Under the Vultures Moon

by William Stafford

  Better than a broken neck.

  “Jed!” Dawson cried.

  “Weren’t me,” said Jed. “Let’s get you out of there.” He bundled his friend out from under the platform - the back way. On top, Carriage and his men had been plunged into confusion.

  “Open the trap!” Carriage flailed at the hangman. It had sprung shut again. The hangman fumbled the lever. Carriage peered into the opening - there was no one there. The prisoner had gone.

  There was no sign of Jed in the stupefied crowd either...

  Jed stashed Dawson in the nearest building - a hardware store that was empty; proprietor and patrons alike were out watching the show. Jed hid his friend under the counter and promised to be back with attention for his ankle as soon as he could.

  Awash with sweat, Dawson grimaced out his thanks. But Jed was already gone.

  “Find me that gunslinger!” Carriage was roaring from the platform. “Bring me Jed the traitor!”

  The crowd was puzzled. They couldn’t accept the idea that Jed their protector was a traitor. It just didn’t make no sense. No one made a move to follow the wild-eyed sheriff’s commands. Nor did they need to. The man in question stepped up onto the platform and tapped Sheriff Carriage on the shoulder.

  Carriage spun around and his chin was greeted by a blow from Jed’s fist. The force of the punch spun the sheriff around again. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  “See! See!” Carriage addressed the crowd, pointing an accusing finger at the gunslinger. “See the depths of his betrayal! To strike an officer of the law. Right in front of you! In broad daylight.”

  “We didn’t see nothing!” someone piped up.

  “That’s right,” said someone else. General agreement bubbled up throughout the crowd but Carriage couldn’t make out which individuals were calling out.

  “He shot down the prisoner! He perverted the course of justice!”

  “Nope,” said someone in the crowd.

  “Liar!” said an old woman at the front. “He was stood right beside me and he never shot nothing.”

  Others nearby were in agreement.

  Sheriff Carriage was beside himself with rage. Jed pushed him aside.

  “Folks,” he addressed the townsfolk, “Show’s over. We’ve shown this jumped-up out-of-towner there ain’t no room here for his kind of justice. Those men who escaped - and yes, I helped them! - were all innocents. They had no part in the shuttle crash - no more than any of you did. But this man was going to string them up anyways. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen - as I’m sure if you were in the same position, you’d want someone to intercede on your behalf. It’s been a mighty long while since we had us a hanging here in Tarnation and I think folks have forgotten the way we do things. Those men should have had a fair and proper trial - and then their innocence would have been proved in a court of law. Instead of rooting out the real culprits, Sheriff Carriage here would rather put on a display of his power and send innocent men to their deaths, rather than doing his job properly.”

  “Hang him!” called someone from the back.

  “Yeah!” Folks seemed to like the idea.

  “String him up!”

  Carriage was fuming. His red cheeks blazed as vivid as his ginger face-fuzz. “You cain’t touch me,” he bellowed. “I’m the sheriff of this whole county.”

  Jed plucked the tin star from Carriage’s chest. “Not no more,” he said.

  The crowd cheered. The cheering turned to baying for Carriage’s blood. Jed had to fire a bullet into the air to get their attention again.

  “There’ll be no hanging today, folks. And never again, if’n I have my way. What if we string up some varmint only to find out later on, he was innocent all along? We cain’t bring him back. How would you feel if it was one of your loved ones, accused, tried and executed, but we got the wrong man?”

  The crowd shifted uncomfortably. It was easier to look at their footwear than to meet the gunslinger’s searchlight gaze.

  “String him up! Hang the varmint!” The sheriff’s daughter elbowed her way to the front. “It’s too good for him but do it anyhow.”

  “Miss Carriage,” said Jed.

  “No, it’d be justice, right and fitting.” Miss Dupree climbed onto the platform. She was dressed in one of Miss Kitty’s finest and most revealing costumes. Her father’s red face turned pale when he saw her.

  “Eugenia, please!”

  “No, Daddy; you got to let me live my life. I ain’t breaking no laws - not that you’ve let that stop you. A lot of folks is dead because of you. How you could pay that snake-in-the-grass to do me in, I cain’t understand. You were a lousy sheriff, Daddy, but worse than that you are a terrible father.”

  Carriage dropped to his knees. “Eugenia - sweetest!”

  “Name’s Sonia. Sonia Dupree! And folks,” she turned to the crowd and gave a shimmy to better display her assets, “if you want to see more of me - and I mean, much more - come to the Last Gasp tonight, where I’ll be performing along with a troupe of new recruits, a novelty act the likes of which Tarnation ain’t never seen afore!”

  Carriage slumped, defeated and broken.

  “Orson?” Miss Kitty was in front of him, extending her hand. He looked up and met her gaze.

  “Miss - Miss Kitty?”

  “Hello, Orson. I hope you’ll join me for a drink in my dressing room afore the show tonight.”

  “I - I -” He broke off. The sound of Jed cocking his gun got him agreeing soon enough.

  “That’s it, folks,” Jed holstered his gun. “See you at the Last Gasp this evening. First round’s on me.”

  The crowd cheered and began to disperse.

  “All’s well that end’s good,” said Miss Kitty.

  “Nope,” said Jed. “Ain’t over yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “I got to find out who shot that there rope,” he scratched his chin. And, he thought but didn’t say, I’ve got to attend to other business...

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Other Business!

  Jed set Carriage’s men to dismantling the gallows. He found them obedient and obliging workers - clearly they wished to keep on the gunslinger’s good side. Carriage shuffled off, Jed didn’t know where, to lick his wounds before his appointment with Miss Kitty. The townsfolk got on with their usual business, and before long, Main Street Tarnation looked just the same as it did on every other day.

  Having despatched a wagon to pick up the three fellers in skirts they’d left behind, Jed called in at young Doc Willoughby’s to see how Dawson was faring.

  Jed...

  The voice in his head pinched him like a sudden migraine.

  Farkin Shish!

  I know you’re in Tarnation, Jed. I know the boy is at hand. You are to bring him to me in Sawyer’s Canyon - I’m sure you know it. Bring him at dusk.

  “I won’t do it!” said Jed, out loud, startling young Doc Willoughby who was tending to Dawson’s busted ankle. The two men exchanged a worried look. Jed left the room, apparently talking to himself.

  You’ll do it, Jed. Your beloved Horse is at stake. He’s ailing, Jed; fading fast. He needs the top of his head back on and soon.

  “I won’t do it!” Jed repeated through gritted teeth. “You cain’t make me.”

  You don’t want your Horse? I find that impossible to believe.

  “Not at this price,” Jed muttered. Folk in the street dodged out of his way. Some thought of approaching to congratulate him on bringing down the blowhard Carriage but thought better of it when they saw the grim expression on his face.

  Oh, Jed. Before long you’ll realise my original offer was quite the bargain.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you won’t do it to save your Horse, perhaps you ca
n be persuaded by other means.”

  “Get to the point, you mealy-mouthed monster.”

  I see you’re quite attached to that little town. Therefore, you’ll bring me the boy or I shall wipe it and everyone in it from the face of Vultures’ Moon.

  Jed stopped walking.

  I see that got your attention. Sawyer’s Canyon at dusk. Bring the boy and no one else.

  Jed felt the pressure leave his head, but he felt as though he had been sucker punched in the guts. The new terms of the bargain changed everything. Didn’t they? The loss of one little orphan boy weighed against the obliteration of an entire town and its people... It was justifiable, wasn’t it?

  But then what?

  There was no guarantee Plisp and Shish would spare the settlement once their reign of terror began.

  His head pounding with thoughts and the noonday sun, Jed went to see Billy’s ma to ask how her young lodger was settling in.

  ***

  “He’s awful quiet,” Billy’s ma said, glancing out of the kitchen window to where the boys were playing in the yard. She poured Jed hot, black coffee like steaming treacle. “Understandable after what he’s been through, losing his folks like that, but...”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know how to put it, Jed. Sometimes I catches him, looking at Billy and it’s like - I don’t know - you ever had a cat look at you? It’s a bit like that. That dispassionate gaze, that disinterest. But then the boy seems to come to himself again and he gets on with whatever game it is they’ve got going, but - here!”

  She pulled open a drawer and took out several sheets of paper.

  “Wyatt’s drawings. He and Billy like to draw.”

  “Yup,” said Jed. The walls were decorated with Billy’s sketches of Jed and Horse in a range of action poses. He looked at Wyatt’s drawings, expecting to see violent pictures of the shuttle crash, of death and destruction - it would only be natural after the boy’s traumatic experience - but instead the papers were covered on both sides with clumsy representations of the underground world Jed had visited. It was impossible to render the ever-changing fluidic walls of Shish’s domain, but the boy’s untrained hand had tried. There was writing too, inhuman symbols and characters, spelling out some message Jed couldn’t understand.

  “What does it all mean, Jed?” Billy’s ma tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and looked over the gunslinger’s shoulder at the indecipherable images.

  “Trouble,” said Jed.

  He went to the window to watch the boys playing with a ball. It struck him at once that Billy was doing all the running around, while for the most part Wyatt was standing stock still in the middle of the yard. He had a vacant expression. When the ball came near him, he repelled it with his foot - not kicking it exactly but rather exerting some kind of force field to send it in the opposite direction to wherever Billy was expecting.

  He’s already like Farkin Plisp, Jed realised, recalling that distant, eerie boy who had been his childhood friend in Doc Brandy’s lab. He remembered how Doc had been amazed -along with the other Pioneers - to find humanoid inhabitants of the remote sky rock onto which their ship had crashed.

  A thought as quick as lightning seared across Jed’s mind.

  That’s what he wanted you to think...

  Plisp’s people, all but eradicated directly and indirectly by the terraforming of the Pioneers, weren’t humanoid at all. They were - they were - Jed made the connection at last - they were disembodied blue light, like the sphere that had guarded him during his visit to their realm. They only took human form when they wanted to infiltrate the settlers.

  As Plisp had matured, his boy-shape had developed and grown as Jed’s had but there was something else. With the passage of time, Plisp’s skin had become more translucent until by the time of his final showdown with Jed, he was completely transparent with his true self - the light in the skull - visible for all to see.

  Glass head...

  Jed rushed out into the yard. He could hear the voice of Miss Ellen Peabody repeating in his mind: devil boy demon child devil boy...

  “Get indoors, Billy.”

  “Oh, but Jed! We’re playing.”

  The look on the gunslinger’s face silenced Billy’s protests. He picked up the ball and took it inside.

  “Howdy, Wyatt,” Jed stepped towards the orphan boy.

  Wyatt’s head turned. His face was opaque as flesh should be. His pink lips turned up in a smile. “Hello, Jed,” he laughed, but his eyes were empty, like pools at the bottom of a cave.

  ***

  “I want to go back to Billy,” Wyatt said for the third or fourth time. He was sitting in front of Jed on the back of a horse the gunslinger had borrowed from the Double Cross stables. Looking at him and hearing him now, Jed wondered if he was mistaken. The child was a normal, human boy after all - everything else was in Jed’s imagination and Wyatt was not a changeling in the least, not an inhuman creature who had brought about the shuttle crash and killed all those folks, including the couple who had adopted him.

  Cuckoos, Jed thought. The glass heads are just like cuckoos. They plant their offspring in human families and when they get old enough, kill their adoptive parents and turn to glass...

  It made a sort of twisted sense. Plisp must have done the same in order to get taken on board. It was a survival instinct. While the rest of his kind were being exterminated, he was safe in Doc Brandy’s laboratory, being poked and prodded and experimented on. He had taken us all in.

  And now Shish was trying to resurrect his -for want of a better word - brother to resume the plan of overthrowing the off-worlders and reclaiming the Moon as their own. He needs to join this physical form, that perhaps might have once been a real boy called Wyatt, with the remnants of Plisp’s psyche that are part and parcel of what makes Horse Horse.

  I cain’t let that happen.

  But Tarnation is at stake...

  “Where we going anyhow?” the boy stopped his complaining and fidgeting as they rode further and further from Billy’s place.

  “Sawyer’s Canyon,” Jed grunted. “To see an old friend.”

  ***

  A mile from the canyon, Jed became aware they were being followed - I’m paranoid, he thought! It’s just another rider on the road, is all. A rider in a rush...

  He recognised the rider before he got within earshot.

  Jackson Flint.

  Jed turned his horse around and waited for the bounty hunter to catch up.

  “Get out of here,” said Jed. “Afore I arrest you all over again.”

  “Oh now, Jed,” Flint pouted as if hurt, “That’s not very friendly. When I’ve ridden all this way and gone to all this trouble to find you. You owe the Double Cross for another horse by the way - they let me have it in your name.”

  “I ain’t interested,” Jed scowled. “I suggest you keep riding. Maybe you’ll find some place where the folks’ll take you in. See it as a chance to start afresh; see if you can make something of yourself.”

  Flint grinned. “You think I can? Make something of myself? I’m touched, Jed; I truly am.”

  “Was you that shot the hangman’s rope, weren’t it?”

  Flint’s grin broadened.

  “Now get going.”

  Jed geed his horse. Flint did likewise, riding alongside the gunslinger. He waved at the boy.

  “Hello, little one,” he waved his fingers. “What’s your name?”

  “Don’t talk to strangers,” said Jed.

  Flint laughed. “We’re hardly that!”

  “We ain’t friends,” said Jed.

  “He’s a bit of a grump, isn’t he?” Flint winked at the boy. “My name’s Jackson. What’s yours?”

  “Wyatt,” said Wyatt. “Are you coming with us to
Sawyer’s Canyon?”

  Jed groaned. Much to Flint’s amusement.

  “I’ll take that as an invitation,” he said.

  ***

  Jed was silent the rest of the way. Flint and the boy sang silly songs, making each other laugh. When they reached the lip of the canyon, Jed dismounted and lifted Wyatt from the saddle.

  “No need to get off,” he told Flint. “You can keep going.”

  “Oh, don’t be that way, Jed. Whatever it is you’re up to, out here in the middle of nowhere, let me help. I’m a changed man, Jed, and it’s all thanks to you. I have skills, you know. Let me use them in your employ.”

  Jed sneered. “I ought to be taking you in for trial, but I’m a mite preoccupied at the moment. Leave me to my business and take advantage of this chance to get away scot free. It won’t happen again. Next time we meet, I’m running you in.”

  Flint exhaled, disappointed. He touched the brim of his hat, said “So long, Wyatt” and rode away. Jed watched until he was out of sight.

  “He’s funny,” said Wyatt.

  “He’s gone,” said Jed.

  He picked up the boy and found a track that wound down the sloping face of this side of the canyon. It was darker down there, out of the direct light of day, and cooler too. The boy shivered.

  He’s just an innocent child, Jed told himself. Get out of there now and take him back to Billy’s ma.

  But he kept going, deeper and deeper until he reached the tenebrous hollows of the canyon floor.

  He set the boy on his feet and warned him to keep close.

  “I don’t like it here, Jed,” said the boy, kicking at stones. “I want to go home.”

  Perhaps that’s exactly where you are going, kid, Jed thought but didn’t say.

  Jed...

  Jed was startled into alertness. He pulled the boy closer to him and drew his revolver. The voice in his head laughed; the gun would be no use at all.