Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

Now that the room had thinned out, she observed that one of those men had her Peacemaker and her Dragoon. It was the ridiculously tall soldier who had shot her outside the jailhouse. She wouldn’t have recognized most of Joey’s gang, but this guy she remembered. This guy she would kill extra dead.

  Still seated at her table, Calliope palmed the second Derringer, removed her hair comb, and re-did her hair into an oversized bun around the Derringer. Then she stood again and scanned the room. The only thing missing was their leader.

  She shouted, “Where is he?”

  “What are you doing in Blackwater, anyway,” demanded a voice from the second-floor balcony. “This is my town. I own it. I eat it. I shit it out any time the mood strikes me.” Joey had an arm around one of the saloon’s whores.

  The wounded bartender called out loudly, “She’s a bounty hunter.”

  “A woman bounty hunter?” said Joey incredulously.

  “A woman bounty hunter?” echoed three or four of the others.

  The bartender flinched as laughter flitted around the room.

  Calliope’s body tensed. There it was again, that damn vicious dove, hopping and fluttering from lip to lip, from man to man. She despised it more than words could express. Except this time she couldn’t just draw her guns to put people in their place. If she so much as touched a gun, a dozen would instantly be aimed at her. And while she wouldn’t die, no matter how many times she was shot, she didn’t care to endure that much pain just to prove a point.

  Ignoring the pain already flaring in her hips and back and legs and neck, Calliope made a somewhat awkward show of sauntering over to the tall soldier with her Dragoon and Peacemaker. She raised her left leg, planting her foot on the chair next to him and tugging her skirt up toward her knee. The too-tall soldier leaned back to get a better view.

  Predictable. He’d get an eye full, all right. Of the business end of her Remington. She would shoot him through his lecherous eyeball and reclaim her Colts before anyone could so much as—

  Marshburn jumped from his chair. He shouted, “She’s got a gun.”

  Calliope froze. Raised both hands high in the air.

  “No gun,” she said, slowly turning to face her accuser.

  Thomas aimed a dark finger at her, eyes darting back and forth between Calliope and Joey. “She’s got keys in her hairpiece and Derringers inside her boots. I’ll bet good money she’s got a pistol under that skirt, too.”

  Calliope turned to face Joey, her black boot sliding off the rickety chair. Pistols emerged from inside of jackets and underneath tables.

  Joey looked down from on high, and Calliope realized he had his flunkies arranged in a perfect crescent around her. No chance of getting them to inadvertently shoot each other.

  The redhead said, “Nice work, Swamp. Learn anything else useful? Is she bone tree born?”

  “Hard to say,” answered the black cowboy. “Shoulder appeared to be healing even before I bandaged it, but she seems sluggish and in a lot more pain that I’d have expected. I asked her a couple of times how she felt, but she kept changing the subject.”

  “You’re going to be the first one to die, you know,” Calliope said coldly, eyes hard.

  “Seriously?” Joey said, gesturing to Swamp. “You thought he was helping you?” He laughed. “Of course you did, sweetheart. He let you catch him in a small lie; that way if you didn’t trust him right off, you’d think you had him figured out.”

  Calliope looked from Thomas to Joey and back to Thomas again.

  “No, not him,” she said, whipping her hair comb out of her hair and throwing it at the too-tall soldier. “Him!”

  In a perfect world, the teeth of the comb would have caught the overly tall soldier in the throat and ended him. But Calliope didn’t live in a perfect world, and she had never practiced throwing the comb, so while every eye in the room tracked the flight of the shining comb over the soldier’s head, she shook out the bun on top of her head and grabbed her second Derringer from its hiding place.

  The comb hit the wall, then the floor. It landed with a clank. The soldiers looked at each other and laughed.

  When the laughter died down, their attention returned to Calliope to find she’d crossed the floor and put herself directly between Joey’s men and Thomas Marshburn.

  “Don’t shoot,” Joey barked. “You’ll hit Swamp!”

  “You’ve all seen what I can do with this,” Calliope said, pointing her Derringer at Thomas. “Anyone have any doubts I can put a bullet through his forehead from ten paces?”

  “It’s not loaded,” said one of the soldiers. “She emptied her guns shooting at that stupid Medicine Show sign.”

  Calliope fired once, shooting out the mirror over the bar to prove him wrong, hoping she didn’t come to regret spending the bullet. “You saw exactly what I wanted you to. Any more stupid questions?”

  Calliope gazed at Thomas with contempt. “You have to be the worst poker player I ever met. Are you aware that you grin like an idiot every time you lie? It’s a beautiful smile, but it gives you away like the sunrise at the beginning of a new day. Stunning, but impossible to miss.”

  She cocked the Derringer a second time.

  “Please,” Thomas said. “What I said about being an outsider. About you and me fighting similar battles. I told you the truth.”

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. Damn it. That was probably the only thing he had said that was true. Her heart softened, so she punched him in the face. Thomas went down and had the sense to stay there.

  Calliope remembered she needed him as a human shield and yanked upright again.

  “I’ll give you one thing, sweetheart,” Joey said. “You managed to do something no one has ever done before: you surprised me. Let me see if I can return the favor. I got someone that I hear you been looking for.”

  Joey strode to the edge of the balcony and gestured to one of his men. “He look familiar?”

  Calliope followed his gaze to… yes, yes he did. It was the outlaw from her wanted poster: Dan Hatcher.

  “How about him, over there?” Joey pointed to a second man, behind and to the left of the first. Another Dan Hatcher.

  Two of them?

  “Twins,” Joey said gleefully.

  That explained why the locals thought he was everywhere.

  Joey continued. “I don’t need them both. I’ll trade you one Hatcher—worth $1,000 dollars, from what I hear—for my man, there, Swamp. You take your pick: whichever one you’d like.”

  “But boss—” One of the Hatcher twins stepped forward.

  “Shut up, Danny boy,” barked Joey. “No one’s talking to you.”

  “I’m Dan,” said the other. “He’s Stan.”

  Joey spread his arms and shrugged. “You see? I can’t tell them apart. They even smell the same to me. You’ll be doing me a favor taking one of ‘em off my hands.”

  Calliope placed the barrel of her Derringer just below Thomas’s ear. “If you like this asshole so much, I think I’ll hold on to him, thanks.”

  Joey stopped smiling. “A Mexican stand-off? Really? Those are always fun.”

  “You have a strange idea of fun.”

  Joey stood up straight and tall, spreading his arms wide. “I need somebody to shoot me! I haven’t been shot in hours.”

  Calliope wasn’t falling for that again.

  “Come on, damn you,” Joey screamed, spittle flying from his lips. “Somebody shoot me!”

  The boy was insane.

  Or was he? Was that what he wanted her to think?

  Screw this. She was playing chess with a lunatic and she didn’t even like chess. To make matters worse, she was playing his game his way. If she wanted a different outcome, she’d have to play by different rules. Hell, she’d have to play an entirely different game.

  She sighed, accepting the inevitable. With this many guns and this much testosterone, did she really think she was getting out of here without a gun fight?

  At least she still had that meta
phorical ace up her sleeve. And she didn’t need to kill Joey, which was lucky, since she couldn’t kill him anymore than he could kill her. The only way to truly kill someone who’d been hung from a bone tree was to kill their bone tree, and she had no idea where Joey’s tree was. She assumed he kept it a closely guarded secret, just like she guarded the location of her own. No, right now Calliope just needed to slow him down. Cut his legs out from under him.

  It was a calculated risk. This time she paused and did the math in her head, just in case.

  Twelve bullets in her two Colts, assuming they were fully loaded. That seemed like a safe assumption. Plus one in her Derringer.

  She wasn’t going to waste a bullet on Joey, and she didn’t think she’d need to shoot Thomas. He was a liar, but he seemed otherwise harmless.

  That meant she had thirteen bullets for twelve men. One to spare. Good thing she had a literal ace up her skirt to go along with the metaphorical one up her sleeve.

  She shoved Swamp to one side and strode toward the absurdly tall soldier, shooting him in the throat with the last bullet in her Derringer. His neck exploded in a spray of blood. The whole plan hinged on that one shot; without it, she was screwed. With it, she at least stood a chance.

  She continued straight for her Colts even as the rest of the gang opened fire. The room was instantly transformed into a smoke-filled, high-pitched killing zone as guns blazed and ear drums screamed. She could see little and hear even less. And the odor was biting and caustic; she could taste the gunpowder on the edges of her tongue.

  She threw the empty Derringer at one of the Hatchers to make him duck, make him stop shooting for a second. A bullet caught her in the bicep of her throwing arm. She counted her blessings that it only tore muscle and didn’t shatter bone.

  A second bullet hit her in the side, shattering a rib. Her vision momentarily whited out from the pain, but it passed as quickly as it came. Calliope knelt and retrieved her Colts, testing their heft. She could tell by their weight that both were fully loaded, so she cocked the Dragoon and shot whichever Hatcher she’d thrown her Derringer at.

  No sooner had Hatcher number one fallen than she saw a muzzle flash through the smoke and fired toward it. No more flashes followed, and she assumed she’d hit her target.

  The smoke grew thicker. Calliope headed where she thought she remembered seeing Hatcher number two. She was almost on top of him when they simultaneously spotted each other. Both fired into each other’s chests, and only Calliope stood afterward.

  Calliope was going into shock; her body ceased feeling pain. It would catch up with her again later, much worse. But that was a problem for later. Right now she had four down and seven to go.

  Two men came at her as she stood over the second Hatcher. She raised both guns and shot both men. One of them managed to shoot the Dragoon out of her hand before dying, but it landed at her feet and she grabbed it again and moved on.

  The smoke came to life then, snaking on its own. For a moment she wondered what strange magic was afoot. Then she noticed a breeze playing with her hair. Her ears were ringing too much to have heard it, but stray bullets must have shot out the saloon’s windows. As the breeze shifted the smoke, visibility cleared enough to spot someone coming up on her left. She shot him in the throat, too. She liked throat shots; if the bullet went high, it hit the head; low, it hit the chest.

  She got lucky again when someone shot her in the right wrist. Bones shattered and her hand dangled at an impossible angle, barely attached by a few tendons. But the hand that was nearly shot off was the one holding her Dragoon. She’d fired five of its six bullets, so losing it only cost her one. She still had five bullets in her Peacemaker, and the Peacemaker was in her good hand.

  She had all the luck.

  The last four men rushed at her together, thinking she couldn’t kill them all before they got to her. Calliope proved them wrong, but not before getting shot five more times herself.

  Her body was still in shock, so she only registered the general impact of the bullets, not where she’d been hit. She just knew her body twitched repeatedly like an epileptic marionette.

  Calliope dropped to one knee when another man came at her, surprising her, messing up her math. It wasn’t Joey and it wasn’t Swamp. She must have missed when she shot at the muzzle-flash in the smoke. Luckily, she had that last bullet.

  She fired true this time. She wobbled. Her head swam.

  Smoke began to clear, and Joey’s voice came out of the darkness. From somewhere in the room, he shouted, “Damn, woman. You’re good.”

  But Calliope couldn’t tell where he was; her ears were ringing too much to pinpoint him. She fell to her side, still in shock. The pain hadn’t caught up with her yet, but she’d lost so much blood that her body was struggling to function at all.

  Is this it? she wondered. Do I lay here in a room full of men I killed, not able to feed a single one of them to that stupid fucking tree?

  Thomas appeared in front of her, pistol in hand.

  “Get out here, Joey,” he shouted. At this point if you were alive, you were shouting. Everyone’s ear drums were blown. Calliope laughed, which hurt like hell.

  “I am here,” Joey shouted, appearing out of the smoke. “What are you gonna do?”

  Thomas smiled. “Same thing we talked about before. The experiments I planned for back in the jail. Never thought she’d escape so damn fast.”

  Calliope looked at Thomas, puzzled. Her hearing cleared a little.

  “Be careful,” Joey half-yelled. “She’s shot up pretty good, but she’s still got her gun.”

  “She’s out of bullets. I counted.”

  Thomas glanced around the room, surveying the carnage. “You’ve messed things up for us quite thoroughly, young miss. The boy has amazing abilities, true, but he’s still just a boy. I guide him and steer him, but sometimes we need other men. Now I’m going to have to start all over, build a whole new gang. You have no idea how much time and effort it took to get them to follow Joey without realizing he was taking orders from me.”

  Calliope stared at him, hoping he could feel her hate.

  “At least I still have you,” Thomas said, finding his silver lining. “I’ve always wanted to know how much punishment the boy’s body could withstand. Test his limits. But I’ve been afraid to push him too far too fast.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Calliope said thinly, afraid she already knew the answer. She gasped for air like a trout tossed on the bank of a river.

  Thomas smiled. “For every person who enjoys experiencing pain, there needs to be someone who equally enjoys inflicting it. Otherwise the pain has no meaning. I need to know what Joey’s limits are if I’m ever going to unlock his full potential.”

  Thomas pointed his gun at Calliope’s midsection and fired all six bullets, shredding her abdomen. Smoke curled around the muzzle of his pistol. His lips were moving, but Calliope heard none of it. She did, however, feel every single bit of it. The shock had worn off—or been blown away by the barrage of bullets—and the pain was indescribable. She realized she was screaming and had been screaming for as long as Thomas had been shooting, unable to hear her own screams but feeling every fiery shred of it because she suddenly felt everything, screaming until her throat was raw. Thrashing on the floor, she felt absolutely everything.

  Including the Remington holstered just above her knee.

  In the chaos and carnage, she’d forgotten about the Remington. She focused her mind on it, focused all of her rage on it, and reached down and jerked the weapon from beneath her skirt. She wanted to tell Thomas to fuck off before she killed him, but she knew his ears were ringing as much as hers.

  Screw it, she decided, and said it anyway.

  “You know what, Swamp. It’s not about black or white. It’s not about male or female. It’s about honor, and you have none whatsoever.”

  Then she fired five bullets straight up into the surprised-looking man looming over her. Five bullets mi
ght have been overkill, but she was pissed. That was an emotion she could embrace.

  Thomas fell down dead.

  He would never get up again.

  Joey screamed, his face twisted in rage. Calliope fired her last bullet into that twisted face, right into the bridge of his nose, blowing out the back of his skull. He might like pain, but she doubted he’d like that very much.

  He fell to the ground.

  Unlike Thomas, eventually Joey would get back up again. But not any time soon. From the way he twitched like a bolt of lightning was coursing through his body, she didn’t think he’d be getting up again for a very long time. She’d never seen a body react that way. But then she’d never shot a man in the face who’d been hung from a bone tree either.

  Calliope lay on the ground, in unbelievable pain but feeling immensely pleased with herself. She’d accomplished far more than she’d set out to. Not only had she cut the legs out from under Joey, but she had destroyed the brains of his operation. Turned out Joey was no chess master; he was just a lunatic who had a lot of trouble dying. She wondered if he’d been driven insane by too much pain or if he’d simply snapped when he woke up dead at the end of a noose.

  Either way, with a bullet in his face and no Thomas pulling his strings, Joey was unlikely to pose much of a threat to anyone for a very, very long time.

  Now Calliope just needed a little time herself—to get accustomed to the new level of pain—and then she’d drag her sorry ass outside to that water trough. As nasty as that water was, a deep, long drink would help a whole lot. Then she’d drain all of these soldiers’ blood and grind their bones so she could feed her tree.

  But she’d get there, eventually. She’d swallow the pain, like she always did, and she would do what needed doing. Like she always did.

  Once she got that tree fed and watered, she’d be right as rain. Nice clean rain, as opposed to the sludge she knew waited for her in the horse trough.

  On the other hand, she did have two Hatchers. She’d collect the bounty on one Hatcher in one town, and then again in another town with the other one. It would be months before anyone noticed.

  She was one hell of a lucky bone tree bounty hunter.