Dread Reckoning Page 3

  “Another, in Mudflats, you broke up a dog-fighting ring, killing all the trainers and almost everyone there who had placed a wager. You freed all the healthy animals, managed to escape in a wagon with all the injured canines and their newly-born offspring. You even, afterward, then rescued from a vengeful parent, one of the healthy dogs that had bitten their child.”

  “That mutt didn’t know any better - it had been raised that way. And I wasn’t going to let the pups of fighting dogs be murdered either - Buddy was one of them, who you know, so you know that they can be raised better…” Royce gazed longingly into the past. “I wish I could see that red furball just one last time.”

  “And, somewhere between the train stations of Echo and Sundown you-

  “That’s the one,” Royce decided, “the buffalo hunting train!”

  “Indeed,” Lafayette raised an eyebrow.

  “Yup.” Royce nodded. “How about, instead, I tell you how that one went down.”

  “There will be no need…”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because we are already arriving at that moment in time…”

  “So we just arrive at it… there… in the past?”

  “Yes, precisely.”

  “Fugging madness, but giddy-up!”

  “Indeed.”

  Royce stood with confidence. “This was where I was the most justified I’ve ever been.”

  “Excellent, show me what led to that…”

  “I will. Can’t wait.”

  “Thus it shall be…”

  Royce was woken by a crack of thunder as the storm outside grew stronger. Waking, it seemed, had become the trend of this dreaded night.

  The train dream hadn’t appeared to have led anywhere, and he was wearing the horizontal prison stripes again. Usually when Lafayette laid the heavy language on with enigmatic statements like, thus it shall be, bizarre twists of fortune followed.

  But, perhaps it was simply a dream?

  Staring out of the small barred window of Royce’s cell was a bearded man also wearing the stripes of Hayworth Penitentiary. A noose hung from his neck, the rope’s cut end not swaying despite the chill damp gusts of the increasing storm. There was a soft glow about him that mixed with what little moonlight was available – moonlight that cast no shadow.

  Royce, with little care in his voice, joked to the… to… it, “Is there somewhere else you need to be, or are you just gonna hang around for a while?”

  The spectre didn’t react. It continued to peer out of those bars as though it longed for some touch of freedom it could never have.

  If it wasn’t the spirit of a train driver, it was the ghost of a prisoner. Royce was as comfortable as one could be with most occurrences like this; he’d seen his share and often was told by the Falco family and its associates that the gift was the province of the Seventh Son. The only times he wasn’t comfortable with such visions was when they were malevolent – it was during those moments that Royce took exception to the supernatural.

  It still hadn’t passed the stroke of midnight.

  Many destined for the gallows would wish for time to slow down or even stand still to avoid their impending demise. Royce’s Last Midnight was taking forever. Unless Lafayette’s visitations were going to give him some meaning or insight against this dilemma, he simply wished the inevitable Last Midnight would pass and the sun would dawn upon the end of his life at the end of a rope.

  The injured rat was still resting at the end of the bed under the blanket, the little covered sanctuary having become quite warm. “Cornelius, why didn’t I ask Lafayette about that fugging weird bell tolling while I had the chance?” The rat made a chattering sound in response. “All I did was ask about Kumiko.”

  As if the unasked question of Lafayette tapped into a well of mysteriousness, Royce felt a strange shift in the atmosphere. There was an uncomfortable feeling in the air coming from the death-watch station.

  It wasn’t the ghost staring at the storm that had truly started to beat down before he woke up with the rain, cold, thunderbolts and flashes of light flickering through barred windows. It was that a disturbance had presented itself nearby, something sinister had made itself known.

  The spectre had vanished while out of sight when McLaren and Reed led three strangers into the cell corridors.

  You wouldn’t know if they were man or woman, cloaked in heavy flowing black robes. Under a straight-brimmed black hat, each wore the most unsettling mask. Dark-lensed goggles covered the eyes of the mask while a pointed black leather snout – shaped like a raven’s beak - protruded from the mouth.

  Royce had seen a number of different spook hats in his years, but none were ever as intricately strange or disconcerting as these. Many of them had appeared among clandestine gatherings at the Falco mansion when he was growing up, their wearers often holding great interest in Royce and his brother, Kayne.

  They possessed the blessing to do their will by the rich and powerful and given autonomy to override law enforcement by the government - and it is said in quiet corners of the West that they dabble in occult magic. From their reputations gained centuries prior against the Black Death and other plagues of Europe and the British Isles, their function was to investigate, control and cure disease.

  They were known as plague doctors. They ventured where only rats dared go, followed the sick, and enacted their reputably divine purpose wherever they appeared.

  Royce found himself standing, staring at one of the three as he… or she… it… stared back.

  McLaren and Reed unlocked Mortimer’s cell, went in and woke the snoring madman.

  “What?” Mortimer panicked, seeing the thundering conditions outside through his own little square barred window. “I wasn’t making any noise – it was the fugging weather!”

  “Here he is: Clyde Mortimer,” Reed presented.

  McLaren added, “Facing the gallows for murdering perhaps more than a hundred men and women from Alabaster to Rosewood.”

  Mortimer chuckled. “You’re leaving out all the interesting details, they weren’t all men and women – animals, fish, children…”

  “The gruesome details, you mean, you sick fugger.” Reed slapped Clyde upside his head “We don’t want to know.”

  “These visitors need to examine you before your execution,” McLaren explained.

  “Examinations?” Mortimer’s annoyance of being awoken was soon replaced by vile impulses. “I like examinations.” He looked to each plague doctor, suddenly compliant. “I like to take turns.”

  Royce’s spine shivered at Mortimer’s words before he spoke to the goggles of the beaked mask that remained pointed his way. “Do I know you?”

  The plague doctor didn’t flinch.

  As the guards led Mortimer from his cell and headed toward the death-watch station, the old lunatic asked the plague doctors in tow, “Tell me, in your examinations, have any of you ever had the pleasure of sticking a man’s head on a spike?”

  Just before Royce’s plague doctor exited the corridor, he tried one last time to get a response. “Kayne Septimus Falco.”

  The plague doctor flinched, pausing in its next step for a second, before continuing around the corner as though nothing was amiss.

  Royce grunted, getting nothing of worth. He doubted it, but perhaps the plague doctor could at least be useful by not bringing Mortimer back.

  “Look out, Cornelius.” He fell to his bed, the thin padding and wood of the ledge a little hard for comfort, hands running through his hair. “Fugginell, what’s going on around here? I’ve seen some weird shyt before, but this place wins a prize. Fugging Mortimer. Fugging plague doctors… here?”

  As thunder rumbled outside, Royce closed his eyes, trying not to think about the shadowy physicians. Instead, he tried to imagine why Lafayette wanted him involved with his Wakoda brother and the new posse of outlaws he rode with.

  It was impossible: he faced the noose on his next mor
ning. It was living the life of an outlaw that saw his neck headed toward the end of that executioner’s rope time and again. What good could come from continuing that trend?

  It’s a nice dream, Royce thought, but Lafayette’s musings couldn’t outweigh the encompassing dread that continued to gnaw at the inevitable reality that nothing mattered any more as his life was going to end.

  Unlike times before when he’d faced execution, this time there didn’t appear to be an escape from his inevitable Doom.

  “Finally!” The unfamiliar young man’s voice broke through the haze in Royce’s head. “We’ve got ourselves a herd of buffalo for the killing!”

  It had taken him some time to force himself to sleep again after the intrusion of the plague doctors and his dwelling thoughts upon his hopeless mortality. Royce didn’t care for the lunatic, but he was also troubled that Clyde Mortimer hadn’t been returned to his cell. And he was left with the nagging question of whether his brother, Kayne, had anything to do with the black-clad strangers.

  When Royce Falco was awoken by the youthful guffawed announcement of a buffalo sighting, he was in a different train car seat to the one he and the magician had been aboard earlier, feeling a different rocking sensation as he regained consciousness. And this time, Lafayette was nowhere to be seen.

  Royce was wearing the frontier attire he had in the previous… dreamscape - was it a dream? Is this a dream, are these scenes actually elaborate artifices of Lafayette, or a symptom of the mind caused by knowing that your impending Doom draws ever nearer?

  Cornelius was in his pocket again – or in his pocket still, depending upon how Royce thought about it - remaining calm and enjoying the warmth.

  He recognised the train he was onboard: it really was the third choice Lafayette had proffered. The difference in the current moment to that of the past was that he had approached this particular train on a champion of a horse that he had named Meteor, and gained entry via the caboose.

  Men of all ilk responded to the news of buffalo sighted by raising the windows of the passenger car and pointing their weapons outside. The train slowed, attempting to match their targets’ speed.

  This was one of the many railroads and trains owned by Royce’s father, the German railroader, Oskar Falco. The industrialist had seen fit to advertise specifically endorsed Buffalo Hunting by Railroad on train lines that were especially prone to damage from bison on the tracks. This sort of commercially sanctioned slaughter attracted the likes of government agents, professional hunters, fur traders, trophy collectors and other men from all walks of life. They were young and old, some simply in it for the thrill of the kill.

  It also bettered Oskar Falco’s interests that the U.S. Army endorsed this sort of carnage to diminish the plains Indian’s primary means of survival, something his military ally, Captain Phileas Cordell, enjoyed. This degree of mass slaughter forced the native populations away from the railroads. Tycoons like the Gold Baroness of Wakoda Territory, Twyla Matthias, had also poured funds into supporting the massacre of buffalo in a bid to take more land away from the Indians.

  A herd of bison, commonly called buffalo, had begun to stampede away from the train, but still ran mostly alongside it.

  The train’s matching speed was perfect as its passengers eagerly opened fire, plumes of white blossoming to release faint whiffs of gunpowder. Men had shouldered to the gangways between cars to set up positions for shooting. Others had clambered onto the rooves for a clearer vantage point. An open-topped boxcar with barely any freight – a deliberate decision for railroad buffalo hunting – was continuing to fill with shooters looking to make their kills.

  Royce was reviled by the proficiency involved to get clean kills. Ignorant shooters wasted extra shots to the buffalo’s thick furred head, prolonging the damage before death, while educated sharpshooters shot through the less-dense ribs to pierce the lungs, often resulting in the beast falling instantly.

  Royce Falco freed the strap over the revolver of his ammo-stocked gunbelt. His index finger curled expertly around where he would squeeze the trigger, the others taking to the grip, while his thumb rested on the hammer waiting to be cocked.

  The Mustang 68; six-round single-action revolver with modified seven inch barrel, there’d be five cartridges of forty-four calibre ammunition chambered, all together bringing about three pounds or more of heft in hand.

  Royce withdrew the Mustang, slowly, admiring the polished steel of the gun that had once been his choice of weapon until he was arrested…

  Arrested…

  But that wasn’t until after this incident…

  He had enough time to stop this slaughter all over again - the butchery of the buffalo, that is, not the carnage he’d bring upon the hunters. Wherever Lafayette was, Royce would prove he was in the right during this confrontation.

  Royce shot the weapon from the hip, fanning the hammer three times.

  Three shooters nearby dropped.

  Royce moved quickly to grab any revolvers he could lay his hands on. Five shots of his own would never be enough to take out an entire train’s worth of hunters if he didn’t get any time to reload.

  But the three men never hit the floor…

  Instead, their bodies faded from existence as they fell, their forms replaced by rising flames and shadows. The physical men had transformed into hellish spectres…

  “What the fugg?” Royce breathed, a second passing before he moved again. “That is not how this day went down.”

  More of the hunters turned from their windows but were shot by Royce’s quicker reactions. He fired his weapon plus another he’d procured but realised something was amiss.

  He examined his old favourite. Royce hadn’t realised that the chamber should have been empty until he’d fired around twice as many shots as possible. “More than five shots… what’s going on?” He shrugged his shoulders and continued through the passenger cars.

  Time didn’t flow properly as the slaughter of the hunters repeated itself from that fateful day. There were moments when the wood walls of the train cars splintered around him as he returned fire that he’d be reliving the bloodshed that had continued to earn him the reputation of Red Roy as he remembered it, and other times when he’d suddenly be in another car or on the roof continuing the visceral mess.

  The spirits of the recently deceased rose above the train and the buffalo, following the steam-billowing locomotive engine across the plains of Wakoda Territory. Ghostly horses emerged into existence under their new riders, galloping upon the sky above the bloodshed as though they could fly like eagles.

  “They’re not… are they?” Royce had to move on, ignoring memories of the myths of ethereal gallopers he had heard around the campfire of his Wakoda brother when he reached the front of the train. He stood over the coal in the tender, having maimed the pleading fireman with his own shovel, while explaining why what this train was doing was wrong.

  He had the back of the engineer’s head in the driver’s cab lined within his revolver’s custom sights, but slowly realised that he wasn’t aiming at the rear of a sooty cap. Instead, it was the wide-brimmed midnight blue hat of Charles Lafayette.

  “So here you are,” Royce breathed, feeling lucky that he hadn’t pulled the trigger on the magician.

  The fireman begged for the engineer and his own lives, pleading that they were only doing their jobs, not harming any buffalo.

  “Why, dear Royce,” Lafayette slid around in the simple driver’s seat at the boiler’s backhead to face his would-be-attacker, “do you not kill the dog that unexpectedly turns upon the child?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything right now? You wanted to see me at my most justified!”

  “This entire event has everything to do with you proving your justification. I reiterate; why do you favour the dog that turns upon the child?

  “The dog doesn’t know what it has done - it doesn’t know any better.”

  “People ar
e much the same, dear Royce. They must learn from their mistakes.”

  “This is completely different. And people should know better.” The fireman continued to react as though his life was still being threatened.

  “While mostly true,” Lafayette motioned toward the fireman, “some can only know better when shown another way. They lived a life of never knowing, their mercy being that they must be taught.”

  “What,” Royce tried to understand, “you think it’s like teaching the dog that didn’t know any better?”

  “People can improve if shown another path. If offered mercy, a chance for redemption, they too can become the most loyal of companions. But, only if someone is there to guide them.”

  “People aren’t like dogs.”

  “Royce Falco, their impending Doom is upon them at your own hands.” The magician’s voice came from behind and a pleading engineer was suddenly in the driver’s seat – he was the very same train driver that had appeared as a ghost to Royce… a ghost that he had created on this day that had seen him sent to the gallows.

  When he turned around, Lafayette was standing between the cab and the tender. “You have the power to weave their Fate along a different direction. A moment of Reckoning is upon you, do not waste the time Fate has allowed you…”

  Cornelius wriggled in his pocket, a timely reminder about protective vigilance and what can occur when offering mercy to the living.

  Royce didn’t speak, but raised his revolver, the barrel pointing to the sky.

  “Thus it shall be.” Lafayette concluded.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Royce sighed, uncocking his revolver’s hammer. “You thus and I’ll reckon…”

  The decisions of the outlaw Red Roy changed from this point onward. “You stop this train.” Royce instructed the engineer instead of killing him, something he hadn’t done the first time he’d been here. “And you refuse to drive it any further through buffalo territory, or ever drive a train for buffalo hunting again.”