Nineteen
They promised that we could leave together. I believed them. Of course I did. What other choice did I have, precisely? I swallowed my fear, and I packed up Baron onto his horse. I tried to keep my gaze level as I watched him climb up. I fit my foot into my own stirrup. And then my foot settled into the stirrup and I lifted up. And then we started to ride.
I don’t know where Baron was thinking we would go. I don’t know what he thought I thought. There was a question in my mind of whether or not he would actually be able to leave. I wasn’t sure. And I’m still not sure whether or not he could bring himself to let them take the gang away from him. Maybe he thought that he could, for my sake. Or maybe he thought that he’d put me somewhere while he ran off.
I didn’t get the chance to find out. I forced myself to stay upright in the saddle, too tired from the day to really feel prepared for the world around me. Too tired to make it as far as another city, as far as I could tell. But I didn’t have any other choice. It was leave or get myself killed, and I wasn’t ready to get myself killed.
The town was a tight knot of people in a playground of empty buildings. So there was a lot of space where nobody stayed, nobody lived, and there wasn’t anybody around. We were out of the lived-in portion within a matter of two minutes. Almost five minutes after that, we had made it to the edge of what used to be Perdition. I was leaning on my arms, stiff-elbowed and holding me away from the ground.
It was the best that I could hope for in the circumstances, and it was only going to get worse as the night went on. I did what I had to do, which was to pretend that it was just another five minutes.
I didn’t see anything. I felt it before I saw it, and then I was reacting like a horse swishing its tail at flies, pure instinct with nothing else to back it up. I wish I could think that made a difference, but I suspect it didn’t.
The rope was pulled taut across the road, caught me across the chest, and I twisted in the saddle to pull out of it. I think I let out a yell, but I was half-asleep, and I might have imagined it. Either way, Baron must have heard something. He wheeled his horse around, and started back toward me. Maybe he thought, at that point, I’d just fallen off the horse.
A shot rang out. He let out a groan and fell off the horse, and his shifted off to the side as his weight pulled it. I watched him fall in slow-motion. In the pitch-darkness of the night, a pair of figures stepped out, wrapped their arms around me and started dragging. I kicked at them. They pulled.
“Sorry,” the man holding my left side growled. “That’s just how it goes.”
They walked for a long time. I assumed that at some point, I would be set back down and made to walk for myself. Baron wouldn’t have bothered to carry me all that way. I don’t know whether that was out of fundamental respect for me, or because he thought that I needed to pull my own weight. There was nothing romantic about the way I was being carried.
By the time we reached lit streets again, my joints hurt so bad that I couldn’t imagine. It was almost a blessing when they dropped me on the rough wooden floors of the saloon, where I’d left only twenty minutes before, with a plan and a future and hope that things might not go wrong. I thought wrong then. I thought that they were going to kill me.
Of course, it would have been easier to kill me in the street, so I should have thought better. Call it the naivete of youth. Then I started to think about other things that they could be planning instead, and I decided that shot dead in the street might have been preferable.
Leanne was standing behind the bar. Her shoulders were slumped with tiredness or sadness or both, and she was massaging the thick glass of a handled mug. She set it down after a moment and let out a long, low breath.
“I’m sorry you had to be a part of that, sweetheart.”
I tried to lift myself up from the floor. A boot pressed between my shoulder blades, with no particular regard for the way that it painfully smashed my breasts into the floorboards.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re not going to be leaving.”
“You said—”
“And I lied,” Leanne snapped. “I don’t need you to tell me that I lied about it, girl. But that’s how it’s going to be. So get comfortable with it. We’re not going to do nothin’ to you. Not unless you deserve it. But you’re going to be staying here. And that’s how it’s going to be. No funny stuff. We clear?”
I let my head lower down until it pressed into the floor. I could see the grain of the wood where it had started to go ragged with the lack of humidity.
“Can I at least get off the floor, then?”