The Dread Cowboy

J. Rodolphus

Contest Darkly

The Dread Cowboy

My Father: The Killer

Perhaps the World

Saying Goodbye to Papa

When Angels Perish

Rodolphus Dark Fiction

J. Rodolphus

The Dread Cowboy

J. Rodolphus

The Dread Cowboy

short fiction by Rodolphus

TANDISH DOUBLED BACK AND WEDGED himself between a dumpster emanating stink and a stack of rotting cardboard boxes equally smelly. He put his hand into his spanking new Day-Glo yellow windbreak er

windbreaker and withdrew his stainless steel .44 Magnum Colt Python from the shoulder holster beneath his right arm, rechecked the modified chamber containing a full load of seven hollow-point slugs (special sweet surprises!), then sighted down the eight-inch barrel. Satisfied — at least for the next few minutes — Standish replaced the weapon.

He had eight complete identities packed in his wallet, with eight matching permits allowing him to carry his arsenal through any airport in the world — it never hurt to hedge your bets, and decorated cop or no, Standish had always known this day might come. Much of his traveling arsenal was present today: the modified .44, of course, plus a compact 9mm Beretta in a butt holster, and the two-shot .32 derringer strapped to his ankle.

Enough was enough, and he meant to end this horny-goose chase, put a bullet or two into the shambling nightmare which had pursued him across the breadth of the United States. The thing after him had tracked him from plane to bus to stolen car to plane to taxi to bus to plane — a lot better than the frigging feds or bumbling state die-hards and bungling county yokels, whose dicks were baffled before his second United Airlines trip — the thing after him defied logical reason; however, Standish was positive it would not as well defy a few well-placed hollow points.

It was time to face his pursuer and his fears — if a man like Bert Standish could ever even be considered as a candidate for fears — and this out-of-the-way alley was a better place than most to face the ominous tracker. Standish would have a clear seventy-five-foot bead on the man — an easy shot for Standish, fifteen-year veteran plainclothes detective of the New York City Police Department, before that a five-year beat cop in Los Angeles, and two tours a weapons expert in Vietnam.

Some lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick would not even have the chance to be sorry for exercising such skillful tracking. Standish meant to plug him cleanly from seventy-five feet — or, Bert Standish thought, grinning wickedly, he meant to unplug the bastard, for good, forever, for better or worse.

His grin grew fierce and ugly, stretching across his face like a rotting banana peel. Unplug the dike, tap a kidney, aerate the lawn, turn out the lights. Oh shut up, Standish told himself and laughed. Concentrate on the task at hand.

Of course, Bert Standish knew, it could be neither of those: lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick. His grin faded. It was something more, or something much less, coming on, pursuing, relentless and deadly and unnatural and cold-blooded and righteous — and it was after Bert Standish and, like the Terminator, it would not stop until it ripped his fucking heart out of his body. He licked his lips and forced his grin back into place, a vicious rictus snarl, his teeth glittering brightly and his cheeks scrunching his eyes into slits.

“Daddy — Daddy! Donnyo hurt my daddy!” the voice cried, so true to life Standish had to think of the Memorex commercial. Is it live, or is it Memorex? It still hurt, that memory, so he knew he still had some conscience left, he was still human, damn it, damn it, what the hell had he done.

Is is live, or some stinking cassette tape commercial. Or, if it had anything at all to do with Bert Standish, is it dead?

With a fluid, almost supernatural dexterity, Bert Standish drew his revolver without even disturbing his coat, snapped open the firing chamber. Looked at the bright ring of bullet butts. Nodded. Snapped shut the firing chamber. Snapped it open. Inspected the bullets carefully. The rictus of his face slowly subsided.

Standish gently secured the weapon and returned it to holster.

He had glimpsed it, the thing, kalumping on the airport tarmac in New York. Again from the window of a taxi, charging at him from down an alley in Cincinnati. Impossibly, again, down Key West way. If a lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick, that sucker shoa did nohow be ridin’ hossey-back, shoanuff!

Standish had first sensed the tracker when he vaulted the security (ha, security) fence at the tenement slum — it sounded like hoofbeats, some horse running loose in the middle of Harlem —and he paused, speckled with the blood of three separate people (none of it his own), breathing hard, foam upon his lips, his sportcoat ripped from the barbed wire at the top of the fence, his highly modified .44 revolver smoking inside his jacket beneath his arm.

Kalump, kalump, kalump. Some crippled nag charging down a garbage-choked alley. When Standish, eyes dazed and glassy, but rolling slyly even so, glimpsed the thing mounted upon the thing that kalumped along like a horse —

— it was time to make like a dog collar and flea, make like a toe and jam, make like Joan and Jett, like a tree and leaf, like a banana and peel, like a —

“I’m being chased by the lost episode of Bonanza,” Bert Standish breathed and grinned a more natural grin. He chuckled. Right, he nodded, the episode where Hoss goes on a crash diet and loses weight so fast he dies and Little Joe and Adam take his shriveled body down past the saloon to the local taxidermist who does his best to make old Hoss lifelike, and Joe and Adam put the stuffed Hoss at the dinner table and hope Pa Cartwright won’t notice — only, when Hopsing serves dinner, poor taxidermitized Hoss begins to load in the food — see, Hoss isn’t really dead, but only in a dieter’s coma, and all it takes is a sensible meal and a thick rich chocolate milkshake, but now, oh but now —

— now old poor stuffed-yet-skinny Hoss had formed a one-man posse and aimed to bring back rogue-cop and murderer Bert Standish, dead or alive.

Only, thought Standish, licking sweat off his upper lip, that kalumping horse must have been on the same diet and suffered the same fate as poor old Hoss. Standish did not know what was worse, the horse or its rider.

Standish rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. It did not one damn spit of good to cry: unfair! unfair! not my fault. And it did no dern-nabbit good to whine: not possible! ridiculous! horror story drivel! Stephen King fart!

Because the kalumping thing with its weathered, shriveled — and yet impossibly huge — rider were coming. They were coming and they were dead-set on doing a Terminator on Bert Standish.

Standish swallowed hard. They were coming —

— and they were DEAD.

Just relax, Standish breathed. You’ve got the guts and have always been a man, you’ve always been tough, and nobody’s plugged you yet. Correction: nobody’s unplugged you yet!

Plus, Standish said, raising an imaginary lecturing finger before an imaginary audience, you can’t rule out the possibility that you feel guilty — that you’re a good person and that it is your guilt that is pursuing you so unmercifully!

Which means you are just a’wrigglin’ with shit.

I am an officer of the law. I serve the community. I am one of the good guys. I take out the trash.

Standish again drew his piece, his hand a blur. He aimed at the mouth of the alley. His thumb, lovingly, edged back the firing hammer. Got a sweet surprise for you, taxidermy dude — and this surprise is really very rude. Bert Standish puckered out his lips and kissed the firing cylinder. Then, with the same astonishing speed, he holstered the .44 Mag.

“Daaa-Deeey!” wafted the incredible “is it alive or dead” Memorex voice.

Standish closed his eyes. And, of course, it was there, vivid as cable zapped into a shiny thirty-six-inch Sony TV screen —

...the giant lummox, sneering, Thanksgiving turkey-sized fists upon tractor-tire hips, “shoot me, whitey, ifyogots duh guts — ’moan, pig, yo whitey pig ass ain’t got duh guts...” and the lummox, besides being an ex-con violating his parole, has allegedly put two cops in the hospital, and Standish, grinning, eases the hammer back, lovingly, and he just means to scare the shit out of the lummox, enlighten him a bit, but then the gangling boy is there screaming “Daddy — Daddy! Donnyo hurt my daddy!” and Standish screams at the kid, a long coltish kid — eight years old or so, with long wagging toothpick-thin arms and knobby-kneed toothpick legs — Standish screams at the kid to shut up, just shut the fuck up and of course the lummox comes forward cuz he be uh family kind’uh dude and no whitey pig is gonna be usin’ duh “F” word in front’uh his boy — and the lummox has arms and legs that can never be described as toothpick thin and a huge body that can never be called coltish, and Standish does something he’s never done before — not in two tours as a sharpshooter in ‘Nam nor in five years as a beat cop in L.A., or even in his fifteen celebrated Big Apple years — Bert Standish, in a very ticklish situation — the boy screaming before him, five feet away, the dangerous lummox looming close, maybe seven feet away — Bert Standish blinks his eyes, something he never came close to doing before in all his tense times — in that minuscule span of dark-warm oblivion, the .44 Mag hammer slips out from beneath his thumb, and the kid — a real cutey who under other circumstances probably could light up a movie theater with his smile — is rocketing backward, into the lummox, his father, and the lummox is rocketing backward, too, into the wall, which seemingly opens to catch both rocketeers, and the both of them, father and son, wear ridiculously large holes, and there is a ridiculous amount of blood on the walls, the ceiling, Standish’s face and body, and at this point it is probably still a salvageable situation — a very bad situation, mind you — but Standish is, after all, a highly decorated — even celebrated — police officer and these are, after all, expendable blights on the economy; but at that point — the echoes of the .44 Mag blast yet resonating — Officer Tim Trubon, a rookie cop three weeks on the beat, rushes into the room and Standish, eyes glassy, glittering — swivels — and his trigger finger seemingly takes charge, and three blasts later in the span of a half-second, there is not much remaining of Officer Tim Trubon, rookie cop with three solid weeks’ experience...

“Shit,” Standish breathed, massaging his eyes with the heels of his hands, “I ran. I really did run.” It was something else he had never done before — but hey, Berty-Boy, you must have figured this could happen, eventually — you must have planned on running, because why else would you invest nearly twenty thousand George Washingtons into fake IDs with extra-deluxe back-up documentation?

It happened so fast — bang-bang-bang — just wasn’t time enough for cutesy-pooh staging and expert back-up testimonial. Shit, a cop’s life could and sometimes did get very complicated at times.

Bert Standish sat back and lowered his hands into his lap. He took several deep breaths — luxuriated in the intermingled stenches: week-old diapers packed with baby pucky, assorted piles of shit grouped strategically about the dumpster (both dog and human) — there is nothing like some deep lungfuls of sweet shit scent to calm you down. Like the Coffee Achievers — smelling shit can pick you up (don’t be depressed if you’re a baby killer!) and calm you down (so what if a dread cowpoke is hounding you — life can’t be that bad, just smell that sweet mixture of man and dog shit!)!

His eyes drooped and his head dipped — then he jerked awake as if an electric shock had jolted his hair into a Raggedy Annie ’fro. He shook his head and slapped his cheeks. His meaty chest was soaked, as was his face, and even his legs and butt were wet with that gun-em-down sweat.

“Stay awake,” he muttered. Just a wee bit longer. “A little bang-bang, then you can take your chill pill and veg.”

He checked his watch. Already twenty minutes had passed. The thing should be kalumping into the trap very soon. Twenty minutes since he wedged himself between the dumpster and the cardboard boxes. Twenty minutes plus two days since his thumb slipped off the hammer. Two days and twenty minutes without more than a few seconds worth of sleep — each millisecond he dozed he heard that thin wail of “Daaa-Deeey!” and that ominous, stilted kalump-kalump-kalumping. Approaching. Getting closer. Stalking him. Getting cloooooooooooooser.

Bert Standish cocked his head and listened. Could he hear something? Or was it his sleep-deprived brain juicing in the imagination? He swallowed, but there was no spit to lubricate his dry throat. He half-closed his eyes and honed his hearing. Nothing. Or was it? He clenched his eyes shut and his lips pulled back from his teeth. Damn it, could he hear it coming, or not?

Kalump. Kalump. Kalump.

Oh yupperoo, it was coming, all right.

Standish drew the .44 Mag and gripped it loosely in two hands. He blinked his eyes, hard, for clarity, and slowly extended his arms. He rested his elbows on the moldering cardboard and exhaled minutely, dragging out the last of his breath. Keeping both eyes open, he sighted until the sights on the pistol lined together dead-center of his vision.

Kalump. Slower, they — the strange pair of taxidermitized things — were coming.

Kalump. Close. Almost to the mousetrap.

Kal-ump.

Then. Nothing.

Standish held his breath. A little reserve oxygen sneaked out of his mouth which he promptly french-inhaled up his nose. No one ever said Berty-Boy Standish was a slouch at playing hide-n-seek!

Damn, where was it? Where was it?

Kah-luh-ump.

Shit, the thing had to be just around the corner. In fact, Standish could sense it — sure, he could feel it, just around the corner, about to enter the mousetrap of the alley — the thing had dismounted from the thing. The thing was down low, checking the ground, tracking, sniffing after Berty-Boy Standish.

Previously, Standish had glimpsed the thing full-bore charging, like a mad elephant with a hot VISA card. So why now was it standing still, kneeling down, checking his tracks, so carefully, so carefully...

— unless, of course, the thing, so carefully, knew something — that Bert Standish, baby-killer, bigot, ex-good guy and current rogue cop — that Berty-Boy was hiding like a cat with canary on its breath, just around the corner, sweating profusely, hands dead calm before him with a daughter of Big Bertha cocked and ready to sing her happy harpy song.

Standish swallowed and mentally enticed the thing forward. Come on Hoss, good old boy, come on to Daaah-Deeeey!

There was a new sound. Not kalump. The sound was nothing at all like kalump. This was a much worse sound. It sounded like a big foot in a wet sneaker, kind of squishaling forward, squishaling ever closer.

Carefully forward. So carefully you might think that whatever was making the squishaling expected that it might be walking into a mousetrap. Ambush. Standish could use a little bush, along about now, am or not.

“Come on, I’ve got seven sweet surprises for you, you scarecrow motherfucker,” Standish whispered sweetly. His hands steady, so steady.

Slowly, the thing moved into the alley. Bert Standish winced and the .44 Mag wavered, just a bit. Shit, the thing was worse than he had previously thought. He swallowed the lump in his throat. He suddenly felt strangely light-headed. He blinked his eyes and for a moment there seemed to be a subtle fading, as if all substance had drained of color.

But his hands steadied and he honed his aim, from the warped and hanging cowboy hat over a tangled skein of spiderweb hair, below the sloping shoulders to the center of the narrow chest. Good gravy, but the thing was filthy.

Standish grinned and lovingly eased the finger on the trigger back toward his palm. Silkily, so sweetly.

The thing began to look up, to look up the alley to precisely where Bert Standish huddled.

Standish squeezed off the first three bullets in nearly one explosion of thunder. And the first part of the sweet surprise was delivered home to papa: three bullets soaked in Standish’s own piss. If the thing survived, even for an hour, it was in for a pretty painful whirly-gig in the Rodeo of Life.

The thing was thrown backward, into the “horse” it was leading, and then it was down. Smoking.

Quiet.

Standish sniggered. There’s a bump for your kal-umph.

Hemingway couldn’t have dropped the sucker any better.

“Yo! Pa! Little Joe! Yo! Candy! I think ole Hoss needs another visit to the taxidermist!” Bert Standish roared, leaping from behind the dumpster and charging down the alley. He just had to have a look at this nifty thing, a real good long look at perhaps the most interesting thing Standish had encountered in his forty-two years.

The thing on the ground wasn’t moving but Standish burned half the soles of his shoes off stopping as he caught a good look at the thing standing quietly above and behind the thing on the ground.

It was a horse, or what was left of a horse — and in fact, Standish had the impression it must be a stuffed horse. But then its head moved a bit and it seemed to look at him with the dark crevasses which were its eyes. Standish swallowed hard. The horse’s eyes looked like the black “Xs” cartoon characters wore after they were bashed a mighty good one on the noggin.

The horse only had three hooves. Its right front leg terminated in a conical sliver of dark-yellow bone. Its back was swayed impossibly deep, and there were thousands of tiny holes in the cracked tarp of its hide. The only thing sprightly about the beast was the gleaming, well-oiled yellow saddle, which looked better than brand-spanking new.

“Unholy son of a shit,” Standish burped. He tasted the onslaught of vomit at the base of his throat. He slowly replaced his .44 Mag and nearly missed the holster, which definitely would have been a first.

“Now son, yuh ain’t oughta’ve done that,” said the thing which was stirring on the pavement.

Standish yelped, leapt back three feet, his .44 Colt Python magically returned to his hand. He fired three rapid shots into the thing which was slowly pushing itself from the ground. The thing tumbled violently backward — Standish caught the impression of flailing cowboy boots, spiderweb hair fluttering, dust flying everywhere, and a decrepit cowboy hat tumbling away.

There! Three more sweet surprises. Three .44 Mag hollow-points which weren’t quite hollow — these three were specially made, containing a lethal mixture of Vaseline and LSD, guaranteeing a one hundred percent volcano high for that special junkie on your Christmas list.

“Guess that should make for an interesting entry in your diary, asshole!” Standish barked, and actually let loose a laugh.

The thing didn’t seem to appreciate the joke, as it pushed itself from the ground, stabbing Standish with a baleful glare. “Ain’t gonna tell yuh no more, son, you’d best just stop this’ere foolishness before yuh get my dander up.”

Standish blinked hard, slowly returned his pistol to its holster. Running might be a pert idea, but then again all his foxy maneuvers to date had yet to keep this sad sack of shit from catching up in this alley, and six sweet surprises hadn’t done much to smooth the sandpaper rasp from the thing’s pissed-off tone of voice as it rose from the ground, taller, higher, and taller.

“What do you want?” Bert Standish said, and hated the quaver in his voice, his heightened breathing, the light-headedness which made him sway forward and backward like a leaning tower of pizza.

No matter that he was facing a cowpoke from Hell, a thing perhaps three inches towering over his own six feet two inches of bearlike stature. Bert Standish had always faced up to the bad guys, to the goons who outnumbered him in alleys, to the creeps who seemed to have him ever out-gunned (regardless of how impressive his own arsenal) — Standish sounded like a little boy with his “Whaddayooo-waaaant” whine.

“Son,” the thing rasped, bending down, creaking, retrieving its thrashed cowboy hat, “Yer just gunna have tuh stop yer fussin’ and come along with me. Comprendez?”

The thing, some hideous cowboy freak, was all flapping rags — what had probably once been a black boot-length duster, was now more a shredded cape, and its boots, split and sprung, seemed to overflow with some kind of wet-looking moss; however, as with the perfect better-than-new saddle on the “horse,” the cowpoke wore gleaming yellow chaps which glistened just as brightly.

Its face, like the sharp edge of a hatchet, was cancerous and onion-skin thin, and Standish thought he might be able to see more than a little of the yellowed skull leering through. Its hair was the nastiest nest of white medusa coils hanging below the sunken shoulders Standish had ever seen — he considered suggesting two bottles of Head and Shoulders, but figured the thing might not appreciate the joke. It sported a huge catfish moustache housing — Standish flinched — several creepy-crawly spiders.

“Not going with you, anywhere, motherfucker,” Bert Standish wheezed.

Its eyes, shit, its eyes, Standish mentally screamed — its eyes were painfully too real, too wet, too shining with intelligence and nasty life. Some Doctor Frankenrustler had stuck some very alive eyes into a rotting mannequin wearing a cowpoke suit.

“T’ain’t a matter uh choice, son,” the cowboy rasped, straightening its duster with a skeletal hand — loosing a cloud of dust and sweet-terrible smell — indicating something affixed upon the rotting rags inside the coat. Standish glimpsed an iron star-shaped thing, presumably a black badge. “Yup, I’m the law in these parts, and son, yer in a heap’uh trouble. Yuh can keep the cannons if it’ll make yuh happy, but I don’wan no whimperin’ ner yappin.”

The strange X-eyed horse nickered softly although it seemingly did not move. The three-hoofed horsey unnerved Standish more than Billy the Crypt, if that was possible.

“Mosey along little dogey, this boy ain’t going with you, not now, not never!” Bert Standish snarled. He cleared his windbreaker from his gun and angled his chest. One sweet surprise remaining. And this one, an expensive gag gift from Petey Ironwolf — Standish’s partner of eight years in the past, dead these last six years — could turn out to be more than just a joke. Old Ironwolf was half Apache, wasn’t he? And didn’t them Apaches practice magic every now and again?

The cowboy spat next to Standish’s shoe — chaw, Standish assumed, until he looked at the glob and saw it wriggling and white.

“Yuh shot yer load, son, I counted ’em — six shots,” the cowboy said, and it was difficult to tell, but it seemed it grinned.

Reality check: if this was some overcharged spirit of guilt battening down the hatches of Berty-Boy’s widdle tugboat, then, physically, it would seem, this nightmare could not hurt him. And if this was something more than a psychological belch, Standish was going to have to be the bestest, strongest, gutsiest prickiest version of himself he could be.

“Wrong,” Standish said, his body and mind going easy, going fast. He hocked up a good phlegm ball and spat it between the cowboy’s boots. “You miscounted, Marshall Dillon. I fired FIVE shots.”

“If I was in uh frame uh mind to count ’em I’d imagine I’d find six holes. Save yerself the effort, sonny. I don’t mean t’exasperate yuh none, an’ I don’t expect yuh t’exasperate me none. I’m’uh takin’ yuh in.”

“I mean to draw on yuh, pardner,” Standish drawled — he’d always had a talent with mimicry: he could do the blacks, the browns, and the yellows, and this Texas 89 IQ-level drawl was easier than sitting down in a big clump of warm bird shit — and Standish felt good.

This was kind of fun. He was way, way quicker than this staggering strip of beef jerky. And this last sweet surprise — from old Petey “Tonto” Ironwolf to yours truly Bert “Lone Stranger” Standish — would put the dread cowboy on his disintegrating ass for good. Enjoy yerself, Berty-Boy, let’s yuck it up in cowboy glee!

The dread cowboy sighed, or at the very least produced an appropriately condescending death rattle in its leaky chest.

“I reckon yuh mean t’do exactly that, do yuh son? I’ll tell yuh, hombre, it shure will be a might easier if yuh come quiet-like. If yuh make me draw, it’ll be much worser. Now yuh don’wanna be arrivin’ where yer going with holes the size of a pig’s snout. I’ve met men faster than yerself, hombre, and I’m faster than yuh’ll ever live t’be,” the dread cowboy said, clearing his flapping duster from a piece of rusty hogleg strapped to a moldering leg bone (and those yellow chaps were extraordinarily gorgeous).

Standish looked up into the dread cowboy’s face. The eyes were focused and dangerous, boring into Standish’s brain.

“Clint Eastwood said it better, Taxidermy Dude,” Standish said, lifting his eyebrows. Evidently the dread cowboy wasn’t current with western flicks such as High Plains Drifer, or else his wit was as moistureless as the rest of him. “But I think I just may have a sweet surprise for you, Hoss.”

The orange-with-rust hogleg, what appeared to be an ancient Colt .45, was the most humungous pistol Standish had ever seen, and he prided himself as an authority in the field of canon-sized handguns. The firing chamber, smooth, looked mighty enough to lug .60 caliber slugs, and the barrel was ten inches long, if not longer. The stock grip, some stone-age wood, looked so termite-gnawed that Standish nearly burst into laughter — the comical look which would spread over the dread cowboy’s mug when that grip popped off in his hand, leaving that decrepit hogleg strapped to that sad old moldering thigh bone!

Berty-Boy Standish had participated in many quick-draws — real-life quick draws where the other guy didn’t get up and go home to sit in Mama’s lap. He’d faced mucho-macho drug pushers bearing Uzi submachine pistols (one for each paw, if you can dig it) and the paramilitary dudes AK-47ing their way into Happy Hell and the wacked-out kids who thought they were the Sundance Kid when they pushed a Saturday-night special into their pants. Berty-Boy Standish had participated in many such quick-draws, usually with several other officers watching, and he had never met anyone close to being his match.

Berty-Boy Standish had always been a très dexterous fellow — his handspeed often was called “supernatural,” “amazing,” and “slicker than diarrhea through an ass-lubed chicken.” When he was a kid he was King of the Capgun. His heroes had always been real-life wild-ass dudes like Wild Bill Hickock and Harry Longbaugh and George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody — always the good guy, the kind of guy that might be a little bit bad at heart (and in deed), but the guy he dropped was always a little bit badder — and it was this long-haired group of boys that Berty-Boy Standish had considered himself a card-carrying member.

“If’n you draw on me’n lose, Mr. Standish, yuh’ll be goin’ t’afar diff’rnt place than where’ll be takin’ yuh if yuh come quietlike.” The dread cowboy’s eyes were not quite as bright — he seemed to be forcing himself to relax, go limp, even as did Berty-Boy Standish.

“If I win?” Standish said, allowing his body parts to disassociate with his brain. All was peace, all was quiet — he would not think about his hand, his right arm, the hand which would fly inside his jacket to the .44 Mag which was turned butt-outward in the holster beneath his right arm. Most would consider Standish’s mode of quick draw awkward and inverted — hey, it always seemed to work just superbly for Berty-Boy. Standish would allow his body to do all the talking.

“Yuh cain’t, hombre. I never beed whupped, nah in pert near century, and no soft city boy like yerself is going t’be t’first.”

“Okay, amigo, then get ready to take your sweet surprise,” Bert “Berty-Boy” “Lone Stranger” Standish said, grinning his laconic grin. His feet separated slightly and he exhaled all the air from his lungs. He looked at the dread cowboy’s right hand which hung in space just an inch or two from the ridiculously huge hogleg.

The cowboy’s hand was still — there was no flexing or wriggling of fingers. Standish knew the tall piece of beef jerky must know his stuff.

Standish felt the energy oozing along his body. He would be fast, faster than ever before. His body felt completely weightless, as if he might suddenly drift upward.

He showed the cowboy his open palm, perhaps three inches from his chest, three inches from the butt of the stainless steel .44 Magnum Colt Python — a theatrical flourish which always disturbed the punk on the receiving end of Berty-Boy’s big bullets. And this sorry-looking, spongy boot-stepping, spiderweb-haired slab of petrified beef jerky would be the proud recipient of a .44 caliber Magnum hollow-point silver bullet. Yup, you heard right, Dwight — a SILVER BULLET! If that didn’t tickle the cowpoke’s fancy, Standish supposed nothing ever would.

Standish always assumed the silver bullet would be his check-out ticket, whenever that inevitable day came — Berty-Boy always figured it would come to something like this, with him on the run, the pseudo-good guys closing in — and what better way to go than with a stainless steel .44 Magnum Colt Python eight-inch barrel crammed in your mouth, a true-to-life silver bullet, just a’snuggling in its cozy little chamber, just a’waiting to leap out and embrace that cute-but-squishy brain?

Bodacious!

“Hate t’see yuh embarrassed, boy, but I expect we better be gettin’ on with it then.” The dread cowboy spat another blurb of writhing white junk. He remained as before, unmoving, hand at ready and still above the hogleg.

Standish did not reply. He wanted to extend this moment. It just didn’t get any better than this — he wished he had a camera! This was a Kodak moment — a beer would taste great right now! A Bud. Yeah, this blood's for you...

If only mommy and daddy could see. The stinking bastards.

Standish grinned.

The two big men, one towering and flaky, the other swelling and sweaty, loomed about twenty paces from each other. Both were unnaturally stationary.

Move, I want you to move, Hoss, Taxidermy Dude, you siwwy-siwwy dead Dwead Cowpoke you! Standish needed it. He craved it. If only the dread cowboy would make that initial grasp — it would just make this Best-Things-in-Life-Kodak-Moment liver than Memorex.

The dread cowboy did not move. His eyes were half closed.

Standish readied. He could not hear the sounds of the city.

The dread cowboy did not move.

Standish could feel it, the force — that Luke-and-Obi juice — just coursing through every artery, every single-solitary-lonely butt hair. He was going to be fast, Berty-Boy Standish was. He was going to be the fastest hombre this side of Bean Town, U.S.A.

Now if only the dread cowboy would draw his fucking gun.

Moved not, did the dread cowboy.

“Well then,” Standish said, and his hand vanished into his jacket — or did it simply emerge with the gun — and which did come first, the chicken or the egg?

Bert “Berty-Boy” “Lone Stranger” Standish had never been faster.

He saw the puff of “dust” blow out of the dread cowboy. Not so dread, are you Mr. Dead? Now just dead.

The dread cowboy, his gigantic hogleg held out before him and smoking up a storm, blinked at Standish.

Standish smiled the biggest shit-eating grin of his life. Ah, smell that cordite! He winked at the dread cowboy, who seemed to be doing a forward and backward hula.

“Wull I beed damned,” the dread cowboy said, and gawked down at the hole in his chest and the crumbly stuff drifting out of it.

“Amen,” Bert Standish said.

“Well what’d yuh pack in that there slug, anyhow?” the dread cowboy said, moustache bristling, glaring up at Standish.

Standish noticed that the dread cowboy looked rather peaked. Standish chortled.

“That, my beef-jerky-friend, was a true and working silver bullet. Guess you didn’t expect me to come prepared, did you, turd breath?”

A silver bullet, the dread cowboy mouthed tonelessly from under his spiderwebby, catfishy tangle of moustache. His eyes were bigger and wetter than ever.

Standish felt he had never seen a dead thing look as worried as did the dread cowboy. Not much call for dread, these days, Standish chuckled.

“Told you I’d beat your ass!” Standish giggled.

The dread cowboy suddenly closed his eyes and swayed forward. He slammed the hogleg into its holster

At my feet, Standish crooned, you better lie your sorry ass right at my feet! Give me a tender kiss on the ass.

Then the dread cowboy snuffled. His lips exposed a skeletal grin. Standish frowned. And the dread cowboy laughed. What a nasty sound. Again, that putrescent snicker. You could tell the dried-out sucker was attempting to be serious, he was doing a Hell of a job containing his mirth, but more laughter bubbled out. Louder. The dread cowboy broke straight into the Guffaw Zone. He slapped his dusty coat and brayed laughter like a drunken donkey.

“What the Hell are you laughing at?” Standish shouted, confusion slamming into his disappointment.

“A silver bullet — a real silver bullet — a real silver bullet?”

“What’s so funny about that!” Standish screamed.

“What — whaddidya think, son? Didja think — ” the cowboy broke off to pursue another bout of braying laughter.

Standish whipped out his Beretta and prepared to plunk fifteen fat slugs into the dread cowboy, whose laughter he found positively insulting. And the dread cowboy whup-whup-whupped it up, tears flooding his shredded-leather face.

“What?” the dread cowboy resumed, “did yuh think I was one’o them, you know, one of them WARE-wolves or somethin’?”

Standish stuttered and waved his little automatic gun as the cowboy barked out a few more giggles and then muddied his eyes as he drew the filthy arm of his coat across his too-wet and too-weird eyes.

“I still BEAT you, asshole, don’t forget that. I BEAT you. I’m quicker than you!” Standish screamed, face livid and veins bulging.

“Well, son,” the dread cowboy sobered, tipping his hat back on his head, “I don’t think yuh can rightly say yuh beat me, though I gotta’dmit, yer fast enough.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I DIDN’T BEAT YOU? YOU’RE A POOR LOSER!” Berty-Boy Standish screamed, his eyes clamped shut, his teeth grinding. “I BEAT YOU, TAXIDERMY DUDE, AND I’M QUICKER THAN YOU!”

The dread cowboy winced. He spat out a white hunk of wriggles. “Never did see nobody carry on so, win or lose.” The dread cowboy watched the big purple-faced screaming man with evident interest. “Son. Say thar, son! I think yuh better just calm yerself down. I said t’calm down, son! Maybe yuh better take a gander at yerself, son.”

Standish did not appreciate the condescending tone of the dread cowboy, almost as much as he had hated the insulting laughter before. The dread cowboy did not play fair. The dread cowboy was a sore loser.

The dread cowboy was a big meany.

Bert Standish glanced down. And his world went very dim. The shiny Beretta pistol dropped from his fingers. He was looking at his chest. And what he saw didn’t do a whole lot for his confidence.

“I reckon yuh see my point, there. Yuh were pretty fast, but I reckon I was just about as fast. And The Kid — or Wild Bill — woulda shot yer city-boy peepers out. They'ze the only rascals I reckon faster than me.”

Standish gaped at the jagged hole in the center of his breast. It looked nasty, and deep, and was probably the circumference of a silver dollar, one of the big old kind. And looking back over his shoulder Standish could feel his shredded back muscles and sinews, flab and gristle, and he sensed the exit hole back there was about the width of a dinner plate.

How come I’m not dead? Why am I standing here with this hole in me and I’ve been carrying on a conversation with a strip of jerky, and maybe that’s it, it’s impossible, and so this has to be a dream — shit, a pretty bad one at that!

“Um, Bert — if yuh don’ mind me callin’ yuh that — well, Bert, if yer wonderin’ ’zactly what’s transposin’ — well, maybe yuh should take a gander back that direction...”

Standish followed the finger. He looked dead behind himself. And saw Bert “Berty-Boy” Standish aiming a cannon directly at him. At himself, Bert Standish, that is. He blinked. The man back there, wedged between the boxes and the dumpster, had a look of intense concentration and confidence on his face. But he was very pale. And his eyes had gone blank. He was, the man back there, pretty much dead, Standish — who had seen much death in varied forms — could see.

“Yuh kinda crossed over when yuh chose tuh interact with me, so t’speak.”

“Can’t be. Shit. Can’t be.”

“Yup, it can, hombre. Now, we got us a pretty particular situation, we right enough do, Bert.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Bert Standish squeaked. He no longer cared how weak or strong he appeared — all of that was gone and all of that was silly. Now, here he was, right in the middle of his afterlife, and he was all too justifiably afraid that he was closer to pitchforks and brimstone than haloes and clouds.

“Well, here’s the way it lays. If’n yuh would’a outdrew me, yuh pretty much could’a written yer own ticket, as I see it. But nobody never beat me a'fore. If’n yuh would’a lost — and this is a sore point for me, Bert, seein’s how yer a tall fella and widely spread — you would’a made me a right nice longcoat, yes sir, and I’m powerfully in need uh one. Seems only small lawmen cross the line nowadays, and shure, they might make a dandy pair uh chaps...”

...Standish winced. He looked closely at the saddle. At the dread cowboy’s chaps. That silky sweet pink leather...

“...anyhow,” the dread cowboy continued, “seein’ how we might be construed as goin’ to a draw like, it might be fittin’ yuh ware this, Bert.”

The dread cowboy tossed something dark at Standish’s feet. It sounded heavy when it hit the blacktop.

STEVE LANGLEY, A CONTROVERSIAL BEAT COP on the take for many years, blew across the top of his smoking .38 Police Special as if sounding a note on the flute. On the ground before him were two very dead men — well, actually, dead mutant slime creepazoids, as Langley commonly thought of such as these. One of the dead creepazoids had a sawed-off shotgun clenched in its paws, the other lay near a smoking .45 automatic pistol with lasersight.

Langley had been fast, perhaps his fastest to date. Too bad none of the others had been around to enjoy the quick-draw show, except he had kind of goaded the two creepazoids into going for their illegal weapons. The first creepazoid got it in the nose before it could even squeeze the triggers on the sawed-off shotgun. The second creepazoid had squirmed around a bit after taking two hollow-heads in the gut — Langley had watched until the whimsical spectacle began to beg for mercy. He had drove in another hollow-head to the nose.

Langley snapped his pistol into its holster on his hip. He ached to drop the belt, ride the holster low, way down on his thigh, like one of the old dudes.

Kalump.

Maybe he wasn’t as alone as he thought. Langley swallowed hard. Maybe there was a witness. Maybe he was going to need to draw out the quickest gun in the midwest.

Maybe it was time to make that crazy boom thing!

Kalump, kah-luh-ump.

“Who’s there? Step out into the light!” Steve Langley demanded. He snatched his industrial-strength flashlight and beamed it about the warehouse. “This is the police. Step out into the light! Now!”

“Just yuh hold on there, son,” said a ratchety voice as two silhouettes loomed nearby.

“Police!” Langley squeaked, and could not understand the fear blooming from his guts into his breast. His hand hovered above the butt of his .38. He couldn't believe it, but he was peeing in his pants, literally, the warmth was going mostly down his left leg, but he'd always leaned a little to the left.

“You got that right, Wannabe!” Standish roared, drawing his .44 Mag and squeezing off seven quick shots.

“Bert,” the Dread Cowboy spoke, his raspy voice cutting into the last reverberations of the .44 Mag thunder. “Wuz my draw. I called it.”

“Go to Hell, Taxidermy Dude. I need boots, and this Steve Langley’s got bigger feet than mine,” Standish snarled, bending over the fallen cop. He produced a straight razor and proceeded to carve off the man’s legs below the knees. “Plus, you been showing off for a week — I’m sick and tired of the way you pretend you don’t want to draw on these quick-draw wannabees!”

Steve Langley woke. He looked about with blurry eyes, focusing on the Dread Cowboy. He looked down and saw what was happening to his feet.

Steve Langley began to scream.

“Now Bert, yuh know we gotta wait fer a bounty t’come down — we ain’t even got the proper authority to bring this old boy in,” the Dread Cowboy said.

“You knew I didn’t pay close attention to the rules when you swore me in, you old fart,” Standish said, yanking off the first foot.

Steve Langley, disbelieving but very much conscious, screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Oh, well, bounty’s probably comin’ down t’shoot even as we digress,” the Dread Cowboy said, and grinned, producing a massive Bowie knife — chipped and rusty — with enough edge left to set into Steve Langley’s chest. “Ain’t enough here fer a coat, but a nice new vest might be purty in the meanwhile!”

When they had their new garb they threw the screaming, skinless man over the dread cowboy’s horse and set out for the Between-Worlds Jail.

“Next time, Bert, if I call one I expect yuh to respect it,” the Dread Cowboy said.

“Oh, what are you going to do, shoot me?” Bert Standish snipped through the side of his mouth, admiring his slick new shin-high boots. He was so pleased he hardly noticed the shrieks from Steve Langley.

The Dread Cowboy’s hogleg erupted in fire and smoke.

Bert Standish went down. Then he sat, half his jaw hanging from his face.

“You shaw me, you bassard,” he said from his swinging mouth, very calmly. He lightning-fast drew his .44, plugged in a gleaming new speedloader, and emptied it into the Dread Cowboy.

The Dread Cowboy, from where he’d been tossed to the ground, emptied his .45 into Bert Standish. They calmly reloaded and commenced to fire, putting terrible holes in their nice new leather clothes. It was a terrible waste of ammunition, and also of beautiful pink leather fashion, but they both seemed to enjoy the battle at least once a day.

Steve Langley, in the middle of the meanwhile, screamed and screamed.

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