Westward Weird (InCryptid) Read online

  I need to convince myself that you’re not an unspeakable horror using a woman’s skin as a disguise while it sates its hellish appetites.

  “I wish it hadn’t come to this.” Jonathan withdrew his hand from his coat, bringing the pistol into the open, and aimed it at Fran’s chest. “I need you to answer my questions, miss. I won’t say the fate of the world depends on it, but your continued survival certainly does.”

  The knife sliced through the air next to his head and embedded itself in the wall of the trailer before Jonathan even saw her move. He froze, gun still aimed at Fran, who was now holding a throwing knife in either hand.

  “The way I see it, you might be able to shoot me before I put a pair of these in your throat; then again, you might not,” she said amiably. “Do you really want to go down this road?”

  For a moment, Jonathan couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He was saved from needing to by the small white mouse that popped out of his pocket, ran up his arm to his shoulder, and gleefully declared, “Hail, Priestess of Unexpected Violence!”

  Fran dropped her knives.

  —from “The Flower of Arizona” by Seanan McGuire

  Also Available from DAW Books:

  Human for a Day, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek

  Here are sixteen original tales, by authors such as Seanan McGuire, Fiona Patton, Tanith Lee, Jim Hines, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, that examine what it means to be human in all its positive and negative aspects. If you were an intelligent robot would the opportunity to become human for just one day be worth the risks? And what would the consequences be at the end of that day? If a magic spell switched a vampire and a teenage girl into one another’s bodies would both savor the experience or search for a way to undo the enchantment? And what if only one of them wished to switch back? What tests would an angel face if transformed into a mortal for a day? Can a statue brought to life protect its turf? Will becoming a man for just one day put an end to a pet’s happy home life? These are just a few of the inventive stories—some humorous, some sad, many thought provoking, and all unique—to be found in this thought-provoking anthology.

  Courts of the Fey, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis

  In the world of Faerie, there are two courts—the Seelie and the Unseelie. According to legend, the Seelie Court, also called The Blessed Ones, are those faeries representing light and goodness. They are the heroes, the judges, and they serve the Queen of Air and Light. The Unseelie Court is the opposite: dark, malevolent, and often dedicated to evil. They are the riders in the dark clouds of a storm, travelers on the night winds. From Lilith Saintcrow’s magical tale of a half fey ready to take on the entire Unseelie court to rescue the one he loves… to Rob Thurman’s twisting account of mortals, Seelie, and Unseelie caught up in a Hunt at the end of the worlds… to Amber Benson’s compelling story of a girl’s desperate bargain to escape her evil stepmother… to Michelle Sagara’s poignant exploration of what it means to be a fey among mortals—here are visions bright or dark, terrifying or seductive, fascinating glimpses of both the highest royals and the lowest rogues as they vie with one another or league together against those of the mortal realms.

  After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray

  The first bar, created by the Sumerians after they were given the gift of beer by the gods, was known as the Ur-Bar. Although it has since been destroyed, its spirit lives on. In each age there is one bar that captures the essence of the original Ur-Bar, where drinks are mixed with magic and served with a side of destiny and intrigue. Now some of today’s most inventive scriveners, such as Benjamin Tate, Kari Sperring, Anton Strout, and Avery Shade, among others, have decided to belly up to the Ur-Bar and tell their own tall tales—from an alewife’s attempt to transfer the gods’ curse to Gilgamesh, to Odin’s decision to introduce Vikings to the Ur-Bar… from the Holy Roman Emperor’s barroom bargain, to a demon hunter who may just have met his match in the ultimate magic bar, to a bouncer who discovers you should never let anyone in after hours in a world terrorized by zombies.…

  WESTWARD

  WEIRD

  Edited by

  Martin H. Greenberg

  and Kerrie Hughes

  Copyright © by Tekno Books and Kerrie Hughes.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art courtesy of Shutterstock.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1577.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may be stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  EISBN: 9781101572450

  First Printing, February 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Kerrie Hughes

  “The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen,” copyright © 2012 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

  “The Last Master of Aeronautical Winters,” copyright © 2012 by Larry D. Sweazy

  “Lowstone,” copyright © 2012 by Anton Strout

  “The Flower of Arizona,” copyright © 2012 by Seanan McGuire

  “The Ghost in the Doctor,” copyright © 2012 by Brenda Cooper

  “Surveyor of Mars,” copyright © 2012 by Christopher McKitterick

  “Coyote, Spider, Bat,” copyright © 2012 by Steven Saus

  “Maybe Another Time,” copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  “Renn and the Little Men,” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Showdown at High Moon,” copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Brozek

  “The Clockwork Cowboy,” copyright © 2012 by J. Steven York

  “Black Train,” copyright © 2012 by Jeff Mariotte

  “Lone Wolf,” copyright © 2012 by Jody Lynn Nye

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  Kerrie Hughes

  Science 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 Coun
ty 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.

  THE TEMPTATION OF EUSTACE PRUDENCE MCALLEN

  Jay Lake

  You 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.

  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 places 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.

  “Boy
s,” 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.