Last Girls

10

The wolf bit down on Angel's arm. He cried out, instinctively pulling the trigger twice before his arm went numb. The wolf thrashed into the sinew and skin at his elbow gave way. The limb came off in its mouth. Angel screamed, collapsing to his knees.

The wolf bounded off on all fours, gnawing loudly on its stolen meal.

Alan ran to his tent, and returned an instant later with a small medical kit he kept with him most of the time, especially at games or when they were in the woods. He knelt beside Angel, wrapping a bandage around his bleeding stump. "Hold pressure," he yelled to Angel. He tied a length of rope around Angel's bicep, tightening it with a stick until blood stopped dripping from the severed limb.

"You need to draw," the cowboy drawled.

"He took my fucking gun!"Angel growled.

"Ain't right, shooting an unarmed man," the cowboy said, drawing one of his pistols into the flat of his palm. He tossed it into the dirt midway between them. "Now draw."

Angel tried to stand and stumbled back down onto one knee. "He's woozy from blood loss. This is insane."

"Ain't gonna repeat myself," the cowboy said, and slowly pulled his pistol from his holster, and aimed it at Angel's chest. "Die a man, or a coward." Angel was ten feet from the gun, dead to rights. He whispered a prayer in Spanish. "Vaya con dios, hombre," the cowboy said, thumbing back the hammer on his revolver.

Kelly bashed his right shoulder, knocking his aim off, sending a shot harmlessly into a tree. He raised the gun again, and she hit him; this time the blade of the shovel cut deep, and his shoulder slumped. But still, he sighted Angel in, and she swung it again. This time the arm came off.

"Hmm," he said, and bent down, freed his revolver from his fingers with his remaining hand, and proceed to aim again. Her swing this time carried the shovel through the bone, shattering it while cutting away the meat and tendons. The limb slid off the bone like a wrapper from a half-melted popsicle.

"That weren't sporting," he said, turning towards Kelly. His lip curled into a snarl, and he charged at her. Lark tackled him, sending him stumbling into the fire pit. He kicked embers from his boots as he stepped back out. Betsy reeled back, and threw a strike that knocked him flat into the fire.

Alan ran to his side, before recognizing he was the only one there. "Shouldn't we help?" he asked.

"He wasn't alive," Betsy said. "It was like if you built the terminator out of rotten leather and old meat."

"Seems like he had more maggots than blood," Lark said, holding up one of his arms. Hardly any blood was dripping out of the place where it had come off the cowboy, but a steady stream of larval flies continued dropping out of its meat.

"What the fuck is going on?" Denny asked. "We just got attacked by a werewolf and a zombie cowboy..."

"I don't know," Angel said, shaking from the ground. He had crawled over to the gun the cowboy tossed halfway to him. "But to add to the what-the-fuckery, these are original Colt Walkers, made in 1847,designed for cavalry soldiers to let them kill enemy horses at close range. Ones in nowhere near as good a shape as these sell at auction for a million a pop, and he tossed it in the mud like it was nothing."

"What else can we do for him?" Betsy asked.

"I can maybe put a better bandage on it, now that the bleeding's stopped by the tourniquet, but..."

"What if we get his arm back?"

"I don't know. I'm no microsurgeon, so I don't know if the damage is too much for reattachment."

Moaning from the fire interrupted. The cowboy was struggling to get back up. "Nuh-uh," Betsy said, and put her foot on top of his hat. Kelly was beside her in an instant, and raised the shovel, before bringing it down on the cowboy's neck. His held rolled off the stump of his neck, and came to rest next to a smoldering log.