by Tim Marquitz
“Why the hell’d ya have to do that?” Dalton barked at the man, standing slightly as he slammed his fist onto the tabletop, before falling back down into the seat of the booth, breathing heavily as he tried hard to control his temper: a temper that had claimed so many lives. With the back of his hand, he rubbed away the saliva and mead that clung to his lips and tried to calm his breath as he reminded himself he was no longer that man. That man had died many years ago, fleeing an abandoned farmhouse in the fields of Pine with his son’s blood still splattered on his boots. “Why?”
“It cut through your foolish son’s chest, leaving him bleeding, but not yet dead,” the Rider continued, not distracted and certainly not intimidated by Dalton’s outburst. There was nothing the older man could do him to make him afraid, as the Rider feared very few things anymore. “And the last I put between the poor boys eyes, when you were too much of a coward to end his pain yourself.”
“And these last two?” Dalton asked, his breathing still in a frenzy, though he was trying to calm himself. The image of his son dying on the floor before him as he pleaded for help that his father could not give had not come through Dalton’s mind in years. He struggled to stay the kindly old drunk man who rented the room upstairs and came down for cards or billiards, but he could feel the cold-blooded murderer, who filled everyone from the fishers of Highshore to the mercenaries of Shadowfort with terror during his four-year trail of bloodshed, returning to him.
“One I’ve always kept for you, in case one day our paths should cross again,” the Rider said, stroking one of the bullets that lay upon the table. “As it seems the gods have allowed. And the last I’ve always kept for myself, in case I am ever asked to take their will into my own hands.”
“So, you’re gonna kill me then?” Dalton asked. “Is that it? You gonn’ do me in like ya did my boy?”
“You killed your son, Dalton,” the Rider replied, concisely. His voice was smooth, though his demeanor jaded. “I simply... pulled the trigger.”
“To hell I did,” Dalton snapped as his tone and pulse rose in unison. “Ya’ killed an innocent child! You’re as bad a man as I am... you’re worse than I am!”
“I only did what you didn’t have the courage to do yourself,” the Rider said, coldly. “If it weren’t for you and your selfish need for more than this world provided you, your son wouldn’t be in the ground somewhere.”
“My son died because you put a bullet through his skull!” Dalton yelled, spit flying once more into the unflinching face of the Rider before him, Dalton’s old self overtaking the new. In that moment, he remembered how it felt to be truly powerful. Dalton had learned early on that there was no feeling quite as intense as the power he felt when he held a gun to a man’s head.
“I put him out of his misery,” the Rider said, scoffing at his rival and interrupting his thoughts. “Something you were too weak to do yourself. You ran, Dalton.”
“My running didn’t change a damned thing; he would have died either way,” Dalton barked as the Rider smiled, confident he was succeeding in his task; he was confident he was reawakening the boogeyman.
“So what’s next?” Dalton continued. “You could take me to Greyhurst, but I’m an old man now. I doubt the Queen would give you any more than a few copper coins for me now. You can’t take me back to Iron Side seeing as ya ain’t a Rider no more neither. They locked ya’ up for six years in that camp for killin’ my boy... shoulda been sixty years, if ya ask me.”
“They have taken my title,” the Rider admitted, his eye migrating to the brand that marked his inner forearm. He knew when he killed the boy what he was facing: In the Plains of Otache, to kill a child was a far greater crime than to kill a grown man. Few children survived to birth in the tiny villages where mysticism still ran rampant, and even fewer survived to adulthood living so far from the medicine and midwifery of Greyhurst.
“So you’re gonn’ kill me?” Dalton asked. His long hidden drawl had reemerged in his tone by this point.
“I don’t know,” the Rider confessed after a pause, rolling one of the two bullets between his thumb and forefinger. “For years, yes, that was the plan. But lately, I’m not so sure.”
“Then why are ya even here?” Dalton asked as he leaned across the table, his face within inches of the Rider’s, a strange mix of the old and new Dalton Croyle living inside of him.
“Because you… have become my life,” the Rider said, his words apprehensive, as though it were a true confession, but one he’d wished he’d never have to make. “When they released me from the camp, I thought about going back home to the village where I was raised. I thought about forgetting you and forgetting the Order.”
“Yeah, then why didn’t ya?” asked Dalton, swallowing another mouthful of mead, a scowl fixed to his face.
“Because I have spent the last nineteen years with you living inside my brain,” answered the Rider, his hands moving before him to accentuate his words. “Do you understand that, Dalton? That is nearly a career. I was practically a child when I first heard your name, only 22 years old, and now I’ve nearly doubled in age. I’ve lost the opportunity to wed, to... create children. What would I have to go back to now? I have no other life to return to.”
“So what good’d killin’ me do ya then?”
“It wouldn’t,” the Rider admitted, without a moment’s hesitation. “If you die... well, I think a large piece of myself would die with you.”
Dalton hadn’t tried to laugh, but in that moment he found it was the only thing he could do.
“That right there might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Dalton said after regaining his composure. "I think you lost your mind at that work camp, boy."
The Rider stared at Dalton, his eyes burning a hole through his rival’s skull. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he contemplated and reconsidered saying what he was thinking. He’d planned the words for months, months that had seemed like years to the scorned man, but after so many years, it was hard for him to say them.
“I’m going to let you walk out of this taproom,” the Rider said, slowly reloading the bullets into his gun. “I’m going to watch as you leave this inn, this town, this whole region, and then tomorrow, I will hunt you again.”
“That right?” asked Dalton, scoffing. “You’ve know the things I’ve done, boy, firsthand you’ve seen the things I’ve done... the things I could do again, and you’re just gonna let me… walk right on my way?”
“I am,” the Rider nodded. He knew how strange the offer must have sounded to the older man. “And I will hunt you again. It will be something of a game for us.”
“Huh," Dalton said, with as much thoughtfulness as you could fit into such a guttural sound, but as he leaned further forward in his seat, the Rider knew he had the man’s attention. "And what is it that makes you think I won’t kill again?"
“I never said you wouldn’t,” the Rider said, coldly. “In fact, I expect you will, as I’m sure I will too.”
“So all the people I kill over the rest of my days,” Dalton asked. “Those aren’t a problem for you, law man?”
“Well, they’ll just be collateral damage, Dalton,” the Rider said, shrugging his shoulders apathetically.
“What’s in it for you then?” Dalton asked, confused by the proposal, but clearly interested. Ever since he began dreaming of the man several days before, he’d awoken every morning convinced it would be his last. "You come all the way out to the middle of nowhere just to tell me to move on to some other middle of nowhere town?"
“I can’t bind you and lead you to justice, Dalton, when, in my eyes, the Order no longer cares for justice,” the Rider explained to his rival, and in truth, greatest friend. “And if I killed you now, where would that leave me? No life remains for me with you gone. I need you, Dalton, just as, I assume, you need me.”
“I don’t need you!” Dalton rasped somewhere between a shout and a laugh. He was, in many ways, more offended by this comment than any other that
the man had said. “In fact, I could kill ya’ right now and I wouldn’t feel a single damned thing for it!”
With a short glance at his rival and not a single word escaping from his lips, the Rider reached out and pushed his own revolver across the table towards Dalton. The old man simply smiled as he slowly extended his arm towards the heavy object, wrapping his fingers around the wooden handle of the gun. The resurgence of empowerment that had crept back into Dalton after decades lost grew stronger as he found himself in a situation he’d never truly imagined he would see.
During the years that Dalton spent as an outlaw, it seemed that in every town he came to there lived another man who was eager to prove himself by challenging him. While many men fell at Dalton’s hand over those years, if Dalton had ever had a true rival, it was this man sitting before him.
This Rider likely knew Dalton better than Dalton knew himself. He had spoken to dozens of the older man's friends and family, slept in the same beds in the same small town inns, and for half a lifetime, had shared the same haunted fever dreams that seemed to link the two men indelibly through all these years.
In the years since his son had died, Dalton had dreamed of being able to exact revenge on the Rider if he could just fire upon him one more time. In the past, Dalton had been involved in more than a few shooting matches with that man, but through all their encounters, Dalton had never imagined he’d be holding a gun in his hand as the Rider sat by completely vulnerable.
Dalton’s hands were shaking slightly as he straightened his arm, placing the muzzle of the Rider’s six-shooter on its owner’s forehead and pressing it hard between his rival’s eyes. The force caused the Rider’s head to push back slightly, but the man did not flinch. Dalton was unsure if it was because the man no longer feared death, or because he did not fear Dalton. The cold and quiet breathing of the Rider, whose face bore an expression of calm, contrasted Dalton’s grunting, ragged ones, as he gritted his teeth and perspiration formed on the ridge of his forehead. He had one hand gripped tightly on the edge of the booth and he stood slightly as he tried with all of his might to pull the trigger, but after several trembling moments, he found he was entirely incapable of doing so. Perhaps the outlaw had lay dormant inside this shell of a man for too many years, replaced in time by the rambling old drunk man whom he had become, and would never fully awaken from this coma.
“I can’t do it!” Dalton shouted, defeated by the realization that he couldn’t pull the trigger. He slammed the revolver back down to the tabletop again. In his youth, he was more than willing to kill to meet his ends, but since that morning when the Rider killed his son, he saw his child’s face in every man who crossed his path. He saw parents mourning their fallen children, because he knew that after all the years that would pass, the bodies that he left abandoned, breathing their last breaths and bleeding out their last drops blood on the side of some quiet street were someone else’s babies. Because of him, how many others had felt the same emptiness inside of them that he felt for these last seventeen years?
Laughing, perhaps the first sign of emotion since he entered the bar only a handful of moments earlier, the Rider swatted his own revolver from the tabletop where Dalton had slammed it, sending it sliding off the table and through the air, where it clattered to the floor beside them and slid into the shadows behind the bar.
“It would be unfair to kill you now,” said the Rider, still laughing. “You’ve grown weak with time.”
The Rider waited for a response, but found none as Dalton choked down lumps in his throat, unable to speak through this sudden muted lack of confidence.
“I made my offer, Dalton,” the Rider continued, standing. “You leave this town, and you never return, and tomorrow, when the sun rises again, I will...”
A gunshot rang out through the inn, interrupting the Rider as the sound reverberated off the walls and pounded in the eardrums of the two men who sat in the taproom. Dalton felt the pain radiate throughout his body and he clutched his hands instinctively to his chest, convinced the man had shot him. Looking down though, he felt no blood draining through his fingers and he saw no wound beneath his hands. Looking up again, he saw the ashen look on his rival’s face, and realized it was the Rider who was shot, his crimson blood flowing from a large hole inches below his heart. Just as the men had been psychically linked for so many years, he realized they were must be physically linked as well.
“You did it,” the Rider muttered, a wide smile crawling onto his face. Dalton was convinced why the man was seemingly happy at the prospect of his fate. “You really did it.”
Looking down himself now, the Rider saw that Dalton’s gun still lay on the table where the other man had left it when the two first started speaking moments. His face twisted from happiness into an odd mixture of confusion and dismay, and he opened his mouth to speak this final thought. He crumbled in a heap on the taproom, blood slowly pooling on the floor around him before he was able to ask Dalton ‘how?’
Instinctively, Dalton grabbed his gun from the table, preparing to defend himself against whomever may be aiming to do him harm, but within seconds, those grand double doors behind the bar opened and Caroline stepped out, the Rider’s own gun still smoking in her hands.
“Caroline, what have ya’ done?” Dalton asked, shocked as the girl crossed the tavern to stand in front of him, her eyes dripping tears down her cheeks and to the floor. “He wasn’t gonna do me no harm!”
“He was gonna send you away, Dalton,” she sobbed, wrapping her arms around the shoulder of the only man she’d ever called her father.
Lying at their feet was the one person who Dalton Croyle had ever truly come to respect, even if he would never admit to that. This Rider had never given up on the search for his prey, even when the Order who commissioned him had long ago turned their back on him, making him a man without country. Because of him, Dalton had spent the last two decades living with a constant, pressing anxiety throughout his entire being; he was always unsure of who was a friend and who was a foe. While he first saw this paranoia as a hindrance, after so many years it had become another part of life for him. Now, with his last and final pursuant lying bleeding at his feet, he saw no more cause for anxiety.
He was a free man for the first time in decades, but he had forgotten how to live the life of one.
“He was gonna make you leave,” the young girl continued, sobbing nearly to point of incoherence. “He was going to take you away and then I’d never see you again and as soon as I heard him say that…”
“Ya don’t know me, child!” Croyle barked, wrapping his hands tightly around her arms and shaking her roughly, as she sobbed even louder.
“But I do,” she cried out through tears. “I heard it all, Dalton. Hell, you told me it all when I was a child. I just didn’t realize the stories were about you! I heard everything you’ve done, and I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it. You’ve been nothing been kind to me through my life because that’s who you are; that’s who you’ve become!”
She broke down into unintelligible sobs and once again threw her arms around him, her emotions no longer containable by words. Despite the sods and cries of the young girl before him, all that Dalton Croyle heard was his own blood as rushed and thrummed within him. It was a familiar sound, not unlike those far off oceans that he had told the girl about when she was still a child. Through the ocean’s roar of his own blood, he recalled one of the last things the Rider had said.
“If you die, a part of me would die.”
Though he had laughed belligerently in the Rider’s face when he had said it, with the man now dead at his feet, Dalton realized there was truth in the statement. As he thought on a life without the fear and anxiety of constant pursuit, a world where his rival was fallen at his feet, he wasn’t sure what he would do with himself. While most would feel a freedom as that anxiety and paranoia felt away, Dalton only felt as though as piece of large himself, the caged animal, was dying within him.
For
a moment, in his confused and delirious state, he was sure that the frail arms that clung tightly around his neck and over his shoulders were not those of Caroline, but rather those of his son’s and he almost called out the young boy’s name, never forgotten, even through so many years. His cooler head prevailed, however, and he remembered that his son was dead, and with him another piece of himself, the outlaw, had died seventeen years ago in that rotting barn in Pine.
He remembered days, half a lifetime before, when tales of him had spread like wildfire and strangers throughout this land had feared him. Now, after years in hiding, most folks alive today thought him dead already, and with his supposed death, the legends that had terrified adults had become bedtime stories to warn the youth from misbehavior. This had perhaps been the biggest piece of the man that had died on that day, as he realized that he was no longer the boogeyman that he once was.
Frustrated, he again tried to pull back the trigger of the gun that he still held tightly in his hand, the gun that was pressed against the belly of his Sweet Caroline, but realized he was still unable to do it. He feared that in killing the girl, this daughter whom he had denied, that he would be killing the final living piece of himself. As he tried unsuccessfully to put a bullet in the stomach of the girl who stood before him, he realized he was now a man he did not know.
With so many pieces of the man dead or dying, the monster, the boogeyman, the outlaw Dalton Croyle wondered if there were any pieces of him which were truly still alive. In that moment, Dalton understood the strange, pleasant tone in the Riders voice when he realized he was finally facing his death, the only thing the man still had to live for, and Dalton prayed to the Gods of his youth that his own death would come soon as well.
City of Ashes
Amanda Shore
Flash Fiction
Amanda Shore operates By the Shore Editing and is a crochet enthusiast. She is working on dusting off her short stories for her own collection as well as combining the two in a project called Literary Crochet. You can find many of the books she’s worked on at her By the Shore Editing pages on Facebook (facebook.com/ByTheShoreEditing) and Twitter (@ByTheShoreEdits) or check out her side projects on Patreon (patreon.com/capitainecrochet).