Lucy, Belle, and I walked along the stretch of businesses lining both sides of the street. There weren’t a lot of them. A general store. A farm and ranch supply store. A barber. Doctor and dentist… combined. Grocer. One of the stores was boarded up with the sign ripped from above the door. It appeared recently.
“What happened there?” I asked.
“Used to be a gun store. Real popular. Sheriff shut it down and word is he’s planning to confiscate real soon,” Lucy said.
“Sure to go over swell,” Belle added, with gratuitous sarcasm.
Other than the occasional horse and wagon transporting supplies. I wondered how the new sheriff intended to handle that issue. He seemed awfully concerned with control, but not much about anything else.
“Don’t towns like this usually have a mayor?” I asked.
“The last mayor hung for corruption a few days ago after opposing the sheriff closing the gun store. Ain’t nobody wanted to replace him, believe it or not,” Belle said.
“Wow, I wonder why…” Lucy said, steering me into the clothing store. “Let’s talk about something less sad. Like clothes.”
“You can’t eat clothes,” Belle said.
“You can’t eat clothes,” I repeated.
“Girls!” Lucy scolded, pushing both of us deeper inside the store. “Taylor, we’re going to pick you out some pretty dresses.”
“Don’t get too carried away. Samuel told me two personal outfits, and two for work. One can be a dress. Prefer the other be something like what I saw some of the men wearing in the saloon, with a gun belt.
“A gun belt? For a lady?” Lucy asked.
“That’s not the problem,” Belle said, shaking her head. “The sheriff ain’t going to like you walking around with a gun on your hip.”
“Don’t sound to me like Sheriff Eric likes much of anything,” I said, flipping through the catalog on the counter.
The man standing in front of us cleared his throat.
“Please, ladies… refrain from that kind of talk in my store. We don’t need that kind of attention in here or everyone in this town will start having to go naked.”
“I can think of worse outcomes,” Lucy said.
The shopkeeper sighed, shaking his head.
“Should’ve known better than say something like that around your kind.”
“What do you mean by my kind?” Lucy asked, raising her voice.
“Apologies. I misspoke,” he said, clearly not sorry about anything he’d just said. More likely, he just wasn’t willing to alienate a paying customer.
The shopkeeper’s comments killed a bit of Lucy’s enthusiasm, so we didn’t spend as long browsing as we’d intended.
As we were leaving, my arms full of clothing, there was a commotion in the streets.
“Come on, Sheriff. This ain’t right,” an older man said, standing in front of the gun store. “At least let us by ammunition.”
One of the deputies shoved the man back, despite the fact he hadn’t lifted a finger against them.
“What you need a gun fer anyhow?” the deputy asked.
“I need to protect my livestock. Unless you want to starve even faster.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Now look, we don’t need no talk like that where folks can hear. I reckon that could be interpreted as inciting a panic,” Sheriff Eric said, resting his hand on his revolver.
“Good! We need to panic. We ain’t gettin’ no outside supplies no more and the folks in this town are gonna starve if they ain’t somethin’ done about it. I lost two perfectly healthy dairy cows last night on account of bein’ out of ammunition. You’re gonna have to come back down to reality, Sheriff.”
“I’m gonna… have to…” the sheriff paced back and forth, his face turning red. “You know, Jim, you’re getting a bit too big for your britches. I reckon it’ll have a good impression on the other townsfolk if they see their sheriff gettin’ talked to that way and doin’ nothing’ about it.”
“I ain’t said nothin’ that weren’t true,” Jim said, spitting on the ground. “You weren’t a bad feller once, but you ain’t been nothin’ but a sorry excuse for a sheriff.”
Without warning, Sheriff Eric drew his pistol and shot Jim in the chest. Jim looked down in shock, holding his hand over the wound, stumbling back.
“You son of a… you actually shot me!”
The sheriff cocked the hammer on his revolver and shot again, this time hitting him in the head, leaving him dead on the ground.
“You crazy fool!” another man shouted, running to Jim’s side. “Jim’s farm feeds the people in this town.”
“You defendin’ the man?” one of the deputies asked.
“Dang right I am!” the man shouted.
The deputy raised his rifle and shot the man. No comment. No more argument. No hesitation.
A woman, who I assumed was the man’s wife, ran up to him screaming.
“Got something to say?” the sheriff asked.
She just shook her head, sobbing. I dropped the clothing, unsure of how far this was going to escalate. If they just kept killing indiscriminately, I’d have no choice but to try something now even if the timing was terrible. Thankfully, Sheriff Eric had enough, and they left without further bloodshed.
This was so much worse than I thought.
“Where do the Red Collar Boys camp?” I asked Belle in a quiet voice.
She didn’t answer. Simply looked at me to acknowledge I’d said it, then shook her head.
“We should be getting back,” she said. “Ask Daisy to help you get settled more into your room tonight and catch you up on the happenings of the town. She knows a lot, that Daisy.”
Despite both Lucy and Belle attempting to pull me back, I approached the woman crying over her husband and hugged her shoulder. No one else had bothered to approach them, fearing retaliation if the sheriff came back. It would be easy to get angry about such a thing, but I understood. Most things had a price you’d be willing to pay in order to stand up for it. Most values came with a price tag. When that price tag included your life, that’s when standing up for things became too expensive.
I couldn’t fault them for that.
“I can’t believe they shot him…” she finally said, her sorrow boiling into anger. “I envy the man who gets to put a bullet in his head.”
“Could be a woman…” I said. I shouldn’t have said anything, but it just came out naturally. She didn’t respond. Just got quiet and looked down at the ground, lost in thought.
“I’ll help you move him out of the street,” I said.
The two of us dragged him aside, then did the same for Jim the farmer.
Jim was a large man, and I needed to use a bit of the enhancer in order to move him.
“You’re strong,” the woman said.
“Good genetics.”
“What’s genetics?” she asked, wiping her nose.
I frowned. “My parents were both strong people.”
She nodded, and I reached out and squeezed her hand before returning to Belle and Lucy.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Belle said.
“Somebody had to,” I replied.
As we walked back toward the saloon, the town that had been bustling and chattering just moments before felt like it was past curfew. Few people were outside or talking, and the few who were simply focused their eyes on their task, their expression numb.
Walking back into the saloon, little was different. The place wasn’t even half full. No one was playing the piano. There was no conversation at the bar. Word traveled fast in a tiny town like this, and they were already adjusting to their new life as subjects to a tyrant.
They didn’t know they were still within their window to turn the tide. Once all their weapons were taken, it would be harder. Now? It was still possible, but no one wanted to be the hero. If they’d been rushed by townspeople after shooting Jim, that could’ve been the end of the entire regime. Instead, everyone stood around quietly, shocked and powerless.
Even me, truth be told, though I was merely searching for the correct timing, hoping desperately I’d not just missed it at the cost of someone’s life.
I walked up the stairs, waiting outside Daisy’s door. To my surprise, the man who walked out a few minutes later was the same man who had entered just before I left. How long had he been in there? Nearly two hours?
Barely a section of fabric looked out of place. Only his tie, slightly misaligned from where it had been before, indicated the possibility his clothing had ever been touched at all. He smiled to me, nodded, and bowed before leaving.
I knocked on Daisy’s door frame as she sat on her bed, arms crossed, looking up at me impatiently.
“Since I’m new here, I’d love a mentor,” I said.
“Would you now?” she replied, raising an eyebrow.
“Could you spare some of your time tonight after everyone’s turned in? I’d love to ask you some questions about how things work around here so I can make sure I fit in as well as possible and follow all the rules.”
We locked eyes for a moment, and I had the strange sensation an understanding was forming between us.
“Alright. I suppose we can chat.”
“Thank you,” I said.