Danny Boy, this is a showdown

The mines had long since gone to ash and silence. Their shafts yawned beneath the black hills like the mouths of forgotten beasts, breathing cold air that smelled of iron, sulphur and the moss of old graves from the lone prairie. Nothing grew there except scrub cedar and thorn, and the wind carried a dust so fine it found its way beneath doors, beneath skin, into the lungs where it settled forever.

The man derided as Rocky Raccoon came out of those hills with one eye swollen nearly shut and a hatred that had ripened into something harder than grief.

The woman had left without farewell. She had climbed onto the back of another man’s horse beneath a sky the colour of soot and never once looked behind her. The man had laughed when Rocky called after them, and before the laughter had died he’d struck the young cowpoke hard enough to split the flesh around his eye.

There are wounds that clot. Others wait.

Rocky carried the second kind.

He crossed dead country where bison skulls whitened in dry riverbeds and telegraph poles leaned like crucifixes abandoned by whatever Indigenous god had once watched over the place. At dusk he reached the settlement. It was hardly more than a handful of warped buildings clinging to existence beside the remains of wagon tracks disappearing beneath drifting sand.

The saloon still stood. Nobody wanted to be there and nobody wanted to leave.

The whisky was mostly kerosene. Its patrons watched him without curiosity. In a ruined world, vengeance required no explanation.

He paid for a room upstairs.

There beside the narrow cot rested a weathered Bible, its black leather cracked white along the spine. Someone had left it years before. Its pages smelled faintly of mildew and smoke. Rocky turned it over once in his hands before laying it back untouched.

He had brought another, even older testament with him. It rode heavy beneath his coat.

The man he sought had stolen more than a woman. He had stolen the shape of the future, and in a land where tomorrow had become myth, that counted for everything.

The woman’s true name had nearly vanished beneath the names she’d gathered through her life. Once she had been Magill. Later called herself Lil. Most knew her only as Nancy. Her man called himself Dan.

Names survived the end of the world better than governments did.

Music drifted through the walls from the adjoining room. A fiddle scraped out some broken memory of dancing while boots struck warped floorboards in stubborn celebration. People had always danced on the edge of extinction.

Rocky burst through the batwing doors. The room quieted. Dan turned.

Nancy stood behind him with fear written across her face, though whether for one man or both even she could not have said.

Rocky spoke only once.

The old customs still demanded witness before blood.

Dan answered with lead.

The report rolled through the building and out into the dead hills where it echoed among empty mine shafts.

Rocky folded against the wall as though the bones had simply been taken from him. Blood spread beneath his coat.

The doctor came in, stinking of gin and holding medicinal herbs that had lost their power years before. His beard was stained yellow. His hands trembled.

He looked upon the wound and shook his head without touching it.

“Rocky, you met your match,” he said.

Rocky spat a bloody phlegm and almost smiled.

“Doc, it’s only a scratch.”

Outside, the wind worried at the walls.

Back in his room Rocky lay staring toward the ceiling while moonlight crept across the floorboards. The Bible still rested where he’d left it. At some point he reached for it, not from faith but because there was nothing else within reach.

Its pages opened of their own weight.

He read words older than kingdoms, promises spoken to generations who had believed the world itself could end and still leave room for mercy afterward.

Perhaps they had been right. Perhaps they had merely been desperate. Perhaps Cormac McCarthy was right in proclaiming that there is no God and we are his prophets.

Toward dawn the lamp and Gideon both guttered out. Beyond the window the black hills waited in silence, patient as eternity, humming of mystery, swallowing every name men had ever carved into them.