Coilhunter - A Science Fiction Western Adventure (A Coilhunter Chronicles Novel) (The Coilhunter Chronicles Book 1)

by Dean F. Wilson

   “Steady now, Nox,” Danny said. “I'm sure we can sort this out.”

   “We'll sort it with lead. You know that well.”

   He did. They all did. There was no wondering about that. They only wondered which of them, if any, would leave the Deadmakers' Den tonight. Maybe some of them would limp. Maybe some of them would crawl. Those would be the lucky ones.

   “It wasn't us,” Danny said.

   “Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But there aren't many bounty hunters who don't come through these doors and don't sit at that bar. You know 'em all. You must've heard the tales. Someone knows something. Someone's gotta spill the beans or we'll be spillin' bullets soon, and spillin' blood.”

   “This isn't like you, Nox,” Long-eyed Lizzy said. “You can't just shoot up the place.”

   “You'd be surprised what people can do. Like kill someone's family when there weren't no bounty on 'em. What you wouldn't be surprised by is that justice needs to be paid.”

   “This won't end good,” Danny said.

   “No,” Nox replied. “No, it won't. But it'll end. Either people start talkin' or people start screamin'. You know the drill, and you know I mean it. Right now there's a bounty on all o' you. That's what Waltman's paper is, your little poster with no face and no name. Help me narrow it down. Give me a face for these bullets. Give me a name to bury.”

   Someone stirred in the corner. It was TNT Tom.

   “You won't like what you find, Nox,” he said.

   Nox didn't like him. He always felt like he was scheming, like he saw the Coilhunter as just another fly.

   “Maybe not, but I don't like not finding it either.”

   “Come with me then.” Tom stood up, resting on his walking stick. When everyone else was trying not to move, he was the only one who ignored the barrels. He was fearless. You had to be to work with explosives. He'd been gambling with his life for decades, and so far he kept on winning.

   The Coilhunter followed him through into the back room behind the bar, the place where other gambling was done. There was no one there tonight though. This was a night off, a night for drinking, a night for dying.

   The others breathed a sigh of relief when the Coilhunter left. They lowered their guns and raised their glasses.

   Long-eyed Lizzy strolled over to Danny Deadmaker and helped him up off his seat. “You better run,” she whispered to him. “It's only a matter of time before he finds out.”

  36 – TNT

  “Take a seat,” Tom said.

   “I'll stand.”

   “Come on, Nate. We're old friends, us.”

   Nox raised an eyebrow. “Are we?”

   “Of course. We go way back.”

   “Back to when my family was alive.”

   Tom scrunched up his mouth. “Yes.”

   Nox pulled out a chair noisily, letting the screeches tear through Tom's old ears. He sat down, staring at Tom from beneath the brim of his hat, keeping one hand—and one gun—on the table, and the other reaching down to the ground. Sometimes you wanted a gun on show. Other times, you wanted it perched beneath the table.

   Tom sat slowly, his legs almost buckling. He groaned audibly.

   “You're gettin' on,” Nox said.

   “We're all getting on, Nate.”

   Nox's breath was heavy. “Not all o' us.”

   “Look, Nate. This hunt of yours, it's not good for you.”

   “It ain't good for whoever I'm huntin'.”

   “But you might never know.”

   Nox drew closer, resting both wrists on the table, keeping the guns pointed at Tom. “It got to the point that I thought maybe that was true. The trail was always pretty cool, but it kept on gettin' cooler. I'd resigned myself to maybe never knowin'. But now … the list has narrowed down a lot. There's maybe a hundred bounty hunters in the Wild North.”

   “Living ones,” Tom said.

   “There'll be less of those soon enough.”

   “Yes.”

   “Maybe just me and you. Maybe just me.”

   “Indeed.”

   “So, Tom,” Nox said, taking off his hat and placing it down on the table. It revealed the scars along his head. The hair was cut tight around them. “Tell me what you know.”

   “All right, Nate. Do you remember when you and Dan were kids?”

   “Like yesterday.”

   “A lot of yesterdays ago. Back in the good old days.”

   “When the sun didn't shine.”

   “Well,” Tom said. “You and Dan never did get along, did you?”

   “Boys'll be boys.”

   “And then you were men.” Tom seemed suddenly agitated now. “And you were married, and my Dan was out in the cold. Emma was meant for him, you know.”

   “I don't get ya,” Nox said. “She fell in love with me.”

   “She made the wrong choice, and you made the wrong choice too. You shoulda backed away. You knew Dan had set his eyes on her.”

   Nox shook his head.

   “I don't like seeing my boy disappointed.”

   Nox started to stand up, but he felt something holding him down. Metal cuffs sprang from the armrests of the chair and latched into place.

   “What's this?” he asked.

   “You're not the only one with gadgets, Nate.”

   Nox struggled, but the bonds were tight.

   “Well,” Tom said, hobbling to the door. He tapped his walking stick against a barrel of TNT there. “I guess you can have Emma after all. Till death do you part.”

  Back in the bar, the Den-goers were surprised to see TNT Tom waddle out. It wasn't often you went into a room alone with the Coilhunter and came out in one piece.

   “The Den's closed,” he said. “For refurbishment.”

   They didn't quite get what he meant until they heard the sizzle of a fuse in the back room. With TNT Tom, you didn't have to guess what that was. The bounty hunters charged for the door.

   The explosion rocked the building, blowing a hole in the back. Some of them stopped at the door, but Tom kept on going, and Danny was already long gone. The rest of them stared at the haze of smoke and splinters, wondering if they should go straight to the scoreboards and wipe clean the Coilhunter's name.

   Not yet.

   He came out of the smoke, like he often did. He held one of his signature tools in one hand and an unclasped metal cuff in the other. His coat sparked with embers, and his eyes flickered with anger.

  37 – A WHOLE LOT OF HOGS

  The other bounty hunters parted as the Coilhunter came through, kicking open the Den's door and stepping outside. He was greeted by a fleet of motorbikes, big and black, with thick wheels designed to cope with the uneven sands. On them sat rough bikers, decked to the nines with leather and studs. Emblazoned on the back of their coats, and the side of their bikes, was a flaming skull. Unsurprisingly, they were the Flaming Skull gang.

   “Coilhunter,” their leader, Ember, said.

   Nox stepped down. They blocked the way entirely.

   “Get outta my way,” Nox said through his gritted teeth. The sound echoed in his mask.

   “No can do,” Ember replied. “We were hired with a job to do, and we're doin' it.”

   Nox eyed them one by one. They puffed their chests and revved their engines in response, but he didn't need any big gestures to seem menacing.

   “I wanna fight,” Nox said, “but not with you.”

   The Flaming Skulls were one of the “good” gangs, if there was any such thing. They were on the side of the law, for the most part, standing up for the weak. They had a code of honour, even if it was a bit of a bent code. They co-operated with the Deadmakers, passing on information, showing up in force when force was needed. Like now.

   “Danny Deadmaker said you went and gone mad.”

   Nox shook his head. “Not yet. There's still time fo
r that.”

   “Said you went and threatened his life.”

   “It wasn't just a threat.”

   “He's a good man, that Danny. Looked out for many of us. I thought you were one too, Coilhunter.”

   “He killed my family.” Nox pointed his finger to the ground, to maybe six feet under. “There needs to be justice.”

   “Well, I don't know anything about that, but it doesn't sound like good ol' Danny.”

   “He didn't get a title like Deadmaker for no reason.”

   “And you didn't get one like Coilhunter for none either.”

   Nox sighed. “You don't know what you're doin', Ember. You don't know how close to the fire you are. Get outta my way and you won't get burned.”

   “As I said, no can do. Danny's been good to us.”

   “Don't make me be bad to ya.”

   “Stand down, Nate.”

   “I don't go by that name any more. That man died when my family died. I buried him as well. But there's still space inside that grave, space for the killer. I'm askin' ya one more time: get outta my way.”

   “I guess it's a stalemate.”

   The door creaked open behind them and out came Iron Ike, who halted with a clang. “Oh,” he said. “I thought this would have been finished by now. You humans take an awful long time to get things done.”

   “Ain't that the truth,” Nox said.

   He charged at Ember, who was caught by surprised, then threw himself over the end of the bike, tumbling in the sand. He raced to his monowheel and dived into the driver's seat. He was lucky it was a biker gang that tried to stop him, as they knew not to touch another man's wheels, even more than touching another man's wife. That was part of the code for all of them, no matter how criminal they were. It wasn't just the code that stopped them though: it was the duck, perched in the box at the back.

   He sped off, but the bikers had him circled. He drove towards one, but the biker didn't baulk, and the Coilhunter didn't feel like crashing. He turned sharply, sending sand up into the face of the biker. He tried another route, but it was blocked as well. They weren't there to fight him, but they weren't going to let him escape.

   So he took the only route he could, straight into the Deadmakers' Den, and out the blasted back, firing the new machine guns to cut a bigger door. The bikers had already started to gather there, but they hadn't quite ringed him off. He drove up a dune, flying over the head of one of the bikers and sending up a plume of dust behind him.

   Now he was in the wide expanse, and the sun was quickly setting. He knew he had to be quick or the trail would vanish into the obscurity of the night. By morning, those tracks left by Danny Deadmaker and TNT Tom would be gone. He only hoped the Flaming Skulls hadn't messed them up too much already.

   He heard their engines revving behind him, drowned out only by the purring of his own. He hammered his elbow down on a latch at the side, and out of the back of the monowheel came a hundred little balls, encrusted with nails. The bikers swerved, but a few of them drove straight through, suffering punctured wheels as a result.

   Ember pulled up beside him. Each of them fell back a little in turn, until they matched each other's pace.

   “This is madness,” the biker shouted against the wind. His hair flailed madly behind him.

   Nox kept his eyes on the tracks ahead.

   Ember pointed a pistol at him, but Nox knew he wouldn't fire. No Flaming Skull would shoot a man on his machine, and certainly not a man who didn't do wrong. That ruled out a lot of people in the Wild North, but it didn't rule out him.

   “I made a promise not to shoot you,” Ember shouted.

   Nox drew the shotgun from the side of the monowheel and pointed it at the biker. “I made no such promises,” he rasped, then shot the back wheel instead. The motorbike careened off as Ember lost control, skidding into the sand.

   The incident meant Nox didn't see the bike drawing up on the other side, and the biker stretching across a long bar with a hook on the end. He grabbed a hold of one of the metal tubes of the engine, pulling himself closer.

   Nox grabbed the bar and tried to reef it free, but it held on tight. The biker reached out to him, grabbing his arm. Nox rolled his shoulder to loosen the grip, but it held on just as tightly. So Nox turned the monowheel sharply, tearing the biker from his bike. The man clutched the end of the bar for a moment, bashing off the sands, until he rolled off down a dune, leaving the hooked bar behind him.

   Nox unhooked the bar and tossed it behind him, where he heard it smack off the head of one of the bikers behind. That unconscious biker then drove into the next one beside him, and both of them veered off into a heap at the side.

   The Coilhunter continued on, but the biker gang started to fall behind. He wasn't sure why they were giving up so easily, but then he saw it. The wind was working the sand up into a frenzy ahead. A storm was brewing, and not just in the Coilhunter's head.

  38 – SANDSTORM

  It started as a gentle haze, like a summer shower, if it ever rained. Then the winds kicked up a frenzy, and the further he pushed on, the more they pushed back. He squinted his eyes as the grit came like little boulders, pelting off his mask. He had to tilt his hat down until he secured his goggles on, but soon they started to clog up too, until he found himself in the howling sandstorm, barely able to see anything in front of him.

   No, he told himself. Maybe he was speaking to the gods, or whoever worked this weather like loyal machinery. He scoured the ground, but he couldn't see it clearly enough. The tracks were already shifting. The storm was growing. The sands were thickening.

   Then he spotted something black in the haze, something small, something that was then just as quickly shrouded in sand again. He swerved, realising just in time that it was a mine. Then he saw another, and turned again. The dunes were littered with them, freshly dropped. He knew who had put them there. For the first time ever, he knew. They didn't care if the Flaming Skulls drove into them too. They didn't care who died, so long as it wasn't them. They thought it would stop or slow him, and maybe it would, but with the tracks swiftly fading, these were the new iron breadcrumbs, leading the deadly way.

   He had to push the vehicle harder, fighting against the fierceness of the wind. Normally when there was a sandstorm like this, you got indoors. You dropped everything and ran for shelter. People were swept away by these monsters of nature, bundled off by the sandy tide. If you ever knew someone who went missing—and chances are you did—then you'd blame the devils of the sand. “The sands took 'im,” people said. And here those devils were again, conspiring with the wind to take the Coilhunter.

   He felt himself vanishing into the shifting dust walls. He could barely breathe, even with his mask. If it had been anyone else, with just a neckerchief around their mouth, they would have likely already suffocated. And there'd be no need for a burial, because when the winds settled, the sand would have settled more than six feet overhead.

   The monowheel became sluggish. The sand caught in the parts, filling up the exhaust pipes, clogging up the diesel tank. It got everywhere, even in the vents of the Coilhunter's mask. It dug into the wrinkles and crevices of his face, and tried to tunnel under his goggles to finish off his eyes.

   The sightlessness and breathlessness brought back flashes of the past, of the blinding fire and smothering smoke. The sting of the sand in the cuts and bruises brought back the burn. Any other time, this would have overwhelmed him, but now it rekindled the fires of wrath in him. He could see nothing ahead, but in his mind's eye, and his mind's crosshairs, he could see Danny Deadmaker and TNT Tom, smiling their crooked smiles.

   There was a boom as the monowheel clipped the edge of a hidden mine. He was thrown, and then he felt a sudden drop, and he realised he was tumbling down a dune, with the monowheel somersaulting around him. In the haze of the storm, he didn't know which way was up or down. It must have been a mountain of a dune, fo
r he kept on falling, whacking his arms off the sides of the vehicle, feeling the weight of it drag him up and pull him down, while gravity tried to finish him off.

   He struck level ground again, feeling a pang in his left shin as the monowheel came down on him, trapping him. The sands came swiftly, mounting on top of him, shovelling in the first dirt of the grave. He knew he didn't have much time. He had to get free. Despite everything, he had to get shelter.

   He hoisted the monowheel up a little and unpinned his leg. Though he had already dug himself out of the sand, it was building around him again. Aaron used to tell him about “a different kind of sand” near the waters, wherever they were, where you could bury yourself up to your neck, or build sand saloons. Little wild Aaron, always dreaming.

   Nox got to his feet, feeling one leg sinking into the sand. He pulled it loose and plodded on, yanking one foot free, then the other. The earth kept munching away at him, and he kept on resisting, shielding his face with his gloved hands, not knowing where he was going, only that it had to be away from here.

   Then he spotted a bauble of blackness and realised that it was another mine. It was very close, and the wind kept on nudging him towards it. The sun was completely obscured now, but it must've been beaming away, content that finally the land would get him.

   But just like TNT Tom, it didn't get him yet.

   He trudged on, following the trail of mines, coming out of the storm, watching it sweep behind him like some great tidal wave. The wind died down to a whistle, and Nox pulled off his blocked goggles, halting as he spotted a town on the horizon. He knew where the locals would gather. Any building offered safety, but it was the shelter of the saloon that everyone flocked to, pushed by the stormy winds toward the nearest bottle. Whiskey to lift the spirits. Rum to calm the nerves. Anything to forget your troubles. Yet the Coilhunter didn't come to forget—not this time.

   He hobbled on towards the town, spotting the tumbleweeds gathering at the doorways, as if they were just waiting to move in. It was still a trek to go, but normally you'd hear the music from the saloon as the locals made the most of the company. There was nothing like a storm to bring everyone together, to make them see an enemy in the sand instead of each other. But no piano keys carried on that dying wind. No boisterous cries bellowed out through the cracks of the door. No chanting choruses rang out from inebriated lungs. The town looked dead from a distance, which made Nox feel like he, Danny and Tom would be right at home there.