'Give Me a Crucifix and a Colt .45' is a 7,500 word Horror Western short story with just a little more bite. When Josiah Cotton, owner of a struggling General Store in the town of Granite Ridge, takes in an injured gunslinger looking for a new start - he never expected an undead posse to follow. It is the first in my Vampire Hunting in the Old West and is about 20 pages in length.
Genre: FICTION / HorrorBest monthly sales were between 3-8 copies a month in Amazon.DE, with lowest rankings reaching 14,000 in May and <10,000 in June 2017 (no. 2 in Kindle fremdsprachige – Englisch – Western). It is currently ranking at 280,038 on the DE marketplace.
The storekeeper finished his sweeping, the daily battle with the desert sand. Josiah Edward Cotton; seventy three years old, sixty one of them man and boy in the grocery trade. He straightened and cursed under his breath; waited until the ever present ache in his spine faded into the background. It was a memento from a sordid, short-lived range war that nobody remembered anymore. A no-good bushwhacking son of a bitch put a bullet in his back for selling feed to both sides in the spirit of neutrality, too drunk to shoot straight. An inch higher and there would be another memorial stone in the cemetery, another name on the long list of those lost to the gun. Half an inch lower and Josiah would have been crippled for life – a far worse fate in a frontier town which did not make allowances for such things.
Then he shoed away the thin gray dog that came around every day looking for handouts. He looked again at the battered newspaper clipping and the drifter who had asked him to read it. The kid was typical of the rootless breed blowing like tumbleweed with no kin above ground, or any reason to stay in one place very long. Tall but whipcord-lean, half-starved with the marks of a failed hanging clear around his throat. From somewhere in Texas by the accent, not yet born when the South fell, but he kept his past hidden and unquiet ghosts hinted it was better that way. An unmistakable hardness in those grey eyes suggested he was good with the revolver at his side with none of the gun-wolf’s arrogance. Josiah turned his attention back to the advertisement.
“Young skinny fellows wanted, willing to risk certain death on a daily basis; orphans preferred. Wages: twenty five dollars a week; two meals a day, burial expenses if necessary. Married men need not apply; must like horses.”
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Portuguese
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Denise Sousa
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Rubén Muñoz
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