Stitches: A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale Volume 2

Stitches

A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale
Volume 2

Smashwords
Edition

M.T. Murphy

http://www.luciferaspet.com

©2010 by M.T.
Murphy

All rights
reserved.

Discover other titles by
M.T. Murphy at Smashwords.com

Lucifera’s Pet –
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/10755

Silver Shells: A Werewolf
Gunslinger Tale Volume 1 -
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/10710

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You
are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be
reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes,
provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you
enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover
other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

The
man with the noose around his neck was dead. No doubt about
it. The problem was they hadn’t hanged him yet.

Pale skin gave way to dark circles
around droopy eyes. He wasn’t just pale. He was damn near green. He
looked like a week old corpse sitting on the back of that horse. He
had no heartbeat and he wasn’t breathing. It was a shame I was the
only one who could see that.

“
Any last words?” The
question came from a tall old man with a mustache who stood next to
the horse with rifle in hand.

The doomed rider was as still as a
piece of wood. If the prospect of a short drop and a sudden stop
troubled him, he didn’t let on. Slowly he turned his head to face
the mustached man. His eyes were dull and glossy. One was brown and
one was blue.

He scanned the crowd that had gathered
to watch his execution on a lovely sunny day. I counted forty
people including a young couple who stood right in front. The
woman’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. The man had been
crying too. A mother and father who had lost a child?

“
Monster!” the sobbing
woman exclaimed.

No. A mother and father whose child
was murdered.

The condemned man looked past all of
them, locking eyes with me. “Last words?” His voice was deep but
quiet. “Ignorance is bliss. Pray your eyes stay closed to the real
monsters in your midst. Get on with it.”

The mustached man looked towards the
couple. The father nodded at him. He fired the rifle into the air
and slapped the horse’s backside.

The animal lurched forward, taking the
rider with it for a single stride before the rope grew taut. The
horse continued on its path leaving the man to swing by the
neck.

The hanged man was big. No. He was
huge. The limb of the old oak tree drooped from his weight. His
toes dangled a hand’s width from the ground, almost touching each
time he would swing. He was at least seven and a half feet tall if
he was an inch. The heavy iron chains they had attached to his
wrists must have weighed forty pounds. He didn’t move or struggle.
He just swung in the breeze.

They let him hang there for five
minutes before cutting him down. It took six men to hoist his body
back up on the horse to be hauled away.

“
I’m sorry you had to see
that, miss.” The mustached man looked genuinely troubled. He reeked
of pipe tobacco. It was obvious from the way he fiddled with the
corncob pipe in his shirt pocket that he wanted nothing more than
to fire up and calm his nerves.

“
The name’s Lily. What was
all that about?”

“
Nice to meet you Lily.
I’m Stanley. I run the general store.” He watched the others lead
the horse and its grisly cargo away. “It’s hard to even imagine
what he did. That feller killed Judy and Todd’s little girl. Brute
ripped her clean in half and ate her insides. I ain’t never seen
nothing like it.” Stanly covered his mouth with a handkerchief. For
a moment I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or be
sick.

I placed a hand on his slumped
shoulder. “That is truly horrible. Just horrible.”

The surprisingly calm lynch mob slowly
disbursed after the corpse was gone. Unlike most such groups I had
seen, nobody was celebrating the death they had just caused. The
all looked a lot like Stanley: stunned and sickened.

“
Where is the
sheriff?”

“
We got no lawman to speak
of. Old Bill Tucker was the sheriff for years, but he died last
fall and nobody else wanted the job. We never had no trouble until
that man showed up.”

“
The killer?”

“
Yep. Adam was his name.
He came and asked me if he could camp outside of town. He was a
rough looking character, but he didn’t have no gun, so I figured he
was mostly harmless.” Stanley wiped tears before they had a chance
to fall. “Damn it.”

The rest of the crowd paid no mind to
me or to the reluctant executioner. They made their way down the
hill from the hanging tree and back towards town.

Stanley regained his composure and
took an honest look at me for the first time. People mention how
I’m taller than most of the men folk. Some ask about my
reddish-brown eyes or my Irish brogue. Others tell me that a woman
should find a nice fellow and settle down instead of trekking
across the west by herself. I got used to the comments a long time
ago.

Stanley’s eyes focused on the two
Walker Colts strapped to my sides.

“
Them’s some mighty big
hand cannons you got there. Can you really shoot them
things?”

“
When I have
to.”

He nodded and draped the rifle over
his shoulder.

“
It’ll be dark in a couple
of hours. Saloon should have an empty room if you tell them I sent
you.”

“
I appreciate that,
Stanley. A night’s sleep in a decent bed will do me some
good.”

“
Yep. You never did say
what brung you here, Lily.”

“
Just passing through. I’m
heading to Deadwood in the morning.”

I was unusual and that didn’t sit well
with folks. Most couldn’t handle what they didn’t understand. They
equated different with malicious. The dead man had been even more
unusual than me. I wasn’t convinced that he did the deed. Newcomer
shows up, kills a girl, and gets hanged. It was too damn
matter-of-fact for me.

I could have left things alone, but it
just didn’t feel right. That little girl deserved justice and
something told me that justice hadn’t been served.

I wondered what the corpse would have
to say about the situation. The only way to know for sure was to
ask him.

***

I left my room at the saloon about an
hour after sundown. The night crowd was still living it up in the
main hall downstairs. That meant that no one was outside to see me
leap from my second-story window and land silently on the ground
below.

I wore only a shirt, an old pair of
britches, my boots and my guns. The cold North Dakota air felt
good. There was a full moon out and my blood was
boiling.

The silver orb in the sky called to
me. I wanted nothing more than to shed my human skin and hunt for
deer in the nearby hills. First I had to see if I was right about
the dead man.

Stanley told me that the body was
taken to the cemetery outside of town for burial in a shallow grave
away from the main plots. He was half right.

I found the cemetery easily enough.
The tombstones jutted out of a hill on the road about two miles
from the saloon. Instead of a fresh shallow grave, I found the
corpse lying face-up in a ditch. Either the gravediggers
purposefully disrespected him or they were just plain
lazy.

The heavy chains still kept his wrists
bound tightly together. I knelt down by him to get a closer look.
His scars were even worse than I had noticed earlier that day. Deep
lines circled his wrists. Similar lines ran down his cheeks and
under his jaw. Great care had been shown in making the scars as
small as possible around his face, but that just meant using
smaller stitches. Areas closest to joints were patched with the
largest stitches to allow some freedom of movement at the expense
of a jagged, disfiguring groove along the flesh.

Save for the stitches and pallor of
death, his face might have been handsome, though it did seem a
little too small for the rest of his body. The more I looked at
him, the more oddities became apparent. One arm was slightly longer
than the other. His left leg was at least two inches shorter than
the right. He was like a patchwork man pieced together from a
thousand people.

I was so enthralled in my observation
that I never saw his fists connect with my sternum. One moment he
was dead, the next he sat up and punched me with both hands,
sending me flying. The blow itself was loud, but the cracking sound
my sternum made as it broke was far more sickening to
me.

I crashed into the ground at least
thirty feet up the hill from the ditch. Pain filled my chest and
blood flooded my mouth. I tried to look back down towards the man,
but I could only see blackness and stars.

When my vision returned, he was
standing over me. He glanced down at his chains. Then he grasped
the chain itself with both hands and pulled. His expression did not
change as the middle link of the hardened metal broke.

The taste of blood and the call of the
moon were almost more than I could bear. The beast was just below
the surface, begging to be let loose, but I couldn’t let her free.
Not until I tried to get some answers.

Ignoring my pain, I pulled both
six-shooters and aimed them at his chest.

“
You tried to kill me,” I
said.

“
That punch would have
killed a human, but I knew
you
would survive.”

“
You did? And just how did
you know that?”

“
Because I can see
supernatural power, and you have no small measure of
it.”

I raised the gun in my right hand and
fired. The silver projectile hit its target, right between the dead
man’s eyes. Instead of the snap of shattering bone, the sound of
the bullet ricocheting off of metal accompanied the man’s startled
grunt. He shook his head, but stood there expressionless. A
bloodless open wound marked the spot where the bullet hit his
forehead. The unmistakable shine of polished metal reflected the
moon from the hole in his flesh.

“
You are full of
surprises, dead man. Just who the hell are you?”

“
Don’t you mean what the
hell are you?”

“
A better question is, why
did you kill that little girl?”

Fury exploded across his face. He
raised his hands and took a step towards me. I rolled to the side
at the last instant, narrowly avoiding the two massive mismatched
fists that slammed into the ground like cannonballs.

I could feel my beast
taunting me in the back of my head. “
Let
me go
,” it whispered, “
I will kill him
.”

“
That’s the problem. I
still ain’t sure he’s the one that needs killing,” I
thought.

The dead man ripped his hands out of
the ground and flung a bushel of dirt at my face. I scooted
backwards, rubbing the dirt out of my eyes as I went. He was faster
than he looked. A single hand clamped down on my throat and hoisted
me up into the air.

Through my blurry vision, I saw the
fury had left his face but his grip was growing tighter on my
throat.

I pressed the barrel of my Colt
against his eye. He didn’t blink or flinch when the cold steel
touched his eyeball.

“
Is your brain made out of
metal, too?” I croaked out the words as best I could. He had nearly
closed off my throat with his grip.

“
I did not kill that
girl.”

“
Yep. The weird thing
is... I believe you.”

His eyes grew wide and his grip
loosened. My body descended until my feet found the ground
again.

“
I could have killed them
all, you know. The whole town. I didn’t have to let them hang
me.”

“
I believe that, too. Do
you believe I’ll fire off a bullet to rattle around in that metal
noggin of yours?”