Elizabeth Bear - Faster Gun

“Well,” he said, straightening his stiff spine with an effort. “That was a long poke.”

He imagined he didn’t look any better than the others—sweaty, disheveled, smeared with varying shades of ochre as if they’d been caught in an explosion in a painter’s studio. But every chin had a determined set.

“He went that way,” Miss Lil said, pointing. “He’s got a head start.”

“He had one already.” Flora picked up the rope as if to begin coiling it, frowned, and let the end flop again. “I hope there’s an easier way out. But if there isn’t…”

“Leave it,” said Missus Jorgensen. “We should be moving. Let me go first?”

“Begging your pardon—” Doc began.

But Flora held up a hand. “She’s got the best eyes of any of us,” she said. “If our invisible friend left us any tripwires or other nasty surprises, she’ll be the one to spot them.”

“Of course,” said Doc. And though it griped him, he stood aside for the lady again.

Beyond the point of collapse, the passageway began to fork and meander. Missus Jorgensen led them at a brisk walk, occasionally turning to Doc or Miss Lil for direction when they reached an intersection or a chamber that had been broken open by the force of the crash. The trail was clear; their quarry had run, and left occasional drips of blood behind. He was obviously bleeding freely—though not copiously—from the gash he’d given himself on the jagged metal of the crawlway.

“I think he’s lost,” Miss Lil said, when they’d been pursuing for ten minutes or so. “Panicking. He just ran nearly in a circle. It would have been faster to have come down that way, and it would have gotten him to the same place.”

Doc thought about running through this maze of rotten steel, with six armed men and women at your heels, and actually felt a little sorry for Johnny Ringo. But only a little.

He started to cough and tried to stifle it, though in truth they weren’t being so quiet Ringo wouldn’t have heard them coming anyway. The echoes rang out, though, and Doc’s mouth filled with the seawater taste of blood while Doc pawed in his pocket for the stick of horehound. Miss Lil’s touch on his back eased him fast enough, and the candy soothed his throat. Still, he wheezed with the force of the fit.

The echoes of his hacking hadn’t died when a male voice echoed back, distorted by corridors and cavernous rooms. “That you, Holliday? Or is it a hyena?”

“It’s the angel of the redemption,” Holliday called back, his voice threadier than he would have liked. “I understand you have some explaining to do.”

Flora shot him a look. He nodded, holding his position in the center of the corridor, and she and Bill and the other women fanned out to either side, backs flat against the walls, pistols and Miss Lil’s coach gun at the ready. Doc waited until her gaze jerked down the corridor before he started boldly forward, front and center, walking past the first of several side passages before the corridor turned, up ahead.

Drawing fire.

“I hear you coming, lunger,” Ringo warned. “I got a sense this funny gray monkey-thing is something you want alive. If that’s so, you’ll stop right where you are. In fact, you’ll crawl back out of here—and you’ll leave me those horses you brought, and all the water and food they’ve got on ’em.”

Doc paused. “You’re bluffing.” But he was already shaking his head at Flora to indicate the truth of what he thought.

“So I am,” Ringo answered.

There was a thump, and something inhuman made a strangled noise of pain. Doc didn’t flinch, but Miss Lil cringed.

“You learn those smarts in dentist school?” Ringo called.

“Come by ’em honestly,” Doc said.

Flora jerked a thumb down a side passage and raised her eyebrows to Miss Lil in a question.

Miss Lil glanced. Nodded. Smiled.

Flora’s answering grin showed how crooked those front teeth really were.

Doc remembered Miss Lil’s dead-on sense of direction. An unfamiliar sensation—a little bright hope—flickered in his chest, beside the dull old recognized burn of the disease that was killing him.

But Missus Jorgensen put up a hand. Not whispering, just talking so low it wouldn’t carry, she said, “John Ringo doesn’t die here.”

“ Crap ,” Flora hissed. She glanced around. “All right. No killing shots.”

“When does he die?” The demand was out of Doc’s mouth before he even realized he’d made it. In for a penny , he thought. “And who kills him?”

Missus Jorgensen shook her head “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Right,” Doc said. “If you changed the past, you’d change the future. And then you might not even exist.”

She nodded. “Doc—”

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “Whatever answer you gave, it wouldn’t satisfy me.”

Doc slipped the coach gun into its sheath, slung it over his shoulders, and walked forward again, hands held high. He went alone—or nearly alone: Bill ghosted down the wall beside him, for support of morale and covering fire if nothing more. But Doc didn’t look at him. Doc didn’t do anything as he rounded the corner into John Ringo’s sights, in fact, other than raise his hands up just a little tiny bit higher.

Ringo—a dark fellow with a moustache like a set of window drapes—stood against the far wall of a chamber as big as the one where they’d stabled the horses, holding the moon man around the neck. This room was in better repair, though—the walls and floor rusting, sure, but scrubbed and not heaped with debris. There was a sort of nest of fabric at one end, and transparent jugs full of what must be drinking water.

The moon man in Ringo’s grasp was no taller than a boy of twelve, and just as skinny. Its long hands curved over Ringo’s arm where his grasp forced its head up. Ringo pushed the muzzle of his pistol against the creature’s head hard enough that even from across the room, Doc could see its slick gray flesh denting.

Poor critter , Doc thought. Marooned here like Robinson Crusoe. And we’re the cannibal savages.

Ringo grinned over the moon man’s head as Doc stopped twelve or fifteen feet away. “I’m heeled now, Holliday.”

“I can see that.” Doc clicked candy against his tongue with his teeth, letting his hands drift wide. “I said all I wanted out of you is ten paces in the street, John. This isn’t a street. And that isn’t a combatant.”

“But it’s worth something, isn’t it?” Ringo asked. “There’s gotta be a bounty. That’s why you all are out here.”

Doc opened his mouth. He closed it again. For a change, he thought for a second.

“That’s right,” Doc said. He edged a step or two closer to Ringo. A step or two farther from Bill, and the potential cover of the bend in the corridor. “There’s a bounty. Thirty thousand dollars. But only if we bring it in alive.”

He didn’t hear the women coming down the side corridor. He had to assume they were there, though, and that their silence was for Ringo’s benefit… or detriment.

”Thirty… thousand ?“ Ringo said it like he’d never heard of so much money. Doc appreciated the reverence; he might have said the same words the same way himself if their situations were reversed.

“Alive,” Doc said.

Ringo might not have noticed it, but his hand eased off a little on the pistol. The moon man’s head came up straighter. It blinked at Doc with vast, sea-dark eyes.

He didn’t dare look at it. He kept his attention on Ringo’s face. “I’ll split it with you.”

“Where are the rest of ’em?” Ringo asked.

Doc shrugged. “Thirty thousand seemed better than five thousand.”