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Gunfire echoed around the mountains, bullets whirring past his head as Arthur struggled to keep pushing up the mountain. Pinkertons galore, plus the threat of the last remaining Van der Linde gang possibly tailing them.
No, Arthur thought. They’re going for the money Abigail spoke of.
Fuck, if Arthur didn’t feel like a damned fool to not go back for it. He didn’t know how much was there, and he sure as shit knew he wouldn’t survive long enough to use it, but he mentally hit himself for not trying to go back for John. To get Marston and his family a nice little nest egg before they escaped.
He hadn’t realized he had paused until John was ahead of him, turning back to yell out, “Keep pushing!”
“No, John,” Arthur wheezed. “I think this is as far as I’m going.”
A mild panic crossed John’s eyes, followed by acceptance. They both knew Arthur didn’t have long left on this planet.
Arthur and John stepped closer, Arthur worn down by the disease and the fight; John fighting against the burning pain and blood loss from his shot shoulder.
Arthur gripped his hat, his father’s old hat, and pushed it firmly onto John’s head. He slipped his bag, filled with his journal and May’s old ring, away from himself and pressed it into John’s good arm. “It would mean a lot to me…”
“You’re my brother, Arthur.”
He gulped. “I know.” The younger man gave a final nod before pushing himself to go farther up and down the mountain.
Arthur braced himself as much as he could before turning back around and pulling his gun from its holster, ready to die fighting.
He stumbled back after firing a few shots, Pinkertons all hit and down. Suddenly Arthur was back on the ground, the weight of Micah Bell dragging him down—the rat bastard was hiding above him, waiting to strike.
“You rat!”
Micah landed a good sucker punch, Arthur still on the ground, rocks digging into his back. Micah hit him again, no sympathy for the dying man’s rasps for air. It was hard to say if the blood Arthur was spitting out was from the tuberculosis or from the hits.
“I’m a survivor, Black Lung!”
Anther punch and Arthur’s vision was blurry, black spots dancing in his sight.
This is it… that rat bastard is what’s gonna do me in, Arthur thought bitterly, coughing blood straight up. The red dots rained back onto his face.
Micah smiled his shit-eating grin, cocking back his fist to sucker-punch Arthur one more time. Arthur slid his eyes closed, ready for the final knockout to finally put him out of his misery.
But it never came.
He cracked one eye open, body aching and mind desperate for rest. Micah was still above him, legs straddling Arthur’s hips, but his face was blank. The body slumped forward and Arthur barely had the strength to nudge himself to the side, so that Micah wouldn’t be face-to-face with him.
Arthur noticed Charles in the distance before he noticed the arrow sticking out of Micah’s forehead, the end jutting out of the back of the man’s head of dirty hair.
“C-Charles,” he wheezed, not strong enough to remove the lopsided weight of Micah from his torso. His lungs felt crushed, but that wasn’t saying much when he’d been slowly dying these past few months. He was used to struggling to breathe and to feeling a weight on his chest when there was none.
“Charles, how did…” Arthur’s face paled when he saw the man standing beside Charles.
“It’s okay, Arthur,” the native man spoke, voice soft yet stern. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“N-no,” Arthur whined, “Not we. Please, no, don’t bring—”
The figure beside Charles burst to life, becoming animated and over-the-top. “Never fear, Tobias is here! I knew you and John would need a little help from everyone favorite Analrapist!”
Charles sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, Arthur… He insisted he come along, and he was the one who noticed Micah sneaking around the mountain while you thought off the law…”
“Leave me to die.”
Tobias bounced forward, barely getting a hand on Micah’s body as Charles grabbed the dead man by the scruff to toss the body aside. Arthur could now all-too-clearly see Tobias’s attire: freshly-polished, never-seen-work leather boots that looked as if they were meant for women; an obnoxiously bright-red collared shirt, complete with a god-awful black vest with far too much fringe. Tobias wore chaps over his jeans, and it was obvious that rather than a union suit, Tobias as sporting another pair of jeans under his current pair… cut off, fashioned into knickers.
“Get that goddamn never-nude away from me and let me die,” Arthur snarled out. Unfortunately, no one cared much what Arthur had to say. The light started to fade from his vision and he felt himself slipping away.
Finally.
To say Arthur was livid when he woke up would be an understatement. He was meant to die on that mountain, an honorable death after helping John escape to freedom. But no, that son of a bitch Tobias Funke, the worst outlaw he had ever met, just HAD to track him along with Charles.
Charles had to physically restrain Arthur when he had first awoken and caught sight of Tobias’s extremely loud outfit. Arthur was about dead, so Charles counted it as a miracle that he had to use his full body weight to pin Arthur back down. He could see the rabid look in Arthur’s hazy blue eyes.
Tobias was the worst person Dutch had ever had the misfortune of bringing to the group. He was annoying, he bragged about some title that didn’t exist, and he kept bugging Charles to go out with him and do “Native Things” because—for some unknown reason—Tobias was convinced he was part native.
“You are the whitest man I’ve ever met,” Charles had tried to reason. But, alas, he was no match for the world’s first (and only) Analrapist.
Once Charles had forcibly removed Tobias from the abandoned cabin they were holed up in, Arthur had calmed down considerably. He had as well, not realizing the tension he held in his shoulders just from Tobias being in the vicinity.
Now, Arthur didn’t know if he believed in God or Heaven. He didn’t know what the afterlife had in store, if there was anything waiting at all… but he did know what living with Tobias Funke was Hell.
And until the heat with Dutch and the Pinkertons died down, he was going to be stuck living with Tobias for a while.
It ain’t often you wish you had been beaten to death by Micah Bell… but hey, Tobias had that effect on people.