When The Man Comes Around

Since writing The Echoes Of The Golden Spike I had a notion for turning my hand to another Western, but something a bit grittier than before, something with real outlaws and hombres in it. I also have had a strange notion to write something with a bit of ultra-violence in it, probably because nothing that I have ever written could be classed as violent, even The Planetside Legacy was more of an adventure than a war story.

So I have combined those to desires into one story about revenge, trying to be reminiscent of the old Sergio Leone movies like The Dollars trilogy. The final novella is stylized as an old Dime Novel and since starting 'The Devils Boots' may become 'When the Man Comes Around pt1, The Longest Sunday'.

This is the opening chapter and is fairly tame as it sets the scene, it may not be to everybody's taste...

Available to buy now on Amazon and Kindle

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01. A Heart Torn Asunder

And I heard as it were the noise of thunder,
One of the four beasts saying, "Come and see,"
And I saw,
And behold, a white horse

A brisk wind was about the land as the sun fell lazily toward the horizon, the creatures of the prairie coming from their places of hiding from the brutal New Mexico day. The baked plains causing the air to shimmer as the heat of the afternoon released into a flame orange sky speckled with the first of the evening stars watching the New World.
Amanda lay on a patch of recently disturbed earth, her body ached and heavy tears turned dust to mud on her face. She cried long and sorrowful as she leaned her head against the cold slab of a tombstone, this last six feet was as close as she would be to her husband and son now.
Wailing, she dug her nails into the dirt, cursing the men who had done this to her, cursing the people and their apathy, cursing God for abandoning her.
She still hurt from the violation, the bruises on her body would take a long time to fade but still that would be nothing to the deep scar that was cut upon her soul.
With tears she remembered lying in a cuddle with her James in front of the fire, he kissed her on the forehead as they talked about life, love, and being together.
On the cold dirt she ran her hand as she had done that night along his thigh, "Come on," she whispered, "I'll show you how much I love you."
They kissed and they made love, and as they lay in the afterglow the front door was kicked open and the dream became a nightmare.
They made James watch as they had their brutal way with her, Billy had walked in and they shot him dead.
In the midst of the screaming and the crying another shot went off, in the corner of the room James was gone suddenly silent. Amanda screamed his name as she fought against the coarse and stinking thug on top of her, she bit and gnashed until at last her attacker beat her unconscious.
She awoke in the daylight bleeding and battered, she cried.
And she cried.
And she cried.
The next thing she remembered was her youngest son, Patrick cuddled to her breast. By God's grace he had been spared, but in Amanda's heart would have been better they had died than live now in this shattered world, robbed of family, robbed of security, robbed of dignity.
This morning James and Billy were buried, Patrick had went home with her parents as Amanda wanted to spend one last sunset with her love, to see out one last day together.
And again she wept.
Behind the tears in her eyes she saw in her mind with flawless clarity not the faces of her attackers but that of the one man who hadn't had his way with her.
A grizzled man of little words with the dead eyes of one who had looked into the very maw of Hell itself and had said, 'alright'.
He had watched Amanda pinned and exposed to the world and clearly he found it distasteful yet rather than stop the abuse he stood outside with his lieutenant. He left them to torture her.
She hated that dead-eyed bastard with the fire of suns.
A match flared in the darkness beyond the tombstone, an incandescence that brought around it the darkness of the night into the reality before her. She was alone in a cemetery and someone in the shadows stood watching her.
As she rose, carefully backing away toward the town at her back, she kept her eye on the glow of the cigarette tip hovering six feet off the ground.
"I can have your vengeance for you," a voice like the primal darkness itself said, "I can make those who hurt you and yours suffer for their crimes."
Amanda stood still, her eyes trying to penetrate the darkness beyond the grave, on a clear night under a starry sky there was nothing but a perfect blackness beneath the old cemetery tree.
A perfect blackness and the glow of a cigarette.

***

The first rays of sunlight set the sky ablaze over the town of Armageddon, a morning red as fire and pregnant with a sense of foreboding.
The wind whipped up dust devils in the empty streets and a single tumbleweed bounced it's lonesome path past the deserted saloon. In the stables a horse whinnied and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
In the homesteads along the outskirts families rose, it was Sunday and soon it would be time to hear the Word of the Lord.
Farther out on the plains, beyond the ranches of the simple farmers in the dry flats that reached out for Old Mexico there stood a tree ancient and gnarled. It had stood on this spot since time immemorial and had played witness to the passing of empires, it's bleached bark bore countless small scars from the hurried age of man.
The twisted and bowed old sentinel had watched the world change again and again with nary a care for it was patient like the Earth, knowing the transient things would soon pass on in their eternal rush.
But on this Sunday in 1862 against a sky on fire the crooked old hardwood had hanging in it's boughs a young man.
Crucified.