The Boys Are Back InTown

 The sun didn’t set over Red Creek; it bled out, staining the bruised clouds the color of a fresh-cut throat.

Marshal Eli Vance stood on the boardwalk outside the dry goods store, his thumb hooked instinctively in his gun belt. He watched the horizon, where the dust devils were kicking up along the alkali flats. They weren’t natural dust devils. They were too steady, too purposeful, riding the wind straight down the main drag.

Inside the Gilded Spur, the piano player hit a flat note and abruptly stopped. The barroom chatter died as if a collective throat had been slit. Boots scraped against floorboards as men backed away from the windows, finding sudden, intense fascination with the bottom of their whiskey glasses.

Out on the street, the hinges of the batwing doors in every saloon seemed to creak in unison.

The three riders crossed the town line at a slow, deliberate walk. Their duster coats were stiff with dried mud and miles of bad road, the brims of their hats pulled low enough to cast their eyes in permanent shadow. They didn't look like men who had come to trade pelts or buy dry goods. They looked like a judgement.

Eli’s mouth tasted like copper. He knew those horses. He knew those saddles. Most of all, he knew the men riding them.

Lucas Cole rode in the center. To his right was "Toothpick" Joe, lean as a rail and twice as sharp, and to his left was Aaron Vance—Eli’s blood brother, though Aaron hadn't answered to that name in a decade.

They pulled their mounts to a halt right in front of the marshal. The animals huffed plumes of white air into the cooling desert dusk, lathered in gray foam.

Eli didn’t move his hand from his holster, but his fingers twitched. "Lucas," he said, his voice grating like gravel under a boot heel. "You served your time. Or you were supposed to. Judge Parker’s ledger said twenty years."

Lucas pushed back his hat. His face was a map of old scars and unholy weather, his eyes milky-pale, like dead grease. A slow, thin smile cracked dry, chapped lips.

"Judge Parker's rotting under six feet of Kansas clay, Eli," Lucas said, his voice soft, carrying an easy, terrifying cadence. "And so is the governor who signed his papers. Seems to us the law changed its mind."

"The law didn't change," Eli spat, stepping off the boardwalk into the dusty street. "Red Creek is peaceful now. We got a church. We got a schoolhouse. We don't want your kind of noise."

Aaron shifted in his saddle. He looked down at his older brother, and there was no warmth in it—just the hollow gaze of a ghost haunting its own grave. "You always were a hypocrite, Eli. Built yourself a tin star on the bones of the men who rode with you. You traded our blood for a Sunday shave."

"I grew up, Aaron. You should try it."

Lucas chuckled, a dry, rattling sound that made the hair on the back of Eli’s neck stand up. "We didn't come back for apologies, Eli. We came back for what was left behind. That iron safe in the bank behind you? It holds the bounty from the 4:10 stage out of Santa Fe. Our bounty. Blood money with our names burned into the stamps."

"That money belongs to the town now," Eli said, planting his boots firmly in the dirt. "It built the schoolhouse. It paved the road. It stays."

Lucas didn't argue. He didn't raise his voice. He simply let his right hand drift downward, hovering mere inches from the polished rosewood grip of his Colt.

"The boys are back in town, Eli," Lucas whispered, the shadows swallowing the last rays of daylight. "And the dead don't pay taxes."

The wind howled down the canyon, sweeping a tumbleweed across the empty street between them.

Eli’s mind flashed back fifteen years, to burning homesteads and screams in the dark, remembering the monsters he used to run with, and the one he had tried so desperately to outlive. He knew how this ended. There was no talking them down. There was only the math of lead and steel.

His thumb slipped over the hammer of his revolver.

"Then let's see how well you remember the dirt," Eli said.

The first shot shattered the stillness of the Red Creek dusk, and in the blink of an eye, the street erupted into fire.