A/N: Hi guys. Firstly, I must apologize. I've had terrible writer's block for a long while, and this was the only thing that could break me from it. Secondly, while Colt revolvers existed in this time, the Python wasn't a thing yet. However, since I'm taking liberties with history to weave this strange tale, I figured...meh. I can't part a man from his pistol, I just can't. I hope you enjoy this, it's going to keep coming, I have a wild ride planned. If you love the movie Tombstone as much as I did, you'll want to stick around for this one. And I promise you I have not abandoned Vantage Point or Bad Thangs! I just...needed to get this out.


well I recall his parting words

must I accept his fate?

or take myself far from this place?

why would I want him, just to lose him again?

we'll rise above the scarlet tide

that trickles down through the mountain

and separates the widow from the bride

- 'The Scarlet Tide', Alison Krauss


Prologue:

"Vengeance it is, then."

June 5, 1881

At the chilly break of dawn on a dirt road* thirteen miles from the homestead of Tucson, Rick Grimes feels his knees begin to ache to the bone.

He's been on them for two hours.

He is shivering in his marrow, his entire body fighting the shock, grief, and near-paralyzing anger coursing through it. His hair is wet with sweat and morning dew, his eyes watery with tears both shed and unshed. His head pounds, his face marred by a dark, thick streak of drying blood and sinew. His brother's blood. His expression is void of any emotion. Slack, blank. His crystal blues are blown wide and almost unseeing as he relives each blow to his brother's head until there was virtually no head left.

The man with the club, the leader of this gang of murderous thugs, laughs. He stalks, unhurried and confident, down the line of kneeling, terrified members of Rick's family. The blood-soaked weapon floats menacingly close to their traumatized, grief-stricken faces. Sweet Miss Maggie Green, whose father Hershel's head is pulverized on her left. Her little sister Miss Beth Green, pale as the lace of her wedding veil, frozen with shock, staring at their father's remains. Dazed, frail Missus Lori Grimes, wilting away from the grotesqueness of her surroundings, clinging to her boy Carl Grimes. A stoic, fiery-eyed youngster the leader had already taken a sinister shine to. Now the disintegrated head and crumpled body of the once proud and dandy young Shane Grimes.

The leader moves with dramatic slowness. The spurs in his boots sing sharply with each heavy step, pausing to admire the terror and carnage he's inflicted.

Finally, he reaches the notorious former Sheriff Grimes; bent, broken, and silent in the dirt.

"Oh my. Mister Grimes…" croons the dark outlaw with the red sash around his neck, spurs catching the newborn sunlight. "You don't look like you're feelin' dandy at all." He sucks his teeth, the sound stabbing at the nerves behind Rick's eyes as he watches the blood dripping from the club's heavy end. "What's the matter, boy? Cat got your tongue?"

Rick swallows, his head still throbbing with intense pressure, and tries to speak. Like dragging a horse through quicksand, the words that have been rattling around in his head since the club landed the first blow finally come. "I'm gonna kill you."

His voice is choked, barely audible, but his resolve is like solid iron.

"What…?" Negan Emory chuckles softly and kneels down slowly until his face is in Rick's line of sight.

With certainty as sharp as a knife's edge, Rick repeats himself: "I'm gonna kill you."

Somewhere nearby, bundled in the back of their wagon, being watched by the cold eyes of a dangerous stranger, their baby girl Judith Grimes begins to whimper from the chill in the air and the emptiness in her stomach. Lori, dazed, doesn't notice. But Rick does. The sound slices through him like a saw as he finally focuses on the face of the man who just murdered his brother and best friend in cold blood.

There is a sickening smile gracing the menacing visage before him. "Well, shoot. I gotta hear that again, friend. Just one more time."

Rick swallows bile and sits up straighter, the effort threatening to break him in two. But he has to make himself clear. There is nothing on this Earth Rick Grimes wants more in this moment than to see the man before him dead. Come Hell or high water. No matter how many red-sashed bodies he will have to step over to get there. Negan Emory is gonna die. If God damns Rick's soul for his vengeance, so be it.

In disbelief, Negan's amusement turns cold as his dark eyes latch onto the broken man's volcanic blues.

"Not today. Not tomorrow." Rick whispers, staring Negan square in the eyes. "But I'm gonna kill you."

"That so?" Negan sucks his teeth again, cruel fascination befalling his expression.

Rick just stares at him, wrestling his body to stillness. There is deafening silence that reverberates through every crevice of the atmosphere.

Judith, in the distance, starts up her whimpering again. Negan ignores her, even as Rick flinches and looks off into the fog as though he can see her. "Johnny!" Negan barks quietly.

Rick's gaze snaps back to his, where Negan is branding holes into his soul with his eyes.

"What did he have? A pistol?"

"He had himself a Colt. It's a beaut." The infamous gunslinger Johnny Ringo mutters in his slick, unaffected drawl from behind Rick, twirling the stolen Colt Python at his hip between his deadly-quick and nimble fingers. In his other hand, he holds a short ax loosely at his side. "And a hatchet."

"A hatchet?" Comes Negan's droll, impressed twang. He's surprisingly uninterested in the gun. The calculating leader turns from getting a look at the weapons in question to plant his focus on Rick again. A barbaric gleam in his eyes, he leans in, his voice low and steady. "Johnny's my right hand man, Rick. You ever have yourself one o'those? One of these fine people still breathing, mayhaps?"

He scoffs suddenly and shakes his head sadly.

"Oh, my, my, my," he tisks, "...it wasn't that smart-mouthed brother o'yours, was it?"

Rick swallows down an overwhelming urge to rip the man's throat out with his teeth, silently absorbing the blow of hearing his dead brother referred to so callously. His dead brother, lying cold and destroyed on a dirt road a mere thirteen miles from Hell on Earth. A brother he'd spent the last twenty-four hours fighting with, resenting, and contemplating separating from. It wasn't like this before they rode into Tucson. Ever since they arrived in that town, blood, death and trouble followed them no matter what they did.

But if he is honest with himself...blood, death and trouble have been following Rick Grimes his whole goddamned life.

And now Beth and Maggie's father is dead. On the night after of poor Beth's wedding, where her new husband had been gunned down. Now Shane is gone...Shane...Rick's only brother...Negan's voice rips into Rick's painful thoughts.

"Right hand man?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Bring me the ax."

What follows plays out like the quicksand in Rick's throat, slow and suffocating. He falls to the bottom of a well of shock as Negan takes his boy and forces him on his stomach in the dirt. Lori wails and faints dead away as Negan then drags Rick to kneel next to his son, plants the hatchet in his shaking hand and counts down. What proceeds is nothing short of Hellish torment as Negan orders the broken former sheriff to rid his only son of his right hand unless he wants every remaining member of his family to die on Quandary Road.

And then: "Just do it, Papa." Carl utters with so much strength that it sends his father into a tornado of anguish. Because he knows his son is right.

As the last of Rick's sanity snaps, he raises the ax.

And then Negan and his men laugh. They laugh so hard they howl. Tears sprout from their eyes. They stamp their feet and roar with wild, cruel laughter. Rick looks around at them, shocked to the point of insanity, horrified, confused, murderously angry.

He still holds the ax in the air above his son's slender arm.

"Aw I'm not gonna make ya stump your boy, Rick!" Negan sings, laughing boisterously. "Not on such a fiiiine mornin' as this!"

He kneels again, facing Rick with a cold, dead stare.

"But I will put a bullet through his eye if you ever set foot within a hundred miles o'this town again. Along with all those pitiful folks behind you." He gestures half-heartedly to Rick's family. "What's left of 'em, anyhow."

Rick is riddled with shock. Carl remains silent underneath him.

"I'll burn everything you ever loved to the ground. We understand each other, Rick?"

Beside himself, Rick nods stiffly. His damp curls hang in his eyes as his trembling hand lowers the ax slowly, its blade sinking into the ground near his bent knee. Negan stares at Rick for so long that the silence and the time trample the entire, traumatized party's threadbare wits like a bull stampede. Then he smiles, satisfied.

"Well…bye." He says, standing abruptly and whistling for his men to saddle up and move out.

Johnny Ringo is the last to mount his horse. He gives Rick one last cold smirk as he saunters forward on his wiry legs towards where the broken man is still kneeling next to his silent son. He stops short and twirls Rick's pistol between his deft hands. "Tell that Lunger it's a shame he wern't around to see all this. Guess he's just as coward as your brainless baby brother, huh?" He spits at the ground and holsters Rick's pistol. "I'll think o'this pretty pistol o'yours as a good faith payment o'sorts, all right? So we really understand each other...you set foot in this town again, I'll use your gun to end your life. And your wife's. And your boy's."

Ringo tips his hat politely at the women, backing away to mount his horse next to a patiently waiting Negan. "Y'all have a nice mornin'..."

In a haze of dust, galloping horses, cat calls and red sashes, the gang is gone. There is only a thick, heavy, cold silence left in their wake. Finally, the call of baby Judith rips life into the traumatized group again, as she begins to cry in earnest now.

Beth jumps to her feet, her wedding dress so dirty by now that it's almost unrecognizable, and runs toward their broken down wagon to see to the baby girl. Running away from her grief, her shock, and the sight of her father's destroyed body.

Rick sniffs loudly, tears breaking through to blur his vision as he finally drags himself to his feet.

He pulls his boy up into a hard hug, clinging to him as if to let him go would be to witness him disappear on the wind like the dust from the trampling hooves of the Savior's horses.

"I'm all right, Papa." Carl mutters into his father's sweaty shirt. Rick nods, holding back sobs with all his strength, and lets his boy go. Then he finds his wife and steps toward her, opening his arms to embrace her with the same overwhelming relief.

But Lori doesn't greet her husband with relief.

She slaps his face before he can get near her.

Rick blinks and steps back, shocked, before he realizes what she's doing. She slaps him again, and then her fists begin to assault his chest as she shrieks with pain and anger. "YOU ALMOST TOOK MY BOY'S HAND - AFTER ALL THIS?! WHO ARE YOU TO DECIDE, YOU SELF-RIGHTEOUS BASTARD, BASTARD, BASTARD! THOSE SAVIORS SHOULDA KILLED YOU! THEY SHOULDA KILLED ME! WE BOTH SHOULDA DIED, NOT SHAAAANE! AND NOW YOU ALMOST MAIM MY BOY?! GODDAMN YOU RICK GRIMES, YOU BASTARD, GODDAMN YOU…!"

Rick endures her avalanche of residual anger, holding her thrashing wrists in his strong hands to thwart her physical assault as best he can. Finally she collapses to her knees, crying into the dirt at his feet. Rick can only stand there as Lori trembles and cries. He is too grief-stricken, furious, and maimed on the inside himself to do anything but stand there.

Finally, he realizes that Lori has lost all of her energy and is trembling so forcefully now less out of grief and more out of withdrawal. She hasn't had any laudanum since during the wedding and the stress of all this brutality has exhausted her. Once she's had it, she won't move or speak for a while. Rick finds himself filled with relief, rather than worry.

Carl kneels at his mother's side and holds her in his arms, allowing her to use him to stand with silent resignation. Maggie gets shakily to her feet, looking as pale and sick as Death. Rick accepts a tight hug from her frail body, too ashamed of himself to look her in the eyes.

Maggie seems to understand that words will not suffice in this moment. Silently, she turns to help Carl take Lori to the carriage, where the laudanum awaits in Herschel's...Hershel's bag. He had been forcing her to ration her doses, because they would be on a long journey and arranging for refills along the way would be difficult. She'd been quietly seething with need and anger for almost the entire ride before…

Rick's gaze remains fixed on the ground now. Where his friend, Herschel...and his little brother, Shane, now lay dead.

Worse than dead. Destroyed.

With bitterly real, unyielding finality. And just like that, the anger boils inside him again as the sun rises above him, glaring down over his shoulder and through his soul. He's gonna kill 'em all. Every single stinkin' red-sashed one o'them. He doesn't know how at this moment, but he will find a way.

And suddenly he hears the sound of a longrider approaching. He looks up at the horizon and sees a silhouette so familiar that he almost chokes with relief.

It's Doc Holliday. And Michonne. They've come after all.

He had been hoping against hope that they'd stay clear of this place until Negan and his men left. He couldn't bear to see any harm come to Doc, or...

Michonne.

She's riding behind Doc on her black stallion, her arms wrapped around his slender waist.

He looks somehow even paler and worse off than Maggie. The lung disease he's suffering from, that damned consumption, is gonna kill the man one day. Soon, Rick knows. He ain't a doctor, but he knows that sure enough from watching it kill his sister and Lori's father. He knows this is what Herschel had to say about it, from the moment he met Doc Holliday.

Doc's skin is deathly white with a yellow tinge to it, just under the surface. The rims of his sharp, dangerously intelligent eyes are red as the sashes Rick intends to rip from the cold, dead bodies of every Savior on Earth.

But Michonne looks as radiant and alluring as ever, staring at Rick with her large, empathetic brown eyes. Her dark skin is in sharp contrast to Doc's ethereal complexion, her long dark twists of hair pulled up to the top of her head. Her dress is ripped in places, marred by dust and some signs of the last gun fight they found themselves in together.

The night Rick realized that he was in love with her. That he would die for her, if the situation ever came to it. That even though she belonged to his friend Doc Holliday, she would always have Rick's heart. He might never get to tell her that truth. He might wait for her forever. But there was nothing he could do to change it.

Even now, with his family murdered and torn apart, with nothing to show for himself but failure and tragedy, he cannot - and will not - change his heart.

The horse stops just beyond where Herschel and Shane still lay, now a sight so ugly it turns Rick's stomach.

Rick takes off his jacket, tearing his beseeching gaze from the vision of Michonne, and lays it gently across Herschel's destroyed head. He can't yet bring himself to face what's left of his brother.

He doesn't have to. Doc gingerly picks himself up off the horse, perspiration dotting his deathly pallor, and drapes his own jacket over the corpse of Rick's brother.

Then the two men stand there, side-by-side, with Michonne steadying the horse behind them. Rick feels her, however. He senses her every move. He always has.

"Forgive me, Rick. I should've been here." Doc utters in his unhurried, gentleman's drawl. He smirks tiredly, the curled tips of his mustache lifting as he eyes the scene before him sadly. "It seems...this Lunger's determination to destroy himself has finally caught up with him. Irrevocably. Isn't that what our friend the good doctor has told us, mon amour?"

Now Michonne joins them at Doc's side, her eyes only for Rick as she answers her lover's question. "He hasn't got long..." she mutters, the meaning blistering in her eyes. So Rick's hunch and Herschel's visual diagnosis was right. The man is at Death's door.

"I'm sorry as hell to hear that, Doc." Rick swallows, his throat as dry as the desert at high noon.

Doc squeezes Michonne's hand and turns to look at Rick in all seriousness. They don't have much time. And Doc won't have it any other way.

"Save your 'sorry's, Rick. If it's vengeance you seek...I have just enough life left in this...waste of a vessel to help you see it done." Rick stares into his friend's eyes. He knows Doc is telling the truth. He'll ride at Rick's side, helping him unleash a scarlet tide of blood and justice until his dying breath. Doc's eyes glint with keen, almost gleeful determination. "Just say when."

The broken former sheriff looks now to the woman he loves. Michonne gazes back at him steadily, not flinching away from what's on his mind. Her sword hangs across her back, where she always keeps it, and he knows she'll use it for him. To avenge him. He is comforted by this. He can't know yet how much she feels for him, but he knows that she is on his side. He isn't alone.

"When." Rick growls.

Doc nods. "Vengeance it is, then."

Rick Grimes, Doc Holliday, and Michonne Despereaux stand in the early light of morning on Quandry Road, all in agreement.

Thus begins the story of the most devastating massacre of outlaws the Old West ever told.


*The Quandary Road Murders, June 5, 1881

That day on Quandary Road is widely reported to be the incendiary incident in the year-long, bloody vendetta ride known as The Scarlet Tide - in which Rick Grimes, Doc Holliday, and a gang of militia men hunted and slaughtered seventy men across three counties. On this fateful day, just before dawn, the outlaw gang known as the Saviors (recognized by the red sashes they wore) cajoled and trapped Rick's family as they were fleeing the homestead town of Tucson, murdering two. Among the casualties were Rick's younger brother Shane Grimes and the town's former doctor, Hershel Green. The deaths were brutal, and atypical for the time, when the most common way to settle disputes was a gunfight. Each victim was bludgeoned to death in front of some thirty witnesses, including Rick Grimes, his son, his wife, and Herschel's young daughters. Also said to be the site where one of the most infamous alliances (and love triangles) in Old West history began: That of Doc Holliday, Rick Grimes, and Michonne Despereaux.