Chapter Two

While unusual things were busy happening in the desert, the town of Carter's Refuge - a few dozen miles to the southwest - was right in the middle of an extremely ordinary day.

There was nothing the least bit unusual about the town. It had one ordinary main street, which ran past rows of very ordinary storefronts. A row of ordinary horses were tied to posts in front of the town's very ordinary saloon, from whence could be heard the very ordinary sound of an extremely ordinary piano.

If you were to picture a typical Wild Western town... well, you'd have exactly the right idea.

Describing the inside of the tavern is almost a waste. It had the usual bar, the usual serving girls, the usual raucous patrons - some of whom were about to find themselves in the one usual cell of the town's usual jail.

Towards the back of the saloon, Polk Buckhorn stared into the bottom of a glass.

His friends would have called him Buck, except that he didn't have any. This was partly because he was a drifter, and mostly because he was a rotten bastard.

He'd been sober for four days now - a personal record, as best as he could recall - and he'd decided to celebrate the occasion with a drink. He was sloppy drunk now, and in a mean mood; this was quite possibly the least unusual thing in the history of usual things.

If you were to take the spare parts that were left over after making a hideous nightmare thing and arrange them into the rough shape of a man, you'd get something not unlike Polk Buckhorn. He wasn't sitting in his chair so much as he appeared to have collapsed into it; never had a collection of such powerful limbs looked so much like a heap of debris. His hair was matted; his clothes were torn. He was forty, but could have passed for sixty; he had the drawn face of a man whom life had treated unkindly, and who was inclined to bear a grudge.

In all fairness to Buck, his appearance was currently somewhat more wretched than usual, if only by a matter of degrees. This was largely as a result of the fact that he had just arrived in town after a week spent lost in the desert; bad directions were at least partly to blame for this, but habitual drunkenness had not improved the situation. He'd eaten his horse on the fourth day, which was all the more upsetting for the fact that he couldn't honestly claim it as a personal low. His short-lived period of sobriety had been the result of poor rationing.

After the worst of the tremors and nausea had passed, he'd found himself surprisingly clear-headed - which, as it turned out, had only made things worse. Sobriety had made it easier to appreciate the hopelessness of his situation; even worse, it had made it harder to avoid taking stock of his life.

He'd thought of asking himself how it had come to this, but soon dismissed this entire train of thought as a self-indulgent platitude. His memories of the last few years were fairly vague, but he was reasonably certain that he'd hit rock bottom somewhere midway through the previous decade, and that he'd been holding a fairly steady course ever since.

Buck had spent most of his life on the fringes of society, doing the kinds of odd jobs that presented themselves to a man with a gun and the will to use it, occasionally dabbling in petty crime to supplement his meager income. As the frontier had been pushed back, he'd been pushed back along with it - partly because he didn't much care for what most people called civilization, but mostly for the sake of trying to outrun his reputation. He'd been called a lot of things in his life, few of them complementary; there were, however, some people who still called him "the fastest gun in the West." He was able to find work mostly because enough of those people failed to mention the fact that he was as likely as not to forget what he'd been hired to do when he'd been drinking, which he invariably had.

Now it was 1885, and Buck was running out of frontiers to flee to. The days of the Homestead Act were a distant memory; the slow trickle of settlers into the West had become an exodus, and nowadays the only thing standing between any greenhorn Yankee and the Great Plains was the cost of a train ticket. The Wild West had been domesticated, turned into a tourist attraction. Buck's days were coming to an end - in a very immediate and literal sense, judging from his current predicament. That thought bothered him more than he'd expected it to, and he found himself quite suddenly weeping, the tears leaving tracks in the layer of dust caking his face.

His brief burst of self-pity wore itself down quickly, leaving Buck's more typical feeling of dull resentment in its wake. It wasn't as if he had an awful lot to live for, which was some comfort. Having resigned himself to his fate, Buck had lifted his eyes at last, and had finally noticed the town of Carter's Refuge squatting no more than half a mile away.

It was the sort of town for which he would hardly have spared a second glance, not so very long ago; he'd been through a lot lately, though, and he'd found himself staring at the town with fresh eyes. It was a very ordinary town - the sort of place that people only passed through on their way to somewhere else - but something about it had stopped him short. It seemed like the most typical Western town imaginable, and that fact alone made it a rarity in this day and age.

Strange thoughts had begun flickering across Buck's mind. He'd begun thinking of himself as being "on the wagon." He'd started thinking in terms of "fresh starts" and "new beginnings."

He'd frightened some of the townsfolk pretty badly - pouncing on random passersby and asking if they knew who he was, and grinning too intensely when they'd answered in the negative.

Finally, as the shock began to wear off, he'd noticed that the town's residents had retreated to the safety of their homes, and were now watching him warily from behind heavily barricaded doors. He'd realized what he must look like, and decided that he couldn't blame them. The scene had suddenly been a very familiar one, and reality had begun to reassert itself. The local sheriff had come by to suggest that he get on about his business, and had added a black eye to Buck's already haggard appearance just to reinforce the point.

This had been two hours and eight glasses of bourbon ago; the memory of the last week was already dissolving into a blessedly dreamlike haze, and any possibility of self-reflection went with it. Polk Buckhorn stared into the bottom of his glass, drunkenly considering his options. After a few more minutes of contemplation, he managed to arrive at a solution that he liked.

Buck stood, robbed the saloon, shot the sheriff, stole a horse, and left the town of Carter's Refuge behind him.