by Micah Dean Hicks
\n
<\/br>
\nThree years past, Seven-leg and his troupe of hard-backed killers were knocking over settler wagons in the pines of east Texas.\u00a0 They had been in camp one morning, chewing rotten horse hides and Seven-leg dealing a round of cards, while they waited for one-antennaed Willy Moseley to get back with news about a job.\u00a0 Willy never showed, but the state militia side-crept on them and let loose with rifles.\u00a0 The bandits drew iron, swung their segmented bodies around, and shoved themselves underneath logs and rock piles.\u00a0 That day the dirt flushed with blue blood, scraps of shell and leg segments strewn like cards.\u00a0 They lost a lot of good crawlers in those trees before they could get away.\u00a0 But now Seven-leg had heard about Willy turning sheriff in a border town, and his claw itched to squeeze down on his Colt cannon and make meat of the mud-eater who had betrayed him.<\/p>\n
A gambler, Seven-leg was bringing six leadslingers for the job, all crawlers who’d been with him in the pines years ago, totaling seven: himself, Greg Potts, Tom Boiled, Janey Flicker, Nate Sayers, Coy James, and Dean Mitchell.\u00a0 Some of those crawlers would go on to become legends of their own, and some would go back to the mud.
\n
<\/br>
\nIt was two weeks swimming backwards downriver, their tails thumping through the mud-waters and reed-beds making good time.\u00a0 Nobody carried much more than their gun, the duster on their carapace, and pounds of shells.\u00a0 Wouldn’t need anything else.<\/p>\n
They came to a little town on the riverbank, nothing but a few dozen badly stacked mud chimneys, and Seven-leg told them to have themselves a night of fun.\u00a0 There’d be desert tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Nate, Coy, and Dean found a dark saloon with just enough light for their cards, and stayed at that most of the night. \u00a0Janey Flicker took some old shells to a gunsmith and had him fill them up with powder and put a new lead cap on them.\u00a0 She wasn’t one to run out of bullets.<\/p>\n
Old Greg Potts wandered the town for a few hours, his eyes slowly clouding up like dishwater.\u00a0 He found Tom Boiled carrying around a tin bucket, putting out cook-fires, and shook his head.\u00a0 Ever since he’d tumbled into a hot spring, something had been off with the crusty son of a bitch.\u00a0 Greg took the bucket away from him.\u00a0 He said he didn’t know if he was up to crossing the desert, old as he was and all.\u00a0 Tom’s mouth fizzed a little.\u00a0 He told Greg that if he backed out now, Seven-leg would get off Janey just long enough to put a bullet in him.\u00a0 Then, Tom said, he’d eat every piece of Greg himself.\u00a0 Greg called him a flat-tailed crazy piece of shit and crawled back to the saloon, but he was afraid Tom might be right.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Potts’ eyes were solid gray with sick and he could barely see.\u00a0 Seven-leg asked him if he was going to be able to make it, and Tom grinned his burned grin.\u00a0 Greg spat and said that he could.
\n
<\/br>
\nOut of the river, it was three days crawl across the heat wastes, nothing but sun and sun, and old Greg Potts died.\u00a0 That night, with a yellow moon heavy to fall in the sky, Seven-leg said some words over his shell.\u00a0 They sectioned up Potts, held the meat in their claws, and seared him red over the fire.\u00a0 That night, Nate, Coy, and Dean played cards while Janey Flicker fucked Seven-leg under the open sky, her five pairs of spinnerets drumming on his shell and his claw tugging her antennae.\u00a0 Off away from the others, Tom Boiled stuffed his mouth with Potts’ legs and sang every song he could remember.\u00a0 That night, Seven-leg whispered to Janey that they were six now and had lost their luck, but as long as she was with him, he thought he could do anything.<\/p>\n
Morning came and Tom Boiled was up firing rounds off into the face of the sun, bright red splotches shining on his back and head.\u00a0 Coy spat and said they ought to kill him for it, and Janey said she was sympathetic to that.\u00a0 The shots echoed back and forth to the horizon.\u00a0 The town was an hour out, nothing but flatland, and surely Willy would know that they were coming now.\u00a0 Seven-leg told Boiled to get his shit straight, and Tom calmed down.\u00a0 Seven-leg pulled his hood over his rostrum, antennules checking the wind, and told them to get stepping.\u00a0 It would be a hot noon.<\/p>\n
The town was a tiny hump on the desert, no more than a hundred crustaceans and larva taken together.\u00a0 Adobe burrows ringed a few good-sized rocks.\u00a0 There was a clump of wood buildings warped and sun-bleached and all sharing walls with one another.\u00a0 Seven-leg’s mouthparts rubbed together and he thought how generous it was of the militia to hide Willy all the way out here.\u00a0 He stuck a seven of clubs in his hat-band for luck.<\/p>\n
They circled around to the south, knowing Willy had heard the shots.\u00a0 Tom Boiled was steady babbling, revolver clutched in each claw, not making any sense.\u00a0 Nate was fed up with it, but didn’t see anything they could do about it now, so he kept quiet.\u00a0 Nate, Coy, and Dean threw their serapes back off their claws and drew iron.\u00a0 The troupe crawled up the street in a line.<\/p>\n
Seven-leg could see Willy’s burrows on the north end of town, right where he thought they’d be.\u00a0 Bead-like eyes followed them from street windows, but no one moved until a larva ran out in front of Tom Boiled — scrawny thing, not much past a nauplius — and Tom skewered it with one sharp foreleg, shoved it in his mouth, and ate that little bastard with his parents watching from their door.\u00a0 Shit got bad, then.<\/p>\n
The town crustaceans screamed and drummed their claws on the walls.\u00a0 Willy spun around in his burrow, silver star gleaming on his carapace.\u00a0 He saw Seven-leg and his group down the street, and he and his deputies came boiling out, guns high and hammers dropping.\u00a0 Ducking into houses, Seven-leg and his troupe were some cold-water killers, and raked the streets with lead from one end to the other.<\/p>\n
Seven-leg found himself alone in a doorway, a family balled up together on the floor behind him, and deputies sending gunfire his way.\u00a0 He shot back, and wondered where Janey was, but he knew he couldn’t worry about that now.\u00a0 He got hit, a bullet cutting straight through his tail and shattering the chitinous plate above it.\u00a0 It left blue stars of blood every time his tail slapped the ground, but that wasn’t going to stop a crawler like him.\u00a0 He cleaned out everyone on the street, their antennas lying limp in the dirt, and went to find Willy.<\/p>\n
There was an awful sound back around a cluster of cabins, and Dean wondered what in the hell Tom was doing over there.\u00a0 He saw Janey start scuttling that way.\u00a0 Willy’s men were filing past the general store to stop her, but Nate, Coy, and Dean shot the bastards from an alley, their heads settling like helmets in the dust.<\/p>\n
Seven-leg followed the shine of a silver star creeping in and out of water troughs and barrels, squeezing off bullet after bullet, stripping the tops of railings and hearing the sound of shells sink into Willy’s soft body.\u00a0 He finally caught up with him trying to climb back into his burrow on the north side of town.<\/p>\n
Willy was walking in circles, his eyes gummed up with blood and dirt, antennaeless now, his sides dotted with shots.\u00a0 Seven-leg was glad he’d found him before he’d been able to drag himself into a hole and die.<\/p>\n
Willy flailed his claws, and Seven-leg crawled right up on his back and clamped two pincers behind his head.\u00a0 He asked if Willy remembered the night Seven-leg dug him out of jail and gave him his life back.\u00a0 Willy vomited a necklace of blue froth, slurred that he hadn’t had anything to do with the ambush, and asked what the hell this was about.\u00a0 Seven-leg clamped down, Willy’s heavy head dropping into a water trough.\u00a0 It floated there.\u00a0 Seven-leg spat on him and went to find the others.<\/p>\n
Everything had quieted down.\u00a0 He found Nate, Coy, and Dean stacking bodies in front of the saloon.\u00a0 They were passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth, but Dean dropped it when they heard more gunfire at the cabins.\u00a0 Seven-leg raised the Colt in his right claw and went straight down the street while the others covered him.\u00a0 He came around the side of a building and saw Tom Boiled’s bright-splotched head cracking apart under gunfire, some crawler standing over him and squeezing off their whole chamber into his body.\u00a0 Seven-leg didn’t hesitate.\u00a0 He put a bullet down the center of her tail, blistering its way across nerve-bundles and burning out her head.\u00a0 Janey Flicker dropped her gun and fell down across Tom.\u00a0 Seven-leg howled and tore the dirt when he saw what he had done.<\/p>\n
They found where Tom had smashed in the door of a nursery and stuffed himself bloated with little ones, then carved up those he couldn’t eat.\u00a0 One girl’s gray jelly skin was freckled with white spots where he’d tried to burn her.<\/p>\n
Janey Flicker lay upside down in the dirt, her head a mess from gunfire, her spinnerets white and delicate and shining in the sun.\u00a0 Seven-leg lay down across her.\u00a0 He still had the seven of clubs in his hat.\u00a0 Nate, Coy, and Dean each took out their deck of cards, pulled the sevens from the stack, and dropped them beside the couple in the dirt.\u00a0 Seven-leg took her body in his claws and dragged it away, moving backwards down the street.\u00a0 They let him go, hoping he’d take his luck with him.<\/p>\n
That night, it was a heavy moon over them all: Nate, Coy, and Dean playing cards and eating the dead in front of the saloon; Seven-leg watching the dark from the mouth of his burrow, Janey cold underneath him.\u00a0 He tore off chill pieces of her and ate them, each one a reminder of how much he’d loved her.<\/p>\n
When Nate, Coy, and Dean came to get him in the morning, he was gone, seven needle-like tracks going off into the deep desert.\u00a0 They never met up with him again after that, heard later that he had gone further south and had run-ins with the army.\u00a0 They went back to Texas for a while, eventually went further west.\u00a0 They sowed stories wherever they went, shadows that grew larger with every saloon they passed.\u00a0 Though they never saw him again, every once in a while Seven-leg’s stories would meet theirs around a camp fire, behind a hand of cards, under a yellow moon. by Micah Dean Hicks Three years past, Seven-leg and his troupe of hard-backed killers were knocking over settler wagons in the pines of east Texas.\u00a0 They had been in camp one morning, chewing rotten horse hides and Seven-leg dealing a … Continue reading
\n
<\/br>
\n
<\/br>
\nMICAH DEAN HICKS<\/strong> is a master’s student in the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. His work has been accepted to over a dozen journals, including Shady Side Review, Brain Harvest, Prick of the Spindle, Tryst, and the Smoking Poet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"