hurts though."

  "Want me to stay with you?"

  "Hell no, you damn fool. You think this is the first time I've been crucified and set on fire?" McParlan smiled and said, "I'll be fine. Now take that pretty doctor lady home and make sweet love to her, boy."

  "I don't know about that," Jem said.

  "Then send her in here and I'll give it a whirl. She needs to promise to be careful with me though. I'm in kind of a fragile state."

  Anna and Jem walked together toward the Proud Lady. Men standing on the porch saw him coming and called out to the people inside, "Jem's back!"

  People flooded onto the street and surrounded him. Someone passed a bottle of whiskey through the crowd until it landed in Jem's hand.

  "Nothing like a sip of whiskey after killing a fifty foot space monster," he said, nodding his head at Bart Masters. He uncorked the bottle and lifted it to his lips when Bart Masters said, "Wait a second, Jem."

  Bart raised a glass and said, "Welcome home, we missed you. Bout time you showed up."

  They came to Anna's front door and Jem stopped, scraping his foot on the porch. "What is it?" Anna said.

  He laughed to himself and said, "McParlan told me to take you home and make 'sweet love' to you. Sounds kind of creepy to hear him say it."

  Anna put her hand against her face and feigned blushing. "Would that be such a terrible thing to have to do?"

  He looked at her in the twin moonlight. "No. In fact, I aim to do exactly that. But maybe not tonight, if that's okay."

  "Tell you what," Anna said. "Let me draw you a hot bath and get you out of those godforsaken clothes. When you get out, my bedroom door will be open. You can do whatever you want after that."

  Anna walked into the house and headed toward the wash room. The pipes clanged as she cranked the handles and jets of warm water opened up to fill the copper basin. Jem went inside and shut the door. He stood in the doorway as Anna unbuckled his gun belt. She bent to grab his boots, telling him, "Lift your foot."

  "You don't need to do that."

  "You might as well get used to it. In this house we leave our boots on the porch. If you're going to stay here, you need to learn the rules."

  "Actually, I was thinking about taking up in the Halladay house. I thought you might go over there with me and take a look at it tomorrow."

  She yanked on the toe and heel of his first boot and slid it off. There was a hint of disappointment when she said, "If that's what you want to do." She held the boots away from her like they were filled with sewage. "Get out of those clothes so I can boil them. You smell worse than an outhouse."

  Jem stripped and climbed into the copper basin. He settled down into the hot water and let it soak into his muscles. Anna came back into the washroom and pressed a sponge against his neck and started to scrub him. Jem closed his eyes and rested.

  Old Man Willow's map was not easy to follow, with its stick figures and pyramid mountains. Jem stood on the place that he thought resembled the map's "X" and looked around the road, not far from where Walt Junger had died.

  Any evidence of that night was gone. The bodies of both Junger and Elliot were gone. It was hard country in the wasteland, and Jem kicked a rock into the ditch that ran alongside the road. There were piles of rocks and dirt scattered by two decades of violent dust storms and the occasional flood.

  Jem walked along the ditch inspecting the rocks. He dug out a few with the shovel he borrowed from Claire and after a few minutes, became frustrated and moved on. He came to a large pile of rocks buried on top of one another, cemented together with dried mud. He shattered the pile with his pickaxe and started to pry up a round stone from the ground when he realized it was the ball joint of a human femur.

  He bent down and dug out the rest of the bone with his hands and starting searching for more. There were various pieces of a skeleton within feet of each other and soon, Jem had enough to assemble large portions of the legs and spine. He dug deeper and the ground started to cave in over an animal's hole. He stuck his hand into the dirt and his fingers went through what felt like large holes in a bowling ball and he yanked a human skull out of the ground. He sat by the side of the road, turning the skull over in his hands and brushing the dirt away.

  He found tattered fabrics and as he cleaned them off, recognized them as pieces of the shirt Sam Clayton was wearing the morning he left from the Willow house.

  Jem set everything aside and sat on the road for a long while. After some time, he folded all of the bones inside a blanket and placed it on the back of his wagon. He went back to re-check the area and kept digging until his shovel hit something metal in the dirt.

  Sam's leather gun belt was stiff as a rock and both Colt Defenders were still in the holsters. He had to force the guns out of the holsters and smack them against the ground to break open the cylinders. The guns were still loaded, but the bullets were corroded to the point that Jem had to dig the rounds out of the chambers with his knife.

  He cocked one of the hammers back and dry fired the gun. The action still worked.

  Jimmy McParlan was standing hunched over on a set of crutches at the security gate to Seneca 6. Pain was etched across his face and sweat ran down his forehead. "What the hell are you doing out here?" Jem said. "Anna will kill you if she catches you out of bed."

  The Marshal rested on one of the crutches and took his hat off. He turned to face the casket and nodded, "I came to pay my respects. Heard a lawman was coming home."

  "It's just a pile of bones, Marshal."

  McParlan squinted at Jem and said, "Seems like all the elected officials in this town have run off. Got any ideas about what happened to them?"

  "Only what I already said about the subject."

  "Is that right? Well, being that I'm the closest thing to the government left in this town, it's my responsibility to appoint emergency persons who can keep everything from going to hell. What do you think of that Bart Masters fella? He seems like the even-minded sort."

  "I couldn't think of a more decent person, Marshal." Jem fished in his pocket for the Sheriff's badge and held it out, "My father would be proud to know Bart was wearing his badge."

  McParlan looked at the worn badge without reaching for it and said, "You really are dense, boy. I meant as the Mayor, not the Sheriff. You're going to be the damn Sheriff."

  Jem laughed and said, "I don't think so. I'm not exactly a law-abiding enough citizen to enforce it."

  "I've seen a lot of men with badges in my day, Jem. Most weren't worth a squirt of piss when it came down to the important parts of the job. I think you've got the stuff."

  "Can I have some time to think it over?"

  "Hell no. The way you people treat visitors, I might not be around much longer. Besides, who are you kidding? We both know what you'll say. Now get going and take that man home. He earned some rest." McParlan propped himself against the security gate to stand upright and saluted Sam's remains. "Hurry up, damn it, before I pass out."

  Jem headed toward Claire and Frank's home. He thought about what he would say to Claire, and whether she would want to see what was inside the blanket before Jem dug a hole beside their mother's grave and laid the blanket inside of it. He wondered if she'd say no and be angry at him for asking. He wondered if she'd say yes and regret it.

  The badge stayed in his hand while he rode, and he ran his thumb over the letters spelling Sheriff over and over. He could still
picture Sam leaning back in the rocking chair on Old Man Willow's porch saying, "Someday when you're an attorney out on some big Metropolis-Class planet, you'll look back on all this with amazement, I bet. All this fighting and killing over what? A barren bunch of land with the misfortune of having some of the rarest stones in the galaxy buried underneath it."

  "What if I said I'm not going anywhere? Maybe I'll be a Sheriff just like you?" Jem said.

  "Just like me?" Sam said.

  Claire's home was in sight now. Jem tucked the badge into his left shirt pocket and felt it bounce against his chest as he rode. He put his hand over it and pressed it to his heart and said, "That's right."

  Old-Time Lawmen

  Chamber 2 of the Guns of Seneca 6 Saga

  Bernard Schaffer

  Jem Clayton and Anna Willow took the long way around, glad to be alone, glad to have a peaceful moment after a long day of chaos. Both of them had other people's blood on them. The air still smelled like cordite and flop sweat. All the lights were dark along Pioneer Way and even the bars and whorehouses had shut down. If anything was a clear sign of trouble in Seneca 6, that was it.

  Anna brushed against Jem's hand and said, "So tell me the fate of Mr. Elijah Harpe."

  "A person like you wouldn’t understand, Anna. Someone like you helps people. Someone like me does the opposite."

  "I wouldn’t expect anything less from the baddest man in the world," Anna said.

  Jem grinned shyly, "You’ve been waiting twenty years to fire that one back at me, haven’t you?"

  "Maybe. Do you remember Zeke that used to work for my father?"

  Jem nodded.