In the long standing tradition of invading forces, vandals and bastards, a faction of the Big C attackers had decided to torch the infrastructure. So far this had only resulted in close to a dozen Big C men prone in the dirt with blackened headed torches as dead as they were and an outer lying old barn ablaze. A good distance from the main buildings of Community, the conflagration gave young Will Elliott plenty of light to work by this night.
There had been some horses hitched in that barn however. Steve and a few of the others had gotten them all out safely though. Talie even managing to get a stubborn jackass into a small lean-to.
He'd driven his own flat-bed wagon in that afternoon, before all the ruckus started up. At a lull in the gunplay, twenty some minutes ago he'd brought the wagon and its white canvas covered contents up to the end of the main street. He'd unhitched the horse team, Widow's Peak and Jiraiya taking them back to the stables. He'd then anchored the wagon's tongue in the ground, climbed aboard, partly uncovered the rear of the wagon's cargo, towards the driver's seat, and had been working on it ever since.
The representatives of the Big C, initially strong in numbers and fierce in attack, had fallen back after various groups of them succumbed, rather conclusively, to certain of the Gun Crows. They had then taken cover throughout the town, watching for what they considered easy marks, some even retreating.
But a little while back a bare chested 'Slaughter Simon' Petrie, hair all crazy, covered in blood, eyes like a mad wolf and havin' a great old time, had drawn the attention of the Crows to the distant rise of dust off the plain, visible in the moonlight. Then he'd gone back to collecting faces and other trinkets and hanging them off his belt. 'Dandy' Dann, on his way out of the territory, with a good dozen kills to his credit, had alerted Stephen that a fifty to sixty strong reinforcement of Big C guns were on their way.
That was when Will was given the nod.
Now, as he tinkered, Talie 'Widow's Peak' Helene was his guard. In tan leather pants, moccasins (made out of the skin of deadly water moccasins), and a fringed leather jacket, she held a bow in both hands and carried a back and a hip quiver stocked with arrows.
He glanced at her occasionally as he worked with tools and small oil can. She seemed to have more dark pourings of hair than a head should own, and that bow - it looked to be made of some sort of flexible bone and ligaments. It almost looked...alive.
He thumped his head on the machine as he stood up. He wore an Easterner type dark suit and a holster filled with a hand-tooled Colt.
"So," Widow's Peak said a few moments later, " 'Eagle Eye', huh? "
He looked at her a moment, then smiled. "Actually my eyesight's not
that good."
She glanced at him, blank faced. "No kiddin'."
He coughed. "What is it with the nick-names?"
Her intense eyes were focused on the street, the town, all about again, vision prowling. "I think some of them, obviously, are meant to be ironic."
"Yours is Widow's Peak."
"Yeah." She frowned. "My widow's peak isn't
that noticeable is it?"
"I guess not. It's evident though."
She frowned at him.
"But ... not overly so." He gave her a wink, smile and nod, which unfortunately looked, in combination, a little like a leer. "Your ass doesn't look big in that neither." He glanced, perhaps a little too casually, at the distant lean-to.
She just stared.
He cleared his throat, tightened a few more nuts with a spanner.
"That's an unusual bow, where'd you get it?"
Eyes still prowling. "Blackfeet graveyard."
He paused in his work. "Oh."
Prowling. "It's not what you think. I pay my way."
He'd heard that Talie was well known in a number of the Indian Nation tribes. She looked like the type of woman whose ensemble only needed a belt of scalps to compliment it. He looked warily at a woven hair pouch set at her waist.
The prowling eyes saw. Her usually serious, pale face cracked into a brief smile. "This is horse hair," she said, tapping the pouch. "Made for me by a Mescalero."
He pointed at the .38 Peacemaker low on her hip. "You carry a revolver too I see."
She pointed back without looking. "As do you."
He shrugged.
"They do call us 'Gun Crows' I guess," she said. "As you know, Stephen wants everyone to be able to use guns. Even the more... unnaturally gifted among us."
There was no denying that guns had fluent currency in their present environment.
"Why is that?"
"What?"
"Why 'Gun Crows'?"
Her turn to shrug. "It may be because crows are carrion eaters, they live off misfortune and death."
He thought about that for a moment.
"Steve says that crows are beautiful, intelligent creatures," he stated.
"Yeah," disinterested. "That too."
A movement up on a section of roof across the street, a gunman drawing a bead with a rifle.
Talie seemed to pluck from her hip quiver, nock the arrow, draw and fire in one smooth movement that took not much more than one second.
It was a difficult shot, by moonlight and fire flicker, she had to skip the arrow off the roof iron to meet the required upward trajectory. A brief spark as at-speed arrowhead met sheet iron roofing.
The rooftop sniper groaned once, died with six inches of the owl feathered shaft in his head. None the wiser. Score another for Widow's Peak.
She nocked another obsidian headed arrow, ready.
"That cloud of dust is gettin' mighty close now," she said.
"Did Indians teach you to shoot?"
"A Japanese woman. Cook on a wagon train."
He'd noticed that her grip on the actual bow was much lower than one would normally see.
Something glinted, moving slowly high above in the sky. It looked like a bright silver bird with unmoving wings, there was a faint, continuous roaring sound from somewhere up there too.
Still looking up he asked, "What was that?"
She glanced up, at the same time she let loose the arrow - which sank into the chest of a two-gunned man who burst out from the open telegraph office door just back from where they were. The man fell and twisted in the dirt for a short time.
Another shaft sped low through the glass of a curtained window. A man screamed, the scream sounding like it was working around a vibrating sliver of timber. She'd heard the thump of a rifle dropped behind the curtains as well.
Re-nocked, slightly squatted, she continued to eye the town as she spoke.
"Whenever Bob Hood and Lucky Lucy are in the same place you'll get the odd glimpse of some weird shit." She paused, eyes slit in concentration, appraising the street. "Once, when they were around, the time we had to get Fort Baynton back from those copyright bounty hunters, we were in Lawson Town and I thought I saw a big glass window, with rows of smooth black and grey boxes with single glass eyes apiece and coloured images moving on them. And they had price tags, with astronomical numbers on 'em."
A shot!
To Be Continued...
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=pYCgq8q9Ofw&feature=related
