Beyond the Pale

Part 14 —Coldwater Springs

Monday, 05 October 2009 19:19

Out of the corner of her eye, Vicky was aware of Landry’s hand moving toward his holster. To her consternation, she saw Taft not so much hesitate as deliberately pause, waiting for Landry’s hand to reach his pistol, for his gun to clear his holster. Goddamn Southern gallantry! she swore to herself. That, if nothing else, was bound to get him killed.  Suddenly the chiming of the clock was all but drowned out by the echoing report of gunshots, and Vicky realized with something akin to awe that Landry still hadn’t squeezed the trigger of his gun. With a curious twisting motion Taft had drawn his Schofield left-handed, only once he was certain his opponent had had the opportunity to draw first, and had fired two shots directly at Landry’s heart. The Marshall staggered under the impact of the bullets, and fell back a step, still gripping the butt of his gun tightly.

Victoria gaped. She’d never seen anyone move so blindingly fast in her entire life, nor, a small part of her said, had she ever thought she would. It simply wasn’t physically possible for a man of Taft’s size and bearing to move that quickly. Her mind balked at the very idea. Any further thoughts about Taft were pushed far from her mind a moment later, however, as she caught sight of Heywood Landry still standing in spite of the two bullets in his heart, his pistol held casually at arm’s length, as though he hadn’t a care in the world, carefully drawing a bead on Taft.

Taft, certain that he’d won the day, was already whirling to face Landry’s henchmen, who had popped out of their hiding-places and were training their rifles on the apparent victor of the duel.

He should be dead! Nothing can survive that... For the space of a breath Vicky didn’t move, paralyzed by horror and disbelief. There was no time to shout a warning: Taft’s attention was on what seemed the most obvious threat, his back turned to both her and Landry. She pulled her rifle to her shoulder and pointed it at the Marhsall, braced herself for the recoil as the Remington’s distinctive crack! rent the air.

Her shot hit Landry somewhere near the sternum just as his pistol went off, throwing him back several paces and destroying his aim. Taft gave a shrill yelp of pain as the bullet grazed his arm, and turned to stare in shock at the enemy he’d been convinced he’d killed not ten seconds before. Landry was still standing, bringing his pistol up yet again to aim it at Taft’s head.

“That’s not possible! You’re dead!” he shouted. Taft, as was his wont, sounded more outraged than frightened, although even from where she was standing Vicky could see he was shaking.

“Always a bit slow, weren’t you?” Landry rasped, cocking his gun.

Victoria had already cracked open the chamber of her gun without missing a beat, and was loading another bullet, praying she’d be quick enough to hit Landry again before he could shoot Taft again. Bullets were screaming through the aire at a furious rate now, as Monroe and, presumably, the Widow Smith and Jackson Blainey had joined the fray. From where she stood she could only see Monroe, crouched behind his rain barrel, firing his army-issue revolver calmly and methodically if not always entirely accurately. Vicky brought her rifle to her shoulder and fired again, the bullet catching Landry just below the stomach this time and making him lurch frther back. Why won’t he go down, dammit?

A bullet whined past her ear, and she ducked back behind the wall for cover, thanking her lucky stars that Landry’s lackeys were lousy shots. She reloaded again, stuck her head and the muzzle of her gun out the window and fired, beginning to feel thie impact of the recoil in her shoulder, and still Landry was showing now signs of feeling the onslaught, although by now he seemed to be trying to head for cover. Another bullet smacked into the wood above her head, splintering the window frame. Loading another bullet into her gun, she decided to address the more immediate problem of the sonofabitch who was taking potshots at her. She trained her sights on the man on the roof across the street and calmly picked him off. He fell soundlessly and landed in a broken heap in the muddy street. She smiled to herself: Remington rifles were unforgiving, whcih was why she liked them.

She reloaded quickly and looked out the window again in time to see Landry go down under a hail of bullets, his stocky figure crumpling slowly to the muddy ground. Gradually the last echoes of gunshots faded into silence. Vicky stood, glancing at the clock. Less than a minute had passed since the hour had struck. She’d never get used to how time seemed to slow during a gunfight. Slowly she slung her rifle over her aching shoulder, unconsciously licking at the salty tang the gun powder residue had left on her lips, and walked out into the street.

The street was quiet, but the eerie calm that had preceeded the gunfight had dissipated as quickly as it had come. Three men lay groaning in the street, their wounds seeping blood into the mud in small crimson eddies. Another lay quite still and dead, Vicky’s bullet having pierced a large but neat hole in his forehead above his right eye. He was lying face up in the street, eyes staring vacantly up at the sky, flies already crawling over the skin and into his gaping mouth, spreadeagled awkwardly with one leg bent double under him. If he’d lived, he doubtless would never have walked the same again. She couldn’t see the back of his skull, but experience told her that it would be a jagged, bloody mess. She flinched away from what she’d done, her stomach heaving, and turned to Monroe who was coming toward her, shoving his pistol into his holster.

“All right?” she asked, and he nodded, his expression grim.

“The others high-tailed it pretty quick. I think more of them were wounded, but the ones that weren’t crippled got away. We can track them down easily enough later.”

“What about him?” Vicky jerked her head in the direction of Landry’s prone corpse.

“Shoot him again!” Old Eli’s high-pitched quaver interrupted anything MOnroe might have been about to say. “Take a shotgun and make sure his head comes clean off!”

“Drunk as a skunk,” Monroe said scornfully, and although he wasn’t wrong, Victoria looked thoughtfully at the old prospector.

“Can’t hurt, can it?” she motioned to Eli. “Lend me your shotgun, then, old-timer.”

Eli grumbled under his breath, and Monroe protested at the barbarity of mutilating a corpse, but neither man made a move to stop her as she picked up Eli’s shotgun and strode up to where the late Marshall lay, a gaping hole in his temple exposing the contents of his cranium. The Widow Smith was standing next to the body, resting the butt of her Winchester on the ground and contemplating her handiwork with a look of slight contempt on her face. Jackson Blainey was of course at her side, talking animatedly, but he fell silent at Vicky’s approach.

“What are you doing?”

“Just making sure he’s good and dead. He was an ornery sonofabitch, and I don’t want him suddenly changing his mind and clawing his way back out of whatever grave we decide to put him in, or nothin’,” Vicky infused her voice with as much irony as she ciould muster, but the image of Landry taking five bullets to the chest and barely flinching was seared into her mind. Corpses might not come back to life, but then men weren’t supposed to be able to withstand five shots to the chest with impunity, either, no matter how much grit they had.

The Widow Smith nodded and stepped out of her way, directly in front of Blainey in so doing, who had seemed to be about to formulate some sort of protest. He didn’t utter a word, however, when Victoria shoved both barrels of the shotgun into what was left of Landry’s mouth and pulled the trigger, separating his head from the rest of his body.

Old Eli scurried forward to retrieve his shotgun, then grabbed the corpse by the heels and began to drag it away. “We ain’t done yet!” he shrilled.

“Oh, come no,” Blainey expostulated, driven to the limits of his endurance. “The man’s good and dead. Let him at least have a proper burial, no matter how repugnant we found his actions in life. Besides, these things have a tendency to come back around at the most inconvenient times,” he added uncharacteristically.

But Eli refused to be dissuaded, and no one seemed terribly keen on arguing the point with him, especially as it meant getting close to both him and the headless corpse. Victoria turned her attention to helping Monroe bundle the survivors into jail cells and having their wounds dressed. Monroe himself was nursing a gash in one leg where a bullet had grazed him, his rain barrel having not afforded him complete cover in the firefight.

Taft, not surprisingly, was complaining loudly and bitterly to anyone who would listen to him. For the moment, his audience was limited to the doctor, who was patiently bandaging his bleeding arm.

“Cheating! In a duel! Of all the... I expected the man to have no sense of honour whatsoever, of course, but to go that far? Ow! Be careful with those...” he winced and sucked in a hissing breath as the doctor stitched up the laceration, daubing at it with alcohol. “If I weren’t as quick on my feet as I am,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be speaking to you right now. I brook no such interference in my affairs. Let me tell you, if he weren’t already dead, he and I would be having another discussion between gentlemen. Except that he’d probably cheat again,” he said with disgust. “There’s just no winning with him.”

Vicky did her best to ignore the flood of outraged ranting, and, in an effort to get away from Taft’s incessant whining, she stepped back out into the the street. She instantly regretted doing so, as she found Wright and Grey bending over the body ofthe man she’d dispatched not ten minutes before. They both straightened when they saw her, and with identifcal smiles they doffed their hats politely.

“We must congratulate you,” the taller of the pair called out, and she realized with some irritation that she still wasn’t sure whether he was Wright or Grey.

“Pardon?” she couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

“I said we must congratulate you!” he repeated cheerfully. “Very cleanly done. Just above the eye, here, you see? Almost surgical precision, wouldn’t you say, Lucius?” The smaller man nodded and smiled wolfishly at Vicky. “So often these things are botched lamentably, but you do seem to have an uncanny knack for it. Death would have been instantaneous, of course. Poor man probably doesn’t even know he’s dead yet.”

Vicky shuddered. “I don’t exactly enjoy killing people, you know,” she said, trying to ignore the moment of satisfaction she’d felt upon seeing the man drop from the roof, and wondering suddenly why she felt that she had to justify herself to two relative strangers.

“Of course not, of course not,” the large man hastened to reassure her, but, Vicky felt, without much sincerity. “But the fact remains that you do seem to have a talent for it. Well, Lucius,” he turned back to his partner, “I think we have all we need. Shall we get this poor fellow back to the shop?”

The small man nodded heartily, then turned and motioned to two men standing nearby with stretcher. Moments later they’d loaded the gory remains and carted them away. The undertakers lingered for a moment.

“I understand Mr. Quarrie will be having a small party to celebrate at the Springwater tonight. I look forward to seeing you there.”

“Quarrie?” Vicky echoed stupidly.

“Oh, yes. He’ll probably be the next mayor, at this rate. You’d do well to attend. After all, the party will be partly in your honour, and one always does well to ingratiate oneself with the local politicians. I’m sure he’ll have many uses for someone with your, ah, particular talents.”

The large man laid a work-callused hand on her shoulder in what was undoubtedly meant as a friendly gesture, but Vicky had to make an effort not to recoil in revulsion. She felt a familiar constricting sensation in her chest, and smothered the cough that threatened to bubble from her lungs.

“We shall see you there, then?”

She nodded and smiled weakly, not trusting herself to speak.

“Wonderful! Splendid! Good day to you, then, Miss James.”

Doffing their hats once more, the two undertakers linked arms and walked sedately back toward their little shop, leaving her staring back after them. Things were going to change now, she knew. The balance of power in the town had shifted, and she wasn’t terribly keen on the idea of sticking around to see how things played out. In her experience, bad was most often replaced by worse. At least, she thought to herself, this would be the last she’d ever see of Heywood Landry, whose corpse even now was being sawed apart by a determined and partly-crazed Eli, who had loudly announced his intention of burying the former Marshall in as many different places as he could, all of them unmarked.

The pain in her chest grew worse, and she coughed for a few moments, spat bright red blood into the street. She shook her head, and abruptly headed for the saloon. There would be time enough to deal with all the repercussions of the day’s events.

Right now, she needed a drink.

*****