What If
by Setcheti
Michelle’s May 2002 M7
Challenge: Do you
believe in the supernatural, the unusual, the out of the ordinary things that
can not be explained? What would the boys do when faced with such a situation?
Write a story where one or more of the boys are caught up with forces beyond
their control. My one stipulation is that there most be some otherwordly figure, (ghost, alien, angel, etc...) there to
help them along. Note: This should not be a horror story! Good Luck, Michelle
Chris knew he wasn’t really awake…but he knew he couldn’t really be asleep, either. The last thing he remembered was circling around some rocks and jumping one of the outlaws that was shooting at his men, a blur of movement at the corner of his eye and then nothing. “Am I dead?” he asked aloud, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. “Did I get killed, is that what this is?”
No, you were injured because you didn’t trust one of your men.
Chris didn’t know who that voice belonged to…but it sounded familiar and he had to admit it was right. “Can’t trust him. He ran once…”
Yes. Disappointment was evident, but the gunslinger got the feeling it was directed at him instead of at the errant gambler. But have you ever considered…what would have happened if he hadn’t?
“Some people wouldn’t have died that day, maybe.” He didn’t think about the words, just spat them out. “Things might have gone a lot different.”
Yes. Again, a pause. Things would have been very different. Perhaps that is what you need to see, to understand.
Chris was getting irritated—not that he was ever very far from it at the best of times. “I just said that, and I understand just fine! Hell, even if he hadn’t taken off then, I’m sure he would have turned tail later on and probably made things even worse!”
Hmm…perhaps. Why don’t I show you then, what would have happened? Chris was suddenly a ghost—at least, that’s what it felt like to him. The voice was in his ear now, a reassuring whisper. This state of being is temporary. Here is that path. Simply watch, it will be over quickly.
And Chris saw. Ezra coming back from patrol, Buck riding out. The surprise attack happening, just like
before… “Hey, but they only snuck up on
us because Ezra wasn’t where he was supposed to be!” No answer.
The six men were chained, just like before…but this time Ezra was one of
them, putting his talented hands to work picking the locks, getting everyone
else’s hands free. Ezra’s quick wit
joined in the conversation with the one-eyed sergeant, antagonizing the man,
drawing him closer. They made short work
of him… “But…shouldn’t Buck be here by
now? Ezra was here already…” and the fight was
on. They won the cannon and the clifftop with that fight…but the gambler went down,
gut-shot by a stray bullet. More
fighting, JD was killed before they managed to kill
Nathan staying in the village with Rain, Josiah going
back to his church for a few weeks and then drifting out of town, never to be
seen there again.
He himself going with Vin to
Chris tried to close his eyes against the rest and found that he
couldn’t. He saw himself drifting back
up into the Territories, resuming his old habit of stopping every few days in
some little town to get drunk and then hitting the trail again once he was
sober…and he saw himself gunned down in an alley by three men he vaguely
recognized as having been with
You understand. It wasn’t a question, but Chris nodded anyway. If you must know, your man suspected an ambush and changed his route to compensate; along the new route he saw the mine and stopped to look inside it. Had he not done this, you all would have been dead.
Chris woke up in Nathan’s clinic with those words still echoing in his head. It was dark and quiet in the clinic, and he could just make out the shape of someone sitting beside his bed, head cradled in his hands. Chris must have made some sound, because the bowed head shot up and a quick hand turned up the lamp.
The gunslinger blinked; it was Ezra. The normally dapper gambler looked tired and disheveled, but he smiled a rare, genuine smile when he saw his leader’s turquoise eyes open. “And you accuse me of oversleeping, Mr. Larabee,” he chided gently. “We were beginning to wonder if you were going to wake up at all. Ah’ll go fetch Nathan…”
“Wait.” Chris cleared his throat, and Ezra was quick to offer him some water which he drank gratefully. He cleared his throat again, this time with better results. “How long?”
“Two days.” Ezra looked unaccountably nervous about something. “Ah really must go get Mr. Jackson, he was quite specific…”
The clinic door opened. “Dammit, Ezra, I told you no lights in here…” The angry healer took in the scene before him, but to Chris’ surprise his scowl deepened. “And I told you to come get me the minute he woke up,” Nathan hissed at the gambler. “You ain’t good for nothin’, you know that? Get out of here, don’t want to have to look at you an’ I’m sure Chris don’t either.”
Larabee’s surprise turned to shock when without another word Ezra patted his arm and headed for the door, clearly giving Nathan a wide berth. Chris suddenly had a feeling that he needed to know what was going on—before Ezra left. “Ez, wait. Would you do something for me?”
The gambler stopped with his hand on the door and turned back around. “Certainly, Mr. Larabee, you have only to ask…”
“Shut up, Ezra!” Nathan growled. “What do you need, Chris? I’ll make sure he does it.”
The short fuse that was Larabee’s temper caught a spark and started to burn. “I wasn’t talkin’ to you, Jackson,” Chris growled slowly; his head was throbbing, so yelling wasn’t an option. “Ezra, could you go round up the rest of the boys for me, tell them I need to see them right now…and then I’d appreciate it if you’d go watch the jail until I send someone to relieve you.” Ezra nodded once and gave his usual two-fingered salute before disappearing out the door. Chris returned his attention to Nathan. “Why no light? My eyes feel fine.”
“’Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your eyes; I was ‘fraid it might disturb you. Now let me get you somethin’ for the pain…”
“You mean something to knock me back out.” Chris’ eyes narrowed and he cautiously pushed himself up a little, pushing aside Nathan’s protest. “My head hurts, but other than that I don’t feel too bad. Two days?”
“You had a bad concussion—which is why I told that no-good Southerner to come get me if you started to wake up. How long you been awake?”
“Minute or so—and I told him to wait, anyway.” The healer grunted at that and Larabee’s fuse shortened even more, but he held his tongue. “Anyone else get hurt?”
“JD took one in the leg, but it ain’t too bad,” Nathan told him. “Buck’s been keepin’ him in bed over to his room until that fever he’s got is gone. Everyone else is just fine.”
Chris just nodded and scooted up a little farther against the head of the bed. By the time the other men had arrived he’d already fended off the noxious cup of oblivion-inducing tea two more times and his temper was shorter than ever. “Took you boys long enough.”
“Someone ain’t happy,” Vin chuckled. “’Bout time you decided to wake up, Cowboy.”
“Guess we ain’t gonna have to kill that damn gambler after all,” Buck snorted. “How’s your head?”
“Hurts like hell,” Larabee snarled.
He saw Nathan’s hand move and snapped out, “If you so much as pick that
up,
Nathan distanced himself from the cup and held up a placating hand. “Just want you to rest…”
“Uh huh.” Chris’ scowl deepened. “And what the hell to you mean, you won’t have to kill him? What did he do?”
Four confused, worried looks were exchanged. Finally Josiah rumbled quietly, “You don’t remember, Chris?”
“He took a real hard knock to the head…”
“We were hopin’ you’d be able to tell us…”
“Pieced together what might have gone on…”
The Larabee glare shut them all up. “I remember bein’ in the middle of a gunfight, holed up in the rocks and Standish was watching my back. Now why don’t you boys tell me what’s been going on while I was out, and I want to hear it all.”
After a moment of foot-shuffling hesitation they told him – what they knew, what they didn’t, and what they’d done about it. By the time they were finished the look on their leader’s face had them all edging for the door. “So for two days Ezra’s been doing all mine, JD’s and Nathan’s patrols as well as his own, and then at night you’ve been making him sit up here alone in complete darkness…all because you didn’t know what happened.” No one said anything. “And he never said a word, did he?”
Vin looked around at the other men. “Nope, he didn’t; he never said a word.”
Buck shifted his feet. “Just thought he was feelin’ guilty.”
“Good thing for him if he was,” Nathan said darkly. “He damn near got Chris killed; he’s lucky we didn’t toss his worthless ass in jail.”
Chris reigned in an angry roar with an effort. “And just how did you boys know what happened out there?” he hissed. “Did you ask him?”
“No,” Josiah answered slowly. “He kept talking nonsense, and…and I…”
“Knocked the shit out of him,” Buck filled in. “Knocked him out for a minute, I think.”
“He kept sayin’, ‘why did you do it’ over and over again, Cowboy,” Vin explained quietly; he could see Larabee’s anger turning to rage and knew they had all made a terrible mistake. “What did…you do?”
“I moved away from him,” Chris said tightly. “He was coverin’ me, and I moved away from him into those rocks, got where he couldn’t see me and then did something stupid. He probably saved my life, now that I think about it; he would have had to break cover to come after me. I’m amazed he ain’t hurt.” He saw an uncomfortable look pass between his men and paled. “Tell me one of you knows he isn’t hurt.”
It was Vin who spoke up again. “Wish we could, Cowboy,” he said quietly. “But it mightn’t just have been them outlaws that hurt him. We…ain’t been too easy on Ez these past two days.”
“Shit.” Chris closed his eyes for a minute, trying to think. A little voice in the back of his mind whispered that if he’d needed any more proof, there it was; the gambler had stuck around for two days and taken all the abuse his so-called ‘friends’ had dished out just to make sure that Larabee was going to be all right—and he’d never said a word in his own defense. “All right, we’ve got to get a handle on this thing right now, before it can go any farther; I’m sure people in town have picked up on what’s going on, and we don’t need this to get any uglier than it already has.”
No one said anything, but the looks that passed between the four men chilled him. “Might be a little late for that,” Josiah rumbled softly, shooting an ‘I told you so’ look at Nathan. “Let’s just say that Ezra ain’t been too welcome most places this past day or so.”
“Shit.” Larabee said again. “Oh, this is just goddamn wonderful; I’m out of it for a little while and the four of you manage to send everything straight to hell—guess I should be grateful those outlaws didn’t kill me, you probably would have hung him.” No one said anything again, and Chris groaned. “Dammit, don’t even tell me any more! I’m about ready to shoot the lot of you right now. Now here’s how it’s gonna be; Vin, you’re gonna go down to the jail to get Ez and bring him up here. Then you’re all gonna apologize, and I do mean grovel or I’ll make you do it again until I’m satisfied. And then tomorrow you will tell everyone in town just how much of stupid assholes the four of you have been—when you get a break from your duties, that is, because I don’t intend to make Standish ride patrol or do anything else he doesn’t want to for at least a week. Do you all understand me?” Four nods; no one would look at him. “Good. Vin, get your ass down there and get him.”
Ezra stepped through the clinic door with Vin behind him , fully aware that the tracker was in position to prevent him from escaping. He took in the shuttered expressions of Buck, Josiah and Nathan without much surprise, but the fury on Chris Larabee’s face hit him hard; he had been so hoping that Chris would have remembered what happened. Now he had no hope; he’d be lucky if the worst they did was run him out of town. Ezra straightened as much as he could and tried to force his features into their usual expressionless mask. “Mr. Larabee, you sent for me?”
Chris groaned internally; this was even worse than he’d thought. “Vin, I take it you didn’t bother to tell him what I wanted him for?”
The tracker shrugged, but there was concern in his eyes. “He was asleep, Chris; I had a devil of a time wakin’ him.”
“It was an inadvertent circumstance, I assure you,” Ezra explained hurriedly, hearing the nervous tremor in his own voice as he saw the gunslinger’s expression darken even further. Without thinking about it, he took a step back…and ran into Vin, throwing himself off balance.
Larabee sat bolt upright when he saw the gambler falter, ignoring the renewed spike of pain behind his eyes brought on by the sudden movement. “Shit! Vin, catch him! Buck, grab that chair…” Stunned green eyes never left his as the two men forced Ezra into the chair he had only recently vacated beside the bed, and Chris was horrified to realized that those eyes were dull and glazed—not to mention red-rimmed and bloodshot from too little sleep. A barely concealed wince as the man sat only served to convince Chris that Ezra hadn’t escaped the shootout unscathed.
Nathan had seen it too, and the healer was already busy unbuttoning the gambler’s vest and shirt. One faintly trembling hand raised to brush him away, but when Josiah caught the protesting hand it went almost limp in his grasp and he realized that it had been an instinctive gesture only, one with no real objection behind it. With his free hand, the older man gently forced Ezra to turn his head and look at him, careful not to put pressure on the still-livid bruise that he himself had left on the younger man’s jaw. “Son, why didn’t you tell us what happened?” he asked quietly.
Ezra frowned, making a halfhearted and completely unsuccessful attempt to twitch away from the restraining hand. “You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“He was waiting for me to wake up and tell you, weren’t you, Ezra?” Chris clarified. “And when Vin woke him up in the jail just now and dragged him back up here, I’m guessing he thought I didn’t remember and that I would just go along with whatever all of you told me.” He saw Ezra blink up at Josiah and nod slightly, and he sighed. “I remember, Ezra—and I told them. They know it was my fault and not yours.”
Nathan by this time had gotten a glimpse under the gambler’s clothes and what he’d seen had told him enough. He took hold of the cup he’d been trying to offer Chris just a short while ago and held it up to the smaller man’s mouth. “Here, Ezra, drink this; it’ll help with that fever you’ve got…”
The gambler pushed the cup away. “No, that’s for Chris…”
“Chris don’t need this; he don’t have no fever,” Nathan responded firmly. “You just drink this, now.” He put the cup back up to Ezra’s lips and tilted it, letting the flow of liquid drown out any further objection. Ezra choked a little but swallowed the bitter medicine, and after only a few minutes he blinked once, then again, and then slumped over like a puppet with cut strings. Nathan caught him before he could fall from the chair and he and Josiah carefully moved the sleeping man onto the narrow cot where the healer lost no time stripping the gambler of his upper clothing to reveal the two layers of makeshift bandages wrapped around his ribcage. The wrappings were quickly cut away, and Nathan gently probed the deep bruises that adorned Ezra’s ribs and the swollen red gash that marked the spot where a bullet had apparently come too close to reaching its mark. “This graze is infected, but not too bad—he must have tried to tend it some. Looks like two cracked ribs and a few more bruised. And now that I think about it…” He touched the bruised jaw lightly and then ran his hand over the back of the gambler’s head, finding the lump he’d been hoping wasn’t there. “Looks like you did more than just ring his bell, Josiah; I think he might have been just a little concussed, probably why he’s just been goin’ along with everything so peaceful-like these past two days—must’ve been too confused to argue with us.”
Or too scared to, Larabee amended silently. “If I ever get killed, boys, you do me a favor; each of you pick a different direction and just keep ridin’, leave the town to Ezra and JD.” He settled back into his pillows with a sigh. “Buck, you’d best bet gettin’ back to JD now, let him know what’s happened. Vin, you’re on watch and Josiah will relieve you in the morning—Nathan’s gonna need him here for the time being to help get Ezra taken care of. And I’m goin’ back to sleep.”
An indefinite amount of time later Chris realized that he was back where he’d started from—and the soft voice was back as well. Very good, it said. You have mended the situation; I hope you remember this so it need not happen again.
Chris suddenly remembered where he’d last heard that voice. “Sarah? Sarah, is that you?”
There was a shimmer, like snow falling off a branch in the sunlight, and his wife was standing there with a smile on her face. It was the smile he remembered from every time she’d been proud of him, and it warmed a place inside the gunslinger’s heart that he’d thought would be frozen permanently. “I couldn’t let you kill him,” she said. “It would have destroyed you.”
“I wouldn’t have…” But the vision was there again, different this time; he saw - or was that remembered? - himself waking up in the clinic, snapping at Ezra in his pain and irritation and then taking Nathan’s foul herbal medicine and going back to sleep…only to wake a day and a half later, clear-headed, to find that the gambler was gone, having been run out of town by the other men that same night after the healer had mistakenly taken Larabee’s harsh remarks as confirmation that Ezra was indeed responsible for what had happened. The gambler’s horse had returned three days after, riderless. Vin had backtracked the animal, but it had already been too late. Chris shut his eyes and fought back the bile that had risen in his throat at the sight of what the tracker had found when he reached the spot where Ezra had apparently fallen from his horse, overcome by injury and exhaustion. “You’re right,” he managed. “It…it would have. God, Sarah, what if I hadn’t listened to you?”
“You did, so it doesn’t matter.” He had the distinct feeling that she wanted to move closer to him, to touch him, but she couldn’t. “You’ve been allowed to change what might have been, what if you learn something from it…and move on.”
Chris reached out to her…but suddenly found himself waking up again in Nathan’s clinic. Early morning light was creeping into the room, and turning his head he saw Ezra still sound asleep on the cot beside him. Wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, hearing his wife’s voice still echoing in his ears, he smiled his first real smile in years and whispered, “What if we start over?”