Straight Outta Deadwood by David Boop

Author:David Boop [Boop, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Collections & Anthologies, Dark Fantasy, Westerns
ISBN: 9781481484329
Google: GW_zwQEACAAJ
Amazon: 148148432X
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2019-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE SPINNERS

Jennifer Campbell-Hicks

The Spinners resided in a ghost town under big prairie skies. Eloise rode in on a main street reclaimed by grasses. Hitching posts and broken shutters marked what used to be the feed store, the smithy and the sheriff’s office.

Wind gusted through grass with a sound like a hundred rattlers. Eloise pressed a hand to her wide-brimmed hat, while the long braid of her hair whipped around her. Her horse snorted and pranced.

“It’s all right.” Eloise dismounted and rubbed his nose. “This place gives me the willies, too. It doesn’t feel solid, like it might blow away.”

She stayed on foot and led the horse toward a decrepit saloon with holes for windows and a hawk’s nest on the eaves. The horse planted its hooves and refused to go any closer. When it reared and almost kicked Eloise, she backtracked to tie him to a hitching post that wasn’t rotted through.

“Don’t you run off,” she said. “You do that, and I’ll be stuck here.”

Satisfied the horse would stay put, Eloise returned to the saloon. Her spurs jingled and her boots clomped up three steps and across a wooden porch to a door that creaked on rusty hinges.

The place smelled like a barn. Animals had left behind nests, scat and bones. Sunlight shafted through broken windows onto dust-covered tables and chairs, some overturned, some splintered or missing legs. Broken bottles littered the floor. Behind the bar was a mural of a tree, bare branched and bristling with brambles.

Eloise’s heart quickened.

This was the place.

After months of searching, on a horse she had stolen from her father’s ranch, with money she pinched from her father’s safe, with impossible hopes in her heart, she had finally arrived.

“Hello?” she said.

A voice came from the shadows like the rumble of an avalanche. “Why are you here?”

Her hand flew to Peter’s gun on her belt. Beside it hung the knife that had once belonged to her sister, Annie—buried in the ground these last ten years. None of Eloise’s belongings, it seemed, were her own. The most important—her heart—she had given to Peter, only to have it die alongside him.

What did that leave her with?

“Show yourself,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m here to deal. That’s what you do, right? You make deals.”

Outside the saloon, clouds crossed the sun, and the shadows deepened. They swirled and slithered across the walls, and an eerie sense of déjà vu came over Eloise, that of a recurring dream of shadows and darkness, and of falling into darkness, falling so long and so far that she would never hit ground. She shivered as the shadows coalesced behind the bar in a semiopaque silhouette that was humanlike, but also not.

Was it one silhouette, or many? Her eyes couldn’t focus on the shadows long enough to count. They dissolved and reformed, and through them, the branches of the bramble tree mural appeared to sway in a breeze.

“Saints alive,” Eloise muttered.

She lifted her hand from her gun and crossed herself. Bullets would no more harm this shadow than a drop of water would douse a raging forest fire.

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