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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Judgement Day
Monday, September 7, 1885
6:53 AM
Clara emerged from the teacherage into the cool sunrise. Minding her telescope case and ensuring her best dress didn't get caught by the closing door, she sighed at the horses facing the dawn. One shouldered her belongings while the other waited with an empty saddle.
Her eyes drifted to the schoolhouse and fell with shame. They would have Emma next week. Clara's intuition suggested that the blacksmith's daughter had no knowledge of her father's ploy, but it also said that Emmett was her true love. That he was the man sent to complete her. Clara didn't know what to believe anymore, save that she didn't want to stay another moment in Hill Valley.
But before Clara took another step, her forlorn gaze found her brooch in the shade of the windowsill. The memory of pinning the blooming stem to Emmett's vest drifted through her threadbare resolve; Clara emotionally ran herself so deep into the ground overnight that she became a comatose shell, afraid of shattering before she could thicken her skin.
Clara put down her telescope, opened the clasp, and let the lupine fall back to the windowsill.
Head held high, Clara's gloved hand found the top button at her collar. The lump in her throat bobbed. Careful not to stick herself with the sharp point, Clara fastened the brooch at the base of her neck.
Her heartache welled up behind it, nearly choking her.
Clara lowered her hands and picked up her telescope.
She did not look at the lupine again.
She did not look at the schoolhouse again.
She got on her horse, took a deep breath, and headed for the train station.
Emma winced into the waking world at the odd points of pressure crying out from her body. Sleeping on the ground wasn't kind to her, let alone being slept on by another person. Marty was half-laying on her, face leaking drool on her shoulder, with his arm and leg thrown over her at weird angles.
She wriggled her upper body from under his dead weight and pushed herself onto her elbows. A stream of smoke rose from the dying campfire in a light gray sky.
Beyond it, her father's empty bedroll.
Emma sank back on her elbows and pursed her lips.
"Son of a bitch."
"And in the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called 'automobiles'."
Levi cackled. Jeb hooted.
Between them, Zeke narrowed his eyes.
Emmett Brown was not a man he'd come to associate with dull exuberance and a flat tone. The blacksmith was a card, to be sure, but Zeke never knew him to tell stories. Not like this. He threatened to surpass Crazy Ben's reputation right now, concocting outlandish tales about refrigerators and telephones. Zeke would blame the whiskey, but he hadn't seen Emmett put that liquor to his lips since he came in an hour ago.
He waved Chester over, pointing at Doc with his cigar.
"How much has he had?"
"None," Chester said to his surprise. "That's the first one, and he hasn't touched it yet."
As Levi and Chester had another laugh at Emmett's expense, Zeke tapped the edge of his hand, debating how much longer he should let this go on. Turned out he didn't have to wonder much longer; Eastwood and Emma rushed right in on the tail end of his thought, doors banging off the walls.
"The circus is back!" Levi announced.
Emma laid a level glare on her bad influence, but his exaggerated haughtiness wheedled a hint of a smile out of her as Marty beelined for her father.
"Doc!" He stared at the shot in Doc's hand. "What are you doing?"
Emmett shook his head, commiserating with Marty as if he'd been there with him all through the night.
"I've lost her, Marty. It's over."
Emma's shoulders fell. Despite being beyond frustrated by what he'd just put her through – thinking he'd eloped with Clara when they found the teacherage deserted, thinking he was dead they didn't see him in the shop – Emma's heart took half a moment to mourn with her father's.
Marty dutifully pressed on. They didn't have time for this.
"That's why you have to come back with us."
"Where?"
"Back to the future!"
In the dead silence that followed, Zeke whispered to Emma, "What have you been slippin' in their stew?"
Doc slammed his shot glass down on the bar.
"Gentlemen," he said, "excuse me, but we have to catch a train."
Zeke furrowed his brow at Emma and received an apologetic smile in return. Mayor Thomas would never live down not making her the new schoolteacher now. She graciously agreed to play second fiddle after all that hullabaloo, but with her fiancé come to whisk her away, Zeke didn't blame her for wanting to move on.
He raised his glass with Levi, Jeb, and a hearty "Amen!"
"Amen," Doc concurred, throwing back hi—
"Emmett, no!"
Marty's eyes grew as Doc's face buffered, watching the whiskey hollow out his gaze and apply gravity. Emma screamed as her father crashed through the edge of the table. She hid from the glass projectiles launched from the upended table behind Marty before they both dove forward to help him.
"Doc!"
Marty threw the tabletop aside, and Emma kicked broken glass out of the way to kneel next to them. Marty vigorously shook Doc's chin as Emma's paranoia checked for a pulse. Chester leaned over Marty's shoulder to better understand what they were dealing with.
"How many did he have?"
"Just the one," Chester said.
"Just the one?"
"Wild West whiskey is not compatible with my dad." Emma removed Doc's hat, fanning his face with it. "I can't believe you let him have it," she griped at Chester. "You know he can't hold his liquor!"
"I tried to talk him out of it!" Chester defended, passing a cup of coffee from Joey to Eastwood. "Thought maybe the Fourth was a fluke when he told me to leave the bottle, but what's the hurry? You can throw him over the horse and walk him to the station in time to catch the train. He'll sleep it off."
"We don't have time for that," Marty said. "He needs to wake up. Now."
Chester bit back a sigh and shook his head.
"You wanna sober him up in a hurry, son, you're gonna have to use something a lot stronger than coffee."
Emma's fanning of Doc's face slowed when Marty's "What do you suggest?" ignited a wily grin on Chester's face. The bartender called out for his assistant and suggested with great enthusiasm, "Let's make some Wake Up Juice."
Emma fell back on her haunches and glanced over her shoulder at the clock. While missing the train would be a setback, it routinely came through Hill Valley every three days. All the back and forth to conceal and set up the DeLorean again would be a pain, but they hadn't crossed the windmill.
Still, Emma had plunged into that ravine a hundred times over.
We are not missing this damn train.
"You better hurry it up, Chester."
"Don't you fret, Miss Brown," he chided, stirring up the harsh, glumpy slop in a beer glass. "In about ten minutes, he'll be as sober as a priest on Sunday."
The locomotive chuffed into Hill Valley station. Its bell clanged, calling out to new passengers, but Clara already stood in wait, enveloped by the smoke and steam as the platform rumbled beneath her shoes. The screech of the brakes grated through her listlessness.
September 7, 1885
HILL VALLEY to SAN FRANCISCO
Central Pacific No. 131
Though desperate to get as far away from Hill Valley as possible, she appreciated that the first train out of town was not headed east. Some might be superstitious about getting on the same train after being delivered into a spot of misfortune; would going further west on this line exacerbate her afflictions? But the thought of giving up – of returning to New Jersey – would not be entertained.
Clara offered a weak smile to the conductor and boarded.
Whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow.
Emma shook her head as Marty and Chester chased her father outside.
"Did he hit the horse trough this time?"
Jeb leaned back in his chair to get a better look out the window.
"Looks like he did!" the mustached salooner cheered, getting another cackle out of Levi.
Reassuring as that was, Emma's grimace deepened as they dragged her father's limp body back inside. He slapped down into a chair like a sack of wet rice. She reached for the bar mop to towel her father off while Marty wrung the water out of the bandana into Doc's face.
"He's not going to wake up yet," Emma told him.
"We have to try, Em."
"I'm telling you," – she swatted the bandana out of Marty's hand and dabbed her father's face dry – "it's no use. You have to give it time to work."
"Yeah?" Marty snapped. "What's time given me lately, huh?"
"A very tolerant girlfriend."
Marty held his tongue and shook Doc by the shirt again.
"Come on, Doc…"
Since Martin's death, Seamus wouldn't set foot inside a saloon after nightfall. More knives came out at night, more seedy-underbelly types. Scruffs, fistfights, and ruffians like Tannen still lingered during daylight hours, but Seamus knew how to keep his head down long enough for a pint.
Today was different.
An odd tug of fate beckoned him into town, similar to what he experienced when Clint Eastwood fell through his fence. Something bounded him to this young man; he reminded Seamus so much of his brother that he thought Eastwood was a ghost. A message. He couldn't quite put his finger on it.
"But somethin' inside me told me I should be here," he said to Chester. "As if my future had something to do with it."
Marty froze. His eyes slowly locked into Emma's over Doc's limp form; the proverbial rug ripped out from underneath them. Sure enough, another glance at the clock reinforced a vital, surfacing memory.
Eight o'clock Monday, runt.
In front of the Palace Saloon.
A rush of fresh perspiration chilled Marty's skin.
"Are you in there, Eastwood?"
Buford Tannen came looking for trouble.
Marty left Doc's side and found his foe waiting in the window – an imposing, black figure to personally escort him to the afterlife. At least a dozen people lined the street behind him, waiting to witness the conclusion of the dispute that interrupted their merriment the night before last.
"It's not eight o'clock yet!"
"It is by my watch!" Tannen decided. "Let's settle this once and for all, runt!"
Marty's stomach lurched. He patted down his pocket, pulled out the tombstone photograph – "Or ain't you got the gumption?" – and paled as the name "Clint Eastwood" materialized before his eyes.
Dead was dead; the opacity of the name on the tombstone didn't matter. It wasn't a scale.
If he had the gumption, he was a dead man.
He forfeited.
Buford reflexively bristled at the suggestion, announcing after a brief aside with Stubble that forfeiting wasn't an option. His gun hand itched too much; this "gutless, yellow turd" begged to be shot from the moment Buford laid eyes on him. Only a coward balked over a matter of minutes when it came time to pay the pied piper.
"And I'm givin' you to the count of ten to come out here and prove I'm wrong!"
Sweat shined on Marty's face. The room began to blur.
"One!"
It all hit hard and fast then – seventeen, whole life ahead of him, the people he loved, the things he'd never do. Mortality loomed and pressed down on Marty's airway until he dove for the one person who had saved his ass more than he would probably ever know.
"Come on, Doc," he whined, roughly jiggling the scientist's jowls. Please. "Sober up, buddy. Let's go."
"Two!"
If Tannen came in the saloon, he'd kill all three of them.
"You better get out there, son," Levi said, deepening Emma's brow. "I've got twenty dollars gold bet on you, so don't let me down."
"Three!"
"I got thirty dollars gold bet again' ye," Zeke countered, "so don't let me down!"
Emma's mouth fell open. "Zeke!"
"He ain't my fiancé," the cattle driver said, earning an outraged sneer. "What'd you think was gon' happen, girl? He got lucky Tannen's gun wasn't loaded last week."
"That's exactly right," Levi said. "He's lucky!"
"Four!"
"You better face up to it, son," Jeb said, rounding out commentary from their table, "'cause if you don't go out there –"
"What?" Marty demanded, storming toward the salooners. Emma grabbed the back of his serape and stopped him short at the corner of the bar as Tannen hit the halfway mark of his countdown. "What if I don't go out there?"
You're a coward.
"Six!"
For the rest of your days.
And the real Clint Eastwood would have to change his name to achieve stardom because who wanted to start their career with the same name as "the biggest yellow belly in the West"?
"…Seven!"
A revolver glided down the empty bar into Marty's hand like a magnet.
"Eight!"
The burden of fate woven into the warmth and shape of the iron infused itself into Marty's hands. It offered choice but not control. And when he lifted his head to see if the undertaker skulked amongst them, Marty looked Seamus directly in the eye instead.
Never considered the future, poor Martin. God rest his soul.
"I already got a gun."
"Nine!"
Emma's hand wrapped around his upper arm.
"Ten!"
Marty swallowed.
"D'you hear me, runt?! I said that's ten, you gutless –"
"Buford, shut up!" Emma suddenly yelled, stepping in view of the window. "Nobody likes you!"
"Whoa, Em." Marty pulled her back behind him, flashing a tight smile around the room. "Easy."
Emma threw his hand off with a growl.
"You are so stupid sometimes I want to strangle you," Emma seethed in one breath, "and I promise you if you set footoutside of this saloon for some pointless pissing match, I will kill you myself before he does!"
Marty took her by the shoulders. "He's an asshole –"
"Tell me something I don't know –!"
"I don't care what Tannen says."
Emma blinked at the softspoken declaration. Marty glanced dismissively at the patrons to assure her, "And I don't care what anybody else says either."
"Y-You don't?"
Marty smoothed the loose strands of hair out of her face and shook his head. As the young couple shared a tentative smile, Seamus sighed in relief. Though a small comfort, Clint Eastwood learned the lesson his brother could not.
A scholar, indeed.
The sharp squeak of wood and clinking glasses heralded Doc's return to the land of the living. Emmett was sober, as promised, but he had to clamber through the disorienting nausea before finding his balance. Chester steadied him as he had on the Fourth of July; this concoction hit in as many bad ways as it did good.
"Are you comin' out here," Buford hollered, "or do I have to come in there after you?"
The blacksmith's daughter and apprentice looked to Chester.
"You got a back door to this place?"
"What did he say her name was?" the peddler asked the man next to him. He'd met this gentleman's eye at the opposite end of the bar last night during the blacksmith's lament and thought he'd recall this elusive detail. "Cara? Sara?"
"Clara."
"Clara." That was it.
The woman seated before them leapt around, bashfully averting her eyes as she remembered herself and muted the astonishment on her face.
"Excuse me," she said, "but was this man tall with great big, brown puppy-dog eyes and long, silvery flowing hair?"
The bespectacled peddler narrowed his eyes. "You know him?"
She gasped, putting a hand to her heaving chest.
"I'm Clara!"
The peddler raised his eyebrows, crossed his wrists over the top of his briefcase, and leaned in.
"Well, Clara," he imparted wisely, "if you have any feeling for him, go find him. I've never seen a man more tore up or in love than he was, and love like that doesn't happen too often. Whatever happened between you two, I'd give him a second chance."
The peddler smiled as a revelation brimmed in the woman's eyes.
Without warning, she lunged for the emergency cord. The peddler pitched forward halfway into her seat, holding the hat on his head as the brakes shrieked over the outcry of the passengers. A parcel bounced off his back before he righted himself. He straightened his glasses in time to see her rich purple gown exit the car.
He chuckled as she ran past his window.
"Well, I'll be."
"Reach, blacksmith!"
Emmett peered over the top of the barrel. Marty had rolled out of his grasp when the gunfire rained down on them, but he had Emma trembling between him and the brick wall. Her eyes were stunned wide open and darting about, but she was unharmed. He prayed the same was true of Marty. Doc tried to devise a way to give Emma enough time to escape and find him, but there were too many guns in too many hands to leave her freedom to chance.
Heart pounding, Doc stuck his hands in the air. He held Emma tight as Buck and Ceegar approached, but they tore her from his arms.
"No, wait," Emmett begged as they were dragged out of the alley into the crowded street. "Please. Please, let her go. I'll pay you!" he said as they were brought to Buford. That's what this was all about, wasn't it? "I'll pay you triple what you wanted!"
The amusement coloring Tannen's lecherous leer frightened Doc for the first time. Emma was thrown back into his arms as Tannen bore down on them, eclipsing Doc's fierce scowl like a dark and deadly twister. Emmett defiantly shielded her from the outlaw's soulless aura.
"Too little, too late, smithy," came his gruff murmur. "We're dealin' in consequence now. And if Eastwood ain't man enough to shoulder your atonement, your death is on him."
He then chiseled into the fearful flicker that crossed Emma's features.
"I warned you, Clemmy. Everything has a price."
Emma looked away.
Tannen took out his pocket watch.
"Listen up, Eastwood!" he called into the steely matte sky. "I aim to shoot somebody today, and I'd prefer it'd be you! But if you're just too damn yellow, I guess it'll just have to be your blacksmith friend. You've got one minute to decide."
Doc tried to shirk off Tannen's men as they separated him and Emma again.
"Forget about me, Marty, and save yourself!"
"Awfully noble of you," Tannen said, turning to Doc. "But when you're dead on the ground and Eastwood's head for the hills," – he smiled at Emma – "what's to become of darlin' Clementine?"
Emma swallowed, taking the smallest step forward.
God, Marty, do something.
"I'll go with you."
Tannen instantly snatched her up by the waist, pulling her flush against him with a pleased grunt.
"Yeah, you will." He effortlessly overpowered Emma's efforts to create some distance between her and his stinking beard. "You belong with a real man –"
"Get your filthy hands off my daughter!" Doc roared. He clocked Buck under the chin – "Let her go!" – but Stubble pinned his arm to his back until his words turned to stiff whimpers under the point of Ceegar's knife.
"Wait!" Emma yanked hysterically at Buford's lapels to get him to call off his men. "Wait, stop. Please! I'll go. I'll go! Willingly. Just don't kill him."
Doc ceased his bucking, eyes black with rage and sick with dread.
"Emma –"
Buck landed a retaliating blow on Doc's right flank. Tannen felt the girl's grip intensify again as Emmett's knees buckled from the pain. Before Ceegar's knife could nick Doc's neck, Buford raised his hand, and his gang obediently arranged themselves in a semicircle around the battered blacksmith.
Doc searched for the comfort of his daughter's eyes, but she denied him, burying her blank gaze into Tannen's bandana. Her fingers spread into the valleys between the wrinkled peaks in his shirt. She shuddered under the suffocating proximity of her captor's hawkish scrutiny.
"Think you're gonna buy time for your yellow dandy?"
"No –"
"Do you?"
"N— I'm not–"
"You had your chance!"
"I know," Emma said quickly, desperate to keep some semblance of composure in front of all the people she'd come to know in the last eight months. "I know I did, and– Please. I won't run. I swear, I won't. Not if you promise not to hurt him. Just stop this, and I'll go."
She couldn't watch him die anymore.
Emma finally met Buford's eye, a flecked ring of dull blue lost to the surrounding mud and slobber. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly, dubiously considering her offer. Emma slowed her breathing and sharpened her eyes.
"Everything has a price, Mr. Tannen. This is mine."
Buford analyzed the rhythm of the soft, stuttery exhales on the underside of his jaw. He detected a satisfying trace of resignation veiling the confidence she asserted and smirked.
"You're gonna try'n stab me in my sleep every night, aren't you?"
"Every day, too, if you let me."
"All right, then."
Buford snapped his watch shut and pinched the band of Emma's opal ring. He roughly tugged it from her finger and left his own promise burned into the flesh between her knuckles, making her gasp. The threads of the space-time continuum began to branch from her breastbone; the frayed end of this moment diverged into infinite paths, possibilities, and realities. Very few of these tendrils, however, did not run through Buford Tannen.
He watched her eyes redden as he threw the ring down the street.
"Outlaw's bride."
The opal sailed headlong through the saloon's shadow, lost from sight in the relatively vast expanse of the dirt road.
But by the grace of a glint, Marty caught the ring at his knees.
"Right here, Tannen!"
He glared at Buford as he entered the street, several men hurrying their wives out of his way. His heart hiccupped to see Emma attached so cleanly to Tannen's side, but unlike his dream, profound fear emanated from her wide eyes. Coupled with the arrogant hoots of Doc's captors, anger began to encroach, to endanger Marty's plan.
Once again, Tannen left him no choice.
But he was in control.
The blood rushing through Doc's ears muted the tolling of the clocktower's bell. The poise of Marty's stride pained him, but something more was in play that stayed the scores of lashings on the tip of his tongue. He folded Emma back into the safety of his arms as Tannen lined up some twenty yards from Marty, and she started bucking out of his grasp to the point that Stubble had to help him restrain her. Doc and Stubble exchanged bewildered frowns but doubled down on their efforts to keep Emma sidelined.
"Hey! Hey!" Emma squealed after Buford."You said you'd stop! You said you wouldn't hurt him!"
"I didn't say anything about Eastwood."
Emma paled.
Tannen took center stage, ready to put on a show for his audience.
"He's the whole reason we're out here on this fine mornin', ain't'cha, Eastwood?"
Marty sniffed back some salty drainage, skin glistening under the invisible sun. His fingers fluttered near the Peacemaker with enough inexperience that Tannen offered to level the playing field instead of shooting him outright.
"Draw."
Emma's heart swelled in her throat.
Two hands. Two hands, two ha—
"No."
A sea of eyes shifted from Marty to Tannen. The quickdraw's mouth hung open in confusion, a perfect likeness to the mugshot Marty found in the archives. As sweat rolled down the seam behind his ear, Marty removed his gun belt, held it high for all to see, and let it fall to the dirt.
Mr. Elmer Johnson of Colonel Samuel Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut huffed with a hand on his hat in front of the Marshal's office, dumbfounded.
"I thought we could settle this like men."
A tremor like timpani rolled deep into Doc's gut.
"You thought wrong, dude."
Then, fast as lightning, Tannen fired.
Marty collapsed.
Emma stared, erupting in a dizzying, cold sweat as she slackened in her father's arms. All the months spent undoing the harmful, psychological repercussions of the Libyans' rapid gunfire leaked away with that singular shot, suspending her in the traumatic purgatory of inconceivability. The strength of her father's embrace squeezed tears into her eyes.
Her breath hitched when Marty didn't move.
But when Tannen had the gall to step toward his body, Emma tore through her emotional paralysis. Her screams doubled her over Doc's arms, ragged with anguish and fury.
"You murdered him!" she bellowed. "Isn't that enough for you?!"
"He had it comin'!" Buford barked mid-saunter, springing fresh tears to Emma's eyes.
The sullen citizens averted their eyes from Tannen as he strolled by, tallying each of their sneers and sniffles as applause. Rage distorted Doc's glare when he saw that Emma's sob lifted the corner of the outlaw's mouth.
"Saved you a lot o' heartache, Clementine," Buford tutted dolefully as he examined his latest kill. "He was only ever gon' disappoint you.
"Best just let it be this once," – he drew back his hammer – "and be done with it."
Tannen centered the muzzle over Eastwood's body.
Marty kicked it out of his hand.