And Kill Them All by J. Lee Butts

sting of the massive, red-hot slug as it entered the fleshy part of my side caused me to groan in my half consciousness and squirm atop twisted bedding. And for way longer than necessary, I relived the events that had transpired outside Marshal Jacob Cobb’s office each time my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes.
    Top of everything else, it was doubled-up summertime in Texas and hotter’n a burning mesquite stump. During the day everything with legs spent most of its time looking for any spot not deep-fried by the sun. Even the coming of darkest night brought almost nothing in the way of much-needed respite. ’Course, as I’ve said before, I didn’t mind the heat back then.
    But early on one particular morning, the unrelenting, elevated temperature snapped me awake coated in the damp sheen of an icy sweat. Seemed as though every square inch of my aching body was slick with clammy flesh. Groggy from being snatched out of my dreadful nightly tossings and turnings, I rolled onto one side.
    Propped on an elbow, I hacked out a croupy cough, then wheezed as though being strangled by some evil, unseen spirit. Damn the nightmares. Ugly, confused visions possessed the uncommon power to give me a case of the waking willies. Or maybe it wasn’t the dreams this particular time. Something else, possibly.
    â€œSweet Jesus, have mercy,” I grumbled and cast a heavy-lidded gaze at the open doorway and out onto the veranda.
    Fuzzy-headed from the night’s short, dank siesta, I swung aching legs around and came to a stoop-shouldered, humped-over sitting position. Clawed at a spot on my throat, beneath a stubble-covered chin. It felt as though my mouth had somehow been filled with a wad of flour glue laced with a handful of straw.
    My narrow, coffin-like cot—a wood-frame and leather-strapped contraption—appeared as though it had been specifically designed by hell-bred demons to torment the unsuspecting user. This medieval torture contrivance was topped by a lumpy, cotton-ticking bag stuffed with brittle corn shucks. The sack crackled and crunched with my slightest move.
    â€œMy God, but this is a right sorry mattress,” I mumbled to the empty room.
    Used a fist to poke at a particularly rocklike, irritating bulge near the spot that one unthinking leg usually sought out. The entire less-than-comfortable apparatus groaned, creaked, rustled, and complained as I shifted from one spot to another.
    With considerably more conviction, I growled, “Damnation.” Then set to rubbing my lower back. Yawned. Pawed at one sleep-matted eye with the back of a clenched fist. Picked at something wayward on my lower lip. Puckered and tried several times to spit the offending article away.
    Pushing off the wobbly bed, I went to work getting completely erect. My saddle-abused spine creaked into place, one bony vertebrae at a time. Kind of like a carpenter’s folding, metal-jointed ruler. Felt as if I was being stabbed with heated ice picks, when all those grating bones snapped and ground their way to the spots where each belonged. ’Course that set me to wondering what daily life would be like when I actually went and got old.
    I wobbled a bit on sluggish legs. And, in the manner an ancient, solitary, battle-scarred grizzly, awakening in his hidden den, I stretched, shook all over, then snarled to warn off any wayward intruders.
    Swaying in the near dark of the advancing morn, I ran shaky fingertips over the thumb-sized, near-healed weal on my right side just above the belt line. Then I slipped those same fingers around to my back and gingerly checked the spot where the bullet had come out.
    â€œDamn Irby Teal for a good shot, anyhow,” I muttered. “Guess if the evil bastard had been any better with a pistol I’d be dead, buried, and nothing but a gob of rot just like him, his brother, Boston, and their stupid friends.”
    Satisfied that the matching welts of angry flesh had not