Elizabeth Bear: Faster Gun

However they reacted, he missed it, because his chest tightened around the excitement with the pain of an incipient cough, and he doubled over with his hands on his knees. Slow breaths. Shallow. Easy. That was the way. His hands shook and his vision narrowed as he fished in his pocket for the stick of candy.

You’d shoot a horse with a broken wind. Why couldn’t he get anybody to put a bullet into him?

The horehound eased his throat. Nothing would ease the tightness in his chest except the solution that had already been so long in coming. Or the touch of Miss Lil’s hand, he realized, as she took his elbow and helped him stand upright.

“Bastard thing,” he said, when he could say anything. “Consumption killed my mother. Likely kill me too.”

“I know,” said Flora.

He caught her looking, got caught on her gaze. Nodded. “I’ve got a legend where you come from?”

“Oh,” said Missus Shutt. “Yes, Mr. Holliday. You do.”

“That’s something, then. They got a cure for this, in the future?”

“We do,” Missus Shutt answered.

“Good,” he said. He felt for his pistol. Took it out, spun the cylinder. Made sure there was a bullet under the hammer.

Bill and the women watched him in silence. The horses crunched grain in their nose bags.

“Well,” said Holliday. “Sooner we find this son of a bitch, sooner we can rescue your moon man and head back to town. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked up a good whiskey thirst.”

Doc and Bill hoisted Missus Jorgensen, Missus Shutt, and Flora into the tunnel where they’d first seen the moon man. The first women knelt to help haul Miss Lil over the edge. Then Bill let Doc put a boot in his hands and kick high enough for the women to steady him while he clambered up. Bill himself surprised Doc: He might have been grizzled and a little soft around the middle, but he planted his hands on the lip, brushing rust flakes and debris aside, and jumped and swung over the head-high threshold in a scattering of rotting metal.

Doc gave the hex a hand to stand while Missus Jorgensen and Missus Shutt kept an eye down the corridor in the direction the gunman must have run. When Doc’s gaze met Bill’s—Bill’s face gaunt and strange in the shadowy blue light—Bill nodded.

Without a word, the six fell into three ranks of two—Doc and Miss Lil in the front with their scatterguns poised. The other four minced softly behind, pistols ready, while the rasp of boots on blistered metal echoed out.

The corridor—or tunnel, or gangway; if this was a star-ship, Doc’s store of nautical terminology was insufficient to its engineering—must have once stretched in a bowed line the length of the craft. Now only the first fifty feet were more or less intact—Doc and Miss Lil probed each step with a toe and shifted weight carefully forward—and they picked up the gunman’s trail about thirty feet from where the moon man had been hanging by his toes.

Beyond that point, the corridor warped, the metal twisted and crumpled so anyone who wanted to pass through would have to do so by writhing under the buckled roof like a snake on its belly. Piles of debris had been pushed to one side to allow someone to do just that. Shiny scratches showed where that same someone had retreated back through the gap in a hurry.

Doc crouched, keeping his body well to one side, and rested a hand against the roof to brace himself. More flakes of metal dusted his shoulders and hat as he tipped his head down to peer through the gap.

It was dark beyond. The blue-white lights did not penetrate the constriction, leaving Doc with the uneasy sense of staring into a cave that might contain any horror he could conceive of—and a few inconceivable ones as well. At the mouth, caught on a jagged twist of metal, a few strands of yellow-and-black cotton were still damp with blood on one end.

Miss Lil, just as careful not to silhouette herself, crouched on the other side of the gap. She eyed the sticky smudge on Doc’s fingertip after he touched the snagged fabric and frowned across. “Somebody was in a hurry.”

“John Ringo was wearing a yellow check shirt when we saw him last,” Doc said.

“John Ringo?” asked Flora.

“The man who tried to convince you to hire him as a guide when I turned you down that first time,” Doc said. “He’d not scruple to follow us out here and lie in wait, ma’am, if he thought you’d anything worth stealing.”

“The horses are worth stealing,” Bill said.

“It bled,” Miss Lil said, bending further to get her head into the crevice. “But a moderate amount.”

Flora put her hands against her back as if it pained her. “A scrape like that isn’t enough to slow anybody down.”

Missus Jorgensen made a sound that might have been a bitter laugh, in a less strained situation. “Not until he comes down with lockjaw in a week or so.”

“Do we risk a lantern?” Bill asked.

Whatever conversation took place then was silent, a matter of glances and twists of the mouth, but Doc thought he followed it… more or less. When Flora said, “I’d just be making a target of myself,” though, he balked.

“You’re not going first,” he said, forgetting politeness in his shock. “A little slip of a thing like you? It don’t matter if I die.”

“That’s exactly why I am going first, Doctor Holliday,” she said, in a tone that bade to remind him who was paying whom to be here. “I’ll be able to move quickly and freely. Much more so than either of you gentlemen.”

He frowned at her, formulating a protest. She let her fingertips brush the pearl handle of Miss Lil’s revolver, which she was carrying since they’d traded guns.

“Are you prepared to contest it with me?”

“Never get in the way of a lady when she’s made her mind up,” he said, and stood up strictly so he could step back. “Will you at least let us sling a rope around you so we can pull you back if we have to?”

“That…” Flora dusted her hands together. “I think we can compromise on.”

Their precautions turned out unnecessary, but Doc still felt the better for having made them. Flora crawled through the crushed section of corridor, dragging a rope behind her, and vanished from sight. After seven or ten palm-sweating minutes, her voice came back: “It’s clear on the other side!” and one by one the rest of the group followed. It was a tight squeeze for Miss Lil, who found herself scraped flat and wriggling once or twice, but even she made it.

Doc went last, feeling his way in the darkness, following the line by touch. He’d tied his bandanna across his mouth to keep from breathing in rust flakes. It forced him to regulate his inhalations to what the cloth would filter. He hoped that made it less likely he’d trigger a coughing fit. He could imagine little worse than lying there in the darkness, pressed between sheets of warped metal, coughing his life away.

Corrosion gritted against his knees and palms and where his shirt rubbed between the deck and his belly. The roof brushed his back and disarrayed his hair. He had to push his hat before him in one hand, the coach gun in the other. At one point the passageway dropped, and he slithered down on his belly, wondering how he was ever going to manage if it turned back up again. But at the bottom it only flattened out, and his dark-adapted vision picked out a dim sort of reflected glow that seemed to hang in the air rather than come from any place in particular.

The line led him on, and soon he came around a corner and saw the edge of the passage widening, and the rust-stained trousers and boots of his companions standing beyond. He had enough room to push himself to his knees, then to a crouch.

He clapped his hat against his hip to clean it at least a little, then set it on his head.