Faster Gun

Behind him—not to him—Miss Lil whispered, “I thought this was a shooting adventure,” and Missus Jorgensen answered, “It isn’t over yet,” her tone prim as a Yankee schoolmarm’s.

”Shh,“ Flora hissed back, jerking her head at Doc.

Miss Lil replied, “He can’t hear what’s out of—”

That echoing incomprehensibility claimed the rest of the sentence. Maybe she’d turned her head.

Maybe she was using some kind of hex to keep him from hearing what she didn’t think he’d ought.

Flora ducked back against the horse. Doc could tell from the timbre of her voice as she leaned across the saddle that what she said to Lil, she meant to hiss low and sharp. But those echoes were deceptive, and his ears were pretty good.

“”That’s John Henry Fucking Holliday over there,”“ the quadroon whispered, as if his name were something to conjure with. She gave it more weight than Missus Shutt had given President Garfield’’s. “”He’ll kill you off, not just kill you out. So unless you never want to see 1881 again—”—“

Doc snorted. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “I heard that.” He was a good shot, fast, and despite his cough he rode with the Tombstone posse when the law needed him. But he hadn’t ever killed even a single man—although to hear some people tell it, he might have shot down two or three hundred.

Still, he kept hearing that ring in her tone: awe as if at something out of legend… even as he kept his eye on the motionless moon man tree frog which—who—breathed, and looked at them, and breathed again.

She said his name like he was somebody.

Doc’s confusion was interrupted by the glitter of the moon man’s wide, black, sclera-less eyes as its head turned slightly, tracking the sounds of the others. He didn’t reach for the coach gun. He could skin his pistol faster, if he had to. But he was really starting to think he might not have to shoot.

“We come in peace,” Missus Shutt said.

The moon man was still in near shadow, but a little light fell across its face from the side, now that it had its head turned. Doc saw the long split of its lipless mouth part above—it was still upside down—the flat bump where a nose should have been. He saw the tongue glisten.

“Water,” the thing said, in the piping voice of a child.

“You need water?” asked Missus Shutt.

It reached out a hand. “I give water,” it replied, in warbling tones.

The Code of the West, Doc thought. Even a moon man understood it. He reached to lift his coach gun by the barrel, to slide it back into the saddle holster.

The sound of a pistol shot, dizzy-loud in the echoing space as if somebody had boxed his ears, knocked him back against the gelding. The brown mare sidled, yanking her tie down, and hammered the coach gun from his hand. It went to the floor, under stomping hooves. To dive for it was to risk a crushed skull.

Deafened, seeing black spots, head ducked, Doc hauled himself up the saddle leathers, his pistol in his right hand. A horse was screaming; so was the moon man. Or what Doc assumed was the moon man: It sounded like a reed instrument blown to piercing discord, and it went through Doc more sharply even than the report of the gun.

The moon man wasn’t where it had been. Doc assumed it had sensibly dropped out of the tunnel and sought cover, just like everything that could.

The mare and the gelding stamped and twisted, trying to bolt, caught on their snubbed-off reins. Between them was a bad place to be. Dodging past their hindquarters wasn’t any better. And there was Flora, clinging to the saddle beside him, a death grip on the pommel as she tried to stay by the gelding’s shoulder and not get smashed by hooves and rumps as the panicked mare swung around and bumped him behind.

Somebody was returning fire. Missus Shutt and Miss Lil, it looked like—Missus Shutt against the wall, sighting down her arm in the direction of the tunnel the moon man had dangled in; Miss Lil standing tall, legs braced, and handling her pistol with both hands like a target shooter.

Doc got an arm around Flora’s shoulder and pulled her hard against him, hard against the wall. Over the squealing of horses and the reverberations in his head, he couldn’t hear what she said, but he saw her lips moving. There was a little curved alcove in the bulkhead just beyond the gelding’s head; he watched Missus Jorgensen push Bill into it and come out gun blazing, laying a line of cover down the far corridor.

Doc and Flora had to get out from between the horses if they were going to live. He yelled in her ear. As deafened as he was, she didn’t hear him. She tugged away, but she was slender and light. He had no trouble at all hooking her around the waist and pushing her before him as he went under the gelding’s head and into that selfsame alcove while the displeased horse fought his reins and tried to rear.