Chapter 11

The riders coming at us were thicker than I had expected. At the farm, I only saw around ten law enforcers. Once I had lost them, they stopped coming.

This was different. Everyone Coot and I killed was replaced by a new bandit there to rob this family on their road to Aberdine.

The riders cresting the hill got to the front, and me, sooner than the one's coming up from behind.

I could hear Coot's new pistol blasting away as he hung from the side. His position provided him with cover, but it limited his field of view. On the other hand, I had no cover, sitting next to the driver. To his credit, he was firing when they got too close, but it wasn't very helpful.

"Behind you," I shouted to Coot. Behind him wasn't behind the wagon anymore, and he twisted to shoot at a pair of riders on one horse coming up on the left side of the wagon.

A rider with an almost cartoon mustache came up on our right. He brought a pistol up and aimed it right at our driver and that's when I realized that they didn't need to kill us, only stop us.

I didn't even try to aim as I swung around and pulled the first trigger on my shotgun.

His head vanished in a spray of mist and the horse he was riding slowed to pull away from us. I wondered, briefly, if that horse was a player, too.

An idea occurred to me, and I whistled. Horse's icon appeared on my map way behind us, but that was good enough. I didn't need him yet, and hoped I wouldn't at all.

Spinning back toward Coot, I saw that he had only been able to take out one of the riders on that tandem horse. I didn't know if it was the front or back one, just that there was a horse with only one rider when there had been two. I watched him fire a few more misses before I decided to assist. My second shot hit the rider in the chest. For whatever reason, his horse went to the ground in a tumble.

The XP notifications were coming in, but I didn't have time, nor the care, to look.

The map looked mostly clean for the moment, but this had already been the third wave of them and Coot and I knew better than to assume we were in the clear.

"Reload everything now," I shouted.

The driver seemed to take my words to heart as well and began reloading his pistol too.

"You guys got any guns?" I shouted down to the cab of the carriage.

"Us?" the woman stuck her head out to answer. "We're dreadfully against violence," was all she gave as an answer.

"Then duck back inside and keep your heads down," I said. "Let's hope we run into some bandits that share your point of view."

I turned to the driver. "How much farther to Aberdine?"

"We're about half way."

Shit. This was getting rough as far as resources. This seemed like maybe a better mission for a larger gang. That being said, Coot and I were still alive. I reloaded the shotgun and switched to my Farmer's Pistol to reload it as well.

My minimap flashed. I was beginning to recognize that as incoming enemies. The flash was always red and brightest in the direction where they were coming from. It also meant that they were shooting. If they didn't shoot, we wouldn't know they were coming until they were almost on top of us.

That flash also told me another thing. Our attackers consistently started shooting as soon as they could see us. So, if my map was alerting me, that meant that they could see us.

And if they could see us ...

"The road is blocked," Coot shouted and pointed ahead of us with his pistol.

My map also had a yellow line that I recognized. It was the path to the mission end, to Aberdine. That made me wonder if we could still pass this mission if the driver died.

“Slow down,” I told him right as bullets started buzzing by our heads again. “Go around them.”

“Wagon won’t make it,” the driver said.

I drew my pistol and started taking aim from our stopped position. The bandits had erected several wooden barricades made of barrels and some sort of spiked fencing to stop us from racing through it.

I fired twice and they started spreading out. Some stayed behind the barricades for cover, but the rest went into the open, which should have made them easier to hit, but they were circling wide and moving closer. The further they spread out, the harder it was to see them all.

“We’re going to die if we stay here,” I shouted. “Go around them.”

The driver shrugged. “Can’t do it. If we die here or die because they caught us when the wagon broke down doesn’t change how dead we’ll be.”

A drastic decision needed to be made at that moment and I didn’t have to make it.

Coot twisted and shot the driver in the head.

Blood splashed on my face and the driver slid forward and off the wagon, landing between the two horses that were pulling us. I was shocked, mostly by the blatant murder of our driver, but also because Coot had beat me to it.

The way I, and obviously Coot, had seen it was that we weren’t going to survive this mission if we let them surround us and the driver wasn’t willing to move us. It would seem that Coot had already been thinking about the roadblock that the driver had made himself become.

“Grab the reins, boss,” he twisted back to fire at the oncoming bandits. “Coming up behind us.”

“Get up here with me,” I demanded as I grabbed the reins and cracked them against the horses.

Begging the driver to take us around the blockade was the original plan, but with about twenty of them spreading out to circle us, going around no longer seemed any less dangerous than going through. We started moving and I did my best to ignore both the bullets screaming by my head and the passengers screaming in fear beneath us. I used a free hand to grab a stick of jerky, my last one, and keep it ready in case I got hit.

Oddly enough, the road itself wasn’t blocked. The path was surrounded by things meant to block the path, but the actual path was wide open. It was more like they wanted us to stop inside. They shouldn’t have shot at us if that had been the plan.

Four of the outlaws were still within the blockade and they emptied every bullet they could at us. Coot took out two of them with one well-placed bullet into an oil lantern behind them. The fire made them scatter but also caught their pants. They were rolling and screaming as the other sixteen of their friends came running up the way we had come from.

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The other two were my problem, mostly because I made them so. I held the reins in my left hand and drew my pistol, much as I had seen the driver do. Unlike the driver, I actually tried to aim, or at least let the auto-aim do its thing. I hit one in the chest. It sent him back a few steps but didn’t drop him. The other one took my bullet to his neck with the rewarding spray of blood hitting the side of our carriage.

The map flashed.

“Ahead,” Coot said without turning around. He continued to fire at our pursuers while I focused on pushing the horses as hard as I could. We were both just an accurate shot away from this mission being over.

Coot bent forward and started reloading as the bandits in front of us started shooting.

“Just a thought,” he said with his crooked grin, “we might want to recruit some more folks for the Flamingos.”

“Great idea,” I said through gritted teeth. Then the rain started.

I hadn’t been in Wicked West long enough to even realize that dynamic weather conditions was a thing, but I had been on this mission long enough to know that this was the last thing that we needed.

“Does fire still work in the rain?” I asked Coot.

“Not normally, but in here it might,” he said, slapping the last bullet into his pistol and twisting towards the back again. A bullet hit him in the arm. I saw it because he was next to me, but that was also when I noticed that it wasn’t the only hole in him.

I handed him the jerky. “Eat. I can’t do this alone.”

He munched down on the jerky and I could see in his face as the energy flooded his body.

“Why?” Coot said.

“You were dying.”

“Not the jerky,” he explained, “why about the fire and rain?”

I pointed ahead.

Coot turned and saw what I was pointing at. Three people on horses were riding down the trail. Each of them was carrying a bow and the arrows at the end were on fire.

“Well, shit,” he mumbled. “Any ideas?”

“Not good ones,” I said.

“Pick a bad one and stick with it,” Coot said.

I nodded. “Call your horse.”

Coot whistled. I couldn’t see his horse’s icon on my minimap, but I knew it had to be coming. I could still see Horse mixed in with our attackers behind us. They were ignoring him entirely, which made me think they only really wanted us and the folks we were escorting.

“Take the reins.”

Coot grabbed them from me and I opened up my map completely to see how far Aberdine was. We were looking at another two miles or so. We wouldn’t make it.

I got back out of the map and took the reins back from Coot.

“I’m going to stop the wagon at an angle,” I explained. “When I do, grab the kid and get on your horse. Don’t use the roads. Go straight to Aberdine. Don’t stop for anything.”

I expected some more conversation from my gang member. At least some sort of addendum or adjustment to my weak-ass plan, but all Coot did was nod.

We were about a quarter mile from the archers when I pulled the carriage to the right, giving them a too-broad target to aim at. Real world archers would have a little trouble hitting something that far, but this world had weird aiming assistance and I wasn’t going to bet on it.

“Move, move, move,” I shouted unnecessarily. Coot was already pulling the kid onto Sandra. They took off just as our pursuers were starting to catch up. An arrow hit the side of the wagon, just as I was expecting it to, and I cracked the reins again. I turned us back toward the archers and glanced over my shoulder just to make sure that the plan was working.

Sure enough, about half of the people chasing us cut away from their group and took off after Coot and the kid.

I cracked the reins again and drew my pistol. I had already experimented enough with the reins to know that if I put them down or let them go the horses would begin to veer away from the path. Instead, loosely held onto them and used my left hand to steady my grip on my pistol. I could feel the heat radiating from behind me.

The familiar pull toward the first archer’s center mass followed by Ed’s trick of pulling up, just lightly, against it, and then I pulled the trigger.

Head shot.

Another flaming arrow landed in the seat where Coot had been.

Center mass, gentle pull up, and fire.

Head shot.

I didn’t have time to hit the final archer. I let go of the reins and swung down and toward the door of the cab. I pulled it open and pulled the kid’s parents out and into the mud before jumping and landing roughly in it myself.

A normal arrow hit me in the side as I stood up. I let out a howl of pain and pulled it out.

My health was less than half, somewhere around the forty-five percent mark. I really needed to buy a bag of almonds or something.

Horse came up beside us.

“Get on,” I said to the couple.

“I can only carry two people,” Horse said. “They can’t both get on.”

I shook my head. “They can get on,” I aimed and fired behind us, emptying my pistol, holstering it, and drawing my shotgun. “I can’t.”

“Another suicide win?” Horse asked. “I get put in the stables when you die. Automatically. So, if you die with them on me, this mission is over.”

“I’m not planning to die. Not if I can help it.” I stepped further behind the flaming wreckage of the wagon. I noticed that the horses had somehow become disconnected and taken off. “I read something in the manual about stealing horses from riders.”

Horse whinnied. “Cheating on me already?” The couple climbed onto him. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get them to Aberdine.” I stepped forward and pushed against Horse. He stepped backward in confusion and the rider that was coming up crashed into the back of Horse.

The other thing that I had read in the manual was about horse collisions. It wasn’t much, just one line that said that when horses collided the one moving forward tended to be the one to take the brunt of the impact.

That was an understatement. Horse didn’t even flinch. As far as the bandit and his horse were concerned, Horse was a statue. The rider went ass-over-tea-kettle and landed in the mud. His horse landed on its side behind Horse, but got up quick enough.

I ran past Horse, slapping his ass as I shouted. “Get!”

Then I jumped on the new horse and followed.

Our pursuers were closer and the couple I was escorting had lost their carriage that was acting as cover, but now we were about a mile and a half from the mission end point and we could move faster.

Speed made the difference. The horse I stole seemed to tire faster than Horse did, and I wondered if that was because I had stolen it or if it was just a less healthy horse. Even with the lower stamina, we made great time. When the borrowed horse grew tired, I would slow so that it could rest while Horse and his riders continued on. Any pursuers who caught up with me while the horse rested were either dispatched in a bloody mess or kept back by my gunfire enough for me to get back on the horse and put some distance between us.

When I rode into what I assumed had to be Aberdine, I was surprised by what I saw. Easter was a place that looked like your stereotypical old west town. Everything was rustic wood and dust and mud.

Aberdine was the exact opposite. We rode into Aberdine between two large homesteads and a cemetery. As we moved further into town, with its two-story buildings and patrolling law-enforcement, the dirt gave way to brick roadwork.

There was a courthouse to my left that looked like something out of Back to the Future. The buildings nearest me were the two-storied kind, but once I was further into the city it was easy to see that this port town had several stretching at least three stories high. I couldn’t imagine how Ed would handle a raid on this town.

The yellow line brought us to a back alley between several of the buildings. It only took me a little bit of investigation to see that this was behind one of the main hotels of Aberdine. I had never caught the names of our charges, but I was relieved to see that Coot and the kid had arrived safely.

Both of his parents climbed off of Horse as I climbed off of the stolen horse. I don’t know if robbing bandits was enough to get me wanted by the police. I also had a passing thought that I should take a moment and find out what the law was actually called around here. Were they police? I had no idea.

I walked toward the family I had just escorted across the bloody hell of this game and realized I was walking toward a small yellow circle on the map. When I stepped into it, the couple came alive.

Hands were shaking, thanks were being offered, and wads of cash were getting shoved into my hands.

For whatever reason, the little shit came up to me and kicked me in the shin. I glared at the little cretin until his mother shoved another bit of cash into my hand.

Then they were gone and I was standing alone with Coot.

Coot had a smile from ear to ear and was completely oblivious to the blood coating all of his clothes and most of his skin.

He turned that smile on me and I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or hit him.

“Aren’t kids just precious?”