Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

And then the scream came right at him, slicing through the cornstalks a second before a woman emerged from the field. Tate whirled to meet her with his finger tight on the trigger, but he saw right off that the woman was both unarmed and injured.

Which was another way of saying that someone had already shot her and done a damn thorough job of it. Still, her wounds didn’t seem to slow her down any. She charged right into Tate, and it was all he could do to keep from going down.

Panic flared in her eyes as soon as she saw his pistol, and she took hold of the barrel with one hand and begged him, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”

Her blood was on his gun, and on his shirt. Already, it had soaked through to his skin. Tate tried to keep his wits about him. He knew he had to size her up and do it quickly, because whoever had pumped her full of lead had to be close by.

She had platinum blond hair and bee-stung lips. She wasn’t a farmer’s wife. That was for sure. She didn’t belong in a cornfield.

She had to be part of the gang.

The woman coughed and a stream of blood made a mess of the little Cupid’s bow painted on her lips. “I don’t want to scream no more,” she said, her fingers trembling around the barrel of Tate’s gun. “Don’t do nothing to make me scream.”

Before Tate could say a word, the woman let go of the gun and slumped. Instinctively, Tate caught her before she fell.

Another second and she was dead.

Tate looked over her shoulder just in time to see the man with the Browning Automatic.

One look at the corpse cradled in Tate Winters’ arms and the man’s eyes went wild.

Then he started shooting.

Fat droplets of blood rolled down Claire’s face. Four vultures lay at her feet, scarlet caverns burrowed in nests of black feathers courtesy of several .45 slugs.

The birds that only ate dead things were quiet now. Not one of them managed a scream. They had tried to make a meal of Claire Ives. They might have done it if Claire hadn’t had a killer instinct that would shame Jack Dempsey.

She had a gun, too. And a handful of bullets, cupped in her right palm. The bullets were slick with her blood. She could hardly feed them into the clip.

Claire almost laughed. She was covered in blood, her body painted red as a five-alarm fire, and here she’d been worried about a little cut on her hand.

Gunfire raked the cornfield. Claire slammed the clip home and started toward the ruckus. It sounded like Hank’s Browning, and maybe a pistol. Arson always used the Thompson, so the pistol probably belonged to a lawman. But if Arson was out there, Claire expected she’d hear him open up soon enough if the law was around.

Claire hoped she’d hear that sound, and soon.

If she didn’t hear it… If the cops had chopped Arson down before he fired a shot… If they’d shot her man in the back… if they’d done that…

Claire refused to think about it. She moved down a corn row, her pistol ready. It was quiet now. She listened for a familiar voice, or an unfamiliar one… but there was nothing. She tried to remember where the car was, but she was all turned around. The sun was gone from the sky so she couldn’t gauge direction at all. Besides that, blood flowed into her eyes from the cuts the vultures had inflicted on her forehead, nearly blinding her.

Wiping her eyes, she took a chance and stepped into the next row.

She gasped and opened fire on the man she saw there. Her bullets tore through him, but he didn’t so much as flinch.

And then Claire saw why.

The man wasn’t a man at all.

He wore a skeleton’s face.

And he was grinning.

Gunfire rocked the woman’s corpse, and she danced in Tate Winters’ arms as only the dead can dance.

Tate shielded his body with the corpse. Still, he felt the lead pound into him. Once… twice… three times. Hard punches that stole his wind while stray bullets sang in the dead corn.

The moist air ripened with the smell of gunpowder. Tate held the woman with one arm, her skin still warm to the touch, his blood pumping between them. He held her close, the way the man with the Browning must have held her on cool moonlit nights.

But the woman was dead now. She belonged only to Tate, and he wasn’t going to —

“Let her go!” yelled the man with the Browning. “Fight like a man, goddammit! Let my Pearl go!”

Anger and horror flared in the man’s eyes. The barrel of the Browning jerked in Tate’s direction again, but this time Tate’s pistol traveled a determined arc that mirrored it.

Both men opened fire, and the man with the Browning bucked in his boots as Tate’s bullets sank red wells in his chest. The rifle fell silent and tumbled from the man’s grasp and he dropped to his knees just as Tate’s last bullet trenched the top of his skull.

The man didn’t say another word.

Tate released the woman’s corpse and reloaded quickly, staring into the bandit’s clear blue irises. A wave of blood spilled from the trench in the man’s head and washed his face. He blinked, watching as a scarlet puddle spread across Tate’s left shoulder, and then he smiled, wet red breaths whistling through holes in his chest that pumped dark blood like gushers in a Texas oil field.

Tate kicked the Browning into the road and moved on, never taking his eyes off the fallen bandit.

The man took the longest time to topple.

The longest time to die.

Claire emptied her pistol.

Red tears burned her eyes. The skull swam before her in a scarlet sea of blood. She wiped her eyes clear, wiped again at the cuts on her forehead. She blinked, and stared, and the skull stared back, hollow eyes over a leering grin.

Claire lowered her gun. It was only a scarecrow. She realized that now. Just a straw-stuffed suit and a rusty white bucket of a head with a skullface scratched on the dented side.

She’d shot it full of holes, but there was no blood at all. That was the funniest thing. No blood, only straw and cloth and rust. Rust around the slashing hole that formed the laughing leer, and flaking orange teeth that had powdered to nothing when her bullets ripped through the bucket.

But still the scarecrow smiled, despite its wounds.

Claire smiled too. The scarecrow would grin long after she was gone. Under the hot summer sun and the freezing winter moon, the gentle rains of April and the angry sleet of October. The scarecrow would grin through all of it, and it wouldn’t bleed a drop. It would just hang on its cross laughing at the funniest joke of all, laughing until its brittle leer rusted clean away.

Nothing could hurt it.

It couldn’t bleed.

It couldn’t die.

But it couldn’t live, either.

Claire didn’t know if she could live anymore. She didn’t know if she could die, either. But she knew that she could bleed. And as long as she could do that — alive or dead or consigned to some hell in between — why then, that was something, anyway.

Even with all the blood, that was something.

Claire jammed the last of her bullets into the .45 clip. Arson was out there somewhere. All she wanted was to find him.

She’d do it.

Even if it took her last drop of blood.

A scarlet woman hurried through the corn.

Tate glimpsed her between the rows. There and gone, cutting her own path, never pausing. Tate tracked her from the road, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind.