The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  Noreen smiled over her shoulder at the sound of her new surname.

  “—You will be first.”

  She stepped up to the firing line, delineated from the rest of the field by a line of wooden beams lying on the ground. She stood straight with her feet shoulder-width apart and pushed the pistol out in front of her.

  “If your arms get tired,” said Walter, “—keep your hands together and the pistol pointing out there, but bring your arms closer to your chest to rest, as if you were praying. Actually, go ahead and do that right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “At the count of five, I want you to very calmly extend your arms to length, sight down the barrel of the pistol, and fire five rounds into the cutout. Try to remember what I’ve told you. Dominant eye, sight on the chest, breathing, squeeze, surprise.”

  He took off his hat and combed his fingers through his long hair, then laid it on the table and put a rock in it to keep it from blowing away. “Five...four...three...two...one.”

  Noreen put out the gun, hesitated long enough to look at the front sight, and the gun went off with a deafening crack. Several seconds later, it fired again...and again. I saw a puff of dust stand up from one of the cutouts and roll away, fading into the air. Twice more, and she was done.

  “Holster the pistol, and we’ll go down and see how you did. When you holster it, make sure your finger is outside the trigger well. Believe me, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. That’s why the Quartermaster walks with a limp.”

  The Deon whipped the oilcloth off of the box by the table and uncovered a pile of cutout men. He picked one up and we went down to Noreen’s cutout—I’d say it was about twenty-five, thirty yards away—and looked for bullet-holes in the splintered wood and flaking paint. Someone had painted a smiley-face on it and a pair of hands holding a gun.

  I saw four holes—one in the right cheek, one in the left shoulder, one in the gut, and one on the edge of the right arm, about where the elbow would be. “Not horrendous,” said Walter. “Not astounding. There’s potential. You need to work on your breathing and trigger squeeze.”

  We were discussing the cutout when Clayton came up behind us. I hadn’t even noticed him coming across the field. He was stealthy for such a big man.

  “How’s it going so far?”

  “I’ve only gotten Normand’s daughter up,” Walter said as we went back to the gear table. “She didn’t do too bad. I still have to put up Sawyer and Eddick’s boy.”

  “Well, let’s see how he does. Sounds like I’ve shown up just in the nick of time. You’re up, kid!”

  Sawyer got up and sauntered over to the firing line cross-ties, the heels of his hands on his pistol grips. I couldn’t help but notice just how much he was beginning to look like a real Ainean.

  “You got this in the bag, desperado,” I said, and sang the Eagles’ eponymous “Deees-peraaado!”

  He looked back and grinned, and drew a pistol, aiming it downrange. He had elected to use the Weaver stance, angling himself so that his right foot was back. Walter told him that he was holding the gun too close to his face, so he pushed it out a little bit.

  “You don’t want that thing to kick back and hit you in the mouth.”

  “You’re too pretty,” said Noreen.

  “Thanks,” said Sawyer.

  Walter cleared his throat. “You remember everything I told you, correct? Dominant eye, sight on the chest, breathing, squeeze, surprise. Just aim with your eye, and shoot with your mind.”

  “Kill with your heart,” I piped in, though I wasn’t sure where I’d heard it before.

  “I like it,” said Walt. “Yes, you want to do it all in your head. Your head is the locus of battle. When you aim your gun, let everything else fall to the wayside. Draw a curtain around yourself and shut the world away, focus on your target. In that last instant, you and your opponent are all that exist. You are the one that will continue to exist. You are the bullet. You are the god of death. Smite him and move on to the next.”

  “Five, four, three, two, one,” said Noreen.

  Unbidden memories of a loudspeaker voice came to me and I said, “It’s your lane. Five shots.”

  Sawyer lifted the pistol and sighted down the barrel. Two seconds later, the round went off. I saw a clot of dust whip from a cutout and fade away, leaving a bullethole in the silhouette’s face.

  “Nice one,” said Clayton.

  The pistol erupted again and a cutout to the left wobbled. I could see a clean hole in the shape’s left chest: the heart area. Clayton whistled.

  Bang! A cutout some several dozen yards distant jerked, halfway up the field. I couldn’t see the hole from here, but it must have been a good shot to make it move like that, better than a glancing blow. I looked over at Walter and he nodded appreciatively to me, his eyebrows high.

  “Don’t get fancy,” he said to Saw, “You don’t have to shoot all the targets out there.”

  Bang! A silhouette to the right shook. I could see the woodline through the hole in its belly.

  Sawyer rolled his shoulders, bringing the pistol back and up to his nose, resting his arms. Refreshed, he extended it again and took aim. This time, he took a little longer. I could tell he was having trouble getting it to stay center-mass. He was overreaching himself, trying to shoot targets too far away.

  I thought about getting up and saying something, but I don’t like surprising people holding firearms.

  The gunshot whipcracked and rolled up the valley. I didn’t see any cutouts move. The echo soared back to us through air pungent with cordite.

  “I don’t think that one hit,” said Walter. “Come on, let’s go see how you did.”

  “Damn,” said Sawyer.

  The last one turned out to have been a near-miss. Clayton found a notch where the bullet had hit the very edge of the wood plate, at the point where the left shoulder sloped down into the upper arm of the man-shape.

  On the way back to the table, I said to Walter, “I think you should put a few rounds down-range before we leave.”

  “I like the way you think,” he said.

  We sat back down at the table, and Walter went over to the firing line in his sauntering, loosey-goosey walk of his. He stood straight, staring down the field, and tugged the brim of his hat. “Count to five, and don’t stop,” he said, his hands hovering over the handles of his pistols. His fingertips tappled the sandalwood grips in a soft rattle.

  “One—” said Noreen.

  He snatched up the left-hand gun, his thumb on the recoil guard, and fanned the hammer with the blade of his right hand for six shots, bang-bang-bang-bangbangbang.

  She continued counting, “—two, three, four—”

  He holstered it—drawing the other as he did so—and fanned the trigger with his left hand for seven shots. I squinted and tried to make out the holes in the cutout he’d been shooting at, but all I could see in the bluing dusk was a hole in the silhouette’s left clavicle the size of my fist. He’d been splitting his own arrows.

  “—six.”

  “Shit!” Walter said, holstering the pistol. “I’m rusty!”

  “Rusty my ass!” cawed Clayton, throwing his head back with laughter. “You’re just slow, fancy-pants!”

  We dumped our casings and unexpended ammo and started back to town. The last of the sunlight was slipping down below the roofs and treetops, immersing us in deep purple shadow. The night-bugs were beginning to sing, and the air had taken on a cool sweetness, flavored by the honeysuckle and grass. I took a deep breath and caught some heavy, musky scent.

  “I don’t think I ever want to leave here,” Noreen said, after nearly twenty minutes of silent walking.

  “What, Ostlyn?” asked Sawyer.

  “No, Destin. I don’t—I don’t think I want to go back.”

  “I do,” said Sawyer. “I want to tell my...my ‘Earth mom’? I want to tell her where I am and that I’m doing okay. And tell her the truth, maybe. You know, I bet she’s worried
sick.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think anybody misses me back home—on Earth, I mean. My dad, maybe. My Earth dad.”

  “You never told me his name,” said Sawyer.

  “Rick. Short for Richard. He’s a district manager for Wells Fargo.”

  “What’s that?” asked Walter.

  I said, “It’s a bank.”

  “A bank!” said Clayton. “Banks in the other-world too? I guess evil is universal, innit?”

  That made me think about the towers of silence again, and the people languishing in them. I had been thinking about them off and on since we got off the train. Worrying. I wondered if they existed while I wasn’t writing about them. I wondered if they ever existed at all.

  I looked at Sawyer and Noreen’s faces, and Walter’s, and wondered what they’d seen down there. Had they even been down there at all? Were their minds filled with visions I’d poured into them? Was the whole thing in my head? Had the hallucinations been wholly manufactured for my benefit? For their benefit? Did I manufacture them? Were my friends hallucinations?

  My mind felt like it was about to split at the seams trying to distinguish reality from fiction. I tried not to think about it.

  Sawyer must have noticed how grim and thoughtful I was, because as we passed through the front gate of Ostlyn proper, he elbowed me. The crowd had tapered off significantly since the sun had gone down, and we went the long way, walking the main street unmolested. Ostlyn was not a party-town like Maplenesse.

  “You okay, Scooby?”

  “Yeah—I guess. I can’t stop thinking about what happened.”

  “The towers? The Mariner? The rope?” he asked.

  I wondered if I was actually drooling in a mental hospital somewhere, strapped to a bed, dreaming all of this. Maybe the gunshot in the shoulder I’d suffered back in that ghost town had been a hypodermic syringe full of Thorazine. I couldn’t imagine what the nurses were thinking about my one-sided conversations with gunslingers they couldn’t see.

  “Yeah. I’m having trouble reconciling it all. I’ve been feeling a little crazy all day.”

  “I hear ya, man. I don’t feel like I’m all here either. It doesn’t feel real, does it?”

  “No,” I said, maybe a little curtly.

  “You know what they say, Scoob. Truth is stranger than fiction.”

  The two men walked around each other in lazy circles, their hands resting on their gunbutts. The Redbird stroked his lush gray beard and pulled the collar of his shirt loose.

  “It’s been a long time comin, Pack boy,” said Lucas. His voice was a raspy whiskey buzzsaw.

  “It has,” said Normand.

  “Why’d it take you so long?” asked the older man. “It ain’t like I’ve been laid up all this time. I been movin and shakin too. I been watchin you. I know all about your exploits. You coulda come gunnin for me at any time.”

  “Waiting. And watching.”

  “Waitin for what?”

  Normand licked his lips. His fingertips traced the contours of the pistol in his hip holster with almost erotic grace. He was a coiled snake. “I never could settle on how I wanted to watch you die. And then after a while, it hit me like a bolt from the blue—I didn’t want to watch you die so bad anymore.”

  “Oh?” asked Lucas. “Why’s that?”

  “I realized some time ago...I had become partial to the anticipation.”

  Lucas smiled. It was a warm smile, but his eyes were dead and cold. “I see. You’ve become a hunter. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to play with your food?”

  Normand simply stood there, crow’s-feet in the corners of his tight eyes.

  The smile dropped like a hot potato. “Without the chase, you ain’t nothin no more. You’re a hollow hunter, Kaliburn. Full of vengeance and nothing else. Whoever ends this today, it don’t matter. You’ll die either way!”

  Lucas broke into uproarious laughter, giving Normand the half-second he needed to draw first.

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

  Dreaming in Technicolor

  CLAYTON TREATED US TO A HUGE dinner at a little restaurant in the first tier of the city. Well, I say restaurant, but it was more of a roach coach. We ordered our food from a little window in the side of a drawn carriage and sat at one of a half-dozen tables by the street to wait for our orders.

  The fare was decidedly less seaside and more upscale than Salt Point, and more meat-and-potatoes than Maplenesse. Several other carriages were lined up next to that one, each one of them touting different dishes and desserts.

  I ordered something that looked like an open-faced chili-burger: crumbled ground meat in a bowl made of a crusty heel of bread, covered in something like a cross between chili and curry.

  It had beans but looked milky and had peppers julienned into it. The bread’s crust was as hard as a rock, and the stuff piled on was hot enough to strip the paint off of a Cadillac, but the whole thing was amazing. I ate it with a fork in one hand and a sweaty napkin in the other.

  I got the feeling Clayton fed us less out of generosity, and more out of a need to flaunt his financial plumage. He seemed to have warmed up to the idea that his youngest son was back in Destin, and asked Sawyer questions about himself between gulps of beer. The more he drank, the friendlier he became. I sensed that this was a trend.

  “So what do ye do for a livin, back in Zam?” asked the old man. He smoothed out his salt-and-pepper mustache with his thumb and forefinger. It struck me how often I’d seen Maxwell Bayard do that.

  Sawyer was eating some sort of flatbread club sandwich. It smelled like chicken. “I’m going to school. I’m a student.”

  “A student, eh? A scholar?” said Clayton. He leaned back, his belly pressing against the table. “What are you studying?”

  I decided that it was dubious whether fame and affluence had been good to the Chiral. I wondered what he was like when he and Normand were young. It suddenly occured to me that I hadn’t seen any copies of the Fiddle series lying around in either of my father’s houses.

  “Making movies.”

  “Movies?” asked Clayton. “What are those?”

  Sawyer seemed to be confused, then he remembered who he was talking to and where he was. “They’re like...a combination of books and stage plays. They’re like a stage play you can take home and watch whenever you like.”

  “Oh!” said Walter, squinting through his smoke. He tapped ashes into an ashtray, sneaking fried potatoes out of Sawyer’s basket. “Picture shows. We have those. Well, something like them, I suppose. I guess if you had the equipment you could take it home and watch it.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Sawyer.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “They been around for a good ten or fifteen year’n. They were invented by an Iznok named Atanaz...Atanzas ...see-jee...whatever the hell his name was. I used to know the guy. Real good sort, charitable chap.”

  Sawyer took a huge bite of his sandwich, and said through it, “Can we go look at it when we’re done here?”

  “Why not.”

  “I’ll be,” said Clayton. He threw back his head and barked laughter. “My youngest is a picture-show maker. Not what I expected, but there are...worse things a man could do with his life. What kind of picture shows d’you make, boy?” He pretended to fondle his own nipples and wobbled in his chair. “The ones with dancin women in em?”

  Walter dropped his face into his palm.

  Sawyer grinned. “No. I used to want to be a nature film-maker, but I got into a project with a friend of mine and got hooked on making horror movies.”

  “Nature?” asked Clayton. “What’s that, you take pictures of the woods?”

  “Ahh, sort of. It’s kind of like hunting, but instead of killing animals, you make picture shows of animals in faraway places that most people wouldn’t get to see up close. And then later you record someone talking about the a
nimals, and put it with the picture show so people can learn about them.”

  “Oh, okay then. Well, that’s certainly charitable of ye. There ain’t a many farmer in Ain get to leave his farm for too long, what with his work and all. It’s mighty nice you make it so they can see the world.”

  “I like to think so. It’s a good career. Lots of famous film-makers.”

  “What’s a horror movie?”

  “It’s a picture show with...scary things in it. Some people back on Earth like to be scared, I guess. There isn’t much to be scared of there, so people like to get a thrill seeing spooky things.”

  “I get what you’re saying, I get you, I get you,” said Clayton. “We don’t cert need that here, I figure. There’s plenty to be scared of here. You want a thrill? I know where to take you and show you things that would make you piss your pants. And the next guy’s pants.”

  “I believe it. I’ve seen plenty of scary things since I’ve been here.”

  I noticed that Noreen seemed quiet and introspective. She was picking at some sort of chowder in a big spun-clay bowl, absent-mindedly dipping a breadstick in and nibbling on it.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” I asked her, dipping a breadstick into the chowder and leaving it there.

  “I wish Normand could be here,” she said. “I want to hang out with him.”

  My heart ached. “Awww. I bet you do. He probably doesn’t come out too often these days, though. He’d probably get mobbed or something like Brad Pitt at a McDonald’s.”

  “Yeah,” said Noreen, staring into her food as if she were trying to scry her father in it.

  After we ate, Clayton broke off and went back to Weatherhead, while the four of us strolled up the main avenue, enjoying the dry, cool evening. The streetlights were short steel lamps, squat like fire hydrants, with conical shades. They gave off a soft and indirect electric light that I found very comfortable.

  Next to the half-timbered shops and boutiques, and the fact that there were so many slat benches, the lamps made me feel as if I were in an inside-out house. The sky full of stars I saw now was more familiar, faded by the light-pollution of sprawling Ostlyn.