Pretty much this was an old experiment (and my first in first person perspective) for an old creative writing community class I took (to keep my skills sharp). I'd love comments and obviously my tense and narrative have improved since this one-shot so here it is. Do note the RUSHED narrative I wasn't happy with but I wasn't allowed to go further in the word count than I already provided so keep that in mind.
PHOENIX's DAWN

Act One


The frontier is a damned place, smelling of abhorred rotten swine with the air tasting of sand and dust. But past these loathsome senses there is something that makes it all worthwhile in some context of the terminology. The tension of death is only the concluding consequence of true freedom, the freedom of civilization and of you. I’ve never been to what they call civilization; it represents everything about man that confines us to one single shell. A falseness of perfection I detest, but what I detest even more is the lack of freedoms time’s confining stone and timber walls. The frontier may have its anarchy, but anarchy is the only true freedom. That is one thing I agree with the gypsies on.

It is the sixth month of the new cycle and I feel my body ache with mystified pains, the only soothing thing comes to me in a moment; the voice of an angelic spirit calling to me?, perhaps the spirit is finally leading me to my salvation or realistically; my damnation. But it all fades before my hand can touch hers. What does it mean? A shiver then crept up my hollow spine and my eyes open alongside my own breath which was heavy and callous. I’m awake now and the harrowing dream still aches in the back of my head like a rusty bullet in my spine. A terrified gasp leaves me, like a child after their first nightmare. I felt my sweat dripping from my head and the pulse in my heart left me in temporary pain. My left hand grips the stone amulet that is strewn around my neck, my grayed blue eyes looking down to the old stone. There was nothing… not a vibration; the stone itself told me nothing which led me to my conclusion that it was just a dream. My eyelids are still heavy, but my body cannot go back to rest. The morning was my dawn for the first time in weeks and it was because of a damned dream. This line of thought amused me as I looked over to the empty bottle of skal that I had been drinking the day prior. I raise my hand to move through my worn blonde hair, the palm of my hand resting on my forehead.

“This is the last time I’m drinking anything from the hands of a gypsy.” I say to myself as the skal’s alcohol still lingered in my system. It was loud enough to be audible, yet my female companion, Elaine, slept like a rock. I had told her on the previous night to take the bed and I would take the floor without complaint, after all I was more accustomed to floors and cold earth then the comfort within beds. The taste of the liquor was still lingering in my throat like a snake’s bitter poison. I moved up as quietly as I could, Elaine needed as much sleep as anybody, though with what she was feeling I wonder how she could. Guessing people wasn’t my shtick so I decided to stop such useless pondering as I grabbed my worn hat and placed it on my head, my grayed eyes took a look at it as my hands halted before my face. I don’t gawk much, but there’s always a time when I come face to face with this old and shot to hellfire hat. Part of me called it my lucky charm; the other part saw it more as an extension of myself. It was just a simple black hide frontiersmen hat with the feather of a phoenix clipped to its brim, if anything it was the blasted feather that made me hold on to the hat.

With the hat firmly on my head, I took a back against the walls to my left. I took another deep breath while I moved my hand to my eyes, wiping the dust and dirt from my eyelids. I didn’t dream much, but it certainly never was angelic or spiritual. It was different from this nonsense, at least before I could relish in the anarchy of my dreams. I was no psychologist, but I was pretty certain they were an allegory for how I lived my life. Bah! It doesn’t even matter, it’s just sleep nonsense. I swiftly swiped a piece of applied tobacco rolls which I had collected in a pack and moved it to my mouth hastily, without manner. After retrieving a match and then lighting it from the flint clip on my belt, I felt some peace of mind when the smoke travelled in me and I could distract myself from that dream for a time.

“Girl, you up?” I spoke outwardly, impatient; though that was more due to my desire, or lack thereof to deal with the spirits or anything related to them. Damn the spirits, I’d say in my head as she rustled to my response, some sort of sound leaving her mouth which was pretty much unrecognizable. Then again, most mumbling was unrecognizable in my experience.

“Ver…Veracruz?” she followed up with her incoherent mumbling with actually speaking my name.

“Yep.”

“Fool, did I say I wished a drunk rooster to wake me?”

“Nope.” I spoke plainly. This girl sure loved to complain, but it was her coin in my pocket. I removed the tobacco from my mouth for a moment, only to breathe a cloud of smoke into the air above me. I chuckled, I probably shouldn’t of.

“Is there something amusing?”

Her voice was increasingly aggressive as she continued to stir herself awake and I probably shouldn’t of have been vexing really. It didn’t help with what I spoke as reply.

“Well. Your hair looks like an old rag.” Honestly, I did not know why the words left my mouth. But she bore daggers into me with her eyes, though it was nothing I hadn’t seen nor felt before. I had become distilled to a point where hostility from the other gender was pretty much predicted behavior. The acclaimed Phoenix was a scumbag after all. I pondered what exactly my reputation was at this point; it had been years since I had tried to get a pacing on it. My meaningless mental banter was cut short when she spoke again. I prefer them when they don’t speak; really, I never was fond of headaches.

“Maybe I made a mistake hiring you.” She had groaned as she began to take to her appearance. Women, right?

“Maybe you did. I’m the best shot in this county, though.”

“Your arrogance does you no credit, Veracruz.” She told me with emotion of bitter discontent and laced with clear sarcasm.

“I get that a lot.”

She didn’t reply to me, not in the vocalized sense, but by the way she looked at me I could tell she wanted to say something against my worthless honor code. Not surprising given what I imagined of the environment she was accustomed to. My mind went back to the thought of what she had contracted me for when she had sought me out two days prior. I shifted in my place against the wall, the sound of her voice echoing in my mind from the day when she said she was seeking to punish the men who killed her brother. The details of how they made it as slow and as excruciatingly painful as possible still rang clear in my mind. Jackals, the lot of them and as such they deserved to be put down like the animals they embodied or in the least that’s how I felt about them. They might have had families, but nothing breaks an honest man to turn to the behavior of torture; not on a damned banker anyway.

Tracking them down was not going to be a problem when well, it was clear who did it. They lived out of town in an old homestead, which information told us the previous night. Today was going to be the culmination of events, which was certain. Though it did bring to my mind of why this girl did choose pick me over just another hired thug? It wasn’t likely these men were anything but cheap run of the mill bandits at best and an entry level bounty hunter could of have easily laid down her personal law. Maybe I had just ran into a stream of conscious luck. But I didn’t ever like to assume, but when the hog’s hide stunk it was usually rotten. Talk about overthinking a simple job. But something rang at me like a rattlesnake at a rat or a wolf to a deer.

“Are you ready to make them suffer now?” Her voice was like iced poison and she looked it, too. She had slicked, flowing hair of a raven, with eyes of sapphire. Alongside her normally low expressions it was like a combined drink of skal and rattlesnake poison. You knew you were going to die, you couldn’t breathe and in the end it had a blissful numbness before you shut your eyes for the last time. I let out a nervous chuckle like it exited me like a rupture in a vein. I spoke before she could call me a coward for being nervous, though it was her who made the emotion poignant.

“Whatever you say, boss.” I said the comment plainly, like an obedient hound. It didn’t take long for everything to get moving after I said the claim of readiness. I guess it was a fit of impatience with myself at this point. That’s when I took flight from the Red Oak Tavern; I had a bounty to upkeep.

Act 2


I went with a mare to the Fedrel homestead almost as quick as the spirits themselves. When I found myself there it was by my guess about noon, which always was an irony with all of the high octane gunfights and duels set at the time. As I was to confront these men of two I imagined every shot happening throughout the frontier at that very moment. The sound of the hammer, the sharp piercing sound of a gunshot and the smell of tarnished sweat flickered back in the depths of my mind as if alluding to either the irony or the supposed justice that was about to be pressed.

I took a step on the dry, cracked earth and my eyes went around every corner of what I could see of the homestead and then it came to the fact either these two buffoons were hiding or they had fled. But I knew for a fact if I had left a stone unturned, it would have been a headache in the foreseeable future, but then that mental stink came back to me, although briefly as I ventured forward with my hand moving my pistol out of its firm holster. I walked forward to the homestead’s centerpiece; a farmhouse stood defiantly in front as if declaring itself to me and it felt foreboding. I figured it was the place they were lurking about in and the spirits were being kind to my senses for once in a phantom moon.

“This is so damned eerie.” I spoke outwardly, not really towards anyone in particular since there was nobody to speak of or so it seemed by my eyes and ears.

Usually if someone was waiting for whoever was hunting them to come they would of let out a warning shot; some sort of noise. But for the only sounds to be the wind hustling the lone tumbleweeds? This wasn’t the expectations of a duo that had supposedly strapped down a man in his own home and then mutilated him to death. I approached the farmhouse despite the tumbleweeds and general signs that told me this was definitely not one of the best of my ideas, but then it hit me like a jagged rock to my face, this place didn’t even look like it had seen any ounce of labor in months; no frontier animals, homestead workers or anybody and anything really. It struck a quick chill down my spine. That is one thing that truly could not have been helped.

“Like a damned gothic.” I muttered underneath my breath.

The sound of an eagle’s cry topped off the ambience as I pulled open the door of the aged farmhouse. The first room coupled itself with three doors; the one I just opened, one in front of me and one to my left. There was also an oak staircase in the left corner. If they were here it was time to focus my hearing on them. To my previous peculiar thoughts, this whole job went up in a smoke of lies or so I finally started to recognize when I came across no bodies, no noises, nothing as I searched the farmhouse’s every corner, nook and shadow to find nothing but time wasted. I came again to the thought that the boys ran off, but the state of the farmstead bugged me like a drunk would bother a suit.

“If they fled, they sure kept this place in damnation, that’s for sure.” I once again muttered, the words leaving my breath as my ears finally recognized something. It was the sound of a mare or a stallion? Huh, perhaps the two brothers were out to lunch then? I moved toward a window to see a horse strapped across the stead, indeed. I did not see any human figure that it belonged to, then a familiar jolt hit me just then and I looked down to my stone amulet. I felt energy come from the old gypsy item and in the past it had saved my life. It was a warning beacon to my psyche. To me it was obvious when I fought Smith the previous week, he went to attempt to shoot me in my back and it went off then. Now was no different.

During the jolt I saw myself, engulfed in flame; if for a moment. So I did what any sane man would do with an open window in front of him in the same situation, I made my feet move as fast as they could. My back fell flat on the roof piece below me, but I made no waste of time by sitting there; moving as quickly away from the house that held nothing.

“Well, maybe this one time the stone was wr-- ” my snarky comment was cut short by the sound of a switch and as I had seen prematurely before, the house that probably would have been still holding me caught itself in flame and ash. The flame was violently explosive and seemed to come from nowhere. The devil’s dime rung in my head, a nickname to a given explosive grenade-like tool used in demolitions and mining all over the frontier. The name wasn’t an analogy; it was just a play on words upon the creators who made it some generations ago; Gerald Dime and Hartman Devil. But reminding myself of the history lesson only just told me, “Hey, you idiot you! You almost got exploded by dynamite!”

My psyche was not kind to me, then again neither were all sorts of pains I felt at that moment when I realized the momentum of the explosion made me tumble to the ground below and rather violently at that. Luckily, I wasn’t too far from the ground when the farmhouse decided to combust. My eyes were squinted as the flame and debris rocked my senses so much that I heard and felt something fierce. The feeling was another jolt from my stone amulet, which my psyche decided to show me the sound of a gunshot as a figure loomed over me. My hand rocked to my second holster, as my main pistol had left my hands due to the force of the explosion and now was several paces away. The sound however was something I recognized and did not expect.

“You have got to be damn well kidding me.” A familiar voice exited the figure I had seen in my psyche and I couldn’t help but be surprised when I realized who was in front of me.

“I don’t think they are home, Elaine.” I chuckled, though in reality I was fuming at such underhandedness. The person who hired me almost made me well… explode. Either way it was pretty unpleasant and downright not nice. Though, her manners were pretty much bad when the sound of her pistol’s hammer being pulled back was heard on my ears, right before she spoke again.

“I can’t believe you escaped that… how did you know?”

“Well, me and the spirits play this guessing game and if I win, I live.” I said as I crawled back a bit, maintaining some distance and made sure I wasn’t well, faced down in the dirt. My brows were narrowed, even if my tone spat jokes, but really I had no reason to be amused internally.

“More jokes, even now?” she asked, aiming the pistol of hers; a simple obsidian six shooter with words engraved upon it. The pistol’s words spoke a sentence of death in a different, but familiar language to me. It was then I felt like the most moronic gunslinger north of the providence line— no, all of the frontier. This woman wasn’t who she claimed to be, she was one of those assassin women, one of the members of the black widow. There was no doubting it, because the memory of crossing paths with the group then suddenly came to me; though from what I recalled they usually were more extravagant. Then again, she did just try to explode me with dynamite which was pretty extravagant by itself.

“You widows really like the flash of something grand, don’t you?” I spat, my pistol’s hammer back as I gripped it in its holster.

“Damn it.”

“Struck a nerve, huh? Well, you guys are pretty bad at your job.”

“Your last job is this one, Phoenix, and it’s to die.”

“Sorry, that wasn’t in the job description.” My tone switched from wit to a serious one at this point. I knew why she didn’t kill me in the tavern when she had the chance. She was setting up the farmhouse to be her extravagant way of taking me down. It was a stupid code, but I believe the widow’s had their code and they stuck by it.

“Enough, we are finishing this now!”

The next few minutes went out like seconds; she fired her first bullet, I drew while dodging to the left; her bullet grazing my right shoulder as I fired outward. I wasn’t so sloppy to get done in by rank amateurs, although it didn’t help that I predicted where her bullet would be. The gypsy stone around my neck was like cheating in a way. I also predicted her movements as I fired my own firearm and it nailed her square in the head, like I was the assassin cultist and she was the stupid frontier gunslinger. When all was said and done, I looted her body for her contract, pocketed it, took her gun and retrieved my discarded pistol from the ground paces in front of me before looming back into the sun, like a true phoenix.

The End