May 12, 1874
The gunslinger approached the fortified gate of the outpost in the noonday sun figuring that if anything was worth dying for in all his two hundred years, it was this. Under different circumstances, Hunter would’ve thought it insane to approach a fortified compound like this in the middle of the day but there was no use giving the werewolves an advantage. He knew that somewhere beyond that gate was Joe Stout—a Confederate war criminal and a being like himself that he should have killed forty years ago.
Setting his square jaw and raising his hand, he signaled for his Karuk Indian friend Ik Aah Taak to start the attack. This land—only months ago shining lush and green in the desert and now snuffed out to a black and grey hellscape by the terraformer under their feet—had belonged to Taak and his people. It was only fair that Taak should get the first blow.
A dynamite-tipped arrow swooshed over Hunter’s head to the base of the iron-banded gate blasting the doors ajar in a flurry of dust and wood. Hunter marched in with his Smith and Wesson model three revolver cocked and took two bullets to the chest from the rifles in the tower above. The bullet holes had already begun to close when he heard Taak’s Joslyn rifle echo from three hundred yards out exploding the head of one gunman and he took out the other before the man even saw his hand move.
Then a mocking howl rang out from atop the cliffs flanking the gate. It was the Van Dyke mustached Ty Boyd and his crew of werewolves leaping down the rocks toward him. Stout only had five of them in his service and even in their human forms they were formidable; almost as fast as Hunter and almost as rapidly healing but Hunter was prepared.
They liked to get close and beat a man to death which is what he was counting on. And Ty obliged slashing him across the face with razor sharp extended fingernails as the others closed in biting and clawing. He reached on his belt dropping a carboard tube on the ground and shot it igniting black powder in a flash that sent a bloom of silver nitrate into the air. Spiked Chinese firework. When the smoke cleared, only four corpses lay dead of anaphylaxis. Ty got away. But he couldn’t afford to be led off mission. Stout had to die and the metal cylinder of black liquid at the back of his belt was the only thing that was going to kill him.
Hunter heard the rapid crunch of Taak’s leather boots against the wasted ground and looked back to see his friend running through the gates painted for war, so he reloaded as he advanced taking out the normal human hired guns with rapid efficiency as he went. As he passed an alcove in the rock, Ty leapt out grabbing his arm and slicing off his pistol hand with a bone-handled Bowie knife in a spray of green blood that streaked across Ty’s crazed blue eyes and snarling lips.
Hunter barred Ty from his throat with the amputated limb as it grew back and Taak shook the werewolf with a volley of solid rifle shots to no avail.
And then in the distance, “Sorry to do this to you, Ty but you’re in the way.” It was Stout, all broad-faced and blond sideburns wearing his Confederate jacket with his ranch clothes like some perverse badge of honor as he opened a corral letting forth a herd of zombified slaves that Hunter had not accounted for, and which were nearly upon him.
He and Ty were quickly swarmed. “Run!” he shouted to his friend.
But instead of running, Taak reached into the quiver on his back, pulled an arrow made from the bone of a thunderbird, and shot it into the sky above Hunter drawing down a bolt of lightning that scattered all the bodies in the Hunter-Ty-zombie pile across the rocky ground.
Hunter rose with already-healing burns across most of his body to see Taak get overcome and consumed by the herd. Stopping to shoot the arrow that freed him had cost Taak his life.
“Kill him!” were Taak’s final words.
And now only Hunter and Stout were left glaring at each other across the empty space.
“You come fer tha terraformer?” Stout called out glancing over his shoulder into the hole behind him.
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“I come for you.”
“I ain’t gonna let you stop me. I had to sacrifice my Jap vampire wife to reprogram that thang to terraform gold.”
Hunter just stared angrily.
“You got yer suicide injectah? Cuhz one of ‘em’s getting’ used tahday one way or tha utha.”
Hunter clenched a scowl on his face and ran at Stout first who responded in kind. The two clashed in a preternaturally fast grappling contest that defied tracking with the eyes. Stout drew his injector. Hunter drew his. Stab, block. Stab, block. Stab, block. It seemed they were evenly matched.
Not willing to abide a fair fight, Stout separated and threw sand in Hunter’s eyes as he did so and gained an opening to put his injector into Hunter’s neck.
As the world went black, the last thing Hunter heard was “You shoulda killed me while we was floatin’ through space in that life raft.”
Hunter was back with Taak on the ridge outside the outpost where they planned the attack. He ran his hands across his shirt to find the bullet holes were gone. “How’d this happen?”
“You know as well as I,” Taak said looking through his spyglass at the gates. “Joe Stout somehow found my village and slaughtered us all.”
“No that’s not what…” He stopped to watch a small Asian lady approach dressed in black with her hair in a bun wearing tobi pants, knee-high tabi boots and a short open Spanish campera jacket with a katana and a Smith and Wesson Army Number Two revolver on the sash at her waist. Hunter could feel it. “You did this.” And despite his wariness, he knew drawing a gun on someone who can reverse time would be useless.
She furrowed her thin arched eyebrows and the two beheld each other with equal apprehension and puzzlement. “How can you know this?” Her accent was almost nonexistent.
“Why don’t you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here?”
She held out a pale lithe hand which Hunter shook. “I am Ariko Saigo, daughter of Admiral Judo Saigo and I’m here to retrieve Princess Junko, sister of Emperor Meiji.”
“If she’s married to Joe Stout then she’s dead” Hunter said.
“What happened to her?”
“He said that he had to ‘sacrifice his vampire wife’.”
“When did you speak with Stout?” Taak asked.
“A few minutes from now when we raid the compound,” Hunter said.
“You both died,” Ariko admonished them.
Taak looked puzzled and Hunter explained. “She somehow reversed time and brought us back to this moment. You have no memory of it, but I do.” He turned to Ariko. “How did you do that?”
“Many people in this world are born with many powers. I am but one.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was all Hunter figured he was getting from her. “Then why not go back before the Princess ran away from you?”
“I was too far away on another mission to stop her at the time she ran away. If I go back there, I’ll still be too far away. If I go back even further, then I undo my mission.”
“Surely, you’ve used this power before. How have I not felt it until now?”
“I can only guess that it has to do with my proximity to you. And how is it that you know when I use this power?”
“I was not born of this world,” Hunter replied. “Stout and I are more similar to the plants on this planet than we are to you but we each found human bodies to inhabit complete with language and memories.” Ariko seemed less shocked by this than he expected, and he continued. “We crashed here around forty years ago in something like a lifeboat. But in that craft was a terraformer—a machine that can change an environment. Stout and I both thought it lost until I came upon Taak’s village growing green in the desert.”
“But a few months ago, Stout found us and slaughtered my village,” Taak said. “I’m the only one left.”
If there was any shot at justice for Taak and his people, it was up to the two of them. There was no calling the Army. The government didn’t take kindly to natives living off the reservation and looked the other way when not outright encouraging their murder. Just last year they hung Captain Jack and his band of rebels. They’d been captured by General Jefferson C. Davis who was as big of a jackass as the Confederate president he shared a name with. Hunter had met him once in Mexico before the war; a small man with something to prove. You don’t count on men like this for justice. You go around them.
“Where was Stout before he came here?” Ariko asked.
“A ranch outside the town of Rainwater near Sacramento,” Hunter said. He and Taak knew Stout could hear the terraformer if he were close enough, but why did he leave a lucrative ranch to be this far out in the open desert in the first place?
“But wait,” Ariko said. “If you and Stout are of the same kind, then he—”
“Knows what ya did too?” came Stout’s voice from behind them along with a bullet to Hunter’s back as Ty Boyd and his werewolves converged on them with guns blazing.
They must’ve made a beeline for the ridge as soon as Ariko turned back time. Hunter thought. Despite his speed, he wasn’t fast enough to save Taak who took a shot to the head and fell from the ridge. Hunter moved to cover Ariko as Stout turned on her with a shotgun blowing a chunk from Hunter’s side. “Ah don’t know what ya want lady, but ev’ry time ya use that powa, I’m gonna find ya.”
Hunter looked back to check on Ariko and there was no retreat except to the valley floor below. Another shotgun blast from Stout took out his leg.
“Meet me in Rainwater,” Ariko whispered in his ear.