Hello, everyone! My intention was to close everything out with one mega-chapter, but due to the fact that I will be off the grid for a couple of weeks, and I promised you a more immediate update, I decided to go ahead and post this.
Jesse McCree awoke screaming, as if falling from a terrible height. He sprang up from the bartop, upending a knock-kneed wooden stool which clattered impossibly loudly, his head swimming now, a fiery lance of pain through his skull, broken images of light and thought and sound like shattered glass underfoot after a particularly heinous car crash. He had to remember. It was the most important thing in the world. He tried grasping at his thoughts, tried to clench them tight in his fist, but they vanished like smoke through his fingers. He probed the recesses of his mind, and found nothing, as if the door to that particular room in the warehouse of his memory hadn't just been painted over—it had never been built. He felt his mind drift away without him, like an untethered sailboat, and suddenly he'd forgotten all about everything he'd meant to remember. Just like that, the thoughts were gone.
He found himself on the floor, bleeding.
His head felt like a cheap piñata, bleeding profusely from a golf ball-sized knot his sticky fingers found on the top-right center of his noggin.
"You okay down there, hun?" called a voice from behind the bar, just a glint of matronly concern buried deep in there somewhere, perhaps wherever great lizards were compressed down into oil. "I know the boys worked you pretty good, but I didn't think it was that bad," she said. The voice belonged to Miss Rita, who worked the High Side most nights. She had just recently crossed over to the wrong side of forty, but she still looked great, as all the boys would swear to in court, provided the cops could make any of the dozens of pending charges against them stick long enough to see them inside a court room. Her hair was streaked with garish red highlights that fought with her dirty blond hair, and she had never been above openly teasing him like a cat may toy with a cornered, helpless mouse, much to his chagrin.
"That bad, woman? They worked me over with a goddamned bat," he said, or attempted to say, the fiery pain in his jaw stopping him immediately, a thousand red-hot needle points boring into his bottom left mandible.
"Ooh," she winced. "Better put some ice on that, hun. They really cleaned your clock, didn't they?"
"And you just let me sleep it off on the countertop," he finally managed, his words an Eastwood half-sneer, half-snarl from the corner of his mouth, a mouth whose architecture, he had come to find, had been reneovated, no less than two teeth missing in action. "Damned decent of ya'," he said, picking himself up off the floor, the head wound making him uneasy, like a newborn foal finding its legs. He struggled over to the bar—but, "scene of the crime," was the more apt description.
As he recalled, he'd been attempting to tie one on earlier, tonight's agenda not sitting right with him. It was a bad play, he knew. He wanted blood just like the rest of the boys, but a public shootout like what Walton had planned could only end in innocent bloodshed. He'd said his piece, but ol' Walt had insisted the plan was perfect, and there'd be no casualties. His friend had been so cocksure, he'd damn near believed him. But as the hour grew nearer, Jesse's conscience had grown three sizes, and he'd decided the only cure for that was to be found in the bottom of a glass.
He was polishing off his fourth beer—he still couldn't make himself acquire the taste for bourbon, a fact that Rita, and her low-cut tanktop, used against him at every available opportunity—when Slim and a Domino brother strolled in through the shuttered doors. They'd taken up the seats opposite him, so that the net effect was they had him at both sides. He'd noted the fact that Slim had strolled in holding a baseball bat all casual-like at his side, but it hadn't seemed of particular import at the time.
"Howdy," he'd drawled, not looking up from his beer. The brother was Chessani, he realized, the bigger, meaner sonofabitch of the pair, more muscle behind all that fat than met the eye. Slim, a rangey, greasy thing like himself, was the only one feeling talkative, it seemed.
"You weren't at the briefing," he said. Jesse liked that word, briefing, thought it sounded all official-like. "Makes some of the boys wonder if you're getting cold feet."
"Sounds me of the boys, huh?" He smiled. They couldn't just say Walton. "Well, you tell some of the boys this plan is going to get someone killed."
"That's the idea," Slim said, looking at him like he was an idiot. Maybe he was.
"People. Innocent people for Christ's sake," Jesse said. His stomach began to twist, and not because of the alcohol. "God damnit," he swore, "I can't let this happen."
"You don't have a choice in this, brother," Slim declared. Jesse attempted to rise from his barstool, but his shoulder was suddenly seized by an iron vice that clamped down roughly onto his left shoulder, shoving him into his seat. Chessani. "Have a seat," Slim offered smartly.
Jesse suddenly became aware of the bat now, resting between them like a coiled rattler. He became cognizant of his own rattler-fingers coiling around his beer bottle, wondering how good the man's face would look redecorated with it.
"What's with the bat?" He asked finally.
"Ask him," Slim nodded.
Jesse had just begun to tilt his head when the Domino brother caught him in the jaw. Everything seared painfully white, and the last thing he'd seen—maybe he'd imagined it—was the bat coming down on his skull.
The two boys weren't subtle. But they'd knocked his ass in the dirt.
He propped himself up against the bar to keep himself vertical. When the room finally stopped running away from him, he located the clock on the wall, which read 0245. He swore vilely. There's still time. His hand went instinctively for his six-shooter, but he found the smokewagon had been skinned already, while he was indisposed. What was he going to do, anyway? Shoot his brothers? It won't come to that.
"You feeling alright, hun?" Rita asked. "Need to lie down? Maybe in the back somewhere … ?"
"The sawn-off," he snarled again, using his forearm to wipe away the red spittle from his cheek. "'Neath the counter."
"Oh, Jesse," she declared, "Always business and no pleasure." She made a show of looking pouty—and for a second there, the wrinkles that formed briefly offered up a glimpse at her near future—but complied, bending down in her low-cut top to produce a sawn-off double barrel shotgun. He broke the action, catching the two ejected shells mid-air with quiet dexterity. Satisfied, he shoved them back down the throat, and sealed the action with both hands, ignoring the strong urge to lock it in with a flick of his wrist.
"Shells?" He grimaced.
"That's it, hun. Hadn't gotten around to buying any more lately. Didn't suppose I saw the need to, all you tough bikers drinking here, guns and all."
"Suppose not," he agreed. He looked around the unnervingly empty bar, not seeing what he needed. "Hat," he growled, knowing he was pushing his luck now. The High Side had a strict no-hats policy ("show some damned class," Miss Rita had been heard to say on occasion, unironically), and all headwear was left at the door, with the exception of religious wear, she'd remind you with a wink. The last person that had attempted to abuse that particular loophole ended up taking the window outside.
Come to think of it, she never had gotten around to fixing the second story window.
"They'd tried to take it off the rack," she said, referring to Slim and Chessani. His hat, a beaten-up old thing too big for his head, materialized in her hands. "I wouldn't let them," she added, almost as an afterthought.
"Thank you kindly," he said, and was out the doors.
"I hate to see you leave, but I love watching you go," she called back at him. He shivered involuntarily.
Out of respect, and maybe a little bit of fear, he waited until he was well outside the bar before he clapped it on his head.
He was outside now, ambling down the dirt streets to the Cave-Inn Motel. His steps were lurching and ungraceful, his head still reeling from the attack, everything swirly and somehow far away. The pale, gibbous moon revealed the streets before him, which were fortunately empty at this hour. He could only imagine the sight he made as he shuffled through the streets, a dark silhouette shambling through the night like the risen dead.
He heard his name as if it were carried in on the wind, and he felt a sudden cold grip-seize him by the arm.
He felt a stab of fear in his chest like an icicle through his heart, as he turned to face it, what looked like a woman. She was there, and then she simply wasn't, a ghostly afterimage of impossibly blue light. Jesse, she had called, he was sure of it. But she was gone now. The preternatural cold that had taken him had vanished. He was sure he had seen her there, which frightened him, made him stop dead in his tracks. Perhaps his head wound had done more damage than he had realized.
Those thoughts profited little, and he started moving again.
Walton and the gang would be entering the motel from an old smuggler's tunnel that let out in the basement. It was far too late to catch up to them from where they had started, and he had no intention of simply waltzing in the front door, for fear of alerting the would-be assassins and starting the firefight he was trying to avoid. He slunk around the building, clinging to the shadows, observing most of the lights were out this time of night, save a few scattered rooms.
He found what he was looking for on the back side of the building—a small window on the ground floor that let out into the basement. He glanced around again to be sure no one had seen him, and no alarms and searchlights went off to prove otherwise. The window shattered under the butt of his shotgun, and he crawled in, careful not to slice himself on any of the jagged pieces of glass that were lying in wait for him. He allowed himself to fall in, his heavy boots echoing throughout the oppressively dark room, which was only lit sparsely by whatever moonlight cast through the shattered window. He moved quicker than his night-blind eyes allowed as he began to explore the basement for the secret entrance.
It looked like this section of the basement had become a dumping grounds for whatever junk the hotel had accumulated over the years. Everywhere old, broken-down appliances, rotten packaging crates stuffed with yellowed, crumpled newspapers, rusted bicycles and warped infant-cribs, trash bags of old clothing, soiled burlap sacks of mysterious provenance. Every step he took seemed to trigger some buried land mine of acrid dust that stung his nostrils and made his eyes water.
The junk was so plentiful, he doubted he could see from one end of the room to the other. The place was a fire hazard. He groped for the chain of a lightbulb he saw swaying in the moonlight, and gave it a hopeful tug. Even though he expected nothing, he still found himself somehow disappointed when no light came. He spotted the elevator shaft, which was completely open save for an iron latticework gate that retracted when the elevator platform reached its destination. He felt for a raised panel in the dark, finding a call button for the elevator. He wondered if it even came this far down anymore. He left it, wandering the room before his eyes fully adjusted, nearly stumbling and losing his gun in the dark. He decided it best to spare a few more seconds to adjust.
He felt his senses sharpen to a razor's edge in the darkness as he continued to walk. There, along the back wall, he felt a slight breeze wafting in from behind a dirty woolen blanket that covered the wall. He peeled it back and discovered another iron latticework gate, this one a door leading into the old smuggler's tunnel. The darkness was thick, and his vision died abruptly no more than three feet down the tunnel. The bars of the door were wide enough to shove his arm through, which was swallowed so suddenly by the darkness, it nearly made him recoil out of animal reflex. The hinges seemed good, and what he needed now was a means to bar the door. He searched near the door and found it immediately, a solid length of chain and a heavy Master Lock to complete it. He wrapped it through the bars like a woman would wreath herself in a feather boa, the rattling of chains ungodly loud in the darkness, him wondering how far it carried down the tunnel. He managed to secure the chain and clamped the lock down with a satisfying click, just out of reach from behind the gate, in case one of them managed to produce the key. He would confront them down here at the gates of ruin, steer them off the path they had begun to tred.
He sat down opposite the door, resting the shotgun lazily across his lap. He brought his zippo to life, and produced a pouch of tobacco from inside his coat. He began to roll a cigarette absentmindedly, then shuttered his lighter with another satisfying clink. He sat there in the darkness for some time, bathed in only the light of the glowing coal at end of his cigarette.
He felt a presence near him, exactly where, he couldn't say. He pricked up his ears, at first thinking the hotel detective was doing his rounds outside, and had discovered the shattered window. He wished that had been the case. Instead, he heard his name again. It came from no particular direction, sounding far-off and dreamlike. This time, there was a new word, a warning.
"Stop!"
His eyes searched the dark of the basement again for the wraith woman, and found nothing. He could almost see her in his mind's eye, something about her uncannily familiar. His head hurt. He was imagining things again. He focused himself on waiting for the party's arrival, trying to prepare some sort of speech and failing, hoping to all hell it wouldn't come down to his shotgun demanding the last word.
As it turned out, he didn't have to wait long.
He watched the light creep along through the iron slats of the gate, an orange ember crawling up through the tunnel. He met them when they all piled up at the gate, the tunnel not wide enough to seat more than four abreast, Walton leading the party of course, sporting a lantern in his hand and a .38 at his hip.
He seemed happy to see him.
"Well, if that ain't a ten-gallon hat on a five-gallon head!" Walton declared as the group sauntered in from out of the darkness of the old smuggler's tunnel and stacked up against the iron bars. Too many of them to count, all of them armed, it went without saying. He spotted Slim and Chessani as they moved up the ranks. If they seemed perturbed about the earlier bar incident, it didn't read on their faces. He took a slow drag on his cigarette, as if inhaling his words from it.
"Walton." He said. "Good to see you."
"Jesse," he beamed, brushing the straw rat's nest of dirty blond hair he never cut out of his face, testing the heavy chain that secured the door. "Fancy runnin' into you here! I don't suppose you've changed your mind?"
"No such luck," he admitted. "In fact, I'm here to put a stop to this whole sordid affair."
Walton smiled now, but there was no warmth behind it.
"Don't be like that, Jesse," he said. "Don't tell me you're sore over that bar fight. I put 'em up to it, in truth. I needed to know where you stood." Slim looked guiltily at Chessani, who seemed oblivious to the man's words, incapable of guilt.
"I'm standing right here, Walton. I can't—won't, he corrected himself—let you do this. You know I don't give a good goddamn about these cartel boys, but this is too public. People are gonna get hurt, Walt. Call this off. We'll find another play. This ain't it."
Walton and the rest of the boys listened to his speech. From the reactions in the crowd, he thought he had gotten through to a few of them, but Walton was as unreadable as he always was.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Jesse," is what he said, and Jesse knew he meant it. "But this has to be done. Here and now. And if you don't agree with it, you unlock this gate and get the hell out of here."
"You know I can't do that, Walt," he said. "Even if I had the key, I wouldn't give it you. Hell, even if you found a way through that chain, you'd still have to go through me if'n you wanted passage." He tapped on the sawn-off strewn across his lap. Walton sniggered.
"Aw, hell, Jesse. When'd you go and get so dramatic?"
"Turn around," he said. "Please."
Walton's eyes became hard and he chewed on his lip.
"Brother," he began, "we have to do this. They killed our boys. You saw what they did to the bodies. I will not let that stand," he barked.
"I know," Jesse said. "I want those cartel assassins as bad as you. But not like this. People are going to get hurt. Just listen to me."
"Listen to this," Slim said, having worked his way up to the front of the procession, sticking his arm through the bars. The whole room flashed and flashed as if from a lightning storm, and the monstrous roars of a .45 filled the room.
Jesse's body exploded into fire and pain, and he collapsed to the ground. He heard Walton's voice, piercing the din.
"What the hell did you do that for?!" He screamed. He didn't bother to wait for an answer, leveling his pistol on the man.
"It had to be done," Slim spat, his own pistol rising up to meet him. "And if you don't realize that, you don't have the right to be leading the gang!"
Jesse's breathing came hard, ragged. He managed to pick up the sawn-off from the floor, and used it like a crutch to right himself. Chessani's piece met him as he did.
It was like a switch had been flipped.
The entire party turned in on itself, guns everywhere, every which way. Jesse counted no less than five distinct factions that had formed in the chaos. He laughed, blood staining his lips.
"No honor among thieves, huh?" he said, doing his best to hold the sawn-off as steadily as he could, the sheer weight of it growing heavier with every second.
"Drop 'em," Walton growled. There was no way they hadn't heard the gunshot upstairs. Their time was limited, and, like the grains of sand in some board game hourglass, would soon run out. No doubt they were scurrying to figure out just what the hell was going on in the basement. They had minutes now, if that.
"It's over, Walt," he said, the words like passing a stone. "They're comin'. You gotta get out of here." He pressed his hand to his stomach, and when it returned, it was the color of death.
"No, Jesse," he called out, not taking his eyes off Slim. "I'm not leavin' you here to bleed out."
"You ain't got much of a choice, partner," he replied. The party was becoming uneasy now, heads on swivels, eyes darting back and forth between each other, waiting for someone, anyone to make the next move. Maybe this was the Mexican's play all along, he thought. Make the Deadlock Gang kill itself.
"ENOUGH!" Walton roared, the unspoken power of authority in his voice. "Everyone clear the hell out of here, 'cept Slim and Chessani," he added. "Get to steppin' before the law gets to us first."
Walton had always been one to inspire loyalty. Hell, Jesse had been drawn to him for that very reason. The guns dropped, save for the four of them. Someone in the back must have evidently brought their own lantern, as the mob trailed out the way they had came.
Slim was the first to break the silence, which shattered like an expensive porcelain vase.
"I didn't have to come down to this," he said—but to Walton, Jesse, or himself, he couldn't say.
"You're right," Walton agreed. "It didn't." He made a show of holstering his .38, never breaking eye contact with the man. Chessani and Slim looked back and forth incredulously, sure it was some kind of trick. Jesse limped over closer to the wrought-iron gate, bracing himself against a pile of boxes. You couldn't have paid him all the money in the world to drop his gun.
"Let me put him down, boss," the wormy man said to Walton, trying to ingratiate himself now. His hands were shaking. "He's clearly working with the Mexicans. He's gonna get us all killed."
"No," Walton said, that familiar gleam in his eye now. "You got yourself killed."
The blade was a silver flash in Walton's hands, a white hot flame that danced through the air. It disappeared several times into Slim's stomach. Chessani whirled in place, shifting his sights off Jesse, but it was too late. The blade sang it deadly song across the man's throat. Arterial spray spurted from the dying men like geysers from hidden wellsprings. Walton turned to him now, soaked in blood like some sort of demon.
"This was my fault," he said. Jesse made a non-committal grunt, not wanting to agree with him. "I should've listened to you," he muttered, an apology from him like extracting teeth.
"Go," Jesse said. "They'll be coming any minute now." He tried to push himself off the boxes on which he leaned, but he found his legs unresponsive and wholly alien to him, like someone had sewn another man's legs on when his head was turned. He hit the ground.
He became aware of Walton now, banging against the gate, hands clenched around the iron bars like a prisoner trying to escape a fire that had begun in his cell. His eyes were wild.
"Jesse, god damnit, hang on!" he said. "I'm gonna get you patched up!"
"No," he said, trying to pick himself off the floor, nearly slipping in his own blood. "You get yourself gone. I gotta make it up top," he said. Walton just looked at him incredulously. "I'm fine," he lied. "Gonna limp on out of here. Meet you at the bar."
"I can't just leave you here, Jesse," he said.
"You can and you will," he answered, breaking out into a coughing fit. He could feel the blood clogging up his throat now, and it seemed like his lungs were hemorrhaging air with every breath. "The boys need you."
"I'm sorry," Walt said, finally.
"Me, too," Jesse said, walking away, having the strong suspicion that was the last of his best friend he'd ever see.
He used the walls for support as he walked, leaving scarlet handprints and a contrail of blood as he made his way. Some part of him understood if he tripped and fell here, he wouldn't get back up. He realized absentmindedly he had dropped his weapon at some point, but it didn't matter. In fact, nothing seemed to really matter anymore. He found himself at the elevator, by accident or design, he couldn't say. A bloody thumbprint smeared the UP button.
He became distantly aware of the rattle-trap elevator as it made its descent. When the cage finally opened before him, he all but fell in. He punched the first button he saw—a star—and pressed his forehead against the cool metal. This time, when the gates opened before him, he did fall, hitting the ground abruptly and unceremoniously.
They surrounded him, dozens of dark figures against the harsh, grating light of the lobby. His body was crawling now, a trail of blood behind him like the passing of a particularly muculent slug. His vision was blurry and unfocused as the shrouded figures advanced on him. He was on his back now. The light was impossibly bright, and he could feel it buzzing down into his bones. The woman was there.
Unlike the others, she was clearly in focus. She was a lanky thing with spikes of black hair coiffed every which way. At first blush, she looked almost brittle, a frail thing to be protected and locked away from the evil that was the world at large. But she was strong, he knew, stronger than him, stronger than all this. She knelt down before him like some kind of angel descending from the skies to deliver him from sin. No one else seemed to notice her. Her name was Lena Oxton, and she was his friend.
"Lena," he said, and the world seemed to vanish around him, as though nothing else existed but this moment. "I did it."
"Oh, Jesse," she said, and he saw there were tears in her giant eyes, somehow green, somehow brown, somehow bigger than the world itself. "What have you done?"
"What I had to," he confessed. "I fixed everything."
"But at what cost?" she demanded of him, cradling his head in her lap.
"The one I'm willing to pay," he admitted quietly.
"Yes," she answered, her smile an awful, pained thing. "But I'm not."
"Please," he begged. "I fixed it. I fixed everything. Don't take this away from me."
"I'm sorry, Jesse," she said. The light grew brighter, so bright it practically burned him and he shrank away from it, ashamed. He grabbed at her hand, but she pulled away from him.
"No, no, no," he pleaded with her now, desperate. "don't do this to me, Lena, I fixed it, I fixed it all, please," he cried.
"I'm so sorry, Jesse," was all she could say.
Well, you can't always get what you want! I have a short denouement to wrap everything up, but consider this my last update for probably two weeks, until I find Internet access again. Thank you so much for reading and inflating my already considerable ego!
