The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “I’m looking forward to this one,” Missus Jorgensen answered. “Could be our greatest run since the Spider Women of Queso Grande.”

  “Hey,” Flora interrupted. “No—”

  Whatever she said got lost in the background noise as well. Doc shook his head at himself and straightened up, letting the gelding’s off fore drop. A little confusion and thwarted curiosity was no more than he deserved for such rudeness.

  He almost lost the rustle of something unexpected kicking through rust flakes and litter in the hollow clop of the gelding’s hoof.

  “Shhh,” he hissed—but you couldn’t shush a horse, and he was the second one to hiss for quiet, behind Missus Shutt, who was turned at the waist, wrist cocked and one bony hand on her iron like she could have it skinned as fast as any man.

  “What?” Bill asked from the outside of the group, real soft—but his voice still echoed and sloshed around the crumpled, cavernous room.

  “Company,” Doc said gently. He let the coach gun slide into his hand now; he’d seen a man die once because he waited to try to get to a rifle on his saddle until the shooting started and the horse was spooked.

  Flora ducked under the gelding’s belly and flattened herself against its saddle behind Doc. “What’d you hear?” she asked, more breath than sound.

  Doc let his lips shape the words. “Footstep.” He thought about the sound, something about the way it rustled rather than crunched. “Moccasins or barefoot. Not boots.”

  Flora frowned, but as if she was annoyed or disappointed, not as if she were scared. “Oh, I hope they didn’t go there. That’d make me sad.”

  The corners of Doc’s mouth curved up at her irritation in the face of danger. But there was an intriguing clue in her words, and—well, he’d proven his unhealthy curiosity already today. “Who were you hoping not to have come here?”

  Her eyes had been straining into the shadows beyond the shadowy bulk of the horses. She looked at Doc, now, startled. “I beg your pardon. Just a turn of phra—”

  Another rustle silenced her. Louder this time, closer. Doc let the coach gun rest beside his leg. He didn’t want to fire a scattergun over the horses that hemmed them on both sides, though he could use the big brown for cover and a shooting rest if he had to. Once. And then it would be hooves and half-ton panic everywhere, in a crowded chamber with uncertain footing.

  Better for everyone if they could get out of this without gunfire.

  Flora must have thought so too. “Bill,” she said, low and conversational this time so it would carry. “How’s that ward line coming?”

  “Faster now,” Bill answered, over a scraping sound. Doc caught a scent of burning orrisroot. A ward line wouldn’t stop a bullet—lead just didn’t answer to magic—but it would keep a person out.

  “Hey,” Miss Lil said, forgetting to whisper—and as Doc turned his head toward her, she suddenly pointed back over his shoulder.

  He whipped round, the coach gun to his eye, up on tiptoe to get line of sight over the back of the brown mare. Trying to remember not to hold his breath, because if he held his breath, he would start coughing. And if he started coughing, there was no guarantee that he would ever stop.

  Over the iron sights of the gun, Doc glimpsed something that nearly made him drop it.

  The figure half-silhouetted against the blue glow at the back of one of the above-ground-level tunnels could have been a naked child just on the verge of puberty—slender, fine-limbed, large-headed for the delicate lines of an elongated neck. Except he—or she, or possibly even it—hung upside down by its toes in the mouth of the tunnel like one of the slick mud-green tree frogs of Doc’s Georgia boyhood. The long fat-tipped fingers on its splayed hands did nothing to disabuse him of the comparison.

  The hands—

  Its hands were empty.

  Incrementally, Doc let the coach gun drift down, aware that beside him Flora was doing the same. The harsh breaths of his companions echoed to every side, layering over one another in an atonal fugue.

  Doc pointed the shotgun in a safe position and uncocked it. He lowered the butt to the ground, letting the barrel lean against his knee. He raised his hands again, fingers spread wide like the frog-thing’s, showing them to be empty.

  “Well,” he said. “I reckon you ain’t from around here.”

  The thing made no sound in return, but it leaned forward from the hips. Behind Doc, Missus Shutt stepped out from between horses, her iron reholstered too. Doc wanted to hiss at her to keep cover—the bony-limbed critter could be a decoy, a distraction. But as she walked forward, her boot toes nosing softly through the rust and trash on the floor, each step tested before she shifted her weight onto it—well, Doc found himself just purely unable to intervene.

  And all Missus Shutt’s companions just stood around and watched her risk her fool life like charades with moon men was some kind of a fashionable parlor game.

  “Hey there, friend,” said Missus Shutt. She spread her hands out a little wider, until Doc could see the light and shadows stretched between her fingertips. She paused when Doc could just see the faint greeny glow of Bill’s ward line shining against the scarred leather of her boots. “We didn’t know there were any survivors of the crash. We’re here to help.”

  The moon man didn’t even shift. But his—its—ribcage swelled visibly with what might have been a deep breath. Doc found that strangely reassuring: If it breathed, it was alive. And if it was alive, it was vulnerable to flying bits of metal and flying hexes both.

  Missus Shutt must have read some encouragement in its steady posture, because she let her hands drop gently against her thighs and said, “My name is Elisa Shutt. I’m a duly-appointed representative of James Garfield, the President of the United States of America, the political institution whose territory this is. And I am empowered to offer you assistance on behalf of my government.”

  Hah, thought Doc. I knew there was something more to this than treasure hunters.

  Behind him—not to him—Miss Lil whispered, “I thought this was a shooting adventure,” and Missus Jorgensen answered, “It isn’t over yet,” her tone prim as a Yankee schoolmarm’s.

  “Shh,” Flora hissed back, jerking her head at Doc.

  Miss Lil replied, “He can’t hear what’s out of—”

  That echoing incomprehensibility claimed the rest of the sentence. Maybe she’d turned her head.

  Maybe she was using some kind of hex to keep him from hearing what she didn’t think he’d ought.

  Flora ducked back against the horse. Doc could tell from the timbre of her voice as she leaned across the saddle that what she said to Lil, she meant to hiss low and sharp. But those echoes were deceptive, and his ears were pretty good.

  ““That’s John Henry Fucking Holliday over there,”” the quadroon whispered, as if his name were something to conjure with. She gave it more weight than Missus Shutt had given President Garfield’’s. ““He’ll kill you off, not just kill you out. So unless you never want to see 1881 again—”

  Doc snorted. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “I heard that.” He was a good shot, fast, and despite his cough he rode with the Tombstone posse when the law needed him. But he hadn’t ever killed even a single man—although to hear some people tell it, he might have shot down two or three hundred.

  Still, he kept hearing that ring in her tone: awe as if at something out of legend…even as he kept his eye on the motionless moon man tree frog which—who—breathed, and looked at them, and breathed again.

  She said his name like he was somebody.

  Doc’s confusion was interrupted by the glitter of the moon man’s wide, black, sclera-less eyes as its head turned slightly, tracking the sounds of the others. He didn’t reach for the coach gun. He could skin his pistol faster, if he had to. But he was really starting to think he might not have to shoot.

  “We come in peace,” Missus Shutt said.

  The moon man was still in near shadow, but a little light fell across
its face from the side, now that it had its head turned. Doc saw the long split of its lipless mouth part above—it was still upside down—the flat bump where a nose should have been. He saw the tongue glisten.

  “Water,” the thing said, in the piping voice of a child.

  “You need water?” asked Missus Shutt.

  It reached out a hand. “I give water,” it replied, in warbling tones.

  The Code of the West, Doc thought. Even a moon man understood it. He reached to lift his coach gun by the barrel, to slide it back into the saddle holster.

  The sound of a pistol shot, dizzy-loud in the echoing space as if somebody had boxed his ears, knocked him back against the gelding. The brown mare sidled, yanking her tie down, and hammered the coach gun from his hand. It went to the floor, under stomping hooves. To dive for it was to risk a crushed skull.

  Deafened, seeing black spots, head ducked, Doc hauled himself up the saddle leathers, his pistol in his right hand. A horse was screaming; so was the moon man. Or what Doc assumed was the moon man: It sounded like a reed instrument blown to piercing discord, and it went through Doc more sharply even than the report of the gun.

  The moon man wasn’t where it had been. Doc assumed it had sensibly dropped out of the tunnel and sought cover, just like everything that could.

  The mare and the gelding stamped and twisted, trying to bolt, caught on their snubbed-off reins. Between them was a bad place to be. Dodging past their hindquarters wasn’t any better. And there was Flora, clinging to the saddle beside him, a death grip on the pommel as she tried to stay by the gelding’s shoulder and not get smashed by hooves and rumps as the panicked mare swung around and bumped him behind.

  Somebody was returning fire. Missus Shutt and Miss Lil, it looked like—Missus Shutt against the wall, sighting down her arm in the direction of the tunnel the moon man had dangled in; Miss Lil standing tall, legs braced, and handling her pistol with both hands like a target shooter.

  Doc got an arm around Flora’s shoulder and pulled her hard against him, hard against the wall. Over the squealing of horses and the reverberations in his head, he couldn’t hear what she said, but he saw her lips moving. There was a little curved alcove in the bulkhead just beyond the gelding’s head; he watched Missus Jorgensen push Bill into it and come out gun blazing, laying a line of cover down the far corridor.

  Doc and Flora had to get out from between the horses if they were going to live. He yelled in her ear. As deafened as he was, she didn’t hear him. She tugged away, but she was slender and light. He had no trouble at all hooking her around the waist and pushing her before him as he went under the gelding’s head and into that selfsame alcove while the displeased horse fought his reins and tried to rear.

  “But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger!” Doc cried, as much to encourage himself as anything else. His own voice sounded as if it came through layers of cotton wool. Flora stared at him, and so did Bill.

  Of course they’d seen his mouth moving. And they couldn’t make out a blasted word.

  He gave Flora a push on the shoulder, urging her to stay still as he poked his head out quickly to assess. The horses were still sidling and stamping, but there was no more gunfire, and they had stopped rearing against the reins. Miss Lil, Missus Shutt, and Missus Jorgensen stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the chamber, each one eyeing a different tunnel mouth. Of the moon man, there was no sign.

  Doc yawned to pop his ears, hoping. He could fool himself that the ringing eased a little.

  “Shit!” Flora snarled, then covered her lips in horror when he looked at her mildly, feeling his eyebrows rise.

  “My momma would be scandalized,” Doc said, and kissed her quick, sideways across that unladylike mouth. Beside them, Bill rocked back against the wall, looking away quickly.

  Doc, he thought, setting Flora back into the alcove, did you just kiss a Negress? Well, that wasn’t like him at all.

  Of course she didn’t stay where he set her. When he stepped out, mincing, his pistol in his hand, she was there too, that shotgun she’d somehow hung on to at low ready. He scuffed his own over with his boot and crouched to scoop it up, hoping he wouldn’t have to fire it before he had a chance to check the barrel.

  When he started to stand again, Doc coughed hard, and kept coughing. When his lungs spasmed to a stop, before he could make himself look up, he wiped the froth of blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. He had seen it often enough to know it was crimson, a fresh, juicy red like poppy petals and cherry jam—but in the dim blue light of the derelict it was just a dark smear like any blood by moonlight. John Keats, physician and poet, had said upon coughing that red, “I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant.”

  John Henry Holliday, dentist and son of a consumptive, was no more likely to be misled. But he had already outlived poor Keats by half a decade, and the bullet that was supposed to shorten his suffering hadn’t yet arrived.

  No doubt delayed in the mail.

  A gentle hand brushed his shoulder. Warmth and ease followed the contact. Miss Lil. He pressed the bloody hand to his lips so he wouldn’t cough in her face and looked up.

  “I’m a healer,” she said. “Can I help?”

  He’d heard of such hexes. Never met one. Even the strongest couldn’t heal consumption, or potter’s rot, or cancer. But she could probably ease his pain. He imagined the clean pleasure of drawing a breath that would fill him all the way to the bottom instead of one that choked and suffocated like a lungful of stones.

  He couldn’t speak. He nodded.

  She laid one hand on his back between the shoulders and murmured some indistinct words. When she pulled away, he stood up straight and shivered.

  “Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said.

  She patted his shoulder. “Don’t mention it.”

  * * *

  They went looking for the moon man, and also for the man with the gun. Miss Lil found the scuffed place in the trash below the tunnel where the moon man had fallen. She followed it to a series of freshly broken flakes of rust across the wall that showed where he’d run, sticky as a lizard, along the vertical surface.

  “Well I’ll be,” Doc said, edging between two mares to get a better look at the wall. “And here’s a mark from a ricochet.”

  He pushed a fingertip against it, judging the angle, and glanced back over his shoulder to confirm. “The shooter was down that passage behind the moon man. I don’t know how he could have missed. He had a clear shot at the critter’s back.”

  “And the…moon man…he ran through us to lose the shooter.” Miss Lil hesitated over the term, but once she’d chewed on it for a minute she seemed to accept it. Missus Jorgensen, coming up on their right, paused at the edge of the conversation. Her hair was coming loose around her face in pale wisps. Her holster was still unbuttoned.

  Doc shrugged. “In his boots, wouldn’t you?”

  “He wasn’t wearing boots,” said Missus Jorgensen, provoking Miss Lil to giggle shockingly, for a woman with Flora’s shotgun balanced over one shoulder.

  “He wasn’t wearing much of anything,” Flora said, coming up along the other side of one of the mares.

  Doc bit down on his own laugh. He was breathing easier, sure, but he didn’t want to push his luck. “You think that was the only one?”

  “I think it wasn’t threatening,” said Missus Jorgensen. “I think it was trying to make friends.”

  Doc met her gaze and nodded. “Shooter was after a trophy, like as not,” he said. “You could get a good price from a side show for a dead moon man.”

  Missus Jorgensen recoiled, chin tucking as if she’d taken a blow. “But they’re…”

  “Obviously intelligent,” Flora finished for her. Hard creases pinched along the sides of her mouth. “That never stopped a lot of folks.”

  “No,” Doc said, thinking about the brief resilience of her mouth against his. He hadn’t kissed a wo
man since Kate had left. “It never did.”

  She jerked her gaze off his after a moment too long. “I say we follow the shooter back along that corridor. He’s the threat.”

  Miss Jorgensen said, “And he might be after the same thing we are.”

  A glance that Doc couldn’t read passed between her and Flora.

  Flora said, “Our objectives have changed. It’s a rescue mission now. Anything that could be learned from documentation—anything that could help us reproduce the technology—” She shook her head. “If we promise to do whatever we can to help get it home again, it might just be willing to help us understand its science.”

  “Indeed,” said Miss Lil. “The president will want to interview survivors.”

  Doc felt his jaw drop. “Call me a daisy,” he said, when he got a little bit of air back. “You aren’t from back East at all.”

  The three women looked at him, stricken. For a moment, Doc felt a creeping vulnerability between his shoulder blades. He fought the urge to check his back and make sure Bill and Missus Shutt weren’t flanking him.

  “I’m from Boston, actually,” Flora said.

  Doc shook his head, as their funny way of talking, the funny way Flora had said 1881 like it was ancient Rome, the funny way they reverenced him all came together in his head. “That ain’t what I mean. You’re not just from back East. You’re from sometime else. You’re from the future.”

  However they reacted, he missed it, because his chest tightened around the excitement with the pain of an incipient cough, and he doubled over with his hands on his knees. Slow breaths. Shallow. Easy. That was the way. His hands shook and his vision narrowed as he fished in his pocket for the stick of candy.

  You’d shoot a horse with a broken wind. Why couldn’t he get anybody to put a bullet into him?

  The horehound eased his throat. Nothing would ease the tightness in his chest except the solution that had already been so long in coming. Or the touch of Miss Lil’s hand, he realized, as she took his elbow and helped him stand upright.