Hell's Highwaymen

by Phillip Granath

  Jamie tried to hold that image in the forefront of his mind. Over time Jamie had found summoning the places from his life or places where he had already been grew easier with practice. But this was the first time he had ever tried to find a specific person. Fortunately for the gunfighter, he had a will of iron and having freshly drained Jerry’s body felt full of life. He closed his eyes and let the horse’s reins fall from his grasp. Sweat began to bead upon his brow as the minutes drug on and on. Jamie began to almost sense the energy flowing from his body as he tried to will Cesar and his unknown city into being.

  Suddenly a wave of dizziness swept over him, and he nearly pitched from the saddle. Jamie opened his eyes and tried to blink the stinging sweat out of them. Then he saw it, there on the horizon, a dark cluster of buildings stood and even from here Jamie could see a dozen fires belching smoke into the sky. Even from here the place seemed intimidating to Jamie, he doubted he had ever seen that many buildings in his entire life, let alone all gathered in one place.

  “So that’s a city,” he said aloud.

  The gunfighter scooped up the reins and kicked his horse into a run. It felt good to be moving again even if it was towards this strange and monstrous looking city. How would he find Cesar in such a place he wondered? As he approached the outskirts of the city the dirt of the plain shifted into hard dark asphalt. He had seen a myriad of buildings and towns since he had arrived in Hell, but this was the first that looked like it truly belonged. Fires burned out of control, smoke filled the streets and as Jamie sat trying to make sense of the destruction a series of screams echoed from the city’s center.

  Jamie just shook his head and said, “Too late to turn back now.”

  The gunslinger urged his horse forward and into the maze of the ruined city. Within moments the buildings towered over him, surrounding him on all sides. Jaime immediately felt trapped in the narrow space, the dark streets reminding him of his own nightmarish canyons. Nervously he glanced behind him and found the street was now a dead-end, the plains out of which he had ridden was long gone. Cursing silently Jamie gritted his teeth and pushed further into the ruined city.

  The deeper Jamie rode in, the worse the place seemed. Nearly every building had been touched by fire in some way. Some buildings still burned, others had been reduced to smoldering ashes. Smoke hung in the air seemingly everywhere and Jamie squinted his eyes against the haze. The streets themselves were filthy and looked as if the buildings had belched their contents into the streets in desperation before they started to burn.

  A scream echoed out of an alley at the gunslinger’s right and his pistol was in his hand before the sound even had a chance to echo. The scream had barely died away when the sound of running footsteps followed after it. A moment later a man emerged from an alleyway at a full sprint. His shirt was torn, and his face was splattered with blood. As he ran, he glanced behind him his eyes wild with fear. The fleeing man saw Jamie just then and paused just long enough to shout.

  “Run, they’re after me! Run!”

  The terrified man crossed the street and darted down another alleyway never slowing his pace. A few heartbeats later a crowd surged around the corner in dogged pursuit. But the posse was unlike anything Jamie had ever seen. The two dozen or so figures were roughly shaped and moved like men. They carried an odd assortment of sticks, clubs and hurled rocks and glass bottles as they ran. But instead of flesh and blood, the rioting crowd was made entirely of dark and swirling smoke. Nearly as unsettling as the posse’s appearance, was the way they moved in complete and utter silence.

  “The fuck?” Jamie demanded.

  The gunfighter leveled his pistol on the crowd ready to open fire. But the group crossed the street in front of him at a full run without bothering to even glance in the gunfighter’s direction. The barrel of his pistol followed them as they entered the opposite alleyway to chase after the fleeing man in what Jamie guessed was a perpetual pursuit.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Fucking smoke people.”

  Jamie lowered his pistol but decided from here on out it may be more prudent to keep the gun in hand. The gunfighter kicked his horse back into motion eager to put as much distance between himself and the strange group as he could. In his experience, a posse was something you were better off avoiding. Up ahead the street seemed to widen, and Jamie pushed onward eager to be out of the narrow confining streets.

  The street was crossed by another of what Jamie would have called a crossroad, but as Father Callahan had once told him, was called an “innersextion” when it happened in the middle of a city. At the corner of these crossroads stood what looked like a store, it’s walls were mostly glass and covered in bright advertising signs. Several of the shop’s windows were broken, and black smoke trailed into the air. At first, Jamie didn’t give the store much of a thought, just another burning building in the middle of a burning city. But as he neared the store movement on the roof caught his eye.

  An Asian man wearing a white apron stepped out of the swirling smoke on the shop’s roof. The man turned to look directly at Jamie and even across that distance the gunfighter could see that half of the shopkeeper's face and chest were burned and blistered. In his hands, the man gripped a rifle. It was a fast shooter, a repeater of black metal with a wooden stock. Jamie and the riders had run across a few like these over their years in Hell. And while Jamie had never come across a man that could shoot one straight, even he had to respect the rifle’s ability to deal out death swiftly.

  Jamie pulled up his horse short seeing no need to get any closer and provoke the little man. Then just as he was contemplating his next move, the smoke seemed to shift and change as if driven by some strange wind. Jamie could see the movement immediately agitated the shopkeeper as the man raised the repeater to his shoulder ready to fire. The smoke shifted and quickly reformed into a narrow wall in front of the little store. No sooner had the wall settled when individual shapes began to step out of the smoke, now in roughly human form. Just as Jamie had seen in the alleyway, an angry crowd of smoke formed apparitions now surrounded the storefront.

  While Jamie was momentarily surprised by their appearance, it seemed the shopkeeper was not. The Asian man screamed and opened fire on the gathering crowd. Immediately several of the smoke forms broke apart and evaporated. Other members of the crowd, undeterred by the shots, surged ahead to the right and the left. The shopkeeper screamed something unintelligible and turning fired wildly. Another smoke monster dissipated and several more were forced to leap back, but even as they did so others pushed forward elsewhere. Jamie could see how this was going to end. They were just too many, and the shopkeeper wouldn’t be able to keep them all back.

  “Fuck it, let’s have some fun!” Jamie announced and kicked his horse into motion.

  As the shopkeeper continued to fire into the crowd of attackers, Jamie raced towards their exposed back. He let the reins drop and pulled his second Schofield. With a loud cry, he raised both of his pistols and began to fire into the mass of smoky bodies. The effect was immediate and devastating. Faced with a shooter behind them the forms seemed confused and panicked. They surged forward at the sound of Jamie’s shots and directly into the shopkeeper’s automatic fire. Others turned to try and flee, but Jamie picked these off easily enough, the gunfighter now slowing his shots trying to conserve his ammunition. Once hit, the apparitions immediately broke apart, vanishing into smoke even before they could fall.

  Using his knees, Jamie turned the horse to his left and thundered down the length of the quickly evaporating crowd. Picking targets at random and trampling the few that turned to try and flee. As the gunfighter’s pistols went dry, he lashed out with his boot connecting with one of the ghostly figures and dissipating the thing’s head. Jamie wheeled his horse back the way he had come and put some distance between himself and the remaining crowd. But when he looked back he realized the fight was already won as the shopkeeper sprayed the last of the fleeing figures with gunfire.

  Jamie
slowed his ghostly mount and turned it back around approaching the shop at a cautious pace. The shopkeeper remained rooted in his place on the rooftop. His eyes now held a wild look, just as his hands still held the smoking repeater. The gunfighter cursed himself silently. The fight, though brief, had been a welcome relief from the city’s dark drudgery. But the action had left his pistols both empty. So here he was out in the open, with the shopkeeper holding superior firepower and the high ground. Jamie began to feel awfully exposed. Just then the shopkeeper called out to him, unfortunately for Jamie, the words sounded like pure gibberish.

  “Annyeong chingu, gomabseubnida!” the man called out.

  “You have to be shitting me?” Jamie replied.

  The shopkeeper lowered the barrel of the repeater slightly, and the side of his face that was not burned showed a look somewhere between suspicion and amusement.

  “Mwo?” the man replied.

  “God damn it!” the gunfighter said under his breath before shouting back, “I don’t speak Chinamen!”

  The shopkeeper shook his head slowly.

  “Naneun jung-gug-eoga anida.”

  “What?” Jamie asked in confusion.

  “Naneum…Ko..re..an!” the shopkeeper replied, shouting the words very slowly and with careful emphasis.

  Jamie nodded his head and grinned, “I got that, your name is Ko-re-an! My name is Jamie,” the gunfighter replied smiling broadly.

  The shopkeeper just shook his head in frustration.

  “So Korean, good buddy. I’m looking for some friends of mine that live in this here city. They are in a little club, they call themselves the Horde. Do you know where maybe I might find them boys?” Jamie asked holstering his guns.

  “Ho-orde?” the shopkeeper asked and then holding his fists up in front of him held an imaginary set of handlebars and gave a few quick twists on an invisible throttle.

  Jamie looked up at him in confusion, “What?”

  “Horde, horde,” the man repeated and again twisted the throttle on imaginary handlebars.

  “Where?” Jamie asked, and in reply, the shopkeeper turned and pointed down the street to his left.

  “geudeul-eun…pole cat,” the man said pointing again.

  “Did you say polecat?” Jamie asked, finally happy to hear a word that he recognized.

  The shopkeeper nodded again and repeated, “Pole cat,”

  Jamie nodded in confusion and looking down the length of the street repeated, “Polecat.”

  The shopkeeper nodded in reply and Jamie turned his horse in that direction, “Well, thank you much Korean.”

  With that, the gunfighter rode away from the intersection leaving the confused shopkeeper behind him. He wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of entering back into the narrow maze of streets. And as he pushed further into the city his imagination began to run wild, as he began to question which would be more terrifying. Fighting one giant hell-spawned demonic skunk in these narrow streets or facing a whole pack of the rabid little bastards. He drew out one of his pistols again and couldn’t stop himself from staring into the shadows of each alleyway he rode past, straining to see the glow of eyes in the darkness. Fortunately for Jamie, he didn’t have to worry for long because a short time later he rounded a corner and the polecat in question came into view.

  The animal was easily 10 feet tall, a mass of dark black fur and wrapped precariously around a huge copper pole. The ridiculous looking statue adorned the top of a long squat building painted bright pink and decorated with golden stars. A sign below the beast proclaimed that the building was The Polecat Gentleman’s Club, in a flowing golden script.

  Jamie shrugged and admitted to himself, “Okay, not exactly what I had in mind.”

  He urged his horse forward, and as he rode into the establishment’s small parking area, he knew he had found the right place. A row of the steel horses that the bikers referred to as “choppers” lined the front of the building. Jamie counted nearly 30 of the machines. It seemed to him that the Horde’s numbers had continued to grow while the number of horsemen continued to dwindle. The priest had once called it the inevitable march of progress. Jamie took a moment to hock and spit on the nearest bike before stepping down from his horse.

  The young gunfighter made his way down a narrow set of concrete steps and paused for a moment in front of the bright pink door. A wooden stool sat next to the door, where he guessed a doorman would have usually been perched. Jamie was thankful for one last moment alone with his thoughts. He pulled both pistols from their holster and checked each of them in turn. The guns were loaded again just as he knew they would be. He shook his head knowing that he was just stalling.

  This was it he realized. This would be the moment. If he crossed this line, he was done with Cort and Oliver and the rest, done for good. Everything up until now could be forgiven over time and time was the one thing that they always had plenty of. Even draining that runt Jerry wouldn’t amount to much given another decade or two. But even as the thought crossed his mind Jamie knew there was no future for him riding with Cort. The man had decided to make for the lake, and he wasn’t one to have his mind changed easily or to forgive for that matter.

  “Fuck him,” Jamie said.

  The gunfighter pushed his way through the pink door and almost immediately, Jamie couldn’t help but feel just a little bit more at home. Though he had spent plenty of his time riding the open country when he was alive. He had truly honed his skills and made a name for himself in places just like this. A long bar top ran the length of the building on his right, nearly its entire length lined by leather wearing bikers. The rest of the club it seemed was a series of padded booths and tables all facing a raised stage that was fitted with a single brass pole. For a fleeting moment, Jamie wondered in the real world did trained polecats actually perform in places like this for entertainment? If so that would be a hell of a thing to see.

  The thought was dismissed a moment later by the unmistakable sound of a fist being put to flesh. A pair of gang members standing at the bar fell upon each other in a flurry of punches and curses. A moment later the men were on the ground and fighting viciously. The rest of the bikers cheered and quickly gathered in a rough circle around the fighting men, each adding their own curses and encouragement. The only one that seemed completely disinterred in the fight was the bartender, the large black man stood behind the bar wearing a bloodstained tuxedo and absently polished a glass.

  The circle of the bikers let out a cheer as one of the men gained the upper hand and now straddled his opponent his hands locked firmly around the man’s neck. Jamie watched as the pair strained against one another, each desperately trying to drain the life from the other. The man on top was clearly winning and as the man on the bottom struggled he happened to look up and his eyes locked onto Jamie. As he choked, he extended a trembling hand and pointed it at the rider. The rest of the bikers turned to look, and as they saw the unexpected visitor, a hush settled over the group.

  Clearly, none of them had ever expected anyone to be stupid enough or perhaps suicidal enough to just walk into their clubhouse uninvited. Jamie couldn’t help but crack a grin. He had to admit, he loved being the center of attention, even if it wasn’t the good of kind of attention. Jamie casually placed his left hand on the buckle of his gun belt and the other he let hang down at his side. He began a slow but confident walk towards the gaggle of gang members. The gunfighter showed the gang members no sign of fear because truly he felt none, he had done this sort of things more times than he could count. Instinctually the bikers began to back away giving Jamie plenty of space.

  Most of the bikers didn’t seem to know how to respond to Jamie’s unexpected entry and were left to just look at each other in confusion. No none seemed eager to engage the new arrival, and most seemed simply content to wait for someone else to make the first move. But for two bikers leaned up against the bar nearby, indecisiveness wasn’t a problem. From the corner of his eye, Jamie caught the glance that passed bet
ween the two of them and the faint nod that was given in reply. The gunfighter didn’t give them any indication that he had seen the gesture, he didn’t even break stride as he made to pass them by.

  The first biker was as quick as a snake, both of his thick hands lashing out and wrapping around Jamie’s right forearm. The biker then viciously tried to pull Jamie’s right hand away from his holstered pistol. In the same moment, the second biker drove a knife towards the gunfighter’s stomach. Even at that speed, Jamie had time to wonder if they would have tried this little move if they had known that he was nearly as fast with his left as he was with his right.

  Jamie went with the pull and shouldered into the first biker, and though the man was considerably larger than Jamie, he was expecting Jamie to try and pull away, not push into him. The big man stumbled back into the bar top. In the same motion, the gunfighter cleared leather with his left hand and disdainfully batted away the knife thrust with a backhanded slap of his pistol. Not missing a beat Jamie drove the barrel of his Scofield deep into the biker’s stomach.

  “I think this was about the spot you were aiming for,” Jamie said with a grin and then shot the man.

  The biker screamed clutching at his stomach as he fell to his knees. Jamie turned to look up at the big biker that still had ahold of his arm. The man looked down at his hand as if realizing that he held a tiger by the tail and was now regretting taking hold of it in the first place. Glancing down at his wounded friend the biker decided to try a different strategy. Gritting his teeth and leveling his will he tried to drain away Jamie’s life through the grip.