Way Out West

WAY OUT WEST

Tales of the Weird West

BIG PULP PUBLICATIONS

BILL OLVER Publisher

contact: editors@bigpulp.com

Cover illustration by Luke Spooner

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Way Out West is also available in softcover

(ISBN 978-0-9896812-3-0)

The stories in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance between the characters in them and any persons living or dead – without satirical intent – is purely coincidental. Reproduction or use of any written or pictorial content without the permission of the publisher or authors is strictly forbidden, with the exception of fair use for review purposes. All stories are copyright the author or artist.

All other contents © 2015 Big Pulp Publications.

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Also by Bill Olver

Black Chaos II: More Tales of the Zombie (Editor, 2015)

Black Chaos: Tales of the Zombie (editor, 2014)

The Kennedy Curse (editor, 2013)

APESHIT (editor, 2013)

Clones, Fairies & Monsters in the Closet (editor, 2013)

Periodicals

Big Pulp (all-genre quarterly)

Child of Words (SF&F)

M (Horror & Mystery)

Thirst (Passion & Romance)

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CONTENTS

Flesh, Soul, Money by DeAnna Knippling

Diablo Seven by Terry Alexander

Siege by Mike Loniewski

The Showgirl and the Wendigo by Milo James Fowler

Panning in Thin Air by Gerri Leen

Junction, Texas by Joshua Gage

Chikcheeree by Paul Lorello

The Two of Guns by John F.D. Taff

Boomer Boy, Now You’re A Man by Walter Giersbach

Have Time Machine, Will Travel by Harri B. Cradoc

The Blood of Family by Joriah Wood

The Conservator by Cecelia Chapman

Above Snakes by John Medaille

More books from Big Pulp!

Copyright notices

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FLESH, SOUL, MONEY

by DeAnna Knippling

The wind blows across the prairie like a saw, cutting away the dead wood and turning everything into a sculpture. Nobody’s there to see it but the rats and the snakes and the grasshoppers. Two men lie next to each other, both dead, both wearing identical outfits—cheap suits, bowler hats. The wind hasn’t had time to work on them yet so it’s up to the flies crawling over their coats and hats and leather boots. And flesh, of course.

The flies don’t seem to be having much luck.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

They were train robbers, Poindexter and Guillaume. The world was a richer place then: easier to steal. The treasure wasn’t gold or silver but banknotes, but they still made a pretty good penny off robbing trains. They had got to the point where they hoarded the money like dragons hoarded gold anyhow, kept most of it in a series of underground caves.

To see them together you would have thought Poindexter was a businessman. Suit, bowler hat, tidy mustache. He had a kind of northeast feel to him but it was hard to say where from. Not New York, not Boston. Somewhere north of the Virginias. He was thick. So broad through the torso you would have been justified in calling him fat but that wasn’t the important part. The important part was that he was strong as an ox and contained within himself reserves of both cleverness and cruelty. If you saw him apart from Guillaume, you’d think he looked like a thug. He wasn’t from New England but from Manchester. He carried with him at all times a butterknife that had been carved into a very small saw. It was rusty and dull, couldn’t hold an edge, and was stained with old blood in the crack between the handle and the blade. Other knives came and went but this one was with him always. Sometimes he whispered to it in his sleep.

Guillaume was—had been—one of the last of the old kind of fur trappers in Canada. Lived in the north wilds of Quebec. Fished through holes in the ice covered with skin tents. Eyes red from living with so much smoke. Smoked meat, cleaned furs, avoided his fellow man. Even now he wore a yellow leather jacket with a fringe of leather along the sleeves, kept his gray-and-white hair long and straggly, wore an eye patch. Stank of grease and smoke. Wore tied leather boots lined with rabbit fur. Had mice skulls in his pockets, which he would give to small children when bothered. He was enormous. Had been mistaken for a bear when he was younger and his hair was black.

The story was, he’d killed a whore who’d looked under the patch while he was passed out drunk. Somehow he’d known.

From our point of view, they were two men living in rougher, wilder times. From their point of view, they were watching the old ways die out and didn’t much care for it. The trains came and went, carrying their burdens of men, men, always more men. Their women and children, too, respectable ladies who wanted social halls and churches and schools. The prairie echoed with the sound of hammers driving nails into pine boards. The wild men were dying out, and Poindexter and Guillaume didn’t like the notion of it. So stealing from the trains wasn’t just a pastime or a means of making a living. Neither one of them had need of money, as such. They hadn’t been the kind of men who’d made money an equivalent to worth. No, the reason they stole money from trains was to announce to the world: put your trust in this stuff and see what it gets you. It goes up in smoke.

The problem was that the money had started getting hold of them. They had started out destroying the stuff, blowing up the trains, killing every man, woman, and child among them, driving off the cattle, prying open crates, hacking open flour sacks, pissing on clothes, and burning the money in a great whooping bonfire that drove the natives away for fear it would take the prairie and spread, which sometimes it did. But time had worn on, and the fires had grown smaller, then disappeared, and now they were at the point of carting the money away with them to their cave in Kansas.

But recently it had got even worse.

Here’s what it had come to: Guillaume, being perhaps the more human of the pair, had taken a woman captive and had her on the saddle in front of him. Her hands were tied in front of her with rawhide. He’d soaked it and now it was drying out, getting tighter. The woman’s hands were swollen and red but turning purple. Soon they’d be blue. She’d thrown herself off the horse a couple of times. Her face was beaten and bloody, just the way he liked it. She had a rag stuffed in her mouth.

Poindexter didn’t like it. Oh, he liked hurting women as much as anybody, and he understood the need for a snack. It was the rag he didn’t like. It wasn’t torn off something. It wasn’t robbed from one of the corpses, not even the woman’s husband or little girl, lying dead on the scrub grass with the grasshoppers zinging through the air around them. It was a rag that Guillaume had brought with him, took out of his fringed leather coat, close to his chest. It spoke of a premeditated act. Of a plan.

We’ll kill her at the top of that ridge.

We’ll kill her when I say so. Guillaume stroked the woman’s hair. It was matted with blood and dirt. Gold underneath, but there was no getting around that. I took her, I kill her. You want a pussy puss of your own, you take one yourself.

We’ll kill her at the top of that ridge, I say. I don’t want her polluting the place with her filth.

I’m going to lay her down on top of the money when I do it. Nice and slow. I like to listen to them singing.

The woman had had the horror beaten out of her, including most of her sense. And if she understood a word of what they were saying she couldn’t say so, what with the rag stuffed in her mouth. At the moment, she was trying to swallow without getting the tail end of the rag, which tasted like rotten cheese, drawn down into her stomach.

They were monsters, Poindexter and Guillaume, no doubt about it. Let’s not mince words here. They were murderers and monsters and train robbers. Let’s not heroize them. I can understand the temptation to do so. We call some men heroes that aren’t. Dig deep enough through the skin of anybody, you’ll find something that’s better left unseen, we know that. That’s why we like our villains so much. They’re closer to the truth. They show us what we already know: that, given the opportunity, we’ll take every virtue and piss it away for gain. Sure, sure, the hero kills the villain but that’s in stories, right? We know who the real hero is. It’s all there to see.

But Poindexter and Guillaume are not those kinds of villains. They resist the snuffing out of humanity but that doesn’t make them any better than monsters. It doesn’t make them saints. It makes them monsters who like a particular spice of individualism to their meat.

Keep that in mind.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

The train. It was stiflingly hot in the summer and rattletrap-cold in winter. The beds swayed at night and every creak, rattle, and snore could be heard through the curtains, and she didn’t dare move lest she fall out of bed. She never slept, just laid awake and stared until she couldn’t tell what was a dream and what was real. She dreamed of the dead, come back to haunt her. The only time they could find her was when she rode the rails, the unending thrum of the iron under them, the vibrations of the carriage, the smells of too many people shut up together for too long.

Karen was traveling with her family, that was, her husband and surviving child, back to Kansas. She’d lost a pair of twin boys born too small about six months ago. Since then she hadn’t caught and was glad of it. Even though she wasn’t popping them out the way pioneer women were expected to. The attitude in Kansas seemed to be that there was a continent to fill, and if she didn’t help fill it, then that would mean there was more room for men from back East, the constantly flowing river of bodies that spread out from civilization like a plague. But after she’d lost the boys George hadn’t touched her. It wasn’t his way to weep but she felt the weight of the boys’ loss in him, too.

She’d gone back to Massachusetts to stay with her mother while she recovered. Mattie played with Grandma while Karen wept, and huddled inside a wrapper of blankets, and drank cold tea and broth from trays, discreetly appearing and disappearing while life went on outside the narrow door to her childhood room. She wrote letters to George and prayed he hadn’t done himself a mischief while she was gone. Now he’d come back East on business and it was time for her and Mattie to come home. His face was long and turned down at the mouth. It was a relief not to have to pretend to happiness with him.

Her stomach churned with every bump and lurch of the train. If she’d had to have ridden out here on a wagon train she would have killed herself after a week. As it was she clutched her hands together in her pearl-gray gloves, which seemed to show up dirt and stains even more than whites ones did. She hated trains. She hated this train. She hated the springs under the cotton batting, which was never thick enough. She hated the smell of ground-in dirt and rust underneath the powders and perfumes the women drenched themselves in. She hated the way she’d given Mattie opium to make her sleep, and she hated the way her child was so full of livelihood when she was awake. She hated the other passengers. They felt like fleas crawling through her clothes. Their eyes were on her always. If one person wasn’t staring than another one was. She hated the sky, its unwearied blue that turned to contemplative black at night, so wide and yet so filled with stars. She wished for life in the city, with its heavy smells and gray skies and hopelessness. On the prairie one was constantly surrounded by people who told one to keep one’s chin up, to always look on the bright side, etc., etc. She stared out the window and hoped that no-one would speak to her.

She didn’t want to move forward. She didn’t want to move on with her life. She didn’t want to get back into the old routines. She didn’t want to keep the books at the store. She didn’t want to sweep out the dust or rub dishes dry.

She didn’t want to deal with the business of living anymore. If only it hadn’t been for Mattie she would have found release.

She was sure George felt the same.

The train rumbled. It was that time after sunset in which the world became haunted. The barren landscape flickered by. Stunted trees shadowed the course of a stream. They appeared in clumps, like the dots and dashes of a telegraph message. The grass turned gray, the sky leaden.

Her eyelids sank. She would sleep. She would sleep in the seat next to Mattie, and not in the bed. She would never sleep in the upper berth again. Her daughter was a warm presence beside her, curled up like a cat with her feet tucked under her blue wool coat. George sat opposite to her, studying her face. His mustache had grown longer, covering both lips and part of his chin. He looked as though he wanted to ask impossible questions. She closed her eyes.

The train jerked, and then she was flying.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

The horses had been damaged. If they hadn’t been damaged, they would have gone mad. But Guillaume knew the trick of it; he had a drill-tipped metal rod that he kept in his pack for just such an event. He was very matter-of-fact about it, not horrified in the least. He thought no more of a horse than you might think of a machine.

The three of them, the two monsters and their passenger, rocked along with the horses. The tack jingled dully, more like a pocketful of pennies than like bells. Your mind could only stay alert for so long in those conditions: the heat of the day, building after the dry, dewless chill of the night. The sweat on your skin evaporating before it had a chance to crawl, spiderlike, down your skin. Your identity fades, slips, transforms. Who are you, you wonder, as the heat ripples off the dirt road ahead.

Poindexter was aswim with souls, thousands and thousands of them. Human souls, bison souls, souls of small mice and large, ragged-furred rats. Horses, now. The souls of horses usually escaped him. Too restless. He shifted in his saddle; the smoothed, heavy cotton of his trousers squeaked against the leather. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the woman, as such. Just Guillaume’s interest in her.

Was it some perversion to do with the money? Had it been Guillaume who had made the decision—who had pushed, encouraged, manipulated—to save it, instead of destroying it? He, Poindexter, was the manipulator. He, Poindexter, knew that his function in their duo was to manipulate. He was the talker that contained the hidden threat. Guillaume was brute force that contained a direct cunning: and yet this plan, this plot of his seemed to contain manipulations. Hidden threats. Had Guillaume become Poindexter, and Poindexter, Guillaume?

When you get off a horse this kind of thinking fades; you know who you are. Guillaume knew that this mindlessness came from the properties of the body he currently inhabited, that this strange wandering of thought was not madness as much as some kind of surreality constructed over the gaps in his idle thoughts. It was like dreaming, a torturous dream inflicted by one’s own flesh. He had inflicted such dreams on others. He had used the properties of the flesh to drive men mad, and take their souls. That it was happening to him seemed an indication that he was, himself, being infiltrated. Manipulated.

Violated.

Had he, Poindexter, been damaged? Had Guillaume taken the rod, pushed his eye gently to the side, and drilled into his skull? It was not beyond the realm of possibility.

Guillaume, he said.

Guillaume grunted.

Kill her or I will. Now. Before we get to the caves. This is wrong and you know it.

Guillaume spat on the ground, turning his head so he wouldn’t foul the woman’s dress. Poindexter felt the hairs on his arms raise, even in this heat. The grass around them sniggered in long ripples across the prairie. The wind gusted over his skin and brought up gooseflesh.

Won’t, Guillaume said. You had better leave it alone, my friend.

Tell me what you’re doing.

Saving for later.

You’ve never done that before.

That’s true, I haven’t. Now shut it before I knock you off that horse.

Before, he