Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  Lawless Lands

  Tales from the Weird Frontier

  Emily Lavin Leverett

  Margaret S. McGraw

  Misty Massey

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Desert Gods

  2. Railroad

  3. Pixie Season

  4. The Men with No Faces

  5. Lost Words

  6. Boots of Clay

  7. Trickster’s Choice

  8. Wolves Howling in the Night

  9. To Hear a Howling Herd

  10. Calliope Stark: Bone Tree Bounty Hunter

  11. Cards and Steel Hearts

  12. Bloodsilver

  13. Volunteered

  14. The Stranger in the Glass

  15. Belly Speaker

  16. Walk the Dinosaur

  17. The Time Traveling Schoolmarms of Marlborough County

  18. Rainmaker

  19. Out of Luck

  20. Rollin’ Death

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors & Editors

  Falstaff Books

  Introduction

  Everyone imagines something a little different when they hear “the wild west.” For Emily, it’s childhood memories of Clint Eastwood in the Outlaw Josey Wales, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and High Plains Drifter--hard men and women searching for a bit of peace in an unjust and lonely world.

  For Misty, “the wild west” invokes hot sunlight in a painfully blue sky, the soft creak of leather, and the occasional whiff from the horse as she rides toward a horizon that never gets any closer. She thinks of black iron locomotives pulling wooden cars painted red and gold and herds of buffalo thundering over seas of golden grass.

  To Margaret, “the wild west” is freedom, mystery, opportunity, and danger. It’s natural magic, or old spirits and gods that were out there long before white men ever set foot across the Mississippi. It’s Coyote the Trickster sitting just on the edge of the campfire’s light. It’s dying of thirst or cold or heat and stumbling into the mouth of the dark cave, or down the sandy ridge to find the hidden spring...and whatever else may be there.

  The wild west is a frontier, a land of possibilities: fresh starts and new beginnings made in dangerous and distant country. In Lawless Lands the frontier extends into the fantastic, a world of magic, faith, and futuristic science. The worlds are weird, not only strange and unfamiliar, but touched by the fates and filled with the impossible and supernatural.

  Creating an anthology means facing our own kind of frontier. As editors, we start with a vague map of expectations, but the travel from the call for submissions to the final print always takes us to unexpected places. We received around three-hundred submissions for the open call, from which we selected ten stories--an incredibly difficult task given the high quality of the submissions.

  We give you this book as your ticket to the Lawless Lands--twenty different weird frontiers to explore.

  Misty Massey

  Margaret McGraw

  Emily Leverett

  1

  Desert Gods

  by Aubrey Campbell

  The desert breathes. Tiny grains of sand dance in the wind, hissing and rattling along like miniscule tumbleweeds. Knocking against windowpanes, asking to be let in. When entrance is denied, the grains slip through the cracks anyway. A constant reminder that the desert gods no longer demand sacrifices. They simply take and take again.

  Jackson had more than her fair share of run-ins with these desert gods. And she spent more than her fair share of time in saloons because of it, just as she did now.

  Seeker’s Pass wasn’t much of a town. It sat too close to the edge of destruction—about to be swallowed down the gullet of the hungry desert at any second—to be considered a proper town. The inhabitants were too thin, too few and far between, and too haunted to even enjoy a proper drink, let alone stand in defiance against the gods looming on the horizon, waiting to strike and wipe this smudge of a town from the map. But there was nowhere else to go. The sands were everywhere, the gods not far behind. And when the gods were done, there was nothing left to build on, let alone any survivors. Nothing but sand. Endless sand.

  Then again, Seeker’s Pass had a saloon and what Jackson supposed could pass for a stable, though it looked about ready to pitch over and fold in on itself at any moment. In her opinion, a town didn’t require much else.

  Jackson sat at the bar of The Wraith’s Kiss saloon and threw back another shot of White Fire whisky, gritty with sand as usual. A soft whisper started somewhere at the back of the saloon, a question posed low and quickly chastised into the suffocating silence again.

  The city saloons still held a little friendly buzz of chatter, warm with life and the possibility of survival. But the cities…eventually, they came to be just like Seeker’s Pass. Broken down and scrubbed away with the abrasive assault of the sands and the promise of death, waiting. Always waiting. The Wraith’s Kiss was silent, save for that one brave whisper and the clink of glass.

  Jackson didn’t like silence. It never lasted long. And when it broke, generally all hell broke loose with it.

  Out of habit, Jackson rested one hand on the butt of her six-shooter at her left hip. With her free hand, she pulled a cigar and a match from her vest pocket. Slowly, each movement measured and unhurried, she put the thick, earthy cigar between her teeth and dragged the match across the counter with a rasping scratch and a flare of light.

  Touched the match to the tip of the cigar.

  Inhaled.

  Let out a cloud of smoke on a tired sigh.

  A reek of desperation tainted the bittersweet flavor of her cigar, a stench Jackson had smelled so many times in her life, she had long since lost count. The reek of desperation had started with that faint whisper. All too soon, the desperation would grow into a plea for help, just like the last town, and the town before that. Endless, like the sands.

  Footsteps, heavy and thunderous on the floorboards, entered the saloon. That would be O’Reilly then, after finally intimidating the stableman into a dirt cheap price, just for the fun of it, only to tip him generously to annoy him. She settled onto a stool on Jackson’s left with a creak of her leather holsters, a hiss of metal as her blades shifted against her back.

  Jackson poured another shot for herself, then slid the bottle of whisky down the bar. O’Reilly gave a wild smile, green eyes still bright with excitement over the smallest taste of an argument from the stableman, weak though it must have been in a place like this. It didn’t feel like the folks of Seeker’s Pass had much fight left in them to give. But for the moment, O’Reilly got the fight she craved—no matter how easily won it might have been—and she tossed her head back as she took a long swig from the bottle.

  “Where’s Imala?” Jackson asked.

  O’Reilly set the bottle on the bar and wiped her hand across her mouth. “Takin’ a tour ‘round the place,” she replied, the words rough and heavy with her Irish accent. “Said there’ll be two storms in the next day.”

  Jackson nodded, calculations flying through her mind at this piece of information. Three gods to a storm meant six gods were looking to take Seeker’s Pass and every measly, ghost-like soul who still lingered in this hellhole.

  O’Reilly leaned back against the bar, bottle draped from her fingertips. Her short, curly hair caught a few slivers of light from the lamps of the saloon and gleamed wicked red, like fire in the dim, smoky atmosphere, matching the all-too-eage
r glint in her eye.

  “Two-to-one odds,” Jackson pointed out.

  “We’ve fought worse and come through fine,” O’Reilly said.

  “The last time we faced four. I was laid up for a month from one of those things rammin’ a poisoned barb in my leg.”

  O’Reilly’s smile turned into a smirk, a knife’s slash of confidence and teasing and a challenge on her lips, all at once. A dangerous, dangerous mixture if ever there was one.

  “Losin’ your touch, old girl,” O’Reilly replied.

  Jackson stiffened, though not at O’Reilly’s teasing. The whispers had started up again at her back, this time insistent and determined despite the chastising. The impending plea for help was coming, no stopping or escaping it now. She went rigid as she sensed a hand reaching out toward her shoulder, a faint presence hovering just out of her line of sight.

  “If you don’t want your fingers blown off, boy,” Jackson said, “best keep ‘em to yourself.”

  The boy snatched his hand back. He was a thin, grubby little creature, well acquainted with hunger and the hard, unforgiving life of the desert like most folks these days. His shock of blond hair held a thin coating of dusty golden sand, and his clothes hung on his slight frame, three sizes too big for him.

  “Are you…I was wondering…” he stammered.

  Jackson raised an eyebrow and turned toward him. She propped one elbow on the bar while her other hand pushed her black duster aside to reveal the massive six-shooter on her hip. The boy’s eyes bulged, and his mouth dropped open, words forgotten. O’Reilly chuckled and took another long draw from the bottle, watching the interchange play out.

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Jackson asked the boy.

  His gaze flicked up to meet hers. Solid. Unwavering. She had to give him credit for that. Most people were too scared to look her in the eye.

  “Is it true?” he croaked. “Can you really kill a god?”

  Jackson let her coat drift back into place, and she waved her cigar at him. “What do you think? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe it was possible.”

  He shifted, uncertain. “The last bartender here, Mr. Stockman, he tried to kill a god with his sawed-off shotgun.”

  Jackson stifled a groan and slid her glass over to O’Reilly. She filled it to the top with a knowing look and a smirk.

  “Let me guess,” Jackson said. “There wasn’t enough of Mr. Stockman to bury.”

  The boy’s face went deathly pale, and he shook his head.

  “Don’t mean to be callous or anything,” O’Reilly piped in. “But he was askin’ for it, going after the gods with nothing but a shotgun. You got to have somethin’ with a little more kick.”

  She sat up, always enthusiastic to show off her prized weapons. She unsheathed her scythe blades with a swish of leather and the high whine of metal against metal.

  “These beauties,” she said, “were passed down by the priestesses of my homeland when it was still green and the desert was only a nightmare far away.”

  The boy looked doubtful. “Swords? The gods would eat you before you ever got close enough to use those things.”

  O’Reilly scowled, indignant.

  “Here we go again,” Jackson muttered into her glass.

  “How old are you, boy?” O’Reilly demanded.

  “Thirteen.”

  She pointed to the etchings decorating the full arch of each blade. “Then you’re old enough for what I’m about to tell you. You see these along here?”

  The boy squinted. “I can’t make it out…”

  “It’s a saying, old and worn, and it’s never failed me yet. ‘Send the enemy off to meet death with a farewell kiss of steel and a solid Irish blessing to go straight to hell.’ A blessed blade is no common sword, I’ll have you know, and the priestesses must be howling with fury back home to hear you say that. A god can’t stand against a blessing slicing through its flesh. And I can get plenty close enough, boy, so mind your young tongue, why don’t you?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he mumbled. His gaze dropped to Jackson’s holster. “Does that have enough kick?”

  Jackson studied him for a moment in utter silence, unmoving. Then she pulled a bullet from her belt and held it up. Clouds of the deepest, richest red swirled in the bullet’s depths, streaked through with black lightning that snapped and sparked.

  “You know what this is?” she asked.

  “A Devil’s Eye,” he replied, voice soft with wonder as he reached out to touch it. “Made from the curse of a witch’s blood.”

  Before his fingers made contact, Jackson snatched the bullet away. The boy frowned.

  “But witches don’t give their blood freely,” he said. “How did you…?”

  “All you need to know is that it makes gods bleed. And if a god can bleed, a god can die, just like any other fragile life out there. Got it?”

  Jackson leaned on the bar again, shoulders hunched, closing the boy out. Conversation over. Too many questions made her uneasy. With a mind like that, knowledge was the kick he craved, the weapon he was looking for. The last thing she needed was some scrawny boy with whip-sharp curiosity to figure out she was the witch, taking her own blood to forge god-slaying bullets. Then she’d find herself pinned on the ground with the suddenly wide-awake folks of Seeker’s Pass leering over her and draining her of every ounce of blood in her veins.

  No. The boy definitely didn’t need to know any of that.

  But the boy seemed to be the only one in this dying town who harbored a lick of fight in his body. He remained at Jackson’s shoulder and pulled himself up to his full height…which wasn’t much. He hardly came up to her elbow standing there.

  “I want to hire you,” he said, his voice echoing in the silent saloon. “This is the only home I’ve got, and I’d like to keep it if I can. My farm was taken last summer by the gods. My parents, too. I got nowhere else to go.”

  Jackson kept staring straight ahead. “Move to the city then. That’s what most folks are doin’.”

  Not that it makes much of a difference, she thought. The sands were crawling into the cities just as steadily as they were crawling into the half-rotten towns like this one, trembling at the edge of the world where mercy didn’t exist anymore.

  “If you’ve got the money,” the boy replied, an undeniable bitterness biting through his words. “Which I don’t. But I ain’t runnin’. My parents died here, and I won’t leave ‘em.”

  Jackson turned to look at him now with a faint light of admiration in her eyes. O’Reilly nudged her with an elbow.

  “He don’t look like much, but he’s got a fighting spirit,” she whispered. “I like him.”

  Jackson tapped her cigar ash onto the floor, poured a fresh shot of whisky, and slid it over to the boy.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  The boy pushed the drink back in refusal. “Spencer Perkins,” he said.

  She gestured to the handful of onlookers who had been alternately gaping and glaring at them for the entire conversation.

  “Your friends don’t seem to agree with you,” Jackson said. “Seems like they could care less whether Seeker’s Pass rots or not.”

  “They don’t trust you. They think you’ll take your cut and hightail it when the trouble comes.”

  “It’s a decent concern. And so far, we haven’t discussed payment. You said you don’t have enough to get into the city, but you think you’ve got enough to pay me for my work?”

  Spencer’s bravado flickered, just for a moment, and he hesitated. He pulled a thin silver necklace from his pocket and placed it on the bar’s counter. He spread it out gently to display the fine chain, slight as spider-silk, and the tiny pearls that winked in the lamplight.

  “It ain’t much, but…” He paused then added, his voice quieter this time, “It was my mother’s.”

  Jackson didn’t look at O’Reilly. Payment wasn’t needed for O’Reilly to dive head first into a fight like this. But Jackson had pul
led countless bullets from her veins and sent countless gods returning to the ravenous desert sands in her lifetime, and she was tired. Where one god died, three more sprang up to take its place. The fight never ended. And the desert continued to creep in. Steady as water, moving and rustling and eating away. Nothing slowed it down. It was in her hair, in her mouth, in her whisky. All the time.

  Before Jackson could reply, the batwing doors squeaked open, accompanied by the familiar whispering footsteps of Imala. A collective hiss rose in the saloon, the first sound Seeker’s Pass had managed to muster up together.

  “No,” the bartender said. He was a short, stooped man with wire-rimmed spectacles clouded by years of scratchy sand and wind. While Jackson had been sitting at the bar, he’d shown no interest in anyone or anything else besides wiping down his humble collection of shot glasses. But now that Imala stood in the doorway of the saloon, with no weapon and not a grain of sand anywhere on her…he was suddenly sharp and alive with anger.

  “No,” he repeated, waving his dishrag at her. “We don’t serve your kind here.”

  Jackson pulled her duster back, presenting her six-shooter in all its glory. “And what kind would that be?”

  The bartender faltered, his small wary eyes shifting from Imala to Jackson and back to Imala again.

  “Sandspinners,” he grumbled under his breath to Jackson. “You know they can’t be trusted. They’re no better than the gods.”

  “Ever met one?” Jackson asked.

  “I…I’ve heard stories and…”

  “Then I’d say you’ve got enough trouble on your hands without making an enemy of a spinner on top of it,” she said, tapping her thumb pointedly against the butt of her gun. “Especially one who never travels alone.”

  There had been the rare occasion when Jackson resorted to violence against humans, though she didn’t like to make it a habit. She’d much rather scare the stupid out of people instead of shooting them. The death grip some folks maintained on their small-minded and unfounded prejudices never ceased to baffle her. And when such pettiness put her friends in the line of fire, she had no tolerance for it.