“It doesn’t matter,” said Little Guy #3. “None of them would talk to us anyway.”
“You’re the first human who was willing to have a conversation,” said Little Guy #1 mournfully.
I wasn’t really paying attention to them. “Even if you did hire a gunslinger,” I said, “where would you hold the shootout?”
“In our village,” said Little Guy #2.
I looked at him. “Really? Because your town is as small as you are, right?”
They nodded. In unison. Again. I was beginning to find that creepy.
“Two gunslingers would stomp your town to pieces before the first shot got fired,” I said. “I mean, have you looked at the size of human feet?”
I instantly regretted that question. Fortunately, they hadn’t heard it. Instead, they leaned on each other, and Little Guy #3 began to cry.
“We’re going to be troll slaves,” he said. “I would rather die. But I can’t die. I don’t want to be a troll slave.”
The others patted him on the back and murmured something that I couldn’t hear. But they weren’t being soothing or at least, they weren’t being successfully soothing, because he didn’t look soothed.
“Does this meeting of the champions have to occur in your town?” I asked.
Little Guy #1 raised his tiny head and frowned at me. “Why?”
“Because,” I said, “I have an idea that just might solve your problem.”
~ * ~
And that was how I ended up in a one-horse town in a part of the Great State of California that made the butt-end of nowhere look like New York City. I’d like to say I didn’t know that places like this existed, but that’s not true since I’m the one who suggested it to the little men.
It was high noon. I stood in the center of the main street wearing a pair of my brother’s discarded breeches, a loose cotton shirt, a vest with two bandoliers stuffed with bullets of all types crisscrossed over my chest, and my trusty six-shooters on each hip. I can shoot equally well with either hand, unlike any other prizewinning shooter I know. I wore a hat pulled down over my forehead, and I waited for my opponent to appear.
The little men and their little families sat on the wooden rails that separated the wooden sidewalks from the dirt street. There must’ve been a thousand little people, looking like birds on a rooftop, watching and chattering and all wearing hats with one tiny feather.
The big people were all inside the various buildings, mostly the five saloons that dotted the main drag, drinking charmed beer and unable to come outside. I didn’t ask what magic made that possible, although I did ask if the charmed beer would hurt them. It seemed the charmed beer made them all very, very happy and very, very forgetful.
I wasn’t sure exactly what they had to forget.
Until the trolls showed up.
You don’t forget moving gray boulders. Particularly when they were ugly gray boulders with craggy features and massive arms that reached all the way to the ground. They had hands the size of horse’s heads and teeth that made the little men’s look like metal shavings.
As these creatures approached, the ground shook like it did in a cattle stampede. Everything bounced, everything moved. Wafting ahead of them was a great stink, like a thousand million buffalo rotting in the sun.
If the little men had trouble hiring a gunslinger, I had no idea how these massive creatures managed to hire one. As I saw them approach, I wanted to turn and run.
But I didn’t. I held my ground. (All right. Technically, I was rooted there.) I watched as this lumbering gray stinky mountain of troll flesh approached, and I wondered how the hell I could get out of there.
And then I saw the human man in the center. He was tall, whip thin, and dressed in black. He walked at the head of that column of stench like it didn’t bother him at all.
Next to him stood an ethereally beautiful creature seemingly made of light. The creature wasn’t human—it was too bright, too lovely—but it wasn’t an angel either, because it had no wings. Its hair was long and silver, and it wore some kind of gray robe. It would have blended into the gray troll army if it weren’t for that brightness, which made it hard for me to take my gaze off the thing.
The trolls stopped on the outskirts of the one-horse town, just like the little men told me they would. It wasn’t that they had to be invited in (apparently some creatures are like that), it was more that they didn’t want to overwhelm the spectators with their stink. Or maybe they didn’t want to scare me off.
Or maybe they were shy.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because the man in black kept walking toward me, and that was when I realized—
“Hey!” he said at that same moment. “Those are my pants.”
Yep. It was my brother, Kid Vicious. Only he didn’t look like his usual slovenly self. That black outfit made him look both older and thinner and almost dapper. The guns on each of his hips had mother-of-pearl inlay grips and his boots were as shiny as the ethereal creature at his side.
The creature, who had a long, bony and somewhat homely face (from this distance), moved to the sidewalk, displacing maybe five dozen little families.
“Renn!” he said as he stopped, feet spread. “What the hell—heck—hell—ah, heck—heck are you doing here?”
I swallowed. “I thought I was going to have a shootout with a bad guy.”
“Oh, God, Renn,” he said, and turned toward the ethereal creature. “I can’t fight her. She’s not just a woman, she’s my sister.”
The boulders behind him rippled. I guessed that meant they had some kind of reaction, but from my vantage, I couldn’t quite tell what it was. The ethereal creature raised its head and glared at my brother.
“Besides,” my brother said plaintively. My brother was only plaintive with authority figures. When he was being Kid Vicious, the West’s Second Most Famous Kid Gunfighter, he wasn’t plaintive at all. “If we go through with this, she’ll win. She’s the one who taught me how to shoot.”
The ethereal creature raised its hand and my brother jerked forward. Then his arm went for his gun, even as his face squinched in disapproval.
It was shoot or be shot, so I grabbed my trusty six-shooter from my left holster, raised the gun in one quick motion, and shot the shit out of that ethereal creature off to the side.
As it tap-danced its way off the sidewalk, my brother tapped and jerked too. His mouth moved, he shook his head, and his gun went off.
The bullet hit me before I could move out of the way. It felt like one of those boulders had landed on my chest. I flew backwards and landed on my back, my remaining air knocked out of me.
Ralphie screamed and ran toward me. The area got lighter and I thought for a minute I was going to pass out.
“Renn, Renn, Renn,” he said as he got to my side. He put some kind of filthy cloth on my vest, pushing down on the wound. “I didn’t mean it. Talk to me, Little—”
“Shut up,” I said. Or whispered. Or breathed. It was an effort, whatever I did to make the sound come out. I just didn’t want him to say my full name.
Ralphie never was the sharpest knife in the drawer.
“They had me prisoner. I was magicked.” He was pressing hard. It hurt, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of the pressure or because of the damn wound. “You broke it somehow, Renn. I’m so, so sorry.”
I broke it with the silver bullets I had in my left-handed trusty six-shooter. My right-handed trusty six-shooter had regular normal lead bullets. I just figured a girl had to be prepared, so I spent the previous day with Old Gus, making bullets of every single kind I could think of and every single material that was mentioned in those stories I had read in all of those books.
“Leave her,” the little men said as they crowded around me. “She’s ours now.”
Some were climbing on my boots and I knew they would pull the damn things off. Apparently toe jam to them is as delicious—and rare—as chocolate is for us.
Some of them
started climbing Ralphie and he was batting them away with one hand, loosening the pressure on my chest.
“You have to save her,” he said.
“They can’t,” I managed. My heart’s desire wasn’t to live. My heart’s desire was to be taken as seriously as a man, to be recognized for my strength and skill just like a man, to be—
“Of course they can,” Ralphie said. “They owe you three wishes.”
“Wrong kind of creature,” I said.
“Heck, no,” he said. “I’ve spent the past month with all kinds of very strange magical folk, and believe me, they owe you three wishes.”
I saw Little Guy #3 gingerly avoiding the bullets crosscrossing my chest. “Is that true?” I wheezed.
He froze and I could see on his beakish little face that it was.
“You mean you were going to cheat me of two wishes?” I said, then started to cough blood. “My heart’s desire is a wish, right?”
He nodded, reluctantly.
“You cheating little snake.” I sprayed blood on him. I was dying. Tears were running down Ralphie’s cheeks.
“We don’t owe you anything,” Little Guy #3 said. “We own you, Renn Visch.”
He said my name like it had magic. Ralphie went white, and I realized someone had said those words to him. That was how he had gotten ensnared. (That and probably the charmed beer.)
“That’s not my real name,” I said or rather gurgled. The blood was getting thick inside my mouth, which now tasted of rust.
Little Guy #3 looked horrified.
“Three wishes,” I managed. “First, heal this wound.”
Little Guy #3 glared at me, then glared at my brother, and then waved his tiny fist.
I could breathe. Whatever had been on my chest or in my chest or near my chest was gone. The blood wasn’t, though, and I spit out a whole pile of it onto the dirt around me. My shirt clung to my healthy chest.
“Ask for riches, ask for riches, ask for riches,” my brother repeated.
Anyone who asked for money in all the old stories got screwed. And I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to make sure I beat the system. But I tried anyway.
“Make my parents wealthy,” I said.
“Noooooo,” Ralphie said. “You should’ve done it for us too.”
Little Guy #3 waved his fist again. I had no idea if the wish was granted, but I had to assume it was.
“And finally,” I said, “grant me three more wishes.”
All of the little creatures raised their little heads and their little feathers bobbed in the little wind created by the little movement. For an instant, time stopped, and I thought I had truly screwed up for a moment.
Then Little Guy #3 waved his fist and said, “Done.”
“But,” said another little man, and I had to assume that was Little Guy #1, “our power isn’t limitless. You must wait a day to wish again.”
I had no trouble with that. I knew the pitfalls. I had to wipe the words “I wish” from my vocabulary, and I had to think before I spoke.
My brother was cackling like he had gotten extra wishes, but he hadn’t.
“Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s get out of here.”
He helped me get up. Little people fell off me like fleas off a mangy dog. I realized as I stood that the reason it had gotten light earlier was the boulder blockade was gone. The trolls had vanished when it became clear that their champion had forfeited.
We staggered out of that one-horse town and headed home.
When we were finally free of the little people, I said to Ralphie, “What was that creature? The one I shot?”
“He said he was an elf. But I don’t think so. They called him fae. I don’t know what that is, but you made him explode. I don’t think he’ll bother me again.”
As we walked (staggered) Ralphie confirmed what had happened. He met the fae/elf in a bar after too many (charmed) beers and told the fae/elf his real name, which enslaved him. I broke the enslavement when I killed (exploded?) the fae/elf.
He’d been with them at least a month, maybe more. And there I’d been cursing him for drinking, carousing, and not coming home while he’d been living among the trolls, never getting used to their stink.
“That was some shooting,” he said.
“I was the one who taught you how,” I snapped.
“Yeah,” he said with admiration. My brother wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was loyal. “We have to come with a nickname for you, Little—”
I put my finger on his lips. “Don’t say that. Ever.”
It took him a minute to understand what I meant. Renn was my name so far as outsiders thought. But inside my family, from the moment I was born, I had a different name. One given to me by my whimsical father, who thought I looked like a small brown bird.
I had three names, only one of which made it onto the rolls, and on that, it was misspelled.
“Yeah, all right, got it,” Ralphie said, and I sure as hell hoped he wouldn’t say it if the time ever came again.
We made it home, and I thought Ma would give me holy hell for wearing breeches, but she didn’t even notice. Instead, she was sitting on the porch, staring at a pile of gold coins and crying.
Guess that second wish came true, just like the first.
Which meant that the third had come true too, so I had to be extra careful, and I had to choose my two fresh wishes per day wisely. I figured I’d mess up eventually, but until then, I had a series of wishes to get through.
And the first would be that Ralphie would forget my real name. I still don’t know the second.
But I will always know the third.
<>
~ * ~
SHOWDOWN AT HIGH MOON
Jennifer Brozek
T here’s never enough, is there?” Mena asked
I with a sigh as she watched the night sky.
“Of course there will be. We’ll have what we need,” Will said. He stopped counting the money from their latest coach robbery and shifted around the low campfire to sit next to the love of his life. “We’ll get married, go west and claim our homestead.” He pointed across the plains. “Out there is our future. There’s a farm just waiting for us to come get it. Just as soon as we’ve got the seed money, we’ll go.”
She smiled at him. “All right. Then the ‘Star-crossed Bandits’ can disappear into legend, never to be heard from again.”
He gave her a peck on the cheek. “That’s my girl. I’m going to make all our dreams come true.”
~ * ~
Mena Scott. Will Brogan. Wanted for robbery. We would speak with you.
As Mena sat up with a jerk, her gun already in her hand and looking for a target, she saw that Will had woken up in the same manner. Both of them squinted at the flashes of bright light twinkling at the edge of their camp, confused as the rising sun pulled shadows from the surrounding land.
Will Brogan. Mena Scott. We would speak with you. We mean you no harm.
The voice, without inflection, reminded Will of a Chinaman learning to speak English by rote. Within the flashing lights he could see things hovering on the edge of the camp, but not the silhouette of a lawman as expected. He blinked again. The things looked like bejeweled metal teacup saucers.
“Will, it’s them.” Mena gestured to the flying things. “They’re talking.”
“I see that.” He raised his voice at them. “Speak to us about what? And would you stop flashing the light in our eyes?”
Immediately scores upon scores of the flying things stopped hovering and landed on the ground. One of them, one almost the size of a soup bowl but as flat as the rest, landed just inside the camp. Not quite sure of what to point her gun at, Mena lowered her weapon and looked at the thing next to her foot. It was silver, edged with flickering jewels on its rim, and adorned with a bronze, maybe gold, top that had an engraving on it. The engraving was something she recognized. “A scarab,” she murmured to Will.
The thing within their camp b
egan to hover again. It slowly rose to eye level.
Scarab is an acceptable classification, Mena Scott. We would speak of hiring you for a job.
Mena and Will looked at each other. She nodded to him, letting him take the lead. He lowered his revolver. “Just Will and Mena, if you please. Hire. For what?”
Mena and Will, you are wanted for multiple robberies. You are not wanted for murder. We would have something stolen. We would not have humans killed.
Westward Weird Page 17
