1. Hoop and Holler

The heat in the prison car was the kind that cooked a thought before you finished thinking it. Helma “Buzzard Bait” Fenapple rolled his flip lighter between his fingers while Elidor “Waterweight” Hoot rehearsed the worst stomach cramps Fort Gullet had ever seen. Their chains kept them ankle-to-ankle, a three-legged race toward the gallows, but when the guard ambled past with his swagger and bad attitude, the performance began. Elidor groaned, thrashed, invoked saints and sausages. Helma whooped and rattled the bars. Behind them lay the corps of Pappy, a battered old fella hidden under a blanket. His severed foot, a necessecity to unbind him from them, had been gifted to the third accomplice.

When the moment came, it was less heroic than desperate: a tin to the temple, a stumble, a grab for keys slick with sweat, a push. The guard stumbled into the reach to the accomplice, Lord Bertie, blood still dripping from his teeth following the foot-sized snack. A torn throat was all it took for the guard to hit the floor, hat skewed, dignity gone. Bertie’s piercing blue eyes held a permanent hunger, but he held tothe plan and used the keys to free them. He then slipped free in the chaos and vanished toward the rear of the train, promising to “make a disturbance.” Helma and Elidor, armed now with a revolver, a stolen hat, and a map half-guessed at, chose the front. The gallows waited behind them. Ahead, smoke and the unknown.

2. Buzzards in the Scarlet Wind

Climbing onto the roof of the Organ Rail was like stepping into a furnace that hated you personally. The desert wind tried to peel them off the black iron, and the couplings gaped like metal jaws between cars. Helma nearly went under the wheels when his grip slipped; Elidor caught him with a grunt and a prayer to his lucky cracked horseshoe. Then the sky descended.

The Blood Vultures came shrieking through the Scarlet Billow, all claws and murder. They were bigger than stories allowed and faster than fairness. Helma went down under beaks and talons, unconscious and bleeding into the red-stained roof. Elidor fought like a man defending the last friend he’d ever make, driving the creatures back long enough to drag him to the trapdoor. They tumbled inside, battered and half-plucked, leaving the roof to the birds and the desert to its appetite.

3. Stew with a Menthol Aftertaste

They found the mess car by the smell—stew and smoke and something medicinal beneath it. The cook, Larbara, had a shotgun under the counter and the look of a woman who’d seen too much of both hunger and men. Helma’s blood-soaked blanket and buzzard bites earned a wary sympathy; Elidor’s manner did the rest. Bowls were filled. Bread was torn. The stew tasted rusty, almost minty, like it had opinions about your lungs.

It worked. Color crept back into Helma’s face. Elidor wiped grease from his chin and asked, politely, for knives. Larbara’s eyes narrowed, then softened. She’d stay out of trouble, she said, so long as trouble stayed out of her stew. They left warmer than they’d arrived, with blades tucked away and the uneasy sense that the train had already begun to change around them.

4. The Taxidermist’s Gospel

The lab car smelled of old secrets and fresh stitches. Shelves sagged under composite creatures—half-this, half-that—while a surgeon’s table held something worse: a woman’s torso married to eagle flesh. Dr. Vulchester—craning, cheerful, unwell—spoke of miracles in a foreign lilt, of serum drawn from a patient named Gnomon. When he injected the green fluid, the thing on the table breathed.

It breathed, and then it bled him.

As the harpy tore free and fled toward the engine with keys in hand, Vulchester’s gut spilled onto the floor like an argument he couldn’t win. Helma took one of the scarlet syringes in the confusion. Later, curious or desperate, he pressed it into his own wound. The flesh knitted. A tooth regrew. And somewhere in the attic of his mind, a new room unlocked. A voice began to whisper, distant and rhythmic as pistons: Kill the engine.

5. The Car of Open Cells

They found the next prison car with every door hanging open and the guards reduced to meat. Weapons were gone. Hats remained. Helma lifted one black cowboy hat from the gore and felt a pressure behind his eyes, like a telegraph tapping directly on bone. The voice was clearer now—closer—less whisper than command.

Elidor read from Vulchester’s diary in halting bursts while Helma filled in the gaps. Gnomon’s blood healed. It also bound. Those marked would die when the engine died—unless only one remained at the final strike. They stood amid the ruin, hat in hand, and understood that escape had become arithmetic. Not whether the engine should fall, but how many would be standing when it did.

6. Machine Gun Lullaby

The gun car was thunder and splinters. Guards braced behind an iron half-wall while a mounted gun chewed the length of the carriage. Mutants—crocodile-jawed, rat-eared, desperate—returned fire from a makeshift barricade. Helma and Elidor kept low, counting the rhythm of the gun. Move when it stops. Pray it stops soon.

Iron Gorgon—the centaur—fell screaming. A gelatinous horror split under fire. Helma vaulted the barricade in a storm of smoke, smashing the gunner with a satchel that still held the doctor’s severed head and finishing him with steel. Elidor’s shot took another guard clean through the skull. When the mounted gun finally ran dry, the car exhaled gunpowder and blood. The voice in Helma’s mind pulsed approval. Closer.

7. Heart of the Rail

The engine car was not iron but flesh. Walls flexed. Pipes throbbed. A massive heart hung in pipeline arteries, beating faster as they approached. The train’s terrible core spoke through the wet echo of it: End our misery. Destroy the engine.

Helma and Elidor argued in the shadow of the pulse. Together meant death for both. Alone meant survival for one—and inheritance of something vast and wrong. In the end, they struck as one. Bullets tore into the heart until it ruptured, black-green fluid baptizing the chamber. The train shuddered, slowed, and died beneath them. They did not. Helma’s neck wound reopened, but was bound. Elidor wiped blood from his nose. The voice and pressure was gone.

8. 1616

Beyond the false engine they found the safe, squat and iron, waiting like a punchline. The numbers on the revolver whispered the answer all along. 1616. The door swung wide on ten thousand silver dreams.

They stepped out into the desert air with the weight of it, only to find Lord Bertie waiting, two guns drawn and ambition in his grin. The last shots of the Organ Rail cracked across the sands. Bertie fell. Elidor staggered, wounded, fate uncertain in the settling dust. Helma stood with blood on his collar and silver at his boots, the dead train behind him and the wide, merciless frontier ahead.

Epilogue

Helma patched Elidor up. There was too much gold for Stabbin’ Cactus, Helma’s intransigent donkey to carry, so they buried half and made their way to Fort Gullet, the searing heat a continuous companion on the rough journey.

They survived, but neither had the sense to hide their new wealth and soon they fell out and were individually separated from their silver.

As fate would have it they separately ventured into the desert to retrieve the other half, only to arrive at the spot from opposite directions. Hands hovered above gun handles. Only one would walk away with the prize.

Frontier Scum is great fun! Get it. Play it.

Until next time,

Owen