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This is a work of fiction, using characters from the film, “The Quick and the Dead". No insult or invasion of privacy or infringement of copyright is intended. The story is for readers over the age of 18 only, and contains adult language. The writer is not responsible for any "discomfort" caused to the reader by this language and these situations.
This will be a ROUND ROBIN series of episodes. Anyone who wants to continue the story with her/his own twist or turn, have at it! I'll start it out... Begins 5 years after "The Quick and the Dead" ended.
What Came Next
Episode 9 by: Mare ©11/2006
Stewart Kirwan awoke on the floor of his rented room. There was barely enough space for him there. But a fragrant pile of girls’ clothing softened the boards. The girls had taken the bed. Stewart had let them have it. After their epic sexual explorations last night, they all needed slumber. Stewart was sore and strained in spots he hadn’t known he had.
Standing, he stretched, bent and touched his toes. Gazing warmly at Irina and Susan, he didn’t contemplate how their threesome and two angry mothers would sort it all out in days to come. He just wanted to look at them. And feel very, very lucky. And hungry. Slipping out, he went to make a simple tea and porridge breakfast to serve them in bed.
Between bouts of lovemaking Cort and Ellen had managed a few hours of sleep. Well before sunrise they hung buckets of water over the fire while they once more, on hands and knees, slaked their insistent desire. Then they crept out to the bath house. Emptying the buckets into the tub they wrestled and splashed until the water was too cool. The Roman’s face was covered with Cort’s towel.
“Wouldn’t want to make him blush.” Cort knuckled the statue under its marble chin.
Back in the bedroom, they ate bread toasted over the fire and spread with blueberry jam.
It amused Ellen how Cort spread the crumbs on his windowsill for birds.
Noting a crows’ nest in the treetop outside bedroom, Cort smiled. “The crow is my favorite bird.”
Ellen queried, “What’s your favorite beast? – horse doesn’t count. Mine is the lynx.”
“Figures. I’m quite fond of beaver, myself.” Ellen pinched him hard on the rump.
“Hey, remember that night I dined at Herod’s house?”
“Sure. You looked a treat!”
“And you looked parched.” Taking a candle, lighting it from a lamp’s oil flame, Ellen knelt by a glass of water on Cort’s night stand. “Watch.” She blew out the candle and quickly applied the sticky hot wick-end to the glass. The melted wax glued the glass just long enough to drag it several inches. Far enough for his shackled hands to have captured it...
“Now you show me. I nearly fuckin’ thirsted to death.”
“If you hadn’t badmouthed me, I’d have given you that water.”
“Oh, yeah? I’ll show you badmouthing!” Cort leapt like a lascivious lynx and attempted to nuzzle every nook and cranny of her.
He was interrupted by a loud whistle. Not from a crow but from the yard below. It was followed by Dean‘s voice. “Hey, Preacher, we know you’re busy makin’ women wet, but our jail shift just started. Time to do your other job!”
~*~
Hurrying to begin his Madonna and Child, and heedless of hung-over heads who heard him hammering, Tree was de-nailing his rafter piece at eight-thirty in the morning. Soon a collection of bleary eyes glared at him from the street.
Doctor O’Sullivan appeared, frowning. His office had been burgled overnight. Not much had been taken, just bandaging gauze and antiseptic salve, and a bottle of ether. Finding Bones Hillman in the crowd, he reported the theft.
“What’s ether?” Bones asked.
“Well, it’s made from sugar cane, a liquid distillation of ethanol. Used to be called ‘sweet vitriol.’ There was a landmark day in eighteen-forty-six up in Boston when a man named Morton tried it as an anaesthetic. ‘Gentlemen, this is not a humbug,’ he declared. A doctor in Norway put a patient to sleep with it in forty-seven, and did surgery. Doesn’t slow the heart down so much but slows respiration and relaxes muscles. Though not the uterus, which makes it useful in Caesarian childbirths.”
“Does the patient drink it?”
“Oh, no, he breathes it through a cloth.”
Bones nodded, impressed. “Damn. I thought rum was all they distill from sugar cane.”
~*~
Cort and Ellen parted reluctantly. He went to spend his morning getting the prisoners ready for their journey, writing letters to any kin they might need to notify. On their own schedule, the Zunis would meet him at the jail.
~*~
Stuart Hunter, having found sleep elusive under the Pairing Moon, ran to intercept Carmen as she carried breakfast to the jail. He offered to tote her platter. When he complimented her on her light-footed dancing, she shyly revealed that she was learning to play a flute. Stuart, gazing into her midnight-starry eyes, imagined this...and the flute morphed into...well, a “meat whistle.”
Ellen went to the livery stable with bag of oats. Peanut and her mare, whom she had inevitably named Paint, were in opposite stalls and gazing at each other. Making sure Peanut’s stall door was latched. Ellen rubbed his nose. “Don’t worry. When she’s in season, you’ll be first in line. She could sure do worse, and it looks like you’ll be here a while.”
This afternoon she and Jennie planned to take all the Pussy Posse horses to a field planted last year with clover seeds.
While the horses munched oats, she cleaned her saddle and their bridles’ bits and shook out saddle blankets.
Byron Starr lurked behind an empty stall’s door. Fingering a small dark, stoppered bottle, he watched Ellen refresh the water in her horse’s trough. His original intent in returning to Big Bell was to steal a horse, preferably Peanut, who knew him and whose theft would be payback painful to Tree. And lift a gun. But seeing Ellen in her bath, Starr wanted her, too. Painful payback for Cort, this would be.
He jumped her as she passed, wrestled her down, rendered her unconscious with ether on a rag. Hurriedly he bundled her into a small buckboard and covered her. With those towns folk who rose early collected at the Marshall’s Office, Starr assumed no one witnessed him steer the wagon hitched to Peanut towards the northern road. Ellen’s horse was tied behind.
But from her bedroom window Mattie Silk wondered what Peanut was doing drawing a cart – he wasn’t trained for that, as his uncomfortable lurching, veering and attempts to buck off the harness made obvious. The driver was struggling. Another figure lay still in the bay behind his bench. Strands of yellow hair were all that Mattie could see outside of the blanket covering him...or her? Tied to the back of the little wagon was a paint horse. Ellen’s? That driver was certainly not Cort or Tree. It was someone smaller. Stiffening, Mattie’s curiosity changed to acute alarm. She hurried on her dress and dashed out barefoot.
She went to find Cort. He was at jail with Dean, the Zunis and the captives, discussing with them their indentured servitude in penance to the tribe. Carmen had arrived with her heaping bowls of breakfast. That meal seemed to calm the tense gathering. The youths stared at their strange new bosses less fearfully, their questions grew more optimistic.
Mattie showed Cort the direction the buckboard had taken. He knew Tree was with Jennie and that Ellen had gone to the livery stables to feed horses. She was not there now and her Paint and Peanut were gone. So was one of the liveryman’s rental wagons. Fortunately Cort’s own horse was waiting, excited, in his stall. His eyes were full of messages. He was as eager as the Marshall to give chase.
~*~
A talented baker, Ramona had accompanied Rosario, Selma and Cathy on a dawn berry quest. Bones was designated child-sitter while Dean did deputy duty.
The best berries and other spring fruits hung from a meandering patch of shrubs and cacti and a few struggling trees on a steep slope bisected by the northern road. Decades back, Herod’s men had built a series of ladders from stolen railroad ties, spikes and rails. This construction augmented steps carved crudely from the rock. Overgrown and in places crumbling, this route was scarcely visible from the road. The berry pickers had sewn themselves loose climbing trousers out of sail canvas Alan had once brought to town. They’d grown adept at negotiating the ladders, secured by ropes tied around their chests. Alan had taught the group how to wrap the rope-end over two encircling “bytes” and tie a “bowline” knot with one hand, so the coil wouldn’t tighten and break ribs if it had to brake a fall. Descent ropes were looped over a massive metal wicket pounded down deeply about a yard back from the cliff’s edge.
Strung along the ladder, Rosario and Cathy were already filling shoulder-slung sacks as Ramona took her first few nervous steps downward. Selma above her still peeked over the cliff’s rim, waiting her turn. So it was she who spotted the big tan horse unevenly pulling a wagon whose driver swore in frustration, yanking the reins. The horse as it came closer looked at Selma, pulled up and neighed at her. His eyes rolled frantically. He neighed again and a paint horse behind the wagon neighed back.
That horse looked too much like Peanut. The load likewise alerted Selma: it was thrashing around in a wrap of blanket. A female human shriek suddenly rent the cool air.
Selma ducked to evade the driver’s eyes. In a whisper she informed Ramona that someone was trying to sneak out with a screaming woman and stolen horses, told her to pass it down to the others.
“Get down to the road as fast as we can. We have to block that wagon’s way!”
As they scrambled down Selma continued, “I think he’s got Peanut and Ellen’s Paint! Whatever woman I heard, I think she’s been kidnapped. The man was short with long fair hair – doesn’t that match Byron Starr?”
Accelerating their trip down, the foursome arrived at a broad bend of the northern trail before the wagon reached it.
The women staged a drama of damsel in distress. With her trousers doffed, wearing only her tunic and with her hair loose, Rosario lay as if injured across the road. Selma knelt wailing and waving as Starr approached. “She must’ve been sleepwalking! She’s fallen down the cliff – we need to get her up to Doc O’Sullivan!”
Hiding, Cathy and Ramona – the strongest of the four – held opposite ends of a rope stretched across a particularly overgrown patch of the unpaved track a few feet uphill from Rosario. As Byron approached suspiciously, they yanked their ends as hard as they could and tripped him. He fell and was instantly trounced upon.
A wild struggle raised dust and frightened birds from bushes. Starr thrashed, swore and kicked. One by one he threw the women off, losing his jacket, bandana, and strips of skin.
Drawing his gun from his trouser waist holster, he forced their retreat. He dashed off and plunged in to a thicket at the base of the cliff. When he reappeared he was clambering up the bottom length of Herod’s makeshift ladder.
Ramona and Selma helped groggy Ellen out of the wagon, Cathy and Rosario threw rocks at Starr. Some of them struck him but he persisted, ascending awkwardly, obviously shaken. He cursed and the women replied in kind, derisively daring him to come back and fight fair.
Hearing female voices wafting up over the precipice, Cort drew reins and dismounted. Approaching the edge, he could see four women grouped at the cliff base. Not far from them, the rustled horses and wagon. Then he spied Starr scaling the cliff face. Starr had reached a point where the ladder had long since fallen off. He was slowly free-climbing, making for the next rungs.
There was a rope still dangling from a rusty iron wicket above the ladder. Quickly Cort circled his waist with it and improvised a knot through his belt loop. Then – fighting what he called “a strong disinterest in heights” – he backed over the brink.
But in sudden panic he had to clutch for purchase. His rope was merely looped over the wicket, not tied to it. Below, seeing him fall and stop his fall precariously on an unstable jut of rock, the women realized he was trying to rappel on an unanchored rope. They swiftly swarmed the other end of the doubled rope. They yelled to Cort that they had him counterbalanced. He resumed the descent. The ladies looked like some soused sailor’s fanciful signal flags flying from a yardarm, or colorful lures on a fishing line.
Byron tried to find footing from which to fire, but Cort got off the first shot. It just missed Byron’s outstretched hand. Losing that handhold he teetered. Regaining balance, he sidled to his right and took refuge under an overhang.
Now Cort had to expose himself to aim at Starr. With a rushed prayer he swung out from the cliff and located his target. Bouncing sideways, he pulled his trigger hopefully, but in the same instant Starr pulled his. Byron’s bullet nicked Cort’s shoulder joint with searing pain. He nearly dropped his gun. Pain and shocked nerves made his arm jerk uselessly. He flattened himself against the sheer rock face and flexed wrist and hand until grip returned, his heart hammering hard. Blood stuck his heavy shirt to his skin and flowed to drip from his elbow. He could hear Starr scrabbling as the cliff shed debris under his boot soles.
“Cort, we can lower you fast!” Cathy shouted.
“No!” he answered. “Where is he?”
“He’s...like on a clock, one o’clock! Above to your right, one o’clock!”
Shoving out with his legs, Cort fired again but his finger’s jarred nerves lagged, and Starr kept climbing.
Several breaths later a bullet split a knob of basalt beside Cort’s head.
“Don’t move!” Cathy warned him.
But then the women screamed as Byron aimed two shots at them. They hung onto the rope but took cover out of view, pulling it taut.
“You hurt?”
“No! Fucker missed us!” Selma reassured Cort, and he resumed breathing. He hated looking down but now he spotted Ellen, unsteadily standing with arms around Paint’s neck, staring up at him.
A fresh alarm -- brief, deep humming like a giant insect, then a broken, guttural grunting. Puma! Smelling his blood.
Inhaling through his nostrils Cort expected an animal odor. But he saw the sounds’ source several seconds later. In the clatter of a rockslide Starr scraped past head-first. His slide became a free-fall and Cort glimpsed the feathered tail of the arrow that skewered his torso.
“Hell of an aim,” Ramona murmured, staring at the body. The ladies stepped back, still clinging to the rope, and peered up at the silhouettes atop the cliff, backlit by the morning sun.
From above Zeke’s voice instructed Cort, “Hold rope! We help you come up.”
~*~
An impromptu party ensued at the top of the cliff when the ladies with wagon and horses joined Cort and the smiling Zunis. Even the captive boys were included. With Starr’s corpse blanket-covered in the wagon, their mixed emotions gradually settled on a kind of relief. Starr would no longer haunt their horizons. Life’s confusing options diminished in number and complexity. They would be able to focus solely on their season of service with the Zunis. And any embryonic plan of escape would go unhatched, considering Zeke’s exhibition of native skill with the bow. That had not been an easy shot!
Revived but her head throbbing, Ellen helped Ramona clean Cort’s shoulder wound. Just a bit of bone was gone from his humerus, but no major vessel bleeding and the arm moved well. As Selma applied the dense juice from a freshly-picked aloe vera leaf, Cort nuzzled Ellen’s neck and kissed her.
Parting after toasts the Zunis shook the ladies’ berry-stained hands. Zeke, as he and Cort grasped each other’s forearms, uttered a formal pledge that translated to “Strength and Honor.”
The ladies decided to continue their harvest, while Ellen under Cort’s wary eyes drove the wagon back to town. She vowed to live at least one month without another trip out of this town. It was, she was now convinced, a town renewed. Ironically now worthy of its former name, Redemption. But she would never call it that again. She would hire Tree to carve her father’s monument. She might even homestead with Cort if he could stand her through more than this Pairing Moon.
Peanut snorted and Paint replied with coquettish whinnies. Cort reached over and stroked her back.
“Easy, girl. You’ve got plenty of time.”
FINITO
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