The Meeting

In Agua Fria, Arizona, a meeting was being held. It was being held in Lucky’s Tavern, a rough-and-tumble joint known to cause fights that concluded in stand-offs that concluded in shootings that concluded in death(s). Many of the men in this meeting were famous: John ‘Tex’ McGraw, who had met Geronimo; Lucius Goodfellow, who had helped hunt down Billy the Kid; Benjamin ‘Golden Bullet’ (or ‘Goldy’) Alabaster, war hero of Second Bull Run; and even Aldous Jung, who had fought at the Alamo. The oldest member, though not present, was John Fitzsimmons, a charter member of the West Texas Cowboy and Lawman Association, to his dying day (and well after) claims to have seen Abraham Lincoln in Frisco. 

The meeting took place once a month, on the first Tuesday of the month. There was no drunken rabblerousing, and the congregants of the meeting were left alone. There was a new member at least every other month, usually a young man lawman or bounty hunter trying to prove himself in a stand-off outside in the main street outside the tavern. And so it was that a no-name vigilante could now be sitting next to such names as Alabaster and Fitzsimmons, for no matter their status in birth or their accomplishments thereafter, they all found equity in life’s great equalizer: Death. 

I joined the group – the Southwest chapter of the Departed Police and Lawman Fraternity – two years ago. I was born in Kearney, Missouri, to devout Methodist parents. I was the sibling of four sisters and two brothers, all of whom stayed in Kearney their whole lives. I met a man named David Earp at age 18 who convinced me to find gold with him in Colorado and Idaho. So that’s what I did. We had no luck finding gold in those territories, so we moved south toward Arizona. We settled in Flagstaff. I took a job as a jail guard, and David made wagon wheels. David did this for about three months and left for California. I stayed back; the jail I worked in was only four cells, and the criminals ranged from the publicly intoxicated to the Navajo. 

On a hot day in April, there was a ruckus outside the jail. Two outlaws had come into town, looking for a man that we had locked up. The sheriff went out to speak with them, while I watched the exchange through a window in the jail. The sheriff was calm, while the lead outlaw grew more and more intense. As his voice got louder, he drew his revolver. At the same time, the sheriff drew his and shot the first outlaw. I came running out with a rifle pointed at the second outlaw. Before I was able to pull the trigger, a searing heat passed through my stomach, and another through my right shoulder. There had been two other outlaws behind the building. The sheriff was also killed, and we have never spoken of the incident. (The sheriff, Stanislaw Merensky, is a member of the Northwest chapter of the DPLF, preferring the cooler, wetter climate). In point of fact, no one in the DPLF ever talked about their incident, or their time. It was a silent agreement, one that saved the pain of revisiting the details. 

The agenda for today’s meeting – it was August 6, 1889 – was a matter of philosophical importance. 

“Gentleman, I begin this meeting on a somber note,” began the chairman of the chapter, Wyatt “Colt” Lair. Locomotive hijackings and violence, an utterly new type of crime in our Union, is on the rise. I believe the locomotive has done more to harm the minds and souls of the living than anything in the past one hundred years!” The members at today’s meeting, about forty in number, looked around at one another. The silence in the room beckoned Lair to support his thought. 

“Before the locomotive, there was the wagon, and our forefathers journeyed West in search of opportunity, taking in the Great Plains and the Rockies with great admiration as they went. With locomotives, one is from New York City to San Francisco in a matter of days; one may blink and completely miss the landscape!” The silence in the room continued; eyes began shifting in heads as ideas and thoughts fomented. “In fact, the wagon industry may cease to exist completely in short time!”

It wasn’t often that a meeting started with such hoopla. Generally, Colt started the meeting with small talk and formalities.

A crinkly voice in the back said, “we know better than anyone that men are naturally violent and will use all means they have to commit crimes. Some of us remember all too well what men were capable of on the Oregon Trail.”. There was a loud hm and a few yeses of affirmation. 

“That may be,” Colt responded, “but the point remains: train crime far outdoes wagon crime, in terms of deaths and property damage. Why, it’s only been in the past three years we’ve had hijackings in Ouachita, Durango, Arlington, the big one in Oklahoma City. We can’t keep up.”

“We’re not supposed to,” said Humphrey Baggot, a Texas Ranger. “We just… nudge the living to make the right choice.”

There were more grunts of assent. 

“I propose we nudge them to do something, something beyond what we normally do.”

What the DPLF normally does is leave suggestions as to a proper course of conduct: a note written on a chalkboard, a missing clue needed to solve a case, and the like. On the rarest of occasion, we’ll show up to scare some sense into the living. This was done rather famously against Napoleon before Waterloo (space doesn’t allow for even a brief introduction to the European equivalent of the DPLF, for though it is a well-established organization, it is bureaucratic and spans too many centuries. For the reader’s sake: imagine a Teutonic Knight trying to solve modern crime with a Cassock or Red Coat and you can imagine it’s quite a mess).  

Colt paused and looked around. He finished his thought: “I propose sabotage.”

There was loud whispering around the room. 

“Sabotage. Tier one sabotage,” he said again.

The DPLF used a tiered system for all reactions and interactions with the physical world. As I’m sure you’ve gathered, a tier one is the highest tier with which we operate; an example would be an appearance in the physical world or an altercation resulting in the death of a living one. 

“Wouldn’t we simply become the thing we fought against?” said Jackson Hearth, a lawyer-turned-bounty-hunter from Topeka. Several yeses came from the room.

“What’s gotten into him?” someone close to me asked. 

“This probably happens when you’ve been dead for too long. His soul’s too restless,” said someone else.

Colt’s not the only soul that has tried something like this. Rumor has it – though several reliable sources have corroborated the event – that the reason the North won at Gettysburg was because of an ‘ammunition shortage’, a miraculous event orchestrated by a handful of Revolutionary-era Minutemen that, even when they had passed in 1777, had vehemently opposed slavery. This was considered a tier two sabotage.  

“Let’s at least get a show of hand, shall we,” said Colt. “Any in support?”

Several hands went into the air. Colt looked a little surprised by this. He rode the surprise into conviction and continued on: “what will be invented after the locomotive? Will they fly? What about the rumors of a horseless carriage that’s self-propelled? I say those are nesting grounds for all sorts of new crime. We have a chance to alter history!” 

“This sounds like a new tier of interaction with the world!” came a dissent. 

“Yes, we’re at a new epoch. Any shift in it could have catastrophic results for the living!”

“Yes, we may harm the living more than helping!”

And there were several other indecipherable murmurings. 

“Fine, fine. Who are opposed?” Colt asked. “And remember, we’re not voting to do anything, just to consider doing something.”

Several hands went into the air. 

There was no strong consensus. 

In order that I occupy the reader’s attention, and not bore them with the minutes of our meeting, I’ll summarize the rest of the meeting:

Colt finished his appeal, and invited others to offer an opinion. Many opinions were shared, and it became obvious rather quickly that there were three camps: those that wanted to do something drastic (or at least consider it), those that didn’t want to do something drastic (and didn’t even want to consider it), and those that may have done something (but didn’t want to bother with the consideration). Those who didn’t want to do anything fell under the consensus of Latimer Rouge, a frontiersman from Wyoming, who became their spokesman. 

Latimer and Colt went back and forth for about an hour and a half, and each rallied a number of men to their side. This was a case where each of us needed to have an opinion. I followed Latimer, for I believe the locomotive was a net good, a benefit for the expansion of civilization and trade. 

            Colt and his crew saw an expansion of crime and criminal enterprise. The meeting concluded awkwardly on a series of announcements, one being the 35^th Anniversary Reunion Dinner with the Northwest chapter of the DPLF. Half of the Southwest chapter would not be in attendance. 

            In order to hasten my story, I have to pass over many significant details regarding the Southwest chapter. In short, Latimer and Colt parted ways. Both parties claimed to have the best interest of the Southwest chapter of the DPLF in mind, but only Latimer and his followers stuck around the Southwest. I stayed with Latimer. 

We continued meeting each month, and rumors of Colt’s gang slithered their way back to Agua Fria. They caused us little disturbance, but would distract us nonetheless. Where in the country is Colt? Wonder what Colt’s up to. This meeting’s awful boring; maybe I shoulda gone with Colt. 

It stayed this way for a few months: rumors from Chicago, from Detroit, from Pittsburgh. Word in our world could travel fast but it rarely needed to travel at all. But, like the world of the living, that was changing. 

On one dry, dusty evening in June, several departed lawmen came riding into Agua Fria (even though there was resistance to Colt’s plan, many DPLF members refuse to ride trains). They had initially left with Colt, but had grown weary of his plans. Latimer called an emergency meeting that evening. 

            “Gentleman, I won’t waste any time with trivial matters; I intend to hear each one of the men that have returned from Colt’s clan in their entirety.” And so we did. There were five men, and each talked in depth about their time with Colt. 

            I have summarized their experiences thus: Colt had developed a three-fold plan, called “Windtalker”. The first part was a disruption of steel mills in and around Pittsburgh. The details of this part were vague. What I can gather is that the shipment of ore would be diverted. As it happens, Colt’s crew was fairly successful in diverting the shipments to some of the biggest steel mills. But the steel mills in other parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio would be able to make up the difference.

            Simultaneously, Colt would divert trains and send them to the wrong stations. 

            But the biggest, boldest part of the plan had sent ripples through the worlds of the living and of the dead. Colt himself haunted none other than Andrew Carnegie. From what the five men could gather – this part of the plan was kept within a small circle – Colt would pose as Carnegie’s grandfather, who’d chastise young Carnegie’s hoarding his wealth and monopolizing an industry. 

            This last part had indeed been the most effective, as he immediately began donating large sums of his fortune. He also began paying his workers more money. This gave workers more incentive and increased steel output twofold. 

            Had Colt’s plan been enacted in a previous generation, in a pre-industrial era, he would’ve shut down the entire country. The remainder of the Southwest chapter could admit at least that much. But this was the modern era, and the machinery of civilization could not be stopped, at least not by a few dead men. As we would all find out, neither could the living. 

            It was hard to know what Colt would do next, if anything. 

Time and machine would continue their march on, and there’s nothing he, or anyone, could do to stop it.