Chapter 19

Buchanan came to collect Shane shortly before it was time for him to fight. Shane had practiced until the motion of drawing and shooting felt as natural as it had used to feel, but that wasn’t the only way in which he felt different. The coldness in his heart had spread too. It had crawled into his arms and legs and left him feeling like a man made of steel, cast by the same processes that had forged his revolver.
It was the way he had used to feel six years ago. That didn’t seem so very long ago any more.
Buchanan noticed how he was different and couldn’t resist mentioning it but Shane ignored him. Better to maintain the appearance that he had resigned himself to his fate and let Buchanan think that he was beaten than to open his mouth and risk alerting him to the fact that he still had one surviving hope of escape.
He just prayed that Vendetta had passed on his message and that Madison had been receptive to it.
The sun was high overhead when he stepped out of the courthouse. It blazed in the sky like a witness to the coming bout. Tom Freeman was waiting for him on the porch.
‘I always wanted to fight against you,’ he said.
Shane looked down at the ground, ignoring him, but Freeman was persistent. ‘I hear you’ve been practicing,’ he said. ‘That’s good. I want to fight you at your best.’
‘No.’ Shane said quietly. ‘You really don’t want that.’
The dust swirled up on a sluggish breeze and drifted over the crossroads. Shane took one side and Freeman took the other. The town felt more desolate than it had the other day. There was hardly anybody left to watch them any more. All of the other contestants were dead except for Chastity, and only the invigilators remained, watching from their rooftop eyries with wary suspicion, waiting to lend their own guns to the killing if needed.
Shane drew his revolver and took the single bullet that Buchanan gave him. He loaded it like an opium addict shooting a needle into his vein. It hit him with a rush.
In that instant, he wished he had more bullets.
He wished that he could kill everyone in town.
And, in a voice that was getting quieter and quieter with every passing moment, he wished that he was somewhere else, far away from here. Somewhere where he could be free of the gun’s malevolent influence and his abhorrent obsession with it.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. The gun’s mind remained like a layer of scum on the surface of a stagnant pond. Shane took a deep breath and sank beneath it. It surged from the depths of his soul like vomit, terrifying in its intensity, but as it stole over him and smothered his identity with its embrace, it soothed him like a gentle lover and coaxed away his fears. He felt a cool peace come over him, a calm self-assurity: a sense that he was now complete.
He looked into Tom Freeman’s eyes and saw in his expression that the same process was happening inside his mind as well.
Nathaniel stepped up to the edge of the porch in preparation to signal the draw. Shane became absolutely still, his muscles poised like a spring about to uncoil. He heard his heart beating. Its steady rhythm sounded like the distant beating of a drum.
All other sounds faded away, except one.
Nathaniel’s voice. ‘Draw!’
Tom Freeman was fast. He was halfway to firing when Shane’s bullet took him through the side of the head. At a speed of almost 900 feet-per-second the 250 grain bullet smashed through his skull, deforming on impact so that, by the time it entered the soft tissue of his brain, it was tumbling end over end in a storm of shattered skull fragments, pulping everything that it struck. Freeman’s momentum caused him to turn a half-revolution before he hit the ground. Dead.

Shane slowly lowered his smoking gun and shed its poisonous influence from his thoughts like a spider shedding its skin. It departed reluctantly, or maybe it was simply that he found it harder to be parted from it this time and yearned for it to stay. He shivered, in equal parts from fear and excitement.
How many more times can I do this? he wondered. How many more times before I can’t give it up?
Buchanan strode up to him, clapping his hands together in applause. ‘Now that is the Shane Ennis that I remember.’
Shane gave him a cold look and started back towards the courthouse without waiting to be led there. Buchanan held out a hand to stop him. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
Shane still wore the gun belt about his waist, the revolver sheathed in its holster. He had not given it a second’s thought. He had become comfortable wearing it again and, removing it, he understood why Chastity cried so hard when her gun was taken away from her. It was like having his skeleton ripped from his living flesh.
Buchanan saw the murderous look in his eyes and nervously backed away from him. He summoned over two of the invigilators and they escorted Shane back to his cell. Nathaniel came to visit him once he was locked up and congratulated Shane on his victory.
‘Buchanan always assured me that you would make it this far,’ he said. ‘I confess that I did not believe him but here you have proven me wrong. Well done, that is not something that happens often.’
‘Save it for someone who cares.’ Shane muttered sulkily.
The smug look vanished from Nathaniel’s face. ‘You’ll face Chastity tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Tell me something I don’t already know.’
‘At twelve noon.’ Nathaniel told him.
The Gunfighter’s Hour. Shane had guessed it would be then. The tournament was finally coming to an end and its secrets would soon be revealed.
‘Tomorrow,’ he echoed dumbly. ‘Twelve noon.’
If he had not escaped by then, he never would.

The storm had been building for some time, massing its energy until the air seemed heavy with it, tensed to the point of bursting. When it finally chose to erupt, it did so with apocalyptic violence, as if it was the storm that would end the world. Winds of more than a hundred miles an hour stripped the desert like a scythe, choking the landscape in a cloud of razor sharp sand and airborne debris.
Shane would have kept on running had it not been for that storm. He would have kept on running and maybe, in the end, Castor Buchanan would have stopped chasing him. Maybe. It was academic now because the storm had put Shane’s back against the wall and trapped him, and now Castor Buchanan had caught up with him.
The walls of the boarding house shook under the onslaught of the ravenous wind. Every eye in the place was watching him, waiting to see what he would do. Buchanan stood outside, bellowing over the roar of the wind, calling him out.
‘You’d best go out there, son,’ one of the old timers said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to go away.’
Shane wasn’t listening. He was afraid, but it wasn’t Buchanan that scared him. He should have known from the beginning that he could not simply walk away from the Fastest Guns. He was too far gone for that. Two weeks had passed since Spinster’s Peak and he had still not laid down his guns. Instead, he had found more and more reason to use them. He had killed without provocation. The influence that they held over him was growing and he could scarcely think any more without their thoughts intruding on him. He had barely slept in days.
He knew that if he fought Buchanan and won that everything he was would be consumed by his guns. The man he was would cease to exist, and he did not like to think of what they would make him become. And yet his heart cried out for it, tearing his soul in two.
Buchanan’s voice roared from outside. ‘Hunte’s dead, Shane! Let’s finish this.’
There was no escape. Buchanan could not go to Covenant until he had proven himself, and neither could Shane. Bowing to the inevitable, Shane wrapped a scarf around his face. He turned his collar up high, drew the brim of his hat down low to shield his face and went to the door. He had to put his shoulder to it in order to push it open against the force of the wind.
Outside, he was met immediately by a stinging blast of sand. The small town was lucky in that it was only catching the edge of the storm; its full fury raged in the heart of the desert, where it could sometimes be glimpsed through a gap in the sandstorm as a towering pillar of black dust that reached from land to sky. Its noise was tremendous. In addition to the howling of the wind there were the sounds of the town straining against its foundations: the creaking of poorly constructed homes; the whip-crack of tarpaulin roofs half torn away in the wind; and the singing of wires in the scaffold above the main pit.
Shane bowed his head and forced his reluctant feet to bear him onto the road. Buchanan was waiting for him. He turned and walked slowly down the high street, and Shane followed him to the edge of town.
They stood with ten paces between them, their hands poised above their revolvers, the wind casting sheets of black sand between them.
Shane felt as though he had already been beaten. He was certain that he could kill Buchanan; he felt no doubt about that at all. It was his destiny to become one of the Fastest Guns and it filled him with a righteous fire that stirred his spirit.
But Shane did not trust his feelings. He believed in his thoughts. The war between his heart and his mind had ended, and it seemed that his mind had lost.
A dust cloud blew between them and Shane reached instinctively for his gun, knowing that Buchanan would do the same. He drew and fired, expecting to be damned. But in the last moment he found the strength to resist.
The bullet that was meant for Buchanan’s heart tore through his fingers instead.

Shane woke from his memories, hearing footsteps outside his cell. He rose slowly, not daring to get his hopes up in case they were for nothing, and crossed to the window.
Madison and Chastity stood in the alley outside. Madison looked nervous and glanced repeatedly towards the street, afraid that somebody would see her. Shane’s sudden appearance at the window startled her and she recoiled with a gasp, only to be brought up short when Chastity refused to follow her. The little girl stared up at Shane with what looked like wonder, her eyes focussed and oddly intense.
‘Shit!’ Madison exclaimed. ‘You scared me.’
‘You got my message?’
‘Yes.’ She looked down at Chastity, who still stared fixedly at Shane. ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ Madison asked her.
‘She recognises her own kind when she sees one.’ Shane muttered.
Madison glanced sharply at him. He was surprised to see that she understood his meaning. He guessed that Nathaniel had been educating her. How accurate Nathaniel’s information had been, and how much of it had been shared with her, Shane was curious to know. The more ignorant she was, the easier it would be for him to manipulate her.
‘I want to get out of this town tonight,’ he told her. ‘How about you?’
‘I’ve got no reason to want to stay,’ she agreed. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘First I need you to get me out of this cell. Buchanan keeps a key around his neck and acts like it’s the only one there is. That’s bullshit. Nathaniel’s the sort who’d want to have one as well. Think you could get it for me?’
‘If I can’t, I’ll take Buchanan’s.’
‘Go after Nathaniel’s.’ Shane told her firmly. He did not rate her chances of tackling Buchanan. ‘Bring it to me here after it gets dark tonight,’ he said. ‘And bring food and water for the three of us.’
‘Three of us?’
‘Chastity as well,’ he said.
‘Okay.’ She was secretly relieved that he wanted to take Chastity. Despite the circumstances under which they had met, Madison had grown quite protective of the little girl. Like her, she was trapped in Nathaniel’s service and that had forged a bond of sorts between them, at least so far as Madison was concerned. She did not want to leave her behind to what Nathaniel had in store for her. ‘I have a condition,’ she added.
‘What?’
‘Nathaniel’s money; the bounty he put out for your capture. I know where he’s keeping it. I want half of it. You can have the other half if you want.’
Shane frowned at her. ‘Getting out of here is going to be hard enough as it is,’ he started.
‘It isn’t guarded,’ she said quickly. ‘Nathaniel keeps it in a locked room on the ground floor of the Grande. I’ve got a pretty good idea where he keeps the key.’
Shane was not interested in going after the money. They would have problems enough to contend with without adding to their burdens, but he needed Madison’s help if he was to get out of his cell and so he nodded his head. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But get me out of my cell first. We’ll get the money together.’
‘Sure.’ Madison cast a hurried glance back towards the end of the alley. ‘I’d better get going. I told Nathaniel I was taking Chastity for a walk but he’ll get suspicious if I’m gone too long. I’ll be back later.’
‘Be careful,’ Shane warned, and watched as she hurried away. He was not happy placing his trust in her; she did not seem like the sort of person who could be relied upon, but he presently had no other choice. She was the only ally he had.
As soon as she had served her purpose, however, he decided that he would kill her.