by Chloe Garner
Studied her, they did. Knew her habits. Knew when she slept, when she ate. One of the reasons she kept so few habits. She slept at night, like the rest, but that were about it. They knew when she was most like to show up to a fight, and who she looked out for.
Attacking her wedding…
It made no sense.
Sure, sure, she’d mocked Jimmy for puttin’ out such a spread of consumable treasures for them to loot, but it weren’t like a herd of cattle they could pinch and make do with for months after. Some of ‘em had hit scores big enough to mostly drive them straight, just carin’ for a herd. Calvin’ and butcherin’ and tendin’ took up a big chunk of time, and you didn’t need much more, so long as you had water and bullets.
Cakes and dainties weren’t gonna last ‘em like a cow and a horse. Weren’t even as good as a good dog.
She booted Gremlin up into a gallop.
It was a message.
And it weren’t comin’ from the men takin’ the bullets. You didn’t risk your life for another guy’s agenda unless you believed or you didn’t see it comin’, and bandits weren’t the believin’ type.
They’d followed orders and those orders brought them to Sarah Todd.
Whatever that message was intended to be, she was going to get it.
But right now, she had a deep need to see that Granger was all right.
There were a few things that someone could want, and one was just to let Sarah know that the fight weren’t over. Another could be to send fear into the community that the supply chain were vulnerable. Weren’t no way in hell she was gonna let anyone get to Granger, now. Not now that he’d made it through everythin’ else.
Faith in Granger was faith in Sarah and faith in Lawrence. The threads that had held the place together all this time were thin, fragile. The moment Granger had given up shopkeepin’ and headed east again, Lawrence was done for, and everybody knew it. Everybody includin’ the layabout bandits every direction but north, so while they’d go after Sarah - she was a fair target - Granger was out of bounds for everyone.
With the Lawsons here, though, and the train runnin’ a regular schedule, Granger was just a trapping of old Lawrence, one of the pillars that only mattered to the old community.
The way Sarah Todd did.
Her wedding.
Granger’s store.
They were tied together in her mind, and she needed to lay eyes on the place before she moved on to any other rational line of thought.
It was this single-minded focus that probably made her miss the sandstorm on its way in.
She’d seen it, sure enough, but she’d missed the signs as it had gotten too late to react, failed to check the horizon behind her because she was so sure the next problem would be beyond the horizon in front of her, and the sudden change of wind driving hard sand through her hair, stinging Gremlin as he ran and throwing him into a frenetic gallop that she could scarce control, the storm took her completely by surprise.
She couldn’t see town yet, and the wind was blowin’ harder than Gremlin could gallop. In moments, she’d lost visibility, and less than a minute in, the world was nothing but swirling, painful red sand. Gremlin bucked, frustrated and afraid, and she kicked him again, pulling her hat down against her head and ducking her face into his mane.
How far had she been from town?
A couple of minutes? Right? No more?
The problem was, in a storm like this one, it was possible she’d pass within a dozen yards of the first building and never see it.
There was no shelter, though, and stopping was suicide.
She’d dug out those bodies, before, and it weren’t pretty.
So she kept Gremlin on line best she could, kept her duster out across as much of his haunches as she could cover, and held him at a run by sheer force of will.
The gust that nearly unseated her came as a shock, and Gremlin danced sideways, hopping again as he threatened to buck while she got herself back up onto his saddle.
She squinted.
There to her left.
She pushed him, and Gremlin dropped his head down by his ankles, giving up.
She kicked him again, and he did nothing.
She dismounted, dragging the reins, and he grudgingly followed, head away from the stinging wind.
The shadow had been a building, and Sarah held her arm up in front of her face, dragging Gremlin to the end of the boardwalk where the stairs were and pulling him up onto them.
“Come on, dumb animal. We’re here. Just gotta make it.”
They ran, scrambling across the loose sand in the hard wind, counting doors. Most of them were abandoned and wouldn’t give her appreciable shelter, if she could get into them.
She wanted Granger’s store.
That was where she needed to be.
The sign was missing, or just invisible, but she knew the door to Granger’s shop, almost without even seeing it, and she shoved her shoulder into it, then kicked it with her boot.
“Granger,” she yelled. “Unbolt the door. Come let me in.”
She kicked the door again.
It was possible he wasn’t in there, and it was equally possible he weren’t gonna hear her in this ruckus, so she squatted, putting her eye to the crack in the door.
If’n he’d seen the storm comin’, he’d’a taped the door to keep the wind out, but he hadn’t, and she could see into the shop, as it were still lit by lamps in the deepening dark as the storm turned worse.
She tipped her head.
She mighta been off, seeing the damned storm coming, but it had been for good reason.
There was a man with a rifle there, right where she could see him. Had it leveled, too.
She couldn’t hear a thing, but that were enough for her.
She drew a hand gun from her belt and shot the door in the three spots where bolts woulda held it closed, and both it and its mate flew open before the devastating wind.
Letting Gremlin to his fate, she dropped the reins and stepped into the store.
“Helluva time for a robbery, boys.”
--------
Granger had his hands up. Lamp light gleamed off of his sweaty bald head, and he didn’t turn his head.
Everyone else did.
Trustworthy Granger, knew where to watch.
Look at the man with the gun.
The moment the bandit’s head turned, Granger dove behind the register, and Sarah laughed grimly.
Pulled the trigger.
She only shot the first man she’d been able to see, as she were as certain as moonrise that he weren’t one of the good guys. After that, she looked around the store, taking in four, five, six more men.
They were in various stages of reaction to her, standing there with the sand and the wind blowing in around her, and she had surprise.
Honest men would dive for cover.
Bandits were gonna take a swing at her, smart or not.
She dropped to a knee as a great black shadow came rushing past her, snorting a terrified indignance, and she shot the first two men. Gremlin was a new distraction, and she took out the next two men as they tried to figure out what he was and whether he were the target, then she rolled, going to put her back against a shelf as what mighta been two gunshots sounded.
The pressure from the wind was intense, and the sound was unbearable.
Doors needed closing fast, but she still had two men to deal with.
She shot the first over her shoulder, ninety percent luck and ten percent no alternative, and she spun, sliding across the floor on her knees to take out the last one.
“Granger?” she called. “Granger, you livin’?”
No response, but she shouldn’t expect one, with the racket of the storm.
The doors slammed against the wall like loose shutters, and she went to grab the first of them, pulling it and then pushing it against the wind.
“Granger,” she roared. “Get out here and help me with this.”
His specta
cles appeared over the counter and he took in the room, then he scrambled over to help push the door closed.
“You busted the locks,” he said.
“Get somethin’ heavy,” Sarah said. “I’ll hold it.”
He went to get a barrel from under one of the windows, rolling it over to the door. She dashed across the doorway and pushed it closed in the middle of a brief lull, and Granger rolled the barrel on its lower rim to stand in front of both doors.
“You do know how to make an entrance,” he said when finally the howling wind was outside rather than in. He straightened, searching his side for his hand cloth, which he used to clean his spectacles.
“Yer welcome,” Sarah said, looking over at Gremlin. Needed to search the damned animal for bullet holes. “You okay?”
“Your timing is better ‘n most,” he said. “Can’t say I appreciate the mess.”
She looked around, not knowin’ whether he meant the sand or the bodies.
“Why were you out?” he asked. “You here in town?”
She shook her head.
“Comin’ in from the Lawson place. Had a hunch.”
He wiped his hands and then the top of his head, tucking the cloth away again.
“Woulda figured you of all people ‘d know when to hunker and ride it out,” he said. “Not that I’m ungrateful.”
“Had a hunch,” she said again, sweeping a drift of sand out of the way with her boot as she went to check Gremlin.
He blew air at her, dancing away as she got close, but letting her run her hands from his shoulders to his feet, haunches to hooves. Content that he weren’t in danger, she turned back to Granger.
“What the hell, Sarah?” he asked, and she nodded.
What the hell, indeed.
--------
The storm only went another eighteen hours.
Sarah helped Granger clean up the store for lack of something better to do with herself, especially considering Gremlin kept knocking things over as he wandered the shop.
A few minutes after they’d gotten the door closed again, several dozen young men drifted down from the loft.
“I sent ‘em up when the guns came out,” Granger said. “They locked the door. Couldn’t get ‘em to open up when the storm came up. Hope everyone found cover.”
Sarah nodded.
One of the biggest rules in Lawrence during flood and sandstorms was cover. Didn’t matter that you had it legitimate and someone else deserved to be out there, you let ‘em in and gave ‘em shelter for the time, cause next time it could easy be you needin’ it.
Granger’s woulda been one of the first places the transient young men in the shantytown at the end of main street woulda turned up, and to turn ‘em away there was a special kind of cruel.
“Gladder and gladder I put ‘em all down,” Sarah said.
Granger nodded, cleaning his glasses again.
“I’d hoped we might of seen the end of it,” he said. “With the auctions and all, everyone’s thinkin’ better times are here.”
“How are your supplies holdin’?” Sarah asked. Granger shrugged, looking around.
“There’ll be some losses from today, but mostly we’re keepin’ everyone fed.” He wiped his hands and then did his glasses again. “Willie and Paulie are gonna try to get the dormitories up in the next couple’a weeks, get the tavern open again.”
She twisted her mouth.
She hadn’t forgotten the deal she’d made with the tavern owners. Too much violence in Lawrence came pourin’ out of that tavern, and when the men had started starvin’ to death, she’d vouched for ‘em, told Granger to feed ‘em at whatever cost, but she shut down the tavern in the meantime. Willie and Paulie had been spittin’ mad at the time, and they hadn’t gotten any gladder to see her, since.
Housin’, though, was on the way, and that were somethin’.
“Y’all lookin’ to put some shine in your pocket when this is over?” she asked the young men as they pushed brooms and set cans back on shelves. Weren’t one of ‘em said no - not that she’d expected they would. “Gonna need a lot of cleanin’ to get everything back where it goes,” she went on. “Not as bad as some, but bad enough. Need to get the walks cleared and repairs made where we need ‘em. I’ll pay for a good day’s work of each of ya.”
“When are the mines gonna open?” one of the men asked.
“When they open,” Sarah said.
She settled in against the front window, the rifle from Gremlin’s saddle across her arms, and she propped her feet up on a crate.
“You got gremlin?” she asked Granger as he went past at one point, and he hurried away, coming back with a bag of it. She tucked it into her inside pocket, paying Granger what it was worth, then setting her head back against the window and letting her eyes droop.
Bandits didn’t act like this.
Not at all.
Something was wrong, and she didn’t like it.
--------
Dawn the next morning, Sarah got up to the sound of silence. The bandits’ bodies were piled up against the front doors, keeping the wind out, and the young men were sleeping wherever they’d found space. Gremlin was dozing nearby, snoring at the floor. She pursed her lips, looking at the great big horse, then shook her head and went to push the bodies out of the way, letting herself onto the walkway.
It wasn’t as bad as many sandstorms had been. Everything was red, covered in the finest dust from the storm, and dunes eighteen inches or two feet deep had drifted against the walls, anywhere there had been a break in the wind. At the end of the day, though, Lawrence was built for just this kind of storm, and she didn’t expect much damage, outside of what she’d done to Granger’s store.
The shantytown would have blown away again, and any of the men living there who hadn’t found shelter would have found himself stripped of skin, flesh, and life, but hopefully the fools had scrambled in time and made it into cover.
Even as she watched, she saw a group of men crawl out from under the walkway.
That was one way to do it.
She hopped down off of the walk, kicking up a cloud of dust and sand, and tipped the rifle back against her shoulder, going to see them.
“Anyone need Doc?” she asked. The men had survivor’s awe, mostly speechless and dull-witted, so she went over each of ‘em separately, checking for signs of sand damage.
One of the men had a scrape on his cheek he said he’d gotten from the walk itself, trying to get under it, and she went back to Granger’s shop to get a paste and glue she used for deep cuts when she were out ridin’, and she went back, tendin’ the boy’s face ‘fore she sent him on his way.
“Do you know when they’re going to start hiring people to work up at the mines?” one of his companions asked.
“Don’t,” she answered, turning away. The young men from Granger’s shop were already spreading out, starting the work of cleaning all of the sand and dust from where it shouldn’t have been. The world outside of Lawrence was stripped bare, red, and raw desert as far as the eye could tell.
Depressin’ place, Lawrence after a storm.
She nodded at one of the young men as he went by, one she recognized from another job, another stack of bills changing hands.
She was doin’ everything she knew to keep the men in money, keep ‘em feedin’ themselves, but without reg’lar jobs, without a place to shelter from sand and sun, they was just waitin’ on the next major crisis, where they’d die off in droves again.
Like little birds.
Or hobflowers.
Corpses of all three caused problems, keepin’ ‘em away from the rest of life.
She went to check on Kayla’s shop, lettin’ herself in the fine new doors Kayla had ordered out of her pretty catalogue and browsin’ through the shop. No one had sheltered here, but the vents had let in sand, all the same. Sarah grabbed a broom and started goin’ after the carpet with it. Out in the civilized world, they had vacuums to deal with this type of thing, but
in Lawrence, no one had carpet, on account of the sand and there bein’ no carpet to have.
Voices outside, men calling to each other, checkin’ in on the wellbein’ of this man or that. Boots on the boardwalks, scraping sand.
The big sandstorm not long back had left piles ‘a sand deep enough the boardwalks got lost. This one needed cleanin’, but at least the walkin’ space was still there.
A set of boots went quiet, nearby, and someone put a hand on the back of her neck, turnin’ her and pulling her across the carpet. Same instinct her feet had to stay under her, her hand went to the slip of knives she wore on her back, bringing it up and around even as she turned. Weren’t the first time this had happened to her in Lawrence, and it wouldn’t be the last.
A hand found her wrist, blocked her arm out, then Jimmy’s mouth was on hers.
She pushed him away.
“Dammit, Jimmy, next time you do that, I ain’t apologizin’ when I scrape your spine by way of your belly button.”
He shook her wrist and she let the knife drop, and he pulled her against him again, kissing her harder.
His hand was looking for her skin, buried under too many layers of sand-blocking fabric for there to be much hope of it, and she twisted her face away again.
“What’s got into you, Lawson?”
Gray eyes, intense, close, as he looked at her face.
“There was no way you could have made it here, after you left,” he said. “Merlin came in and told us there was a sandstorm coming, said the kid put you out on your horse not ten minutes before, and that…” He blinked, letting the grip on the back of her neck ease slightly. “I know how to read a sandstorm. You shouldn’t have left the house. How did you not see it coming? How are you not dead?”
She gave him a flicker of a smile, saucy.
“I’m Sarah Todd.”
“You shouldn’t have gone out.”
“The weddin’,” she said. “They came at the weddin’. Someone’s tryin’ to send us a message, Jimmy.”
He shook his head, pressing his forehead against hers.
“I don’t care. I spent the last day thinking you were dead. That I’d never even find you.” He closed his eyes, and she closed her own, knowing that feeling. Normally, when it had happened in the past, she’d been right.
