The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  That was battle tactic. They were not rookies.

  I went around to the back door, which was already hanging off the hinges, and grabbed the leg of a table from a pile of smashed furniture out back.

  I crept into the bar from the rear. Stepping inside the back door, I was in the pantry behind the bar, the trap door open at my feet. I slammed it shut and danced backwards into the shadows of the windowless little room, turning sideways to hide behind a narrow shelf.

  Bowler stormed into the pantry, flung open the hatch, and fired a round into the tin cellar, shouting, “Come out of there, you son of a bitch!”

  You ever been poked in the face with a ball bat?

  I came around the shelf and leapt at the man in one fluid motion, spearing him in the forehead with the end of the table leg as he looked up at me. The bowler hat flew straight up like Donald Duck doing a double-take and his legs crumpled; he fell onto his knees and swore in a venomous hiss.

  Before he could recover and shoot me, I clubbed the gun out of his hand, sending it clattering into the cellar.

  He snarled in pain and swung at me. I wasn’t fast enough to dodge the punch and he clipped my eyebrow. My head bounced off his knuckles, the world stepped seven inches to the left, and I lost my bearings just long enough for him to snatch the table leg out of my hands and throw it on the floor. For a split second I could smell the pain.

  I tried to punch him back, but he caught it and tried to twist my arm.

  I stomped his foot and attempted to hip-toss him but since I was already standing on his toe, this only resulted in me collapsing and him falling on top of me like two turtles fucking. We grappled on the floor for a few seconds, grunting and crawling around, and then I managed to grab his lapels and get behind him.

  I used the leverage to put my arm around his throat and my legs around his waist, tightened my grip, and tried to pull off his head with the crook of my elbow.

  The man began to choke and spit, and tried to shout but all that came out was a strangled “Ffffcccck ynnn!”

  I held on until he went limp.

  His face was a horrible shade of magenta, and the veins on his forehead were swollen.

  I tipped his unconscious body toward the trap door and he collapsed like a Slinky into the cellar, tumbling loudly down the ladder, landing at the bottom in a heap of limbs. I bent to grab his revolver off the floor and a loud bang startled me. A bullet hit the wall in front of me, flicking splinters against my face.

  I didn’t look to see who fired. I ran out the back door and cut to the right.

  I was standing next to the stoop when Red came running out.

  As soon as the rifle barrel cleared the doorframe I grabbed it and shot him in the face with his friend’s pistol. A hole the size of a dime appeared next to the bridge of his nose and the wall behind him was splashed with a fine spray of blood and brain matter.

  His inertia carried him the rest of the way down the stairs—he took two more steps and dove bonelessly into the dirt.

  I’d never shot a man before. It wasn’t what I expected.

  I couldn’t afford to stand around and get messed up over it. I took his rifle away and ran back to the corner of the saloon, meaning to hide under the porch again and snipe Brains when he came out to look for me.

  Somehow he’d expected something of that ilk. A pistol round traveled the clapboard siding next to my face with an insectile whir and I ducked, doubling back, jumping over Red’s corpse. I felt a hot thump on my right shoulder like I’d been slapped with the flat of a hot sword.

  Luckily, the saloon was only flanked by an alley on one side. The other side was flush up against the structure next door.

  I hurdled a fence, almost twisting my knee, and ran as hard as I could. Brains cursed as he turned the corner, ran across the back of the block, and caught up with me, but unless he was particularly imaginative, he would never find me where I was hiding.

  I peered through a crack in the wood panels. He was no more than ten feet away from me.

  “Where did you go, Kingsman?” he bellowed into the desert afternoon, staggering to a stop. He panted, looking around, checked the rounds in his chamber, and slapped the cylinder shut.

  He stood there for several minutes, listening, waiting for his breathing to slow.

  About the time I got tired of watching him listen for me, he turned and walked the way he’d came. I remained where I was, however, unwilling to give him the chance to trick me, and grateful that the outhouse I was currently hiding underneath hadn’t been used in a very long time.

  I looked down at the dried shit-mud pit I was standing in and vomited again, croaking up a mouthful of bile as quietly as I could manage.

  _______

  I waited until I hadn’t heard anything from the outlaw for a couple of hours or so, and then lifted myself out of the latrine, clambering out of the seat-hole. I looked at my bare arm, sleeved in a grimy craquelure of blood. I needed to get back to my shirt and vest, and rinse the cut on my shoulder where his bullet had grazed me.

  The sun was low and fat on the western horizon, the shadows were tall and stringy, and the shredded clouds were tinged with the bruise-purple of settled blood.

  I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of shooting the other man in the face, the rangy red-headed man, couldn’t stop thinking about him. I’d never shot anyone before, not even during my time overseas.

  I wondered if he had family. Children.

  The thought transfixed me, had paralyzed me while I sat in the dried-out shitpit in the dark, sweating my ass off. I could see him in my mind’s eye, stiffening facedown in the dirt as bugs explored his motionless body.

  Did someone somewhere love that dead man?

  I wondered if the guy in the cellar that I’d clubbed was still alive. If he was, he couldn’t be a happy camper at all. I thought about checking on him, but the idea seemed counterproductive. If he was still conscious, he’d for sure have a broken neck. He’d landed on his head when he went into the hole.

  It was heartless, but I put it out of my mind.

  He would have killed me if given the chance.

  There was no reason to trouble myself over it, let the guilt eat at me, or get myself into a situation where I had to fish a broken man out of the cellar and force myself to worry about taking care of him. I told myself that he was an outlaw, probably a wanted man. I had prevented a train robbery.

  The knowledge that I’d killed a man rooted me to the spot; the revelation that I’d prevented a serious crime released me.

  I sat in the outhouse, listening, trying to ignore my arm, waiting for the boot-scuff that would tell me Brains was waiting for me, waiting to see where I was, where I had been hiding.

  I tried to calm myself and pass the time with thoughts of Memne, tried to reminisce about her smell, the peculiar feel of her soft skin, but nothing seemed to work.

  I abandoned the tactic. I didn’t want to taint my memories by trying to use them here in this place of death and stink.

  I crooked my neck so I could see the oblong hole in my upper arm, a divot the size of a spoon-head. Looked like someone had taken a bite out of me, but it wasn’t as bad as it felt.

  Once I’d had time to calm down, the adrenaline drained from my system and the cut felt like someone was holding a branding iron to my skin. I tried to put it out of my mind, but everything I did aggravated it.

  I checked both Red’s rifle and Bowler’s pistol. The former was empty, but the latter had four rounds out of seven chambers. I would have to make do with the pistol, but if I wanted to use the rifle, I would have to go check Red for more ammo.

  I crept around the side of the saloon and retrieved the satchel from where I’d hidden it behind one of the support columns under the front porch. The contents were still there and intact.

  I put the fountain pen in my trouser pocket (I did not want the fungus touching me), looped the strap of the bag over my shoulder, and went back to the rear door of the saloon whe
re Red was lying on his belly in a pool of congealing blood. I turned him over and massaged his shirt and jacket, looking for ammo, and found several cartridges tucked into the loops on his belt.

  As I was slipping them out, the world crackled in a flash of light and I heard a dull boom of thunder that shook the dust off my boots.

  I fell over next to the corpse, and the last thing I remember thinking was that I’d forgotten my umbrella.

  It couldn’t be helped; the No-Man had forced him to seek refuge in the strange cave. He could still hear the incredible thunder of it walking around on the street above, looking for him. Normand threw a sheet of metal out of the way and descended into the dark burrow. Someone had crafted a stairway, and even lined it with tile, like a bath-house.

  A sign on the wall in the Etudaen language told him where he was going, but he couldn’t understand it.

  Several times he had to crawl on his belly or climb through junk to get past the wreckage, but once he was in the pit, he felt better. Safer.

  He took out the Etudaen device and depressed the button on the side, illuminating his surroundings with the weak lamplight. Roaches scattered from his presence, scuttling out of sight. He was in a large sort of atrium, and gates barred his progress. He climbed over them, hoisting his exhausted body through the wreckage, and picked his way down another flight of stairs until he found another unnatural cavern.

  At the foot of a tiled platform, an eldritch tunnel extended to the left and right.

  He went left. He lowered himself down onto the tunnel floor and found a set of railroad tracks! The familiar sight comforted him. An underground train! Incredible!

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

  I Remember You

  I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS WITH A tremendous headache, a terrifying, piercing agony like I had an arrow through my face. I was sitting in a barber chair in a dark room, and by the light of an oil lamp I could see my reflection in a mirror on the wall. My beard was a scratchy mask of black felt, oiled with crimson. My scalp and arm were plastered in sheets of blood; I looked like I’d been shot in the head.

  I flexed, trying to free myself, but it was useless. The sheets from the saloon’s bedrooms were twisted as tight as ropes, and looped around my arms and legs and waist. I was completely immobile.

  Someone was standing behind me.

  Brains cupped my left cheekbone with the palm of his hand, pressing a straight-razor against my throat. He leaned in and whispered in my ear.

  “If you’re a Kingsman, you’re a stupid one.” Stewwwwped one.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  He laid the flat of the razor against the hole in my shoulder and a lance of hot iron rocketed down my arm. The room pixelated for an instant.

  “You must’ve taught I was a dumbass, boy,” he said, and came around in front of me. He braced his hands on the chair’s arms and tapped the blade on my face.

  Brains was not a pretty man. He was balding on top, with long greasy wrestler hair and a face like Pete Postlethwaite, thuggish-thick, with beady, twitchy eyes. “You mighta took out me friends, but tey were just kids, like you. Tey ain’t been playin ta game as long as I have.”

  The man gave my face a couple of light slaps and smiled. “You doon’t remember me, do you? I remember you.”

  “What?”

  He pointed to a fiddle lying on a table in the corner.

  “Does that jog your memory, ya greasy miser?”

  The fiddler from Salt Point that asked me for money at the bazaar. He sucked the drool out of the corner of his mouth and shook something in my face. It was the leather satchel.

  “At first, after I knocked your ass out with that rock where I was sittin on the roof, when you came back to loot Mr. Rennell, I was like, Ain’t no way this dumb shit is a gunslinger, but then I saw this bag, and look what I found in it!” Brains plunged his hand into the satchel and shook it off onto the floor.

  In his hand was the weird gray fungus, which he jammed against my upper lip. I expected a musty smell, but all I could catch was the penny-scent of my own blood.

  “If you ain’t a Kingsman, what are you doing with the Acolouthis?” he asked.

  He drew the twisted thing under his own nose, taking in the aroma of it like a fine Cuban cigar. It looked like a mummified penis, a stretched and withered finger with a knob on the end.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said, truthfully. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

  “Anybody ever tell you you’re a shitty liar?” he asked, and punched me in the stomach. I bellowed in his face, my lungs emptying of air.

  I answered him with a miserable grunt. “Yeaaaaahhhhnnnnnn.”

  He made a face and laughed. “Smells like that tin o ruint food didn’t agree with you, did it?”

  All I could do was fight to breathe, sweat loosening the blood on my forehead. It trickled down my face. I tried to spit on him, but all I could do was a weak pfuh that misted my bare chest with red. I glared at him, trying to brush off the burning knot in my guts. I wanted to puke again, but there was nothing left in me.

  “I’ve never had any of this,” said the fiddler. “The slingers and the Grievers keep it pretty locked up. Tey all say it’s too dangerous for most people. That only a few people have the intestinal farditude that it takes to survive eatin it. Is tat true?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Actually, it’s a funny ting. I might believe you. I don’t tink yer a Kingsman gunslinger tall. You’re just some stupid spoilt kid. I kinda want to see what I can get out of yer parents for ye. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Tearty yares? Are ye serious? You look twenteh, at t’most.”

  “I hear that a lot.”

  “Is tat so? Clean livin, I guess. Why, I ain’t got but a few yares on ye.”

  “Clean living, yes. My body is a temple—that’s why I leave my shoes on the outside.”

  The fiddler threw his head back and laughed at that, great cawing laughs that filled the room.

  “My parents are dead, anyway,” I said, once his braying had tapered off. It was only half the truth, of course, but hopefully enough to put him off of that idea, at least. “So that’s a no-go.”

  “A no-go,” said Brains. “Never haerd that befare. I like it. Do you mind if I steal it?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Very kind of ye. I like to expand my vocabulary when I can.”

  “Glad I could help,” I said, and spat in his face.

  He flinched, closed his eyes, was completely unprepared for it. I’d saved it up while he was talking to me, rolled a blob of saliva at the tip of my tongue and blew it out like a sneeze, shotgunned it all over him in a fine mist.

  The fiddler stepped off of my lap and wiped the moisture out of his rheumy eyes, spat my saliva on the floor, and punched me in the jaw as hard as he could. My head dipped down and whipped backwards at the same time. I developed a headache, a dull, twisting agony at the base of my skull.

  Surprisingly, my jawbone didn’t break. Must’ve been all the milk I drank growing up. The room swam for a moment, a sea of crawling stars.

  He held up the Acolouthis.

  “You look like a haingry man,” he said, shaking it. He snapped off the fungal cap and held it in his thumb and forefinger like a numismatist inspecting a silver dollar. “I bet yer starvin, aintcha? After pukin up that tin a soup, I bet yer just cavin in at the middle! I bet your arsehole is rubbin a sore on the back o yer navel! Well, guess what!”

  I looked away from him, but he grabbed my aching jaw and whipped my head back around.

  “I’m gonna feed you dinner,” he said, and tried to open my mouth like a purse, using my chin and forehead as handles. That made it hard to put the cap against my lips, so he went around behind me and tried to brace my forehead with his armpit and hold my head like a football. He smelled like pic
kles.

  “My treat. I want to see what tis ting does to a man befare I make a decision. Do I want to try it myself and maybe die? Or do I wanna sell it?”

  I kept my mouth shut, even as he pulled my right eyebrow up with the heel of his hand, holding my eye open. His breath was the fetid, shitty, cesspool swampiness of a man who’d never brushed his teeth. Ever.

  He came back around in front of me, took out his revolver, and put the barrel against my temple.

  “Eat it, shit-arse!” he screamed, flinging spittle. “Eat it or I’ll cheese yer thinkin-meat!”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed at that like I used to laugh at Full Metal Jacket, but I did it through clenched teeth.

  The fiddler aimed his pistol straight-armed to the side and fired all seven cartridges into the wall. One of them hit the mirror and shattered it all to pieces.

  My ears were ringing when he finally pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He showed me the gun like he was giving me the A-OK sign, and then put the piping-hot muzzle against the filthy, ragged hole in my shoulder. The nerves in my arm instantly transformed into concertina-wire being dragged through my veins.

  The pain sent me into an atavistic, reptilian place I had no idea existed, a raw and crazy corner of my head where the air was purple and up was wet. A night sky of stars exploded in my eyes. I lost myself, reared my head back, and loosed a howl from the depths of everything I had ever been.

  The fiddler dropped the Acolouthis cap onto my tongue, tossed the pistol, and clamped my jaw shut.

  Walkin on the Moon

  IT WASN’T THAT BAD, ACTUALLY—a bit like having a fishing bobber in my mouth, a bland little ball. The fiddler gazed into my eyes expectantly, like an idiotic lover. I don’t know what he wanted.

  Did he think I was going to start convulsing underneath him? Explode out of my restraints and start whirling around the room like the Tazmanian Devil, or blow the chair to pieces like Popeye?

  “Chew it,” he said. I glared at him over the edge of his hand. “Chew it! Swallow it!”