Free Stitches: A Werewolf Gunslinger Tale Volume 2 by MT Murphy

The man with the noose around his neck was dead. No doubt about
it. The problem was they hadn’t hanged him yet.
    Pale skin gave way to dark circles
around droopy eyes. He wasn’t just pale. He was damn near green. He
looked like a week old corpse sitting on the back of that horse. He
had no heartbeat and he wasn’t breathing. It was a shame I was the
only one who could see that.
    “ Any last words?” The
question came from a tall old man with a mustache who stood next to
the horse with rifle in hand.
    The doomed rider was as still as a
piece of wood. If the prospect of a short drop and a sudden stop
troubled him, he didn’t let on. Slowly he turned his head to face
the mustached man. His eyes were dull and glossy. One was brown and
one was blue.
    He scanned the crowd that had gathered
to watch his execution on a lovely sunny day. I counted forty
people including a young couple who stood right in front. The
woman’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. The man had been
crying too. A mother and father who had lost a child?
    “ Monster!” the sobbing
woman exclaimed.
    No. A mother and father whose child
was murdered.
    The condemned man looked past all of
them, locking eyes with me. “Last words?” His voice was deep but
quiet. “Ignorance is bliss. Pray your eyes stay closed to the real
monsters in your midst. Get on with it.”
    The mustached man looked towards the
couple. The father nodded at him. He fired the rifle into the air
and slapped the horse’s backside.
    The animal lurched forward, taking the
rider with it for a single stride before the rope grew taut. The
horse continued on its path leaving the man to swing by the
neck.
    The hanged man was big. No. He was
huge. The limb of the old oak tree drooped from his weight. His
toes dangled a hand’s width from the ground, almost touching each
time he would swing. He was at least seven and a half feet tall if
he was an inch. The heavy iron chains they had attached to his
wrists must have weighed forty pounds. He didn’t move or struggle.
He just swung in the breeze.
    They let him hang there for five
minutes before cutting him down. It took six men to hoist his body
back up on the horse to be hauled away.
    “ I’m sorry you had to see
that, miss.” The mustached man looked genuinely troubled. He reeked
of pipe tobacco. It was obvious from the way he fiddled with the
corncob pipe in his shirt pocket that he wanted nothing more than
to fire up and calm his nerves.
    “ The name’s Lily. What was
all that about?”
    “ Nice to meet you Lily.
I’m Stanley. I run the general store.” He watched the others lead
the horse and its grisly cargo away. “It’s hard to even imagine
what he did. That feller killed Judy and Todd’s little girl. Brute
ripped her clean in half and ate her insides. I ain’t never seen
nothing like it.” Stanly covered his mouth with a handkerchief. For
a moment I couldn’t tell if he was going to cry or be
sick.
    I placed a hand on his slumped
shoulder. “That is truly horrible. Just horrible.”
    The surprisingly calm lynch mob slowly
disbursed after the corpse was gone. Unlike most such groups I had
seen, nobody was celebrating the death they had just caused. The
all looked a lot like Stanley: stunned and sickened.
    “ Where is the
sheriff?”
    “ We got no lawman to speak
of. Old Bill Tucker was the sheriff for years, but he died last
fall and nobody else wanted the job. We never had no trouble until
that man showed up.”
    “ The killer?”
    “ Yep. Adam was his name.
He came and asked me if he could camp outside of town. He was a
rough looking character, but he didn’t have no gun, so I figured he
was mostly harmless.” Stanley wiped tears before they had a chance
to fall. “Damn it.”
    The rest of the crowd paid no mind to
me or to the reluctant executioner. They made their way down the
hill from the hanging tree and back towards town.
    Stanley regained his composure and
took an honest look at me for the first time.