Stitches

A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale Volume 2

Smashwords Edition

M.T. Murphy

http://www.luciferaspet.com

©2010 by M.T. Murphy

All rights reserved.

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The man with the noose around his neck was dead. No doubt about it. The problem was they hadn’t hanged him yet.

Pale skin gave way to dark circles around droopy eyes. He wasn’t just pale. He was damn near green. He looked like a week old corpse sitting on the back of that horse. He had no heartbeat and he wasn’t breathing. It was a shame I was the only one who could see that.

“Any last words?” The question came from a tall old man with a mustache who stood next to the horse with rifle in hand.

The doomed rider was as still as a piece of wood. If the prospect of a short drop and a sudden stop troubled him, he didn’t let on. Slowly he turned his head to face the mustached man. His eyes were dull and glossy. One was brown and one was blue.

He scanned the crowd that had gathered to watch his execution on a lovely sunny day. I counted forty people including a young couple who stood right in front. The woman’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. The man had been crying too. A mother and father who had lost a child?

“Monster!” the sobbing woman exclaimed.

No. A mother and father whose child was murdered.

The condemned man looked past all of them, locking eyes with me. “Last words?” His voice was deep but quiet. “Ignorance is bliss. Pray your eyes stay closed to the real monsters in your midst. Get on with it.”

The mustached man looked towards the couple. The father nodded at him. He fired the rifle into the air and slapped the horse’s backside.

The animal lurched forward, taking the rider with it for a single stride before the rope grew taut. The horse continued on its path leaving the man to swing by the neck.

The hanged man was big. No. He was huge. The limb of the old oak tree drooped from his weight. His toes dangled a hand’s width from the ground, almost touching each time he would swing. He was at least seven and a half feet tall if he was an inch. The heavy iron chains they had attached to his wrists must have weighed forty pounds. He didn’t move or struggle. He just swung in the breeze.

They let him hang there for five minutes before cutting him down. It took six men to hoist his body back up on the horse to be hauled away.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, miss.” The mustached man looked genuinely troubled. He reeked of pipe tobacco. It was obvious from the way he fiddled with the corncob pipe in his shirt pocket that he wanted nothing more than to fire up and calm his nerves.

“The name’s Lily. What was all that about?”

“Nice to meet you Lily. I’m Stanley. I run the general store.” He watched the others lead the horse and its grisly cargo away. “It’s hard to even imagine what he did. That feller killed Judy and Todd’s little girl. Brute ripped her clean in half and ate her insides. I ain’t never seen nothing like it.” Stanly covered his mouth with a handkerchief. For a moment I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or be sick.

I placed a hand on his slumped shoulder. “That is truly horrible. Just horrible.”

The surprisingly calm lynch mob slowly disbursed after the corpse was gone. Unlike most such groups I had seen, nobody was celebrating the death they had just caused. The all looked a lot like Stanley: stunned and sickened.

“Where is the sheriff?”

“We got no lawman to speak of. Old Bill Tucker was the sheriff for years, but he died last fall and nobody else wanted the job. We never had no trouble until that man showed up.”

“The killer?”

“Yep. Adam was his name. He came and asked me if he could camp outside of town. He was a rough looking character, but he didn’t have no gun, so I figured he was mostly harmless.” Stanley wiped tears before they had a chance to fall. “Damn it.”

The rest of the crowd paid no mind to me or to the reluctant executioner. They made their way down the hill from the hanging tree and back towards town.

Stanley regained his composure and took an honest look at me for the first time. People mention how I’m taller than most of the men folk. Some ask about my reddish-brown eyes or my Irish brogue. Others tell me that a woman should find a nice fellow and settle down instead of trekking across the west by herself. I got used to the comments a long time ago.

Stanley’s eyes focused on the two Walker Colts strapped to my sides.

“Them’s some mighty big hand cannons you got there. Can you really shoot them things?”

“When I have to.”

He nodded and draped the rifle over his shoulder.

“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. Saloon should have an empty room if you tell them I sent you.”

“I appreciate that, Stanley. A night’s sleep in a decent bed will do me some good.”

“Yep. You never did say what brung you here, Lily.”

“Just passing through. I’m heading to Deadwood in the morning.”

I was unusual and that didn’t sit well with folks. Most couldn’t handle what they didn’t understand. They equated different with malicious. The dead man had been even more unusual than me. I wasn’t convinced that he did the deed. Newcomer shows up, kills a girl, and gets hanged. It was too damn matter-of-fact for me.

I could have left things alone, but it just didn’t feel right. That little girl deserved justice and something told me that justice hadn’t been served.

I wondered what the corpse would have to say about the situation. The only way to know for sure was to ask him.

***

I left my room at the saloon about an hour after sundown. The night crowd was still living it up in the main hall downstairs. That meant that no one was outside to see me leap from my second-story window and land silently on the ground below.

I wore only a shirt, an old pair of britches, my boots and my guns. The cold North Dakota air felt good. There was a full moon out and my blood was boiling.

The silver orb in the sky called to me. I wanted nothing more than to shed my human skin and hunt for deer in the nearby hills. First I had to see if I was right about the dead man.

Stanley told me that the body was taken to the cemetery outside of town for burial in a shallow grave away from the main plots. He was half right.

I found the cemetery easily enough. The tombstones jutted out of a hill on the road about two miles from the saloon. Instead of a fresh shallow grave, I found the corpse lying face-up in a ditch. Either the gravediggers purposefully disrespected him or they were just plain lazy.

The heavy chains still kept his wrists bound tightly together. I knelt down by him to get a closer look. His scars were even worse than I had noticed earlier that day. Deep lines circled his wrists. Similar lines ran down his cheeks and under his jaw. Great care had been shown in making the scars as small as possible around his face, but that just meant using smaller stitches. Areas closest to joints were patched with the largest stitches to allow some freedom of movement at the expense of a jagged, disfiguring groove along the flesh.

Save for the stitches and pallor of death, his face might have been handsome, though it did seem a little too small for the rest of his body. The more I looked at him, the more oddities became apparent. One arm was slightly longer than the other. His left leg was at least two inches shorter than the right. He was like a patchwork man pieced together from a thousand people.

I was so enthralled in my observation that I never saw his fists connect with my sternum. One moment he was dead, the next he sat up and punched me with both hands, sending me flying. The blow itself was loud, but the cracking sound my sternum made as it broke was far more sickening to me.

I crashed into the ground at least thirty feet up the hill from the ditch. Pain filled my chest and blood flooded my mouth. I tried to look back down towards the man, but I could only see blackness and stars.

When my vision returned, he was standing over me. He glanced down at his chains. Then he grasped the chain itself with both hands and pulled. His expression did not change as the middle link of the hardened metal broke.

The taste of blood and the call of the moon were almost more than I could bear. The beast was just below the surface, begging to be let loose, but I couldn’t let her free. Not until I tried to get some answers.

Ignoring my pain, I pulled both six-shooters and aimed them at his chest.

“You tried to kill me,” I said.

“That punch would have killed a human, but I knew you would survive.”

“You did? And just how did you know that?”

“Because I can see supernatural power, and you have no small measure of it.”

I raised the gun in my right hand and fired. The silver projectile hit its target, right between the dead man’s eyes. Instead of the snap of shattering bone, the sound of the bullet ricocheting off of metal accompanied the man’s startled grunt. He shook his head, but stood there expressionless. A bloodless open wound marked the spot where the bullet hit his forehead. The unmistakable shine of polished metal reflected the moon from the hole in his flesh.

“You are full of surprises, dead man. Just who the hell are you?”

“Don’t you mean what the hell are you?”

“A better question is, why did you kill that little girl?”

Fury exploded across his face. He raised his hands and took a step towards me. I rolled to the side at the last instant, narrowly avoiding the two massive mismatched fists that slammed into the ground like cannonballs.

I could feel my beast taunting me in the back of my head. “Let me go,” it whispered, “I will kill him.”

“That’s the problem. I still ain’t sure he’s the one that needs killing,” I thought.

The dead man ripped his hands out of the ground and flung a bushel of dirt at my face. I scooted backwards, rubbing the dirt out of my eyes as I went. He was faster than he looked. A single hand clamped down on my throat and hoisted me up into the air.

Through my blurry vision, I saw the fury had left his face but his grip was growing tighter on my throat.

I pressed the barrel of my Colt against his eye. He didn’t blink or flinch when the cold steel touched his eyeball.

“Is your brain made out of metal, too?” I croaked out the words as best I could. He had nearly closed off my throat with his grip.

“I did not kill that girl.”

“Yep. The weird thing is... I believe you.”

His eyes grew wide and his grip loosened. My body descended until my feet found the ground again.

“I could have killed them all, you know. The whole town. I didn’t have to let them hang me.”

“I believe that, too. Do you believe I’ll fire off a bullet to rattle around in that metal noggin of yours?”

The hand released my throat. “The world would be better off if you pulled the trigger.”

I holstered my guns.

“Maybe, but you never answered my question. Who are you?”

The dead man sat down on the ground and I sat down across from him. After his display of strength with the chain, I whole heartedly believed that he could have killed the whole town. But he didn’t lift a finger at his accusers. That had to mean something.

“My maker called me Adam.”

“Your maker?”

“Yes. He was a genius and madman who fancied himself a god. He thought he created life. Instead, he created me.”

He offered no further explanation and I asked for none.

“I’m Lily, and I’m a—”

“A werewolf. I know. I have seen your kin before. Your eyes glow like theirs, only yours are red.”

“Enough with the introductions. If you didn’t kill the girl then what happened to her?”

Adam sighed and brushed back his thin, wispy hair.

“I do not know. I saw the girl yesterday morning at the general store with her mother. She smiled and waved at me, so I smiled and waved back. Her mother took a look at me and rushed her out of the store. That’s the reaction I usually get.”

He looked down at his shirt and pulled the fabric so he could see it better. Dark brownish red stains covered the bottom of it.

“I went to sleep last night at my camp outside town. When I awoke, this blood was all over my shirt and what was left of her body was next to my fire. The townspeople were already gathered around me.”

I leaned forward and took the bottom of his shirt in my hand. The scent of the girl’s blood was overpowering, but another pungent scent was mixed in with it. It was a scent that was all too familiar.

“Adam, let’s go for a walk.”

***

It was after two o’clock in the morning when I rapped on the front door of the unassuming house on the edge of town. The occupant took his time answering the door. After several minutes, he opened it and greeted me in his sleeping gown tucked into an old pair of pants with his shotgun in hand.

Stanley rubbed the sleep out of his eyes but kept a tight grip on the shotgun.

“Lily? What are you doing here?”

“I’m awful sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour, but I need your help.”

The mustached man stepped outside his house.

“What’s going on, girl?”

“The smell of your pipe tobacco is hard to forget. It’s in your very pores, you know. You framed an innocent man for murder and I think some justice is in order.”

Adam stepped around the side of the house and stood next to me. Stanly staggered backwards, fear of the man he had executed overtaking him. He pulled the trigger on his shotgun without aiming. The shot hit me square in the gut.

The pain from the buckshot and scent from my own blood was the last straw. I fell to a knee as the change took over. My shirt got tighter so I ripped it off. I had enough of my wits about me to take my gun belt off and drop it before my body outgrew it. I kicked off my boots as the pain from my transformation hit me. I screamed then I howled. In less than half a minute, fur covered my body and my stomach was healed from the shotgun blast. The beast was free.

The first thought in my head was to kill the man who shot me. I looked up to find that someone else had the same idea. Adam held the man suspended by his throat against the side of his own house. The shotgun lay broken into two pieces at his feet.

“Why, Stanley?” The anger in Adam’s voice was tinged with sorrow. “You treated me like a friend. Why did you do this?”

Stanley held on to Adam’s wrist with both hands, desperately trying to keep the pressure off his neck.

“I can’t help it! I had to kill her. It’s not my fault. Something inside me just snaps. It was so easy to break into her room and take her. I didn’t plan to kill her. It is like I am watching someone else in my skin when it happens. I like you, Adam. I do. But you were my only choice. I had to make them think it was you. I had to.”

He still hadn’t noticed me. I wanted to rip him open and do to him what he made it look like Adam did to the girl. My claws were ready as I stepped towards them.

Adam’s words stopped me.

“I will kill you, old man.”

It was wrong. The man may have deserved that fate and more, but we couldn’t be the ones to pass that judgment on him. I had never killed a human with my claws and I didn’t plan to start that night.

I placed a monstrous hand on Adam’s shoulder.

“Adam, no. If you do this, you become what they think you are,” I snarled.

“Who is to say they are wrong, werewolf?” He tightened his grip on Stanley’s neck.

“I do. We do not have to be monsters.”

He looked back at me. Stanley was turning blue.

Without a word, he released his grip and dropped the man to the ground. Stanley coughed and grasped his neck.

I knelt down and grabbed his face in my claws, forcing him to look into my glowing crimson eyes.

“Hello, Stanley.”

He stuttered and stammered and tried to move, but I held him clamped in place. I closed my eyes and willed the change to come. The wolf did not give up easily, but I sent her away. When I reopened my eyes, my hands had regained their human shape along with the rest of me.

“Y-you are both monsters.” Stanley’s eyes were wide and drool fell down his chin. He was on the verge of madness.

“No, Stanley. We have discussed this already. You are the only monster here.”

I released him and stood. I pulled on the remains of my tattered clothing and replaced my gun belt.

“Let’s go talk to the mayor. You are going to offer a full confession, leaving out what you saw tonight, right Stanley?”

The old man looked from me to Adam and back again, but he did not reply.

Adam placed his hand on Stanley’s shoulder and spoke, “Right Stanley?”

Stanley nodded and hung his head. “Right.”

***

Stanley’s body swayed in the breeze from the very tree from which they hanged Adam a day earlier. The crowd was smaller for the second hanging. I guess some of the spectators didn’t have the heart to face the innocent man they tried to kill once before.

Stanley had confessed as he was supposed to do. Afterwards he blurted out that Adam was some kind of devil and I was a demon. By then the mayor had heard enough. He apologized to Adam on behalf of the town and immediately said a prayer thanking the good Lord for showing mercy and somehow sparing Adam’s life in what could only be called a miracle.

After they hauled away the corpse, Hannah’s mother walked over to where Adam and I stood. She took his hand and looked him in the eye.

“I am so sorry, Adam. So very sorry.” Tears streamed down her face as her husband tried to console her.

“I am sorry, too,” Adam replied.

The rest of the observers returned to their lives, leaving Adam and I alone under the hanging tree.

“So, what will you do now?” I asked.

He looked towards the dirt road leading out of town.

“I think I’ll head that way. Deadwood is a three day walk from here. After that, I don’t know.”

“In the strangest of coincidences, I too am heading to Deadwood. You care for some company?”

The undead giant nodded. “I’d like that.”

“Sorry about your head, by the way. Did that hurt?” I pointed at the open wound between his eyes.

“Forget about it. I don’t feel pain. Besides, I am held together with stitches. A few more will make little difference in the way I look.”

“Oh, and Adam?”

“What?”

“I don’t think it’s your looks that scare people. It’s probably the fact that you smell like moldy cheese.”

He laughed. “Then I have nothing to worry about. I am sure that filthy dog smell you give off will drown it right out.”

Dear Reader,

Thanks for taking the time to read the continuing exploits of the gun slinging werewolf, Lily Farrell. She got her start in the pages of my novel, Lucifera’s Pet, but she could not be contained there. Stay tuned for more stories about the werewolves, vampires, and boogey-men and women that populate the landscape in my demented head.

Beware feral gerbils. They walk among us.

Howlingly yours,

M.T. Murphy

authormikemurphy@gmail.com

Website: http://www.luciferaspet.com

Myspace/Blog: http://www.myspace.com/luciferaspet

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/werewolfmike

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/MT-Murphy-Author/336152311014

About the Author

M.T. Murphy prefers his vampires evil, his werewolves feral, his facial hair excessive, and thinks that shades of gray are far more interesting than black and white. He lives in a den deep in the woods of Alabama with his beautiful and patient wife, their two ridiculously adorable children, and a were-Schnauzer named Logan.

Table of Contents

Stitches: A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale Volume 2