"A Fistful of Bad Guys, and an Ugly"
(Science fiction/Western)

David Riley's Science Fiction Trails is a niche magazine if ever there was one: He wants science-fiction stories that are set in, or somehow relate to, the Old West. Everything from steampunk to aliens visiting Deadwood, he looks for a meshing of the two genres.

I've never written a Western, but it sounded like fun, especially with an SF twist to it. One thing I hadn't counted on was the research I'd be doing to get the times, dates, and fine details right.

I did get one stunningly negative review for this one. The reviewer was clearly offended by the almost-rape that doesn't quite take place in the story. I don't think it was as graphic and nonchalant as he seemed to think it is, and its whole purpose was to show how bad the bad guys were and how helpless the other characters were. But if you get your panties in a bunch over stuff like that, better skip reading this. Better yet, don't skip it, and unbunch your panties. There just might be a good story in there somewhere. But maybe not.
 

"A Fistful of Bad Guys, and an Ugly"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick

I packed up everything I owned, which fit into one suitcase, and left Pennsylvania for Elmworth City, Nevada—one of those Manifest Destiny settlements that was supposed to become an urban oasis in the Great Wild West. I was in search of adventure, and thought a thriving frontier city would be a good place to start.

After several smoky train trips and one long, dusty stagecoach ride, I realized that calling it a city was merely positive thinking. It consisted of a few dozen buildings in the main town and six dozen homesteads in a three-mile radius. It was a rugged place in a hostile, alien world, built through the sweat and tears of frontier settlers determined to make it succeed.

There I was, a young piano player without a single half-dime in my pocket to take me any further. I hadn’t had the gumption to run out to California like the rest of those get-rich-now panners who flocked there after gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, and thought instead that a growing frontier city would be the place for a talented musician to make his coin. Elmworth City wasn’t what I’d expected, but I could play the piano like nobody else, and certainly better than those mechanical player pianos that came along a few years later. Besides, no roll of paper can ever bring soul and feeling out of a piano like a man can.

As it happened, the saloon in Elmworth had lost its piano player just the week before and needed another one. I went into the Happy Whore and found its proprietor, a right fine man name of Silas North, and asked about the job. I figured I could work there a while and earn enough money to go to California after all—to San Francisco, a real city, and to hell with the frontier life.

He sort of looked me up and down as he was wiping whiskey glasses clean with a cotton cloth and said, “This is a shit-hole bar in the middle of nowhere, son. You don’t want no job here, kid like you.”

I told him I did, and that I’d spent all the money I had to get there. He said, “You know why I lost my piano player last week?”

“I do not, sir,” I said.

“Poor Jimmy was killed, right where he sat,” he said, gesturing with his eyes at the piano against the wall. “All because Blackheart John wanted him to play ‘Long Night in Raleigh.’”

“Then if Blackheart John wants me to play that song, I will,” I said.

“Jimmy didn’t refuse to play it. Blackheart John shot him through the heart because the unfortunate bastard just didn’t know how to play it.”

“Well, I know it,” I said.

He furrowed his brow and set the clean glass down on the bar, leaning in closer to me. “What’s a young feller like you trying to find a career playing piano in some whorehouse bar way out here?”

“I’m just looking for a little adventure, sir—looking for something different than working a farm in Pennsylvania.”

He cracked a grin then, and we bantered about for a while, and to make this a short story, he hired me. I’d play piano in the evenings, but I’d help out in general around the place the rest of the time. As it turned out, Blackheart John had led his gang of outlaws through Elmworth looking for trouble, and found it. After gunning down the the town marshal and his two deputies, he got drunk at the Whore, where he shot Jimmy. There were already a new marshal and deputies. All the town needed was me to bring some music to the place.

Inside a few weeks, I knew everyone, including Silas’ beautiful daughter, Merry, spelled just like that. Merry Anna North worked in her daddy’s saloon—not as a whore, thankfully—and it didn’t take long for us to get sweet on each other. She was sixteen, four years my junior, pretty as a picture with alabaster skin, beautiful golden curls, and bright eyes that sparkled like ice crystals under a street lamp. Every time she looked at me and smiled, it sent tickling shivers up my spine and through my groin.

After two months, we shared our first kiss, and we were hopelessly in love. Hell, I’d even held onto my virginity—in a brothel full of whores who constantly enticed me—because my heart belonged to Merry. We smooched secretly wherever we could, usually in the back room, where Silas kept his kegs and bottles. It was one such session, wrapped in each other’s arms as I wrestled with the pleasant demons of lust, when Merry pulled away and said, “Do you love me, Jack?”

“I certainly do,” I said, breathless.

“Then why haven’t you yet asked me to marry you?”

“I plan to. I’m just waiting for a bit, that’s all.”

“Please, don’t wait too long,” she said. “If you marry me, then we can go back to Pennsylvania and work on your daddy’s farm, and... do more than just kiss.”

“I promise we will,” I said. “But not just yet. I can’t go back home without some kind of adventure to tell.”

“Well, you find that adventure real soon, Jack Payson,” she said with that pudgy-cheeked smile that drove me wild. “I just can’t wait!”

It couldn’t have been better timing, because Blackheart John came back to town that night. But we had another visitor that nobody could ever have expected.

#

The Happy Whore was busy that Saturday night, the townsfolk wanting to get all their sinning in so Reverend Morrill could save their souls for it the next morning. Everyone was in a good mood—sinning brings that out in people—and I was playing up a storm on that old piano. Nobody was too drunk, but if they started to get that way, Silas would direct them to the upstairs railing, which was lined with his ladies in short dresses and tall stockings. A trip upstairs for a few minutes sobered them up and put a few more dollars in Silas’ pocket, and then it was back downstairs for music, drinking, and darts.

Merry was behind the bar with her father, arguing about not wanting the unfortunate task of emptying the spittoons, when gunshots sounded outside in the street. Everyone stopped talking, I stopped playing, and we all spun about to look at the batwing doors.

We heard the horses clopping down the dark, dusty street, heard the whooping and hollering of their riders, heard them reining up and dismounting. Ben Deering, a rancher from the other side of Trump Hill, who was closest to the front window, hurried over and peered out. When he spun back, his face was as white as his widened eyes.
“It’s Blackheart John!” he hissed. “He’s come back!”

“God damn that suffering bastard!” Silas spat, and he dug under his counter and came up with a big shotgun, which I knew was loaded and ready. “He’s not doing this again!”

“Put it away, Silas!” cried Louie Michaud. “There’s too many of them!” Louie was an old Maine sailor who’d given up fishing when New Yorkers and Bostonians decided they’d rather eat lobster. He’d come out here to retire, not to endure vicious outlaws shooting up his town.

Silas froze for a moment, but Merry tugged on his arm and begged him to listen. Outside, many men were tying up their horses. Then came the telltale sounds of boots clomping on the wooden porch that fronted the saloon, punctuated by the jangling of spurs.

“Put it away!” Ben Deering, our blacksmith, pleaded, and at the last moment, Silas bent over and stuffed the gun back under the counter. He was no sooner upright than the men appeared in the doorway.

Blackheart John pushed the batwing doors open and stepped in, and he was a frightening sight. He was damn near six feet and six inches, with shoulders broader than Samson. His outfit was as black as his heart was reputed: black, floor-length leather duster; a big black hat with the widest brim I’d ever seen; black shirt and pants; and black boots. His thick black hair was unkempt and wild, spilling over his shoulders and down his chest. He sported a handlebar mustache, and his face was dark with stubble. He looked like a giant Italian, with perhaps a bit of Chinese and Indian ancestry.

He brought a presence with him that chilled me to my bones, a feeling of pure evil that hung in the air like the stink of death. And I couldn’t help but recall with sheer terror the tales I’d head of what had happened to the last man sitting in my piano chair when Blackheart John had visited the Happy Whore.

He crossed the room toward the bar, his gang of eight thugs following. The word was Blackheart John had knocked off banks and stages all across the frontier lands, and those eight men would live and die at his command.

And then he stopped in the middle of the room, and slowly he turned, turned, turned... until he was looking right at me.

“I seem to remember killing you,” he said to me in a baritone voice that seemed from the throat of Satan himself. His black eyes smoldered like coals in the pits of Hell.

I didn’t soil myself, but I admit I leaked out a few drops of piss. You would have, too. I tried to answer, but didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t speak if I’d tried.

“You deaf, boy?” he growled at me, and his gang snickered.

I shook my head, my body trembling like a leaf in a storm.

“Then what do you say, boy?” he said. “Didn’t I kill you?”

And, God help me, I have no idea where my stupidity came from, but I said, “Obviously not, sir, because I’m sitting here alive.”

You could have heard a pin drop in that saloon.

Blackheart John squared his massive shoulders and flexed, and his duster opened and I saw the gigantic Colt Dragoons he wore low on his hips. In that moment I knew I was about to be shot dead. I was scared, but all I could think about was that Merry was going to have to watch it happen. I turned my head, unsteady across a shaky neck, to her and our eyes met, and in that look we both said I love you. Hell of a time to find adventure.

Blackheart John saw this, and he swiveled his head to her and broke into a lascivious smile. “Got yourself a lady, do you, boy? Maybe instead of shooting you with my gun... I’ll shoot your little lady with my other gun.”

His men laughed, and I knew what he meant, and I couldn’t let it happen, and so I came up out of my chair with the intention of saying something—anything—to bring his attention back to me—but Blackheart John was ready, and his reflexes were inhuman. He spun about and went for both of those big guns and they were out before I’d even taken a step. Twin thunderclaps sounded, and Merry screamed and I froze in place as the piano erupted in a discordant cacophony.

He’d fired on either side of me and into the piano. I think I pissed a little more then.

“You don’t move a muscle, boy,” he snarled as he holstered his two smoking revolvers. “You stand right there, and you watch me have my way with your lady. You even twitch a finger, and my boys’ll gun you down. Meanwhile, barkeep,” he said to Silas, “your new lawmen are out there dead in the street, so don’t you or anyone here think about fucking with us. So you pour us all shots of firewater and set out bottles of beer while I break the lady in.”
Silas was trembling, and I could tell he was weighing whether to go for his shotgun. It would be suicide to try, and we all knew it. But I knew he’d do it, because a father would have to try.

You could have heard another pin drop.

“You deaf, too, barkeep?” Blackheart John said. “Pour those damn drinks. And you, lady, get your wide ass out here.”

Merry laid her hand on her father’s arm, as if to comfort him or perhaps silently tell him not to risk what he was thinking, and she moved out from behind the bar. As soon as she was within Blackheart John’s reach, he grabbed her and threw her over a table as if she were a ragged scarecrow. As he hauled her dress up from behind and fiercely tore away her delicates, I realized that even if Silas dared to go for his shotgun, he couldn’t fire at the outlaw without hitting Merry with the spread. And me, just a piano-playing farmboy from Pennsylvania—I didn’t even own a gun to at least try to defend my love.

“Yeah, that’s the sweet gates of heaven, right there,” Blackheart John said with a deep chuckle as he reached for his buckle. “You hold right on, darling. This’ll be over soon. Then you can take care of my boys.”

They all whooped and cheered, and I saw my life about to come completely apart around me. I wanted adventure, but this wasn’t the adventure I wanted.

And from outside came the sound of boots clomping on wooden boards, with the jangling of spurs. At first, I thought it was another of Blackheart John’s men, but the gang all turned to see who it was, and even Blackheart John paused and turned, keeping his hand on the small of Merry’s back, as the shadowy form of the new arrival came into view above the batwing doors.

They slowly opened, and the stranger stepped in. Everyone gawked as the doors swung lazily back and forth on double-action hinges behind him.

“What in tarnation...?” Ben Deering tried, but even he was at a loss for words.

The stranger was less than six feet tall, and not particularly broad-shouldered. His clothes were like what any frontiersman might wear—a button-down shirt, brown sailcloth pants, brown boots, and a tan hat with a reasonable brim. And on his right hip, slung low to accommodate an unnaturally long arm, was a holstered gun. But all normalcy ended with his outfit.

His skin was green like the springtime leaves of apple trees, and his face was framed by long blue hair that looked as fine as corn silk. His bright-yellow eyes were as big as duck eggs and set at angles—not quite on the sides of his head, but not straight on, either, although his black pupils, tall and rectangular like a goat’s, faced forward. He had no nose, but tall, narrow nostrils, like two knife wounds, were set high between those eyes. His lipless mouth spanned his extra-wide jaw, and he had six fingers on each hand...

 

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

This new gunslinger is from out of town--from WAY out of town.

Get a copy of Science Fiction Trails #4 at www.ScienceFictionTrails.com.
 

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