Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy

by T W M Ashford

  ‘Up there!’ he screamed, pointing straight at Wesker’s bemused face. ‘They’re hidin’ in the damn barn!’

  Pierre threw himself to the wooden floor. The air was filled with gunfire and the walls of the barn began to pop and splinter. He crawled past Viola, who was the only one of them firing back.

  ‘What was all that about not wanting to die, eh?’ he hissed at Wesker. ‘We’re really out of harm’s way now, aren’t we?’

  Viola kept on shooting. Pierre poked his head out of Wesker’s skylight panel and saw at least three men sprawled on the ground, one of whom had been crushed by his own horse. The others were doing a combination of running for cover and blasting more holes in the side of the barn. He looked up at Viola. She seemed to be enjoying herself, at least.

  ‘Take that, ya bastards!’ she screamed, firing off a couple more rounds.

  A plank of wood beside Pierre erupted into a thousand pieces. One of those pieces smacked him clean across the nose.

  ‘Do you think we ought to move?’ asked Wesker, chancing another look outside. He ducked as another bullet went whistling over his head.

  Pierre looked over the edge of the balcony, down into the centre of the barn. There were plenty of mounds of straw and hay. And probably no sharp pitchforks lying in wait inside them.

  ‘Viola?’ he shouted. She kept firing. Whether she ignored him or couldn’t hear him was unclear.

  ‘Viola!’ he shouted again, grabbing her shoulder. She turned to look at him, startled.

  ‘Jump!’

  It may have been the wrong word to use. Jump usually implies a brief period of going up before heading more permanently down. In this case the correct verb should have probably have been drop.

  The three of them dropped, quick and clumsily, into the hay below, just as a fresh section of the wall upstairs was blown into pieces as fine as sawdust. Pierre rolled out of his respective bale, picking blades of hay out of his ear holes.

  He looked around at the disintegrating mess of a barn. The horse was in the stall opposite him, cowering. He’d never seen a horse cower before. He hadn’t known they were capable of it.

  The big barn doors facing the front of the town were bolted shut - the three of them had made sure of that before the outlaws had arrived. Nobody was going to sneak round and flank them that way. There was another pair of doors at the opposite end of the barn, and those ones were cracked open just enough for Pierre, Wesker and Viola to escape through in the case that the Bowder Boys tried burning the stables down.

  ‘What’s the plan, then?’ hissed Wesker, crawling up to Pierre. He clasped his hands over his head. ‘How do we stop them?’

  ‘We?’ snapped Viola, joining them. ‘We? You couldn’t shoot an elephant if it were standing two feet from your face! You’re not stopping anything!’

  A bullet smashed through the wall and ricocheted off a rusty tin bath with a dire clang. Pierre searched the stable for a suitable door through which they might escape, but all he could spot was the broken wheel of an old wagon and a pretty ragged (and now very porous) saddle hanging from a rafter.

  ‘I say we try our luck running to the nearest door in a spot where we won’t be shot dead,’ said Pierre, ducking. ‘And then we go home. Or at least somewhere that isn’t here. Happy with that?’

  ‘Sounds grand to me,’ replied Viola, shooting him a thumbs-up. ‘This party’s getting a bit stale anyway.’

  ‘What, and just leave everyone here to die?’ shouted Wesker. ‘What’s wrong with you both?’

  ‘Oh, look who’s changed his tune!’ replied Viola. ‘Weren’t you asking why we were even here a moment ago? I seem to remember you being really adamant about the whole “not dying” thing.’

  ‘That was before they shot Sheriff Ketchum!’

  ‘What difference does it really make, in the end?’ Pierre asked, already crawling towards the enormous barn doors. ‘If we save your town folk here, it only condemns a duplicate universe’s version of your town to death. If they die here, the other version of the town lives. It all works out much the same eventually, you know that.’

  ‘Then why does it matter if we die doing the right thing?’ snapped Wesker, crawling after Pierre and Viola.

  ‘Because we’re us,’ replied Viola. ‘I don’t care if all the other versions of me die, so long as I don’t!’

  They kept crawling, even when the shooting turned from a storm into a drizzle and then stopped completely. When they reached the barn doors they rose to their knees and peered outside.

  The Bowder Boys who hadn’t been gunned down by Viola (and there were still a great deal too many of them) were patrolling the street. There was a lot of shouting, some of which Pierre recognised as instructions from Jimmy to storm the barn. Something across the street caught Pierre’s eye.

  ‘Look, Wesker! The sheriff’s still alive!’

  In all the commotion, Sheriff Ketchum had dragged himself down the dark side alley that ran between the cobbler and blacksmith’s workshops. He was bleeding from a wound in his shoulder.

  There was no sign of the older Bowder brother, but they watched as the younger marched up to the door of Mr. Bonnetide’s coffin shop and kicked it open. The lock smashed and the wood splintered. Sammy strode inside and started knocking things over. Something glass got smashed.

  The barn doors behind them started to shake and rattle, held shut only by the thick bar of wood pulled down across them.

  ‘Wesker, what’s that building over there?’ Pierre asked, nodding towards the squat, square, wooden box of a shop in front of them. There were old barrels piled up beside a rickety, crooked back door. There was an outhouse about twenty feet beyond, towards the untamed brush and desert.

  ‘That’s the chemist store, owned and run by Mr. Campbell,’ Wesker replied. His words tumbled out all at once.

  The other set of barn doors began to heave and crack. Sammy Bowder emerged from the undertaker’s building and stormed into the cobbler’s store next door. Sheriff Ketchum kept quiet, crawling further backwards into the shadows.

  ‘Okay. There’s about ten metres between us and that pharmacy,’ said Pierre. ‘We need to get round to the back of it and unlock that door before our friends out there turn it into Swiss cheese. It’s probably too much to hope we can get to the other side without any of them spotting us.’

  ‘What do we do if they see us?’ asked Wesker.

  ‘Die, probably,’ smiled Viola.

  The doors buckled on their hinges. Some of their planks were smashed inwards; laughter crept in from the other side.

  ‘On the count of three?’ suggested Pierre.

  ‘One,’ said Viola, biting her lip.

  - snap -

  ‘Two,’ said Pierre, readying himself.

  - crack -

  ‘Wait!’ yelled Wesker, starting to panic.

  ‘Three!’

  Pierre and Viola sprinted across the open yard towards the back of the chemist’s shop. Pierre kept his eyes shut, just about keeping a scream at bay. Wesker hesitated for a second before chasing after them… which he soon came to regret.

  Viola and Pierre were about two-thirds of the way across the patch of plain and empty dirt when they heard Polly Wright scream in rapturous surprise.

  ‘There they are! They’s runnin’!’

  Suddenly the air was full with the sound of firecrackers - all bangs and cracks and whistles. Pierre felt the air beside his ear wobble as something whooshed by. Each time Viola lifted her foot, the ground where it had been burst up like a Yellowstone geyser. One of the rounds was wayward enough to burst a hole in the stacked barrels beside the pharmacy.

  Viola reached the pharmacy first. She took cover behind its rear wall and fired back at the outlaws with her pistol. Pierre dove into safety a split second afterwards, narrowly avoiding decorating the building’s wooden panels with his brains. He spun around, expecting Wesker to be right behind.

  He wasn’t. And no sooner did Pierre turn to see him, did he s
ee him twist around in wide-eyed shock as a bullet dug a tunnel through his upper arm.

  ‘Wesker!’ screamed Pierre as his bartender fell to the earth. He quickly threw himself back behind cover before the subsequent entourage of bullets could do it for him. Viola continued to return fire, each colossal boom of her Victorian pistol sending a high-pitched ringing through Pierre’s skull. She caught one of the grimy men in the gut, and another in the shin. Both went down screaming - not that either of them could be heard over the smokey din.

  Pierre unfolded his arms from over his head and looked at Wesker. He was lying on the ground and groaning, clutching his arm. The blood ran out from between his fingers and stained the dust beneath him.

  ‘Don’t move!’ Pierre shouted. ‘Stay where you are!’

  A stray bullet decimated a wooden hitching post about five feet from Wesker’s head.

  ‘Sod that for a sandwich,’ Pierre muttered. ‘Scratch that. Crawl over here, goddammit!’

  Viola swung back into cover to reload, summoning another handful of rounds from somewhere in the recesses of her trousers. She flinched as yet another part of the wall exploded beside her.

  ‘Make yourself useful,’ she said, nodding towards the pharmacy’s back door. ‘Get that open, will you?’

  ‘Not until Wesker’s over here with us!’

  They looked at Wesker. He was crawling towards them with all the grace of a reanimated corpse struggling to get out of a body-bag.

  ‘Oh, beardsplitter,’ sighed Viola. She turned to start shooting again, only to hesitate. It was odd. Nobody was shooting at her anymore.

  ‘Er… Pierre?’ she said, beckoning him over. ‘What the bloody hell is that?’

  ‘What’s what?’ yelled Pierre, his fingers in his ears. Viola grabbed his arm and yanked him over.

  ‘That?’

  In the middle of the street was a thin, rippling line. It hung about three feet in the air and stretched for a good ten feet or more above that. The line was as thin as a finger but as dark and final as Death’s cloak. The very fabric of reality around it shimmered like a heat haze. Every surviving member of the Bowder Boys gang was standing around it, staring up at it, their guns lowered. They looked like baseball fans watching the other team’s ball go sailing out over the bleachers.

  ‘Oh no,’ whimpered Pierre. ‘Not now.’

  He tugged on Viola’s arm. ‘Quick. Help me drag Wesker over here while nobody’s looking.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘If I’m right you’ll see soon enough, Now, come on!’

  They rushed out into the dusty yard, certain that at any moment a hailstorm of bullets would come raining their way. But it didn’t. With Wesker’s arms hooked around their shoulders they carried him back to the relative safety of the pharmacy’s rear wall.

  ‘Thanks guys,’ wheezed Wesker, really making a four-course meal out of his injury. ‘I was certain I’d… Jesus. What is that?’

  A high-pitched ultrasonic whine grew stronger and stronger, digging into their ear drums like a gnawing maggot. The three of them covered their ears with their hands and winced. Sammy Bowder, on the other hand, approached the floating, shimmering line with an expression of almost reverential fervour, reaching out to it…

  ‘Here… it… comes!’ Pierre shouted.

  There was a colossal supersonic boom as the amorphous blur of the untangled octowürm burst through the tear between worlds, whipping about like an octopus trapped in a tumble dryer. One of its tentacles sliced Sammy’s hand off at the wrist. The spell was broken; Sammy fell to the floor, clutching his stump and screaming.

  Something was thrown in Pierre’s direction; it landed in the dirt beside him with a sullen thump.

  It was a Japanese gangster’s head.

  Sammy’s screaming broke everyone out of their stupor. Gunfire became the town’s soundtrack once more. The octowürm was so quick and so vicious in its movements that nobody had a chance to truly see it. One second the outlaws were firing at what looked like a colour being blown about in a breeze, the next they found their torso a good ten metres from where they were sure their legs used to be. Heads were launched like mortar shells. Blood was turning the soil of the street dark red.

  Polly “Snapjaw” Wright thought she had the mettle to take it down. A tentacle stabbed through her belly with the efficiency of a hole-punch, and then all her intestines spilled out onto her shoes.

  Viola was watching it all happen with gleeful fascination. Pierre asked her why she was squinting.

  ‘The inspector, what was the colour of her top?’ asked Viola.

  Pierre tapped his finger against his chin. ‘Red and yellow, in a kind of flowery pattern,’ he replied. ‘Black cardigan over the top, I think.’

  ‘Thought so,’ said Viola. She grinned. ‘It’s hard to make out any shapes in that cloud of violence, but I could have sworn I saw flashes of red and yellow in the middle of it all. I reckon your Ms. Rundleford is in there somewhere.’

  ‘Really?’ Pierre looked back at the ongoing carnage. The octowürm - if it even was an octowürm, of course - was no more clearly visible than the whizzing spokes of a bicycle wheel. It was like trying to catch sight of a ricocheting bullet.

  Another outlaw was torn in half. His legs were thrown over the roof of the sheriff’s office.

  ‘Doesn’t mean she’s alive, though,’ Viola conceded.

  Only a few members of the Bowder Boys gang remained. This number included Jimmy, who upon seeing his brother lose a hand and his girlfriend disemboweled had decided New Havant wasn’t really worth all the bother. He ran out into the desert alongside the other two survivors, chasing after horses that had long since bolted.

  The chaotic blur that was the octowürm rocketed down the street in the opposite direction… straight towards the rickety scaffolding around the rocky hills, straight down the entrance of the mine shaft.

  All was silent. All was calm. Hanging signs stopped swinging. Weather waves turned slowly in the wind. A few more pieces of the pharmacy wall fell away.

  A tumbleweed skipped down the street, out of habit.

  ‘You folks still breathin’?’ came a voice from the dark alley on the other side.

  ‘Just about,’ shouted Pierre. He looked at Wesker. Viola was tying a strip of cloth around Wesker’s arm. She’d borrowed it from his shirt, much to Wesker’s irritation. It was tied round tight, and though the makeshift bandage was soaked through the bleeding appeared to be slowing down.

  Sheriff Ketchum came shuffling into the street, holding onto his shoulder. His arm didn’t look that great either. It hung limp by his side. Still, he’d faced down the Bowder Boys and lived. That was more than most could say.

  Pierre and Viola helped Wesker back onto his feet and the three of them met Ketchum halfway across the street. There was no sign of the surviving outlaws in the desert… but nobody was coming back out of the mines yet, either.

  ‘That… that thing,’ said Ketchum, leaning on one of the saloon’s hitching posts. ‘What was that? No, that ain’t what’s important,’ he said, waving the question away before any of them could answer it. ‘Y’all saw where it went, right?’

  They all turned to look down the street, past the church and its towering spire, past the general store and the sheriff’s office, to the dark maw in the rocks, surrounded by rotten supports and old, overturned mine carts that had rusted from the rain.

  ‘Could be that people don’t know it’s safe to come out yet,’ said Wesker, hopefully.

  ‘Could be. Or could be that whatever did all this,’ the sheriff snapped, gesturing at the sea of offal sloshing about in the street, ‘is about to do the same to the good folk down there. Don’t tell me that monster ain’t what you three were trackin’. You saw what it did. We gotta get down there, right now.’

  He went as if to walk down the street but couldn’t even muster the strength to push himself off the hitching post. Fresh blood oozed out of his shoulder.

  ‘Sherif
f, I think it’s best if you stay here and act as lookout in case any of those maniacs come back,’ said Viola, helping him sit down on the steps of the saloon. ‘God, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Don’t worry. We’ll go down there and make sure everyone’s alright.’

  ‘Will we?’ asked Pierre.

  ‘Yes,’ said Viola, glaring at him. ‘It’s our fault the octo… that thing… came here in the first place. Well it’s yours, actually. And I know what I saw back then. Your inspector was there. We find her alive, and maybe the Council of Keys will go easy on you. We find her dead…’

  ‘Then at least we can blame everything on an octowürm attack and not Pierre’s stupidity,’ Wesker said in a hushed voice, nodding. ‘But can we take a moment to think this over? If we go into those mines, I really don’t see much chance of us getting back out. I don’t want to die down there anymore than I wanted to die up here, thank you very much.’

  ‘Then it’s a good thing you’re not going down there, isn’t it?’ said Viola. She and Pierre turned Wesker away from the sheriff so he couldn’t eavesdrop on them. ‘Look at your arm. It’s nothing a good doctor back home couldn’t fix in five minutes, but in this world you’re about as useful as a paraplegic shire horse. Plus it’ll end up infected if you don’t get it looked at.’

  ‘She’s got a point, buddy,’ said Pierre, getting his keyring out. ‘It’s my fault we’re all in this mess, and now I’ve gone and got you shot. Besides, you said you didn’t want to go any further. I should have listened to you back at the warehouse. The least I can do is make sure you get home without further injury.’

  Wesker went to speak, then shut his mouth. When he opened it again the words came out slow and hopeful.

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Pierre, leading him back to the door behind the pharmacy where the sheriff couldn’t see. ‘Get yourself patched up and make sure the hotel doesn’t burn itself to the ground under Ashley’s watch. And if the Council asks any questions, tell them everything is under control.’