The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Bastard thing,” he said, when he could say anything. “Consumption killed my mother. Likely kill me too.”

  “I know,” said Flora.

  He caught her looking, got caught on her gaze. Nodded. “I’ve got a legend where you come from?”

  “Oh,” said Missus Shutt. “Yes, Mr. Holliday. You do.”

  “That’s something, then. They got a cure for this, in the future?”

  “We do,” Missus Shutt answered.

  “Good,” he said. He felt for his pistol. Took it out, spun the cylinder. Made sure there was a bullet under the hammer.

  Bill and the women watched him in silence. The horses crunched grain in their nose bags.

  “Well,” said Holliday. “Sooner we find this son of a bitch, sooner we can rescue your moon man and head back to town. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked up a good whiskey thirst.”

  * * *

  Doc and Bill hoisted Missus Jorgensen, Missus Shutt, and Flora into the tunnel where they’d first seen the moon man. The first women knelt to help haul Miss Lil over the edge. Then Bill let Doc put a boot in his hands and kick high enough for the women to steady him while he clambered up. Bill himself surprised Doc: He might have been grizzled and a little soft around the middle, but he planted his hands on the lip, brushing rust flakes and debris aside, and jumped and swung over the head-high threshold in a scattering of rotting metal.

  Doc gave the hex a hand to stand while Missus Jorgensen and Missus Shutt kept an eye down the corridor in the direction the gunman must have run. When Doc’s gaze met Bill’s—Bill’s face gaunt and strange in the shadowy blue light—Bill nodded.

  Without a word, the six fell into three ranks of two—Doc and Miss Lil in the front with their scatterguns poised. The other four minced softly behind, pistols ready, while the rasp of boots on blistered metal echoed out.

  The corridor—or tunnel, or gangway; if this was a star-ship, Doc’s store of nautical terminology was insufficient to its engineering—must have once stretched in a bowed line the length of the craft. Now only the first fifty feet were more or less intact—Doc and Miss Lil probed each step with a toe and shifted weight carefully forward—and they picked up the gunman’s trail about thirty feet from where the moon man had been hanging by his toes.

  Beyond that point, the corridor warped, the metal twisted and crumpled so anyone who wanted to pass through would have to do so by writhing under the buckled roof like a snake on its belly. Piles of debris had been pushed to one side to allow someone to do just that. Shiny scratches showed where that same someone had retreated back through the gap in a hurry.

  Doc crouched, keeping his body well to one side, and rested a hand against the roof to brace himself. More flakes of metal dusted his shoulders and hat as he tipped his head down to peer through the gap.

  It was dark beyond. The blue-white lights did not penetrate the constriction, leaving Doc with the uneasy sense of staring into a cave that might contain any horror he could conceive of—and a few inconceivable ones as well. At the mouth, caught on a jagged twist of metal, a few strands of yellow-and-black cotton were still damp with blood on one end.

  Miss Lil, just as careful not to silhouette herself, crouched on the other side of the gap. She eyed the sticky smudge on Doc’s fingertip after he touched the snagged fabric and frowned across. “Somebody was in a hurry.”

  “John Ringo was wearing a yellow check shirt when we saw him last,” Doc said.

  “John Ringo?” asked Flora.

  “The man who tried to convince you to hire him as a guide when I turned you down that first time,” Doc said. “He’d not scruple to follow us out here and lie in wait, ma’am, if he thought you’d anything worth stealing.”

  “The horses are worth stealing,” Bill said.

  “It bled,” Miss Lil said, bending further to get her head into the crevice. “But a moderate amount.”

  Flora put her hands against her back as if it pained her. “A scrape like that isn’t enough to slow anybody down.”

  Missus Jorgensen made a sound that might have been a bitter laugh, in a less strained situation. “Not until he comes down with lockjaw in a week or so.”

  “Do we risk a lantern?” Bill asked.

  Whatever conversation took place then was silent, a matter of glances and twists of the mouth, but Doc thought he followed it…more or less. When Flora said, “I’d just be making a target of myself,” though, he balked.

  “You’re not going first,” he said, forgetting politeness in his shock. “A little slip of a thing like you? It don’t matter if I die.”

  “That’s exactly why I am going first, Doctor Holliday,” she said, in a tone that bade to remind him who was paying whom to be here. “I’ll be able to move quickly and freely. Much more so than either of you gentlemen.”

  He frowned at her, formulating a protest. She let her fingertips brush the pearl handle of Miss Lil’s revolver, which she was carrying since they’d traded guns.

  “Are you prepared to contest it with me?”

  “Never get in the way of a lady when she’s made her mind up,” he said, and stood up strictly so he could step back. “Will you at least let us sling a rope around you so we can pull you back if we have to?”

  “That…” Flora dusted her hands together. “I think we can compromise on.”

  * * *

  Their precautions turned out unnecessary, but Doc still felt the better for having made them. Flora crawled through the crushed section of corridor, dragging a rope behind her, and vanished from sight. After seven or ten palm-sweating minutes, her voice came back: “It’s clear on the other side!” and one by one the rest of the group followed. It was a tight squeeze for Miss Lil, who found herself scraped flat and wriggling once or twice, but even she made it.

  Doc went last, feeling his way in the darkness, following the line by touch. He’d tied his bandanna across his mouth to keep from breathing in rust flakes. It forced him to regulate his inhalations to what the cloth would filter. He hoped that made it less likely he’d trigger a coughing fit. He could imagine little worse than lying there in the darkness, pressed between sheets of warped metal, coughing his life away.

  Corrosion gritted against his knees and palms and where his shirt rubbed between the deck and his belly. The roof brushed his back and disarrayed his hair. He had to push his hat before him in one hand, the coach gun in the other. At one point the passageway dropped, and he slithered down on his belly, wondering how he was ever going to manage if it turned back up again. But at the bottom it only flattened out, and his dark-adapted vision picked out a dim sort of reflected glow that seemed to hang in the air rather than come from any place in particular.

  The line led him on, and soon he came around a corner and saw the edge of the passage widening, and the rust-stained trousers and boots of his companions standing beyond. He had enough room to push himself to his knees, then to a crouch.

  He clapped his hat against his hip to clean it at least a little, then set it on his head.

  “Well,” he said, straightening his stiff spine with an effort. “That was a long poke.”

  He imagined he didn’t look any better than the others—sweaty, disheveled, smeared with varying shades of ochre as if they’d been caught in an explosion in a painter’s studio. But every chin had a determined set.

  “He went that way,” Miss Lil said, pointing. “He’s got a head start.”

  “He had one already.” Flora picked up the rope as if to begin coiling it, frowned, and let the end flop again. “I hope there’s an easier way out. But if there isn’t…”

  “Leave it,” said Missus Jorgensen. “We should be moving. Let me go first?”

  “Begging your pardon—” Doc began.

  But Flora held up a hand. “She’s got the best eyes of any of us,” she said. “If our invisible friend left us any tripwires or other nasty surprises, she’ll be the one to spot them.”

  “Of course,” said Doc. And though
it griped him, he stood aside for the lady again.

  Beyond the point of collapse, the passageway began to fork and meander. Missus Jorgensen led them at a brisk walk, occasionally turning to Doc or Miss Lil for direction when they reached an intersection or a chamber that had been broken open by the force of the crash. The trail was clear; their quarry had run, and left occasional drips of blood behind. He was obviously bleeding freely—though not copiously—from the gash he’d given himself on the jagged metal of the crawlway.

  “I think he’s lost,” Miss Lil said, when they’d been pursuing for ten minutes or so. “Panicking. He just ran nearly in a circle. It would have been faster to have come down that way, and it would have gotten him to the same place.”

  Doc thought about running through this maze of rotten steel, with six armed men and women at your heels, and actually felt a little sorry for Johnny Ringo. But only a little.

  He started to cough and tried to stifle it, though in truth they weren’t being so quiet Ringo wouldn’t have heard them coming anyway. The echoes rang out, though, and Doc’s mouth filled with the seawater taste of blood while Doc pawed in his pocket for the stick of horehound. Miss Lil’s touch on his back eased him fast enough, and the candy soothed his throat. Still, he wheezed with the force of the fit.

  The echoes of his hacking hadn’t died when a male voice echoed back, distorted by corridors and cavernous rooms. “That you, Holliday? Or is it a hyena?”

  “It’s the angel of the redemption,” Holliday called back, his voice threadier than he would have liked. “I understand you have some explaining to do.”

  Flora shot him a look. He nodded, holding his position in the center of the corridor, and she and Bill and the other women fanned out to either side, backs flat against the walls, pistols and Miss Lil’s coach gun at the ready. Doc waited until her gaze jerked down the corridor before he started boldly forward, front and center, walking past the first of several side passages before the corridor turned, up ahead.

  Drawing fire.

  “I hear you coming, lunger,” Ringo warned. “I got a sense this funny gray monkey-thing is something you want alive. If that’s so, you’ll stop right where you are. In fact, you’ll crawl back out of here—and you’ll leave me those horses you brought, and all the water and food they’ve got on ’em.”

  Doc paused. “You’re bluffing.” But he was already shaking his head at Flora to indicate the truth of what he thought.

  “So I am,” Ringo answered.

  There was a thump, and something inhuman made a strangled noise of pain. Doc didn’t flinch, but Miss Lil cringed.

  “You learn those smarts in dentist school?” Ringo called.

  “Come by ’em honestly,” Doc said.

  Flora jerked a thumb down a side passage and raised her eyebrows to Miss Lil in a question.

  Miss Lil glanced. Nodded. Smiled.

  Flora’s answering grin showed how crooked those front teeth really were.

  Doc remembered Miss Lil’s dead-on sense of direction. An unfamiliar sensation—a little bright hope—flickered in his chest, beside the dull old recognized burn of the disease that was killing him.

  But Missus Jorgensen put up a hand. Not whispering, just talking so low it wouldn’t carry, she said, “John Ringo doesn’t die here.”

  “Crap,” Flora hissed. She glanced around. “All right. No killing shots.”

  “When does he die?” The demand was out of Doc’s mouth before he even realized he’d made it. In for a penny, he thought. “And who kills him?”

  Missus Jorgensen shook her head “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Right,” Doc said. “If you changed the past, you’d change the future. And then you might not even exist.”

  She nodded. “Doc—”

  “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “Whatever answer you gave, it wouldn’t satisfy me.”

  Doc slipped the coach gun into its sheath, slung it over his shoulders, and walked forward again, hands held high. He went alone—or nearly alone: Bill ghosted down the wall beside him, for support of morale and covering fire if nothing more. But Doc didn’t look at him. Doc didn’t do anything as he rounded the corner into John Ringo’s sights, in fact, other than raise his hands up just a little tiny bit higher.

  Ringo—a dark fellow with a moustache like a set of window drapes—stood against the far wall of a chamber as big as the one where they’d stabled the horses, holding the moon man around the neck. This room was in better repair, though—the walls and floor rusting, sure, but scrubbed and not heaped with debris. There was a sort of nest of fabric at one end, and transparent jugs full of what must be drinking water.

  The moon man in Ringo’s grasp was no taller than a boy of twelve, and just as skinny. Its long hands curved over Ringo’s arm where his grasp forced its head up. Ringo pushed the muzzle of his pistol against the creature’s head hard enough that even from across the room, Doc could see its slick gray flesh denting.

  Poor critter, Doc thought. Marooned here like Robinson Crusoe. And we’re the cannibal savages.

  Ringo grinned over the moon man’s head as Doc stopped twelve or fifteen feet away. “I’m heeled now, Holliday.”

  “I can see that.” Doc clicked candy against his tongue with his teeth, letting his hands drift wide. “I said all I wanted out of you is ten paces in the street, John. This isn’t a street. And that isn’t a combatant.”

  “But it’s worth something, isn’t it?” Ringo asked. “There’s gotta be a bounty. That’s why you all are out here.”

  Doc opened his mouth. He closed it again. For a change, he thought for a second.

  “That’s right,” Doc said. He edged a step or two closer to Ringo. A step or two farther from Bill, and the potential cover of the bend in the corridor. “There’s a bounty. Thirty thousand dollars. But only if we bring it in alive.”

  He didn’t hear the women coming down the side corridor. He had to assume they were there, though, and that their silence was for Ringo’s benefit…or detriment.

  “Thirty…thousand?” Ringo said it like he’d never heard of so much money. Doc appreciated the reverence; he might have said the same words the same way himself if their situations were reversed.

  “Alive,” Doc said.

  Ringo might not have noticed it, but his hand eased off a little on the pistol. The moon man’s head came up straighter. It blinked at Doc with vast, sea-dark eyes.

  He didn’t dare look at it. He kept his attention on Ringo’s face. “I’ll split it with you.”

  “Where are the rest of ’em?” Ringo asked.

  Doc shrugged. “Thirty thousand seemed better than five thousand.”

  Ringo snorted. But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a hell of a lot about a man by what he assumed others got up to. If you’re looking for a thief, bet on the man who’s always accusing his neighbors.

  “So what’s to stop me taking that whole thirty thousand myself?” Ringo slid the muzzle back from the moon man’s head, turned it to face Doc. The barrel looked as big and black as barrels always do.

  Now, Doc thought. Now! But there was no crack of gunfire from the side corridor, no blossom of blood from Ringo’s skull. Doc forced his eyes to stay trained on Ringo. “You don’t know where to collect. Do you think there are wanted posters for that thing?”

  “So you tell me where,” Ringo said. “Or I shoot you and then I shoot it.”

  He was just the sort to spoil a well so somebody else couldn’t use it too. “I can draw a map,” he said. And snorted. “That is, assuming you could read it.”

  “Who’s holding the shooting iron, Holliday?”

  “Not much of a threat,” Doc said, “when we both know you’re going to use it no matter what I say.”

  Ringo couldn’t keep the grin from lifting the corners of his moustache, like hell’s curtain drawn back from an unholy proscenium arch. “M
aybe you better tell me where and from who to collect that bounty.”

  “Maybe so,” Doc said. “Maybe I’d rather chew a bu—”

  The echoes of a single gun’s report weren’t any easier to bear in this chamber than they had been in the one where they had left the horses. Doc winced—how the hell was that supposed to keep John Ringo alive until he met whatever unholy date with destiny these five had planned out for him—and then realized: Flora, walking forward now with Lil’s smoking six-gun leveled, had shot the pistol out of Ringo’s hand. Which was a hell of a lot harder, Doc knew, than Eastern lady writers made it out to be in the dime novels.

  “Now’d be a good time to run,” Flora said, her posse arrayed behind her, as Ringo stood there disbelieving, shaking his bloody, numb right hand.

  He stood rooted on the spot, though, until the moon man turned its head and clamped that wide, lipless slash of a mouth closed on Ringo’s arm.

  They let him run. Miss Lil moved to the moon man, her hands outstretched, her voice soft. As she crouched down beside it, it didn’t flinch.

  “Victory?” Bill said to Missus Shutt.

  “Victory,” she agreed.

  John Henry Holliday looked down at the spatter of red blood on orange rust and shook his head. “I’m damned tired.”

  * * *

  Flora and her partners left Holliday at the last fork in the road, their little gray guest bundled up in concealing clothes and riding crunched up on the brown mare behind Miss Lil. Before she’d left, Flora pulled Doc aside to pay him the second half of his money, and a little bonus, and to share a private word or two.

  He’d been the one who’d spoken first, though. “So. You really are from the future.”

  “Something like that, Doc,” she said. “But not exactly. It’s against the rules to explain.”

  He looked her in the eye. “Call me John,” he’d said. “I haven’t much use for rules, Miss Flora.”

  “John,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you.”

  1.

  A dusty sun crested the rooftops of Tombstone on the first day of November, 1881. Doc Holliday staggered across the vacant lot next to Fly’s boarding house. There was nothing in his life so pressing as the idea of a shot of whiskey to ease the ice-pick of pain through and behind his left eye.