A Lust For Lead (20 page)

The door creaked open on rusty hinges revealing yet another room that was empty except for a few relics of abandoned furniture, all of it heavy with dust. Disappointed, Madison quietly eased the door shut and moved on to the next one.
She led Chastity by the hand, the girl shuffling along behind her. Madison had given her the rag doll that she had found and the girl carried it unthinkingly by one leg, its head dragging against the floor. Occasionally, she sniffled or moaned unintelligibly, but mostly she had settled down from her post-match temper tantrum and was content to follow wherever Madison led.
They searched among the rooms of the hotel, finding echoes of its former days wherever they went. The empty rooms were covered with dust and piled furniture. Here and there a trinket lay, discarded by somebody many years ago. But Madison was searching for something more substantial than forgotten memories.
She had woken early that morning and crawled from Nathaniel’s bed feeling wretched and miserable with herself. Their lovemaking the night before felt like a betrayal of all that she had felt for Kip. Better if she could have said that she had not enjoyed it, but that was not entirely so. Nathaniel had provided her with company and the illusion of his protection had helped to comfort her. She hated herself for that.
Gathering her clothes around her, she had slipped quietly from his room and returned to the attic. Whisperer had been sat there, minding over Chastity while she slept. He had not said anything to Madison but the look in his eyes as he rose silently to leave had been cruel and mocking. Nathaniel’s whore, they had all but said.
She had been too upset to find the strength to be angry. Somehow she had managed to hold back her tears until after he had left but, with the door closed and nobody to witness her grief she had given in to her sorrow and wept. The emptiness inside of her had yawned impossibly wide.
All that Nathaniel had told her the night before had left her challenging her grasp on reality. She felt as if she was lost and, longing for something to comfort her, she had grasped at her memories of Kip. His loss had pained her that morning more than ever and she had needed to feel his presence around her. Waking Chastity, she had left the Grande and gone back to the house that they had slept in.
She had half-feared to find all of their belongings gone. The invigilators took whatever belonged to the contestants who died and auctioned them among themselves but, possibly because Madison was known as Nathaniel’s woman, they had left her stuff alone.
Her belongings lay side by side with Kip’s, strewn messily about the floor of the dusty old house. Madison had walked among them, picking things up to touch them and smell Kip’s scent on them. Her sadness had overwhelmed her and she had sniffed back tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had whispered.
An angry sniff behind her had alerted her to the presence of somebody else in the house. Turning around and pulling Chastity to her defensively, she had been surprised to find Vendetta standing in the doorway. The hard woman had regarded her with undisguised contempt. ‘I have a message for you,’ she had said. ‘You were supposed to get it last night but you sounded busy.’
Colour had flooded to Madison’s cheeks.
‘If you want to get out of this town, Shane Ennis wants to speak with you.’
Vendetta had delivered her message without any apparent interest and had left as soon as she was done. Madison had sat down to ponder what she had said. She had been too stunned at first for the words to have any meaning but gradually it had sunk in and she had laughed out loud.
When the elation had passed, she had begun to consider things in a colder, more practical light. Vendetta had given her hope for her future but there were things that needed to be done in order to make this new opportunity work for her.
She had begun by bundling together all of her stuff, together with some of Kip’s and had crammed as much of it into her carpet bag as she was able. In the process, she had discovered the old abandoned rag doll that she had hugged the night after Kip had died and she had given it to Chastity, hoping that she would like it. The girl had shown no sign of even knowing what it was but she looked more human with a doll in her hands and that made Madison feel safer in her presence.
Back at the Grande, she had washed and changed clothes and had then sat in front of a mirror and made herself up. She had covered up the puffiness that surrounded her eyes and painted the illusion of an afterglow onto her face. Even if she could not fool Nathaniel, he would know that she had made an effort and that would make him think that she was his. The more complacent he thought she was, the easier it would be for her to work behind his back.
The trick had worked. Nathaniel had been suitably flattered by her attentiveness when they had met for breakfast that morning and thought absolutely nothing of leaving her alone in the hotel with Chastity now that the day had worn on. He had business elsewhere in town. Madison was not entirely sure what he was up to but he had taken Whisperer and his bodyguards and gone to prepare the warding fires, whatever that meant.
She did not care. His absence gave her the chance to explore the hotel unobserved and she searched along the hallway, trying every door she passed until she found what she was looking for.
A door that was locked.
Crouching, she peered through the keyhole. The room inside was dimly lit. Sunlight broke through small gaps in the boarded windows, casting jagged rays through the dusty air. She could just about make out the shape of a pair of wooden panniers, each of which she was willing to bet held ten-thousand dollars.
She smiled to herself. If Nathaniel was determined to make her his whore then he could damn well pay for her.

Buchanan came to collect Shane shortly before it was time for him to fight. Shane had practiced until the motion of drawing and shooting felt as natural as it had used to feel, but that wasn’t the only way in which he felt different. The coldness in his heart had spread too. It had crawled into his arms and legs and left him feeling like a man made of steel, cast by the same processes that had forged his revolver.
It was the way he had used to feel six years ago. That didn’t seem so very long ago any more.
Buchanan noticed how he was different and couldn’t resist mentioning it but Shane ignored him. Better to maintain the appearance that he had resigned himself to his fate and let Buchanan think that he was beaten than to open his mouth and risk alerting him to the fact that he still had one surviving hope of escape.
He just prayed that Vendetta had passed on his message and that Madison had been receptive to it.
The sun was high overhead when he stepped out of the courthouse. It blazed in the sky like a witness to the coming bout. Tom Freeman was waiting for him on the porch.
‘I always wanted to fight against you,’ he said.
Shane looked down at the ground, ignoring him, but Freeman was persistent. ‘I hear you’ve been practicing,’ he said. ‘That’s good. I want to fight you at your best.’
‘No.’ Shane said quietly. ‘You really don’t want that.’
The dust swirled up on a sluggish breeze and drifted over the crossroads. Shane took one side and Freeman took the other. The town felt more desolate than it had the other day. There was hardly anybody left to watch them any more. All of the other contestants were dead except for Chastity, and only the invigilators remained, watching from their rooftop eyries with wary suspicion, waiting to lend their own guns to the killing if needed.
Shane drew his revolver and took the single bullet that Buchanan gave him. He loaded it like an opium addict shooting a needle into his vein. It hit him with a rush.
In that instant, he wished he had more bullets.
He wished that he could kill everyone in town.
And, in a voice that was getting quieter and quieter with every passing moment, he wished that he was somewhere else, far away from here. Somewhere where he could be free of the gun’s malevolent influence and his abhorrent obsession with it.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. The gun’s mind remained like a layer of scum on the surface of a stagnant pond. Shane took a deep breath and sank beneath it. It surged from the depths of his soul like vomit, terrifying in its intensity, but as it stole over him and smothered his identity with its embrace, it soothed him like a gentle lover and coaxed away his fears. He felt a cool peace come over him, a calm self-assurity: a sense that he was now complete.
He looked into Tom Freeman’s eyes and saw in his expression that the same process was happening inside his mind as well.
Nathaniel stepped up to the edge of the porch in preparation to signal the draw. Shane became absolutely still, his muscles poised like a spring about to uncoil. He heard his heart beating. Its steady rhythm sounded like the distant beating of a drum.
All other sounds faded away, except one.
Nathaniel’s voice. ‘Draw!’
Tom Freeman was fast. He was halfway to firing when Shane’s bullet took him through the side of the head. At a speed of almost 900 feet-per-second the 250 grain bullet smashed through his skull, deforming on impact so that, by the time it entered the soft tissue of his brain, it was tumbling end over end in a storm of shattered skull fragments, pulping everything that it struck. Freeman’s momentum caused him to turn a half-revolution before he hit the ground. Dead.

Shane slowly lowered his smoking gun and shed its poisonous influence from his thoughts like a spider shedding its skin. It departed reluctantly, or maybe it was simply that he found it harder to be parted from it this time and yearned for it to stay. He shivered, in equal parts from fear and excitement.
How many more times can I do this? he wondered. How many more times before I can’t give it up?
Buchanan strode up to him, clapping his hands together in applause. ‘Now that is the Shane Ennis that I remember.’
Shane gave him a cold look and started back towards the courthouse without waiting to be led there. Buchanan held out a hand to stop him. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
Shane still wore the gun belt about his waist, the revolver sheathed in its holster. He had not given it a second’s thought. He had become comfortable wearing it again and, removing it, he understood why Chastity cried so hard when her gun was taken away from her. It was like having his skeleton ripped from his living flesh.
Buchanan saw the murderous look in his eyes and nervously backed away from him. He summoned over two of the invigilators and they escorted Shane back to his cell. Nathaniel came to visit him once he was locked up and congratulated Shane on his victory.
‘Buchanan always assured me that you would make it this far,’ he said. ‘I confess that I did not believe him but here you have proven me wrong. Well done, that is not something that happens often.’
‘Save it for someone who cares.’ Shane muttered sulkily.
The smug look vanished from Nathaniel’s face. ‘You’ll face Chastity tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Tell me something I don’t already know.’
‘At twelve noon.’ Nathaniel told him.
The Gunfighter’s Hour. Shane had guessed it would be then. The tournament was finally coming to an end and its secrets would soon be revealed.
‘Tomorrow,’ he echoed dumbly. ‘Twelve noon.’
If he had not escaped by then, he never would.

The storm had been building for some time, massing its energy until the air seemed heavy with it, tensed to the point of bursting. When it finally chose to erupt, it did so with apocalyptic violence, as if it was the storm that would end the world. Winds of more than a hundred miles an hour stripped the desert like a scythe, choking the landscape in a cloud of razor sharp sand and airborne debris.
Shane would have kept on running had it not been for that storm. He would have kept on running and maybe, in the end, Castor Buchanan would have stopped chasing him. Maybe. It was academic now because the storm had put Shane’s back against the wall and trapped him, and now Castor Buchanan had caught up with him.
The walls of the boarding house shook under the onslaught of the ravenous wind. Every eye in the place was watching him, waiting to see what he would do. Buchanan stood outside, bellowing over the roar of the wind, calling him out.
‘You’d best go out there, son,’ one of the old timers said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to go away.’
Shane wasn’t listening. He was afraid, but it wasn’t Buchanan that scared him. He should have known from the beginning that he could not simply walk away from the Fastest Guns. He was too far gone for that. Two weeks had passed since Spinster’s Peak and he had still not laid down his guns. Instead, he had found more and more reason to use them. He had killed without provocation. The influence that they held over him was growing and he could scarcely think any more without their thoughts intruding on him. He had barely slept in days.
He knew that if he fought Buchanan and won that everything he was would be consumed by his guns. The man he was would cease to exist, and he did not like to think of what they would make him become. And yet his heart cried out for it, tearing his soul in two.
Buchanan’s voice roared from outside. ‘Hunte’s dead, Shane! Let’s finish this.’
There was no escape. Buchanan could not go to Covenant until he had proven himself, and neither could Shane. Bowing to the inevitable, Shane wrapped a scarf around his face. He turned his collar up high, drew the brim of his hat down low to shield his face and went to the door. He had to put his shoulder to it in order to push it open against the force of the wind.
Outside, he was met immediately by a stinging blast of sand. The small town was lucky in that it was only catching the edge of the storm; its full fury raged in the heart of the desert, where it could sometimes be glimpsed through a gap in the sandstorm as a towering pillar of black dust that reached from land to sky. Its noise was tremendous. In addition to the howling of the wind there were the sounds of the town straining against its foundations: the creaking of poorly constructed homes; the whip-crack of tarpaulin roofs half torn away in the wind; and the singing of wires in the scaffold above the main pit.
Shane bowed his head and forced his reluctant feet to bear him onto the road. Buchanan was waiting for him. He turned and walked slowly down the high street, and Shane followed him to the edge of town.
They stood with ten paces between them, their hands poised above their revolvers, the wind casting sheets of black sand between them.
Shane felt as though he had already been beaten. He was certain that he could kill Buchanan; he felt no doubt about that at all. It was his destiny to become one of the Fastest Guns and it filled him with a righteous fire that stirred his spirit.
But Shane did not trust his feelings. He believed in his thoughts. The war between his heart and his mind had ended, and it seemed that his mind had lost.
A dust cloud blew between them and Shane reached instinctively for his gun, knowing that Buchanan would do the same. He drew and fired, expecting to be damned. But in the last moment he found the strength to resist.
The bullet that was meant for Buchanan’s heart tore through his fingers instead.