The Boss

by Bryant, Malcolm

  Emma didn't say anything, but I could tell she was mulling it over. She knew I had a point. The bandits were basically guerrilla fighters, and they would use guerrilla tactics to try to win.

  “Think about it Emma,” I said. “We're big and stationary, they're small and mobile. We have to be ready to defend all the time, while they can pick and choose the moments when they attack. We need to accept the situation and adapt to it—we can't just have everyone up all the time. And as soon as people figure out that's what's going on, they'll think, 'Hey, I can go to sleep for a little bit,' and that's when someone is going to miss seeing them coming, and then they'll try to swarm us when we're out in the open.”

  “All right, all right, I get it,” Emma said. “What are you, some kind of Marshal?”

  I laughed before I replied, taking a second to really scan the horizon before I answered.

  “No Marshal, but I've been in some pretty sticky situations before, and I know what works and what doesn't. One time up north I got stuck in a fort when the local Indian leaders laid siege to it. It was a nightmare, but because the sergeant in charge knew what to do, it minimized what could have been fatal to all of us. Did we lose people? Sure. But did we prevail? Eventually.”

  The night went quiet. I decided not to say anything else and just let Emma make the decision about how she wanted to handle it. I figured that if I kept pushing she would just dig in her heels and not want to do anything that wasn't already happening. That's not what any of us needed, though. The town needed Emma to start listening to me and to start thinking more long term than just one night. That's when it occurred to me that she might have known the saloon owner, the man who had done his best to be the law for this small town in the middle of the desert.

  “Let's set up a watch.”

  That was all Emma said. She turned and strode to the closest building with people on the roof. Setting up a watch wouldn't be hard, and I needed to stay and man the post. Besides that, I knew that there was no way I would be of much help considering I didn't know any of the town's people. I hoped that Emma was using her best judgment when she assigned posts and told people when their watch was. One week link could break the entire chain. But I had to trust this to her if I wanted to work with her during this time of crisis. I knew that much. If I wanted the bounty, both of us needed to make it out alive.

  When Emma returned, she walked over and stood close to me, so close that I caught her scent again. It was intoxicating, and I tried to push it out of my mind.

  “Everything is set up,” Emma said. “You and I need to get some rest because we'll be busy tomorrow. I want to put some fences up—tanglefoot style—to catch those fucks the next time they try to ride into town.”

  We made our way back to the hotel. I wasn't sure what to expect from the rest of the night. I didn't think the bandits would be coming back, but I did believe that Emma and I were going to end up having words. When we were back in her room, I turned on one of the oil lamps and immediately a bullet flew through the window.

  “Holy shit,” Emma said. “Are you all right?! You're bleeding! Just stay down, all right? Stay down. We need to get that lamp off.”

  I was winged in the neck, but I didn't know how badly. If it were really bad, there would be no way for Emma to help me, much less save me. But if it wasn't too terrible there would be a good chance that I could bounce back in just a few days time. They didn't even have just a few days, though. They needed to be ready now.

  Emma moved deftly around the room, crawling to avoid straying into the sniper's line of sight. She finally got the lamp turned off, and then crawled over to check on me. Her hands were sure of themselves, not the hands of someone who had no idea how to handle a gunshot wound. I felt like I was in the care of someone who would see me through. Emma quickly produced some iodine from a dresser and cleaned my wound. While she was doing so, I couldn't help looking deep into her dark brown, nearly black eyes. At first, I don't think she noticed, but then, after a few minutes, it became obvious.

  “I never liked the color of my eyes,” Emma said. “They just don't pop like the other colors. Sure, brown leaves a lot to the imagination, but I want them to be big and bold. I don't want them to be something that can only be seen in daylight.”

  I couldn't believe I was hearing Emma speak so candidly to me. Maybe seeing me shot and bleeding on the floor had softened her to me a little bit. I wasn't really sure. But whatever it was, I liked it. Even though I hated myself for it, I liked Emma's touch, the way her hands were gentle yet firm. It was so unlike the coarse touch of a man, and so unlike any other touch I'd felt before.

  “You're really good at this,” I said. “We're you ever a nurse or anything?”

  Emma shook her head no.

  “Where I grew up we had to take care of each other in the most literal sense. There was no town doctor, no one to run to when things got bad,” Emma said. “When someone got sick, we'd have to seek out the help of an Indian healer, and sometimes what they would charge us was unreal. But they did make people better, most of the time.”

  Emma started to wrap my neck with a bandage.

  “You'll need to take it easy with this neck injury, or as easy as you can take it,” Emma said. “I know that right now there really isn't much chance that we'll be able to just lounge around and wait for everything to die down, I'm just asking you to keep it in mind that you just got shot in the neck and you really need to avoid infection.”

  While she talked, Emma moved her face close to mine, examining the wound on my neck. When she looked up, it was straight into my eyes. At first, I wasn't sure what she was going to do, but then, before I realized what was happening, she leaned in and pressed her lips to mine. They were soft and supple, the kind of lips that I could dream about for a hundred years and never really get it quite right. The way she pressed them against me was amazing, and I could feel my entire body tremble.

  “Whoa, now,” Emma said. “We don't want you going into shock or anything.”

  “I'm not shaking because of the shock,” I said. “I'm shaking because I've never kissed another woman before.”

  Emma looked surprised.

  “Never,” Emma said. “Not even once when you were a kid?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not ever.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Well, I'm glad to be your first.”

  Before I could respond her lips were on mine again, but this time her tongue probed forward, running across the length of my lips before darting into my mouth and playfully sliding under my own tongue. For a few seconds I didn't know what to do. I wanted to kiss her back, but we were already in the middle of a kiss, and that meant I couldn't kiss her further. But that didn't mean that my hands didn't suddenly have minds of their own, exploring Emma's body, slipping under her clothes and groping parts of her I would have never dreamed of touching before she kissed me.

  “I thought you'd never done anything like this before,” Emma said. “For someone so inexperienced you sure aren't afraid.”

  I wanted to pour my heart out to her, tell her how afraid I really was. I was scared of being shot again and scared of my wound being infected. But more than that I was scared of the chance that I might be having feelings for the very person who I'd come to apprehend. Emma was the person who would make me rich, but right now she was also the person driving me crazy. I couldn't believe how good she felt, and how amazing she smelled. It was like being in another world, one of touch and smell, want and longing.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “My neck. It feels like it's seizing up.”

  “Then it probably is,” Emma said. “Here, let me massage it.”

  Emma gently moved her fingers along my neck, being careful not to touch the wound itself. Her fingers had an incredible amount of dexterity in them, something I couldn't help my mind from going somewhere dirty with. I wondered what those fingers could do to my body if only Emma would feel me like I was feeling her. As she continued to alleviate my pain, I slipped my hand dow
n her pants. Emma lifted herself up and away from me, and planted her lips on mine, hard. I knew then that I was in for something I had never felt before, and as her hands started to caress and tease the rest of my waiting body waves of pleasure washed over me. I hadn't known how much I was anticipating her touch.

  The way her hands knew their way around my body without ever having been there before was such a turn on for me. I combed my fingers through her black hair and kissed her neck as her fingers fondled their way lower and lower, until they undid my pants and tugged them down. It wasn't long until I was gripping both of her shoulders, my forehead pressed against hers, as I moved toward ecstasy.

  It was all so surreal, everything that had happened in the last day culminating in this. I'd just been shot in the neck, but now I couldn't even feel it I was so overwhelmed. The way that Emma touched me was like magic, but not the phony kind of magic that kids believe in—real magic. The kind of thing that would make a person drop to their knees it was so great. I knew that I needed to keep my wits about me, but at this point, it was too late. There was no way I was going to ask Emma to stop when I was so close. The way her fingers moved inside of me was like dancers on a stage, each one knowing where to step and where not to step; each one knowing how the dance would end, and in no hurry to get to that point.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, I climaxed. Gripping Emma tight to me I felt my whole body shake. It was a dam inside of me had broken, and all the pleasure it had been holding back, hiding from me, poured out all at once. I gripped Emma close to me as the tremors slowly subsided.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I've never felt anything like that before. How do you know how to do that?”

  Emma laughed.

  “I guess I just knew, no one ever showed me,” Emma said. “But I can show you if you'd like. Maybe not right now, but when we aren't in danger of being shot or hung or burned alive if those bandits decide to torch the town.”

  Suddenly all of the ecstasy gave way to anxiety. I felt good still, but now the dread of the circumstances which surrounded us crept back into my thinking. We needed to figure out where the sharpshooter was, and we also needed to figure out how many bandits were out there in the night. Emma crawled away from me, careful to keep her head down, and I adjusted my clothes back to how they had been. I wondered if the moment we'd just had would be repeated, or if Emma would never touch me again. I hoped that she would. It had felt like something new and exciting had been awoken inside of me, and that was a pretty great feeling. Emma said that she'd just known how to do that to a woman, and I wondered why I hadn't been born with the same carnal knowledge. I wanted to be able to make her feel the same way, to make the dam break inside of her the way she had breached mine. There was something really special about what had happened, while at the same time being completely and totally normal. I didn't want to spoil the moment by saying anything, so I adjusted the bandage on my neck and tried to act normal.

  “Hey,” Emma said. “Be careful to stay low. I know it's easy to think that there is only one shooter, and therefore only one line of sight, but I'm not sure that's what's going on. There could be a couple of them, all posted up on the slight ridge line you can see out of the window in the daylight.”

  Emma really knew her stuff, and that was something that I hadn't considered about her when I'd first started pursuing her. I'd figured she was just some country bumpkin who, like Billy the Kid, had managed to make a name for themselves through bushwhacking people. But it seemed like Emma was more of a professional fighter than just a mere bushwhacker. This was something I filed away in my mind for later, when, eventually, I would have to apprehend Emma.

  “I'll be careful,” I said. “What should we do? Head out into the night to help stand post?”

  Emma didn't answer at first.

  “Do you hear that?” Emma asked. “It sounds like something burning.”

  My heart sank. If the bandits had started to torch the town that meant that we would quickly be forced to choose between staying and fighting a losing battle or taking our chances in the desert. We made our way out of the hotel to find another building on fire, and the town's people fleeing. I felt so defeated, watching the former inhabitants of the town running off into the desert to take their chances with the bandits. I heard Emma speaking with one of the few young men who had called the town home.

  “Are you going to stay and fight, or run. Running might be a good option, especially with all the yahoos who took off keeping the bandits busy,” Emma said. “Or you could dig in here, maybe hide in the cellar. I know you've made it so you can walk your horses down a hidden ramp.”

  The young man looked around, surveying the grim scene. There wasn't much to stay for, considering the fire was now spreading down the main gangplank. Soon the entire town would be engulfed in flames. The old timber made to build the structures and gangways had been dried to a crisp by the sun. Some of them had even dry rotted to the point of being highly combustible. It was strange to see fire leap from timber to timber like it had a mind of its own. The hunger I saw in the flames reminded me of the hunger I felt for Emma. It was a pang of hunger that I wanted to deny, but one that I knew that, like the flames, would remain and spread.

  “I guess I'll dig in,” the young man said. “It's a goddamn shame that everyone took off for the hills. That's just what the bandits were waiting for. I'm sure most of them won't make it too far, not that they were really thinking about longevity if they were willing to abandon everything here for the coyotes.”

  “I know it's hard,” Emma said. “But you have to think about you and your family now. You were one of the best people in this town, and still are. I know it's hard to see everyone's courage break like that, but that's how people are in this world. When they had a lawman, even an old used up one who had no business even pretending he was part of the law, people felt better here. They could hide behind him. But now that they have to stand for themselves things seem harder. And even though they could have put out the flames if they'd all worked together, it was easier to run.”

  The young man nodded and headed toward his home to get ready to weather the storm. His was set apart from the rest and made of stucco instead of wood, so there wasn't any chance of it catching on fire, although the bandits would most likely loot it in the morning daylight. Already cries and gunshots were echoing from the foothills. Those people who had run off were finding that this wasn't the first time the bandits had done something like this.

  “I say we head for the mesa,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy, but it's the last place they will expect us to go for, especially because that's where they were hiding a few days ago. They probably have the leftovers of a camp set up, and we could scavenge some of their goods, if there are any. And, besides that, I'm a really great shot with my rifle. If I crawl up onto one of the mesa's crags, there's no way they can approach us in the daylight without taking causalities.”

  Emma looked me up and down. The night air filled with the crackling of buildings and homes going up in smoke, and the light from the fire dances across our faces.

  “You've got a good idea, there,” Emma said. “And I'd be happy to loot their camp and then kill them as they try to come back to it, bloated off of the booze and food they're going to loot from this town. They'll most likely return to the mesa tomorrow in the afternoon, coming to this town in the morning to take what they can.”

  We both moved to our horses and mounted up. The ride out of town was one we made at a gallop, while shots and screams continued to echo down from the hills miles away from us. I'd never seen anything like this before, the way the town was all aflame and the silhouettes of people ran to and from buildings, some of them digging in, some of them leaving. It was hard to imagine what it would be like to be them, watching all their worldly possessions go up in flames. I was glad that it wasn't my town burning to the ground, and sorry that I'd shot one of the gang members. I should have just ridden it out and made it to the town. But it was ea
sy to think that now that I was safe, and shots weren't flying past me right and left.

  One of those shots could have just as easily passed through me, killing me, instead of passing by. That was something I had to be real about. I'd defended myself out of necessity, and the town should have as well. But instead, they'd decided to run. That was their prerogative. Some people didn't have what I considered pride, or backbone. Some people were just trying to get by in this world, and that was something I understood, even if it wasn't the way that I live my life. I wished there was a way to go back in time and really ready the town for the onslaught, but that was long past. Now all we could do was push forward, and ready ourselves for tomorrow.

  Emma took the lead, her horse seemingly having no problem finding its footing through the night. My horse was less sure of foot in this terrain. As we rode, I wondered how Emma had known the tactics the bandits used. Had she ever been a part of them? Was that why they posted up outside of the town, to wait for her to leave? These were questions that were going to have to wait for the following day, and questions that I knew I most likely wouldn't like the answers to. Emma didn't seem like a bad person, but she was defiantly someone that did what she had to do to get by. That meant there were times when she did things she didn't entirely agree with to survive. I could understand that, but that didn't make me any less curious. As I rode, I realized that I needed to be much more cautious of Emma, but that was hard considering what was going on between us.

  ~*~

  When we got to the mesa, we found what we both had been expecting, the remnants of a camp. The coals were still hot from when the bandits had cooked dinner before heading to sack the town. Emma quickly stoked the coals into a fire, and we made some food out of the outlaw's leftovers.