johnpender.net

This week’s Fiction Friday assignment was to “Pick a book of fiction you’d never read (e.g., if you read sci-fi, pick a romance). Open to a random page and read the last couple paragraphs of the page. DO NOT TURN THE PAGE. Now continue writing the story. Feel free to change the genre as you write. “
The story I have chosen is Zeke and Ned by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, a small, yellowed paperback I found in a dust-covered old metal desk at my previous place of employ when we took over another warehouse and used it for our new offices. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly a decade now – I’ve never even opened it.
I find myself opening this musty old book for the first time, to page 277, to which I find:

Tailcoat despised the old judge. In fact, he despised all judges. He would rather have sawed the old man’s throat open with a dull knife than listen to a minute of his sass; but financially, he was not in a position to act on his impulse. A simple-looking stagecoach robbery north of Natchez Trace had failed to come off as planned. A resilient posse had appeared out of nowhere and had hung on tenaciously in pursuit, chasing them nearly fifty miles and wounding three of his men in the process. All three of the men died, leaving Tailcoat, Beezle, and a gaunt renegade named Jerry Ankle to flog their tired horses to safety in Arkansas. Not a cent had been earned in the process, and the future for random robbery did not look bright.
Though Tailcoat had boldly sent Beezle off to the hardware

[end of page]

store down in Little Rock, he had come back empty-handed, having spent all of his two dollars at the saloon instead; a mistake that Tailcoat had only once made before. This had been Beezle’s second chance, and like at everything else in life, he failed miserably.  There they were, in the middle of the Ozarks, penniless, low on supplies, and lost, with an angry posse on their tail that Beezle had unknowingly led right back to their camp.
Both Jerry Ankle and Beezle had been killed in the siege, but not before more than half the posse had been dispatched; sly Tailcoat had lobbed a bundle of T.N.T. at them as they approached up the south face of the mountain, transforming its granite face into a prairie of blood. The four that remained hunted down Tailcoat and his men with efficiency and ferocity they had never seen before, for this was their land and Tailcoat and his men were outsiders.
“Tailcoat, whatever your last name might be, you have been charged with robbery and the murders of seventeen men. I hereby sentence you to be hanged by the neck at noon until you be dead, dead, dead” the judge proclaimed as he slammed his oak gavel down on his desk.
“Your honor, you can kiss my lily white ass, ass, ass!” Tailcoat exclaimed. Shackles in the 1800’s were primitive at best, allowing Tailcoat full access to the keypad embedded in his left forearm. He pressed Home and then Enter and the display shown

July 23, 2168

through his skin. Beneath it flashed

Confirm?

He again pressed Enter and

Confirm?

changed from red to green and began to flash.
A brilliant white light enveloped him and before sheriff Brackett could bring the butt of his Colt down on the back of Tailcoat’s head, he disappeared.
The sheriff’s gun swung violently down, breaking through the back support of the chair Tailcoat had been sitting in, flipped it over and discharged, sending a .45 slug straight past the first two rows of spectators and through the left eye of one Sarah Peterson, wife of The Honorable Judge Andrew Peterson.

Related posts:

1. Fiction Friday #133 You can blame Benjamin Solah for this one. I visited his blog today – as I do every day...
2. Fiction Friday #134 “There, that should just about do it” he whispered under his breath as he worked placing the last piece of...
3. Fiction Friday #139 “Turn left up here” “At the big Oak?” “Yeah, that’s it” she said with that youthful exuberance that drew him...