Something rotten (3 page)

The drunk, Howell, had awoken and was demanding a tipple “to set him straight.”

“We’re looking for the Minotaur,” I explained, showing the sheriff the photograph.

He rubbed his stubble thoughtfully and shook his head. “Don’t recall ever seeing this critter, missy Next.”

“We have reason to believe he passed through your office not long ago—he’s been marked with slapstick.”

“Ah!” said the sheriff. “I was a-wonderin’ ’bout all that. Me and Howell here have been trippin’ and a-stumblin’ for a while now—ain’t we, Howell?”

“You’re darn tootin’,” said the drunk.

“He could be in disguise and operating under an alias,” I ventured. “Does the name Norman Johnson mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say it does, missy. We have twenty-six Johnsons here, but all are C-7s—not ’portant ’nuff to have fust names.”

I sketched a Stetson onto the photograph of the Minotaur, then a duster, vest and gun belt.

“Oh!” said the sheriff with a sudden look of recognition. “
That
Mr. Johnson.”

“You know where he is?”

“Sure do. Had him in jail only last week on charges of eatin’ a cattle rustler.”

“What happened?”

“Paid his bail and wuz released. Ain’t nothing in the Nebraska statutes that says you can’t eat rustlers. One moment.”

There had been a shot outside, followed by several yells from startled townsfolk. The sheriff checked his Colt, opened the door and walked out. Alone on the street and facing him was a young man with an earnest expression, hand quivering around his gun, the elegantly tooled holster of which I noticed had been tied down—a sure sign of yet another potential gunfight.

“Go home, Abe!” called out the sheriff. “Today’s not a good day for dyin’.”

“You killed my pappy,” said the youth, “and my pappy’s pappy. And
his
pappy’s pappy. And my brothers Jethro, Hank, Hoss, Red, Peregrine, Marsh, Junior, Dizzy, Luke, Peregrine, George an’ all the others. I’m callin’ you out, lawman.”

“You said Peregrine twice.”

“He wuz special.”

“Abel Baxter,” whispered the sheriff out of the corner of his mouth, “one of them Baxter boys. They turn up regular as clockwork, and I kill ’em same ways as regular.”

“How many have you killed?” I whispered back.

“Last count, ’bout sixty. Go home, Abe, I won’t tell yer again!”

The youth caught sight of Bradshaw and me and said, “New deputies, Sheriff? Yer gonna need ’em!”

And it was then we saw that Abel Baxter wasn’t alone. Stepping out from the stables opposite were four disreputable-looking characters. I frowned. They seemed somehow out of place in
Death at Double-X Ranch
. For a start, none of them wore black, nor did they have tooled leather double gun belts with nickel-plated revolvers. Their spurs didn’t clink as they walked, and their holsters were plain and worn high on the hip—the weapon these men had chosen was a Winchester rifle. I noticed with a shudder that one of the men had a button missing on his frayed vest and the sole on the toe of his boot had come adrift. Flies buzzed around the men’s unwashed and grimy faces, and sweat had stained their hats halfway to the crown. These weren’t C-2 generic gunfighters from pulp, but well described A-9s from a novel of high descriptive quality—and if they could shoot as well as they had been realized by the author, we were in trouble.

The sheriff sensed it, too.

“Where yo’ friends from, Abe?”

One of the men hooked his Winchester into the crook of his arm and answered in a low southern drawl, “Mr. Johnson sent us.”

And they opened fire. No waiting, no drama, no narrative pace. Bradshaw and I had already begun to move—squaring up in front of a gunman with a rifle might seem terribly macho, but for survival purposes it was a nonstarter. Sadly, the sheriff didn’t realize this until it was too late. If he had survived until page 164 as he was meant to, he would have taken a slug, rolled twice in the dust after a two-page buildup and lived long enough to say a pithy final good-bye to his sweetheart, who cradled him in his bloodless dying moments. Not to be. Realistic violent death was to make an unwelcome entry into
Death at Double-X Ranch
. The heavy lead shot entered the sheriff ’s chest and came out the other side, leaving an exit wound the size of a saucer. He collapsed inelegantly onto his face and lay perfectly still, one arm sprawled outwards in a manner unattainable in life and the other hooked beneath him. He didn’t collapse flat either. He ended up bent over on his knees with his backside in the air.

The gunmen stopped firing as soon as there was no target—but Bradshaw, his hunting instincts alerted, had already drawn a bead on the sherriff ’s killer and fired. There was an almighty detonation, a brief flash and a large cloud of smoke. The eraserhead hit home, and the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street, the meaning of the words billowing out into a blue haze that hung near the ground for a moment or two before evaporating.

. . . the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street. . . .

“What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed at his impetuosity.

“Him or us, Thursday,” replied Bradshaw grimly, pulling the lever down on his Martini-Henry to reload, “him or us.”

“Did you see how much text he was composed of?” I replied angrily. “He was almost a paragraph long. Only
featured
characters get that kind of description—somewhere there’s going to be a book one character short!”

“But,” replied Bradshaw in an aggrieved tone, “I didn’t know that before I shot him, now did I?”

I shook my head. Perhaps Bradshaw hadn’t noticed the missing button, the sweat stains and the battered shoes, but
I
had. Erasure of a featured part meant more paperwork than I really wanted to deal with. From Form F36/34 (Discharge of an Eraserhead) and Form B9/32 (Replacement of Featured Part) to Form P13/36 (Narrative Damage Assessment), I could be bogged down for two whole days. I had thought bureaucracy was bad in the real world, but here in the paper world, it was everything.

“So what do we do?” asked Bradshaw. “Ask politely for them to surrender?”

“I’m thinking,” I replied, pulling out my footnoterphone and pressing the button marked CAT. In fiction the commonest form of communication was by footnote, but way out here . . .

“Blast!” I muttered again. “No signal.”

“Nearest repeater station is in
The Virginian,
” observed Bradshaw as he replaced the spent cartridge and closed the breech before peering outside, “and we can’t bookjump direct from pulp to classic.”

He was right. We had been crossing from book to book for almost six days, and although we could escape in an emergency, such a course of action would give the Minotaur more than enough time to escape. Things weren’t good, but they weren’t bad either—yet.

“Hey!” I yelled from the sheriff ’s office. “We want to talk!”

“Is that a fact?” came a clear voice from outside. “Mr. Johnson says he’s all done talkin’—’less you be in mind to offer amnesty.”

“We can talk about that!” I replied.

There was a beeping noise from my pocket.

“Blast,” I mumbled again, consulting the Narrative Proximity Device. “Bradshaw, we’ve got a story thread inbound from the East, two hundred and fifty yards and closing. Page 74, line 6.”

Bradshaw quickly opened his copy of
Death at Double-X Ranch
and ran a finger along the line
“McNeil rode into the town of Providence, Nebraska, with fifty cents in his pocket and murder on his mind. . . .”

I cautiously peered out the window. Sure enough, a cowboy on a bay horse was riding slowly into town. Strictly speaking, it didn’t matter if we changed the story a little, as the novella had been read only sixteen times in the past ten years, but the code by which we worked was fairly unequivocal. “Keep the story as the author intended!” was a phrase bashed into me early on during my training. I had broken it once and would pay the consequences—I didn’t want to do it again.

“I need to speak to Mr. Johnson,” I yelled, keeping an eye on McNeil, who was still some way distant.

“No one speaks to Mr. Johnson ’less Mr. Johnson says so,” replied the voice, “but if you’ll be offerin’ an amnesty, he’ll take it and promise not to eat no more people.”

“Was that a double negative?” whispered Bradshaw with disdain. “I do
so
hate them.”

“No deal unless I meet Mr. Johnson first!” I yelled back.

“Then there’s no deal!” came the reply.

I looked out again and saw three more gunmen appear. The Minotaur had clearly made a lot of friends during his stay in the western genre.

“We need backup,” I murmured.

Bradshaw clearly thought the same. He opened his TravelBook and pulled out something that looked a little like a flare gun. This was a TextMarker, which could be used to signal to other Jurisfiction agents. The TravelBook was dimensionally ambivalent; the device was actually
larger
than the book that contained it.

“Jurisfiction knows we’re in western pulp; they just don’t know
where.
I’ll send them a signal.”

He dialed in the sort of TextMarker he was going to place, using a knob on the back of the gun, then moved to the door, aimed the marker into the air and fired. There was a dull thud, and the projectile soared into the sky. It exploded noiselessly high above us, and for an instant I could see the text of the page in a light gray against the blue of the sky. The words were back to front, of course, and as I looked at Bradshaw’s copy of
Death at Double-X Ranch,
I noticed that the written word “ProVIDence” had been partially capitalized. Help would soon arrive—a show of force would deal with the gunmen. The problem was, would the Minotaur make a run for it or fight it out to the end?

“Purty fireworks don’t scare us, missy,” said the voice again. “You comin’ out, or do we-uns have to come in and get yer?”

I looked across at Bradshaw, who was smiling. “What?”

“This is all quite a caper, don’t you think?” said the Commander, chuckling like a schoolboy who had just been caught stealing apples. “Much more fun than hunting elephant, wrestling lions to the ground and returning tribal knickknacks stolen by unscrupulous foreigners.”

“I used to think so,” I said under my breath. Two years of assignments like these had been enjoyable and challenging, but not without their moments of terror, uncertainty and panic—and I had a two-year-old son who needed more attention than I could give him. The pressure of running Jurisfiction had been building for a long time now, and I needed a break in the real world—a long one. I had felt it about six months before, just after the adventure that came to be known as the Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, but had shrugged it off. Now the feeling was back—and stronger.

A low, deep rumble began somewhere overhead. The windows rattled in their frames, and dust fell from the rafters. A crack opened up in the plaster, and a cup vibrated off the table to break on the floor. One of the windows shattered, and a shadow fell across the street. The deep rumble grew in volume, drowned out the Narrative Proximity Device that was wailing plaintively, then became so loud it didn’t seem like a sound at all—just a vibration that shook the sheriff ’s office so strongly my sight blurred. Then, as the clock fell from the wall and smashed into pieces, I realized what was going on.

“Oh . . .
no!
” I howled with annoyance as the noise waned to a dull roar. “Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!”

“Emperor Zhark?” queried Bradshaw.

“Who else would dare pilot a Zharkian battle cruiser into western pulp?”

We looked outside as the vast spaceship passed overhead, its vectored thrusters swiveling downwards with a hot rush of concentrated power that blew up a gale of dust and debris and set the livery stables on fire. The huge bulk of the battle cruiser hovered for a moment as the landing gear unfolded, then made a delicate touchdown—right on top of McNeil and his horse, who were squashed to the thickness of a ha’penny.

My shoulders sagged as I watched my paperwork increase exponentially. The townsfolk ran around in panic and horses bolted as the A-7 gunmen fired pointlessly at the ship’s armored hull. Within a few moments, the interstellar battle cruiser had disgorged a small army of foot soldiers carrying the very latest Zharkian weaponry. I groaned. It was not unusual for the Emperor to go overboard at moments like this. Undisputed villain of the eight Emperor Zhark books, the most feared tyrannical god-emperor of the known galaxy just didn’t seem to comprehend the meaning of restraint.

In a few minutes, it was all over. The A-7s had either been killed or escaped to their own books, and the Zharkian Marine Corps had been dispatched to find the Minotaur. I could have saved them the trouble. He would be long gone. The A-7s and McNeil would have to be sourced and replaced, the whole book rejigged to remove the twenty-sixth-century battle cruiser that had arrived uninvited into 1875 Nebraska. It was a flagrant breach of the Anti-Cross-Genre Code that we attempted to uphold within fiction. I wouldn’t have minded so much if this was an isolated incident, but Zhark did this too often to be ignored. I could hardly control myself as the Emperor descended from his starship with an odd entourage of aliens and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who also worked for Jurisfiction.