Jailbait Justice

by Danny Hogan

  ‘Oh yeah wiseass, where’s my carbine, then?’

  She pointed at the mule and there, on his right shoulder, was my carbine in a fine new leather scabbard. It was a real beaut all right; chestnut with a deep rich shine.

  ‘I thought I’d get you a present. Save you having to carry your dinky little rifle all that way.’

  ‘Dinky… wha...?’ My hangover had managed to make it across the lot from the capsule and catch up with me. I did not feel well at all and my head was a whirl. What the hell was she jabbering about?

  ‘I’ve been thinking all night and I want to go to Houston. I was hoping my little gift to you would get you to think about coming with me.’

  I just looked at her for a spell, half taking in what she was saying and half just getting my own messed up head together.

  ‘Alice, you ain’t been doing shit all night other than snoring like a prize sow and kicking up one hell of a honk.’

  ‘Excuse me? Look, Jezebel, I’m being serious here. I’m going to Houston and I really need you to come with me. I know I stand no chance of making it alone so you have to come.’ This would have pissed me off enough but her little princess who will get her way stance was sending me over the edge. I turned around and buried my face into the mule’s stinking fur, just for the small comfort it would offer me and in my weakened state, it was all I could do stop myself crying.

  ‘Oh come on Alice, I really don’t feel like it,’ was the best I could do. ‘And they’re planning on hanging me in Houston. Ain’t you heard?’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be a tough girl, where’s your sense of adventure?’ she huffed and, although all I could see was grey fur and fleas, I’d lay a wager she crossed her arms.

  ‘You only have to get me as far as being in sight of Houston. As far as Jersey Village, which hasn’t been incorporated into Houston proper as yet. You get three grand in gold and you can use some of that to hire a wagon to take you all the way back to Austin, safe and sound.’

  ‘It’s a long way, I’m tired and hungover, I need me some food, it’s really fucking hot and we’re both gonna get killed,’ I pulled my face out of the mule’s hide and looked sternly at her, ‘you first.’ I slowly buried my face back in the mule’s neck.

  I felt Alice’s hand on my shoulder, oh so very gentle.

  ‘Listen, I’m gonna buy you a real big breakfast with loads of coffee, then I’m going to take us to the outfitter and get us some new clothes for the trail.’

  ‘Oh yeah, with what money?’ I asked with my voice sounding muffled and pathetic.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ she replied.

  I pulled my face out of the mule’s fur and the fresh air hitting me was orgasmic. Then I followed her around to the mule’s other flank were she was holding a small saddlebag cautiously open; just enough so that I could make out a pile of bits.

  ‘Jesus lord, how much is there?’ I blurted.

  ‘Just over a grand, it was all the cash we had. We kept it in a trunk underneath our homestead and Daddy busted through to get it.’

  ‘Why the hell did you not tell me about this before? We could have got ourselves some nice rooms at the hostelry rather than sleep cooped up like chickens in that there capsule.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t want you robbing me in the night and this money is to last the whole trip and maybe… well… I figured I could dip into it heavy today if it’ll convince you to escort me to Houston.’

  I thought about it for a minute. I remembered that scrawny fella from Sal’s guaranteeing me a paid job if I met him down at the agency either the day before or that day or… well, the thing was, I could not remember exactly. I did get myself drunk that night. The other thing that dawned on me was that I reckoned I could get away with doing close to nothing with this mark. The scrawny fella might have got me in with a crew where I would have to labour on scouting and hauling and shit. Besides, like I said before, I needed an excuse to get out of town for a while and why not earn a load of cash at the same time?

  I looked at her and smiled and held out my mitt and said: ‘Well, I guess I’m your gal.’

  Alice, being a total rube, smiled back like she was the one getting the better deal, and shook my hand like a fairy.

  12

  The mess stand was in a very large tent around back from the agency near to where I shot them two bandits. I must say that I found it pretty amusing, when I took my place on a plank bench, to see a bunch of adventurers looking at the brain stain on the wall with much interest.

  Amongst the chewing hoards, and while Alice breakfasted on oatmeal and dried fruit, I ate chuck brisket, prairie hog sausage and bacon served with scrambled egg, beans, pancakes and syrup all washed down with a river of quarter decent coffee.

  Alice sipped her tea like a fag and looked at me all judgmental. I attempted to return the sentiment as I mopped up bean sauce and grease with a folded bit of pancake.

  ‘Right we need to get ourselves some rough wearing travelling gear and maybe a nice dress each in case we get to do some socialising in the townships we come across,’ I said, eventually. I sure as hell was not going all that way without stopping for a party or two, uh-uh. Alice looked at nothing in particular with more than a hint of discomfort. She seemed to have cooled at the notion of spending money on me but she came along anyway.

  The outfitters had everything a person with taste could find a reason to be alleviated of their money for. Being direct on the main, and only, trade route from east to west there was a wide range of fine garments that filled racks and shelves and the backs of mannequins in all the hues in creation.

  Alice got herself a good pair of leather pants as well as a long sleeve T-shirt, thick woollen sweater for when it got colder at night and a wide brimmed hat.

  Me, I got myself a nice pair of denim short shorts, some pantyhose for the cold, a new sleeveless vest and a leather weskit. We both got ourselves a pair of new boots each ’cos we were sure going to need them.

  In the eveningwear section Alice got herself a really lovely pink tube dress that suited her titless-assless frame. I chose a purple silk wonderment with an incorporated bodice, the skirt of which could be hoisted and clamped right at the hip like what the tarts were wearing the previous evening. It showed an awesome lot of cleavage too, which suited my more womanly figure, even if I do say so myself. I got the idea that Alice didn’t approve of it.

  Alice also got herself some little shoes to go with hers. My new boots suited me just fine.

  We were nearly done. We stopped by the agency store and got ourselves provisions in the form of some bags of jerky, nuts and dried fruit and fourteen gallons of water, which came in big old plastic containers, as well as several pots of chew. We picked up an old state map too. I saved the best until last: the gunsmith.

  The gunsmith, in a large wooden barn, was the last building of the agency on the trail going east. Entering through the big double-doors I was hit by the beautiful reek of cordite and gunmetal, my most favourite smells. Racks and racks of high quality rifles, assault rifles, shotguns and pistols adorned the walls and I thrilled at beholding them. There were men in leather aprons hammering out bits of metal on anvils and some using lathes to whittle parts. A man with a contraption over his eyes was mending telescopic sights and a lady was testing the action on a large calibre hunting rifle. But the guy that interested me most in this place was the one that cooked up the charge and pressed the bullets at the reloading bench. I could see him bringing out big trays of black powder and slicing into them like he was preparing flapjacks. The metallic, heavy aroma was wonderful.

  ‘Good morning sir, do you do custom loads for .44 magnum?’ I enquired.

  ‘Why yes ma’am we do.’

  ‘OK I’ll be back shortly.’

  First thing’s first. We traded Alice’s stupid bird gun for a Remington 870 12 gauge and her daddy’s clapped out 9mm, that she was clinging onto, with a real nice Glock 36. When I say trade I mean we handed over Alice’s crap and h
ad to pay the gunsmith a pretty price for the good stuff.

  We picked up around one hundred rounds of ammo from the reloader for Alice’s new shotgun and pistol. Then I handed the cook some raw grits that I had got Alice to buy me at the store. I explained: ‘I want you to make me up a batch of .44 magnum hollow points using one part of this here grits to two parts powder. It’s my own recipe; adds a little kick to the soup.’

  ***

  Outside I began to feel a little excited, all kitted out in our new gear as we packed the fat bastard of a mule up good and tight. Well, after that me and Alice looked at each other. Then we looked at the trail east and, by god, I fairly had butterflies in my stomach.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Alice said, with a little nervousness in her voice.

  ‘Hell yeah,’ says I, all bravado. Got to keep up appearances.

  With the jingling noises our packs made on the mule’s back we headed out to the very eastern part of the agency where the trail commenced proper and found we had to stand in damned line for something or other.

  Turns out we had to sign a register presided over by some fat old dullwit.

  ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘Duh, east,’ I said.

  ‘Young lady, I did not ask the direction you are going I asked you to state your destination.’

  ‘We’re going to Houston, sir,’ says Alice.

  ‘OK, if you can just sign your names and ages here, along with height weight etcetera.’

  ‘What is the point of all this,’ I asked as I scratched in my details on the rough paper with a pencil that was barely useful. The fat bastard didn’t answer and just ushered us along, and like that, we were on our way.

  13

  About an hour out of Austin was where the evidence of whatever happened in the old world really abounded. The ruins of old automobiles and vehicles of all sizes began to clutter what had been a fairly empty highway. Twisted metal, like the ribs of slain monsters, jutted out here and there and grills and headlamps contorted into faces of silent agony.

  Whole families of skeletons sat in their cars or lay strewn out across the broken tar. Some seemed to accept their lot while others appeared caught in a frozen howl of protest. But it was not all confined to the highway, oh no. Wrecks of vehicles heading in no particular direction lay dotted along the vast scrub desert that flanked the roads. Some seemed headed towards the hills while others east or westerly.

  Just beside the road there was what must have been one of them old airfields. There was a broken wall and some fencing and, through them, you could see planes upended and scattered about like some big kid had come along and played with ’em. A couple of the planes were rooted nose first in the ground like twisted towers, all burnt and blackened.

  ‘I thought they were clearing this shit up?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, so did I. I guess the junk and bodies must have gone all the way to Austin and this is just how far they had cleared to.’

  As we walked we passed other travellers of various types. There were those who lived it up in fancy wagons. They were all done up in gold trimmings with plush interiors, their inhabitants haw-hawing, boozing and fornicating as they rode by. Then there was the doggy carts, packed with them bright orange coated government workers being shipped to work on the Great Renovation. Gleaming dead eyes stared at us from within filthy, bristled faces.

  Couriers barrelled up and down the broken highway in light clothing astride thin, muscular race ponies. The occasional wagon trains packed with miserable looking plebeian families travelled off to find something just as bad as what they had before, only in a different place. And there were people like the lank-haired, mean faced pregnant lady and the four desperate looking armed men she had with her, bounding past us and offering nothing more than a vicious glare. They looked like being out here had begun to turn them into animals or something. With so many people on the road at this stage though, I weren’t that worried.

  I stopped walking for a second to stretch my back but, under that merciless sun with no cover, stopping brought me no comfort at all.

  ‘I don’t see any evidence of any work getting done,’ I grumbled, more to myself than anyone in particular. The excitement of being on the trail had not lasted. Out here I felt over exposed and danged unsafe. Sure you could see for around twenty-miles in all directions but… still.

  ‘Jezebel?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You ever come across a lanky’un before?’

  It was like she was reading my mind. Bravado was called for again.

  ‘Yeah, once or twice. Crusty’uns too. I killed a couple of those rotten bastards in my time.’

  ‘I heard they can’t be killed, the lanky’uns that is.’

  ‘Yeah, I hear that bullshit all the time and that is just what it is; bullshit.’

  ‘I heard they eat people.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ I said, wetting my bandanna for the minute’s respite from the sun’s heat it would give me, ‘out here everything eats people, including other people.’

  I pulled my carbine from its scabbard on the mule’s shoulder and loaded her up before I forgot for the second time. Or was it a third?

  ***

  Around four hours into our journey and just after the midday sun had done its worst, we hit a ghost town that had gone by the name of Garfield.

  There were many one-story dwellings, some fairly intact. There were also strange markings on the walls, manically scrawled. Some of these inscriptions were clearly cusses while others seemed religious in nature. I noticed, also, that there was a distinct lack of junk on the hole-filled roads and little areas of tended land around the dwellings.

  We walked past the remnants of a bus shelter with a torn up poster advertising some old picture show. There was a fine looking lady wielding a pistol. The name of the show had long been torn away but it still had that lady’s name there immortalised.

  ‘Shall we stop here for the night?’ I asked, hopefully.

  ‘What?’ Alice responded, all indignant. ‘Come on Jezebel, we’ve only been walking a few hours, and it’s only just after midday. I reckon we can easily make it to Bastrop before dark. There’s an outpost at Bastrop.’ Alice looked around, her cute little features cringing, ‘It ain’t safe around here.’

  ‘Can we at least stop for a bite to eat, I’m starving. We can get shelter in one of those dwellings yonder.’

  The silly bitch rolled her eyes at this and said: ‘Sure,’ and then: ‘so childish,’ when I imitated her. She led the mule over to where I had pointed and started getting foodstuff out of the packs.

  ‘I’ll be in charge of rationing out the provisions. I reckon you’d happily eat everything we have in one sitting and look around for seconds,’ She declared.

  ‘Fine, whatever.’ It was too hot to be pissed off with her sass.

  I walked up to the nearest dwelling. Its door was badly battered and creaked mightily when I pushed it open. Like I suspected, totally picked clean. I imagined there was not one thing in the whole of Garfield that had not been salvaged.

  We both cautiously walked inside and, when it became obvious it was clear, we sat down on the floor together. Me with a tremendous cracking noise coming from my joints, that is. Alice handed me a pathetic handful of nuts, dried fruit and jerky.

  ‘I got more meat on me to maintain, Alice. Give me some of that cornbread I’m sure I saw you get at the store,’ I protested.

  She just seemed to find this oh so amusing.

  ‘You’re grumbling now, but my you’ll really grumble if we run out of rations.’

  ‘God…’ I smote my own brow. It was too damned hot and I was too damned tired to argue and, the truth of it was, these breasts I was so damn proud of were causing me a heck of a back strain. I didn’t really get anything out of the fruit and nuts but I did enjoy the jerky, what there was of it.

  Alice seemed happy gnawing at her palmful of crap and looking out the window at the nature like it was all new to her, or something. My fe
et hurt, my legs cramped, my back strained and my head ached. I let out a groan and rested my head against the plasterboard wall of the dwelling behind me. Back in Austin I just had to wait for the bad guys to come to me. I wasn’t used to this trekking about.

  I was just closing my eyes and had leaned my head against the wall of the dwelling when a feeling came upon me that I can’t quite explain. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t figure what.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said, looking at Alice. ‘This place is giving me the creeps.’ But it was already too late.

  14

  I should have smelled him way before I opened the door and beheld the little fucker. Alice shrieked with fright at the sight of him and I could tell that gave the bastard some courage.

  About the only thing that concerned me was that they were seldom alone yet I could only see this one crusty’un standing before us.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him fuck you,’ I called to Alice behind me, as I charged my carbine. It was my time to shine. I could hear Alice gag with disgust. ‘It’s the tertiary syphilis that makes them that way.’

  He was all riled and it looked like we had interrupted the wretch making moves on our mule, who was braying like a demon. I could make out hideous dark orbs in the eyeholes of the crusty’un’s filthy sackcloth hood. All bulbous and bloody, they were.

  He was wearing little else other than scraps of blackened sackcloth and whatever else he could find. He was pretty much skin and bone and his hide was a hideous collection of erupting boils and sores. His small rotting tackle was exposed. I s’pose he had no use for modesty, and he moved more like a critter than a man.

  He looked at the heavens and made a strange rasping sound that I took as an intention to attack or, maybe, a call for his buddies. I plugged him in the throat with a bullet from the Marlin stopping it short.