The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  The harsh smell of gunpowder mixed with the reek of the wolves fouling themselves, but Arnie Selmo laughed. Son of a bitch, the old guy was better than Arnie had expected.

  “Reload,” Orphie shouted, still hidden in his own blind. “I’ve got it.”

  Arnie thought about it. He still ought to have four shots left, but there was no point in not reloading. While Arnie was fumbling with the catch of the ammo bag, three more wolves emerged from the hole.

  Orphie got two of them; Arnie barely got the BAR back in action in time to nail one.

  It seemed quiet in the clearing, as Arnie made his way toward where the wolf-bodies lay, the BAR cradled in his arms, his finger off the trigger.

  Pretty beasts, now that they were dead, although …

  He pointed his chin at the largest of them, one that had only a single wound in its side.

  Orphie, now risen to his full height in the waist-high brush, nodded and raised his Garand to his shoulder, firing once, rewarded by the loud report of the Garand and a small gout of flesh and blood from the wolf’s side. It was dead.

  Maybe they all were dead, and maybe they were all there were.

  And maybe not.

  Arnie Selmo kept the muzzle pointed high, but he kept his finger near the trigger of the BAR as he stepped between the places where the two dirty women and one dirty man lay on the ground, panting. “I’ve got it, Orphie,” he said. “You might want to get these folks some water, and then some food. Sandwiches still in the cooler.”

  He didn’t look at them as he spoke; he kept his eyes on the hole in the ground. Just in case.

  Thorsen grunted out something, probably a thank you,

  “Welcome home, neighbor,” Arnie Selmo said.

  Author’s Note

  Anybody with a decent road atlas can follow the directions in Chapter One and find that I’ve placed the fictional town of Hardwood, North Dakota, pretty much squarely on top of the very real town of Northwood, North Dakota, where I lived for several years, some thirty years ago, when my father was one of the two town doctors. In fact, I shuffled the town around some to put the fictional Thorsen house very near to where my boyhood friend Jeff Thompson’s house was.

  Anybody with a Northwood phone book, or any phone book from that part of North Dakota, will discover many people with names like Selmo and Bjerke and Thompson and Larsen and such. Those names are common in that part of the world; any similarities between the Selmos and Bjerkes and Thompsons and Larsens and so forth of any real towns in North Dakota (or anywhere else) and those of my fictional town are entirely coincidental and unintentional—with the exception of the late John Honistead, the retired town cop of fictional Hardwood, who actually was a handyman in Northwood and was, to the best of my memory, the first friend of mine who ever died.

  I figure old John wouldn’t mind.