Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  Another growl.

  “We’ll have satisfaction,” Lily murmured. “In the meantime, presuming those half-demons were from Stewart’s old gang, we ought to be able to collect bounties on them, too.”

  Nate grunted. The prospect, she knew, did not cheer him immediately, but it would, after she’d recovered and he’d finished chastising himself for letting them be bamboozled.

  “You did well,” he said as he dressed her wound.

  “I’ve not forgotten how to act,” she said with a smile. “And you gave me all the other skills I required.”

  It had taken work to convince him to share his curse with her. Eventually, he’d come to realize that the only way a werewolf’s mate could be safe was if she was truly his mate. The process, as he’d warned, had not been easy. The life, too, was not easy. But she would never regret it. Lily knew what she wanted—the man, the life, the person she wanted to be. And she had it. All of it.

  “We ought to hurry,” she said. “The boys will be waiting back at the inn by now.” She paused. “Do you think they heard anything before they left?”

  Nate snorted.

  Lily laughed. “Yes, they’re not the cleverest of lads. Which is the way we like them.” She got to her feet. “Let me find a clean shirt.”

  She looked at him, still naked after shifting back from wolf form. “And we’d best find your clothing. Although…” Her gaze traveled down his body. “The boys are very patient. I suppose they wouldn’t mind waiting a mite longer.”

  SUNDOWN

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  State of Colorado, 1877

  Willie Kennard rode into the town of Duffy dangerously late, looking back over his shoulder at the height of the sun and squinting. He dropped down from the old mare he’d borrowed off Wilson Hayes and hitched her to a post.

  Every step shifted two days’ dust and grit off his long coat, and his thighs ached so bad it felt like he’d been punched in the groin.

  “You’re a fool to walk into Duffy,” the old Pawnee man Willie had hired as tracker muttered when they’d split up outside of town on the bluff. “Once night comes, you won’t need to be worrying about your quarry. It’s the town that’ll get you. They’ll string you up. Whether or not you’re wearing a silver badge.”

  Judging by the stares the white folk sitting outside the hotel gave him, Willie knew it was truth.

  “Help you?” an older man with a long beard asked in a hard voice.

  “Looking for the sheriff,” Willie said. “I need his help finding a man that might be hiding somewhere around these parts.”

  “What kind of man?” the old timer asked. It was a pointed question.

  “The murdering kind,” Willie said.

  “Sheriff’s at the Longfellow Ranch,” said a dapper man crossing the wooden slatted walkway. He looked to be a store owner of some kind, in his carefully pressed suit.

  “Now why’d you go tell him that?” spat the old man.

  “Cuz he’s a Marshal, Pat. You see his star?” the shopkeeper said. “And cuz it’s getting late.”

  They glared at each other, and then the old man pointed a wizened, crooked finger down the other side of town. “Ranch is down that way.”

  Willie looked down the dusty road, sunk deep with wheel tracks and horse shit. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the sun, moving toward the horizon.

  Best to get on with it. He sighed.

  He tapped a finger to his hat at the younger gentleman and made his way back to the horse.

  As he rode past, he asked, “What’s the sheriff doing at the ranch?”

  “Indians mutilated the cattle,” spat the old man. “Damned heathens.”

  Willie spurred the horse into an awkward gallop, the best it could manage, leaving a plume of dust in the air that set the old man coughing.

  * * *

  Willie rode up onto the ranch hard. The damned horse was heaving and bitching about the work, but he didn’t pay it much mind. Dropped out of the saddle while the mare still trotted down to a slower pace, left it with a muzzle flecked with foam and turning circles in the dirt.

  His boots scuffed up dust as he ran for the door, glancing around.

  “Hello Longfellow Ranch!” he shouted, right hand dropped low to brush aside his coat. He put a palm to the Colt’s grip.

  The faded gray wood of the door creaked as it opened slightly. “Who’s that?”

  “I’m looking for the Sheriff of Duffy,” Willie said. “I’m Marshal Willie Kennard.”

  “Marshal?” A ruddy face frowned from the gap in the door, looking out at Willie. “Never seen a negro Marshal before.”

  “Don’t imagine there’re many of us,” Willie said. He tapped the silver star. “But here I am, nonetheless.”

  The dark green eyes flicked down, noted his draw stance through the crack in the doorway. “You seem agitated, Marshal Kennard. Mind if I ask why?”

  “Been tracking a murderer through the scrub a couple days,” Willie said. “Tracked him to Duffy. Hoping I could rely on your help.”

  With a horrible creaking sound, the door opened the rest of the way. “I’m Sheriff Bostick Keen. Come on in, I’m talking to Dr. Longfellow here about what happened to his cattle recently.”

  Willie’d seen them on the way in. The cattle ripped open, ribs exposed and drying in the sun, tongues lolling.

  “Dr. Longfellow is getting us a drink of water,” the sheriff said.

  Sheriff Keen had a puffy, round face but was a stick of a man, really. Wind-swept lean. Meant he didn’t hide in his office, but walked out in the windy grit. Did his job.

  Willie respected that.

  Dr. Longfellow came back into the room with a tray of glasses and a pitcher filled with water fresh from the well. Beads of sweat rolled down the rounded belly of the pitcher.

  The ranch owner bent forward to pick up a glass and fill it.

  Willie stared at the man’s neck.

  Before the sheriff could move, Willie drew. As Dr. Longfellow straightened, he looked at the barrel of the Colt, as if for a second fascinated by it.

  The gunshot filled the room with its violent crack, and Dr. Longfellow’s brains splattered out across the wall behind him. Only, the brain tissue was all wrong. Black goo, filled with insect-like fragments that dripped down toward the ground. No blood. What looked like a wasp’s stinger the size of a thumb was stuck fast in the plaster.

  Sheriff Keen screamed like a child, raising his hands in front of him, then recovering and reaching for his gun. “What the hell…” he started to say, then stopped and looked at the oversized stinger. It twitched and wriggled slowly. Not a slow man, he realized something wasn’t right. “What was that in his head? What was that?”

  Willie pulled his left piece out and aimed it at him. “Turn around,” he ordered.

  The sheriff took a deep breath, his eyes wild and wide. “No.”

  Willie cocked his head. “No?”

  “If you gonna kill me, do it right to my face.”

  “Most likely, I won’t kill you,” Willie said. “But I do want to see the back of your neck. If you don’t show it to me, chances are you do end up dying. I gotta make sure you’re not like him. You understand?”

  Keen’s face scrunched up in defiance and anger. Finally, after several short breaths, he screwed up his face in disgust and turned around.

  He trembled a bit, expecting the shot.

  But Willie nodded. “You’re all right.” He slid the two Colts back into their holsters. “I apologize for drawing on you.”

  Keen yanked his own, overly large revolver out, but Willie ignored him. He moved around the house, kicking open doors and looking into rooms as the sheriff followed him, gun aimed. Willie paused in front of a store room in the back. Looked at the bodies on the ground.

  “See that?” he asked Keen.

  The sheriff’s green eyes took it all in. Shattered human ribs poking through broken skin. Glazed eyes staring at the ceiling. The wife, the two
children lying in her arms. “Like the cattle,” he said.

  “Like the cattle.”

  “How’d you know?” Keen asked.

  “Seen it before. Some men attacked a camp I was providing protection for. Wasn’t pretty.” Willie remembered muzzle flashes and glazed eyes, men with broken legs dragging themselves toward him.

  “Would he have gone for me?”

  “Guessing so.”

  “Then I owe you my life,” he said. “But I still gotta take you in.”

  Keen waved the gun at Willie, pointed outside. There was a horse and wagon waiting.

  Willie looked at the old mare. “Sheriff, I got the impression I wouldn’t be welcome in Duffy after sunset. That was the word. You telling me I got that wrong?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Putting you in the jail. For protection.”

  Willie raised an eyebrow incredulously. “Protection?”

  “The cattle. It isn’t just Longfellow’s farm. They’re all over the place,” he said. “All around town.”

  All around town.

  “There’s a Pawnee tracker I hired to help me get here. He’s just outside the other side of Duffy,” Willie said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to pick him up or let him know to run like hell. If that’s all right with you.”

  Sheriff Keen nodded. “After what I just saw, I’d say that’s fair. But my shotgun’ll be resting here on my lap, and you’re still coming with me.”

  Willie nodded. He had time to think about what to do next on the ride out. Time to decide whether it was better to lay in with the people of Duffy or leg it out into the dark wilds knowing there were strange things out there.

  He got up in the back of the wagon, looking around the farm.

  The sheriff urged his horse forward, and they rumbled out over the dirt road in the dim light of a nearly setting sun.

  * * *

  “Damn.”

  Willie stood on the edge of the wagon and looked down at the tortured body of the Pawnee man who’d led him here. They were well into dusk, the last sliver of sun slipping down under the trees. Residual orange light dappled the scrub.

  “Never even got his name,” Willie said, a bit of anger touching his voice. “What a thing.”

  The sheriff looked over at the horizon. “Figure we got time to bury him?”

  “No difference to him now, and I doubt that’s a good idea, tarrying here. I think it’s time we got moving along,” Willie said.

  “What are they?” the sheriff asked. “I know I saw what I saw. Enough to turn my wits shaky.”

  Willie nodded. “You saw what you saw. And I don’t know what they are either. I just know they overran us. We set up camp for a night, on the way to the goldstrike outside your hills. They killed the men I was being paid to shotgun for. Murdered them before I understood what was going on.”

  “But why? What did they want? What demonic thing is happening out here?”

  “Never really had a chance to ask,” Willie said. “Been moving behind them and trying to get my revenge since they hit.”

  He’d been turning over the idea of overpowering the sheriff and walking out into the desert. But to do that he’d have to steal the man’s horse and leave him without a gun here.

  Not a fair thing to do to a man in these circumstances. Not with what might be out in the dark. And Willie was a man of the law. Sure, most hated him. But there was a respect he’d come to expect, and that had been earned by being a stickler for rule of law. Drilled into him even earlier by the army and his years in uniform.

  Sheriff Keen was a fellow officer; leaving him out here alone was not a brotherly thing.

  And the murderer who’d escaped Willie’s camp was somewhere around Duffy. Willie had sworn he’d bring justice.

  Willie sat down on the bench in the back of the wagon and tugged his hat down lower. “Sheriff, what kind of trouble are your townsfolk going to make for me?” he asked.

  Keen shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well…” he said. “I’ve been thinking on that. I can pass you off as someone I caught and lock you up, keep you under watch. But that could end up going the wrong way. I’d rather explain to the mayor what’s happening. Because if those things are all around Duffy now, what happens when they start coming in? Either way, I’m getting you to safety and standing outside with a shotgun.”

  Willie thought about the shambling forms ripping through the darkness of the camp toward him. It might be dangerous back in the cell. But certainly not as dangerous as it certainly was out here. In the dark.

  “Promise me something, Sheriff,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Put a key to the cell in one of my boots, and my guns in a box under the bed. No one has to see them, but I want them there. In case.”

  Sheriff Keen thought about it for a long moment.

  Then he nodded.

  * * *

  The mayor glared belligerently at Willie through the bars of the cell. He didn’t say anything. Quirked the edges of his mouth, then stalked back to Keen’s desk. They started arguing.

  Willie sat on the wooden bench and leaned back, sighing.

  He could see where this was going.

  The mayor wasn’t about to let some “darky” tell them all how some possessed people were out there lurking in the dark. That maybe they’d come attack townsfolk.

  Didn’t make no sense, the mayor insisted.

  “I don’t care how deputized you are,” the well-dressed mayor hissed. “You don’t come into my town spouting half-crazed bullshit like that and expect any of us to believe you. You killed Longfellow. You may well have killed his family, too. And that Indian the sheriff saw. I think we’ll keep you locked up in here and locked up good.”

  Willie didn’t say anything. That was always the better course in these situations.

  He just eyed the man levelly until he swore and walked out.

  The sheriff checked his shotgun, then sat at his desk. “You think, whatever those things are, they’re going to come for the town?”

  Willie leaned back against the wall, relaxing a bit. “Hope they don’t,” he said.

  “That all you got? Hope?”

  “All any of us ever had, Sheriff,” Willie said as he lay down on the bench and pulled his hat down over his head.

  * * *

  He woke at night to the sound of the sheriff cursing.

  First he stretched, worked out the kinks in his arms and back, and then splashed water on his face from a small jug Keen had put inside the cell with him.

  “They are gathering outside.” Keen drew the rough burlap curtains closed against the flicker of torchlight. “And I cannot see their necks,” he said, clearly exasperated.

  “So we don’t know whether they are here to lynch me for being in Duffy after dark, or to kill us and fill our heads with insect parts,” Willie observed.

  Keen looked back at him, horrified.

  “I’m just saying, either reason is a messy one,” Willie said.

  “You’re right. We need to get out of here,” Keen said. “If they’re here for a lynching they’re likely to come after me for trying to help you.”

  Willie was already pulling the box out from under his bench. He holstered up and took a step toward the metal bars, and right as he did so the front doors busted open. Three townsmen stumbled in, and Sheriff Keen wracked a round into his shotgun. “Now there!” he shouted. “You stay back or I’ll shoot.”

  “Sheriff,” Willie muttered through the jail bars, key in hand as he tried to unlock the door. “I’d get in here with me quick…”

  They didn’t look like the hanging type, the three that stepped forward. They looked drunk. Vacant eyed. Although once they saw Willie, their heads tracked him.

  Sheriff Keen stepped forward. “Get outta here,” he growled.

  “We want the nigger,” they growled right back. Willie stiffened. Lowered his hands to his belt.

  Keen aimed the shotgun at them. “I’ll shoot,” he sa
id. “Jamie, Nicodemus, Alex, you know I mean it.”

  They swung their heads to regard Keen. Willie scuttled over to the edge of the cell. “Sheriff, I—”

  Keen fired. Buckshot ripped through all three men, and both Keen and Willie swore to see the black ichor and chitinous pieces mixed with skull slap against the wooden doors. Jamie and Alex slumped dead to the ground, but the one Keen had called Nicodemus jerked forward like a sped up marionette.

  Willie fired from between the bars of the cell, got him twice in the chest, but the man kept on. It took a third shot to get him in the head, and by then the rest of the mob was kicking through the door.

  “Keen!”

  The sheriff never even backed toward the cell. Stood and reloaded his shotgun, fired, moved to reload again, then pulled a pistol. He threw his keys with his spare hand back toward the cell without a word.

  He went down, covered by townsfolk ripping him apart, limb from limb, with one last muffled shot.

  And then when they were done, they stood up and looked at Willie.

  There were more of those possessed townspeople out there than he had bullets for. And he could hear more of them shuffling around in the dirt outside. They pawed around the sheriff’s remains, looking for the keys to the cell with those vacant eyes as Willie watched them.

  He figured he’d shoot as many as he could as they came in, once they figured out how to break through the cell.

  Willie dragged the bench out to the middle of the cell, pulled the blanket off it, and set his spare bullets down on the hard top. Checked his two Colts.

  Twelve in. Ten loose on the bench.

  Thirty townsfolk.

  “Marshal, sheriff, you still in there?” shouted someone in the street on the other side of the mob. “Lie down flat! I am opening fire!”

  Many other men would have paused or asked a question back.

  Willie did no such thing. He dropped and kissed the dirty floor without a second thought, and as he did so the chack chack chack sound of a multi-barreled Gatling gun ripped through Duffy’s main street. The windows exploded, wood cracked, splinters flew around the room. Black ichor stained the bars, Willie’s hat, coat, the floor.