Afterimage by Askegren Pierce

Author:Askegren, Pierce [Askegren, Pierce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-26T05:00:00+00:00

Guitar chords blasted, fast, fat, and fuzzy. They echoed as the camera tracked down from the orange sun that filled the screen, sliding down along a yellow sky to seemingly endless sands that were the color of pale rust. Just watching it all made Xander feel hot and sweaty. It didn’t make sense to start the car and run the air conditioner, so he retrieved a second soda out of the ice-filled cooler instead. It was the cheap stuff, supermarket-brand carbonated fruit punch, but it went down good.

On-screen, the desert sands seemed to stretch on forever. Where they met the yellow sky, something was increasingly visible. It was a man riding a horse.

“This is going to be good,” Xander said. When he got no response, he glanced at Jonathan. The younger boy’s eyelids were half-closed. “Hey!” Xander said sharply.

Jonathan sat up, startled. “Huh? What?”

“It’s kind of early to doze off,” Xander said. He would never admit it, but he had prepared for the evening by taking a nap after school.

“No, no,” Jonathan said. “Just resting my eyes.”

Xander had his doubts, but he allowed another abrupt guitar riff to command his attention back to the screen. Just in time, too: A jump cut eliminated the distance, and a man’s face nearly filled the screen. Presumably, this was the distant rider shown a moment before.

He looked as though he’d been built out of beef jerky, as though the desert sun had sucked every molecule of moisture out of his body and turned his skin to leather, corrugated and rough. He had a Stetson hat pulled low over eyes that were little more than slits but that still burned with a fire all their own. A hand as leathery as the face raised a cheroot cigar to barely parted lips. The traveler took a puff and exhaled, and the swirls of smoke condensed into yet another movie title.

Reach for the Sky—and Die!

“They hardly make westerns anymore,” Xander said helpfully. He drank more fruit soda. If he kept this up, he realized, he’d need to try out another part of the renovated open-air theater.

“Gee, I wonder why,” Jonathan said. He’d opened a cooling beverage as well, but his choice was caffeinated cola.

“This one’s Italian,” Xander said, still trying to be helpful.

The guitar chords continued. The rider’s face gave way to a rapid-fire sequence of images, some of them surprisingly violent. Having dismounted his horse, the man strode along the central street of a flyspeck western town. Storefronts, saloons, and plank sidewalks lined either side. He carried a sawed-off shotgun in one hand and a six-shooter in the other, and a bullwhip coiled around one serape-clad shoulder. In a series of tightly edited shots, he put all three weapons to extensive use.

The shotgun blasted twice, taking out the saloon’s plate glass window. When townsfolk made their opposition known, booming shots from the six-gun silenced them . . . permanently. The bullwhip snaked out to impossible length, snared a rooftop sniper, and pulled him to the street.

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