by Scott Lynch
Sankirk fanned his six-gun, squeezing off round and after round as Redhand rode off, putting distance between himself and the train.
Redhand leaned forward, down low on the horse’s back, and looked behind himself at the receding train—and at Marsdan’s red coat snapping in the wind from the back of his pursuing horse. Then he saw the blood. Redhand’s horse was bleeding from its flank where one of Sankirk’s rounds hit home.
He turned west, uphill and away from the train, toward the flat prairie above. The horse slowed a fraction with every step. Marsdan drew closer.
Redhand moved his shotgun from the front of his belt to the back, then slid Sankirk’s rifle out of its sheath and levered a round into position. Marsdan drew closer.
Redhand swiveled on his horse, tossed one leg over, and rode sidesaddle with the rifle in hand. Marsden galloped hard, riding through the white smoke of an aimless pistol shot.
Redhand crested the hill ahead of Marsdan and took a deep breath. Just as his horse cleared the hill, Redhand dropped from horseback and rolled into the grass, catching his knee on a hidden stone and coming to a stop in a half-kneel. He put the rifle to his shoulder in a flash.
Marsdan crested the hill and rode by at full speed.
Redhand lined up his shot and pulled the trigger. Marsdan toppled from his horse as coat-stuffing and blood flew into the air from a wound in his shoulder. Redhand levered another round into place and started his run toward Marsdan.
Marsdan was faster than Redhand imagined, back on his feet in mere moments and running a half-circle around Redhand, firing his silver six-gun once, twice, thrice.
Redhand dove to one side, rolled back the way he’d come, got to one knee and fired too wide. Marsdan rushed him, then dropped into the grass again. Good timing—Redhand wasted another round shooting where the Twin Eagle no longer was.
Marsdan was quick and cunning enough to rush and weave around a rifle in an open space. Running away would’ve been asking for a bullet in the back from other riflemen. Redhand wasn’t other riflemen. He let Marsdan crawl around in the grass for a while, knowing both men were creeping toward each other.
Redhand fired off another shot with no hope of landing it, forcing Marsdan to stay down.
Then he worked the lever and heard the dreaded sound of an empty chamber.
Marsdan leapt from the grasses with a pistol in each hand and invoked the name of once-just gods from the Celestial Court, working each pistol with thumb and trigger-finger, back and forth, shot after shot trying to predict Redhand’s next move.
Redhand sprang into defensive mode, diving into the grass himself and trying to get within reach of Marsdan. A round split the stock on the rifle. Another put a hole through his hat. A third hit Redhand in the calf. He bled and hissed and then sensed he was close enough to Marsdan. Redhand ditched the rifle and sprang to his feet.
First he put a foot into Marsdan’s knee, then pressed off it and swung the other foot across Marsdan’s face, knocking him into the grass. Marsdan rolled but Redhand came down heel-first on his left hand, driving one silver gun into the dirt.
Marsdan fired a shot—sending Redhand swerving like a drunk—then got to his feet and took aim.
Redhand drew his shotgun from behind him as he dove under Marsdan’s remaining gun, pointed the shotgun upward, and blasted Marsdan’s right hand and silver pistol apart. As he came to his feet, Redhand released the breech on the shotgun and snapped it forward, slamming the barrels into Marsdan’s nose. Then he kicked the man away and snapped the breech shut with a flick.
Marsdan stumbled back and fell into the long grass again. Redhand picked up Marsdan’s bloody silver pistol with two fingers and side-armed it away. Then he left Marsdan there on the ground and limped off to retrieve the Twin Eagle’s other pistol. When he came back, Marsdan had a twin-shot pocket pistol in his left hand, held out in front of him more like a talisman than a gun.
“No closer, you bastard,” Marsdan said. His oiled hair clung to his forehead in errant strands. “Or I’ll shoot you dead.”
Redhand stopped. “I believe it,” he said. “I made a promise to Abby that I’d settle down. With her. Give up the gun. I failed her at that. And I won’t settle down without her. So that leave me this life. Or it leaves me dead by your hand.”
Marsdan’s breathed out. His whole body trembled with pain but his pistol hardly wavered.
“I deserve to die tired,” Redhand said.
“Agreed.”
“I swore, once, to tolerate no wickedness.” Redhand looked down at Marsdan. Sunlight fell through a crack and a bullet-hole in his coolie hat and lit Redhand’s face. “Wicked, though, is what we both are right now, isn’t it?”
Redhand put his palm to his back and then showed it to Marsdan. It was dark with blood from a gunshot beneath Redhand’s ribs—either Marsdan or Sankirk had got lucky. “You came out here to murder me.”
Marsdan blinked sweat out of his eyes.
Redhand cocked Marsdan’s silver pistol and aimed it at him. “You’d never forgive me if I let you do that.”
“I can’t forgive you anyway for what you’ve done,” Marsdan spat. “Cowardice.”
“You’re leaving me no choice but to shoot you, here, Jang.”
“But you won’t. You haven’t learned anything.”
“I learned,” Redhand said, “too late.” He pulled the trigger on Marsdan’s silver pistol, put a bullet in Marsdan’s heart.
The wind came across the prairie. The grass swayed, except where Marsdan’s body weighed it down.
Redhand climbed aboard Marsdan’s horse and ran his hand over the two eagles emblazoned on the saddle. Clouds hustled across the sky. Redhand rode bleeding into the west toward Prosperity.
_________________________________________________
Will Hindmarch is a writer, graphic designer, and game designer whose work has appeared in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Escapist, and Atlanta magazine, among others. He writes fiction, non-fiction, games, screenplays, comics, and more. His hope, in the long run, is to write one of everything.
RAILROAD SPIKES
By Ari Marmell
“I don’t get it. I just don’t.”
The station manager doffed his cap so he might lift a hand to his forehead, wiping away a thin sheen of slurry made up of summer sweat and summer dust. From behind him, across the length of the platform, he heard the clump of boots and the rustling of skirts, the exasperated murmurs of passengers and workers grousing about the unexpected delay. But he had eyes only for the iron wheels before him, and the thick bolts that had been yanked from those wheels and left scattered amidst heaped flakes of rust.
“Robbery, maybe?” he asked softly, trying to wrap his head around it. “Delay you folks so someone could hit you down the line?”
Beside him, the second fellow, dressed in a smart three-piece, frowned beneath a mustache thick as a horse’s tail. “Don’t track.” The Twin Eagles Security man knelt beside the bolts, ignoring what the sand and grit did to his slacks. “Bandits wouldn’t want us on our guard. This sabotage is way too obvious. Somebody wanted us delayed, but didn’t much care if we knew it. Come to think, I heard tell of something similar happening recently, over near Brogdon.” Chewing on his whiskers, he asked, “How long to fix it?”
“Assuming there’s no more to the damage than what we see—and accounting for the extra time to make sure there’s no more than what we see—five, six hours, maybe.”
“Huh.” The detective rose, brushed the dirt from his knees. “Well, Bilson’s workers are gonna have to wait a spell for their payroll, but we’ll get it there. Just wish I knew why someone’d want to slow us up like this.”
As he turned to walk away, the station manager could still only shake his head. “I just don’t get it…”
Of course neither of them understood. Neither of them could see.
Several miles west of the station, something trudged
with slow, implacable steps. Dozens upon dozens of short, segmented legs carried what could only be roughly described as a steel caterpillar across the rocky badlands; the clank and clatter could have masked an entire stampede of panicked thunderbirds. Its sides were solid, gleaming in the sharp morning sun. Where the various segments linked to one another, the joins were covered in a mesh of steel rings, covering what would otherwise have been gaping vulnerabilities in the thing’s armor. From a squat smokestack up front and numerous smaller portals along the edges billowed thick, greasy fumes. The device, or vehicle, or whatever it was left not only a winding trail of the most peculiar prints, but also a scattered, broken line of cinders and soot.
It finally settled, with impossible grace, over the iron rails that bound each horizon to the other. A shift one way, a minute adjustment the other, and it aligned perfectly with the track. Steam whistled, smoke puffed, gears cranked, and the contraption slowly lowered itself. The legs retracted into the individual segments, revealing narrow wheels behind. The smokestack rose, the chain mesh folded open like curtains.
And that simply, the bizarre vehicle wasn’t bizarre at all. Just another train, chugging its way along, riding the rails exactly where, and exactly when, the Bilson payroll delivery should have been.
Just another train. Waiting.
When awareness first returned, it took the form of a gentle rocking of the floor beneath his cheek. A rhythmic sway, almost relaxing in its own right, accompanied by the constant lullaby. Clack-clack… clack-clack… clack-clack…
Why, he wondered, do they always come in pairs?
The thought, bleary as it was, opened the door for others. Memory returned, and with it, a sharp agony across the top of his skull. Groaning, he pressed his fingers to the mat of bloody hair, and struggled to sit up.
Russ Gandry—or “‘Ruddy’ Russ Gandry” to his compatriots, to law enforcement, and to the readers of wanted posters everywhere—was the fastest fist in, and the second-in-command of, the infamous Davallo Gang. He had no trouble recalling that. He and over half a dozen of Davallo’s best shooters had ridden up alongside the train, whooping and hollering and throwing lead, making sure everyone was nice and cowed before they’d clambered aboard. He’d gone in the very back, just forward of the caboose. No trouble recalling that either.
And then… Flat on his face, with the emperor of all hangovers and the taste of floor lingering on his tongue.
Russ struggled to pry his eyes open, and only then realized that they were open. It was just dark as a Marshal’s soul in the car.
Dark? Can’t be dark. Was just a couple hours past noon when we hit the train. Can’t have been out that long…
Puzzled, yes, but he wasn’t worried. Thanks to that old tinkerer Davallo hired on, Russ and his boys were ready for damn near anything. He reached to his belt, not for a weapon but for a tin tube at his back. The “glow juice” inside—he didn’t know what it was properly called, but that’s what he always called it—had been let to sit in the sun for a full day before being poured into this cylinder, which was mirrored on the inside. That meant he should get at least three hours illumination out of it, easy. He clicked open the aperture and raised the tube high.
“Well.” Russ might not have had anyone to talk to, but that didn’t stop him talking. “Guess I know why it’s dark, at least.”
He was, indeed, still in the car—the train’s last car, other than the caboose—just as he’d thought. But no, night had not fallen. Rather, the windows that ran along both walls, just below the ceiling, were covered over with what looked, in the dim light, to be steel plates. So too, when he checked, was the door through which he’d entered.
He did not, however, immediately move to examine the barriers that apparently imprisoned him. No, the bulk of his attention was snagged by the ugly contraption hanging from the ceiling just in front of the door (or where the door had been).
It looked very much like a heavy pick-axe, fashioned from a single bar of iron or steel. A careful prod with a finger set in swinging back and forth; it was, as he’d suspected, mounted above very much like a pendulum.
And even the bare light provided by the glow juice was enough for him to spot the darkening stain that ran along the heavy head—not at the end, where the flattened metal would have punched through bone like paper, but along the center.
Now he remembered the last little bit of it. Now he recalled how the train had lurched just as he stepped inside, how he’d stumbled forward, nudged off-balance. The trap—because that’s what it had to be, a trap—must have caught him at the wrong angle because of it.
He shivered, his skin goose-pimpling and his throat running dry, at the realization that he could have been, should have been, lying dead in a puddle of blood and brain.
Who the Hells booby-traps the door on a train car?! What if it’d been one of the passengers, or the guards?!
His hands moved of their own accord, acting as they were accustomed to act when the rest of Russ was suddenly afraid. His right hand swiftly passed the glowing tube to his left, and swept the double-six from the holster at his side. Russ glanced down, running the pistol through a quick check to ensure that both cylinders were fully loaded and spinning freely, that both barrels were clear. He wouldn’t need his left hand to fire the thing; the rotation of each cylinder triggered a mechanism to cock the hammer of the other. A good thing, too, because he sure as the lowest Hell wasn’t letting go of his light!
So, no way back—but that didn’t mean no way out. Russ held the light before him as far as his arm would stretch, squinting at the far side of the car. It looked to be absolutely empty: No freight, no storage, no passengers, nothing.
“Kinda train is this, damn it?!”
Nobody answered, of course.
But at the far end, scarcely visible in the light, he could make out the door. Not a steel slab, but an actual, honest-to-gods wooden door! All right, so he couldn’t get out the back. He’d just go on ahead, slip out onto the platform between cars, and get his bearings. Maybe he could see or hear one of the boys, try to get a handle on what was happening.
Russ took a single step and froze once more. He cast his gaze upward, and while he didn’t see any more of those pendulum/pick-axes, he could see an array of tubes and lengths of metal running, web-like, down the center of the ceiling. No way was he walking under that! Snickering lowly, congratulating himself on his cleverness, Russ scooted to the left and hugged the wall as he made his way forward.
He’d gotten maybe a third of the way when the floor vanished from beneath his boot.
Russ had trained extensively in multiple combat styles during his soldiering days, and it was Rearing Horse that saved him now. Even as he began to lurch forward he threw his weight back, acting before he was even aware of what had happened. He fell into the rear-leaning stance at the very edge of a precipice that hadn’t existed a second before.
Wheezing as he tried to catch his breath and calm his heart, Russ stepped away and knelt, staring in horror. A long stretch of floor had fallen away on hidden hinges; had he plummeted through, as he was clearly meant to, he’d have been chewed like so much tobacco in the wheels directly beneath.
“The fuck kinda train is this?!” He was screaming, borderline hysterical now, and he knew it—but that didn’t mean he could help it. At least the room was better lit now, than it had been. The sun still shone outside, and while there wasn’t near enough room for him to squeeze out over the wheels, there was plenty to let the daylight in.
All right, stay away from the walls, then. He moved down the center of the car once more, now in an awkward crouch that was somehow both slow and scurrying, checking his footing and ducking low beneath the contraptions above. And although the wood squeaked and the metal wailed and the wheels screeched, he reached the door without anything further attempting to murder him.
He held the light close to the door handle, but he couldn’t see anything harmful about it. Same held true for the hinges. Ging
erly, using only two fingers on his left hand, Russ yanked the door open and took a quick step back, his double-six raised.
On the one hand, nothing tried to shatter his skull or crush him to death. That’d be the good news.
The bad was that, though he could indeed step out onto the platform, he wasn’t leaving the train.
A net of metal rinks, strung close and tight, covered the entire gap, top and sides, connecting this car to the next. Tiny streams of sunlight filtered through, and if he leaned up against the mesh—risking a nasty pinch as the rings rubbed against one another—he could just barely make out the sight of open plains whipping past. But he certainly wasn’t tearing his way through it, and close examination was enough to convince him that he’d just be wasting ammunition to try shooting holes in it.
Russ had exactly two options, far as he could see. He could go back into the room he’d just left and sit, waiting for gods alone knew what, for gods alone knew how long.
Or he could move on into the next car, and maybe the next, until he found some way off this gods damned train!
Choking back something between a grunt and a sob, he reached out for the opposite door.
It was in the second car that he found the first body.
An entire thicket of old and rusted spikes rose and fell in waves down the length of the car. Thrust upward and hauled down by the turning of the train’s wheels, or so it seemed, they rippled and waved in hypnotic swells along both walls, leaving only a narrow path that snaked and meandered its way from door to door. Fearsome, certainly, but easily navigable by anyone with the slightest agility and sense of balance.
Something that one of Russ’s boys had apparently lacked.
“Oh, shit! Mitch…”
The corpse rode the spikes along the left hand side, slowly swaying up and down with the rhythm of the train. Jags of bloody steel punched through ripped clothing and torn flesh, gradually ripping the body apart with their constant tugging. Mitch’s eyes and mouth hung wide open; the poor bastard had known what was coming.