Horror
Date Published: June 1, 2014
Preston Cobb is always looking to make a quick buck selling any kind of gun he can get his hands on, but when the denizens of the weird west get in the way, Preston's his own best customer. Now collected in one omnibus, join Preston as he faces an ancient evil in the snowy Sierra Nevadas in ABOMINABLE, finds romance and bloody mystery in Nevada mining country in SILVER MOON, and squares off with the undead south of the border in DEAD TO RITES. Finally, Cobb finds retirement more exciting than he'd like in an exclusive bonus short story: GUNRUNNER TO THE STARS.
Excerpt
“Reminds me of my
first wedding!” I said.
The lock on the chapel
doors gave a long, ear-curdling screech and shattered. The doors burst open,
knocking the stacked pews aside. In a haze of dust, the undead appeared,
swarming through the opening, groans rising in triumph.
I turned the
hand-crank and fire spewed out of the barrel of the Gatling gun. I swept it
back and forth across the opening of the church doors. Skulls exploded, bodies
jerked and limbs separated as hundreds of bullets shredded through the mass.
The first rank of the ghouls disappeared in a pink haze and I kept firing at
the vague silhouettes behind them. Bullet casings rained down on the adobe
floor and I cursed and shook my leg as a smoking cartridge landed in my shoe.
Over the thunder of
the gun firing round after round, Sister Cardona asked, “Emilio Vega and Ana
Lucia Ana Lucia, have you come here freely and without reservation to give
yourselves to each other in marriage? Will you love and honor-”
“Get to the I-Do's!” I
yelled, turning the crank faster while the undead shambled over their fallen
brethren. The Gatling cut through the undead like a sawmill through a log, but
there was a whole forest of corpses shambling through the double doors. Sister
Ruiz and Sister Ybarra loaded as fast as possible, but the
gun began to sputter when the feeds ran dry. The undead spread out from the
edge of the door and I turned the gun in wider arcs.
“Do you Emilio Vega,
take Ana Lucia Ana Lucia to be your wife? Do you promise to be true-”
“Faster!” I yelled.
The nuns fired their shotguns at the ghouls I was missing. Sister Purificación sat with her back against one wall of
the church, firing her rifle again and again. She shot a corpse through the eye
and it fell onto her shattered legs. She screamed.
Nick Carcano spent his childhood pulling cactus out of his feet and listening to coyotes howl in the California high desert. He speaks rusty Mandarin and Spanish. When he's not writing his day job involves literally saving the world, which sometimes involves shooting zombies, but usually involves a lot of e-mail. If you like dim sum, RPGs, sci-fi, or corgis, you should be his friend. He’s currently working on The Big Weird One a series of sci-fi/horror short stories set during WWII and will release his first novel, Boom: A Wild West Heist, in fall 2015.
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