Prose Verse Part 3, Avenging Angel

(To have tanspired some time before part 1 and 2. I am sorry if it is still rough. I have edited to the best of my abilties.)

Deep cuts to the flesh have an odd effect as injuries go. Either the cut is made know by pain or because the skin parts and blood gushes forth in a wellspring of red life.

The latter kinds are the worst, for some reason the body delays the pain completely until the blood pours.

The man standing two feet from Samantha Fowler had such a wound.

She saw the thoughts of warm pain churn in his mind, his face awash with what stirred about his brain. Those slow trudging ruminations seemed to be disbelief.

He looked at the cut in wonder, locked onto the two folds of skin open and gaping like a mouth.

The blood took its time to find the split; the cut had been so clean that the body didn’t register it at first. Blood wept, trickling like tears; that is until the torrent of red spilled and spurt from the rent flesh in an onslaught, staining his shirt and skin.

Men who see themselves as powerful are often slow to understand their undoing.

The man was a rapist, not hers; but that mattered little. Here in the west, if proven, rape could be a death sentence.

It was rarely proven.

People had this weird feeling that women somehow brought it upon themselves. As if a woman wished for such horrors cast upon their bodies and thus staining their souls.

While the man tried his hand at sin and defilement, Samantha descended upon him like heaven’s avenging angel: beautiful and serene, raven hair loose and unfettered, dark brown eyes lost in the killing; blade in hand, wet with spilled life, and justice in her heart.

The bandit’s potential victim, Maggie, lay unconscious, beaten for her willingness to scream and fight. She showed strength with what weapons she wielded. The man’s face displayed her rage as she fought the assault. His skin rent by her nails and his lip split and bleeding from her punches.

His anger overtook him and he released it on her. The man pounded her body as he threw fists into her face and stomach. She fell to the dirt lost to the pain and he stared at her in wonder. Apparently, a woman never fought him off thus.

As a highwayman, he should have been use to violence.

He must have known making theft by gunpoint could get him killed out in the badlands. Undeterred by the possible result, he and his gang had waylaid Samantha’s stagecoach on the road. They held them up looking for riches and finding nothing worth their trouble, they beat the driver and guard bloody and moved onto the passengers.

Samantha reflected on the events, past, and present, both which had to lead her here.

To her true self.

She had her reasons for moving north, through these badlands, mostly to flee death. However, she found herself surrounded by it once more, this time caused by her own hand.

She had run from such things in the past. Though these deaths didn’t seem to trouble her, her heart raced with the rush of the fighting, not the killing. She felt no need to run, nor did she ache with pain and despair.

She found this odd. Why had her father’s passing rent her soul and weighed down her heart? She remembered clearly days where it had even hurt to breathe so strangle was her heart.

The loss pushed her away, made her want to leave her home and life. This was made worse when, despite being capable of running her father’s butcher’s shop, many of the men about town tried to pressure her into marriage or becoming a prostitute rather than see her as a business owner. Figuring either profession put her beauty to work and thus benefiting one or many.

She decided neither benefited her.

Instead, she allowed her feelings guide what remained of her life and sold her father's business. That money, along with his and her savings, gave her the means she needed to live elsewhere. So she boarded a train followed by stagecoach to more female-friendly lands. Wyoming seemed such a place with its suffrage laws and cheap land. So she picked Prose, a town which showed promise with its positions of mayor and sheriff filled by women. A town like that would not suggest a pretty girl whore herself out for a living.

So here she had found herself, in a stagecoach, traveling through the badlands. Free of her previous life and burden.

And, apparently free of law and morals.

These highwaymen took advantage of such things.

She remembered thinking herself clever in her hiding of her money, and these highwaymen had proven her thus in their inability to find her stash. Her bags had been searched, their carpet hides torn asunder in rage, not knowing that corset wrapped about her waist held her monies tight to her stomach in a small leather pouch. A simple dress best seen on a farmer’s wife hid the fine corset and fortune, allowing her skullduggery to thwart theirs.

She had watched the four men tear into the coach and drivers looking for anything worth taking. They had found little to excuse their actions so far.

Greasy from lack of bathing and dirty from freedom of a social need to clean clothes and keep them in good repair, the men looked the part of highwaymen let loose and free to pursue their own wanton desires.

The leader looked the worst, and his men appeared to be doing their utmost to emulate him. The youngest amongst them was trying too hard, he sported pimples along with his patchy beard.

Clothes were stained, torn, and badly repaired, with an odd mix of colors and sizes spread out throughout the group. The horses also looked ragged and worn down.

Making Samantha certain both clothes and horses were stolen, hence the ill-treated.

Samantha decided to name the youngest one Pimple Beard. Another, in his odd mismatched styles, sported a blue bib shirt, so Blue Bib. The last, not including the Leader, looked the greasiest. Oily hair, grease-stained shirt, slimy skin. Lard? Yes, she liked that, Lard.

The gang raged about a bit. Pimple Beard cursed a lot, not caring ladies were present, while Blue Bib flung clothes around for no other reason than that he could. Lard threw a couple more kicks into the driver and the shotgun guard.

The Leader just brooded, staring at the coach and the women within without really looking.

Lacking money and finding beating the coachmen and tearing up other’s possessions unable to soothe their hot blood, the bandits turned their eyes upon the ladies sitting in the coach. Maggie lost herself in her attempts to remain calm while Samantha looked at the whole event in the same detached way she felt while she watched her first cow be killed and butchered when she was six.

Just like then, the scene before her thing didn’t seem real.

Samantha didn’t know the women beside her in the stagecoach, during the ride she had made no attemps to socialize.

The women was well dressed, shrouded in flashy thing full of bright green and blue spilling into a skirt made of folds and pleats below Maggie’s waist. She looked like money and high society, especially when next to the simple cut and clothe of Samantha’s dress.

The leader looked upon the both of them with hunger and seeing two beauties to choose from he went with the girl from prominence. Men like him, a man who saw himself as powerful, seemed to like to degrade women who actually were.

His three cronies watched, backs turned on Samantha, perhaps waiting for their turn and fairly secure in their safety with nothing but the wild and a women behind them. Samantha remembered the moment she had decided to act. There had been no logical train of thought with a reasonable conclusion. She just pushed herself up off the ground and found herself smiling. She didn't know why her face chose to do so, she hadn't felt joy or happiness in many weeks. And yet, something caused her lips to curl upwards and her dimples to shine.

The youngest of the gang held the means she needed to end his life, a knife. She drew the steel from Pimple Beard’s belt with him unaware, so intent had he been on the doings of the gang leader. She stared at the tool and remembered the blade was called an Arkansas toothpick due to its long double-edged profile and narrow sharp tip.

The knife in her hand felt right, like her soul was now complete.

Her father trained her as a butcher, of both man and beast, and such bits of steel cut well under her guidance. She realized, while he had been alive, she had always had a knife in hand or on her person. Why had she stopped carry one? Dad always carried sharpened steel. Such things were expected, and he taught her thus.

Her father had been an Apache brave, while only having a quarter of their blood, the tribe cared little for that and so he had learned their ways. When he left them to take a white wife, they also didn’t care, a good woman was a good woman. So Samantha grew up in a butcher’s shop with a knife fighter teaching her how to cut, whether by pushing the blade or drawing it, and peppered in with learning how to separate skin from meat, meat from bones, her father told her to apply such skills to man.

Under his tutelage, she had become proficient with a blade.

She moved the blade quick, not testing the edge with thumb or finger, but rather watching to see if the sun caught on any dull flat bits of blade’s edge. The light flicked back and forth across the knife’s sides, lost in the knife edges. She was surprised given their horses, clothes, and grooming that blade was kept in such a state.

It would do.

Samantha grabbed the Pimple Beard with her left hand, locking her hand around the back of his neck. Her fingers pinched one side and her thumb the other. Then, using the web of her thumb and forefinger as a guide and ramp, she drove the dagger into the base of the man’s skull. The spine severed cleanly and the blade slid into the brain. She had practice this a few times on pigs and calves, a man didn’t appear all that different.

She killed him and she felt nothing. Rather like she was floating, detached from her body, hanging from her own shoulder and watching the man die.

He fell due to the lack of will and as his body dropped she ripped the knife free with her right hand and drew his pistol with her left. Again, her father’s instruction guided her arm. When she was younger she had snuck off with a borrowed pistol and tried to teach herself to shoot. Her dad refused to show her, knives being all fine and dandy, but guns were uncouth. Seeing a great unfairness in this, she sought to learn under her own tutelage. When he found out he set her straight or tried to. By then all her skills were inculcated and incorrect. Now, in her odd detached state, shooting with her left, it seemed easy to apply what her father had tried to teach her and ignore her right hand’s bad habits.

The blade on the front of the pistol barrel lined up settled into the slotted v along the top of the gun’s frame. That bit of steel superimposed itself in her eyesight, center of the next man's chest, Lard.

She saw both, man and sight, and realized that both her eyes were open, odd.

She thumbed the hammer, the sound of the pistol cocking drawing no attention, since her next two targets were too enthralled with their leader and his continued attempt at defilement.

Her hand did not shake, her eyes were true.

With that strange detached sense came a certainty. These were dead men.

She shot the other two underlings, two bullets each. She felt the gun buck with the lead judgment. Unlike her first kill, Lard and Blue Bib took their time in dying. Moaning and crying, while they dyed the sand red with their wasted life.

The leader turned from his victim, fear, and anger on his bloodied face. He had tried to start his rape, the woman was sprawled out in the dirt, skirt torn and ripped aside, the attack interrupted before it could truly begin.

He spat words at her, they meant nothing to Samantha.

She fired the pistol once more, unmanning him.

He said more things then, also meaningless.

Dead men couldn’t speak words of worth.

She dropped the gun and approached him, her intent to finish him etched in the calm on her face.

With the knife in a forward grip she jabbed the long double edge blade for Leader’s face, he flinched back and threw up his right hand to block, a little late. The tip bit into his cheek and flayed it open. Before he could pull back his right hand Samantha grabbed his thumb twisted counter clockwise. Bent wrist exposed by the thumb lock and thus veins and arteries braced by bones Samantha cut him.

Needing him to bleed out, she cut deep and true.

She started at the base of his thumb with the hilt of the blade, pulling it around the wrist, nicking bone. By the time she drew her bloody line across his flesh she had come to the blade’s tip.

He looked at the cut in wonder, locked onto the two folds of skin open and gaping like a mouth.

She saw the thoughts of warm pain churn in his mind, his face awash with what stirred about his brain. Those slow trudging ruminations seemed to be disbelief.

The blood took its time to find the split; the cut had been so clean that the body didn’t register it at first.

The skin popped open, blood soon splitting it and escaping. He watched in morbid fascination as the red leaked profusely. He saw his death in that loss. He screamed, cried, and let his bowels loose.

He died keening in the dirt, like a pig, filthy and stinking of shit.