Simon Hawke - The Six Gun Solution

He felt an almost sexual thrill of anticipation surge through him. He took a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves. His palms were sweating. He wiped them on his trousers. Just one more moment…

Scott came running around the corner of Fourth and Fremont and came to a dead stop. Suddenly, it was daylight. For a moment, he was totally disoriented. And then, just ahead of him, he saw Wyatt Earp, his brothers, Virgil and Morgan. and Doc Holliday walking down the street, heading for the vacant lot between Fly’s Boarding House and Harwood’s place. Just beyond them, he could see Ike Clanton, Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury lined up in a row and facing them.

The famous shoot-out.

As if mesmerized, he started to move forward.

He heard Virgil Earp call out, “Boys, throw up your hands! I want your guns!”

The two parties were perhaps six feet apart.

Young Billy Clanton yelled out, “Don’t shoot me! I don’t want to fight!”

Tom McLaury said. “I haven’t got anything, boys. I am disarmed.” He moved his hands up to his coat and started to open it.

Virgil called out sharply, “Hold on! I don’t mean that!”

And as Virgil shouted, Jenny came running around the corner, saw Scott moving toward the men as if hypnotized and..

Lucas and Andre rounded the corner where the Capitol Saloon stood and suddenly everything seemed to shift into slow motion. It felt as if they were moving against some sort of invisible resistance, the current of the timeflow itself pushing against them. They saw Jenny running just ahead of them and it looked as if she were running underwater, bounding in slow motion, her hair gently rising and falling behind her as she ran toward the men ahead of her, Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, Doc Holliday and Scott, all standing abreast and facing the Clanton and the McLaury brothers. They heard her call out, as if from the bottom of a well, and her words sounded slow and drawn out, like a record being played at the wrong speed as she shouted. “Scoooot… noooooooo!”

With agonizing slowness. Scott and Wyatt both turned around and, at the same time, three shots cracked out, their reports sounding like echoes in a cave. Like feathers floating on the wind, both Wyatt and Scott started to crumple to the ground…

In the next instant, with the suddenness of an earthquake, everything speeded up to normal and Lucas and Andre. straining against the invisible force that seemed to be holding them back, were thrown violently forward, as if shoved hard from behind. They both fell sprawling to the ground, hitting hard, Stunned. Lucas raised his head and saw Jenny running just ahead of them, moving with normal speed, and beyond her, moving toward the Earps and Holliday as if he were spellbound, was Scott. It was almost an exact replay of the scene they had just witnessed a split second earlier. A short distance past the Harwood place. standing in the middle of the street across from the Aztec Rooming House, they saw Finn Delaney. The Earps, Holliday, the Clantons and the McLaurys were already standing in the vacant lot. Scott was a short distance behind them, almost to the corner of Fly’s Boarding House and well out of the center of the street. And there was nothing standing in between Jenny, running toward the combatants, and Finn Delaney, standing in the middle of the street, on the far side of Third. And, as he watched, Lucas suddenly saw Dr. Darkness appear out of nowhere, standing at Finn Delaney’s side.

Andre started to get up. and Lucas saw it all in a flash of realization.

“ No! Stay down!” He threw, himself on top of her.

Delaney watched the men turn into the vacant lot between Fly’s and Harwood’s and then he saw Scott come running around the corner. As he passed the Capitol Saloon, Scott stopped and simply stood there for a moment, looking disoriented, then he started moving with a sort of odd gait, heading off to the side of the street, past Bauer’s Meat Market and the Assay Office, moving toward Fly’s Boarding House…

Delaney caught his breath. “Oh. no…” he said. “No, kid, don’t do it…”

Jenny came running around the corner, as fast as she could, hard on Scott’s heels. Then, just behind her, Lucas and Andre appeared as if out of nowhere, tumbling forward into the street. Christ, this is it, thought Delaney, raising his disruptor. He couldn’t wait for Darkness. He’d have to kill Neilson before he interfered…

“The girl, Delaney!” said Darkness, suddenly materializing at his side. “Shoot the girl!”

Without pausing to think. Finn shifted his aim and fired the disruptor on tight beam. As Jenny opened her mouth to call out, she was suddenly wreathed in the bright blue glow of Cherenkov radiation. An instant later, she was gone, her atoms disintegrated.

And so was Darkness.

Two shots cracked out. And then all hell broke loose.

Simultaneously, Finn Delaney, Lucas Priest, Andre Cross and Scott Neilson all seemed to hear a deafening roaring in their ears, as if an entire ocean were being sucked away, and then there was nothing but the sound of gunfire from the lot, an entire fusillade of shots, one right after the other, and the street became filled with gunsmoke.

Drakov had Finn Delaney square in the crosshairs of his pistol scope. He thumbed back the hammer, put his finger on the trigger and

… a blackthorn walking stick came down on the gun and knocked it aside. The shot went wild. Startled, Drakov looked up to see a gaunt man in an Inverness tweed coat looming over him, stick raised for another blow. Before he could throw up his arm to ward it off, the stick came down and Drakov collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

Darkness exhaled heavily. “I’ll be damned.” he said. “It worked.”

Simon Hawke

The Six Gun Solution

Conclusion

They all sat in Moses Forrester’s private quarters in the TAC-HQ building, drinking twelve-year-old Scotch. Andre. Finn and Lucas sat together on the couch, their drinks on the coffee table in front of them. Forrester sat across from them, in his favorite chair, smoking one of his deep-bowled pipes. Scott Neilson stood by the window, silently staring out at the glittering lights below.

“We all thought it was Scott.” Lucas was saying. “We believed he was the key. And, in a way, he was. In the other universe, he… or his twin.. lived about eight hundred years ago and he really was the Montana Kid, a famous gunfighter. In the other timeline, the Montana Kid was at the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, which did not, in fact, take place at the O.K. Corral, but in the vacant lot a short distance from the alley that led to its back entrance. I guess ‘The Shoot-out in the Vacant Lot Between Fly’s and Harwood’s’ didn’t sound as glamorous as ‘The Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.’ It didn’t really happen there, but it became part of the myth.”

“And in the other timeline, both Wyatt Earp and the Montana Kid died in the shootout?” asked Forrester.

Lucas nodded. “That’s what we saw. Jenny had a twin in the other universe, as well. Actually, there never was a Jenny Reilly in our universe. Not until Drakov put her there, in an effort to match what happened in the other timeline. What we first saw, as near as I can figure it, were the events that happened in the parallel timeline, only we’d been caught in a concentrated area of temporal instability, hallway between the two, in the act of crossing over. It was at that exact point that temporal inertia in both timelines reached its strongest surge, creating a sort of temporal whirlpool in which we became caught briefly. What we were seeing were the events that were happening in the other timeline, at the same exact instant as they were happening in our timeline, only we were caught in a sort of temporal lag.”