All of Your Dreams Will Come True When You're Dead

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

All of Your Dreams Will Come True When You’re Dead

Copyright © 2023 by John Wayne Comunale

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Published by Death’s Head Press,

an imprint of Dead Sky Publishing, LLC

Miami Beach, Florida

www.deadskypublishing.com

First U.S. Edition

Cover Art: Justin T. Coons

Edited and Copyedited by: Candace Nola

The Splatter Western logo designed

by K. Trap Jones

Book Layout: Lori Michelle

www.TheAuthorsAlley.com

ISBN 9781639511167

For the Outlaws

PROLOGUE

COCYTUS WAS A town tucked somewhere in the folds of the never-ending blistering stretch of west Texas desert accessible only to those it chose to call, or rather poach. It was a town you could search for forever and never find or fall ass-backward into without realizing you were there. Of course, by then it’s too late. Some say all of your dreams come true when you’re dead. The same is said about going to Cocytus, only once there, you may as well be dead, because you’re as good as for sure.

Most succumb without resistance, heeding a call only they can discern. A frequency to which only they are tuned. These men are easily taken by darkness, their souls having rotted to fetid filth by the time they reached the place they’d been led, the option of redemption forever off the table upon arrival.

The town was called Cocytus, but that was just fancy talk for treachery. The place sucked men in faster than discounted pokes at the local whorehouse and burned them just as badly, only in a different kind of way. Women were taken there as well for different reasons, but none from Cochran.

The cowboys who set off for Cocytus whether by choice or by force were destined for the same fate. They’d be plugged into the grand design, or rather a grand design, as another cog churning the further perpetuation of darkness and the irresistible temptations offered as rewards for giving in.

The town’s run by a toothy-grinned, manipulative, son-of-a-bitch named Lycus who used a group of prickly snake bandits as enforcers named Luke, Samuel, and Paimon. They called themselves Calamity Three. He kept himself well insulated conducting the majority of his business by way of a young girl he’d turned into a conscious-less marauder of death called Alastor.

The Calamity Three were wanted in every settled state for multiple violent offences and constantly hunted by natives from the different tribes they’d slaughtered for no reason other than to kill. Their sole purpose was to destroy life and hope, to induce calamity by way of deployed chaos. They blazed an unstoppable path of havoc across the west with even the best and most seasoned Marshalls unable to bring them in. The fact they ended up in Cocytus with Lycus was destiny playing a cruel joke on every poor soul the three bandits wronged along their way because now, well, they were nearly invincible.

When Luke, Samuel and Paimon joined Lycus and Alastor, the darkest of energy fell across Cocytus, an energy that churned backwards against the current with enough force to change its direction. The three outlaws brought an edge with them that severed the remaining slippery strings of membrane keeping them attached to their present reality. Now, untethered from that world, the bandits slipped through murky quicksand-like ether right into Lycus’s control as he allowed them to straddle the line between planes.

The psychic calls started going out directly after the alliance, or at least that was when the men started hearing it. The ones who went easy, the weak ones, began arriving in Cocytus within days sliding seamlessly through an invisible slit smack in the middle of endless desert. The more who came, the farther the darkness was able to reach until there was nowhere it couldn’t go.

A small Texas town called Cochran was nestled on the edge of the panhandle where they chose to exist in an ignorance only partially feigned. The men from there who heeded the call all those years ago headed west straight for the desert, each and every one of them, but despite knowing this, not once had a search party been formed to go after them.

The Sheriff, for unknown reasons, was amongst the few men left untouched in the culling of Cochran, though no one knew what, if anything, made these men immune. Despite being unaffected, those left behind were too frightened to go after their friends and family members. They were afraid if they left it would happen to them, and they’d never return. When the Sheriff made the call to not go after the missing men, no one protested.

The people left in town, most of them women and children, did their best to go back to some semblance of normalcy, though the task wasn’t easy. The men who could work did their best to help with farming and other labor jobs necessary to keep the town going, but they were spread too thin. Many of the women of Cochran rose to the occasion of stepping in for their absent husband or father, but even that wasn’t enough to keep some places from falling into disrepair.

The first few years after the culling were hard, sad, and slow-going, heaping insult upon the injury of an already embittered people. After a few more years things were better, at least comparatively, with the people having finally settled into a relatively comfortable groove. The population had grown to a respectable amount again as a fair number of families were settling in Cochran, and soon the ruined fields became flourishing farms again under the care of new owners with plenty of hands to help.

Those left there during the incident existed with an unspoken agreement to forget about the culling, and to never never talk about it. Most of them still harbored their old superstitions, terrified that even mentioning what happened could somehow trigger a second round, one from which the town would not come back. It was something that in any other context would sound ridiculous or childish, but no one in Cochran dared put it to the test.

HE AIN’T NO GODDAMN SHOOTIST

LLOYD WAS NO goddamn shootist. He was a gunfighter, and those are two distinctly different disciplines, worlds apart from each other. Some people, ignorant people, will equate the two citing examples of why and how they’re one and the same, but they’re dead wrong. A shootist is a sharpshooter, but that doesn’t mean they use a rifle exclusively. Some of them could shoot the tick off a bull’s ass at a hundred yards with their side iron just as easily.

A shootist has honed a specific kind of practiced patience that keeps them from pulling the trigger too soon. It keeps them cool and calm while they wait for the perfect shot, but sometimes their special kind of patience works against them.

You can wait forever, but the perfect shot isn’t worth horseshit if you let your whole party get killed in order to get it. A shootist will always hesitate when it comes time to stand up and shoot from the hip. This doesn’t mean they’re not brave or good, it means they’re not gunfighters.

The shootist is proficient skill-wise but lacks a certain inherent ability a gunfighter is born with. They learn skill and technique the same as anyone, but it’s intrinsic talent that sets them apart. It can’t be translated tangibly or taught to those who don’t have it. Trying to put it into words would come off like the incoherent retelling of the fleeting memory of a dream.

It was best described as a feeling.

Gunfighters just started calling it the touch, and you had it, or you didn’t. Simple as that. Lloyd had the touch, and it didn’t take his son, Cherub, long to figure out it’d been passed on to him.

Some stronger-willed men like Lloyd, though few and far between, were able to resist the call, and the Calamity Three would be dispatched to retrieve them. When the bandits stormed into a town atop muscled Mustangs blacker than funeral smoke, they were leaving with who they came for. End of story.

There was something especially unsavory about the Calamity Three. The men radiated a sticky disruptive energy that sent ripples of chaos through every town they went to, some of which would never recover. A town like Cochran didn’t stand much of a chance to begin with and had been slowly choking on its own tongue since the culling.

Lloyd didn’t end up leaving Cochran with the three dirty, son-of-a-bitch bastards who came to take him to Cocytus, but he ended up there just the same. He couldn’t remember how though, only that he was coming around the backside of Jesse’s feed and general store to get the drop on the coward bastards looking for him. Gun in hand, he’d turned the corner to come up the side of the building, and that was it. He blinked his eyes and was in a completely different place, with no idea where he was. Lloyd was instantly struck with an overwhelming urgency to get out of this place and back to Cochran, back to his family.

Thing was, he didn’t realize how much time had actually passed since he’d been gone. What felt like seconds had been years, though Lloyd hadn’t aged, nor did he perceive the elongated passage of time, and nothing about his current surroundings indicated as much. Time operated differently in Cocytus and the linear perception of the concept did not exist within its borders, but he’d yet to figure that out.

Lloyd looked around the unfamiliar town and walked out to the road, stepping over the trail of horse hoof divots. The building he’d found himself next to was a general store as well, only it wasn’t Jesse’s and appeared to be closed or abandoned. Down the street, he saw what looked like a bank with a water trough out front, directly across the street from another bank with a similar trough. He thought it odd for a town to have two banks.

There were no horses tied out front of either building or any other building as far down as he could see. Lloyd cocked his head and strained his ear trying to detect the rhythmic clomp of a trotting Philly or thunderous gallop of approaching Mustangs, but he’d be goddamned if he could hear a thing. The silence gave the impression he may be in a ghost town, but the buildings were too well maintained to have been abandoned. Unless it happened recently.

Lloyd moved slowly down the wood plank sidewalk to get a better look and found they weren’t banks at all, they were gambling halls. He’d heard the government was enacting a national anti-gambling law, but it clearly hadn’t made it this far south yet. A big change like that would require a good amount of time to take hold and be enforced across the country. Having two gambling halls when you’re not supposed to have any was like swinging a pair of big brass balls in Uncle Sam’s face. It was asking for trouble.

He continued down past a saloon, finding it empty as well. From the sidewalk, looking over the swinging doors, he could see full bottles of hooch on the shelves and clean glasses lined up across the bar. He’d have figured to at least find a lone barman whose ear he could bend with the growing number of questions he had. Where was he? Where was everyone else? Why the hell was he here?

Lloyd continued past the saloon for a better view of the sign on the building he’d mistaken for a bank, though to be fair large dollar signs painted in gold flanked both sides of the door.

Co—Cy—Tus Gambling Hall, he read out loud. What the hell’s a Cocytus?

Not what, but where.

The voice came from behind, and Lloyd spun, drawing and leveling his iron at whoever thought it was a good idea to sneak up on him. A cowboy stood in the shadow just outside the swinging saloon doors. He was thin and wiry with a dusty flat-brimmed hat and an ill-fitting leather vest over a clingy threadbare shirt. He smoked a thin cigar in tiny puffs as his eyes wandered across the buildings on the other side of the street.

Something was wrong. Lloyd had drawn his gun, but it wasn’t in his hand. It wasn’t hanging off his hip either, but he kept pawing at the empty holster like it would suddenly appear.

Wha—What in the hell is th—

It’s not a thing, it’s a place, the stranger said, still smoking while looking across the street and not at Lloyd. Cocytus. It’s a place. It’s the place you’re in right now.

What the hell’d you do with my gun!?!

The question, though more of a demand, took priority over everything else, but the stranger looked on, puffing his cigar. Lloyd couldn’t give a good goddamn anymore about where, when, or why until the pistol was back in his hand. Lloyd’s gun hadn’t been out of his possession since he’d taken it off another gunfighter whilst passing through a small, East-Texas, cattle town close to nine years ago. The thing had become a part of him, and his palm ached over its absence.

The other gunfighter was just a kid really, with a mouth bigger than he could control and more gun than he knew how to handle. Lloyd only stopped to water his horse and hadn’t planned on conducting any other business, not even a drink for himself, until the kid stepped out of the saloon across the street. He stared Lloyd down with whiskey-bleared eyes and yelled something about ‘recognizing’ him, and ‘knowing what he did’. Before Lloyd could say he was mistaken, the kid’s hand was already dancing around the butt of the gun on his hip. He was nervous though, and Lloyd could see him shaking from across the street.

He didn’t think it would come to it, hoped