Showdown in Pine Bluff: Randolph Ranch

Continued from Chapter 2: The Riders Return

Chapter 3

Randolph Ranch was a sprawling estate – built by an enterprising young cattleman with long-term designs for his family. The home itself had four bedrooms and two guest rooms, a full kitchen, and a formal dining room. The bunkhouse next to the corral out back had just been completed and was being made ready for its first occupants – young men William Randolph was planning to hire on his next trip into Paradise, the region’s capital and largest city.

But none of that was going to happen now.

As Edge approached the Randolph place, he saw the problem immediately. The sheriff’s vehicle was torn in half. On the ground beside it lay the top half of the other deputy. Where the bottom half had gone, Edge had a hunch, but the grisly reality of it didn’t bear repeating.

It was clear to Edge now that Pine Bluff was under siege. And the adversary wasn’t just your usual gang of thugs or gunslingers-for-hire employed by someone who fancied himself a “rail baron.”

No. This time it was a crew of Hollow Men. How many? He wasn’t sure. They usually worked in small gangs and had a “superintendent” who kept an eye on where they were and whom they terrorized. They were feared – and rightly so – throughout the Outlands and in the Midlands, too, although Edge had heard that attacks in the Midlands had come to an end. How or why was anyone’s guess.

Today. Right here. It was Edge’s job to stop these monsters by any means necessary.

Hollow Men were part man, part something not even remotely like a man. Nobody understood where they came from – but Edge knew from first-hand experience that killing one wasn’t as easy as you might initially think.

Edge climbed off his bike and pulled down the bandanna. He was met with a stench he’d smelled before. Even when you had experienced it, the smell verged on, overpowering even the toughest Rider.

Hollow Men stank of decay, and when they fed, the odor grew more intense. Edge knew it was the sense of smell that the revenants relied on the most – and if they were in the middle of a euphoric feast, it was unlikely they’d sense him coming.

He heard a high-pitched scream. Edge felt a cold shiver run up his back, and a pit started to form in his gut. It was time to act.

He pulled his guns from his holster and walked onto the porch of the house. He hesitated. Something just didn’t feel right. He had done this job long enough to know he should trust his gut instincts at times like this, so he held off.

Edge started toward the corner of the house when, suddenly, the front door flew open. A hulking beast staggered through, pulling a woman behind him by her hair. She was still alive, although from what Edge could make out in the tangle of hair, blood, and torn clothes, she didn’t look to be that way for long.

She was no longer struggling. Blood had clotted her hair over her face, and there were dozens of other wounds on her body. It was clear to Edge that her blood loss and the struggle against her captor had exhausted her.

Similarly, the freak who had a hold of her was covered in blood. Her blood, Edge guessed.

He’d seen enough.

Without saying a word, Edge raised one of his revolvers and fired. The blast echoed down the plains surrounding the farmhouse. And even though the shot hit the Hollow Man squarely in the back, the shell only buried itself in the thick muscle and tendons under the canvas duster, causing the beast to stagger forward just a step or two.

The horror turned to face Edge, opening its maw – the space where most men might have a mouth. Like something from a fever-induced nightmare, Edge found himself staring at the rows and rows of gnashing, needle-sharp teeth. While it looked like the beast was smiling at him, Edge knew it was the beast using his keen sense of taste to get his bearings.

People use their eyes and their sense of sight to quickly understand where they are and, more importantly, where their foes might be. For Hollow Men, since they have no eyes to speak of, they make their way through their sense of taste. Edge had learned that lesson many years ago.

He had also learned that if a beast took the time to show you his teeth, you didn’t have long to take advantage of the opportunity. Edge leveled both revolvers at the Hollow Man and fired. Two rounds ripped into the beast’s mouth and exited through its skull, blasting its brains onto the wall behind it.

The hulking mass of muscle, scaly skin, and teeth dropped to the porch next to the injured woman. Edge wanted to go to her but hesitated for just a moment longer.

Something still wasn’t right.

He heard footsteps from inside the house. Running.

Edge ducked around the corner, keeping out of sight.

A man burst through the door and flew past where Edge was standing, then nearly tripped over the woman and the body of the abomination. The sight stopped him cold for a moment. He looked at the woman and then again at the beast. “Oh no, no, no, no …” he murmured. He was visibly troubled.

The man wore a long, tan duster and dungarees, just like the dead brute. He was thin and wiry, with long, greasy, jet-black hair, buck teeth, and a thin neck that featured a prominent Adam’s apple.

His hair hung next to his face, obscuring his vision – allowing Edge to step up and clock him with the butt of his gun. The cretin went down with a single blow.

There was another scream. This time the scream was more intense and clearly that of a child.

Edge moved to the entrance of the house, giving the unconscious man on the porch a kick for good measure on the way. The Rider approached the parlor window and cautiously peeked through it to see what was happening inside.

Edgar “Edge” Wallace takes on two more Hollow Men at the Randolph Ranch.

There were two more Hollow Men in the room near a bookcase, and above them, cowering on a high shelf in a built-in was a young girl. Edge guessed she could be no more than seven or eight.

Another man stood behind them, apparently amused by the situation. He carried a shotgun and had it resting on his shoulder and would occasionally look toward the kitchen area where there were frequent crashes of dishes breaking as someone – presumably more “search party” rummaged through the pantry and cupboards.

Wrapping his coat around his elbow, Edge broke through the parlor window and stuck his gun through the hole. “Stop what you’re doing and put down your weapons,” he shouted. “Come out with your hands up.”

The freaks barely noticed; they were in a frenzy about the young girl. The man who was with them, though, recognized trouble when he saw it – or, more precisely, when it broke out a window and pointed a gun at him. He turned and brought his shotgun to bear just as Edge fired his pistol.

The shot hit the man in the chest and sent him backward. The shotgun went off, hitting the chandelier and bringing it crashing to the floor right behind the Hollow Men.

That got their attention.

They turned toward the commotion, and Edge took aim. He emptied his first revolver with shots to their head, neck, and chest. They were as dead as they could be when he heard more noise coming from the kitchen.

He motioned to the girl to stay where she was – out of reach – and put his finger to his lips to remain calm and quiet. She seemed to understand and nodded in compliance. Setting his jaw, Edge moved farther down the porch until he was outside the kitchen door.

Inside were three more Hollow Men busily rooting around the kitchen of the Randolph place, feverishly searching the room – tearing apart cupboards, ripping holes in walls, and digging through the pantry. Edge burst through the back door of the house and into the kitchen, his guns blazing.

Edge wondered to himself: “What could be at the farm that would be of any value to these freaks and their handlers?”

But this wasn’t a time for contemplation.

Edge’s pistols found their first two targets easily enough, dropping them quickly. But the third managed to avoid getting shot and came after Edge with a meat cleaver. It was big, strong, and fast. Anyone facing it for the first time would not likely survive the encounter. Unfortunately, Edge knew better than to try and out-punch a Hollow Man – they had unnatural strength and, by all accounts, couldn’t feel pain.

Edge’s rule was to deal death to Hollow Men from a distance whenever possible, but it just wasn’t possible this time.

The monster grabbed Edge by the collar of his duster and brought the meat cleaver down fast. The Rider dropped his empty revolver and used his free hand to grab the brute by the neck. He attempted to block the descending cleaver with his gun hand.

Metal hit metal. The gun blocked the cleaver, but between the Hollow Man’s strength and the hard metal edge of the cleaver, the gun was ruined.

Man and beast tried desperately to throw the other off balance and gain the advantage. The brute grinned just inches away from Edge, and from its mouth swelled an odor of death and decayed flesh. Its tongue reached out to Edge’s face to sense a weakness in the Rider.

Edge’s stomach churned. The smell was overwhelming. He had to think of something else and take his mind off the madness.

He heard the girl’s scream again. Whether it was real or imagined, he wasn’t sure – but the fear it evoked went through him like a shock.

Edge used his free hand to grab the beast’s riding coat by the lapel. Then, in a move that called back to years of wrestling with his older brothers while he was growing up, Edge fell to his back, planted his foot into the waist of the Hollow Man, and launched him overhead and onto the large, potbellied stove in the corner of the kitchen.

There was a clatter of pots and pans, and broken dishware followed immediately by the satisfying shriek of the fiend as he burned on the glowing stove top.

Edge rolled to his feet and picked up a cast iron skillet from the kitchen table. He swung it at the head of the Hollow Man, catching the monstrosity in the forehead with the edge of the pan. The blow sent the creature reeling backward one more time, the skillet still lodged in his storm cloud-grey skull – but this time, he didn’t get up again.

Edge picked up the empty revolver and re-loaded it. He looked at the other gun. It was ruined. Both guns had been with him since he mustered out of the High Plains Militia following the Iron Wars. Losing one here was like losing an old friend.

He put two quick shots into the skull of the monster he had subdued with the skillet served as insurance.

Losing one gun left him a little light on firepower should there be more of the savage creatures to face down. Edge listened. He could hear something, but it wasn’t a sound you’d find coming from a Hollow Man.

It was crying.

He went back into the parlor. The girl was still cowering in the bookcase. Edge looked at her. She looked back through blood and tears and snot. Her small features and upturned nose were common for young girls in the Outlands, but there was something about this one that reminded the Rider of the stories he used to hear as a child about the fey and the good witches of the North.

She had stopped crying and was staring intently at Edge. Maybe there was something about his face and the look in his eyes that seemed to reassure her.

“Everything will be okay,” he told her. “Promise.”

She sniffled a reply.

“You stay here right now, okay? I’m going to finish looking around.”

She nodded this time. That was good. It wasn’t much progress, but it was progress.

The lawman walked over to the body of the man with the shotgun. Edge looked more intently for clues as to who he was and what he was doing with a crew of Hollow Men.

Edge searched the pockets of the man’s duster, pants, and finally, his shirt, which held a paper authorizing a search and seizure action at the Randolph Ranch. The order had been signed by a district judge back in Paradise, but the Rider didn’t recognize the name.

Edge had been a Rider for a long time. Long enough to know most of the judges in Paradise. Some were friends – or at least friendly. Others weren’t. As in most matters of the law, personal relationships mattered greatly whether they were supposed to or not.

He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. He’d never heard of a reclamation agent using Hollow Men to do his dirty work. This entire thing seemed queer. He needed more information before any sense could be made of it.

Edge continued his search through the house and found the sheriff’s body in the stairway leading to the second floor. In one of the bedrooms were the bodies of a man and his teenage daughter. From the upstairs window, he could see there weren’t any more Hollow Men on the grounds of the ranch. And he’d personally made sure there weren’t any more in the house.

He’d seen enough.

There was still one last, best source of information about all of this – the Hollow Men, the abductions, the carnage – Edge holstered his gun and walked downstairs and back out onto the porch to roust the man he’d subdued earlier.

But to the Rider’s surprise, the man was gone.

“How is that possible?” Edge wondered. He’d hit that scrawny bastard with everything he had and knocked him cold, but now he was in the wind.

The man’s disappearance was a loose end – and loose ends almost always lead to trouble.

He thought again about the girl. All alone and now in more danger than before.

Edge walked back into the parlor of the home. She was still in her safe place in the bookcase. The house was a mess filled with carnage and destruction. It was no place for a child.

Edge looked at her and smiled. He tried as hard as he could to be reassuring and kind.

“Why don’t you come back to town with me?” he asked her.

She shook her head side-to-side “No.”

“You should see a doctor.”

She still refused.

Edge was uncertain of where to go from here. How do you tell a child that her family is gone and that everything she had known to this point in her life would be different now? How do you convince a child they must leave their home to be safe?

Then it dawned on him. Edge brushed back her hair, revealing a sweet face behind the tears, dirt, scrapes, and bloodshot eyes.

“Do you want to go for a motorcycle ride?”

Continued in Chapter 4: An Unwelcome Return