First Rodeo - a modern western urban fantasy

 From First Rodeo - the Sheriff Ben Logan Series

 

 

 

 

The shadow looked like a rock formation.

A solid brick of a thing that loomed out of the darkness and stretched across the trail.

The closer I got, the more it took shape.

Man made.

The lines were too precise, too even to be nature made.

It rested in the twilight gloom of a hollow between two ridges and a cairn on the edge of the trail told me that the medicine man scout preceded me.

I almost called out his name, but I was over the border and into the Rez.

Excessive noise was not a god idea.

There was no telling who it might attract.

Or what.

The heavy air between the ridges stirred with the wind and shifted, bringing a scent back ot me.

Death.

Carrion has a unique stench.

No matter the origin. Human or animal.

I wouldn’t know which until I got closer.

The hair on the back of my neck stirred in a caveman’s response to danger.

Fear threatened to shut everything down, but the fight or flight impulse and all systems were reporting flight.

Run.

Screaming it like the klaxon ring of an all hands on deck alarm bell.

The shadow was a box car.

Forty something feet long, the color of rust with peeling white letters in script and number sequences I didn’t recognize.

What was a railroad boxcar doing out here in the middle of nowhere.

It wasn’t a railcar though this particular type had been designed as such.

The forty two foot metal container could be lifted off train wheels and locked onto a trailer for big rigs.

There was no sign of a big rig and no way for one to get here.

Another mystery.

Footprints scuffled the dirt in front of the door.

Let there on purpose so I would notice.

I shipped the rifle and clenched the door handle.

A few shoves later it creaked open to the an ebon interior as dark as the river Styx.

This was the source of the smell.

It was too dark to see inside.

I concentrated extra hard and managed to turn my strong willpower into weak light that cast a soft candle glow inside the container.

Empty.

I studied the interior and wondered what my eyes were missing?