Here’s something a little different. This is the opening of a short story I wrote this summer for an upcoming anthology, Dark and Stormy Knights, edited by P.N. Elrod. I’ve had to start picking and choosing which anthologies I write for, but I wasn’t going to turn this one down!
Short stories are fun for me because I get to explore characters and ideas that I don’t have room for in the novels. It’s a great way to explore the world, and I think makes the novels richer in the long run since there’s a whole history I can draw on. “God’s Creatures” features Cormac, the bad-boy bounty hunter from the series, and I had so much fun getting inside his head.
***
“God’s Creatures” by Carrie Vaughn
Cormac waited in the cab of his Jeep, watching each car that pulled into the rest area on I-25 north of Monument. So far, none of them looked like the one he was waiting for. A lot of truckers stopped here, with a few road trippers thrown in, all shapes and sizes. McNeill would stand out, when he made his appearance.
Forty-five minutes after he was due, the aggressively souped-up pickup truck veered off the freeway and came up the lane. It had oversized tires, lights on the rollbar, a gun rack–empty for now–in the back window and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. McNeill was that kind of asshole.
Cormac stepped out of the Jeep; McNeill saw him and swerved to park a couple of spots down. The guy climbed out of his truck and dropped to the ground. He was tall and stocky, wearing worn jeans and a flannel shirt over a white T. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t cold in the winter air, but he was shrugging and tense, trying to keep warm. Cormac waited for him.
“You’re supposed to be keeping your head down,” Cormac said flatly, prodding on purpose, knowing it would piss McNeill off.
“What? My head’s down.” He looked around, frowning, appearing smug because there weren’t any cops around.
“What’s your problem?”
“Registration sticker on your plate’s expired. That’s like waving a flag at the cops,” Cormac said, nodding toward the back end of the truck.
“And I don’t give a fucking cent to an illegal government.” He pulled himself straighter, like he was daring Cormac to make a big deal out of it.
Yeah, McNeill was one of those. Didn’t seem to care that the cops wouldn’t get you on the weapons stockpiles or the conspiracy charges. They nailed you on back taxes and traffic violations. You covered your ass on the little things as the price of doing business. But that was why McNeill was a go-between and Cormac did the heavy lifting.
“What’s the job?” Cormac said.
He’d gotten a call two days ago. A rancher he’d worked with before had some trouble–Cormac’s kind of trouble. They both knew McNeill, who spent a lot of time traveling around the state, so he sent McNeill with the details you didn’t talk about over the phone and the down payment. McNeill didn’t know what exactly Cormac did. He probably assumed he was some kind of hit man.
Which was mostly true.
McNeill went back to his truck and returned with a manila envelope, which he handed to Cormac. He only took a brief look inside, finding a page of description and a business-sized envelope, thick with cash. There’d be 10 hundred-dollar bills. He wasn’t going to count it out in the open, but he did pull out a bill and hand it to McNeill for payment.
“Thanks,” McNeill said, shoving the hundred in his pocket. “Good luck, man.”
Cormac had already turned back to the Jeep.
#
He arrived at Joe Harrison’s ranch in Lamar early the next morning. The old man was waiting for him on the front porch of the ramshackle house. The two-story building was probably close to a hundred years old. It needed a new roof and a coat of paint at the very least. But with a place like this, any extra money the family earned went right back into the ranch. The barns and fencing would get repairs before the house did.
“Thanks for coming,” Harrison said as Cormac left the Jeep, and walked down to shake his hand. The rancher was in his sixties, his face furrowed and weathered, tough as leather from spending his life raising cattle out here. The kind of guy who was more at home with barbed wire and baling twine than a comfortable chair and a TV set.
“Let’s take a look,” Cormac said.
Harrison opened a gate in the fence, and they rode in Cormac’s Jeep, straight across the prairie for about three miles. Harrison navigated by landmarks, pointing to show Cormac the way.
“There, it’s right there,” Harrison said finally, and Cormac stopped the Jeep.
Harrison led him to a spot where stands of scrub oak followed the contour of the hills, bordering the open plains. A carcass lay here, partly sheltered by the wind, flattening the grass. About a week old, Cormac guessed. The steer, a typical rust-and-cream-colored Hereford, had been savaged, its gut ripped open from sternum to tail, its face and tongue torn out, its throat flayed. Scavengers had been through since then — scraps of hair and bone radiated out from the remains. Most of what was left were leathery skin and hair over a ribcage and a leering, ragged skull.
***
Read the rest of the story in Dark and Stormy Knights, edited by P.N. Elrod, due out in 2010.
