Mathematical Showdown

CECIL HIGGINS counted heartbeats like other men counted coins. Precise. Methodical. The drunk swaying twenty-six feet away had an elevated pulse—112 beats per minute, visible in the filthy neck above his crooked collar. Cecil’s pencil scratched another data point in notebook nine. Three years of obsessive documentation had worn the leather cover smooth. Coffee, whiskey, and other men’s blood stained the pages inside.

Subject exhibits classic alcoholic tremors. Right-hand deviation: 1.5 inches per second. Predictable. Equation applies.

The man would be dead in 8.7 seconds after conversation started. Cecil closed his notebook. Science was reliable that way.

Heat turned Sanction Junction into an oven that day—94 degrees of skin-blistering misery. Cecil didn’t feel it. He’d once calculated that men were 17 percent more likely to draw early in temperatures above 90. Sweat compromised grip efficiency. Impulse control diminished. Just more predictable variables in his flawless system. Weather was data, not discomfort.

In 1886, most considered mathematics the domain of dusty academics and schoolmarm spinsters. Cecil had found a more practical application. Three years since he’d fled Boston, his reputation had grown—though few knew the system behind his perfect record. Twenty-seven men dead. Each one predicted, calculated, and executed with mathematical precision.

The Harvard professors who’d laughed him out of academia weren’t laughing now. Not that they knew where he was. Cecil had vanished the night after Professor Whitmore had called his behavioral prediction theories “the deranged fantasies of a disturbed mind.” That same night, someone found Whitmore’s son with a bullet through his mathematical center of mass—a location Cecil had calculated at 4.7 inches below the sternum, angled upward at 32 degrees.

“You Cecil Higgins?” The drunk’s words slurred together, almost indecipherable. The man’s clothes hung on his frame like sheets on a corpse—a body wasting away from the inside, pickled in cheap whiskey and something darker.

Cecil didn’t answer right away. He observed. Cataloged. Data was everything. The drunk’s left eye twitched at irregular intervals. Interesting. Not in his previous models. Worth noting. Uneven wear on his right boot showed he limped, reducing his efficiency by 12 percent. The distance between them—twenty-six feet, seven inches—provided Cecil 1.83 seconds of reaction advantage.

“I asked you a question, numbers man.” The drunk spat a brown stream that landed 2.3 inches left of his own boot. The liquid splattered in a pattern Cecil had documented dozens of times—expectoration velocity consistent with moderate intoxication combined with poor dental structure.

“Yes. I’m Higgins.” Cecil’s voice remained flat, detached. Emotions led to muscular irregularities. Inefficient. He’d trained himself to maintain a heart rate of 62 beats per minute, regardless of external stimuli. The drunk before him was just another equation to solve, another variable to process.

The street had cleared with mathematical predictability. People in Sanction Junction knew what happened when someone called out Cecil Higgins. They had witnessed the aftermath—bodies lying at angles that could be plotted on a graph, blood pooling in patterns Cecil had predicted within a three percent margin of error. Parents ushered children inside. Women peered through curtained windows. Men retreated to the safety of the saloon, maintaining the exact distance Cecil had documented as their “blood splatter avoidance threshold.”

“Name’s Jacob Wilson.” The drunk swayed like a pendulum with a broken mechanism. “Folks call me Whiskey.”

Cecil wrote the name in his notebook, the pencil marks creating an impression on the subsequent page—a backup system he’d developed after a rainstorm in Tucson had smeared his calculations. Subject: J. Wilson. Inebriation level: severe. Motor function: impaired. Threat assessment: minimal. Estimated survival probability: also minimal.

“You killed my brother in Tucson.” Wilson’s trembling hand hovered near his pistol. Faded leather, cracked from years of sweat and poor maintenance, covered the Colt’s grip. The barrel alignment was 0.4 degrees off-center—the kind of flaw that shot bullets into shoulder bones instead of hearts.

Cecil flipped back through his mental catalog—a library of death organized by date, location, and mathematical variance. “Samuel Wilson. September 14th, 1885. Drew at a predictable angle of 42 degrees with hesitation at the trigger. Correction factor of 0.7 seconds applied. Terminal velocity achieved within 0.34 seconds of projectile discharge. Yes, I remember.”

The drunk’s face contorted, muscles contracting in patterns Cecil had categorized in notebook four. Each facial tic, each narrowing of the eye, each quiver of the lip—all mathematically consistent with extreme emotional distress. Cecil noted the reaction—68 percent hatred, 32 percent fear, based on his facial analysis studies.

“You’re a goddamn monster. Talking about Sam like he’s one of your math problems.”

Cecil’s face twitched—not emotion, but his brain re-categorizing Wilson from “standard drunk” to “statistical anomaly.” The look a butcher gives when he finds an extra organ inside something he’s gutting. “Was. Not is. Your brother ceased to be a mathematical variable the moment equation resolution occurred.” He adjusted his spectacles, the wire frames sitting at the exact angle that provided optimal visual acuity. “And everything is mathematics, Mr. Wilson. Your brother’s death was just an equation that resolved in my favor.”

The street had taken on that peculiar silence that preceded violence—a vacuum of sound that Cecil had measured at 7.8 decibels below normal ambient noise. A predictable phenomenon. He calculated the variables that would determine the outcome: wind speed (negligible at 3.2 mph from the southwest), ground condition (dry, minimal dust factor of 1.06), sun position (favorable, 28 degrees west, providing seven percent visibility advantage), witness count (17, irrelevant to calculations except as potential interference vectors, probability 0.043 percent).

The town clock ticked in the distance. Cecil had synchronized his pocket watch to it that morning, confirming its variance of 1.7 seconds per 24-hour period. Acceptably precise.

“Draw whenever you’re ready,” Cecil said, as if suggesting the time for tea. The last meal he’d consumed was 2.4 hours ago—optimal for maximum cognitive function without blood diversion to digestive processes.

Whiskey Wilson’s hands shook, like a telegraph operator having a seizure. Cecil stared at those hands. He’d documented normal drunk tremors in seven previous victims—predictable oscillations between eight to 12 Hertz that created a 42 percent accuracy reduction. These were different. Wild. Wrong. Mathematical blasphemy incarnate. He made a mental note to adjust his formula by 0.32 seconds to account for the neurological anomaly.

A fly buzzed past Cecil’s ear—its flight path adjustable to a vector of 47 degrees with an approximate velocity of 3.7 miles per hour. Irrelevant data. Cecil discarded it.

Cecil’s mind flowed through the calculations automatically, the way other men breathed. Wilson would draw in 7.2 seconds based on his current respiratory rate (22 breaths per minute, shallow, consistent with anxiety and alcohol-induced respiratory depression). The hand tremors would cause a right deviation of his shot by 4-6 inches. Cecil would need to stand right where he was to maintain an optimal position. The probability of his own survival: 99.73 percent. Acceptable odds.

Then reality broke.

Whiskey’s tremors stopped. Completely. For 2.4 seconds.

Cecil blinked. The movement felt wrong—an interruption in his perfect stillness. Anomaly detected. His brain raced to incorporate this new variable, calculations spinning like the gears of a clock forced to run backward.

The tremors returned, but in a pattern Cecil couldn’t immediately categorize. Not the repetitive oscillations of alcoholism with their frequency of eight to12 Hertz. Not the sporadic twitches of nerve damage with their random but mappable patterns. Something else. Something... chaotic.

A bead of sweat formed at Cecil’s temple—the first in three years, two months, and fourteen days. His body betraying his perfect control, responding to something his mind couldn’t quantify.

Cecil’s hand twitched toward his gun. His body responding to the uncertainty before his mind could process it. Unacceptable. Return to protocol. Re-establish mathematical dominance.

Wilson spoke, his voice now clearer, as if the fog of alcohol had lifted. “They say you’ve never been wrong. Never lost.”

“Mathematics doesn’t lose, Mr. Wilson.” But Cecil’s voice had gained a microscopic tremor—imperceptible to anyone but himself. 0.03 percent variation in vocal stability. A deviation that would have horrified him had he time to process it.

“My pa was a miner,” Wilson said, swaying less now, his eyes showing momentary clarity like the sun breaking through storm clouds. “Till a cave-in dropped half a mountain on his head. Doctors said it scrambled his brain. Mine too, when the same collapse caught me.”

Cecil calculated. Mining neurological damage. Unpredictable tremor patterns. Potential random neural misfiring leading to anomalous periods of lucidity and motor control. Non-standard response metrics. He needed to recalculate. Fast. The equations reformulated in his mind, variables shifting, constants now in question.

“Some days I can’t even button my shirt,” Wilson said, his voice finding strange new lucidity. “Other days, for just a blink, everything goes still and clear. Like God himself reaches down and steadies my hand. Doctors call it something fancy. Don’t matter what it’s called.”

Cecil’s mind raced faster than it ever had—faster than when he’d calculated the precise angle to shoot the ace of spades from 30 yards while blindfolded. The encounter had deviated from all predicted parameters. His well-crafted formulas threatened to collapse like a house of mathematical cards. He needed more data. His fingers itched to write notes, document this aberration, and create a new categorical framework for understanding this deviation.

The sun reflected off a window across the street. The angle of reflection—37.2 degrees—was exactly what Cecil had calculated it would be at this time of day. This small predictable detail provided momentary comfort in a sudden unstable mathematical universe.

“It’s time, Mr. Wilson.” Cecil needed to regain control. Establish parameters. Force the chaotic system back into predictable patterns. His survival depended on predictability. On order. On the universe behaving as it should.

He began his final calculation. Wilson would draw in 3...2...1...

Cecil drew on schedule, his movements a choreographed dance of muscle and momentum that he’d practiced ten thousand times. His gun cleared leather at the exact millisecond his calculations had determined optimal—a window of opportunity 0.37 seconds wide.

But Wilson hadn’t moved. Hadn’t even twitched toward his gun.

Cecil hesitated—a microsecond of uncertainty that wasn’t accounted for in any of his formulas. The numbers screamed in his head, formulas collapsing into chaos, variables multiplying exponentially.

In that frozen moment, Wilson’s tremors vanished. His hand moved with impossible speed—a brief window of perfect neurological function amid the chaos of his damaged brain. Not the clumsy draw of a drunk, but the fluid motion of a man whose body had achieved perfect communion with his intent.

The drunk’s bullet hit Cecil center mass before he processed the mathematical impossibility unfolding before him. The impact felt like an equation he couldn’t solve—force equaling mass times acceleration in a way that defied his careful calculations.

Cecil fell to his knees, pistol falling from his hand. His notebooks tumbled around him like fall leaves, pages fluttering open to reveal the obsessive documentation of a mind that had tried to reduce the chaotic universe to numbers and formulas. Blood seeped through his vest, creating a spreading crimson circle that Cecil couldn’t help but calculate—0.87 inches of spread per second. Fatal within 24.3 seconds based on location and blood loss rate.

The pain was a new variable—intense, non-linear, defying quantification. His system had no framework for incorporating it.

Wilson stood over him, gun still steady in his earlier trembling hand. “What went wrong with your numbers, professor?”

Cecil’s hands scrabbled through his fallen papers, eyes darting across equations that had never failed him. Variables. Constants. Probabilities. Where was the error? Which formula had betrayed him? The blood from his wound dripped onto the pages, obscuring well written numbers—chaos consuming order.

An equation caught his eye—his masterpiece for predicting human movement under stress. The formula that had kept him alive through twenty-seven gunfights. Perfect in its mathematical beauty. Flawless in its logical structure. And completely, utterly wrong in the face of true randomness.

“I don’t understand,” Cecil whispered, blood bubbling between his lips. Not just confusion—it was his entire worldview collapsing. The foundations of his existence crumbling beneath him. If his equations were wrong about this, what else had they been wrong about? “The mathematics... was perfect.”

“Life ain’t mathematics,” Wilson said, his hand beginning to shake again as whatever brief neural miracle that had occurred faded. The gun wobbled in his grip, returning to the trembling state that should have made him an easy target, a simple problem to solve. “Life’s just life.”

As Cecil’s vision darkened, he stared at his equations—beautiful, perfect, and utterly useless. Blood droplets fell onto the pages, each one creating a perfect circle according to the laws of physics, yet random in its placement. Order and chaos, existing at once.

His final thought—a realization that perhaps the universe operated according to equations too complex for even his mind to comprehend. That true mathematics wasn’t the rigid structure he’d worshipped, but something far more beautiful and terrible in its complexity.

The universe, it seemed, had its own equations. And they didn’t give a damn about his.