Shadow Falls: Badlands by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff Page B

completely unaware it was being hunted. With a steady hand, Galen lined up the rabbit in the sights of the pistol. Galen waited, inhaled quietly, and started to squeeze the trigger when he heard the scream of a woman coming from—what seemed like—not too far away.
    Galen began running toward the sound, receiving further direction from a second scream coming from just over a rise above him. Quietly, he scrambled up the hill, pistol in hand. Once more he heard it, though this time cut it off in mid-scream. Now Galen could hear other voices—those of men, yelling.
    “I tole you to shet up!” yelled one.
    Galen crawled on his chest to the top of the hill and peered over into a clearing. Standing fifty feet away, his hair-covered back to Galen, was a shirtless hillbilly—his gut hanging over the top of his pants, one hand holding a knife, the other clutching a bloody pink ribbon of flesh. Below him, on the ground, lay a fragile-faced, brown-skinned woman—her dress torn open and hiked up past her thighs—who was being viciously raped by a second similar looking hillbilly. His large pale white ass pumped back and forth with every grunt he made.
    Galen turned away, unsure of what to do. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the barrel of the Colt against his right temple.
    Damnit . From this distance he could hear the one with the knife encouraging the rapist. “Do it! Do it!” he brayed, his voice taking an excitedly high pitch.
    Galen took a deep breath. After Sagebrush, he never wanted to take a human life ever again.
    He took a peek toward the sky. “I'm sorry,” he muttered under his breath before turning and dashing toward the hillbillies, Colt firing. The hillbillies looked up, stunned. Galen's heart pounded wildly as his first two shots went far wide. The third and fourth found their mark in the ribcage of the fat hillbilly lying on top of the woman. The one with the knife found his feet fast enough to begin running, leaving his accomplice behind. Galen emptied his revolver at the escaping hillbilly, half-heartedly firing in his direction without actually aiming.
    He holstered the weapon and turned back to the woman but, as he took his first step, he saw the ribbon of flesh that the escaped hillbilly must have dropped. Galen stopped, instantly recognizing it: a tongue.
    Immediately Galen understood why her last cry for help had cut off mid-scream.
    He looked toward the woman—sure she was dead. But she turned her head toward him and coughed up a large, messy mouthful of blood. Her face was turning purple.
    She was suffocating under the dying weight of the obese rapist.
    Galen rushed to her side. With his boot, he rolled him off of her, allowing her to immediately gulp for air. The hillbilly moaned, blood pumping from his bullet wounds. He looked up at Galen, eyes wide in terror.
    “Help me,” he gasped.
    Galen looked down at the rapist, his dirty dungarees pulled down below his knees, revealing his filthy, pathetic, and shriveled prick. Galen reached into the small leather ammo bag slung around his neck, withdrew a percussion cap, and placed it on the cylinder nipple of the only unfired chamber of the Colt. As a precaution, he’d been taught to leave one uncapped to prevent accidental discharges; there would be nothing accidental about this. Galen aimed the gun between the dying hillbilly’s eyes and fired the round into his skull.
    Galen holstered the again empty Colt and knelt down next to the woman. He turned her head to drain the blood that was pooling to prevent her from suffocating. He looked back toward her severed tongue and wondered if he was going to watch her die.
    She was obviously Mexican—or at least of Mexican decent. Galen began to wipe the tears streaming from her eyes.
    “It’s going to be okay,” he said, fairly certain he was lying.
    From her mouth came a series of sounds as she tried to speak. Without a tongue, her words were unintelligible at best.
    “Shhh,” Galen commanded.