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I had not ridden a horse in years. I made a mental note to never do it again. I would shoot myself first.
Pain radiated from my hips to my calves, and I wobbled when I walked. It didn’t help that my trusty steed, whom I’d dubbed Misery, had the gait of a drunken New Orleans hooker on the Monday after a Super Bowl game in the Dome. The horse had two speeds, slow and stop, and two moods, morose and suicidal. I had given up trying to squeeze more speed out of the gelding, opting instead to try and relax and enjoy the countryside.
I had food, water, camp supplies, and a vintage Colt Peacemaker with a six-inch barrel. Four fat .45 Long Colt rounds rested in the revolver’s cylinder, along with two empty shells. At least Moorcock had gotten off a couple of shots before being killed. With only those four rounds and the five left in my Wilson CQB, I felt woefully under-ammo’d. When bad things arrived, I liked to get enough rounds downrange that the bad things died, departed, or were so weighted down with lead that they couldn’t move. Nine cartridges weren’t enough for peace of mind.
The countryside remained quiet, and whatever or whoever killed Moorcock stayed away. Half-seen things, either deer or armadillos or baby Rancors, taunted me by disappearing when I looked, leaving nothing but a feeling of being watched. I twisted in the saddle to check my back trail several times an hour. Nothing appeared, though I did pop my spine more than once, so there was that.
The terrain, flora, and fauna put me in mind of the desert Southwest. Nevada, Arizona, maybe, but evidence supported California, as one of Moorcock’s law books was a California Penal Code, 1872 edition. Without that, I might have guessed one of the ’Stans, like, say, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Sandinyourass-istan. When I almost urinated on a diamondback rattlesnake that morning, I ruled out the Middle East. Plenty of snakes there, but no diamondbacks.
I tried very hard not to think of my kid sister, huddled alone under blankets in a hospital bed, tubes and wires snaking into and over her body. She was far away both geographically and temporally unless I could get back.
After midday on the fifth day of my new life in the No-Name Mountains, I passed a hand-lettered sign that read Geyser Falls, 2 miles.
“Geyser Falls? Sounds like an oxymoron.” My voice rasped like a dry file on rusty steel. A layer of dust lined my throat, no matter how much water I sucked down. “Geyser or falls but not both.”
My horse refrained from comment. Perhaps “oxymoron” didn’t translate well.
As the trail slithered out of the mountains, a panorama of a wide valley opened. I pulled up and studied the distant town, which I presumed to be the oxymoron itself, the bustling metropolis of Geyser Falls.
The city had burrowed into the middle of the valley, near a crossing on a narrow river. The approach to the town snaked through a scrubby forest of cedar and bristlecone pine—I’d finally remembered the name of the twisty tree—at the higher elevations with sagebrush and creosote, I thought, lower down. Across the river, a snow-capped mountain backdrop appeared painted for the sole purpose of giving Geyser Falls a scenic view. A cornflower-blue sky reached from horizon to heaven, veiled with a single strip of clouds as thin as cotton gauze high above the frosted peaks.
Still no contrails.
I pulled up again a short mile from town, squinted, and scratched my ear. The thin trail led across the scrub plain to the town, appearing to morph into nothing more than twin rutted tracks as it approached the city limits. The town streets, too, were unpaved, as best I could tell. The haze of distance obscured a clear view, but the buildings appeared to be made from stacked rock, packing crates, and twisty planks cut from ugly trees, with a few larger structures near the center that might have been made of something more solid.
There were no cars.
Deep in Moorcock’s saddlebags, I had found a pouch with six silver dollars and forty-two cents in US coins. None of the money had been minted later than 1886.
Evidence kept mounting that Birnbaum had sent me back to the 1880s American West. That truth seeped into my bones like poison from a tainted well, each little drop adding to the sickness in my belly. Hell, I shouldn’t have expected less from a magician who could time travel. Second punch was first dead, and Birnbaum had obviously punched first. I knew something bad had happened in the mall, but I hadn’t known what. Memories floated up, disjointed and out of sequence. I knew it had happened after the Rancor, but all I could remember were tiny bits and pieces, weird visions centered around being in a bubble.
A chill traced down my spine, and I jerked around, positive that a cold-fingered zombie had snuck up behind me, but nothing was there except weeds, trees, rocks, sand, buzzing grasshoppers, and chirruping birds. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.
I rolled my shoulders to loosen the black coat and caught another whiff of the former owner. My own juices had yet to overcome the imprint of the dead man’s sweat stink, an odor similar to rancid goat cheese with a bottom note of wet ass. Moorcock’s shirt rode high on my wrists, covering my sad, torn concert T-shirt. I’d tucked both pistols out of sight, along with my grenades, a Böker seven-inch dagger, a Benchmade Infidel boot knife, and a steel wire garrote. I’d concealed the latter inside the lining of my belt.
I twitched the reins to start Misery moving. A minute later, I swiveled in the saddle, hoping to trick whatever was watching me by catching it moving.
Still nothing. The high desert landscape—with its stunted trees, rocks for miles, and brushy stuff tall as Misery’s belly—mocked me. Nothing stirred. The wind made a sound as faint as the memory of a childhood dream. It sounded like a laugh, and not a good one, but a sharp-toothed, blood-dripping clown cackle.
I kicked the horse hard in the ribs. “Move along there, little doggie.”
For once, Misery listened and picked up his pace.
#
Native Americans occupied the first two dwellings along the road into Geyser Falls. Children in breech cloths played in the dirt yards of sod-and-twig huts, running among the dogs and chickens and aggravating the adults. The latter wore mismatched combinations of Western garb and buckskins. Bead necklaces ringed the neck of every person, from a withered grandma to a wobbly toddler.
I raised a hand in passing. The suspicious coal-dark eyes of the men followed me. No one waved back. Maybe if I stopped to explain my mixed heritage, that I, too, had the blood of the red man flowing through my veins, they would warm up. Peace, brother. Indian power. Instead, I kept riding.
Six dwellings of dubious construction wobbled toward imminent collapse on the outskirts of the town proper. They might once have been efforts at real homes or built for convenient storage of farm equipment, with their scrap timber walls, sometimes four of them, nailed together with neglect and standing by virtue of inertia, sheltering a collection of dirt daubers, spiderwebs, and four feral cats. The better homes were constructed of piled rocks that somehow defied gravity and stayed upright.
“Welcome back, baby, to the poor side of town,” I muttered. “A Johnny Rivers song,” I told the horse, “in case you were curious.”
The quality of construction improved as the road continued. The main drag bisected Geyser Falls, and I counted six cross streets before the main street reached a bridge over the river. A few larger homes occupied the far side, but without getting closer, further gathering of intelligence was impossible. Toward the center of town, the buildings were made of brick, and the tallest reached three stories. Farther out, wood construction dominated, with false-fronted buildings that put me in mind of every Western movie I had ever seen.
Three men in dusty work clothes and slouch hats lounged in front of a shop. A barber pole had been crudely painted on the window glass. I pulled Misery to a stop—as in, I actively stopped trying to make him go forward—so I could read the sign posted next to the door. The loungers’ stink-eyed gaze, thick as bubbling tar, spread over me. The sign listed services from a haircut (ten cents) to a tooth extraction (a half-dollar). Lettered in chalk at the bottom were the words “No Injuns or Nigers.”
My lips twisted. “No ‘nigers,’ huh? Well okay, then, this should be fun.”
None of the watchers seemed inclined to comment. I debated getting off the horse and giving the barber a spelling lesson, but discretion weighed in, and I reined my horse away, continuing toward the center of town. I had reached “civilization” but had no idea what the hell to do. I supposed I could hire on as a cowpoke and ride, boldly ride, in search of El Dorado.
After four days of sparing use, my amulet had charged about halfway, giving me enough power to deal with emergency situations, but the fact remained that I had no idea how to use it to get home. Birnbaum had the knowledge, and Birnbaum was roughly one hundred and ten years away from being born. My memory of the event that triggered the jaunt back to the nineteenth century was more hole than fabric.
So of course, of course, I asked the horse, “What now?”
Misery responded by dropping a smattering of road apples.
Failing to plan is planning to fail was one of my father’s favorites, along with Shut the fuck up and get to work. I listened to the clopping hooves for a time, brain in neutral. Men—and a very few women—went about their business, trekking across the dusty street or thumping along the boardwalk. I received many slanted looks at me from under lowered hat brims, their eyes as narrow and suspicious as those of the Native Americans at the edge of town.
How about food, bath, bed for the night? A stable for the horse. Until your six dollars and forty-two cents runs out, anyway. There’s your plan, Dad.
I found a low-slung building between a bank and feed store, the white facing hand-lettered with the word “EAT” in bold red paint. A smaller signboard posted by the door claimed the establishment as Maylene’s and listed some prices for meals. Among them was a Lunch Special for twenty-five cents. I deduced there might be food to be had inside, and my belly rumbled an okay-let’s-get-’er-done noise.
“Wait here, Misery.” For good measure, I wrapped the reins around the hitch rail. Me cowboy, him horse.
Maylene’s interior enjoyed the homey and welcoming feel of a prison mess hall. Two trestle tables with benches ran from front to back, long enough to seat twenty on a side, or more if they didn’t mind sharing cooties. A central aisle ran the length of the place, from the front door to the kitchen. This time of day—midway between noon and dark—I had the place to myself.
At the jangle of the front doorbell, a squat woman in a flower-print dress and a flour-printed apron trundled from the kitchen. If God had taken a full-sized woman, pressed one mighty thumb on her head and squashed her to half-size, the result would look like this gray woman. Her pewter hair was torqued back so tightly that I was afraid her face might pop if a mosquito bit her.
“Lunch is over.” The woman spoke with a German accent so heavy, I could taste the sauerkraut. “But I haf some food to eat, if that is what you want.” ...If zat is vhat you vhant.
“Yes, thank you.” I took a seat with my back to the wall. “Are you Maylene?”
“Nein. Ich heisse Gerda. This place, I have owned twelve years. People... slow to change, they are, ja?”
I laid a silver dollar on the table. “Keep the food coming until that runs out.”
“Gut. Wait, I bring coffee.” True to her word, Gerda brought a pot of coffee and a ceramic mug. In trip after trip, she served up a wheel of cornbread with a pot of soft butter, a bowl of leek soup, a pan-fried steak that lapped over the plate, boiled potatoes, pinto beans, carrots, and okra. As the final dish landed in front of me, Gerda wiped her hands on her grungy apron and said, “You finish, ja? I heff apfel pie in oven, to be ready soon.”
“Newspaper?”
“Ja. I heff yesterday’s paper. I bring.”
Mouth stuffed with cornbread, I could only nod thanks when she handed me two sheets of folded, greasy newsprint. I cleared a space among the dishes and spread the paper open with fingers that shook with hunger, not fear—absolutely not fear. The header proclaimed the paper to be the Geyser Falls Bulletin, printed in Geyser Falls, California. My eyes danced over the page for a moment, refusing to settle on the date until I forced myself to look at it.
According to the town paper, yesterday was October 21st, 1887.
“Well, damn,” I whispered. No escaping it now. Speculation over. I was in the fucking past. The reality hit me hard enough that I swallowed coffee to break the logjam in my throat. No more denial. The truth was right there, in black and white. I was stuck in the nineteenth century. No phone, no car, no flush toilets. No Administrators of the Codex Magica—at least that I knew of—no Jurgens, Home Depots, Safeways, or even a goddamn 7-Eleven.
I looked up when the door jingled. A broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped lean wolf of a man in tall boots stood in the doorway, sporting a silver badge and an immaculate white hat. The lawman studied me with electric-blue eyes as he moseyed—and that was the only way to describe it—to the table and high-stepped over the bench to take a seat opposite me. He moved with the fluid, easy grace of a panther. The badge said “Sheriff” in block letters.
The sheriff remained silent while eyeballing me from across the table. I let my body go loose. My fight-or-flight sensors triggered a burst of adrenaline, and the fight portion rose to the ready. I was in no mood to be fucked with, and I could sense a serious amount of attitude radiating from the guy’s Randolph Scott jawline to the tips of his pointy boots. My warrior brain cataloged all the convenient weapons and developed a flowchart for sudden violence. If he does this, I do that...
“Now, tell me—” Suspicion leaked out of the lawman’s pores, along with aforementioned attitude. He spoke with the voice of command, much like my father once did. “Just who the hell are you, boy?”
I went cold, and my skin tightened.
The sheriff twitched back a tick, obviously not liking what he saw, and the lawman’s hand fell below the table, presumably to the butt of his pistol.
Inside my head, Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” clicked onto the turntable. “Here’s the deal, Sheriff.” My voice had the razor-steel calm it always did in the buildup to sudden death and smoking guns. “I’m quarter-Chinese, quarter-Black, quarter-Comanche, quarter-Irish, and one hundred percent American, so if you call me ‘boy’ one more time, I will beat you to a frazzled pixie stick and nail your dick to the door.”
By his expression, the lawman had caught the gist of my statement, if not the fine points. His face transformed from ruddy tan to brick red.
“Now.” I set my coffee cup down. “My name is Judge Calico Shivers, and you have one chance to start again before the ass-kicking begins.”