The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  Contents

  Dedication / Epigraph

  Title Page

  Prologue

  My Ithaca

  Oriensligne Burns

  Cats, Cradles, and Comic-Cons

  Ravens and Writing Desks

  I Thought You Were Dead

  The Wolf and the Dragon

  Old Goats and Indian Chiefs

  Normand in the Desert

  Crazy Pills

  White Lightning

  Wilder Attack

  The Preacher-Man

  Too Many Heebies and Not Enough Jeebies

  I Smell The Blood

  Run or Die

  A Wilder Shade of Pale

  The Squire Descends

  Muffins

  A Heart-to-Heart

  Why Won't You Die

  Ramma-Lamma-Ding-Dong

  A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

  Pack's Rescue

  Wonder and Lightning

  The Two-Faced Man

  Drafted!

  The Bright Side

  Dirty Dead Arse

  Fleeing the Castle

  There's a Catch

  Vero Nihil Verius

  The Heat of the Night

  Bunkers and Battleships

  Waffle-Eaters and Dopplegangers

  Clever Bastard

  Ed's Other Life

  The Whirlwind

  My Da Called Me Pack

  Dry Leaves

  Bad Juju

  Normand Escapes the No-Man

  I Remember You

  Walkin on the Moon

  Clayton Discovers His Fate

  The Man Comes Around

  The House of Water

  His Own Kind of Ruin

  The Prosaic Rope

  The Tower of Silence

  The Gunslinger Crosses the Frontier

  The Goat-Fish

  The Second Verse, Just Like the First

  Ardelia Begins Her Training

  Ostlyn City Limits

  The Uncomfortable Solace of Madness

  The Friction of the Day

  Trailmates in Time

  Home on the Range

  The Hollow Hunter

  Dreaming in Technicolor

  Noreen and the King

  Six Bullets for Six Men

  Revelations

  The Best-Laid Plans

  About

  Copyright

  “In school, I could hear the leaves rustle, and go on a journey.”

  — Clint Eastwood

  "How well I have learned that there is no fence

  to sit on between heaven and hell. There is

  a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm

  is no place for any man."

  — Johnny Cash

  Book One of

  The Outlaw King

  Edited & Formatted

  S. A. Hunt

  Prologue

  THE ASSASSIN CREPT TOWARD the house through cold blue beams, moonlight dancing across the forest floor in a handful of silver coins.

  It was a small house, a two-story half-timber cottage set back deep in the trees, up the hill from the main grounds. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t even realize it was there. A small wooden platform served as the front porch roof, accessible by a door that opened in the middle. Next to the front door was a small table, and on that table was a wooden game board.

  The man had never heard of the game before the house’s occupant had foisted it on him fifteen years ago, on one of their few meetings. The rules were labyrinthine and the pace was nerve-wracking. They would sometimes go days between moves.

  He climbed the front porch, careful to avoid the always-creaky second step, and tested the doorknob. It was locked.

  He was never one for picking locks. He went back out into the front yard and looked up at the widow’s-walk on the second story, sizing it up with a veteran eye. He rubbed his hands together and leaned on his knees, gauging and making mental calculations.

  With four quick steps, he ran at the house and stepped on one of the columns holding up the platform, launching himself up at the ledge. It was a challenging jump, three meters at least. He caught the ledge with his fingertips and flexed his arms, kicking both feet up as he did so, and pulled himself onto the widow’s-walk. The railing became a ladder that he heaved himself up and over.

  The night was a living thing out here in the wilderness, crawling and crying with a thousand creatures. The man paused and listened to the nightingales, squatting next to the door to avoid being seen, to make sure he hadn’t woken up the man inside.

  He listened to the frogsong and the fiddling of the insects, his heartbeat settling. Still water. A telescope bolted to the railing focused a speck of moonlight onto the boards.

  Satisfied he hadn’t been heard, he tried the door and found it unlocked. He eased it open, slipped inside, and pushed it against the jamb.

  He crouched there in the darkness of the bedroom as his eyes adjusted to the grainy, colorless environment. Some enormous sort of artwork dangled from the ceiling, a giant paper tube that coiled around the room once. If he hadn’t entered on his haunches, he would have ran right into it.

  The owner of the house lay asleep on the bed in the middle of the room, snoring softly. The intruder lingered in the shadows, watching him sleep. He didn’t think the fat bastard was faking it, but he knew better than to trust such a canny son of a bitch.

  He crouched there for a long time, twenty minutes maybe, long enough for the sleeper to get bored of pretending and look to see what was going on.

  Nope. He went on snoring, oblivious to his fate.

  The man stood up and drew his pistol from the leather jackass rig under his jacket. It was a well-polished seven-shot breaktop revolver, too big to qualify as a hidden piece. He was only wearing the jacket to muffle the holster’s tack.

  “I’m sorry,” the man murmured, and fired a slug at the back of Ed’s head.

  At first, he thought the round had vaporized the sleeping man. The instant the pistol had discharged, the muzzle-flash lit up the room and icepicked his eardrums, and Ed had vanished.

  He didn’t get up and run, he simply ceased to exist, and his assassin couldn’t understand what had happened. In a strange fit of pique, he had the bizarre notion that he’d popped Ed like a balloon. Ed was a big guy, almost three hundred pounds. Maybe all that flab was nothing but hot air. The killer stood there, the gun still pointed at the bed, trying to wrap his head around the results of his premeditated murder, when snow began to fall from the ceiling.

  Great big goosedown flakes waltzed to and fro as they fell, twirling in the air. Still bewildered, he looked up and opened his other hand, catching one of the flakes in his glove. It was a feather from the mattress.

  A tearing, a deafening pain whipped across his mind and he dropped the pistol on the duvet, sinking to his knees, his fists over his temples. Both ears were ringing and he felt like all the blood had drained out of his skull, leaving him wall-eyed and out of breath. The room centrifuged like a zoetrope.

  “Guhh,” he said, his forehead ground against the intricate carpet. His brainpan felt like it was being emptied and washed out. “Nnnnggghhh, ffffggg...leave me be, for the love of the gods. I’ve done your deed.”

  The man floundered on the floor, his fingertips twitching, searching. He found the bedpost and hauled himself to his feet. His cheeks were cold; he touched them and realized that he was weeping. He picked up the smoking revolver and put it back in its holster, and sat down on the hope chest at the end of the bed to collect himself.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to do for you no more, devil.”

  His downcast eyes swept over the famil
iar shape at his feet. He leaned over and picked up the gunbelt that had been lying at the foot of the bedpost. It was empty of all but the rounds.

  A cursory search uncovered the pistols lying on the nightstand, in easy reach of the bed. The man picked them up, put them in the gunbelt, and slung the gunbelt over his shoulder like a gentlemen’s jacket. It was an easy, jaunty look, but he felt sick to his stomach and not at all jaunty.

  On the way downstairs and out the front door, he paused at the typewriter sitting on the desk and typed a few meaningful words, then walked out onto the porch where he half-expected to see a squad of lawmen waiting to gun him down as he left the house.

  There was no one. A surge of grief and anger filled him up and burned away quickly, leaving only regret in its place, tempered by shame. Perhaps he only wanted there to be someone there to punish him for what he’d done.

  He raked the pieces from the game board and stormed away.

  _______

  The sound of the assassin’s gunfire startled him awake, but instead of his bed, Ed found himself underwater. A dark and subtle landscape of undulating blue, red, and green materialized from the nothing. The cold water threatened to take his breath away.

  Ed pushed the slimy stones with heavy hands and rose against the water’s surface, feeling it glass smooth and round over the top of his head. It seemed to happen in slow-motion. He couldn’t get enough air into his burning chest, the water wouldn’t stream out of his beard fast enough. It clung to his face like melting ice and blurred his eyes.

  He gazed, bewildered, at the dead fingers of the evening forest through a curtain of crystal.

  He was on Earth. How did he get to Earth?

  Then the water was gone and he fell away from it, collapsing on his back at the stream’s edge as it coursed over his numbing feet. He sat up and barked a gout of water from his lungs, panting in ragged gasps, the pain sawing at his throat with every breath.

  In that clarity which is so common to the dying, he looked down and marveled with grim eyes at the little sores all over his naked shins, calves, and feet. The diabetes was eating his legs, but today, today was the last day he’d ever have to worry about it again.

  Out of the chilling rush of the autumn water, the bullet-hole howled anew and Ed fell back again onto his elbows, growling.

  (get to the house)

  His head felt like it was wrapped in foam. As he had done so many times before, for so many years before, for so long to his benefit, Ed heeded the raspy words in his head.

  He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up again, struggling to his feet. The world swam again, as if he were underwater once more, and dimmed, and he bent over and grasped his knees until he could regain his faculties. He took one step, then another staggering lurch, then stood a bit straighter and continued onto the house.

  It waited, lurking huge and fat in the forest, a rundown old white plantation house in the middle of ten thousand winter-stripped trees.

  He made it to the back door, and leaned against the splintery rail at the bottom of the stoop to muster up another round of fortitude. He snatched the door open and ordered himself inside.

  When he got into the kitchen, he heard someone tapping an impatient foot on the linoleum, but when he looked around in confusion he realized that what he was hearing was the sound of his blood dripping on the floor. The sight of it astounded him, made him reel again. He leaned on the island as he passed it, and started toward the living room.

  His shirt, already filthy and soaked through, began to greedily drink up the crimson leaking out of the shredded hole in his neck, spreading it across his chest and shoulder, letting it run down his coarse-haired back.

  He couldn’t stand anymore. He went to his knees with a thunderous weight that made the dishes in the sink clatter, and fell over onto his side, causing the grill shelf inside the oven to buzz. Ed lay on his back in his own kitchen, his gray eyes staring up at the horrid popcorn ceiling and the overhead light that had stopped working when his boy was still in diapers.

  This isn’t how it was supposed to go, the old man thought, and he could feel the life running out of him from second to second. This isn’t how it was written.

  Silent feet approached him from a dark corner of the room and someone knelt over him. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

  With what? Oh, I know what you want. Ed’s mouth worked, but he couldn’t get the words out of his throat. The world was falling away, he was dropping, dropping through a trapdoor into oblivion, looking up at his oldest friend’s face as it dwindled to a point high above. He could hear the soft rustle of arrow-shafts in a quiver.

  I’m sorry, old friend. He’ll find it. He’ll do the right thing.

  “Where did you put the key?”

  Your turn, kid, thought Ed, as the world came to an end, narrowing to a bright point like an old television.

  Good luck. You’re gonna need it.

  My Ithaca

  I AWOKE TO THE LIGHTS of home, jostled from sleep by the Greyhound bus as we rattled down an offramp. I peeled my face away from the windowsill and sat up, pulling the fleece cap off my eyes and looking around. Lexington scrolled past the glass, greeting me with an urban smile I hadn’t seen in a year.

  I tugged the hat down over my eyes again and savored the feel of the tires grumbling on familiar surface streets.

  The bus pulled into a parking lot, waking me up again. I grabbed my backpack and sidled off into the cool night air. The driver opened the sidewall compartments and helped me pull my bags off onto the asphalt: a black gym bag, a green canvas duffel bag, and a camouflage rucksack, all of them stuffed to capacity.

  He grunted as he dragged the rucksack out and it hit the ground with a soft thud. I caught a glimpse of the tag the airport baggage handlers had put on it. It was a picture of a stick figure bending over with a lightning zigzag coming out of his back, and the words “TWO MAN LIFT”.

  “There we go,” he said. “Gonna be alright? Got somebody to pick you up?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He hesitated for a moment, wiping his hands on his pants, glanced at me, then got back on the bus and started writing on a clipboard. I took off my backpack, then knelt and hoisted up the rucksack, shrugging into the complex strap frame. I put my backpack on my chest, then squatted to pick up the gym bag and duffel, and shuffled away.

  I felt like an astronaut in my rucksack and heavy boots, just returned from a journey to an alien planet.

  I made it across the parking lot of the pizzeria next door and was halfway across the next when I had to put the bag and duffel down and rest. Cars shushed past on the four-lane, oblivious white-eyed roaches scurrying back to whatever hidey-hole they lived in.

  I panted, my breath a billow of white in the late fall air, and listened to the droning buzz of the sodium mast-light overhead. Exhausted by almost a week of constant travel, I was starting to sweat in my uniform.

  I hefted my stuff again and resumed my shuffling quest.

  The stark lights of the restaurant were a welcome sight. It wasn’t too busy; there were a couple of families eating supper, kids playing in the enclosed jungle gym, a young couple in a corner booth. An old guy in a threadbare jacket was standing at the front counter.

  I squeezed in through a side entrance and crammed the duffel, gym bag, and backpack into a booth and sat down next to my rucksack. My crap and I had pretty much occupied an entire booth.

  Once I’d caught my breath, I took out my cellphone and turned it on. I dialed Tianna’s number and put it to my ear.

  “Hello? Ross?”

  “Hey,” I said. The plastic bench felt slick and strange against my fatigues. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Burger Queen on New Circle Road.”

  “Okay,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I hung up the phone and went to the counter to order something to eat, feeling self
-conscious in my rumpled regalia. I could feel eyes on my back as I waited for my food, unconsciously toying with the wedding band hanging from the chain around my neck. The world around me felt unreal, an elaborate prank.

  I sat back down with my boothful of fat traveling companions and dug into my cheeseburger and fries.

  I thought it would be an orgasmic experience after so long eating NATO chow like raw cabbage, beat-up fruit, and rabbit stew, but it tasted...grungy, for lack of a better word. Dirty, greasy, heavy. It tasted like the junk food it always was.

  My first meal at home was a distant memory by the time I saw the pickup truck pull into the parking lot an hour later. I got up and reassembled my astronaut getup, then carried it all outside to where the Dodge sat, idling.

  My wife got out and watched me load all my stuff into the back.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  We stood there for a long moment, and she stepped forward and we hugged. I wish I could tell you that it was a passionate reunion like the movies, with lots of feverish pawing and kisses, but I’d be lying to you, and I don’t quite want to get into tall tales just yet. There will be plenty of unbelievable things recounted later, believe me.

  The embrace, brief and stiff, broke off and she stepped back. She gave me a vague, wistful smile through the hair the wind was blowing across her face.

  I tucked it behind her ear and she said something I couldn’t quite hear. “Hmm?” I asked.

  “I said, I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.”

  She got into the truck. I slid into the passenger seat and rubbed my hands together, savoring the blast of hot air from the heater vent. We pulled out of the parking lot and merged with traffic, my hands warming on the dash.

  The silence was uncomfortable, but I didn’t have enough time to get wound up over it and turn on the radio, because our house was only a few minutes’ drive away. We climbed a steep curve, slipping through the looming oaks of the neighborhood night like a snake through a tunnel. The headlights washed up the driveway and over the front of our home, a sprawling 1970s ranch house.