I stared up at the fiery-haired girl on the floor above me.  Danni’s gun aimed right at my face, and I knew that my time had run out.

“Sorry, but it’s you or me,” the girl repeated – and before I could even open my mouth, her finger tightened.  She pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked.

For a good second, longer than I’d admit to anyone, we both held there, frozen.  The gun had clicked over on the round – a misfire.

If I had moved right then, I could have moved back, maybe dodged the next shot.

If Danni pulled the trigger a second time, the next round in her .45 would have gone through my skull.

But neither of us moved.  We just held still, staring at each other in mutual disbelief.

It seemed to go on forever, but finally, the spell was broken.  I let go of Danni’s ankle and scrambled back, at the same time as she kicked her foot free and clambered up to her feet.  We were both back up on our feet, but thinking more of defense than attack.

Now up and standing, but still close enough to each other that either of us could reach out and touch the other, we stared at each other once again.  I could maybe try and tackle her, knock the gun out of her hands before she could get off a shot, my tactical training told me.  I knew that I had about a fifty-fifty shot of managing to avoid a bullet in someplace lethal.

But before I could move, Danni did.  She darted forward, pushing the gun up against my ribs as she leaned into me.

And before I could react, I felt the lightest brush of her lips against my face.

Before I could grab her, the girl danced back, pushing off of me and kicking me off balance as she darted backwards.  “Better luck next time, Priest!” she called after me, as she disappeared out of the hotel’s front door.

I could have lunged for my own gun, still lying on the floor.  I can reload my pistol in seconds while at a dead run.  By the time I was through the doors of the hotel and outside, my own weapon would be fully loaded and ready to bring the girl down.  She couldn’t outrun a bullet.

Instead, I stayed frozen, standing there amid the wreckage of the lobby.  Ever so slowly, one of my hands lifted up to touch where her lips had brushed against the corner of my mouth.

Finally, a thought managed to work its way through the haze and mist in my mind, yelling and shouting to make itself clear.

The Organization isn’t going to be happy about this, it whispered to me darkly.

It was true.  I needed to send back a telegraph with my report.  The Organization had given me a pass last time I failed to bring down the girl, but they wouldn’t accept two failures in a row.  This meant an Organization-wide bounty on the girl – and every Priest in the area would perk up and think about going after her.

If I wanted to redeem myself, I’d have to beat them all out and find the girl myself, before they could do the same.

As I slowly labored over to pick up my gun from the floor, still feeling a twinge of pain pierce up from my abdomen with each step, I felt my resolve harden.  I knew my skills, and I knew that I could find Danni first.

But a dark thought in my head perked up, uncoiling in my mind like a snake.  “But why are you so set on finding her first?” it asked me in a soft hiss.

To prove myself, to redeem myself, I told that intruding thought.  If I didn’t find Danni, I was likely to be demoted, if not fired.  And the Organization had very strong views on how it terminated its employees when they were no longer capable.

“Is that truly why you want to find her?” that dark thought in my head pressed.  “When you catch up to her again, will you be able to kill her?”

Or what?

The black snake hissed impatiently.  “Do you truly want to kill her?  Or are you searching for her so you can protect her?”

Protect her?  As if this girl had somehow completely shaken my core, my sense of who I was?  I shook with outrage at the suggestion.

Yet somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to answer that dark thought in my head.  Instead, I remained mute as it, satisfied, crawled back into the depths beneath my consciousness.

To be continued . . . 

A month later, I caught up with Danni.

A girl with fiery red hair, a Southern twang in her voice, and far too much cash to throw around.  It wasn’t the easiest trail to follow, but Danni was certainly recognizable – and she didn’t bother to change her name, either.  Slowly but surely, I hunted after her as she fled west.

When I finally found her, she was just on the east side of the Rocky mountains, making her way through the mining towns.  Always with her big .45 cannon ready, of course – that detail stuck out even more strongly than anything else.  No matter what the big, strong man in front of you might say, he remembers staring down the barrel of that gun.
Unfortunately, word travels fast.  Even before I arrived at Boulder City, in the Colorado Territory, I was catching rumors that a Priest was in the area, hunting this bank robber.

Always weird to hear a rumor about yourself.  Like a goose walking over your grave.

So when I arrived, I didn’t waste time staking out the girl’s next targets.  There weren’t many places in Boulder City to stay, and I picked the biggest hotel to start.

She was at the second-largest hotel, and was waiting for me in the lobby.

I didn’t have much warning.  I stepped into the lobby, caught the flash of bright red-orange, and threw myself behind a couch as the vase behind me exploded.  I landed, rolled, and came up with my revolver in hand as another round shredded through the back of the couch.

“You know, I always thought that Priests were so scary!” I heard the girl call out, her clear tone sounding almost… delighted?  “But you’re not so bad at all!”

I gritted my teeth to hold back a response and rolled again – but this time, I came out into the open, my gun leveled across the room.  And this time, it was Danni who had to duck back behind the wood of the concierge desk as I sent copper-jacketed lead flying her way.

“Give up!” I yelled to her, between shots.  I knew that the girl was ready to pop up as soon as I gave her the opportunity, so I maintained regular covering fire as I crept closer.  “You don’t have to go down like this!”

Sixth shot.  I was out.  I ducked down on the other side of the concierge desk, but didn’t pop open the empty gun yet.  I waited, guessing at what the girl would do next.  Sure enough, she jumped up a moment later, and I saw the tip of her barrel protrude out over the edge as she searched for my hiding spot.

I lashed up, striking out with the barrel of my own empty gun.  I was aiming blind, but I knew where she was standing – and my gun’s hot barrel smacked against her fingers, sending her own revolver skittering away across the floor.

Before the girl could do anything more than gasp, I was leaping up over the wooden barricade.  For a moment, I saw her eyes go wide as I bore down on her.  A second later, she was down on the ground beneath me.

Even as I threw myself down on her, I was amazed at how light the girl felt in my grip.  She was slim, a tiny little handful in my big arms as I pinned her and brought her down onto the ground on the other side of the desk.  I don’t know if it was her small size, but something made me twist slightly as we fell, making sure that my weight didn’t crush her as we hit the floor.

For a second, as we landed, the two of us were staring into each other’s eyes.  The girl’s big green irises were only a couple inches from mine.  Her eyes were wide, but her lips were pursed slightly, gently parted, as if she was about to kiss me.

Once again, I felt that strange little surge of emotion in the back of my mind, trying to tell me something that I didn’t understand.

And then we landed on the ground – and the girl brought her knee up between my legs.  With a crunch, my sight went red with sharp, piercing pain.

By the time I pried my eyes open again, desperately pulling myself back up, the girl had leapt off of me.  She was racing across the floor on her hands and knees, reaching her hand out.  I threw myself forward and grabbed onto her leg, trying to hold her back.

My fingers tightened around Danni’s ankle.  The girl tried to kick free, but couldn’t escape.

I pulled her back, towards where I could grab onto her – and she twisted around onto her back, bringing her hands back to aim her revolver down into my face.

I mentioned that no man, no matter how big and tough he claims to be, easily forgets the terror of staring straight into his death.  That’s true, even for me.  I stared into that yawning, gaping black barrel, knowing that the rest of my life was measured in fractions of a second.

“Sorry, Priest,” Danni said as she held the gun, her voice no longer filled with mirth.  “But it’s you or me – and I’m not ready to give up on life just yet.”

My eyes were on the barrel, but for just an instant, they darted up to her eyes.  There was a strange emotion in there.  Was it a look of regret?

I didn’t have any more time left.

Danni pulled the trigger.

To be continued . . . 

I knew two things that I hadn’t known before, I reflected, as I leaned back against the springs of the uncomfortable hotel bed.  The springs beneath me squeaked and groaned in protest against my weight, but I paid them little mind.  I had slept on far worse.

First, I knew the girl’s name.  Danni, she was called.  The girl had an accomplice, a boy waiting outside with a stolen car, and some of the bystanders heard him call out her name.

The name wouldn’t do me much good, however, now that I knew the second fact.

Danni had flown the coop.  She was nowhere to be found in Indiana.
I’d spent the last few days plumbing contacts far and wide, trying to get a bead on this girl.  The automobile stuck out, those weren’t exactly common around here.  When I heard that she was making her getaway in a car, I hoped that I’d be able to use that tip to locate her.

The next day, the car turned up abandoned in a ditch off one of the main roads.  My contact told me that the thing was shot to hell – broken rods, a bent axle, and the engine was basically slagged.  “Only good for scrap,” he confided in me.

Didn’t do me much good.  That just meant that Danni and her male driver had ditched the vehicle.  Danni probably just flagged down the next car or cart to come along, pointed that big .45 of hers at the driver, and continued merrily on her way.

For some reason, the thought of that little slip of a girl, her red hair flying out on the loose as she happily hijacked some poor sap’s vehicle, made me smile a bit.  It was probably just the ridiculousness of the image in my mind.

Shifting a little, trying to find a halfway comfortable position on the sharp and complaining bedsprings, I felt something poking into my leg.  I reached into my pocket, and my fingers closed on the offending object.

I drew out the small metallic object.  It was the pair of bullets, one from my gun, one from Danni’s gun.  I had tucked the fused mass into a pocket after the robbery, and had been carrying it around ever since.

I knew that I ought to throw it away.  Priests were trained to travel light, after all.  It served no purpose.

Yet staring at it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it meant something, that the two bullets colliding, a little miracle of physics, had some deeper implication for me.  I was not a religious man, but holding this bullet sent a little shiver down my spine.

After a minute, I tucked the little lump of copper and lead away.  Ignoring the prodding of a spring in the small of my back, I turned my attention back to the problem at hand.

But no matter how I turned around the question in my mind, there was no other answer.  I’d have to wait for Danni to strike again, hit another bank, to tell me where she was.

I wasn’t looking forward to telling my supervisor that I’d missed my chance to bring her down when I had the upper hand.

Still, there was something about the hunt, the chase, that always got my blood pumping.  I was a wolf, out on the hunt, stalking and tracking my prey.  I would be slow, deliberate – but I’d keep on coming, until Danni could run no further.

I didn’t know how long it would take, but I would catch her.

To be continued . . . 

Two weeks later, I was in Indiana, sitting outside and sipping at a cup of lukewarm tea.  The tea was not especially good, and there was still a chill in the spring air – but the view from my table was just perfect.

I picked up the cup of tea, lifted it to my lips, and repressed a shudder as the foul liquid hit my tongue.  And they had the gall to charge for this?  I was half tempted to demand my money back.  Indiana wasn’t that far from New York, but the hicks out here had definitely lost something in translation.

Setting the cup firmly back down, I lifted up my newspaper again – but kept the top of the paper low enough so that I could glance over the top.  Across the street, the tall marble pillars of First National Bank were quiet.  There was no commotion, and the few morning customers seemed content to slowly climb the wide steps as they prepared to make their deposits and withdrawals.

I was here on a hunch.  Three banks had gone down, all in cities to the South – but drawing a line through those locations made an arrow that pointed straight to First National.

It had been three days since the last robbery.  This bank robber, some girl who had decided that the reward was worth the eventual cost, would likely strike any day now.

My hand briefly slipped beneath my long black jacket, checking the weight of the gun that hung just beneath my shoulder blade.

The girl’s cost would soon be paid.

I didn’t have much longer to wait.  Before the sun had reached its peak in the sky, the little snatches of conversation carried across the street in the breeze vanished.  In their place, I heard yells, shouts – and then a loud, echoing gunshot.

I was on my feet before the echo faded.  I vaulted the waist-high fence of the cafe, my newspaper falling away in the breeze as I reached beneath my coat for my gun.  I took the steps three at a time, dropping my shoulder down so that I could slam through the front doors of the bank.

Even as I burst in, my eyes flashed around, taking stock of the situation.  Priests are trained on situational awareness.  “The trigger is only as fast as the eye behind it,” my old instructor used to shout at us.

There wasn’t much to spot, however.  Most of the people in the bank, customers and clerks alike, were down on the floor, some with their hands up covering their heads.  Behind the counter, two young men, their eyes wide with terror, emptied out their drawers into a pair of sacks.

And standing on top of a leather-covered counter in the middle of the room, the bank robber watched as she held her gun at the ready.

Her appearance surprised me.  She was young, just a little slip of a girl, the picture of exuberant and overconfident youth.  She wore loose clothes that nonetheless were pulled tight around a fit figure, and the curves suggested beneath those garments said that this was no immature girl.  A black bandana covered most of her face, but it couldn’t hold back errant strands of

Of course, my entry made a considerable amount of noise as I burst in through the door.  Even as I brought my gun out from its holster beneath my jacket, the girl on the counter spun, her own gun coming up to point towards me.

For a moment, there was a flurry of motion as we both simultaneously fired and dodged.  Even as I pulled the trigger, I knew that my shot went wide as the girl vaulted down behind the counter.  Her shot also missed, although I felt the slight breeze as the round passed by only inches from my head.  Well, the girl wasn’t afraid to take a lethal shot.

I landed crouched on the balls of my feet, up against the counter’s heavy wooden bulk.  I knew that the girl was on the other side – I could hear her breathing.

“Give up!” I called out, trying to make my voice sound encouraging, harmless.  “Just put down your weapon, and you can get out of here alive!” I hoped that I sounded believable.

But my query was in vain.  “Why don’t you give up, instead?” the girl called back, her voice high and clear.  “Come on, I promise not to rough you up too much!”

And then she laughed, high and clear and fearless.

For just an instant, I considered it.  Unlike my own promise, the girl wasn’t likely to shoot me.  And if I could break her out of this stalemate, I had a good chance of wrestling her weapon away, disarming her.  I’d quickly come back out on top.

And what’s more… there was something about that laugh.  It was so utterly fearless, like nothing I’d heard before.

“Last chance!” the girl shouted, and I heard her shifting on the other side of the bench.  “Or are you gonna try some crazy Priest bravery?”

She moved again – but this time, it wasn’t just shifting on her feet.  I leapt around the side of the bench, but she was already up and sprinting towards the side door of the bank.  Her gun was pointed back behind her, towards me, but her face was turned towards the exit.

My gun was up, and even though my whole body was in motion and off balance, I still took the shot.

There was a high-pitched clink, like a piece of jewelry on a woman’s wrist.

At the sound, the girl turned back, glancing over her shoulder at me as her arm came up to push open the door.  For just an instant, my eyes locked on hers.  I had only the briefest impression of vivid green, sparkling and almost smiling.

And then she was gone.

Gravity returned an instant later, and I had to stumble forward to catch myself from falling.  Behind me, I could hear the clerks and customers slowly and nervously returning to their feet.  But I didn’t pay attention to them.

Instead, I stepped forward a couple of paces, and then bent forward to examine a small object on the floor.

My bullets were copper-jacketed, for extra penetrating power against a target with a metal vest.  The girl, however, was using cheaper rounds, composed only of lead.  Yet still, the two rounds had hit each other with enough power to flatten each other out into a disk, a sandwich of two colors.

I picked up the still-warm disk, two bullets fused together, and weighed it in my hand as I gazed out the door.  The girl would be long gone, I knew.  I’d have to resume the long hunt.

In my head, however, I felt a curious and novel sense of foreboding.  I stood on the precipice of something, I suddenly felt – although I couldn’t see what it might be.  I didn’t know what might come…

To be continued . . .

I stared down at the sketches in front of me for a couple seconds, running my eyes over the lines of the girl’s face, and then lifted my gaze back up to my supervisor, sitting in front of me.

“She’s barely old enough to call herself an adult,” I said, my tone turning the words into a question.  “And the Organization wants to send a Priest after her?”

Across from me, my supervisor gave a shrug with one shoulder.  The man was infuriatingly good at that, I had noticed, and I already hated it.  I was still young, idealistic, and I believed deeply in the value of my work.  To see someone else treat our mission so callously bothered me at some small level.

“She’s a liability,” my supervisor (I refused to think of him as my boss) said, as if this explained everything.  “The girl’s come from nowhere, and she’s robbed nearly a dozen banks now.  A couple in Louisiana, but she quickly headed north, and the last few she’s hit have all been in Indiana.  So that’s where you’ll start.”

“She’s a bank robber?” I asked, returning my gaze back down to the sketches.  They were just rough pencil and charcoal, but the artist had managed to capture a glint in her eyes, a determined set to her jaw, that spoke volumes about the girl’s strength of character.

“And almost a killer,” my supervisor added.  “Girl carries a .45 – hell of a big gun for such a sweet little thing, but she knows how to use it.  Nearly blew the leg off one of the local cops when he tried to corner her.”

I raised my eyebrows.  The girl in the sketch didn’t look like a cold-blooded assassin.  “Just trying to arrest her?” I said in doubtful tones.

My supervisor winced, as if he’d been hoping to avoid clarifying.  “He might have decided to take a couple liberties with her,” he added.  “Small town cops tend to be… unreliable.”

Nice way of phrasing it, I thought to myself.  Better than saying that most of them are petty thugs with a power complex, not much better than the criminals they’re supposed to stop.  But I know when to be diplomatic, so I held my tongue.

“Anyway,” the man picked up, leaving behind the embarrassment of small town police, “we’ve been asked to step in by the banks, and they’re sending you.  Find this girl, put a stop to the robberies, and maybe see if you can recover any of the cash.”

“Capture is acceptable?” I asked, looking once more down at the girl’s picture.  She didn’t look like someone that the banks desired so desperately to be dead that they’d hire us.  The Organization did good work, but we didn’t come cheap.

My supervisor was shaking his head, however.  “They want this to be an example,” he told me.  “Put a bullet in her.”

I made sure that the man didn’t see my grimace as he stood up from my desk and walked away.

I knew, however, that despite my personal objections, the mission came first.  I had been a Priest for nearly a decade now, and my training taught me to overlook personal feelings.  Feelings, sentimentality, they were just distractions.  I trusted my gut, my training, and my Colt.  Whatever mistakes might have led this girl into a life of crime, they were already committed.  And now, with a Priest after her, she didn’t get another chance.

The Organization already had a train ticket paid for and ready to carry me out west, towards Indiana.  My packing consisted of grabbing my knapsack and slinging it over my shoulder, and then checking my weapons as I headed towards the door.

Priests traveled light.  We carried just enough to do the job assigned to us.

To be continued . . .

“And that,” the man in black said, leaning back a little from his typewriter to gaze at his audience, “is where I first heard of Danni.”

Jenny glanced over at the other member of the audience, feeling confused. Old Hillpaw was nodding, as if this made sense to him, but she was lost.  With the strange sensation that she was back in the single room farmhouse where she struggled through all six grades of school, she put her hand up in the air.

“I’m lost,” she blurted out as the man in black turned his gaze towards her.  “Who are you, anyway?  What do you do?”

Old Hillpaw’s eyebrows drew together into a thunderstorm of a frown, as if this knowledge should be obvious.  But the man in black just sighed, shaking his head back and forth.

“Ah, how quickly we fade into obscurity,” he said, speaking more to the empty air than to his bar companions.  “Let me try something else, miss.

“Have you heard of the Priests in Black?”
Even Jenny knew that name.  She physically jerked back in her chair, her mouth dropping open as she stared at the man in black.  As the new and terrifying realization made its way through her mind, she pushed her chair back, as if trying to put physical distance between her and the story’s narrator.

“You- you’re one of them?” she gasped out, shaking her head back and forth in a tangle of hair as if trying to deny reality.  “But they’re killers!  They assassinate people, shoot people!  They’re murderers, and worse!”

Unbelievably, the man in black tossed back his head and laughed, a surprisingly hearty laugh that shook his whole frame.  “Relax, young lady,” he said, as he reached up to wipe a tear from his eye.  “I haven’t killed someone in longer than you’ve been alive.”

At his urging, Jenny settled down a little, although the whites of her eyes were still wide around the edges of her harried and insecure expression.

“But yes, I was one of them,” the man in black said, once he was sure one of his audience members wasn’t about to bolt from the table.  “Of course, we called it the Organization.  Loyal, we were, as well we should be after the time and training they invested in us.  But even still, I didn’t mind the other nickname we picked up.”

The man nodded to Old Hillpaw.  “I wager you know it.”

Hillpaw licked his lips.  Even though he hadn’t physically reacted, the old-timer looked almost as nervous as the waitress next to him.  “Machine gun priests,” the old man said, his voice hoarser than usual.

“That’s the one,” the man in black nodded.

Jenny glanced over, confused again.  “Wait, they were priests?  I thought they were assassins?”

Even this new revelation about their storyteller couldn’t prevent Old Hillpaw from giving a lecture when he knew more than another.  “Oh, they weren’t true priests,” he explained.  “But they dressed all in black, long coats like robes, with their guns hidden underneath.  And when they wanted someone dead, they’d deliver last rites with a machine gun.  Hence the name, see?”

The waitress still didn’t quite understand, but she nodded.  Hillpaw opened his mouth, about to add more, but he then remembered the other person at the table, and decided to not completely dominate the conversation.

“That’s how the public saw us,” the man in black said, quietly.  “But to us, it was a calling.  We were the arm of the Organization, keeping the world on track, eliminating the criminals, the insane, those that caused a threat to the order.”

“To your Organization’s order,” Old Hillpaw challenged.

The man in black didn’t respond, but his eyes settled on the old man.  After a second, Hillpaw flushed, dropping his gaze down.  “Sorry,” he muttered into his nearly empty drink, and then tossed back the rest.

“We eliminated threats,” the man in black repeated.  “And so, one morning, a sketch and a description arrived at my desk.

“The sketch showed a girl, once with her face bare, and once with a black bandana covering up her nose and mouth.  The description called her slender, lithe, with blazing red hair.  She was armed and considered extremely dangerous.”

The man in black glanced over at his stack of papers beside his typewriter, and shook his head.  “I didn’t know her name, didn’t know her story.  Not yet.

“All I knew was that she was my next target.”

To be continued . . . 

The next Monday, Danni wasn’t at the construction site.

Most of the workers didn’t even notice the absence of the young, slim girl who had counted herself among their number.  The foreman noticed, but only in the vaguely annoyed sense that he would have to go round up another worker to replace her.  It wouldn’t be hard to find someone else desperate for money, but it still took effort, and it still annoyed the foreman.

James noticed, however…
He bobbed up and down through the breakfast line, trying to see if he had somehow missed her, had passed her.  After a few passes, however, he concluded that she was nowhere to be found.  There was no way that he could miss her big shock of flame-red hair.

Should he hope that she would turn up, or should he go looking for her?  James decided that the paycheck was more important than why his friend had decided to play hookey, but he kept his eyes peeled all day.  

Yet still, there was no sign of Danni.

As soon as the day was over, he dashed back down to the makeshift barracks that the workers called home.  Where in the world could she be?

When he entered, however, he spotted movement over by her bunk.  Someone was digging through her things, someone wearing a cloak and cowl to conceal their identity!  

“Hey!” James shouted, running over towards the hooded figure even as he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that he didn’t have a weapon of any sort.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?  Get away from that stuff!”

“James?” came the voice from under the hood – and as the figure stood up and turned to face him, he saw Danni’s face staring back at him in surprise!

He skidded to a stop, barely keeping from colliding with the girl.  “Danni!  Where’ve you been?  You missed work!  You’re gonna get fired!”

“Let them!” the girl shot back, reaching down for a small canvas bag at her feet.  She pulled it up, undid the latch holding it closed, and flipped it around so that James could see the contents.

He stared.

The bag was stuffed with cash, more cash than he had ever seen in his life!  There were stacks upon stacks of bills, wrinkled but bound together with paper bands.  The denominations printed on the faces of the bills varied, but there were ones, fives, tens, and James was fairly certain that he saw at least one stack of hundreds!

Hundred dollar bills!  The young man couldn’t even imagine a hundred dollars.

“Wh-wha?” he managed, trying to find the words to express his incredulity.

Danni grinned at him, the cheeky, irrepressible grin that he recognized.  She reached down into the bag, carelessly shoving some of the bills aside as her fingers quested for something heavier, something towards the bottom.

She pulled out the piece of heavy metal, the muscles in her slim arms tensing as they held it up.  “Remember how you said that all the money’s tied up in banks?” she asked, as James stared at the object in her hands with a mixture of awe and horror.  “Well, I robbed one!”

James couldn’t even speak.  He just shook his head back and forth, staring at the huge, glinting metal weapon in Danni’s hands.

“Like it?  I stole it off the foreman,” she commented, taking his silence as admiration.  “A forty five, I think.  It’s huge!  I just waved it at the bankers, and they all shut up and did what I told them!”

After another moment, the young man licked his dry lips.  “Danni, you’re gonna get killed,” he whispered.

But the girl shook her head fiercely, errant strands of her red hair escaping from beneath the hood.  “No!  Come on, you and me – we can finally get out of here, can go actually do real things, live real lives!” she insisted.  She shoved the gun back into the bag amid the stacks of cash, and reached out to put her hand on James’s shoulder.  

“And I want you to come with me,” she finished.  “But we gotta go now!  Come on!”

Even if he had wanted to resist, the young man never stood a chance against Danni’s reckless, youthful determination.  But he did manage to ask a question as he was tugged out the door.

“Where are we goin’?” he managed to ask, before all his breath had to be devoted to running to keep up with the girl.

“North,” came the answer.  “That’s where all them folks with money are, right?  Well, we’re gonna go change that!”

An hour later, the local constabulary came bursting into the barracks, guns drawn.  But by that point, Danni and her friend were long gone.

Ten hours later, the foreman gave each of the workers a nod as they passed by.  In his hands he held a thick stack of thin envelopes, and he handed one of these to each man as they passed.

Danni knew better than to rip the envelope open right away.  The foreman might be a cheap skinflint, but he knew better than to rip off his workers.  He told them all how little they were going to make, and then paid them precisely that.  If he tried anything else, he’d soon be without a crew.

“Hey, Flame-head,” called out a voice next to her.

Danni glanced over at James, the skinny, scrawny youth jogging to catch up with her.  The young man looked half-starved, like always, but he still put on a grin as he loped up beside her – and Danni’s smile in return was genuine.  

“Hey, Skinny-bones,” she replied, the nicknames affectionate rather than insulting.  “How was your long day of grueling labor?”

“Oh, same as always,” the kid replied with a shrug.  His back was still a bit hunched; that tended to happen after spending the whole day picking up the nails that the other workmen dropped.  He, unlike Danni, had already ripped open his pay envelope.  Danni could see the end of it sticking out of a pocket on his oversized, baggy canvas trousers.

“So,” James continued after sucking in another breath, “what are you going to do tonight?  Are we hitting the town?  Living it up like kings?”  He bounced a little as he trotted along, making the pockets of his pants jingle with the change inside.

Danni couldn’t help but smile at the kid’s exuberance, but even though she was only a year older than him, she couldn’t help feeling wiser by many years.  “Yeah, maybe later,” she dismissed his suggestion.  “But first, I gotta go visit my mom.”

James’s eyebrows rose.  “You know, I’ve never gotten to meet your mom?” he said, his tone turning the words into a question. 

Danni stopped and just looked at him for a minute.  Even for those few seconds, she could see the man growing uncomfortable, his shoulders pulling back a little, but he didn’t back away.

“Okay,” she finally said.  “Follow me.”

*

A half hour later, they both stood in silence, looking down at the smooth stone in front of them.

When James finally spoke up again, his voice was hushed, muted of its usual enthusiasm.  “Sorry, Danni,” he said quietly.  “I didn’t know.”

“That’s okay,” the girl replied, reaching out and patting her friend on the shoulder.  Her eyes, however, never left the stone in front of them.

When they arrived, she had bent down and carefully cleared away some of the weeds and taller blades of glass, making sure that the stone was visible.  It wasn’t properly carved, but she’d paid off the tab of one of the masons in town, and he’d chiseled some words into the stone in exchange.

“Might not be carved proper, but at least it’s good granite,” he had remarked as he finished hammering in the words that Danni requested.  “Should last a while if you keep the roots off it.”

And the girl had done so.  Every two weeks, while the rest of her work crew headed down to the bars to fritter away their meager pay so that they could live like rich folks for a night, she would make the hike up to this hill and carefully clear away any errant plants encroaching on the stone.

After another few minutes, Danni opened her mouth again.  “She wanted me to make something,” she said, not looking over at James.

“What, like a house or something?”

She shook her head, the long strands of red hair falling out around her face.  “No, of myself.”  She gestured around, out at the skeletal frames of buildings in the distance, at her dusty and stained clothing.  “She wanted me to be more than just another little poor girl.”

James opened his mouth, but the boy found himself at a rare loss of words.  “Yeah, but no one gets outta here,” he finally said, truth winning out over tact.  “I mean, nobody leaves – there’s nothing else out there.  At least here there’s work, enough to get by.”

He saw Danni nod, but the woman didn’t reply.  “All the money’s owned by the rich folks up north,” he went on.  “And they keep it all in banks, so you can’t even rob ’em!  So we’re all kinda stuck here.”

The girl had straightened up a little, and glanced back at him.  She was taller than James, and as she looked down at him, James thought for a moment that he saw a queer glint in her eyes in the dusk.  

“What?” he asked, confused.

After a second, though, Danni shook her head.  “No, it’s nothing,” she said.  “Forget it.”  

But as they headed down the quiet hill, back towards the hustle and activity of the town, an idea was growing and flowering in her head…