Dry Heat

July 30th 1898

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Inside The Grand Canyon

a novel excerpt

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by Richie Shemberger

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     The sun was setting, basking a ominous blood red across the canyon. Our horses were moving as fast as they could while still going reasonably slow enough to maneuver the rough canyon terrain. The final confrontation with this wicked abomination that has plagued our town was getting closer and closer. And after everything that had transpired since he found his way into our town, there was a mighty high chance that Daniel and myself were riding straight into our deaths. The kind of otherworldly forces that this man was using was definitely beyond our pay grade. While that was definitely not stopping me, I was somewhat worried about Daniel.

     “How are you feeling?” I yelled to him attempting to cut through the noises of rushing wind and horse hooves clopping.

     “Terrified” He said back with a rather content look on his face. While he was likely using the perfect word to describe how he felt, I could see it on his face that his own personal feelings were irrelevant to how he was going to react to the matter at hand. A bittersweet smile crossed my lips. Daniel was so much different of a man now than he was when I first met him. And i couldn't have been any prouder.

     As we rode on and the sun started to lower out of sight, we eventually came to the waterfall that we were looking for. We disembarked and tied up our horses to a tree. As we approached the back of the waterfall, we were faced with a large cave opening. We stopped and stared at it for at least a minutes straight.  Daniel grabbed my hand and held on tightly.

     “Serenity, I just want to make sure I say this before we face this man, just in case we don't survive this.” My whole body was overwhelmed with emotion. As calm under pressure that I usually am with these kind of things, hearing him say such foreboding words sent chills through my entire essence.

      “I would not be capable of standing where I am right now, about ready to face the danger we will soon face, if it were not for you coming into my life. You have inspired me to be brave in the ways I never thought I could be, and thanks to you I have become the man i was always meant to be.” We came together, hugging one another. I looked up at him whilst still in embrace.

      “Daniel, I need you to understand something and make me a promise,” I said with tears protruding from my eyes.    “You were always a great man. You may not have realized the extent of your bravery right away, but I know the drive to protect the people of your town has always been there, And I need you to promise me that if you survive this and I Don’t, That you will go on being the same man, I don’t want you believing that you need me to do good by these people. You can still be a great force for good even if I'm no longer around." Daniel leaned in and kissed me. He brought his head back up.

     “I will try, but that definitely isn’t an easy promise for me to make,” he said with a sense of doubt about his voice.

      Suddenly, our fixation on one another was broken by the sound of voices echoing loudly through the cave. We darted off through the narrow tunnels as fast as we could following the voices. The air in the tunnels became dense and toxic feeling, so we both tied bandanas around the bottom half of our faces. Eventually we finally reached the source of the sound. There before our eyes in a very high ceiling section of the cave, we found the culprit we had been hunting: Dr. Stefan Nicholes. Who was also wearing a bandana around his face. No doubt to protect his lungs from the fumes that he seemed to be creating, For he stood on the other side of what was likely the source of the toxic air, an enormous blue flamed bonfire at least three times the size of a house. Surrounding it were a large crowd of at least three dozen denizens of our town. Caught in some sort of trance, they were the source of the voices, chanting some kind of intelligible words.

     The two of us were hidden from his sight behind a layer of rocks on the outer rim of the room.

    “That stuff in the fire is the same stuff he has been trying to con all our townsfolk into buying, except this time he has concentrated a much higher dose”

     Daniel and I quietly made our way around the room. Staying out of the doctors sight.

     “Maybe this will be easier than we thought. If we can just find a vantage point where one of the townsfolk are not in the way, we can just put one well placed bullet in the doctor's head and this will all be over,” Daniel said with optimism in his voice. Although this was far easier said than done because the Doctor was within the dense crowd of people. And shooting at him meant the risk of missing and hitting one of them. They may be hypnotized, but they were still capable of being saved.

     I decided I would have to get some high ground to do this right. I made my way to one of the back corners of the room behind the Doctor and started scaling the jagged walls. Daniel looked on with an extremely nervous look on his face. With his gun ready just in case things went not as planned. I climbed about ten feet off the ground before the shape of the wall didn't favor me climbing any further. But I still was too awkwardly angled to shoot him clearly.

Then I spotted a stalactite hanging in the center of the ceiling that had a crooked edge. Which gave me an idea. A tied up a lasso and tossed it around the hooked rock. I was ready to swing low and get my shot at him up close. Daniel's face was getting even more nervous. His attention was eventually drawn back to the doctor because he started to move. He walked towards one of the townsfolk whose chanting had gotten much louder and faster than those around him. The doctor then suddenly reach out his hand and violently placed his palm on the hypnotized man's face. We watch as some kind of energy seemed to flow from the man into the doctor, and after about five seconds of this, the man fell down lifeless.

      I shouted “No!” at the top of lungs. My whole body suddenly lost control of all its patience. I swung low towards the doctor, who had suddenly looked up in my direction. As I rushed through the air his direction, he reached into his cloak and whipped out some kind of sharp weapon. All in one motion, he sliced the skin of my arm as a swung into his vicinity. The pain caused me to let go of the rope as it swung past the center of the arch of my descent. I was going up in the air for about one second and then spent another second falling hard towards the ground, followed by a short roll.

      Daniel, now in full panic mode, jumped off of a rock and grabbed my still hanging rope. He put aside all sense of carefulness and just began shooting at the doctor, hitting him in the arm and the leg a few times. Daniel ran out of bullets but was still aggressively pulling the trigger despite noting firing.

      As I gained my composure. I leaned up and looked at the scratch on my arm. I had a huge gash that was covered with wood splinters. The blood coming out of my arm was turning a bright green and was starting to glow. I looked towards the doctor who was down on one knee due to the injuries sustained from Daniel's shooting. In his hand I saw what seemed to be the sharp object he had swung at me, a fractured piece of the wood that he was burning in the bonfire. Whatever arcane effects this plant had caused me some sort of infection. And it was spreading fast. Luckily for me the drug was temporarily giving me some kind of adrenaline rush. All the anger in my body coupled with the effects of the wood made me feel immensely strong. I moved towards the crowd of hypnotized towns folks, they attempted to swarm me but my strength was enough to force the large crowd off of me.

     Some of the crowd was attempting to yank down the rope that Daniel was held on to. He was frantically trying to swing his legs so that he could move the rope towards a spot where he could safely jump off. But the Towns Folks pulling at the rope made this Extremely difficult for him.

     I continued to press on through the crowd towards the doctor. As I approached his injured body, he was quite obviously intimidated, I lunged at him and pinned him to the ground with my hands around his throat. I was willing and ready to choke this man to death so i could put an end to all the madness he had caused. Then suddenly I felt my gun slide out of my holster. I let the doctor go and turned around suddenly to be greeted by one of the hypnotized people holding my gun and pointing it straight at the center of my chest. Without a second's hesitation, the townsfolk fired the gun straight through my heart. I dropped to my knees and rolled onto my back. I could feel all the power in me surging with the desire to kill this man, but my body was slowly shutting down and i was incapable of doing anything.

     The Doctor stood up, covered in green blood that had just fired out of the back of my body. He turned his attention to daniel dangling on the rope. He had climbed about twelve feet off the ground and was finally getting enough slack to swing the rope. He had begun to swing it towards the wall, and was just about ready to jump. But then suddenly, the aggression of the towns folks pulling caused the rope to snap mid swing. The momentum of the swing caused Daniel to sloppily fly towards the rocky wall. He collided with it head first and then fell all the way to the ground. I wanted to scream out his name, but my voice, along with multiple other parts of my body, were slowly losing function.

     I watched the injured doctor roll over and grab the ankles of two other townsfolk and proceed to suck the life out of them, healing his injuries and allowing him to come back to his feet. As I laid there, helpless and dying, The doctor came and stood over my body, I could see dark spots protruded over my eyes as my consciousness faded away. The last thing I saw was the doctor's covered face staring at my own.

     In my mind, I had already leaped at him and killed him a thousand times over. But instead all I physically was able to do, was just lay there and die…...