Something Rotten (Thursday Next 4)

'You said Peregrine twice.'

'He wuz special.'

'Abel Baxter,' whispered the sheriff out of the corner of his mouth, 'one of them Baxter boys. They turn up regular as clockwork, and I kill ’em same ways as regular.'

'How many have you killed?' I whispered back.

'Last count, 'bout sixty. Go home, Abe, I won't tell yer again!'

The youth caught sight of Bradshaw and me and said:

'New deputies, Sheriff? Yer gonna need ’em!'

And it was then that we saw that Abel Baxter wasn't alone. Stepping out from the stables opposite were four disreputable-looking characters. I frowned. They seemed somehow out of place in Death at Double-X Ranch. For a start, none of them wore black, nor did they have tooled-leather double gunbelts with nickel-plated revolvers. Their spurs didn't clink as they walked and their holsters were plain and worn high on the hip – the weapon these men had chosen was the Winchester rifle. I noticed with a shudder that one of the men had a button missing on his frayed vest and the sole on the toe of his boot had come adrift. Flies buzzed around their unwashed and grimy faces and the sweat marks on their hats had stained halfway to the crown. These weren't C-2 generic gunfighters from pulp, but well-described A-ys from a novel of high descriptive quality – and if they could shoot as well as they had been realised by the author, we were in trouble.

The sheriff sensed it too.

'Where yo' friends from, Abe?'

One of the men hooked his Winchester into the crook of his arm and answered in a low Southern drawl:

'Mr Johnson sent us.'

And they opened fire. No waiting, no drama, no narrative pace. Bradshaw and I had already begun to move – squaring up in front of a gunman with a rifle might seem terribly macho but for survival purposes it was a non-starter. Sadly, the sheriff didn't realise this until it was too late. If he had survived until page 164, as he was meant to, he would have taken a slug, rolled twice in the dust after a two-page build-up and lived long enough to say a pithy final goodbye to his sweetheart who would have cradled him in his bloodless dying moments. Not to be. Realistic violent death was to make an unwelcome entry into Death at Double-X. The heavy lead shot entered the sheriff's chest and came out the other side, leaving an exit wound the size of a saucer. He collapsed inelegantly on to his face and lay perfectly still, one arm sprawled outward in a manner unattainable in life and the other hooked beneath him. He didn't collapse flat, either. He ended up bent over on his knees with his backside in the air.

The gunmen stopped firing as soon as there was no target – but Bradshaw, his hunting instincts alerted, had already drawn a bead on the sheriff's killer and fired. There was an almighty detonation, a brief flash and a large cloud of smoke. The eraserhead hit home and the gunman disintegrated mid-stride into a brief chrysanthemum of text which scattered across the main street, the meaning of the words billowing out into a blue haze which hung near the ground for a moment or two before evaporating.

'What are you doing?' I asked, annoyed at his impetuosity.

'Him or us, Thursday,' replied Bradshaw grimly, pulling the lever down on his Martini-Henry to reload, 'him or us.'

'Did you see how much text he was composed of?' I replied angrily. 'He was almost a paragraph long. Only featured characters get that kind of description – somewhere there's going to be a book one character short!'

'But,' replied Bradshaw in an aggrieved tone, 'I didn't know that before I shot him, now, did I?'

I shook my head. Perhaps Bradshaw hadn't noticed the missing button, the sweat stains and the battered shoes, but I had. Erasure of a featured part meant more paperwork than I really wanted to deal with. From form F36/34 (discharge of an eraserhead) and form B9/32 (replacement of featured part) to the P13/36 (narrative damage assessment), I could be bogged down for two whole days. I had thought bureaucracy was bad in the real world, but here in the paper world it was everything.

'So what do we do?' asked Bradshaw. 'Ask politely for them to surrender?'

'I'm thinking,' I replied, pulling out my footnoterphone and pressing the button marked Cat. In fiction, the commonest form of communication was by footnote, but way out here . . .

'Blast!' I muttered again. 'No signal.'

'Nearest repeater station is in The Virginian,' observed Bradshaw as he replaced the spent cartridge and closed the breech before peering outside. 'And

we can't bookjump direct from pulp to classic.'

He was right. We had been crossing from book to book for almost six days, and although we could escape in an emergency, such a course of action would give the Minotaur more than enough time to escape. Things weren't good, but they weren't bad either – yet.

'Hey!' I yelled from the sheriff's office. 'We want to talk!'

'Is that a fact?' came a clear voice from outside. 'Mr Johnson says he's all done talkin’ – less you be in mind to offer amnesty.'

'We can talk about that!' I replied.

There was a beeping noise from my pocket.

'Blast,' I mumbled, consulting the Narrative Proximity Device. 'Bradshaw, we've got a story thread inbound from the east, two hundred and fifty yards and closing. Page seventy-four, line six.'