Paladins: A Post-apocalyptic Western

Prologue-3

THE MAN—SMITHSON—WAS dead, all right, but his killer or killers hadn’t been content just to carry him away or let him lie. No, whoever or whatever had killed him had felt the need to leave a calling card—his severed head—which they’d sat atop a thick, wooden post so that the vertical railroad tie resembled a grizzly kind of totem pole. Otherwise, save for a nearby pile of spurned entrails, there was no trace of him.

“Now I want you all to take a long, hard look at this,” said Rimshaw, projecting his voice so that everyone could hear him, even those in the back of the mob. “And I want you to remember it next time someone gets the wise idea to question my judgement.”

Williams scanned the crowd, Katrina beside him, trying to gauge their mood, seeking signs of a lynch tenor. Because Rimshaw had a point: if he hadn’t been allowed into the compound the gates would still be standing ... which meant he was responsible, however indirectly, for Smithson’s death—assuming the townsfolk even believed the attack had come from outside. If they believed otherwise, that meant the door was open to blame Ank—regardless if he was herbivorous or not, and regardless of the absurdity that a quadrupedal animal, or any animal, could leave such a gruesome calling card.

Something attacked us only a few weeks after the Flashback ... something ... new.

Something which had talked, she’d said.

“Now the way I see it is there’s only two possibilities,” continued Rimshaw. “And that is that a man, or men, did this ... or that that armored dinosaur has been touched all along and is not what he appears. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: these things are not dinosaurs—not animals. They’re weapons made of flesh and blood, sent here by them”—he indicated the lights in the sky—"to exterminate us no different than we would an infestation of rats. And now we’ve got one among us—right now—somewhere in Devil’s Gorge. Hiding, perhaps, until dark. But that’s okay. Because we’ve got another among us whose true nature must also be suspect. And I think if we were to shackle this man right here, against this very post, and begin whipping him, say ... the beast would show its face.”

Williams began to recoil even before Rimshaw pointed him out, and then he was seized suddenly by the men around him as Decker protested and Katrina cried out, his guitar case falling to the pavement as they d**g him to the post while still others began shouting for a rope.

“No,” he exclaimed, struggling furiously. “Can’t you see you’ve got this all wrong? Can’t you see what’s really happened? Katrina herself told me you were attacked by something different, something new. Something with the power of speech, that used words like ‘pig’ and ‘eggsucker.’ Can’t you see that that’s what did this? That there was more than just one of them?”

He fell silent and doubled over as someone punched him in the stomach, then toppled completely as someone else shoved him. And then, suddenly, there was a cry—a cry that sounded as though it had come from Ank and yet utterly different from any Williams had ever heard. A warbling, frightened, pitiful cry—the kind an animal might make if it were sinking into tar while surrounded by predators.

“Marshal?” said someone. “That came from the Lonestar Corral.”

“Then that means we’ve got ‘im cornered,” said Rimshaw, and shouted, “Johnson! Let ‘em into the armory! Let ‘em all in!” And to everyone else he said: “Get your weapons and meet me at the corral. And someone fetch Creebald and Teller. I don’t care how sick they are. I want them by my side.”

“But, Marshal, I just came from there,” said Johnson, pausing. “And they’re plumb gone.”

“What do mean, gone?” snapped Rimshaw.

“I mean they ain’t there. They’re not at the Rio Grande. No one’s at the Rio Grande.”

Williams craned his neck on the ground to observe Rimshaw’s reaction, and what he saw sent a chill up his spine, for it all but confirmed what he’d begun to suspect. For as Rimshaw stared at the man coldly, his eyes black as coals and his face pale as the dead, his tongue slipped between his lips like a snake’s and was just as quickly sucked back in.

And Williams knew exactly what and who had killed Smithson even as the townsfolk’s boots pounded past him on all sides and he tried to get up but could only grip his stomach in both hands.

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