by Chloe Garner
SARAH TODD
..................
Chloe Garner
A HORSE CALLED ALPHA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sarah Todd
The End
More Fiction by Chloe Garner
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission.
Copyright © 2017 Chloe Garner
Cover design by Desiree DeOrto
SARAH TODD
..................
BACK WHEN THE TRAINS RAN reg’lar, Lawrence was a bustling little town. Back when Lawrence was a bustling little town, the Lawsons ran things. Now there was just Sarah Todd, and she was up to her armpits in bandits.
“Pete,” she yelled, reloading her bolt-action rifle one shell at a time. “Pete.”
“I’m here,” the young man yelled back. Sarah ducked her head as a bullet winged off of the corner of the barn where she was covering. The water barrel would stop most anything, but the Goodsons would be needing that water if the bandits managed to set the loft on fire the way they intended.
“Pete,” she hollered again. “Why is that bastard still shooting at me?”
“Cause he won’t stick his head up where I can shoot it,” Pete yelled back. She shook her head, checking the rounds in her holstered handgun. It was reloaded and ready to go.
“Pete,” she yelled again.
“What?” he yelled back. More gunshots, and Sarah turned her head away from the flying bits of wood. Get one of them suckers in your eye and you were a dead man, like as not.
Bandits came in damned big groups and while you might take out a couple of them in the mayhem, if you couldn’t see them, one of them was gonna get you.
Just the way of things in Lawrence.
She waited, counting under her breath, trying to count out the number of spent shells from each of the men close by, by sound, then nodded to herself. She lay the barrel of the rifle across the top of the water barrel, giving her hat a quick jerk to keep the sun out of her eyes, and sighted the top of the bandit’s hat where she could see it behind the Goodsons’ buckboard.
He was facing away from her, reloading his six-shooter.
There was plenty of guns to pick from, out there, all kinds of em, if you knew the people to sell ‘em to you, but if you lived in Lawrence, a spit of not-quite civilization at the edge of nothing where they still burned stuff in the winter to keep warm, you looked for things that went ‘bang’ when you pulled the trigger, and you bought your ammo any time you got a chance, cause that chance might not come around again for a while.
Sarah bought lots of ammo.
The hat turned and she waited. She’d been doin this a lot of years, now, and it weren’t always possible to know when a guy was gonna turn around and pull a trigger at you, but if you knew it was comin’, you had a distinct edge on that guy, ‘specially if he couldn’t see you.
The hat bobbed up. She pulled the trigger. Never even saw his face. Her round clipped the top of the buckboard, going through neat enough and into the brain of the bastard bandit.
She ducked back down behind the barrel, working the bolt on the rifle and waiting to see who popped up next.
It wasn’t all their fault, really, the bandits.
Lawrence had been a bustling town, eight years ago, popular with men and womenfolk alike. There’d been a dressmaker and everything. They’d had money, and people with money always had it good, even when they didn’t have it as good as the people the next town over. You couldn’t see the people, next town over, so all you had to look at was the people with money.
The Todds had never had money. The Lawsons had, but not like the prospectors.
The prospectors had something better than money. They had title-rights to dig absenta out of the great big rocks that called themselves mountains, west of Lawrence.
Absenta was worth as much money as a guy would give you for it, and most days, most guys would give you a lot of money for it.
A lot.
And then, round eight years ago, it run out. The great big rocks stopped being a fountain of youth for Lawrence and started just being the things that cast shadows across town round about six every day, and things dried up.
The men that made good, they packed it up, went looking for the next big score. The Lawsons left, too, to bigger, better cities and bigger, better things. Sarah stayed on to look after her pa, and the bandits stayed on because lazy men looking for the next easy score don’t tend to move on quite as fast as the men who actually make the next big score.
They’d trickled in in their ones and twos, over the thirty-five years that Lawrence had boomed, men who didn’t shave, who drank too much, who spent their meager take on ladies who didn’t justify the name, and then when the last rail car that showed up to Lawrence on schedule cleared out, all that was left was a few families with roots going down so deep they couldn’t bear to rip ‘em up, the new-minted bandits, and Sarah.
And Pete.
Pete was a good guy. There was a few of ‘em around, young men from good families who stuck by their mas and their pas, but Pete was her good guy, in the way you had to have a good rifle, a good herding dog, and a good horse to make it in Lawrence.
The bandits were still on the hunt for easy scores, and families like the Goodsons were some of the only targets going, so Sarah found herself out here more often than she’d like, pouring lead down on this group or that, knocking ‘em back, proving that she was still Sarah Todd, and it still didn’t pay to cross her.
“Pete,” she yelled. “Why is he still shooting at me?”
“He ain’t stuck his head up yet,” Pete answered.
She leaned out carefully, bracing herself against the water barrel and taking slow aim at the man who was covering the yard from up in the hills.
Damned fine shot, that one. Shame to destroy a talent like that.
She adjusted for elevation change, wind, and distance and pulled the trigger, leaning back in against the barn. There was the sound of horse hooves making a go at the barn, and she pulled the line of snap-cracks out of her pocket, throwing them over the barrel and shaking her head.
Horses are stupid animals.
Humans had carried the embryonic forms of horses across the galaxy in search of a planet where men and their servant animals could survive, and they’d bred them back carefully from the edge of extinction into the same dumb animals they’d always been.
Light off a string of gunpowder charges, and they panicked.
Always would.
She stood quickly and put two bullets into the man as he hit the ground, thrown by his animal, putting her handgun back into its holster as she dropped quickly back into her squat. There was an eruption of bullets, but they were slow.
The man on the ridge hadn’t shot again.
“I got him,” she yelled.
“No, you ain’t,” Pete answered. “He’s still shooting at you.”
“Not that one,” she yelled, rolling her eyes and adjusting her hat again.
“Oh,” Pete yelled back. She grinned.
Stood.
Bolt action was slow, but the power suited her fine for the long shots on snipers up a ways off. She had better rifles for dealin’ with varmints, but when it came to puttin’ men in the ground, this was her go-to weapon.
Pete had them pinned.
It was just the cover fire that had held her from doing what she did so well.
One by one, she worked her way through the men laying siege to the Goodson’s barn, coming to the last one as he lay under the buckboard.
She ducked, holding her hat on her head as she looked at him.
> “You ready to come out?” she asked. “Steady now.”
The man, dumb as the animals, took a full count to make up his mind, then threw his guns out.
“You ran out of shot ten minutes ago,” she said, picking a stray piece of straw out of the buckboard hinges and chewing it.
The bandit scrambled through the dust, coming up dirty and disheveled, only just holding his hat in place.
“You tell Bruiser I’m gettin’ tired of this. Next time, I bring it to you,” she said. She picked up the buggy whip and tagged the man with it. “Now git.”
He leaped, backing away. She whipped him again, and he turned and fled.
Pete came clambering down from the loft.
“Spose they give up?” he asked.
He was a good guy, but not the brightest. He was too good-natured to see that bad men would tend to do bad things until you put ‘em in the ground.
The problem was, there was too many of them and too few of Sarah.
One of these days, the odds were gonna catch up with her and she was gonna take a bullet where Doc couldn’t pull it back out in time. The thing that bothered her the most was that the man with the bullet in his gun that would end her life was probably dumber than wet socks.
“Go home,” she said to Pete. “Your ma will have dinner on the table before you get there.”
He leaned against the buckboard, looking up at the barn. The animals inside were beginning to settle back down again.
“You was lookin’ for a new horse, weren’t you?” he asked. He regarded the skittish animal still staring with flared nostrils at the string of fireworks.
“You ain’t serious,” Sarah said. She’d had to put a bullet to Sasquatch a few weeks back when the horse had failed to recover from the routine cuts and scrapes to his legs that came from living on the frontier. Dumb animals. Infection the size of her thumb had ended him.
“Jus sayin’,” Pete said, shrugging and swinging a leg ‘round to go get his own mount from behind the Goodson house. Sarah grimaced at the cagey animal by the barn, then shook her head. Wouldn’t do no good to just leave it there. She grabbed hold of its trailing reins and jerked him along after her.
“Let’s go,” she said to the animal. “You throw me over a bunch of snap-cracks, I swear to anyone up there listening that I will put a bullet to you.”
The animal grunted, casting a final look back at the black corpse of the poppers laying on the ground, then trotted after her. She shook her head. Stupid animal.
Nothing to be done about it. You needed a good horse in Lawrence. She went to get the borrowed animal she’d rode in on and mounted up on the new horse, making a few more threats as she booted him back toward town.
Always more to be doing, when you were Sarah Todd.
––—
She rode up to the house, leaving the horse to free range in the front yard. If he was there in the morning, she’d feed him. If he weren’t, no loss. She wasn’t attached to him any more than she was attached to anything in this world, or any other.
She unlocked the front door using an electronic key. Elaine Lawson had paid to have it installed when Sarah had been born. It was one of the only ones in the town, the only better lock system Sarah knew of being at the Lawson house, itself.
It was Sarah’s pa’s house, not her childhood home, not her ma’s home, nothing like that. It was just a house that she happened to own, since her pa died and didn’t have no one else to give it to. She sat down at the kitchen table to take her boots off, then went and hung her heavy duster in the front hall next to her hat.
There’d been a time she’d wore dresses. She still had a closet full of ‘em, but dresses was inconvenient for gun fights. She whistled for Dog, who came running from his kennel at the back of the house. He wasn’t allowed out of it except when she told him so. He smelled her hands, finding the slip of jerky in her pocket. She gave it to him, then went and put on the kettle.
Dumber than lone rocks, all of them. The animals, the bandits, the people who stayed when the rest of the town left. Sarah Todd, herself. She could have gone.
Jimmy Lawson had come, himself, to ask her to.
Her pa had been sick, on his deathbed, it turned out, and she’d said she had to stay. The Lawsons, all six boys, had left on the last train that day, and the next day the elder Parson brother had come looking for help with men raiding the farm.
With the Lawsons gone, Sarah was all there was left, and she’d left her pa and put eight men in the ground. The younger Parson brother had died that day.
Good guy.
Less dumb than some.
Buster Parson still ran his ranch out on the edge of everything, still called Sarah every couple of weeks looking for a hot gun.
The kettle whistled and she poured a cup of hot water over a bag of tea, home grown on the Lawrence frontier, then took her cup and went to check her cupboards.
She kept little at the house in plain sight. The spare room was stocked to survive a siege lasting weeks, but the pantry and the cupboards were full of ammunition and medical supplies.
The money was in the floor under the office. She’d never known why her pa wanted to have an office - he was always too drunk to hold a pen - but it was there, anyway, facing the front of the house behind thick wooden shutters.
She took stock of her supplies, noting that she was low on ammunition for certain of her favorite guns and that she was going to have to send Pete on a run for Perpeto soon. She grimaced at this.
Perpeto was one of the reasons the town paid for her ongoing protection. It was a drug developed before the colonization, one that suspended the aging process at a cellular level. It didn’t make you immortal or invincible, but it did damn near the same thing. Sarah was in her mid thirties, but she looked the self-same as she had at twenty-three, save the odd scar. She could have babies into her nineties, so long as she kept away from the hard stuff, meantime. You poison yourself, Perpeto weren’t going to fix it. Her Pa had died of alcohol, same as a lot of Lawrence, cause when there weren’t anything better to do, you drunk yourself dead.
Didn’t mean people didn’t want Perpeto. Kept you young, kept you fit, kept you working, if you was one of the good guys. Kept you drinking without falling down, if you wasn’t. What little money the town made on this and that went to buying Perpeto and paying Sarah to get it. Which she did by sending Pete on horseback up-line to Jeremiah where there was a chemist who mixed a supply for the good people of Lawrence.
The bandits wanted cows. They wanted pigs. They wanted gremlin, the grain that grew outside of Lawrence if you knew what you was doing. More than anything, though, they wanted Perpeto. Folks guarded their supplies pretty close, leaving most of the town’s stash with Sarah until they needed it. Once every few weeks, each homestead would send a son or daughter to the Todd house to pick up their supply, secretive like, hoping to get home before anyone caught them.
And Sarah took their money. They needed the stuff, sure enough. She understood that, and she didn’t hold it against them. Hell, she took it, herself. Didn’t make it any less burdensome to get it. Pete risked his life every time he went. Lotta territory controlled by no one of any good to ‘em, ‘tween here and Jeremiah.
But Pete went. She hardly even had to ask. He thought it his duty to the town, like he owed the place something.
Good guy.
Dumber than a three-story graveyard.
The medical goods were easier to get, if you liked waiting. She put together a list and left it at the train station. The train came, nothin’ like it used to be, but a couple of cars with supplies and the like, when it felt like it. The engineer had a key to the office, when the door weren’t kicked in, and she left the list and money enough to pay him for his time and buy the goods, and sometime when he got ‘round to it, they’d come back.
You ordered in advance, and you ordered a lot. Never knew when the next chance would come to stock up.
Everyone knew she didn’t put Perpeto in
the train station office. Just bullets and patch-up stuff for bullet holes. Granger, the general-goods man, had a second key to the office, and a similar arrangement with the trainman, and he kept the town in everything else their meager fortunes could afford.
Granger and his stuff was off limits. Everyone knew that.
Bust up the train office, steal Sarah’s stuff, you’d get hunted and she’d get her stuff back, but nothing like the rain of hell if you messed with Granger, at the office, on his way back to the store, or at the store itself. Granger’s shop had glass windows that hadn’t been busted since the Killian boys had gotten too drunk one night and thrown stones through them.
The Killians were good folk, so Sarah had only tied the boys to posts in front of Granger’s store and horsewhipped them, then sent them home for more of the same.
Sarah knew it, and so did everyone else. Even the dumbest of the bandits knew it. Granger gave up, Lawrence would give up. It was already a shadow town. Granger’s shop was all that was keepin’ it from being a ghost town.
She added the things to the list that needed being there, then went out and got back up on the forlorn horse wandering the front yard. She rode him out to the station, rolling a paper full of gremlin and setting light to it as she got close.
The sun was setting. Lawrence wasn’t the kind of place you wandered, after dark, not since the Lawsons had left it, but Sarah Todd wasn’t the kind of woman who paid much attention to that kind of worry. She tacked her list to the inside of the railway door, then went and sat on the metal rocking chair that somehow never got pinched in the other raids on the station house. Too big to sit on the back of a horse, too dumb to put in the back of a buckboard.
She rocked, smoking her gremlin and looking down the tracks.
Lawrence was the end of the line. Always had been. The big dumb rocks off to the west kept the railway people from plowing on further, and the distance from the ocean kept the people from doing the same. Wherever people went, the coasts were always the first properties snatched up. It only made sense.
