Westward Weird Read online

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  Westward Weird

  Ed. by Martin H. Greenberg

  and Kerrie Hughes

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Kerrie Hughes

  “The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen”

  Jay Lake

  “The Last Master of Aeronautical Winters”

  Larry D. Sweazy

  “Lowstone”

  Anton Strout

  “The Flower of Arizona”

  Seanan McGuire

  “The Ghost in the Doctor”

  Brenda Cooper

  “Surveyor of Mars”

  Christopher McKitterick

  “Coyote, Spider, Bat”

  Steven Saus

  “Maybe Another Time”

  Dean Wesley Smith

  “Renn and the Little Men”

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Showdown at High Moon”

  Jennifer Brozek

  “The Clockwork Cowboy”

  J. Steven York

  “Black Train”

  Jeff Mariotte

  “Lone Wolf”

  Jody Lynn Nye

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  INTRODUCTION

  Kerrie Hughes

  S cience fiction meets the Old West is clearly not a new idea, as evidenced in shows like The Wild Wild West (1965-1969), The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993-1994), and Firefly (2002). These shows were pure Hollywood because they had clear heroes and enemies, used liberal amounts of fantasy, and could only exist on the movie lot.

  The truth of the Wild West lies somewhere in between those celluloid fantasies and the harsh, often brutal reality. The mass migration westward was devastating for those who had been living there for centuries, but allowed thousands to begin new lives, to remake themselves in the tough crucible of the last true frontier settlement of history. Cities were founded, fortunes were made and lost, tales were told, and lawmen, criminals, inventors, and crackpots all lived there, sometimes all in the same dusty town.

  The West also gave rise to its own style of storytelling—incorporating the tropes of classical myth and legend, but with its own spin featuring larger than life characters that could only have sprung from the imagination of those who had seen and lived in this new frontier.

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  THE TEMPTATION OF

  EUSTACE PRUDENCE MCALLEN

  Jay Lake

  Y ou know that place out west of Casper? Wild badlands like you’ve never seen, all rocks and salt and twisty dead end ravines that’d swallow up a man and his horse both like they was watermelon seeds. Hell’s Half Acre is its name these days, but folks used to call that the Devil’s Kitchen.

  What do you think, biscuit-head? On account of him cooking up sin there. What else’d the devil his own self set to boiling over a fire?

  Now this fellow, name of Eustace Prudence McAllen, rode for Hotchkiss Williamson what had the Broken Bow Ranch out that way. Williamson held a good spread, with two different springs and a box canyon full of cottonwoods running down through his grasslands. Drought didn’t bother him nearly so much as it troubled his neighbors, though he did have a problem with range fires there through the summers of 1864 and 1865.

  McAllen, he might’ve been a Southern man, ain’t no telling now. But he’d showed up the autumn of 1863 and signed on. Working over the winters on the range here always has called for a special kind of cuss, so Williamson and his brother ranchers didn’t ask a lot of questions of a man what rode strong and didn’t backtalk and kept the cattle out of trouble. Anyone who came west in those war years was avoiding something, somewhere. So long as they didn’t bring their troubles in their saddlebags, that was generally good enough.

  No, I can’t rightly say exactly what he looked like. You talk to people who rode for Williamson in them years, you get different tellings. Time plays tricks on memory, don’t you know. There was a lot of panics, from Indian attacks and the range fires and what all. Can’t even say if’n he was a colored fellow, some kind of quadroon, or just white, like a black Irishman. Taller than most, maybe. Carried an ivory-handled double-barreled LeMat revolver what had been engraved real tiny, some folks said it was the Book of Jeremiah writ real small, always close to his hand.

  Why anyone would carry that particular book of the Holy Bible so I can’t rightly say.

  So here’s McAllen working the cattle for Williamson and minding his own business. Don’t drink too much, don’t fight hardly none at all, don’t cuss in front of Williamson’s wife and daughters, lends a hand even when he ain’t been asked. Everything’s fine until the second summer of range fires and somehow word gets around that McAllen has been setting ‘em.

  Firestarting is worse than rustling, in its way. You don’t just lose the cattle, you lose the land. And fighting a range fire is somewhere between suicide and hopeless. Best you can do is get livestock and people out of harm’s way and pray the wind don’t shift wrong.

  Mostly you know what done it. Dry thunderstorm, often as not. But sometimes they got a pattern. Summer of 1864, and again 1865, it was like that. Visitations, almost.

  And people was talking. Cooks and runners and the feedlot boys and the fancy women and whatnot. McAllen’s name was on a lot of lips. For a fellow ain’t made no enemies, he sure didn’t have a lot of friends. It was all around peculiar.

  So Williamson, he got the wind put up his own self and went and had a quiet talk with McAllen. I can’t reckon the old man had pegged his hand for a firebug. More like he wanted McAllen gone a bit, out of the way to let rumor run its course. So he sent the poor bastard out riding trail west of Fort Caspar, what the city was called back then afore it was really a city. Said McAllen was checking springs and shelter in case they needed to drive the herds through the Powder River country.

  Which was so much horse puck and everybody knew it, but it did serve to calm the hard words down some.

  McAllen, he got himself out toward the Devil’s Kitchen. That’s a wild, wild land, looks like God dropped some old mountains into a thresher the size of Kansas, then let Leviathan vomit all over what fell out the ass end. All gray and brown and furze, covered with sand and ash and alkali and salt, nothing a fellow with any sense would ride into.

  But he saw smoke, you understand. And fire was on his mind more than anyone’s. Range fires could take his life in a hanging, if those hard words stuck around and took root in people’s thoughts. So McAllen probably figured on picking his way on in there and finding some camp of layabouts or Indians or deserters, or something he could lay them fires at the feet of.

  Off he went, leading his horse down a slope of scree and into one of them little, twisted canyons, following the smoke and his own sense of what was right and what was not.

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  Now the Devil, he’s one crafty son of a bitch.

  Yeah, I said that. You just mind your piehole or I’ll mind it for you, and you won’t like that one tiny bit.

  Crafty on account of that’s how the Creator made him. Lucifer, he’s practically the first of God’s children. Old Adam, more or less an afterthought he was. A gardener, really, set to watch the fruit trees and keep the snakes off the lawn. No, all the pride and power and glory went into the Prince of Light. When he fell from Heaven, he took a piece of the Old Man’s heart with him. The meek might could inherit the Earth, but it was the prideful for whom the beauty of the day was first forged.

  After the Fall, though, the Devil he had to slink around in the dark patches and hide in the shadows and walk with the rotten side of a man’s soul in his hand. That’s why he hangs around even to this day in plac
es like Hell’s Half Acre, what was the Devil’s Kitchen back then. Ain’t no place for him among the shaded cottonwoods or along a quiet bend in the river with a fishing pole.

  Still, a fellow’s got to eat. That’s part of our earthly estate, don’t you know? And the Devil likes him some barbacoa as much as the next man.

  Yeah, what they call barbecue now days.

  A good loin of pork or brisket of beef, dry rubbed with salt and some spices, then cooked long and slow over a bed of coals afore you slather on a compounded ferment of vinegar and tomato sauce— that’s a ticket to heaven through the gates of the mouth. Food as righteous as any toe-curling sin.

  So here’s the Devil got him a roasting spit down in a dry ravine in the Devil’s Kitchen, and he’s got a dozen lesser dark angels to tend the fire and turn the spit, and a whole heifer off of Mr. Williamson’s land stuck up there roasting to feed his own hungers and keep his myrmidons at their labors. It was a good place for Lucifer, on account of no one ever goes there, and he could rest in peace until time called for more of his mischief to be spread upon this earth or down in the dominions of Hell.

  Yeah, like that, kid. And you wouldn’t be the first one ready to sell their granny down to darkness for a mouthful of that hot, sweet meat fresh off the fire. No, sir.

  Devil was resting his spurred heels on a shattered knob of gray-white rock, a jug of white lightning in one clawed hand, a corncob pipe in the other, when Eustace Prudence McAllen led his old bay mare into the mouth of the ravine.

  Them demons, they giggled and cackled and sizzled as demons is wont to do. Old Scratch looked up to see what the fuss was and saw a beanpole of a man with week’s beard looking back at him. Dark fellow, for a white man, in a pale canvas duster and a busted down slouch hat pulled low over his eyes.

  “Boys,” the Devil announced in a voice like a flash flood down a canyon, “We got us a visitor.”

  You got to understand the Devil speaks all languages and none. Adamic, what everyone talked before the Tower of Babel, that’s the tongue of Heaven. Any man born of woman will understand it, on account of it’s the language God made us all to know and be known by.

  So while his vowels sizzled with lightning and bedded coals, and his consonants were the fall of hammers and the snap of bones, the cowboy McAllen heard this in English as plain as any what got spoke in the bunkhouse back at the Broken Bow Ranch, and in an accent as melodious as General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself.

  Which is to say, McAllen, he wasn’t fooled one tiny bit. The Devil can make himself fine and fair as any Philadelphia dandy, or he can be small and slick and mean as a scorched badger, or anything in between. But this day Old Scratch was taking a rest, so his tattered wings spread black and lonely behind him while the horns on his head showed their chips and cracks and stains.

  The only characteristic that marked him out from the chiefest among his lesser demons was the blue of his eyes, which were as deep and quiet as the lakes of Heaven. No creature born of Hell could ever have possessed such a gaze, and it was them orbs of light that marked the Devil still as being directly the work of God’s hand.

  McAllen saw the wings and the flickering, scaled tale and the great clawed feet and corncob pipe and the jug of shine, but most of all he saw those blue eyes, and he knew his time had come, and probably already gone past.

  He also knew from the barbacoa spit who’d been setting those range fires.

  “How do, neighbor?” he asked pleasantly, careful not to let his hand stray to the gun butt at his right hip. McAllen knew perfectly well that the six or seven wiry, bright red bastards tending that cow a-roasting could take him down before his second shot got off, and he knew perfectly well his first round wouldn’t do no more than irritate Old Scratch.

  “Smartly enough, I reckon.” The Devil sat up straight and set down his jug. “Strange place you picked to be riding fences, son of Adam.”

  McAllen touched the brim of his slouch hat. He dropped the bay mare’s reins, on account of she’d been pulling hard. “It’s rightly son of Allen, your worship,” he said, calm as a millpond. Behind him, the horse bolted with a scream of fear to melt a man’s heart.

  Go, he thought, and carry the news of my death if not the tale of the manner of my passing. For it is given to some of us to know the manner and hour of our passing.

  Well, yes, you’re right. Even a deaf-mute idiot Frenchman would have known this was the manner and hour of his passing. And Eustace Prudence McAllen was none of those things.

  The Devil smiled, which was not a sight for the faint of heart. “Still no fences down in these lands, son of Allen.”

  “Just a fire down below.” McAllen summoned the courage that had stood him up against Yankee bullets and Oglala Sioux arrows and Wyoming winter blizzards and Texas summer droughts—that courage was needful now for him to walk slowly toward the Devil, measuring his steps with every care a man could bring.

  “My cooking could bring a circuit preacher to his knees,” the Devil said proudly. Pride was, after all, his overweening sin and greatest accomplishment.

  McAllen touched the brim of his hat again. “But your worship, the sparks from your fire keep setting the grasslands east of here to flame.”

  With a shrug, the Devil smiled again. “Fire is my servant and my only friend. What does it matter to me that the prairie burns?”

  Here is where Eustace Prudence McAllen showed what a clever man he was. He smiled back at the Devil, though his guts liked to turn to water, and said, “Except folk are setting the blame on me for them range fires. You ain’t getting the credit you rightly deserve.”

  At those words the Devil’s teasing of McAllen vanished in an eruption of wounded vanity. He stomped one great clawed foot, what shook the ground so hard they felt the tent poles rattle over in Laramie. “By all that’s unholy, I shan’t be having you take the credit for my deeds, son of Allen!” His shout smoked the air blue and called dark clouds into swirling overhead. Flames snapped at the broken tips of his horns, and his wings spread wide with a creak like a barn in a tornado.

  No, no, they ain’t had no real buildings in Laramie ‘til after the war was done and the railroad come to town. Of course it ain’t a camp now.

  Anyway, I got a story to tell, if you don’t keep aggravating me like that. Who taught you manners, anyhow?

  “That’s why I come to you, your worship.” McAllen somehow kept his voice steady, though he nearly voided himself in his drawers from sheer, raw terror. “It ain’t right, and I reckon to set the record straight.”

  “I’ll straighten the record,” roared the Devil. “I’ll show them who’s Prince of Flame and Darkness around these parts.”

  At this point, McAllen realized he might’ve overshot his mark just a little bit. He hadn’t aimed to set Old Scratch on the folks of Fort Caspar and the Broken Bow Ranch. He hadn’t aimed for much at all, except to live a minute or two longer in the face of such wrath.

  He had his second fit of brilliance. “Before you go wreaking havoc across the land, your worship, maybe you ought to partake of your dinner.”

  Well, those words brought the smell of barbacoa back to the Devil’s nostrils, along with a strong whiff of the sulfur that has been his natural estate since he first fell from grace. Like I said, there ain’t many that can resist the crackling lure of the slow-cooked meat.

  “Be damned if I won’t,” the Devil replied, then began to laugh at his own joke.

  McAllen, he laughed along with the Devil, because what else is a man to do in such a moment? The two of them stood there, cackling and howling like two lunatics, even the lesser demons capering and giggling through their needle-toothed mouths.

  Old Scratch strode with a purpose to the roasting cow and tore off a long, lean, juicy strip of meat, all crisped dark on the outer edge and dripping fat within. The smell that came off the carcass like to set McAllen’s brain on fire, reaching right through his nose and his tongue and lighting up the sin of gluttony as nothing else in
the world could have done.

  “You want some?” the Devil asked, drippings running down his face from both sides of his mouth, his rotten fangs chewing the soft, sweet meat like it was manna fallen from God’s hand.

  The scent nearly undid McAllen. He was tempted, knowing he’d taste of the finest meal ever to be eaten by himself or any other man. Knowing likewise if he took food from the Devil’s hand, he’d be a servant of darkness for the rest of his days here on earth and damned for eternity beyond.

  He never was a churchgoing man, McAllen, but anyone who’s stood when the bullets fly or watched over the herds when the wolf packs are hunting down the moon knows better than to disbelieve. Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world.

  Yes, even now. And I know none of you knot-heads ever dodged a bullet in your young years.