Orion's Belt - A Dark Sci-Fi Western Romance

“Good shot,” I call back. “But shoot that close to me again and it’ll be your last one.”

“Sorry,” a female voice calls back. “You were in the way.”

I look over my shoulder and see Josie standing there, my rifle in her hands, a thin plume of smoke coming from the barrel.

I’ve known dangerous women in my time. I didn’t pick her for one, but I guess nobody seems dangerous when they’re tied to train tracks. I thought she was too small, too young, and too weak to do something like that. Killing a man in cold blood isn’t the action of a weak woman. Might not be the action of a sane one neither, especially given the way she’s grinning her little head off.

“Git up here and take cover,” I growl. “You’re waiting to get shot, standing there.”

Fortunately for her, most of the posse has already broken off the attack. Seeing a friend’s brains in the dirt tends to frighten even the boldest man. A few keep firing, and they’re the ones who end up dead. My boys and me, we live our lives by our guns. Attacking us is the same thing as asking the reaper for a pass direct to hell.

When the plain is clear of people trying to kill us, I turn to Josie.

“Want to explain that?”

“Shoot bad man,” she says, sassy as hell. “That explain it for ya?”

I let the attitude slide for the moment. I’m more interested in getting information out of her than teaching her a lesson — though I’m thinking that will come. “You’re more than a runaway or a jilted bride, aren’t you girl. Tell me what you know. About all this.”

“I know they’ll think twice before coming for me again.”

“Who were they?”

“Stupid fellers who thought they were going to get paid for killing me.”

“It’s not very common that they send bounty hunters after women.”

“You haven’t been checking the bounty boards. Women’s faces are nailed up there as much as men these days.”

“Uh huh.”

She’s got me curious, but I know what happens to the curious. They get caught. And with as much noise as we just made out here, there’s going to be all kinds of the wrong sort of attention coming down on us. We need to move. I’ll question her later, and when I do, I’ll do it in a way she won’t be able to avoid answering.

“Let’s bury these boys and move on.”

Josie

He pushes a shovel into my hand. “Don’t usually have girls dig the graves, but don’t usually have girls doing the killing either.”

“I’m not really a girl, mister. I’m a woman. And I’m a mad one.”

“Is that right,” he laughs, gruffly. There’s more respect in his eyes though. No man takes a woman serious if he has to pry her off the train tracks, but I don’t look like a damsel in distress anymore, not now I’ve turned a man’s skull into bone splinters.

I don’t mind digging a grave. With any luck, this will be the first of many graves I dig for the bastards who want to put me in one. The men who came today, they’re just peons, doing their job. When they don’t get back to their boss, he’ll send more. And more. He will send wave after wave of bastards for my blood, and in the end, I’m going to fucking kill him.

Orion

I watch her dig, an angry expression twisting her face every time her spade hits soil. She’s consumed with hatred — though even that doesn’t make her dig as fast as the men do. Guns are equalizers for women in a way that spades aren’t. Half an hour goes by and she’s barely dug a hole big enough to bury a dog in. The rest of the posse who attacked us are already in the ground and she’s still sweating away.

I wanted to get away quickly, but I decide instead to let her dig. Could take another hour to get even halfway there, but dammit, she’s going to dig that damn hole if it’s the last thing she does. Taking a shot like that over my head, setting off the whole damn firefight. We could all have been killed thanks to her recklessness.

“Should we finish that off?” Paris is next to me. He wants to move on. We all do.

“Nope. She can finish what she started.”

“There could be more riders. And those gunshots will have alerted the law. They can have birds here from the other side of the planet in less than an hour.”

“I know.”

Used to be you could have a gunfight in the desert and nobody would ever know, but things are changing. Little black specks in the sky see everything that goes on down here. Sometimes they decide they don’t like what they see, and then they come down and try to do something about it.