Shoot-out in Hell by Peter Brandvold

Author:Peter Brandvold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE DEVIL’S FURY

CHAPTER ONE

There is nothing quite like the ratcheting snarl of a coiled diamondback to send fear into a man like a hot Apache war lance being driven into a hot, beating heart.

Friends and relatives . . . if there are any relatives here . . . we have gathered here today at the invitation of Louis Hammond Maxwell Prophet and Mathilda Lenora Anderson to share in the joy of their wedding.

The sound is something akin to coarse sand poured slowly through a hollow gourd and the ratcheting click of a gun hammer drawn back to full cock. If you could marry those sounds and give them two beady copper eyes, flat with passionless savagery, two long curving white fangs, and a flicking button tail rising from the end of a serpentine body coiled like cold, scale-covered, sand-colored hemp, you’d have the very essence of what a man fears most in this world.

You’d have the essence of what jerked Lou Prophet out of a dead sleep in the Mexican desert with a yelp.

This outward celebration that we shall see and hear is an expression of the inner love and devotion that Louis and Mathilda have in their hearts for one another . . .

Prophet turned to see the copper eyes glowing at him from a dark nook in the nest of volcanic rock he’d holed up in. The viper was coiled tightly, looped upon itself, head sliding slowly toward where the bounty hunter slouched against the rock, blood running down from the deep gash in his forehead, into his right eye, and down his cheek. He couldn’t see through that eye. Only the left one.

That wasn’t good. Being right-handed, he was also right-eyed.

I, the Reverend Ezra Thaddeus Waggler, believe marriage is of God, and that Mathilda Anderson and Louis Prophet have come here today to stand before God, who is truly Holy, and me, desiring to be united in this sacred relationship of marriage . . .

Slowly, Prophet slid his Colt from the holster thonged on his right, denim-clad thigh. Oh so very slowly, pressing his tongue taut against the back of his cut and swollen bottom lip, he clicked the hammer back.

As he did, he kept his eye on the snake, which kept both eyes on him. The snake’s forked, colorless tongue tested the hot desert air, following the tongue toward its target, which was likely the vague, sunburned shape of a man and the smell of several days of desert sweat and soiled buckskin and denim and the spine-splintering fear of certain death . . . or something worse than death.

Now, Lou, Mattie—will you please turn and face one another and join hands to express your vows of love and devotion each to the other?

The diamondback shook its button tail again.

I, Lou Prophet, take you, Mathilda Anderson, to be my wife . . .

The revolting sound turned Prophet’s blood cold. He stretched his lips back from his teeth as he slid the cocked Colt across his belly toward his left side.

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