Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
Dee turned to the stranger and nodded to the gun at her hip.
“That’s a fine bit of hardware you’re carrying around,” she said. “Old. The kind that means something. They don’t make them like that anymore.” She tilted her head and took a sip from her flask. “Lone woman on the road, carrying a piece like that around… Eventually somebody’s gonna make you an offer on it.”
She took another nod at the flask, spit into the fire and watched the whiskey flare up into a darkening twilight as it kissed the flame.
“Might as well be me.”
The stranger looked at Dee from across the campfire.
“Not for sale,” she replied.
Dee smiled the way folks smile when they got just the answer they were expecting to get on such matters. “Everything’s for sale, darlin’. It’s just a matter of offering the right sum.”
She made an offer that made one of the boys on her side of the camp whistle. It was a princely sum.
The stranger’s eyes remained flat and expressionless.
“Okay, okay. Can’t blame a gal for tryin’.” The smile held a moment longer than it should have, then Dee moved on with the smoothness of someone who had prepared for this contingency. “That’s a fine animal too. The pale one.” She glanced at Fallow without sentiment — the assessment of someone who saw horses as distance and cargo. “I could use a horse like that. You probably overheard one my boys complaining about his sensitive stomach riding in the back of the wagon. I’m feeling generous tonight.”
Dee chuckled. “Couldn’t keep a straight face, sorry. I’m actually just galldamned tired of hearing the boy bellyachin’ about it all the time, so I’ll make it worth your while.”
“No.” Flatter than the first refusal.
“And there’s nothing I can say or offer to make you change your mind ’bout the gun or the nag?”
Folks on both sides of the campfire were shifting and restless, all anxious energy and movement. Only the stranger stayed where she was, sipping at the dregs of her coffee.
The crow watched and missed nothing from its perch on the mesquite.
A cry was carried on the desert winds, whether that of prey or predator was anyone’s guess. The stranger could smell fresh sage growing nearby, the breeze catching the scent just right to bring it to her and drive away the smell of unwashed bodies and animal.
The telltale sound of the hammer of a revolver clicked into place. The stranger looked up from her tin cup, now drained.
Cord had come around behind the tents to try to get the drop on the stranger and stood over her pointing his father’s tired old revolver at her head. As a glance, the gun looked about as well maintained as the horses he rode to ground.
The stranger had heard his approach before he was halfway around the tents.
“You shoulda taken the gold,” he said to her. “Now you’re gonna hand me that fancy hand cannon you have strapped to your waist and that damned horse. Or I’ll daylight you like I done daddy and take both anyway.”
“Cord.” Dee’s voice had an edge in it.
“She’s not selling, Dee. We’re outriders — this is what we do when someone has something we want.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then why ain’t we doing it.”
“We’re being patient is why,” Dee said. The edge sharper now. “Something you might consider trying.”
The old man on the stranger’s side of the camp had picked up the shotgun, his arm gesturing for his daughter to get away from her seat on the boulder and go behind him. She looked confused by the sudden change in the weather between the two parties, surprised that the tunes had failed to lower the temperature rising between the two groups.
The old man’s son was standing at the wagon and drawn a bead on Cord, who had yet to notice he had made himself a broad target while waving his rust speckled gun around at the stranger’s head.
The boy who asked after the Preacher had his gun drawn, nickel-plated barrel drifting between the father and the son, indecisive.
“Everyone,” said Dee, voice and hands up to command everyone’s attention. Her voice tried to remain calm, yet assertive. “Everyone needs to calm the fuck down and put their guns away before someone gets themselves hurt”.
The crow cawed loudly. Everyone looked in the direction of the sound.
One of Dee’s outriders, better skilled at stealth than Cord, had managed to sneak up on the stranger unawares with his revolver drawn. His eyes went wide when she turned to him. He had not expected to be seen.
A silence to wake the dead settled in as the gloaming’s shadows shifted in their quicksilver and odd ways.
A heartbeat. Two.
The single report broke the silence, followed by a soft sigh. Everyone’s eyes left the crow and traced the sound to its source.
In those scant moments, Cord’s chest had blossomed with a crimson flower. He looked down at those bright, growing petals, revolver clicking uselessly in his hand as he dry-fired his gun. His knees quivered, buckled, and he collapsed on his knees, still dry-firing the empty chambers.
“Shit,” said the son, gun smoke still curling from the barrel of his long rifle.
Then, the camp came apart.
The stranger’s hands had Oldbone drawn as she rolled off to her side, the earth exploding where her head had been only moments before, stinging her face with shattered sand ejected from the hardpan. She turned and fired off a quick round at the thug who had managed to sneak up on her. The night came down.
She rolled away again, aiming at the place where Dee had been standing, but the woman had already disappeared.
She panned Oldbone’s sights across the camp, looking to take out any remaining threats, but the fight was over.
The stranger did her accounting. Cord was face-down in a growing pool of his own blood. Her own would-be assassin face down in the dirt. The man making small-talk between songs was leaning against the outrider’s wain — not quite dead, but he would settle his debt soon enough.
She turned to the other side of the camp.
The son had slumped down in the wagon’s bench seat, stunned. The father bleeding from a graze that had cut across his bicep weeping and on his knees. No sign of the man’s daughter.
That was when the stranger heard a gurgling, rhythmic slurping sound coming from the family’s side of the camp.
She stood up and walked towards the wheezing, wet sound.
Behind the mesquite laid Fallow, also not quite dead. The neck wound was marked in a carmine bright against the horse’s white pelt.
The stranger knelt and stroked its pale mane as Fallow still tried to greet her from the threshold across which it lay.
She placed Oldbone’s barrel just above Fallow’s eyes and pulled the trigger. A moment of thunder followed by an emptiness.
As sound returned to the world, the stranger heard the old man’s weeping.
She grabbed the saddlebag, looped it over her shoulder and followed the sound.
The old man cradled his daughter’s head, rocking back and forth, calling out her name, telling her that she “ain’t in no trouble, please don’ die”. Her glassy, empty eyes said everything the stranger needed to know.
The son had a different dark emptiness that reflected the fire burning low in the growing night. The stranger doubted he’d ever taken a life larger than a prairie dog, much less one belonging to another person.
The crow called out from the grey pine planking rising up from the outrider’s wain.
Dee.
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