Ever Onward

by Wayne Mee

  There, bound and gagged, was Blade.

  “Where the fuck are they?!”, Snake hissed.

  Bull shrugged. He didn’t know where Blade or Flame was. He didn’t even know where he was. And right now he didn’t give a shit. He was hungry and thirsty and tired. His head ached like a bastard and his leg hurt worse than his head. All he knew for sure was that he wanted to be anywhere else but up here! High places made him want to puke.

  Snake thrust a rifle at him and then shoved him up the trail. Snake was no nice guy. He sometimes pretended to be, but Bull knew that inside Snake was a sack of shit.

  “Move out, lard-ass,” Snake growled. “I’m right behind you!”

  Bull shuffled forward. Every step sent rivers of pain up his leg. The narrow trail blurred. He shook his head, but the pounding only increased. Dizziness became nausea. His tongue felt too big for his mouth, his lips dry and cracked. Without a warning, he up-chucked on his boots.

  Then Rings was before him, hovering in the air, smiling, holding out a cold beer. Behind her the rock looked like a witch’s face. Bull blinked and Rings was gone. But she’d come back. All he had to do was follow. Despite the pain, he started to jog up the slope.

  “Hey! Wait up, Bull!” Snake’s voice sounded like a dry rasp.

  Bull kept on jogging.

  Cursing, Snake ran after him, his beergut bouncing with each labored step.

  Eddy watched from his hiding place as Bull shuffled past. His thumb rested near the safety of his rifle. The scope attached to it dug into his chest, his knees hurt from squatting and he had to take a leak.

  ‘Time enough for that later, Eddy-boy,’ he said to himself. ‘One false move now and you could be leaking blood!’

  Snake came next, breathing hard and sweating like the pig he was. Eddy fought down the urge to step out and shoot the bugger in the back. Not because Snake didn’t deserve it, but because that wasn’t the plan. He had no idea where the others were. Blade had gone by a couple of minutes ago, then Flame. Eddy hadn’t heard a damned thing.

  The seconds dragged by. Then the shot came, followed by Josh’s voice. Eddy leapt forward and nearly fell on his face. His bloody knees had cramped up! Cursing under his breath, Eddy started up the path, his Daddy’s old deer rifle held ready across his chest.

  Rounding a bend, he saw Bull and Snake less than thirty yards away standing in a dip in the trail, guns raised, seeking something to shoot. Rocks rose up steeply before them and on both sides. Snake glanced back down the path and saw Eddy. The .44 Redhawk boomed, the sound all but deafening in the confined space. A chip of granite broke off near Eddy’s head and fell to the ground. Eddy did the same, only needing a moment to find Snake’s heaving chest through his scope.

  Josh’s voice spoke again. Eddy presumed he was using what Jessie referred to his ‘teacher’s voice’. “Drop it, asshole! I won’t tell you again!”

  Flame, her mind awhirl, looked at Blade moving closer to her. Something was wrong. He was supposed to be tied. An object glittered in his hand and her wrists were suddenly free. Her gag vanished. He pressed his mouth to her ear and whispered.

  “We’re getting out of here, Babe. Just you and me. But first we need a few things.”

  Then he was gone, moving like a shadow through the rocks. She looked up and saw a large hound watching her, its brown eyes puzzled. Was it real? Everything seemed fuzzy, dreamlike. In a daze, she walked over to the dog, her head pounding. A rough, wet tongue licked her hand. A tail wagged.

  Then she heard the shot. It sounded like Snake’s Redhawk. Both she and the dog ran toward it. Coming round a slab of rock, she saw two strangers below her, one on each side of the spot where she had been jumped earlier. Using the rocks for cover, they were both aiming down into the circular depression where Snake and Bull stood in the open. A third one, the guitar player, was higher up on the far side.

  Then another movement caught her eye. Off to the left Blade was suddenly standing behind the blonde haired girl, his small, razor-sharp Boot knife pressed to her throat. Flame, still feeling like she was caught in some weird dream, felt rather than heard the world take on an otherworldly like stillness. Then Snake’s arrogant voice shattered it all.

  “Well, Hayseed! Looks like we got ourselves a real Mexican fucking stand-off! You kill me, my main man there kills your woman! So what say we both back off, eh? Give things a chance to cool down.”

  Eddy, still sighting on Snake, heard Josh call out his name.

  “Eddy! You still have Snake in your sights?”

  “Sure thing, Josh! Lined up in the cross-hairs!”

  “I’m going to count to five,” Josh replied; “Five, Eddy. Then you put one in his chest! Back or front, it doesn’t maker --- just bring the bastard down!”

  “No problem, boss!”

  Snake, trying in vain to locate Eddy, danced around behind Bull.

  “Still got him?”, Josh asked.

  “Better than ever!”, Eddy lied, Bull now completely blocking his view.

  “One!”, Josh said coldly.

  “Wait a fucking minute!”, Snake screamed, then turned to Blade, high above him and still holding a knife to Tina’s throat.

  “Blade! For Christ sake, DO SOMETHING!”

  Flame saw Blade smile. It was not a pleasant sight. It stirred distant memories best left undisturbed.

  “I am, Snake!”, Blade yelled back. “I’m hauling my ass out of here. Flame’s coming with me. What you do is your fucking problem!”

  “Two!”, Josh said.

  Snake glared around him, the heavy Readhawk now held tightly by both hands. He could see the barrel Josh’s rifle pointed at him but little else. Brad was even harder to see, just a shadow high up on the far side. Where this Eddy asshole was he hadn’t a clue!

  “Blade, you stupid fuck! Get a gun and shoot that prick!”

  Blade laughed. To Flame it suddenly sounded like her Daddy’s laugh. Another memory best left buried.

  “Why should I, Snake?”, Blade demanded. “What’ve you ever done for me besides try to screw my old lady?!”

  “Three!” Josh’s voice sent a shiver down both Snake’s and Flame’s spine.

  “You can have here, Blade!”, Snake yelled. “I swear it, man! You can have them both! Just get me out of here!”

  Blade chuckled dryly, then swung Tina round so he was looking at Josh over her shoulder.

  “You heard him, Hayseed. Tell your boys to back off! The knife at Tina’s throat glittered in the sun.

  Josh looked up to Billy’s position twenty feet above Brad. Something silver flashed in the sun. The longhaired youth was sighting down the long barrel of his overlarge handgun. Josh knew the target would be Blade’s head, but he also knew that Billy didn’t have a chance in hell of making the shot. Maybe if he had a rifle, but with that hand cannon he’d either miss completely or kill them both. Maybe Brad could take Blade out, but a rock outcropping blocked his cousin’s line of sight.

  Then he saw Flame standing midway between Blade and Billy. Instantly Josh decided to try the bluff he had first used on The Dude back in Crown Point. “Billy, you hear me?”

  “Sure do Mr. Williams.”

  “Then listen up! Shoot AT the red-head! Don’t hit her, Billy! Not YET! Just fire at the rocks BESIDE her! Now, Billy --- NOW!”

  Billy’s Python was almost as big as Snake’s Redhawk. Out in the open it sounded like a bloody cannon.

  The heavy slug ricocheted off the rock a hands width from Flame’s right ear. He’d been aiming at another rock a yard to her left.

  Josh played his next card. “Well, Blade, what’s it going to be? The next one can be right between her eyes --- or yours! But if you let Tina go, both you and the red-head can walk away.”

  “Don’t fucking believe him, Blade!”, Snake screamed. “The bugger will kill us all!”

  “Hey, Eddy,”, Josh casually called out.

  “Ya, Josh?”

  “Four!”

  Cursing, Snake backed up aga
inst the rock wall, pulling a confused Bull with him. Eddy’s shot was now completely blocked. Blade, sweat running down his narrow face, backed over toward Flame. Just behind them the land fell away for a thousand feet.

  “She’s got a gun on her, Babe. Get it!”

  Feeling like she was trapped in some never-ending nightmare, Flame fumbled the Glock Lightweight 9 mm out of Tina’s small belt holster. It looked like a child’s toy.

  “Good!”, Blade growled. “Now, shoot those fuckers!”

  What must have only been seconds seemed to stretch out forever. Then a small, distant voice, as though it came from far away or perhaps long ago, spoke. “No.” Flame was surprised to find it had been her own.

  “What?!”, Blade demanded, disbelief written on his sharp features. “Shoot them now!”

  “I... can’t. I... I won’t!”

  Blade turned toward her, his eyes wild. Her father’s eyes. Her father’s face. Her father’s voice. “Shoot them or I’ll slit her fucking throat!”

  “No.”

  “Do it, Babe, or I’ll do her!”

  “No you won’t,” Flame hissed, raising the small gun and pointing it at Blade’s head.

  “Five!”, Josh yelled.

  A number of guns went off at the same time. Eddy shot at Snake while Snake blasted away at Josh. Brad fired at Bull who fired at Billy who fired at Flame. For her part, Flame shot her lover point blank in the face. Three of the bullets found their marks. Snake was hit in the shoulder, Bull in the heart and Blade right between the eyes.

  Bull died instantly, Brad’s 30-30 slug entering the left breast and exiting through the big man’s right hip. As for Blade, his lower forehead now had a neat 9 mm hole in it. The back of his head, however, was gone. Punched back by the impact, his dead arms released both the knife and Tina as he stepped off into empty space. The body bounced twice before it finally came to rest far below the Witch’s Face. The old stone crone seemed to smile.

  With a very large hole in his shoulder and Bull’s two hundred plus body pinning him to the ground, Snake wasn’t going anywhere. He still had his gun however, and as everyone there knew, a snake is at its most dangerous when cornered.

  Stepping back from the edge of the draw where Snake lay bleeding, Josh turned both his attention and his rifle on Flame. He needn’t have bothered. She had slumped down, gazing over the long fall that had claimed her lover. Tina’s pistol lay at her feet. Both Jessie and Ken moved in beside her. The dogs were with them. Ken had his target gun out. Jessie still carried his bow. Og ran forward and licked her hand.

  Billy had reached Tina and now sat with his arm around her. Brad worked his way cautiously around to his son while Jessie moved down to stand beside his father. Eddy soon joined them. All three glanced at the depression. Out of sight twenty feet below them they could hear Snake’s heavy breathing.

  “What do we do now, Josh?”, Eddy asked. “Leave the snake in its pit?”

  All three of them were thinking of the man Eddy had leg shot back at the barricade less than a week ago. It seemed like years. Josh suddenly turned away and dug out his pipe. ‘Christ!’, he thought. ‘How many times am I going to have to do this?!’

  ‘As many times as you need to,’ came the answer. The silent voice in his head sounded a hell of a lot like Doc Gruber’s.

  “Look out!”, Billy suddenly screamed, groping for his massive Python. Tina, sitting with Earls old .303 across her knees, was even faster.

  Both Eddy and Jess had their backs to the gully where Snake lay dying. As they turned, they saw the heavy .44 magnum already over the rocky lip. Snake’s head followed; face twisted with pain, eyes wild with rage. Even as they swung around, they heard the metallic click of the hammer being pulled back.

  Josh had faced that gun once before and lived. This time however, he didn’t feel so lucky. Yet his son stood close beside him, and he had to do something. Shoving Jessie aside, Josh began to raise his 30-30.

  The sound of three guns going off was the last thing he heard.

  Chapter 18: ‘A LEOPARD’S SPOTS’

  Green Leaf Hut

  The White Mountains

  New HampshireJuly 3rd

  Brad sat in a rocking chair on the front porch of the hut reading a well thumbed Western. Something by Max Brand called ‘Blood Red Spurs’. The gunslinger-hero had just saved the beautiful and very well endowed dance hall queen from the usual ‘fate worse than death’. Scarface Calhoon’s men had just tried to pork her on the bar. Old Max had put it a little more delicately than that but Brad had always liked to call a spade a spade. Naturally our hero had saved the day. Old Max had thrown in a well-used twist to the humdrum plot however; the hero had taken a slug in the arm. Naturally the buxom beauty was nursing him back to health.

  Brad tossed the novel aside. Most books rarely had fuck all to do with real life, even though ‘Blood Red Spurs’ did have an odd kind of parallel to their own situation. Getting up, he went inside to check on his cousin.

  Josh’s head was wrapped in torn sheets. Dried blood had stained his left temple again all the way around to his ear. The face, usually so intense and tanned, now looked pale and drawn. But he was still breathing, which was one hell of a lot more than Brad expected three days ago.

  Snake’s bullet had struck the side of Josh’s head just a split second before his own exploded. Both Billy and Tina had fired at the same time. It was impossible to say which one had killed him. Maybe they both had.

  Anyway, the bastard was dead and Josh was alive and that was what counted.

  It had taken them till well past dark to reach Greenleaf Hut. Carrying Josh’s unconscious, bleeding body on a litter made from packs, they had struggled the rest of the way up Mt. Lafayette and then the long mile down to the hut. Thank God for flashlights! Josh had lain there for nearly three days now and hadn’t woken yet.

  Out of the corner of his eye Brad saw the book, lying on the floor near some hiker’s boots whose owner had shuffled off to that great trek in the sky. His mind turned back to it, mentally ticking off the similarities between the novel’s plot and their present plight. There were quite a few.

  Asshole Gulch, or wherever the story had taken place, was a long, hard ride from the bunkhouse they now found themselves in; yet, perched on a bare nob of rock some 4,000 plus feet above their vehicles at the Ranger’s Cabin, they were as cut off from the rest of the world as you could get! (Not that there was a hell of a lot of the world left to be ‘cut off’ from!)

  Brad pushed THAT little tid-bit away and went back to the book.

  Asshole Gulch had a drunken piano player. Out in the main room he could hear Billy plinking away on an old guitar he’d found. One of the dead kitchen crew must have been a music lover, though Billy swore the instrument wasn’t worth shit.

  Asshole Gulch had a dewy-eyed ‘perty y’ung thang’ that slaved away cooking ten-pound steaks for the hungry cowboys. Brad could smell flap-jacks cooking in the kitchen. Jessie, Kenneth and the two dogs were eagerly waiting to gobble up anything and everything Tina placed before them. Tina had spent two summers working in these huts and was as much at home making bread as carrying a fifty pound sack of flour up a trail.

  Every Western also has its ‘nice guy’, someone to hold things together while the hero was off doing whatever it is heroes do when they’re not saving the day. ‘Blood Red Spurs’ had been no different. Phinious T. Potter had run the local newspaper. Brad, being the only business man in the bunch, supposed he qualified for the role. Eddy seemed typecast for the role of the hero’s sidekick; honest, brave and loyal.

  But when it came to the dance hall queen with the heart of gold beating beneath a magnificent chest, they had a problem. Flame, though she did have a magnificent pair of knockers, didn’t quite fit the bill.

  She’d ridden with the bad guys. She’d also been ridden by the bad guys! Brad thought that even old Max-the-Brand himself would have one hell of a time with THAT little plot twist!

  Sitting there looki
ng out at the rugged moonscape of Mt. Lafayette, Brad let his mind continue to drift. After the fight, Flame had been in a kind of trance. True, two days of struggling up a mountain with no food and water and then shooting your lover in the head, might tend to put anyone’s mood off somewhat; yet right after Josh had been shot, she seemed to snap out of it and want to help. She said she had some ‘first hand knowledge of gunshot wounds’ and did a good job of stopping the bleeding.

  Later, between swigging water and chewing on pepperoni, she’d gladly taken her turn with the litter. Once they reached the hut, she’d help clean and dress his wounds again. She had even sat up with Tina for the last two nights taking turns watching over him.

  Yesterday, when Brad had shooed them all outside so he could give Josh a sponge bath and change his sheets, Flame had raced the boys up to the top of Lafayette. And won! Later he’d seen Jessie showing her how to use his bow. Kenneth, Jessie and her had ‘gone hunting’ after that and damned if they didn’t come back with a rabbit! Kenneth had hit it with his .22 target pistol. The three of them had come whooping and hollering back up the trail like a band of Indians, though even Brad had to admit, in her cut-off jeans and sweat-stained t-shirt, Flame looked like one sexy Pocahontas!

  The implications of that last thought shocked him. Bloody Hell! His cousin had been shot by a maniac, his wife and daughter had been turned to ashes not two weeks ago, the whole fucking world had gone to hell, and here he was ogling a motorcycle whore who shot her lovers in the head!

  He didn’t think of Tina that way, and she was young and cute and ---

  Cautiously he examined that thought a little more, worrying over it like a sore tooth. Shock, he reasoned. They were all still in a state of shock. Jesus H. Christ! They’d just gone through the end of the world and topped that off with a shoot-out with a psychopath and his gang! Little wonder he looked around longingly for a little love and kindness. Flame’s sexuality could be nothing more than his reaffirmation of life, a way of convincing himself that he was still alive.