Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  Clint pointed at Rigo, then at Stone. “Help the kid,” he told Stone. Then he ran after Mai and El Feo.

  How many could possibly be left?

  The answer was: a lot. Worse, they seemed to be getting smarter, and adapting their attacks. Shots came from windows. Fires blazed across rooftops — whether from the exploding wagon or from new fires, he couldn’t tell. The Gringos — some still wearing masks, some with their pale faces showing — were peering out from everywhere.

  A shot struck Clint in the arm and spun him like a top. He slapped the dirt, his teeth clattering hard together. Mai was nowhere. The bandit who’d shot him ran out, smelling a killing, and aimed his weapon. He stood above the gunslinger — who, incidentally, found his guns pinned beneath him — and then established that the Teedawges had a collective memory by saying, “I owe you for that day in Nazareth.”

  Clint could only stare up as the albino cocked his weapon, but then something huge fell on the man and he vanished, pounded into the ground like a stake.

  “Pompi smash!” boomed a huge voice behind him.

  The huge object that had crushed the Teedawge rose with a feather’s weight. No man squirmed below what turned out to be Pompi’s magic hammer — just a whiff of smoke rising from the empty crater with a quiet poof.

  Clint saw Mai. She was still riding the wagon axle, but had either dispatched or lost El Feo. The mass of Gringos converged, grabbing her leg and pulling her to the ground. The axle fell, then lay still.

  “Pompi!” Clint yelled, pointing.

  He didn’t need to point because Mai, as always, could handle herself. There was a great rattling from every casito on the square as knives flew out of every kitchen drawer in the pueblo, screaming in a great river toward the Teedawges, ending many and dropping the rest.

  Quickly, unkillt, most of the felled started to stand, now sporting new spikes of iron.

  There was a tremendous explosion two buildings away — like the gunpowder blow in the square, but more hollow and less like fire — sending eruptions of mud into the sky.

  A prim voice bellowed, “Take that, sirs!”

  Mai ran to Clint. Teedawges followed her with knives protruding from them, now mostly weaponless and shambling like xombies.

  “How can there be so many?” she shouted at Clint as he joined her in a dash for cover.

  “They respawn! You have to hit the thinkbox!”

  Mai stopped. Clint shambled a few more steps before turning back.

  “Oh,” she said.

  She flicked her hands. In all of the pursuing Teedawges, the knives shimmered and shifted positions, moving toward their heads. Black smoke belched from their thinkboxes. What remained fell in untidy piles.

  Another blast from Buckaroo’s canon. This time, Clint thought he might have heard a Yee-haw.

  “Did you get El Feo?” Clint asked her.

  “Nar.”

  “Why is it that in these confrontations, the leader is always the last to die?”

  “Because they’re the most cowardly, and they run the fastest.”

  “Or maybe it’s a trope,” said Clint. “That’s Edward’s word for something that the universe sees as unbending. Something that must be.”

  “Like fate?”

  At that moment, Gringos poured into the street behind them and something struck Mai hard in the head, knocking her to the dirt. She didn’t get up, maybe couldn’t get up. Archetypes surrounded them, pointing guns and yelling, but Clint didn’t listen. He knelt. Mai wasn’t dead. She was unconscious.

  Clint stood, intending to draw his guns as he did, but then bodies pressed around him and he found himself boxed in, held tight, his hands pulled roughly behind his back. In front of him, one of the Teedawges who had managed to keep his skull mask stepped forward and slapped Clint with the back of his hand.

  Where was Stone? Where was Buckaroo?

  Clint could hear Pompi, a ways off and causing untold damage with his hammer. What about Rigo? Had Rigo escaped?

  “We may be artificial,” said the masked archetype, “but we still have feelings. And you’ve hurt a lot of our feelings today.” He smacked again.

  Clint spat at him.

  “See, now something like that won’t improve my hurt feelings,” he said. He pulled off his mask. His pink eyes were full of menace. He wiped spittle from his neck, grimacing.

  “You’re cowards,” said Clint. “Mindless. Where is your fearless leader?”

  “Oh, he’s not fearless,” said another of the Teedawges in the circle around Clint. “He’s just the one the big man speaks to.”

  “The big man?”

  The Teedawge in front of Clint slapped him again.

  “El Feo is safe. He’s the only one who needs to be safe, so we aim to keep him that way. We won’t be a Gross of Gringos for a while thanks to you, but…”

  Another of the men picked up his sentence. “… the great thing about being us is that there are always more where we came from.”

  Mai lay at his feet. Her breathing was slow. Clint looked up and saw Stone, held by another six Teedawges. He didn’t have his shotguns, nor did any of the men holding him. He seemed unhurt. He thrashed, but the archetypes held firm. Stone managed to get a foot into the gut of a Teedawge and had a moment where Clint thought he might wrestle himself free, but then his captors tightened their grip and again the orange-haired ex-bandit was bound.

  Clint’s arms were pinned. Stone was held. Mai was out cold. The gunslinger knew not where the others were. In the opening were only a handful of the Teedawge things, but it was enough to stop them.

  They had done well in the battle of Barucho Gulch, but not well enough.

  Stone yelled again and kept kicking out, but the Teedawges held tight. One of his captors punched him in the gut and left him gasping for breath.

  Clint felt one of his pistols pulled from its holster. The feeling of an enemy touching his guns was worse than a violation. It felt like a piece of himself being ripped from his body. He looked up and stared into the pink eyes of the man who’d slapped him, now holding one of his pistols. The man turned Clint’s iron over in his hands, smiling at its deadly shine. Clint could feel neither his own heart nor his own breath. They were in a duel to the death, yar. But it was unthinkable to ever, ever touch a marshal’s guns. Ever.

  “It’s so heavy. Feel this, Teedawge,” said the man with the gun, handing it to another.

  “It is heavy, Teedawge,” said the other, handing it back.

  “It’s full of lead poisoning,” said Clint.

  The first archetype fingered the cylinder, lifting the hammer, spinning the tumbler through its seven chambers. “Seven shots,” he said. “And yet all I need is one.”

  “You can’t handle a gun like that,” said Clint.

  “Oh, I think I can.” Teedawge took a pair of steps back, using two hands to heft the large gun. Clint watched his hands shake, and couldn’t totally suppress a smile at how he was unable to hold it steady.

  “Nar,” said Clint. “I mean, you can’t fire a marshal’s guns.”

  “I know about the taboo.” He pulled the hammer back. Clint heard the click. Every moment the pale man’s fingers were on his gun was torture for the gunslinger. “But the beautiful thing about being what we are is that there is so little we care about.”

  “Nar, I mean…”

  The Teedawge pulled the trigger. But instead of firing one slug forward, the gun split like a shotgun, folded up, and fired the other six shots backward. There was a massive belch of dull red fire as six magic slugs rammed backward through their casings and propellant, then ripped straight through Teedawge.

  The gun re-folded as the Teedawge fell and dropped it. Clint caught it before it struck the ground, then used the remaining shell to end another of the men in the scrum around him. The blast had shocked them all, as well as the men holding Stone. There was a beat of held breath and they flinched.

  It was enough.

  Clint still had se
ven shells in his second gun. There were two men left in Clint’s group. He dropped them, then ended five of the six surrounding Stone before his chambers clicked empty. Stone kicked the remaining man in the chest, stumbled backward in search of a weapon, any weapon. But the Teedawge simply looked at Clint — not Stone — and fired a slug into Stone’s chest.

  Sly Stone fell.

  Clint reached for his belt, for a loose shell.

  The gunman turned.

  Clint’s big fingers deftly pinched a shell while tossing his gun’s tumbler open. Spent casings rained to the ground in slow motion.

  The gunman aimed.

  Realizing he couldn’t load in time, Clint dove as at least twenty Teedawges came from the east, guns up and ready.

  The gunslinger grabbed for Mai, then pulled her back behind a high stack of boards. Only the one gunman knew he was there; the others had yet to see him. But the others did see the gunman turn and fire, missing Clint and striking dirt. The man fired again. Then again. He couldn’t hit them where they were, but he would be able to in a few steps if Clint didn’t reload, and he hadn’t. His hands were full of Mai, keeping her free from the line of fire. Her breathing was steady but deep. He tried peering out for Stone, to see if he’d crawled to safety or if he lay killt, but the gunslinger saw nothing.

  He tried again and a bullet streaked by his ear.

  In the distance, Clint could hear Pompi and Buckaroo, but still nothing from Rigo. He hoped the kid was okay. He hoped Stone was okay. But he doubted it.

  There was no standoff. Stone’s shooter yelled to the new men, and they all came forward at once with no hesitation. Clint wondered how there could be so many of them left, but knew it mattered nar. He pulled the filled reloader from his pouch, snapped the shells in place, then did the same with the other gun and second reloader. He pulled the hammers back, to make the triggers lighter. The gunslinger tensed. They were too many, and they were already halfway to him. Clint had fourteen shots. Even if he hit every thinkbox, he’d never be able to reload before the remainders were on him.

  Get them to line up, he told himself.

  The idea was absurd. Yar, if they lined up with one man behind the other, he could hit more than one with a single shell. But where? How? There were no bottlenecks, and no way out behind him. He was in a corner, and he doubted they’d answer his call to form an orderly line for a neat and tidy extermination.

  He popped up, fired once with both guns. Turned. Again. Four fell, but the others held no pause. Too many. Too fast.

  Teedawges raked the boards aside, and Clint found himself and Mai with no cover at all.

  Clint, in a ball, started to stand, refusing to die in a crouch.

  Hammers cocked. One barrel aimed at Mai. Another found him.

  Behind them all, a great noise held the Teedawges’ barrels in hesitation. Eyes twitched.

  Then in a great crashing of dust and clay, Edward reared and kicked behind them, flailing his forelegs in the air with a noise that was less like a whinny and more like a battle cry. His horn flared with the deep blood red of anger, and a great wall of orange fire swept through the archetypes, turning them to ash. The fire struck Clint. He could feel it thinking, assessing him, judging him worthy. Then it passed through him and Mai both before it was gone.

  Edward’s head flicked toward Stone, lying motionless at one end of the space.

  Teedawges at the ends of the open area turned and ran toward the unicorn. But the fight was over before it started; Clint could see a deep crimson churning in Edward’s eyes — the look those eyes made when his white magic had been turned dark by raw fury. Some of the Gringos fired. Their shells glanced off of Edward’s shield like gnats. The unicorn marched forward, his horn cycling through hot and angry hues. The men began to turn, but Edward shot another wall of fire and sent them flying like debris into the swirl of a tornado, sending them crashing through the village’s walls and over rooftops. Where the archetypes hit, they exploded like fireworks, their machine souls dispatching in thin billows of reeking inky smoke.

  The great white unicorn turned, his nostrils flared and heaving, his eyes slowly cycling back to their usual blue. His head jerked around. He kicked at the dirt testily with one hoof.

  Clint walked forward, leaving Mai on the ground behind him.

  “I ran,” said Edward. “But I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “You still saved one gunslinger. And his magnetic bride.”

  They walked over to Stone. He lay in an uncomfortable-looking position, one hand up and the other down, torso twisted and one leg crossed over the other. He was gone.

  “Not fast enough,” Edward repeated.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  HERO

  Sly Stone wasn’t the battle’s only casualty. The villagers lost twenty-three of their number, including Rigo’s father. His grandmother survived, as did Rigo, giving them at least some good news.

  The other bad news was Buckaroo.

  A mass of Gringos had advanced on a group of villagers attacking with machetes and pitchforks and clubs. The Gringos were furious and gave chase, but Buckaroo flew from the sky, landing between the fleeing men and women and their attackers. The villagers behind him squeezed through a narrow slot between two buildings, so Buckaroo plugged the slot, forcing the Gringos to run all the way around if they wished pursuit. The Gringos were furious — being archetypes didn’t make their emotions any less human — so they drove at Buckaroo instead of circling to chase their original quarry. Buckaroo fired his canon, clearing wave after wave of men, but they rose again and again and beat him and pinged at him with their tiny commoner’s bullets until the sheer relentlessness and number of their attacks finally dented and disabled his weapon. But even after he was disarmed, Buckaroo continued using his metal body to dam the gap, allowing villagers to flee.

  The Gringos fired their weapons, but still their bullets weren’t strong enough to do more than ping like a song against Buckaroo’s Realm metal. Eventually one of them lit and tossed a half stick of dynamite, and the explosion broke something inside the ex-commissioner. Rigo, who’d been with the villagers, circled back and found the thinking machine still functioning after the Gringos moved on. Buckaroo’s final words were that he didn’t mind dying, since dying proved that unlike other thinking machines, he’d actually lived.

  Mai hadn’t known Buckaroo or Stone well, but she cried for them both just as she cried for Rigo’s father and the other twenty-two villagers. Clint didn’t cry, because a marshal couldn’t. Gunslingers had to harden their hearts, since there was always killing ahead.

  Edward had found Paloma with no problem and had healed her. He’d then stumbled back toward the town, trusting that she could find her way on her own… but after the battle, she still hadn’t returned. Pompi was beside himself. Rigo sat with the giant, stroking his hip, which was as high as the kid could reach. Pompi paced the village, causing the water in saloon glasses to ripple. He knotted his enormous hands. Rigo walked with him, to keep him company. Edward said they hadn’t let enough time pass and that she could yet return. He added that he’d told her to hang back and be certain the battle was finished before she stepped into town. But Rigo pointed out that El Feo and his few remaining Gringos (mayhap six or seven) had been seen running off in that same direction.

  “And the bandit escapes,” said Clint. He looked at Edward. “One of your tropes.”

  “Yar,” said the unicorn.

  “Like fate?” asked Mai.

  “Mayhap,” said Edward.

  “And Stone? Also fate?”

  “I don’t know from fate,” said Edward. “It’s a human concept. More of your mysticisms — your way of trying to make sense of things you don’t understand.”

  “But we have to follow the men who escaped,” said Clint.

  Edward was silent for a moment. “Yar.”

  “Because if he lives, he’ll regrow his army and return.”

  “Yar.”

  Clint let it go. All he
cared about was killing El Feo. It didn’t matter why. The bandit was doing the Darkness’s bidding or Kold’s, and so long as he lived, he’d keep on with that bidding. But also, his army had killt a man and a machine that Clint had come to think of as friends… although, of course, gunslingers had no friends.

  So they cleaned up the village and Edward restored their burnt supplies to new. As long as they could keep El Feo from coming back, the supplies would make the village richer than it ever had been — which wouldn’t be very rich at all, though it would feel that way after starving for so long.

  Clint dug two graves by hand, refusing Edward’s magic help. It took him the entire night, working by lantern light as the village slept, before he had them deep enough. At the next day’s dawn, they buried the outlaw who’d become an honorary marshal and the machine with a heart of gold to match his skin. Edward didn’t mock Clint — not about burying a machine, not about digging the graves himself, and not about his sentimentality. The unicorn would never admit it, but Clint knew that Edward felt the loss the same as the others, and grieved in his own way.

  By morning, Paloma still hadn’t returned.

  Edward and Clint were tired and didn’t need another errand of heroic mercy, but if Paloma was anywhere, she had to be with El Feo. Taking a village girl as they fled would be the ultimate revenge — until next year, when they’d return with a new gross of archetypes, take the entire harvest, and burn the village to dirt, thus rendering their party’s two deaths meaningless. Finding Paloma and El Feo was but a single errand, and Clint meant to handle it.

  And so, with their dead buried, Clint, Mai, and Edward packed up and prepared to ride out of Baracho. Pompi had become a permanent part of their troop and packed as well, but his real drive was to find Paloma. Rigo’s was the same. Clint argued that the boy needed to stay with his village instead of heading off on some fool’s errand with the wrong sorts of people, but Rigo said that if Pompi was after Paloma, then he was too. If revenge was to be dealt at El Feo’s table, Rigo wanted his seat as well.