Title: The Storm
Author: Scylla the Healer
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: One of those 'alternate universe' pieces poorly disguised as a character piece. Joey, Tristan, and Duke as cowboys braving a storm to finish a cattle drive that's already claimed three men's lives. I suppose there are some nice descriptions here, but the plot's rather weak.
Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh! or anything having to do with it. And once I've finished borrowing the boys and patched them up, I'll be giving them back. No, contrary to popular belief, I don't hate Duke.
No animals were harmed in the making of this fiction.
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Joe Wheeler pulled the brim of his hat down to blot out the sight of the gunmetal gray clouds looming in the distance. The hats and horse-rumps of his crew and a hundred slick roan backs streamed ahead of him like the river to Hell. The clouds rolled over on their green bellies. He couldn't ignore it anymore. He was responsible for getting those two boys back to their mamas alive and getting the herd at least mostly alive into Kansas City before the fall snows started in. His face was weathered and leathery, and his hands were callused and as brown and rough as his chaps from hard work. Life had been riding hard on him for about fifteen years now, and he was only twenty-three. He'd worked for this outfit for five years, which made him the longest cowboy to stay on the ranch.
And he did all this because he couldn't do anything else. Because he was such a damnfool that he couldn't turn down a challenge – especially not from the foreman. Two Line KC Ranch. Only he hadn't known the guy was the foreman of a ranch. But as it turned out, even though Joe usually had Lady Luck practically straddling his knees most of the time, Mr. Seto Kaiba (now if that wasn't a dumbshit name for a cowboy…) was a better hand at stud poker than he was. Played him for a fool, let him get overconfident, and then bet the whole ranch, horse, house, and a roll in the hay. Against Joe coming to work for him indefinitely.
Joe lost. But he still got a roll in the hay. And a pretty nice little horse out of it all.
But this business of running cattle drives for Kaiba sucked shit. Especially now. Guy was such a genius, why the hell couldn't he come up with a better way to get those horny heads from the Utah side of Wyoming to Kansas City?
'Course. The railroad wasn't through here yet. Oh, they were working on it – right while he and Tristan and Duke rode right into the teeth of a storm. And no money of Mr. Kaiba's was going to make those Irish boys blister their hands on the tracks any faster. Meanwhile, the clouds were waking up and talking themselves into a good spell. A muggy breeze blew the hot smell of cowshit and sweat up into Joe's face, and stirred the greasy straggles of hair spiking from underneath his hat. He whipped his hat off for a little while to let the sweatband dry and slapped it against his thigh. Shot a glare up at the sky and shoved his fingers through his hair. Nothing was going to happen to these boys while he was running tail.
The other boys had seen Joe's storm coming, and they were both riding a little stiff. Tristan's paint was as bombproof as they came, but Duke's grullo started to go a little crazy under the oppressive overhang of clouds blowing their way and blotting out the receding sun on their backs. The little mare danced sideways, throwing up her head and demanding that they do it her way and not be dumbshits and ride right into those nasty anvil clouds. It was just an open plain ahead of them for miles. They'd done two months of hell, with another month to go. Until they got down to the Missouri border, there'd be no cover at all, and they were one hell of a long way from Missouri. It was the tail end of August, hot and dry as you please, and so the sudden humid breeze that went cold around them was more than a little reason to worry.
They were riding into the cave of a bear. And from the lightning strikes hitting the ground about three miles off, the bear was pretty damn pissed. Joe whooped to his crew to pull up, and they peeled off the edges of the herd to ride back his direction. The cattle were edgy. Tristan's dog heeled beside his horse, because if there was one thing they didn't need, it was one false move and a steer that took offense to puppies. That was the kind of thing that started stampedes, especially given the suddenly unpredictable weather.
"I say we hang it up for the night," Duke's saddle creaked as he leaned over and lifted a stirrup flap to show the frayed bits of his cinch. "If we end up running, this thing's not going to take much."
"When did that happen?" Joe demanded.
"Bridget got it going about a mile back. She won't ride through this shit anymore than this saddle, Joe." Duke's eyes, normally a sarcastic slitted green, were sunken with fear in his thin face. Joe didn't blame him – it was the kid's first ride with the late summer storms howling, and they'd already seen the results of two pretty bad ones. "We gotta stop. If you wanna keep going, we'll catch up."
Kaiba didn't think he could make the run in three months. He'd said as much. Especially not without a cookie wagon and no more crew than a tenderfoot and a horse whisperer. They were all that was left when they'd dragged into a little cowtown that followed the telegraph lines. Marik's horse died right out from underneath him when a lightning strike too near the herd had startled a mad stampede while the night was still blacker than the inside of a heifer. Heart burst, they figured. The overo went down and over like a stunt trip-horse and crushed one of Marik's kneecaps. So he was out of the game. Sandy and Rex and about fifty head of cattle hadn't made it back to camp the night of the flash flood.
Joe scratched his head meditatively and scanned the wall of storm riding hard on the horizon. The tail end was a long way off. They were in for it tonight. And they needed to stop before Duke's rope cinch ripped all the way through. But Kaiba's telegraph said in no uncertain terms that with only three of them and no supplies besides the rations in their saddlebags and what they could shoot, they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell and they'd better get their asses back home.
One month gone since then, and it was hell all right, but they were damn well doing it. Joe's shoulders squared. If they kept on going until the storm stopped them, that'd be a few less miles to make up after it was over. He could still prove his foreman wrong. "How long'll it take to stitch up?" He asked.
Tristan shot him a disbelieving stare and pushed his hat back to rub the dark line of sweat and grit on his forehead. He'd known Joe for a long time…and never knew him to take a chance like this. Duke's eyes sank a little further back in his head. He already looked like a skeleton. The blood had long since drained from his face.
"Maybe a coupla minutes if we have to move out, but it'll be a dirty job. Just knot up the frays and hope the thing holds." He shifted his hips in the saddle as his mare sidestepped nervously at another crack of thunder. "Piece of shit."
Joe understood. He did. But he had something to prove, and his eyes were just as hard as Tristan's flashed when he nodded and jammed his hat back on. "Do it. We're not stopping until we can't go no more."
Duke wasn't as much of a 'greenhorn' as the others thought he was. But he'd gotten stuck with a piece of shit pony and a piece of shit saddle and right now…apparently stuck with a piece of shit jackass cowboy. Who made you foreman? He wanted to snap, but all he could do was nod and dismount and toss his reins to Tristan while he unbuckled Bridget's saddle and started on her cinch. Well…the saddle was good. It was just the horse. Dammit…how had they let the remuda get away from them before he'd had a chance to change ponies? Rimfire had been in with the horses high-tailing it away from camp. But there'd only been four of them then to watch, and then Marik bit it in the next storm…
He braided the pieces of broken cord in the woven cinch and knotted them together, and for good measure, ripped the leather wrap from around a stirrup and used the lacing to fasten the spot a little tighter. And pray. "If it hurts, little girl, it's your own damn fault," he stroked Bridget's neck and swung up again. Joe volunteered to give him tail and then he and Tristan moved ahead to fan the herd into motion again. The storm rolled purple and green overhead.
"Get 'em up, Tiger!" Tristan whistled, and like a shaggy gray-black streak of lightning, his dog bullied the nearest steer into movement, and the rest followed. Soon enough, they were trudging along again.
In a half hour, the sky broke loose with rain. In two minutes, it was really pissing down. They fumbled for their slickers and shrugged them on in the dark, but they were already soaked to the skin. Lightning unzipped the sky in unnervingly close quarters. It was then that Joey realized his mistake. It was almost too dark to see by now. There was no moon, and only the occasional strikes of forked lightning that lit up the sky like noon. He raised his voice over the thrum of the rain to catch Tristan's attention, but the wind whipped his words away.
And then a huge bolt ripped into the ground only a quarter mile away from where they walked. The reverberation set Joe's bones echoing, and every animal with ears jumped about a foot in the air. The cattle, already under enough stress from the trip and the heavy anxiety of the storm, gave in to blind fear and raced away, and an unsuspecting Tiger disappeared in the stampede.
Joe watched them fading away into the dark, and swore a blue streak. How the hell had that happened? Why the hell was this all happening to him?
He kicked into his little buckskin's ribs and they shot off after the herd. There was no catching them…but at least they wouldn't lose them. Tristan saw him go by the pale white of the other cowboy's hat brim, and pushed his little paint after Joe. Duke was already heading that direction, following the sound of many hooves that thrummed even over the roar of thunder that clapped his ears and nearly brought blood with the pain. They met, and followed Joe after the herd, swatting the reins to their ponies' necks to push them harder. This was suicidal, Tristan's paint snorted with every other hoof beat. This was suicidal and she didn't want any part of it.
Bridget stumbled, proving Tristan's paint entirely correct.
Tristan watched in horror as a flash of lightning illuminated the entire scene. Duke should have held on – he'd taken harder hits than just the unexpected stumble of a pony. But what he didn't count on was the slow unraveling of Duke's handiwork on the cinch, and the force of the cowboy's weight hauling on the saddle as his thighs gripped Bridget's shoulders when she went down. The leather lacing was only a memory by now, and the knots worked themselves loose with every hard heave of Bridget's stomach. The little pale mare and the saddle and the cowboy separated in an instant as the cinch gave way, and the weight of all that leather came hard down onto Duke's ribs as he slid sideways in the grass. Tristan heard the grunt of all that rain-soaked hide hitting flesh and yelled for Joe to stop. "Duke's down!"
He catapulted out of the saddle almost before the paint had stopped, and grabbed hold of the saddletree to heave it off of Duke's leg. The other man had already come to life, and was gasping for breath like a landed fish.
FLASH!
"Holy shit! You all right? You went over like a—" CRRRACK-KABOOOOM!
"What?!" FLASH!
"I said are you all—" CRRRACK-KABOOOOM!
Shaking his head, Tristan just reached for Duke's hands and yanked him to his feet and held him steady until he could breathe.
Joe rode back out of the dark. They looked up at him, rain dribbling off the brims of their hats.
They made camp – three miserable cold men sleeping on their feet in soaked oilskin slickers holding three miserable cold horses by the reins with one ruined saddle between their feet. Duke had two cracked ribs from making contact with the saddlehorn.
And in the morning…they rode.