Chapter Three – Sore Loser
“Trouble finds Jake like flies find corpses. Hangs around the same way, too.”
~ Cole McJunkins
Jake stepped out into a late summer night, the air scented by cut hay, boiling hops, and machine oil. He heard the faint gurgle of Cherry Creek only a block and a half away. As usual, the cobbled length of 12th Avenue lay empty. Anyone up at that hour on a Thursday was either in the Brewery or one of the whorehouses along Larimer Street around the corner. Decent folk—a group Jake did not consider himself a part of—had already chewed their way through a fair bit of a good night’s sleep.
The doors swung closed behind him, changing the buzz of bar patrons and automaton music to a muffled thrum. A row of horses stood hitched outside, their tails swishing quietly as horseflies tried to burrow deep and drink their fill. There were two steam-driven carriages parked nearby, brass fittings and copper pipes gleaming dully in the lamplight.
Jake pulled out his father’s pocket watch and clicked it open. It showed just shy of 11:30, so he figured he and Cole would be home a little after midnight. Clicking the watch closed, he turned towards the stables off to the left. A soft pool of electric lamplight cast the doors in an orange glow. Several more steam carriages sat parked beyond, nearly lost in darkness. Jake headed towards the stables but paused, caught in the harsh landing lights of an incoming zeppelin. Its motors filled the empty street with the sharp drone of reversing propellers, and he looked up at a stocky cargo carrier. As the light moved past him, Jake flicked the stub of his cigar into the street.
He had taken two steps past a gleaming steam carriage when a voice from behind hissed, “Raise your hands and go into the stables.” The point of a blade poked hard into his lower back. Jake hadn’t heard anyone come up behind him, but he knew who it had to be.
“Boy, you sure are a sore loser, Quinn.” Jake’s voice held no fear, simply disappointment. One man with a short sword frightened him about as much as a kid with a broom handle. Jake raised his hands and looked over one shoulder … and then the other.
A knot of fear tightened in his guts.
There was no sign of Quinn. Instead, Jake found himself looking at three strangers in black, their heads topped with black bowlers, their faces covered by strange looking goggles whose opaque lenses glowed faintly green.
The man directly behind him stood close enough for Jake to smell sour breath. The other two flanked behind about five feet. The flankers twitched their right wrists. With metallic clicks, eighteen-inch blades popped out from their sleeves.
Oh shit, Jake thought. He’d seen such weapons before. The pit fighters and generally unsavory sorts who used them called them slashers. Each of the flankers stepped in, pulled one of Jake’s pistols, and tucked it into his black sash. The knot of fear in Jake’s guts turned to pure dread. Three against one was long odds anytime, and now they had his pistols.
“Shut up and move!” the first man whispered in Jake’s ear. He shoved hard into Jake’s back.
Stumbling, Jake banged into the stable door face-first. Recovering quickly, he reached out and slid the door open. He still couldn’t hear the men moving behind him.
They’re pros, whoever they are, he thought.
He stepped into the darkness, his arms raised, and started to reach for the light switch just inside the door. His arm froze in place, hope pushing away the dread. In the dark he might have a chance, albeit a slim one. But slim was better than none anytime, especially against three armed killers.
With his arms still raised, Jake lowered his left hand a bit and twisted the ocular, allowing in all the available light. He passed the massive, tan hindquarters of his mount Lumpy, tensing his body to leap away.
“Don’t even think about it,” the man behind him said with a mild accent familiar to Jake. Jake froze. “We know all about that eye of yours. Now turn around.” Jake did as instructed. The goggles glowed more brightly in the darkness. The man raised his finger and tapped the goggles for emphasis. “We see you fine.”
Jake was just about out of tricks. The man shifted the dagger to his left hand and twisted his free wrist. A slasher popped out with a loud click, and then all three stood facing him, motionless.
Seconds ticked by.
Jake was a patient man, but he wasn’t in the mood to wait around for someone to open him up like a Christmas goose. “So, are you fellas gonna make a move, or are we gonna just stand here and stare at each other?”
“We definitely will not be staring at each other, Mr. Lasater,” Quinn sneered as he stepped into the doorway. Quinn turned the light switch.
The sudden brightness made Jake wince and close his left eye.
“I have something else in mind.” Quinn added as he slid the door closed behind him.
“If this is about the money, Quinn, I’ll just hand it over.” Jake knew when he was beat, and he wasn’t willing to risk his neck over fifteen-hundred dollars when the odds were stacked so high against him.
“The money is not why we are going to kill you.” Quinn smiled like a predator. “Although I will enjoy taking it off your corpse when we are finished cutting you to pieces.” Quinn drew the sword at his waist as he approached. The curved blade gleamed in his hand. “I will consider it a bonus on top of what we have already been paid.” He spun the blade a few times and loosened his neck and shoulders as he stalked down the middle of the stable. The other three spread out behind Lumpy, crouching down into fighting stances that gave Jake a bad case of déjà vu.
Jake didn’t see how he could beat four trained killers when they had blades. It did seem odd that none of them was packing iron, but even without pistols, four-to-one was over his head. He glanced around, looking for a way out. Walls, hay, dirt, a few harnesses—there was nothing he could use to protect himself. His gaze stalled on Lumpy’s hindquarters, and an idea popped into his head.
“Well, at least let me take off my hat,” he said smoothly. “It cost me eighty dollars in Kansas City.”
“It won’t make any difference,” Quinn replied almost sweetly as he lowered into a stance of his own.
Jake lifted his hat off, holding it high above his head. “You boys haven’t spent much time around big farm animals, have you?”
Confused looks flickered across the faces of all four killers.
Jake threw the short, leather top hat as hard as he could straight at Lumpy’s ass. The startled beast bellowed, rattling the walls of the stable and shaking dust from the ceiling. In a flash, Lumpy lifted his back legs and kicked out with all the force more than a ton of pissed off Brahma bull is capable.
One of Lumpy’s hooves caught the closest attacker in the head. The other hoof smashed into the next attacker’s shoulder. Both men flew into Quinn, and all three shot sideways and disappeared into the stall on Jake’s right, crashing into the far wall. Jake figured they were out of the fight for good. The odds were looking a little better now.
The remaining flanker was only startled for a second before coming at Jake with murder in his eyes. He stepped in like a panther and shot a kick into Jake’s mid-section. Air WHOOFED out of Jake’s lungs, and he crashed into a support beam in the middle of the stable. He saw stars but didn’t lose his focus on the man coming at him. The flanker raised his slasher high and brought it down.
A high-pitched whine of clockwork rang out as Jake’s left hand shot up in a motion too fast to follow. The slasher clashed as it hammered, metal on metal, into Jake’s upraised, brass wrist. The blade snapped off with a TWANG of broken steel, the point embedding itself into the support beam beside Jake’s head.
The surprised look on the flanker’s face was all Jake needed. He brought his left hand across like a sledgehammer. A squelching thud of meat and bone ruined the assassin’s features. His head twisted like a top, and he staggered sideways two steps before collapsing in a motionless heap.
A sense of pride replaced the worry that had filled Jake only moments before. He couldn’t keep from smiling. “Well that went better than I expected,” he said aloud.
Movement in the stall to his right turned his smile southward.
Quinn growled from the shadows, “We’re not finished.” His voice was deeper, more primal that it had been. He stepped out into the light, grinning, and Jake’s breath caught in his throat as his eyes went wide.
Quinn wasn’t human.
His ghost-white eyes glowed with an inner light. His predatory smile was full of sharp teeth, incisors considerably longer than the rest. The tops of Quinn’s ears narrowed to points, and his fingernails stretched into vicious white claws.
“Oh shit,” Jake muttered. He’d seen a few unnaturals in his time, things that would scare the sin out of even the hardest cowboy, but this was a new kind of different. He was in real trouble, and he knew it.
Quinn’s smile grew impossibly wide, a jagged rictus promising death. He looked at the body between them, and a quiet snarl slithered past his fangs. His gaze rose slowly, pausing briefly at the glint of bronze beneath the slash in Jake’s sleeve. Then their eyes met, steel on steel.
Jake sighed, resolved but not resigned to what was about to happen. “The eye ain’t the only thing that got messed up in the war,” Jake said grimly.
It was one-on-one again, but the odds were still stacked against him. He thought about hollering for help, but Quinn might bolt, and Jake wanted to end this now. All, or nothing, he thought. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna look over my shoulder for the rest of my life.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed, flickering briefly to Jake’s clockwork arm. He shifted his stance and came forward slowly. He was going after Jake’s right side, guessing it was flesh and blood.
Unfortunately for Jake, Quinn guessed right.
Jake’s eyes darted to the glinting, filigreed Peacemaker tucked into the sash of the dead man between them, the runes traced into the metal glowing a faint, ethereal green. If he could get his hands on his pistol, the fight would be over in an instant.
He dove towards his Colt, putting every ounce of strength he had into it. His clockwork legs screamed. He moved like lightning, faster than any normal man.
Quinn saw the motion and became a blur.
As Jake’s hand wrapped around the grip, Quinn appeared before his eyes like some sort of ghostly nightmare and slapped the pistol from Jake’s hand with impossible strength and speed. Jake had never seen anything move that fast, not even the werewolf he’d faced down the previous summer. The pistol went sailing into the shadows at the back of the barn, bounced off the wall, and dropped into the dust. Quinn’s backhand hammered into Jake’s jaw, lifted him up, and sent him sailing back into the support beam. Pain shot through his spine, and his jaw felt like it had been torn out. Dazed, his knees buckled, and he slid partway down the post. He shook his head to clear it. As his eyes refocused, the blur came at him again.
Jake lashed out with a haymaker, the best he could manage in his state, but Quinn shifted easily, avoiding it. The creature took the opening and sent a hard punch into Jake’s stomach. Jake grunted with the impact and swung his left out in a backhand, clockwork gears screaming.
Quinn ducked under it, stepped out, and sent a brutal roundhouse kick into Jake’s left knee. His foot impacted on the hard metal of Jake’s clockwork leg, and the metal joint shifted slightly but didn’t buckle. Quinn’s eyes went wide with pain, his face filling with rage. He changed tactics and slashed again and again with ragged claws in fast arcs that angled in from every direction. Jake shielded himself with his left arm, the only thing fast enough to keep Quinn’s attacks at bay. The stable filled with the sound of bone hacking and scraping on metal. Shreds of Jake’s shirtsleeve fell before the onslaught; the gleaming bronze flashing beneath the fabric as it was torn to pieces.
In mid-swing Quinn’s knee came up into Jake’s midsection, smashing him back against the support beam. Quinn lunged just as Jake’s clockwork left shot out and clamped down onto his attacker’s shoulder like a vice.
Quinn’s collarbone snapped, a hollow, popping sound as the bone gave way. The killer’s face twisted in pain and rage. He grabbed at Jake’s arm, trying to dislodge it. And then he wrapped one claw around Jake’s throat.
His breath caught in his throat and his lungs burned in protest. As the pressure of Quinn’s grip increased, a gleam of metal caught Jake’s eye. The broken slasher blade was still stuck in the post near Jake’s head.
“You’re still holding a dead man’s hand,” Jake rasped with cold determination. He brought his right knee up into Quinn’s mid-section like a piston. The clockwork leg hit like a freight train, and Quinn HUFFED with the impact that lifted him off the ground. Jake held firm as Quinn came back down on wobbly legs. He released Quinn’s ruined shoulder, and in a blur his metal fingers clicked around the embedded blade. He swung wide and jammed six inches of steel into the side of Quinn’s head. The blade ruptured Quinn’s right eye as it passed through flesh and bone.
Quinn’s remaining eye went wide and he howled like a wounded animal, staggering back, black blood poured down his cheek. Jake expected the assassin to drop where he stood. Instead, Quinn stopped and stood straight. His left eye focused on Jake, and a wicked smile split his face. He reached up, grabbed the blade, and wrenched it free, dropping it into the dirt at his feet. In a voice with little humanity left, he said slowly, “You’ll have to do better than that.”
Jake knew when he was outmatched. He didn’t hesitate. He only had one chance. He rolled away from the post, and leapt towards the shadows at the back of the barn.
Quinn snarled and dove after him.
Jake took two long strides and jumped. His aim was true. He sailed the remaining fifteen feet and came down on top of his Peacemaker. He clutched at it just as Quinn dropped on top of him. Jake felt the creature grip his shoulder and screamed as Quinn’s claws dug in. Quinn heaved. Jake found himself flying back towards the middle of the barn. He landed hard and slid through the dirt and hay, coming to a quick stop.
Quinn stalked towards him, preparing for the end game.
Jake pulled the hammer of his Peacemaker back with a loud click and aimed between his boots.
Quinn snorted. “Bullets can’t kill me, you imbecile,” he growled.
Jake wondered. “I ain’t much to take a stranger’s word for anything. I guess I better find out, shouldn’t I?”
The hammer came down. The runes of Jake’s pistol flashed bright emerald, and a single shot rang out. The muzzle flash evaporated the shadows for a split-second.
Jake waited.
Quinn froze in his tracks, his eye slowly dropping to the neat hole in the center of his chest. He raised a clawed finger to the wound, surprised to see wisps of smoke drifting through the black fabric.
The door to the stables slid open and Cole stood in the doorway, his pistol drawn. He took in the scene, and his eyes fixed upon the figure of Quinn frozen at the back of the barn.
“What the hell is going on in here?” he shouted.
Jake remained silent, his eyes riveted to Quinn.
In a voice suddenly human, Quinn gasped, “Im … possi—”
The flesh at Quinn’s neck and wrists turned ash white and then a dark gray, his skin crackling and crumbling like a burning cigar. It spread quickly until all of his exposed flesh was gray. In a puff of ash that filled the air around him, Quinn’s body collapsed. His clothing and armor folded in on itself and crumpled in a heap on the ground.
“Hunh …” Jake said, a bit bewildered. “Never seen it do that before.”
“Jake, you mind telling me what just happened?” Cole asked from the doorway.
Without a word, Jake holstered his pistol and slowly got back to his feet. Massaging his throat, he turned to Cole and took his first full, deep breath since the fight began. He bent over and put his hands on his knees while he tried to recover.
“Jake?” Cole asked, worry now filling his voice. He spotted the row of claw-holes in the shoulder of Jake’s shirt and the blood stains seeping through. “Jake, you okay?”
Jake, still trying to catch his breath, rose and took a few steps towards Cole with an It’s about time look on his face.
“Yeah,” he finally grumbled. “I’m fine. What took you so long?”
Cole’s eyes went wide and his hand darted to his pistol. The weapon flew free, aimed at Jake.
For a fleeting instant Jake thought Cole was going to shoot him cold. He only had time to think What the hell? before a shot rang out. Jake flinched. He looked at Cole with a surprised look on his face.
A body dropped to the dusty ground behind him.
Cole tsked a few times and shook his head. “You forgot one, amigo.” He pointed past Jake. “That’s just plain sloppy. And now that’s three you owe me.”
Jake gave Cole an irritated scowl. He looked behind him at the flanker lying on the ground. The man’s right arm looked shattered from Lumpy’s kick, bent at an unnatural angle just below the shoulder. Jake’s Officer’s Colt was clutched in the man’s good hand, but the bullet hole in his forehead indicated he would never kill again.
“Sloppy?” Jake asked, sounding offended. “I was tired and there were four of them. Besides, that’s only two I owe you. That guy in Pueblo don’t count.”
Cole rolled his eyes and chuckled. They both heard people gathering in the street, and someone was hollering for Marshal Sisty.
“So, you wanna tell me why that guy back there belongs in an ashtray now?”
“I don’t think he was human,” Jake said.
“No shit,” Cole replied dryly. After a long pause he said, “I pieced that together on my own, amigo. But what the hell was he?”
Jake shook his head. “I have no idea.” He pulled his Peacemaker and stared at it. “It made that werewolf back in Sedalia go up in blue flames, and it turned what they told me was a demon into a tornado of red lights and smoke. But … that? Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Great,” Cole sighed, holstering his own pistol.
Jake walked over to the gunshot flanker and grabbed his Officer’s Colt, returning it to his right hip. With a rough yank, he pulled the goggles off the corpse. “Aw, hell.…” he grumbled.
“Who is it?” Cole asked.
“Take a look,” Jake replied as he walked over to what was left of Quinn. Wincing at the pain in his shoulder, he gingerly rummaged through the dead assassin’s clothes, trying to keep his fingers out of the ash. He finally found what he was after and pulled out a billfold.
“You know this guy?” Cole asked, staring down at the flanker at his feet. He’d never seen the man before, but he was obviously Chinese.
Jake opened Quinn’s billfold, extracted the cash inside as well as four ticket stubs. The money disappeared quickly into his pocket. Payment for my shirt, he thought. His shoulders slumped as he read the tickets. “God damn it.” Jake shook his head, and the knot of fear returned, tightening in his guts.
“What the hell is going on?” Cole asked, frustrated as he pulled the goggles off another corpse to discover another Chinese assassin.
Jake held up the ticket stubs. “Central Pacific Line,” he said. “Zeppelin stubs … and they were purchased in San Francisco.”
Cole pieced it together instantly. “Oh, no,” he moaned.
Jake walked back to Lumpy’s stall as if the weight of the world pressed down on his shoulders. He grabbed his hat, dusted it off, and set it on his head. Grabbing Lumpy’s bridle, he backed the massive bull out into the middle of the stable.
As Jake pulled himself up into the saddle, Marshal Sisty stepped into the barn and looked at the bodies lying around. A confused frown spread slowly across her face. Billie Sisty was not what most would call an impressive looking woman. She was a bit shorter than average, thick around the middle, with stocky arms and legs. She kept her hair pulled back tight and usually hidden under a black, short-brimmed hat with a silver band. Rumor had it she used to wrestle steers on the Chisholm Trail. She was more politician than Jake cared for, but Jake respected the hell out of her as a damn fine marshal. She was tough, fair, and knew more than a thing or two about what to do when the shooting started.
“You boys mind telling me what in tarnation happened here?” she asked in an accent that was pure Texas and downright pissed off. She crossed her arms over her belly.
Cole moved past Lumpy’s bulk, dodging under the bull’s massive horns, and led his horse Koto out of its stall. With a smooth motion, he slid up into the saddle.
“Sore losers, Billie,” Jake said tiredly, gently rubbing his wounded shoulder. He didn’t want to get into who his attackers really were. He was tired, grumpy, and the information would be of no use to the marshal. “The four of ’em jumped me on account of this.” Jake pulled out the bag in his vest and dangled it in front of her, the shreds of his shirt falling away from the gleaming, heavily scored brass and dark runes of his clockwork left arm. “It seems they wanted what I won fair and square. You can ask anyone who was in the brewery, if you like.”
“I’ll do that,” Billie said. It wasn’t suspicion. It was her job, and she took it seriously. “I may need to talk to you boys about this at some point, but I trust you enough to take your word for it, Jake.”
“Much obliged, Billie.” Jake tipped his hat. “You know where we live, and we’ll be back in town in the next couple of days. I’m heading home, though. I’m beat to hell, bleeding, and I need some sleep.”
“You want the Doc to look at your shoulder?” Billie asked.
“Naw … I’ll be fine.”
Billie slid the stable doors open all the way and let both Jake and Cole ride out. A crowd stood in front of the Colorado Brewery and there were hushed whispers about murder and thieves.
When they were past the crowd, Cole finally spoke up. “You figure them boys were sent by the Tong, don’t you.”
Jake nodded. “It looks like they finally decided to get even for us killing Hang Ah.” He let out a long sigh. “I need to sleep on this one, amigo. I just hope I’m tired enough to not dream tonight.”