Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier

by Emily Lavin Leverett

  As Sally and I debated the best way to wrap the rainmaker in the rain-soaked sheet and get him on his horse in any shape to ride, I heard a change from the crowd below us. Silence. The celebration stilled, and the people separated to make way for a horse and cart as it rolled up the rise.

  I had misjudged the boy. Peter sat in front with Jason Bloom, the saloon owner. Jason hopped down and handed the reins to Peter. He stared at the rainmaker and whistled. “Holy smokes! Pardon me, Preacher. Peter was right, he’s not riding anywhere like that. Let’s take him back to the saloon, and—”

  I shook my head, and he raised his eyebrows in inquiry. “He’s got to leave town, or the rain won’t stop. That’s the flip side of the blessing God gave him.”

  Jason whistled again and turned back to the rainmaker. “You sure it’s a blessing, Preacher? Sounds more like a curse.”

  I shrugged in resignation. My faith, so firm before the rain, failed me now.

  Jason returned to the business at hand with his usual efficiency. “Okay, let’s load him up. Sally, can you come with me to take him across to Murdoch? Preacher, you reckon that’s far enough?”

  I peered through the rains to the distant hills. Even if they were receiving God’s gift, surely He would not begrudge the rainmaker rest there? I nodded and helped Jason pick him up and get him settled in the cart. Sally climbed in back and rested his head on her lap.

  Peter wanted to go, but Jason told him to help his momma and the cook in the saloon, and he’d pay him a whole dollar when he got back. I put my arm around his shoulder, and we watched them leave for as long as we could see them in the rain.

  Eight months later, the desert bloomed. I hadn’t seen it so green in years. Tall grasses waved in a soft carpet, mixed with lavender thistle and brilliant yellow flowers. The long drought was over. The town was thriving once again. I had a full house for Sunday worship, and I was trying to believe my own sermon of praise and thanks when we all jumped at a clap of thunder.

  Lightning speared through the air, and Sally gasped. Her eyes widened, and her hands jumped to cover her round belly in a protective embrace. Peter sat between her and his momma, and he reached around to give her a hug and lean his head against her stomach. She lifted a hand to stroke his hair.

  She smiled up at me, but her eyes held a sadness I understood all too well. I continued the service by rote, thinking her child would grow up with lots of people to love and help him. Even if he never found his father, he wouldn’t have to face this life alone. But he would have to leave, and keep moving, when it came his turn to bring the rain.

  I raised my hands high to finish the service, and they all stood. My own voice sounded hollow to my ears, but everyone raised their hands and voices to fill the church in giving thanks. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

  19

  Out of Luck

  Jeffrey Hall

  "Lucky Liza Reynolds. The Red Revolver of Rio Anne. Hero of the Spindlelands," called Groden as he and his men walked down the main, long-abandoned street of Diago, their weapons drawn. Behind them, the mast of their sail-stage, the wind-powered vehicle that had brought the outlaws there, flapped angrily in the dry air. "They'll soon be calling you the Fool of Fiasco when they see me parading you through those dusty roads by your guts."

  Liza peeked through the window cut into the squishy green walls of a deserted hut-cactus, the giant vegetation the denizens of Diago had made their homes in years past before the savages slaughtered them down to the last man. She could still see the bones of the place's former citizens hanging from the pole-sized barbs that covered the plants' exteriors. A scenery that only added to her current situation.

  She breathed heavily. Blood ran down her arm from where a bullet had nicked her shoulder. Lying beside her, and in much worse condition than she, was her one-eyed, chestnut mare, Wink. Three bullets were lodged in the horse's hindquarters. A deep gash had opened up on her ankle, maybe from a bullet, maybe from the madness of their escape from Groden's hideout. Liza ran a hand through the horse's mane, trying to keep her quiet, whispering with her touch that she would be all right. We'll find a way out of this like we always do, girl, thought Liza.

  Though she wasn't sure she believed it herself.

  Bam! A bullet hole erupted a foot above her head, splattering the wet sinew of the cactus over her legs and Wink's head. The horse startled, but Liza kept her quiet by gripping her snout. It was a shot meant to scare them out of hiding. Nothing more. Or at least so she hoped.

  "Just how lucky are you?" said Groden. His gruff voice echoed strangely into the domed roof of the hut-cactus. "Lucky enough to escape six of my best guns? Lucky enough to escape all them savages chasing our tails?"

  Liza leaned her head against the wall and whispered to herself. "Not nearly as lucky as you think." She opened the cylinder to her pistol. The dust-dirtied light coming in from the window caused the red metal of the demon's gold gun to gleam like blood. She counted three bullets before dropping her hand to her ammo pouch and finding it empty.

  Lucky indeed.

  There's no such thing as luck, her mother had always told her as people began to forget her as simply Liza Reynolds of Old Canyon and started adding the pseudonym to the front of her name to account for good fortune that seemed to follow her entire life as a free-gun. It wasn't luck. Only the good things that happen to people with good hearts, her mother had said.

  But despite the accolades and medals received from sheriffs and governors, she didn't have a good heart. She had stolen. She had cheated. She had left lovers still naked in beds as she crept out into the night. She had killed people; hell, a dozen of Groden's men lay frozen in the dust back there because of her red revolver. She hadn't survived as long as she had because of a good heart. It was luck, plain and simple.

  A luck that seemed to be running out.

  She peered out the window once more to see Groden sending his men into cover, a subtle expression of fear on the man's bearded face. For a brief moment, she wondered why the sudden nerves, but then she heard it. A thunder of hoof beats and a squall of yips and growls approaching from the west.

  Savages.

  "You hear that? They caught up quick, didn't they? Don't matter. Savages ain't gonna send us running. We ain't leaving until I get back what's mine." Groden swept his silver rifle across the street. "Who you think they're going to dehoove first? A man who rolled into this place by wheel and wind, or a woman who's saddled up one of their gods?"

  She crawled to the other side of the hut-cactus and looked out the window in the direction of the open plain. Emerging from a cloud of dust, like a collection of wraiths released from the fogs of hell, were a dozen centaurs of the Rainbow Back Tribe. The brown of their furs looked like something gleaned from the Spindlelands itself. The man portion of their bodies were draped in the blood-stained furs of plain beasts, those of jackalopes and were-bison and puma-men. The long black hair running down their backs had been crusted with the rainbow clays taken from faraway riverbeds that ran through the higher points of the Spindlelands. And the rest of them, the horse part, was painted for war. Snow-white etchings covered them. Depictions of arrows and axes, the cleaved feet of all the men they had killed, and the outlines of their gods. The free horses of the plain. The ones they had killed those men for. But the worst decorations of all, the ones that Liza in all of her wanderings and misdeeds had never stopped being unnerved by, were the dead men they had tied upon their backs. Headless, feetless, saddled bareback upon the centaurs' backs like incomplete riders to make some hellish statement were the rest of Groden's men. A dozen of them that had fallen either to Liza's gun or by the savages' arrows during her mad escape from the outlaw's hideout.

  "You hear? Give me back my chain and we can all be on our merry way," cried Groden.

  "It ain't yours," she dared to yell back, knowing he wouldn't find her before the centaurs arrived. "It belongs to Commander Bethel and you know it."

  Another bullet blasted
through the cactus wall, breaking the wall inches away from her left ear. Wink whinnied, but Liza was at her side again, comforting her before the wounded animal could try to rise in flight.

  "That chain is mine," said Groden, as Liza watched him backpedal into a taller hut-cactus. "Everything in this cursed land is mine. Including your ass when I wrench that chain from your cold hands. I'll mount it next to the head of that blind bitch horse of yours, I promise you."

  "Come and get it then," she shouted just before the cacophonic arrival of the centaurs drowned out her voice. She thumbed the chain tucked inside her shirt pocket. It was heavy. A thing made solely from the metal of Mount Murder. It was rumored to imbue its wearer with the gift of a long life. It might have been the most valuable thing she had ever carried besides her gun. But if she could somehow find her way out of this mess, she wouldn't sell it. No. It was Commander Bethel's, head of Fort Fiasco, and he wanted it returned to him in exchange for sparing Liza's mother's head. Liza owed too much to the old bag of bones to let her hang for missed taxes.

  Now it seemed there was only one way she was getting it back to the commander's hand: kill Groden.

  Put a bullet in his soul and the rest of his men would scatter like flies on scat. The savages she could hide from long enough so they'd eventually mosey along to other game, but the men wouldn't stop tailing her until there was no one left to tell them not to.

  Liza thumbed the hammer of her revolver, the metal making its odd whisper she had become so accustomed to as it clicked into place. She patted Wink on her neck, trying not to look at the pool of blood welling beneath the horse. "Stay here, alright? I'll be back for you faster than you can lick up a gnat. You done good, girl. This ain't the end of our adventures."

  Wink's ears flattened, as if to disagree. It took all of Liza's might to leave her there in such a state. Wink was her first and only horse. She was the one that had carried her through the countless miles of this land, the one she had talked to in her lonely life as a free-gun. But when Liza stepped cautiously out of the hut-cactus, she refused to look back. She was doing this for them both. Worry wouldn't stop Groden. Only a steady hand and a stout heart.

  She peered to either side of the cactus as she stepped out into Diago. To the west lay a knot of tangle-tack, prickly vines growing like a wall to outline the deserted town's border. To the east, a row of small hut-cacti lay on the other side of the main street. West meant a few cuts in her caboose, east meant exposing herself to a hole in her head.

  She chose west.

  She crept toward the tangle-tak, ducking beneath the hut-cactus's barbs. The sound of the centaurs seemed to accompany her movements like a terrible song as they darted in and out the abandoned structures in search of the men foolish enough to encroach on their territory. The vine wall provided a narrow avenue between the houses, bringing her farther north to where she had seen Groden run off. She kept close to the vines, catching herself on more than one pricker as she snuck between the gaps of the huts. She could see the shadows of the centaurs reaching down the alleyways like hungry, black claws as she passed. Her heart thrummed inside her chest waiting for the descent of their arrows as she ran, but she passed each alleyway without incident.

  She came to a spire-like hut-cactus about four dwellings down from where she had left Wink. It grew so close to the tangle-tak that she had to use its barbs to climb over the thorny knot or risk cutting an artery. It was during her climb that she peeked through the hut's window and saw one of Groden's men huddled beneath a cobweb-ridden table, facing the doorway, a pistol in each hand. Liza aimed her gun, sliding it through the broken glass of the window, but retracted it. Though her strange gun needed no special ammunition to do what it did, bullets were precious when they were scarce. Why give one to a man whose life was not worth its value, especially when he was doing nothing to ask for it?

  She circumvented the knot of the tangle-tak, and just as she put her feet to the ground, gunfire erupted from the hut-cactus. Gunfire and the call of the savages. She dared to look once more into the window.

  Groden's man had flipped down the table in front of him and fallen on his back. There, he leveled his weapons, firing them into the massive chest of a centaur as its hooves bore down upon him and the toppled furniture. Four wounds blossomed upon the savage's torso, yet they were not enough to stop it from swiping away the man's guns and picking him up by the scruff of his shirt. He dragged Groden's man out into the dirt, screaming and kicking like a captured rodent.

  Liza looked away. She didn't need to see the horrors happen to be more afraid than she already was. The screams were enough. She moved on, a new chord of agony added to the song played by the centaurs, her hand still steady on her red revolver's trigger.

  She hurried to the next alleyway, her attention still partially upon the disturbing noises now at her back. She crouched and peeked around the corner and saw a striped vest coming straight for her.

  The two collided. The man's buckle connected with her nose in a crunch, sending her sprawling. The impact itself luckily caused the man to tumble forward into the tangle-tak. Groden's man pried himself away from the vine, biting his lip to keep himself from screaming, and Liza, dazed and bleeding, could see why. One of the vine's prickers had gone straight through the man's shooting hand, causing him to drop his weapon altogether. Making him defenseless, unable to retaliate against Liza in her compromising position.

  He peeled himself away from the wall and dove for his weapon. Liza raised her gun and pulled the trigger.

  The hammer fell, the muzzle flashed, and a cackle of laughter echoed out from the gun's mouth. A hole sizzled in the man's sleeve, the arm he had used to reach for his weapon, but no blood spurted from it. Only a waft of red smoke. Not a killing shot, unfortunately, nor could she afford to give him one. So she watched as the bullet from the demon's gold gun bled away his soul.

  The man's hard, scarred face turned from an expression of shock into confusion. Then began the subtle shake of his eyebrows, the watering of his eyes, the twitch in his cheeks. Soon his pupils widened to the size of nickels and he was wobbling to his feet.

  "No, no, no," said the man, the red smoke still rising from his arm. "I can see it!" he shouted.

  See what? The coming darkness? The reel of his life cascading beneath their fading conscious like a waterfall? Hell? Liza never knew what those nonfatal victims of her weapon saw. The dust mystic she had won it from on a lucky hand in a game of flatdeck never told her anything. The only thing he ever said to her was that the gun had been forged from prospecting in the mythical Stream of Tears that ran through the deep desert of the Skull Orchard. After seeing so many faces like the man's before hers now, she was certain she did not want to know.

  He put his hands to his face, clawing at his eyes, screaming louder, "I CAN SEE IT!" as he stumbled past her and into the alleyway where a centaur rounded the corner to meet him. The great savage raised its cleaver with two hands and brought it down into the nape of the man's neck. The man escaped the terrible vision Liza's gun had given him in tendrils of blood.

  She rolled forward, behind the next cactus-hut, unsure if the centaur glimpsed her amidst his victory. Her head swam. She could feel blood trickling from her nose. She tried to quiet her own mind and listen.

  Yip! Yip! Yon Yen! she heard the savage celebrate and then the slink of its weapon as it left flesh. Keep going, you sunnova bitch, she pleaded, and with any luck, it would. But then she heard the soft patter of its hooves as it crept down the alleyway toward the tangle-tak. She cursed to herself and hurried down between the back of the houses and the side of the thorny wall. She ducked into the next alleyway just as she looked back to a hoof rounding the corner from where she had just left. She was exposed to the main street there, but at the moment, nothing occupied it. She cocked the hammer of her gun once more, and it whispered, a sound only slightly louder than the heaving of her breath, a sound much quieter than the fall of the still-coming savage.

  "Pssst,"
whispered a voice in her ear. She nearly pulled the trigger then and there as she swung her gun up. She half expected to see Groden peering out a window, his rifle pointed into her skull, that toothless grin of his plastered on his face as he spent the last of her luck with a bullet. Instead she saw a tumbleweed stuck on the edge of one of the hut-cacti's barbs. "Help me out here," said the wandering plant, its twiggy body quivering as if to emphasize its predicament.

  "Damn it," she whispered back. "I nearly blew you to bramble."

  "I wouldn't mind so long as it got me off this pricker. Free me."

  "I'm busy here," she snapped. She dared to peek around the corner of the house. The centaur crept up the path, its weapon raised, looking into the tangle-tak as if ready to bisect anything that crawled out of it.

  "What is it? One of them savages I hear yipping about?" said the tumbleweed. "Free me and I can help you with your problem."

  "What are you gonna do, give it a rash?" said Liza. Tumbleweeds were strange creatures. Slaves to the wind and the land. Things that traveled in packs in search of enlightenment as they journeyed lazily across the world. They'd no business in a shootout, much less squaring up against a savage.

  "Please," said the tumbleweed. "My posse has already moseyed along days ago now. I'll shrivel out here by my lonesome if you let me be."

  Liza, fed up with its clamber, and perhaps feeling a little sorry for the thing even with the centaur stomping closer by the second, pulled it free. It rolled over the ground with joy. "Thank the stars," it said, and then it rolled to Liza's side. "You're lucky you found me."

  "I'm lucky?" she snapped.

  Without a response, the tumbleweed rolled out of the alleyway and toward the savage. The massive centaur froze, its hairy face widening with fear at the sight of the plant rolling toward it. It backed away, turning, despite the gouge of the tangle-tak against its horse parts, and galloped away.