You Might Well Be the Strangest Woman I Ever Met
Chapter 22 of The Ballad of Abigail Lambert
Yuma casually rode up to the ghost town on his horse, with a conspicuously shaped piece of cargo draped in a blanket over the animal’s back. A couple of Colin’s goons spotted him as they walked from one of the houses to the main house. They planted their feet in the ground to stare him down.
“You lost, Injun?” One of them asked.
“Not at all,” he said.
“Then just what the hell are you doing here?” The other asked. They both slowly reached for their guns.
“I’m here to help a friend,” Yuma replied.
“You ain’t got no friends here, Injun. Beat it.” Their fingers twitched over their weapons.
“Now?” Benjamin asked from underneath the blanket.
“Now!” Yuma replied.
Benjamin rolled off the back of the horse and into the snow. He threw the blanket off behind him and quickly dove for cover behind one of the houses. He laid down covering fire for Yuma as he trotted away. Yuma leaned on the side of the horse to make himself as hard to target as he could, eventually dropping down beside another one of the houses with his bow at the ready while Colin’s goons were shooting.
Yuma emerged from cover with three arrows in his hand, and shot them with incredible speed and precision. He managed to hit one of the men in the face with all three of the arrows he just launched. While the other was distracted with his cohort’s death, Benjamin sprung from cover and shot him in the back of the head. More of Colin’s men poured out the front door of the main house, forcing Yuma and Benjamin back into cover.
Over around the back of the main house, Abigail quietly trotted up on her horse. As the gunfire continued to blast in the fight out front, she snuck inside through a backdoor in the house. Despite doing what she could to get the drop on Colin’s men, the surprise didn’t last long at all.
“There’s the bitch!” One of them shouted.
The three men still inside turned toward her and began to fire. Abigail took cover behind a wall, but the fire they were laying down upon her was thick. Shards of rotting wood exploded past her face, she didn’t have much time before one of those shots blew through the wood and into her back, or brought the whole wall down upon her. She looked up and noticed the rotting wood in the roof being held up by a single beam. She shot at it a few times, and the roof above the men’s heads caved in, crushing the three of them beneath it.
Esperanza screamed upstairs, and Abigail ran up the steps to find her. She burst inside the bedroom with her revolver drawn. She found Colin standing with the young girl’s throat in his hand.
“Let her go, Colin!” Abigail demanded.
“How in the hell—“
She cut him off. “I said let her go!” She pulled the hammer back on her gun.
Colin raised a gun of his own in Abigail’s direction with his other hand.
“After everything I’ve done for you, everything I’ve had to sacrifice,” he shouted in Esperanza’s face, “you lead this bitch right to us! To your family?”
“You killed my family,” Esperanza squeaked out with strained breath. Colin’s grip around her neck tightened. She struggled for air, and could feel herself start to go lightheaded.
“You can walk away, Colin.” Abigail told him.
“Could you?” He asked her.
They shot their guns at the same time, Abigail landing her shot square in the center of his head. It exploded in a fine red mist, but not before Colin could land a shot of his own and hit Abigail in the heart. Everybody fell to the ground. Esperanza held herself on her hands and knees and coughed as she caught her breath. She crawled over to Abigail who lay now in a pool of her own freezing blood.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Esperanza said.
“I had to,” she replied.
“But I lied to you.”
“Should you have warned me he was your Dad? Maybe.” Abigail coughed. “Don’t know what that would’ve changed.”
“You still would’ve helped me even if you knew from the start?”
“I don’t know. But when I found you tied up to that bed, I just wanted you to have a choice.” She coughed again, blood spilling off her lip.
“We gotta get you some help.” Esperanza tried to lift Abigail, but the pain was too much for the woman to bear.
“I ain’t going anywhere, Esperanza.”
“You’re gonna die if we don’t.”
“We all have to at some point or another.”
“I can’t let you die,” she pleaded.
“You’re not letting me do anything.” Abigail was suddenly overcome with a fever of strained laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Esperanza asked.
“I’ve wanted to die for so many years. Now it’s finally here and well—I think I’ve changed my mind.”
“That’s funny to you?”
“Just a bit.”
“You might well be the strangest woman I ever met,” Esperanza remarked.
She was met with nothing but silence.
“Abigail?”
No reply.
“Abigail!” She shouted as tears rolled down her cheeks.
She laid her head down on Abigail’s chest and sobbed into her bloody jacket. Yuma and Benjamin burst into the room to find the girl crying over the body. How it came to be that little Abigail Lambert managed to survive for so long would forever remain a mystery. What she had been brought here to do had finally come to pass, her time had finally come and she finally found what it was she was after. She’d been pining for death for years, but she’d managed to find a family to survive her. Now surrounded by them, facing the death of the entire world around her—the illusion was broken.
Even in death, Abigail Lambert would live on.
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