The Fight

There was a frozen moment.

“Shoot him,” the Businessman said.

The guards hesitated. The Gunslinger had both his guns in hand, one pointed at each of them.

“He can’t hit you both, now shoot him!”

“I’m putting my gun down,” one of the guards said finally, and reached for it slowly. The Businessman cursed and grabbed for it. The Gunslinger shot, and a hole happened in the Businessman’s head—and in the other guard, whose hand had apparently been too close to the gun for the Gunslinger’s liking.

“All the guns into the sack, here,” the Gunslinger said, and poked a bag with his pistol.

The Medicine Seller was the first to put his in. “You have to realize,” he said, “this is madness.”

Looking bored, the Gunslinger shot him. It hit him low on the right side, and he screamed rather than dying, a long, high-pitched sound. The Gambler put her pearl-handled pistol into the sack without a word, and so did the preacher.

The Ghost-catcher didn’t move.

“I said,” the Gunslinger said, “put your gun in the sack.”

The Ghost-catcher didn’t move.

“I will shoot you, you know.” But he didn’t do it as quickly as he had shot the Medicine Seller. The Gunslinger, the Kid realized, was slightly wary of the Ghost-catcher—or perhaps slightly wary of the glowing bottles on her bandolier, and the unquiet spirits contained inside them.

“You do what I say, you half-baked fraud!” Instead of risking hitting the bottles, the Gunslinger stepped forward and hit the Ghost-catcher across the face with one of his pistol butts. Her head lolled without resistance and her dark glasses fell off.

Her eyes stared blankly, and lifelessly, ahead. The Kid realized that she wasn’t breathing.

“She’s dead?” The Gambler was the first person to say it. The Medicine Seller looked as if he might have said something, but he was gasping for air, struggling with the pain.

The Preacher had taken off his black jacket and was pressing it against the Medicine Seller’s side. “Dying without Rebirth,” he said. “I should have offered it to her.”

“Y-y-you do think—“ The Medicine Seller gulped, his face beaded with sweat. “I-I-I mean—she was—a-a-alive when we—talked to her—right?”

The Gunslinger plucked the gun off the Ghost-catcher’s belt and put it in the bag. “Shut up,” he told the Medicine Seller, “or I’ll shoot you again.”

“B-b-but could she have been—“ The Medicine Seller swallowed and went silent as the Gunslinger swung towards him.

Instead of killing him, though, the Gunslinger put the sack of guns over his shoulder and went for the ladder to the roof.

“What’re you going to do?” the Gambler managed.

“I’m going up to signal my friends. You are going to stay down here and watch that squealing piglet bleed to death. None of you can really mess with the package, but if you try, you die slow.”

He pulled the ladder down and ascended it, pushing aside the hatch at the top. And then he was out on the roof of the train.

The Kid thought, the guard.

It was amazing that he was thinking at all, the Kid reflected in some distant part of his mind. He shouldn’t have had room for thought. All he felt like he had room for was screaming, screaming in fear, screaming in anger, screaming in betrayal, screaming in shame. But he looked over at the dead guard.

In stories, people like the guard never mattered much. And it struck the Kid suddenly as profoundly unfair that the story had come true, that the guard hadn’t really mattered. Were there any stories that he could have told, if he had been given a chance to tell them? Would it have chilled the blood, or shown them something they didn’t know? Nobody would ever find out now, and that was wrong.

It was also true that in the stories, guards often had a hold-out pistol of some sort. The Kid opened the guard’s jacket. Death, he discovered, smelled fecal, and that was unfair as well. He’d never found out anything about this man, and now, in the unlikely event that he himself lived, he would always remember the guard lying there, smelling.

He would always remember that he had a gun tucked into an inner pocket.

“What’re you doing?” The Gambler’s voice was sharp.

“Someone’s gotta.” The Kid didn’t know how to make sure a gun was loaded, but he drew the hammer back, and something clicked into place.

“You’re just a kid. Wait here. We can—are you listening to me?”

“Nope.” The Kid shoved the gun—realizing that he probably shouldn’t have cocked it, but not sure how to uncock it—into his waistband, and went to the ladder.

“If you climb up there, you will be outside. On a moving train, in the Desert. You don’t know what you might see. Be reasonable!”

“S-s-she’s right,” the Medicine Seller slurred.

“You save your strength.”

“I-I-I’m dying.”

“I’ve seen people live through worse,” the Preacher said, and then, reluctantly, “I’ve also seen people die of less. It’s time to consider Rebirth.”

“That would kill him for sure—hey, where’re you going, Kid?”

The Kid, who had climbed the ladder during the discussion, pushed aside the hatch and pulled himself out onto the roof.

The first thing he noticed was the moons.

He’d grown up in a place without moons, and now there were moons all over the place, big moons, small moons, irregular moons, dangerously cracked moons—the sky was teeming with moons and comets and all manner of astronomical phenomena that he didn’t know how to name, but there was still room for ripped patches of black in it. And the landscape they were going through, towers of stone that seemed almost to reach the moons in places, or arch crazily back on themselves to form mobius loops, or spear back down into the earth—there were patches of absolute darkness between them, too.

There were holes in the ground. Some of them had stars shining through. Some of them had nothing. The Kid thought of what the Gunslinger had said in his story, about being careful not to step in a hole.

He could have gone on staring at the landscape for a long time, but the Gunslinger was ahead of him, waving his poncho at the sky, and as the Kid watched, some sort of large creature flapped across one of the moons, and then across another one, descending towards the train.

The Kid yelled, “Hey!”

And then realized he had done it all wrong. He should have drawn his gun first.

If it came to that, he should have shot the Gunslinger in the back.

The Gunslinger turned. “Oh, come on,” he said.

“I—I—“ There was no way to say what needed to be said, the Kid realized, without sounding stupid. I trusted you? Had the Gunslinger ever given him a reason to trust? You were supposed to be cool? That sounded like a child’s complaint. “You’re a bastard, you know that?” the Kid managed, voice breaking. “He—he never did anything to you!”

He didn’t know, even in his heart, whether he meant the guard, the Businessman, or the Medicine Seller, down there fighting for his life.

The Gunslinger laughed. “And you’re just a stupid little girl,” he said.

The Kid froze.

“What, you think you can shoot me, girl? Think you can make a difference here? Go on. Try it. Go for your gun, girl. And as you die, you can think about how much better off you would have been popping out babies for some husband who’s topping the grocer’s wife on the side.”

He wasn’t looking to his side. So he didn’t notice the spectral outline fading in, ghost-blue, tall, with a broad-brimmed hat.

“Call me an old man, while you’re at it,” the Ghost-catcher’s ghost whispered, her voice coming from everywhere. “I dare you.”

And, as the Gunslinger’s eyes went wide, her transparent hand plunged into his chest, and grasped, and pulled, and the Gunslinger crumpled to the roof of the train, eyes wide and sightless just as the Ghost-catcher’s eyes had been wide and sightless. She sunk back through the roof of the train, and there was something in her hand, and it was thrashing and screaming.

The Kid stood frozen where he was on the roof of the train, and stayed like that for a long moment. He only spun when he heard the hatch open behind him.

The Ghost-catcher, solid and apparently alive, hoisted herself out of the opening. “Did his guns slide off?” she asked.

The Kid stared at her.

“Looks like there’s one still there. Sorry I took so long, Kid. Takes a while to get your bearings, like that.”

“You—“ His voice was choked. “You were dead.”

“I was out of body,” the Ghost-catcher corrected. “You might be able to do it too, if you joined the Ghost-catcher’s Guild and got trained. People with a bit of the dysphoria are usually better at out of body than most. Something to do with actually thinking about how you live in your body, and what makes it yours, rather than just stumbling along assuming that it is.” She strode around him and picked up the Gunslinger’s gun. “Where did they go?”

The shapes in the sky, the Kid realized. The winged things. Which weren’t there any longer. “I don’t know, I was—how did you know—“

“Nobody wraps bandages around their chest for fun. I’ll buy you a better option, from a real tailor, but right now we have to—“

That was when the winged thing came up from the gap between the cars.

It bowled the Ghost-catcher over. The Kid had only an instant to get a good look at it. It was half like a human, half like a bat, with long extended fingers forming its wing spars. It seemed to be—as near as the Kid could tell in the moonlight—somewhat piebald, with different patches of light and dark skin. The face was grotesque, all exposed membranes and multiple mouths and misplaced teeth, but nevertheless, the Kid’s first thought was, oh, that’s it? That’s not as bad as I was expecting. As the Ghost-catcher kicked at the thing, the Kid fumbled the gun from his belt. “Get off her!”

The creature looked up, which was what the Kid had been hoping for, because he wasn’t sure how well he could aim the gun. If it just straightened up, if it stood up, he wouldn’t risk hitting the Ghost-catcher—

Different patches off skin.

Some of them, the Kid noticed now, with the stitches still in.

He shot the abhuman almost without meaning to, catching it in the shoulder rather than the head. It screeched and came towards him, and then it was a nightmare of desperately trying to cock the gun again while gnashing teeth from four different mouths pressed closer and closer upon him, and he could hear gunshots from the Ghost-catcher too and desperately hoped that they wouldn’t hit him, although of course by the time he heard them it would be too late, and he finally got the hammer pulled back and pressed the pistol into the abhuman’s belly and pulled the trigger, and then—

Then it was off of him, down on the train roof and thrashing weakly.

The Kid thought, how many people’s skin, to make those wings? and very deliberately cocked the gun again.

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong, and he could tell from more than just the Ghost-catcher swearing despairingly from her place at the edge of the train car. Something felt wrong, felt wrong through his feet.

And then he saw the silver wall of the next train car in line, pulling slowly away from the car he was on, the gap between the two widening.

“They did it,” the Ghost-catcher explained, sounding exhausted. “They decoupled the cars.”