Monroe Sample Chapter
Philip Lee
“Hands up, mouths shut and knees on the ground, and no one gets shot!”
Leeroy Callahan wraps his bandana across his face, revolver holstered where everyone can see it. He sweeps his eyes across the Hopetown Bank, where men in sharp suits and women in colourful dresses fall to the ground, breaths held in a tense silence. A smile breaks through Leeroy’s face; even after a decade of retirement, the eyepatch of ‘Deadeye Morgan’ did all the talking.
“Kidd, get the vaults open. Skyler, make sure no one's thinking of anythin’ funny. I’ll take anything worth takin’ from this sorry lot.” Leeroy thrusts two empty bags into the hands of the well-fed lockpick who pulls a pistol on the bank clerk, and nodding to the toned woman with a shotgun slung over her shoulder, who replies with a whistle and a wink.
“Anythin’ of value goes in this bag! I’m not leavin’ until I have three Quills from all of y’all!” Trembling hands reach for wallets, earrings and necklaces to deposit into the sack, alongside the hushed whispers for mercy and prayers for safety.
“Are you deaf? Open the door, you bloody Ignorant!” Behind him, Leeroy hears a good whip from the pistol, followed by a pained wail from the bank clerk as Kidd forces the door to the vaults open.
A ravished man, appearing to be in his early forties with gaunt cheeks, grovels at Leeroy’s foot. “Please, I need this money for my children.” Tears form in the corners of his eyes, which widen as Leeroy draws his gun and puts it to the man’s head.
“Yeah, and your children need a father to come home to them, don’t they? It’s either your money or your blood in the sack.” In response to the man’s hesitation, Leeroy clicks the hammer of his revolver. The man whimpers in fear, and drops his entire wallet before scooting away on all fours to shrivel in a corner of the room.
Leeroy continues around the room, collecting tithes out of the collection of miserable ladies and gentlemen. Most looked like fancy businessmen who had plenty to give but no heart to donate, while some were poor folk who had nothing to give but hearts of gold, which from his experience averaged out in the end. Tense minutes pass in the near silence between gunslingers who don’t want to be found and victims who don’t want to be shot, with the rain outside providing cover for their robbery.
“Skyler, check on Kidd for me.” Leeroy says, single eye fixed on the moustached gentleman with a top hat who donates what could be a wedding ring.
“Alright, keep your eyes… eye peeled for the lawmen while I’m gone.”
Leeroy towers over a woman, furious blue eyes locked to his eye with tears streaming down her cheeks. “You are a terrible person, Deadeye Morgan.”
“Don’t care, now put something in the bag before I make you.”
The woman places her hands behind her head, fumbling with the clip of an emerald necklace. “I hope the lawmen put a bullet through your other eye and send you to damnation, where you belong.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.” She drops the necklace into the bag and turns away, leaving Leeroy to continue on with his robbery. It was a good haul overall, though most of the real money was still in those vaults. He starts tying up the bag when someone slams against him from behind, causing him to tumble forwards and catch himself on the bars of the teller.
He spins around and pulls his revolver from the holster just in time to see the woman from earlier throw herself onto him, screaming. “Damn crazy woman!” the back of Leeroy’s head slams into the bars as she starts pummeling wild punches towards his face.
“To damnation with you! You and all of your gunslinger friends!”
“Get off me!” He throws her onto the floor, eyes scanning the room to make sure no one else was about to follow her example. He points his revolver at her face. “Now you get back and keep your bloody mouth shut, you hear me!”
“Never! Help! Robbery! There’s-” A loud bang cuts off the screaming, gore pasting the floor where the woman’s head once was. Skyler strides up to Leeroy as chaotic screams ring out across the room.
“I leave you for a moment, Deadeye! What in Keelia’s name is going on?”
“What in damnation do you think you’re doing?” He grabs Skyler by the collar of her shirt. “Now half of Hopetown’s gonna to know we’re here!”
“Half of Hopetown’s gonna know we’re here regardless, with some crazy robin screaming at the top of her lungs!” Skyler shoves Leeroy off her, the barrel of her shotgun still smoking. She steps over the woman’s corpse and checks her purse, pulling out a wallet and pocketing it. “Anyone else want to follow her example, or will you all shut your damn mouths!” Silence blankets over the bank.
“Take the bag and get the horses ready, we’re getting out as soon as Kidd is done.”
“Kidd ain’t going to be done soon, from what it looks like. He’s only got two of the vaults open so far.” Skyler takes the bag of tithes and lugs it over her shoulder, making for the front entrance. “If anyone else feels like playing hero, I’ll blow your head off.” She glares one last time across the bank floor before leaving.
Leeroy bursts into the small vault room, where Kidd has his ear to a combination lock. “Bad news, we don’t got much time.”
“I heard the gunshot. I’m going as quickly as I can.”
“Ain’t fast enough. We brought the dynamite for a reason, just blow open the door!”
Kidd laughs. “You blow open these doors, and you’ll blow up the stocks and bonds inside as well, and you’ll be left with an empty vault!”
“What about the gold?”
“Gold? Does this look like a fancy reserve bank to you? They don’t hold any gold in these banks anymore, it’s all paper money now.” With a final click, the combination lock opens, revealing a vault full of small strips of paper held together by metal clips. Kidd starts shovelling them into a sack. “Give me five minutes, Deadeye.”
“We don’t have five minutes. Might not even have one.”
“I can’t do a combination lock in one minute!”
“Well, use a different method, since we’re all found out anyway.” Leeroy fires six shots into a combination lock, breaking it open. He throws the paper into the sack. “Won’t all this get wet in the rain?”
Before Kidd can answer, Skyler’s voice yells from outside. “Come on! Law’s on us!”
The two men close the strings on their bags and hurry outside. “I guess you’re about to find out, Deadeye!”
Whistles and the thundering of hooves signal the rush of lawmen arriving at Hopetown Bank, accompanied by indistinct yells of instructions. Leeroy mounts his horse and hooks his sack onto the saddlebags in a single motion, and cues her into a gallop. The light rain creates a layer of mist which pools on the ground, rising up to ankle height, and is stamped away by the clop of hooves, revealing the paved road of asphalt below and creating a trail of holes in the mist that sink back into the fog.
“That’s got to be fifteen lawmen after us, Deadeye! We shooting them dead?” Skyler asks with an excited smile on her face, hand hovering over her holster.
“We get out of this town, then we consider shooting. Don’t want to get hit by a tram or run into a carriage because your eyes are off the road.”
“Well, I ain’t satisfied until bullets are flying!”
“Oh, you’ve already done plenty of that. This could have been a perfect robbery, you know, law had no idea we were in that bank until the screaming and the shooting.” Kidd takes off his bandana, taking a few chance glances back toward the march of lawmen.
“Both of you, complain once we’re out of the damn situation!”
The three fall into frenzied gallop through the roads and the rain, lawmen trailing seconds behind. They gallop down the main road and break left into a street opening up to the farmland ahead, where an officer points a gun at them.
“Stop, or I shoot!”
In the blink of an eye, Leeroy draws his revolver and puts a bullet between the officer’s eyes, blowing his brains out to be lost in the mist and washed away in the rain. The panicked horse gallops away into the crowd of lawmen behind the gunslingers as they continue their sprint out of town and into the open plain.
“That’s some nice shooting, Deadeye! Didn’t even see you unholster that revolver!” Kidd exclaims, his eyes on the smoking gun already set back in its holster.
“Got a lifetime of practice.” Now outside of town where civilian casualties were no longer an issue, the lawmen reach for rifles and revolvers and take shots at the gunslingers, though Leeroy knew an accurate shot through rain on horseback was unlikely. Unless your name was Deadeye Morgan. “Now, you two get out of here, break for the woods down the road and to the right. I’ll distract the lawmen.”
“I’m not leaving for you to have all the fun by yourself, Morgan!” Skyler objects.
“There’s no fun in havin’ a bullet through you, or stolen sacks stolen back by the law. Now get out of here, I’ll catch up!” Leeroy splits off, leaping over the wooden fence of a farm and turning back towards the lawmen. Luckily, Skyler doesn’t follow. He draws his pistol, reloads the missing bullet, then puts a piece of chewing tobacco into his mouth.
Ignorants and idiots said the achievements of Deadeye Morgan were fabrications in papers and the work of amateur novelists. That no human could truly fire from the hip on horseback with complete accuracy, that in all likelihood, Deadeye Morgan missed more than he hit.
Those people have never looked down the barrel of Leeroy’s gun.
Leeroy kicks his horse into a gallop, facing down the fifteen lawmen. Shots fly left and right of him, one narrowly missing the top of his hat as the amorphous mass of horses and bodies shoot swears and bullets at the old gunslinger. Leeroy puts his gun to his hip, one hand just above the hammer.
He releases six shots in two seconds, hitting seven including the collateral hit of an unlucky lawman and dropping three off their horses. He passes the mass of lawmen and reloads in a second, firing another six shots to drop six more men before they’ve finished turning around. In five seconds, Leeroy looks at thirteen dead or dying bodies and half a dozen screaming in agony on the ground, blood hidden by the mist.
“Well? You two have friends to save, don’t you? Some of ‘em will live if you take ‘em to a surgeon.”
“You’re the real Deadeye, aren’t you?” A lawman replies, in either awe or shock.
Leeroy points at his eyepatch. “This didn’t give it away?”
“Why’d you come out of retirement? Avenburg was a better place before you turned to the Outlaw Gang, gunslinger. You used to be respectable.”
“I’d worry more about the bodies on the ground.” Leeroy spits out his chewing tobacco, then gallops away as the lawmen dismount to help the injured, leaving them in the rain and mist.
“So tell me, Percy, did we just rob a bank for wet paper, or not?” The three gunslingers sit by a tree in the nearby wood surrounded by a shallow layer of mist, the canopy of leaves blotting out the worst of the cloudy sky and rain above. It had rained for two days already, so Leeroy suspected it would only last another week at most, worsening into wild winds and thunderstorms when the mists came up to a person’s navel, before calming back down and dying out.
“I thought of it. Those sacks are waterproof; we’ll be eating well for a long time now, long as we can cash out the stocks and bonds. You know they’ve even invented new terms for fancy paper? ‘Futures’, they say. ‘Options’ and ‘Derivatives’ as well.” Percy ‘the Kidd’ explains.
“It’s all money once you cash it out.”
Percy laughs. “That much is true.”
“How much is all this, anyway?” Laura ‘Shotgun Skyler’ asks.
“We’ll have to cash it out to tell, but I reckon there’s a good few hundred Quills in these bags.”
“We’ll head to Settlement Shore, they’ve got plenty of fancy places that want paper money.”
“We’re going back into the city? I could use a few good days out in the Ruin Belt after all this.” Laura replies.
“Ruin Belt’s smaller than it used to be. There’s more city than Belt, these days.”
“And Avenburg’s smaller for it.” Laura pulls out a quartz lighter, clicking the fire quartz against a hammer to create a lash of flame and lighting up a cigarette. Percy reaches out with a cigarette of his own, using the end of Laura’s to light it.
“We’ll meet in Mistport in Settlement a week from now and work out how we’re going to get rid of all this.”
“Then? We’ll hit another bank or two, right? I’ve heard the stories of you and the Outlaw Gang. Crime sprees from Settlement in the west to Quartz Creek in the east, hiding out in the Ruin Belt and sitting on a boatload of stolen spoils.” Laura asks.
“I told you, Ruin Belt’s smaller than it used to be. I’ll figure it out. Just don’t get found out, and keep yourselves low.” Leeroy mounts up, tips his hat to his fellow gunslingers, then leaves them to their cigarettes.