Dead Man’s Hand Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS AND TITAN BOOKS

  Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (January 2015)

  Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse (February 2015)

  Dead Man’s Hand

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781164501

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164518

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2014

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  “Introduction” by John Joseph Adams. © 2014 by John Joseph Adams. Original to this volume.

  “The Red-Headed Dead” by Joe R. Lansdale. © 2014 by Joe R. Lansdale. Original to this volume.

  “The Old Slow Man and His Gold Gun From Space” by Ben H. Winters. © 2014 by Ben H. Winters. Original to this volume.

  “Hellfire on the High Frontier” by David Farland. © 2014 by David Farland. Original to this volume.

  “The Hell-Bound Stagecoach” by Mike Resnick. © 2014 by Mike Resnick. Original to this volume.

  “Stingers and Strangers” by Seanan McGuire. © 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Original to this volume.

  “Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger” by Charles Yu. © 2014 by Charles Yu. Original to this volume.

  “Holy Jingle” by Alan Dean Foster. © 2014 by Alan Dean Foster. Original to this volume.

  “The Man With No Heart” by Beth Revis. © 2014 by Beth Revis. Original to this volume.

  “Wrecking Party” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2014 by Alastair Reynolds. Original to this volume.

  “Hell from the East” by Hugh Howey. © 2014 by Hugh Howey. Original to this volume.

  “Second Hand” by Rajan Khanna. © 2014 by Rajan Khanna. Original to this volume.

  “Alvin and the Apple Tree” by Orson Scott Card. © 2014 by Orson Scott Card. Original to this volume.

  “Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle” by Elizabeth Bear. © 2014 by Elizabeth Bear. Original to this volume.

  “Strong Medicine” by Tad Williams. © 2014 by Tad Williams. Original to this volume.

  “Red Dreams” by Jonathan Maberry. © 2014 by Jonathan Maberry. Original to this volume.

  “Bamboozled” by Kelley Armstrong. © 2014 by Kelley Armstrong. Original to this volume.

  “Sundown” by Tobias S. Buckell. © 2014 by Tobias S. Buckell. Original to this volume.

  “La Madre Del Oro” by Jeffrey Ford. © 2014 by Jeffrey Ford. Original to this volume.

  “What I Assume You Shall Assume” by Ken Liu. © 2014 by Ken Liu. Original to this volume.

  “The Devil’s Jack” by Laura Anne Gilman. © 2014 by Laura Anne Gilman. Original to this volume.

  “The Golden Age” by Walter Jon Williams. © 2014 by Walter Jon Williams. Original to this volume.

  “Neversleeps” by Fred Van Lente. © 2014 by Fred Van Lente. Original to this volume.

  “Dead Man’s Hand” by Christie Yant. © 2014 by Christie Yant. Original to this volume.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For

  WILD BILL HICKOK

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by John Joseph Adams

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION John Joseph Adams

  THE RED-HEADED DEAD Joe R. Lansdale

  THE OLD SLOW MAN AND HIS GOLD GUN FROM SPACE Ben H. Winters

  HELLFIRE ON THE HIGH FRONTIER David Farland

  THE HELL-BOUND STAGECOACH Mike Resnick

  STINGERS AND STRANGERS Seanan McGuire

  BOOKKEEPER, NARRATOR, GUNSLINGER Charles Yu

  HOLY JINGLE Alan Dean Foster

  THE MAN WITH NO HEART Beth Revis

  WRECKING PARTY Alastair Reynolds

  HELL FROM THE EAST Hugh Howey

  SECOND HAND Rajan Khanna

  ALVIN AND THE APPLE TREE Orson Scott Card

  MADAM DAMNABLE’S SEWING CIRCLE Elizabeth Bear

  STRONG MEDICINE Tad Williams

  RED DREAMS Jonathan Maberry

  BAMBOOZLED Kelley Armstrong

  SUNDOWN Tobias S. Buckell

  LA MADRE DEL ORO Jeffrey Ford

  WHAT I ASSUME YOU SHALL ASSUME Ken Liu

  THE DEVIL’S JACK Laura Anne Gilman

  THE GOLDEN AGE Walter Jon Williams

  NEVERSLEEPS Fred Van Lente

  DEAD MAN’S HAND Christie Yant

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Now Available from Titan Books

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

  The phrase “dead man’s hand” refers to the poker hand held by the gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok when, in 1876, he was shot and killed by the coward Jack McCall. There’s little doubt that Hickok was playing cards at the time of his death, but what Wild Bill was actually holding seems to be open to some debate. Legend has it that Hickok’s hand was comprised of black aces and eights (with the fifth card a mystery), but in some accounts it’s jacks and tens, or other variations. I suppose the only way we could ever know for sure would be to ask the man himself by reanimating his corpse or traveling back in time… both of which are the stuff of the “weird western” tale.

  Not to be confused with “space westerns” like Joss Whedon’s beloved, cancelled-too-soon TV show Firefly, weird westerns generally take place right here on Earth, only the world we all know and love is just a little bit different. Like worlds where vampires are real. Or clockwork cowboys roam the frontier. Or 49ers head to California to mine for mana. Or airships patrol the skies. In other words: weird westerns are stories of the Old West infused with elements of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, and often with a little counterfactual twist thrown into the mix.

  You might be thinking: that kind of sounds like steampunk. And it’s true that steampunk and weird westerns are similar in a lot of ways, and you’ll find some stories—like Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century novels—that could certainly be considered both. But where steampunk can take place anywhere (and often is set in Victorian-era Britain), the weird western almost always takes place in the American Old West; where steampunk is often focused on urban settings and the accouterments of its period, the weird western is typically a darker, grittier take on a similar notion, with strong elements of the traditional Western genre—the wild frontier, the gunslinger/cowboy, gold fever. And while in both you often see anachronistic uses of technology, steampunk tends to be more focused on counterfactual scientific advancements; whereas the weird western welcomes that but also equally embraces magic and other elements
of the supernatural. So while both may have clockwork automatons, it’s in the weird western where you are most likely to have a dead man reanimated by a necromancer only to be subsequently gunned down in a duel by the aforementioned automaton.

  The origins of the genre can be clearly traced as far back as the ’60s with television shows like The Wild, Wild West, and the ’70s with Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series—and perhaps all the way back to the 1930s with the works of Robert E. Howard and the strange Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire—but it was Joe R. Lansdale’s acclaimed novel Dead in the West (1986) that truly blazed a trail; the book, which features the gunslinging Reverend Jebediah Mercer, is considered by many to be the definitive example of weird western literature, and consequently helped define the genre.

  As such, this book would be incomplete without a contribution from Mr. Lansdale; happily, I did not have to contemplate such a notion, for the good Reverend Mercer has a new unholy monster to battle in the very first story in the anthology, “The Red-Headed Dead.”

  Unlike the abovementioned story, many of the tales in the anthology have no literary antecedents—such as “Neversleeps,” Cowboys & Aliens writer Fred Van Lente’s wildly inventive tale of magic, alternate history, and clockwork chrysalises, and Walter Jon Williams’s “The Golden Age,” a rip-roaring adventure story of superheroes in the Old West—but several of the other writers herein, like Lansdale, have already staked their weird west claims and, at my request, have returned to mine them once again:

  Alan Dean Foster, who over the last thirty years or so has written more than a dozen tales about Mad Amos Malone and his magical steed Worthless, brings the mountain man back to battle the occult once again in “Holy Jingle.”

  Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker, the seventh son of a seventh son who is locked in an epic battle against the Unmaker, returns in “Alvin and the Apple Tree”—the first new Alvin tale in more than a decade.

  In “Stingers and Strangers,” Seanan McGuire brings us a new InCryptid story in which cryptozoologists Frances Brown and Jonathan Healy encounter some very weird wasps (plus some other unpleasant surprises).

  And in “Second Hand,” Rajan Khanna returns to the world of his story “Card Sharp,” in which decks of playing cards are imbued with a magic that makes any deck of cards a deadly one.

  That’s just a little taste of what this anthology has in store for you, and that last example brings us right back around to playing cards and our eponymous dead man’s hand. To sum up, in the weird western, we take the historical hand we’re dealt, but we bluff reality and make what you would think is an impossible play.

  So that’s the game, pard. Pull up a chair, ante up, and I’ll deal you in. The game’s “Weird West,” no limit, and everything’s wild.

  THE RED-HEADED DEAD

  A REVEREND JEBEDIAH MERCER TALE

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  East Texas, 1880

  Reverend Mercer knew it was coming because the clouds were being plucked down into a black funnel, making the midday sky go dark. It was the last of many omens, and he knew from experience it smacked of more than a prediction of bad weather. There had been the shooting star last night, bleeding across the sky in a looping red wound. He had never seen one like it. And there had been the angry face he had seen in the morning clouds, ever so briefly, but long enough to know that God was sending him another task in his endless list.

  He paused his horse on a high hill and pushed his hat up slightly, determining the direction of the storm. When the funnels were yanked earthward and touched, he saw, as he expected, that the twister was tearing up earth and heading swiftly in his direction. He cursed the god he served unwillingly and plunged his mount down the hill as the sky spat rain and the wind began to howl and blow at his back like the damp breath of a pursuing giant. Down the hill and into the depths of the forest his horse went, thundering along the pine-needle trail, dashing for any cover he might find.

  As he rode, to his left, mixed in with the pines and a great oak that dipped its boughs almost to the ground, was a graveyard. He saw at a glance the gravestones had slipped and cracked, been torn up by tree roots, erosion, and time. One grave had a long, metal rod poking up from it, nearly six feet out of the ground; the rod was leaning from the ground at a precarious due west. It appeared as if it were about to fall loose of the earth.

  The pine-needle trail wound around the trees and dipped down into a clay path that was becoming wet and slick and blood red. When he turned yet another curve, he saw tucked into the side of a hill a crude cabin made of logs and the dirt that surrounded it. The roof was covered in dried mud, probably packed down over some kind of pine slab roofing.

  The Reverend rode his horse right up to the door and called out. No one answered. He dismounted. The door was held in place by a flip up switch of wood. The Reverend pressed it and opened it, led his horse inside. There was a bar of crudely split wood against the wall. He lifted it and clunked it into position between two rusted metal hooks on either side of the doorway. There was a window with fragments of parchment paper in place of glass; there was more open space than parchment, and the pieces that remained fluttered in the wind like peeling, dead skin. Rain splattered through.

  Down through the trees swirled the black meanness from Heaven, gnawing trees out of the ground and turning them upside down, throwing their roots to the sky like desperate fingers, the fingers shedding wads of red clay as if it were clotted blood.

  The Reverend’s horse did a strange thing: it went to its knees and ducked its head, as if in prayer. The storm tumbled down the mountain in a rumbling wave of blackness, gave off a locomotive sound. This was followed by trees and the hill sliding down toward the cabin at tremendous speed, like mash potatoes slipping along a leaning plate.

  Gravestones flew through the air. The Reverend saw that great iron bar, sailing his way like a javelin. He threw himself to the floor.

  All the world screamed. The Reverend did not pray, having decided long ago his boss had already made up his mind about things.

  The cabin groaned and the roof peeled at the center and a gap was torn open in the ceiling. The rain came through it in a deluge, splattering heavily on the Reverend’s back as he lay face down, expecting at any moment to be lifted up by the wind and drawn and quartered by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Then it was over. There was no light at the window because mud and trees had plugged it. There was a bit of daylight coming from the hole in the roof. It filled the room with a kind of hazy shade of gold.

  When the Reverend rose up, he discovered the steel bar had come through the window and gone straight through his horse’s head; the animal still rested forward on its front legs, its butt up, the bar having gone into one ear and out the other. The horse had gone dead before it knew it was struck.

  The only advantage to his dead mount, the Reverend thought, was that now he would have fresh meat. He had been surviving on corn dodgers for a week, going where God sent him by directions nestled inside his head. In that moment, the Reverend realized that God had brought him here for a reason. It was never a pleasant reason. There would be some horror, as always, and he would be pitted against it—less, he thought, for need of destroying evil, but more out of heavenly entertainment, like burning ants to a crisp with the magnified heat of the sun shining through the lens of a pair of spectacles.

  The Reverend studied the iron bar that had killed his horse. There was writing on it. He knelt down and looked at it. It was Latin, and the words trailed off into the horse’s ear. The Reverend grabbed the bar and twisted the horse’s head toward the floor, put his boot against the horse’s skull, and pulled. The bar came out with a pop and a slurp, covered in blood and brain matter. The Reverend took a rag from the saddlebag and wiped the rod clean.

  Knowing Latin, he read the words. They simply said: And this shall hold him down.

  “Ah, hell,” the Reverend said, and tossed the bar to the floor.

  This would be
where God had sent him, and what was coming he could only guess, but a bar like that one, made of pure iron, was often used to pin something in its grave. Iron was a nemesis of evil, and Latin, besides being a nemesis to a student of language, often contained more powerful spells than any other tongue, alive or dead. And if what was out there was in need of pinning, then the fact the twister had pulled the bar free by means of the literal wet and windy hand of God, meant something that should not be free was loose.

  For the first time in a long time, Reverend Mercer thought he might defy God and find his way out of here if he could. But he knew it was useless. Whatever had been freed was coming, and it was his job to stop it. If he didn’t stop it, then it would stop him, and not only would his life end, but his soul would be flung from him to who knows where. Heaven as a possibility would not be on the list. If there was in fact a Heaven.

  There was a clatter on the roof and the Reverend looked up, caught sight of something leering through the gap. When he did, it pulled back and out of sight. The Reverend lifted his guns out of their holsters, a .44 converted Colt at his hip and a .36 Navy Colt in the shoulder holster under his arm. He had the .44 in his right fist, the Navy in his left. His bullets were touched with drops of silver, blessed by himself with readings from the Bible. Against Hell’s minions it was better than nothing, which was a little like saying it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

  The face had sent a chill up his back like a wet-leg scorpion scuttling along his spine. It was hardly a face at all. Mostly bone with rags of flesh where cheeks once were, dark pads of rotting meat above its eyes. The top of its head had been curiously full of fire-red hair, all of it wild and wadded and touched with clay. The mouth had been drawn back in the grin of a ghoul, long fangs showing. The eyes had been the worst: red as blood spots, hot as fire.

  Reverend Mercer knew immediately what it was: the progeny of Judas. A vampire, those that had descended from he who had given death to Christ for a handful of silver. Christ, that ineffectual demigod that had fooled many into thinking the heart of God had changed. It had not; that delusion was all part of the great bastard’s game.