HERMOSA
𑁍
"Alright men, were moving out! Follow me!" Dutch shouts loudly as they road their horses down the thawing mountain. "Not without me, you aren't." Abby says once catching up with all the men, who turn at the sound of her voice.
"Abby, glad you could make it." Dutch says, nodding his head approvingly towards the girl.
"What in the hell are you doing here?" Arthur practically shouts, clearly not liking the idea of his sister joining them. "Isn't it obvious?" She asks back with the same amount of attitude.
Abby despised nothing more at how some of the men in camp thought she couldn't handle herself. She grew up with criminals, who which taught her how to outsmart, trick, and survive.
"This is a dangerous job for a woman, Ms. Morgan. Maybe you should head back. Wouldn't want your pretty face to get ruined." Micah sarcastically says, before obnoxiously laughing at his own comment as if he was the most hilarious thing in the world.
"Maybe you should shut your trap, and mind your own damn business." She snaps back, which makes some of the other men chuckle in amusement, including Javier. Micah immediately begins to send daggers at the girl, which Dutch took immediate notice of.
"Okay, okay, settle down. All of you. Listen up! According to the information so kindly provided to us by the O'Driscoll's. The train will be coming North, from the big valley. We're gonna pick it off after it crosses the border into Grizzlies. There's a raised spot that will give us a good advantage." Dutch announces while leading the group further down the mountain.
"Charles, you keep lookout for any outsiders. How's that hand, by the way?" Dutch suddenly asks.
"I'll be fine." Charles informs him confidently.
"Good. I'll take the driver and the engineer, then run point." Dutch informs everyone, before continuing his speech. "... Lenny and Javier, you take the front cars. Deal with any guards. Arthur, Abby, and Micah you head straight for the back. That's what we're after... Mr. Cornwells private car." Dutch instructs the others, which only made Abby roll her eyes. It was like Dutch wanted her to kill Micah with her own bare hands.
"Looks like I have both of the Morgan siblings." Micah says with a devious looking smirk.
"Great." The two siblings both sarcastically grumble in sync, causing the blonde man to snap his head towards the two again.
"You both have a problem with that?" Micah bravely asks.
"Not if you keep your head down for once." Arthur quickly responds.
"And keep your mouth shut." She adds.
"How about you two worry about yourselves, huh?" Micah snaps back, clearly taking offense to their comments.
"Enough! After Bill blows the tracks, we're gonna have to work fast. Is everyone clear on what they're doing?" Dutch loudly shouts? breaking up the argument, and quickly changing the subject.
"Yes." Abby says along with the others, causing Dutch to nod to himself.
"Good. Now come on, let's ride!" He shouts picking up space down the mountain, and leading them towards their destination.
𑁍
Once Dutch announced that they finally arrived, they all sat on their horses in a perfect line, facing the train tracks from afar. "Is Bill there?" Dutch asks to no one in particular as they looked around the area. Once Arthur spots him, he speaks up.
"Yeah." He answers.
"Wanna go down there, see how he's getting on?" Dutch asks her brother, who immediately nods in response and heads down in Bills direction.
As everyone watches Arthur race down over towards Bill on his horse, Javier takes the opportunity to chat with the girl.
"You ready?" Javier asks, pulling the girls attention away from her thoughts.
"It ain't my first rodeo, cowboy." She playfully responds with a smile, which was written with anything but confidence. She tried to hide her nervousness with her smile, but Javier saw right threw it—shit anyone could.
Yes, the girl had helped with multiple missions before. And majority of them, usually went rather smoothly. Although, Abby has never done anything of this sort. Train robberies meant rash decisions. And even if she was smart, she knew anything could happen or go horribly wrong at any time.
"We'll, you San always holler if you need a hand." Javier offers genuinely.
"Ditto." She wittily responds back, which causes them to playfully look at one another, and share an smile together.
"Alright—Just be ready to move quick and remember the plan... all of you. Remember no mistakes." Dutch exclaims towards everyone, while watching her brother return.
"Everything okay?" Dutch asks Arthur for conformation.
"I think so." He informs Dutch.
"Okay cover your faces, the train should be here any minute." Micah instructs everyone, who which immediately do so.
"Lady & Gentlemen; it's time." Dutch practically songs as the train starts making its way, causing the girl to begin to feel butterflies in her stomach.
The moment the train passes, they hear Bill's shouts of protests from a far—confirming that the dynamite had failed. "Oh you got to be kidding me!" Dutch loudly shouts out in anger, before internally scolding himself for not putting enough of his full attention on the others.
"Where did you get that moron?" Arthur fires at Dutch in annoyance.
"You said everything was fine!" Dutch hollers back at Arthur, who's eyebrows furrow in disbelief.
"So it's my fault?" Arthur growls causing the girl & Javier to dismount off their horses quickly.
"You are all pathetic!" She shouts before running towards the other side of the hill, alongside Javier, and Lenny.
"Come on!" Lenny shouts to Arthur who was running slightly behind the three.
As they all near towards the other side of hill, they watch as the train zip below them in slight hesitation. "Jump!" Arthur shouts from behind, causing them all to immediately do so.
Just as their bodies all hit the hard metal, everyone lets out a grunts of pain, rolls onto their sides. But unfortunately for Javier, this causes him to completely fall off the train. "Shit!" Abby shouts in fear, instantly feeling her heart drop onto her stomach.
Quickly she stands up, ignoring the pain coming from her side, and looks down behind to see Javier state. Thankfully, he stands up, causing her heart returns back into her chest, and turn her attention back towards the mission.
As she watches Arthur help pull Lenny back onto the train, they look back over towards the girl.
"Where Javier?" Lenny worriedly asks, once realizing they were one man down
"He's fine—He fell off the train." She says, her thumb pointing behind her, pointing to in the opposite direction.
"The others will get him, come on!" Arthur shouts toward the two newbies, before leading them further into the train, before taking down a few more men.
Once they stopped the train completely, they hopped off and watched men from inside exit with their weapons. Immediately a shootout began, causing them to scurry off for cover.
At some point, Lenny mistakes his stupidity for confidence, and runs further off by is own. Which only causes her to shout toward his direction. But just as he turns to face her,he is grabbed by a guard. Arthur quickly wastes no time to shoot the guard holding Lenny. Once the guard fell, the two made their way over toward the frightened boy again. "Don't run off like that! You weren't even looking around at your surroundings! Do you have a death wish or something?" She immediately scolds toward the boy, who looked completely frazzled.
"I was trying to help!" He shouts back at her rather defensively. "Yeah, trying to help yourself get shot at!" She hollers back in irritation, which only causes Arthur to groan. But just before he could break up the two's childish argument, he takes notice of more guards. "More coming!" He shouts, causing the three to all duck for cover again.
After shooting got what feels like hours, Abby's gun states to shoot out blanks. "Shit." Abby curses as she takes cover, and refills the last of her ammo into her rifle.
"He has a goddamn army! Who is this guy?" Lenny shouts, while Arthur continues shooting at the men from afar.
"Someone Dutch took for an idiot." She mutters to herself in irritation, before peering over, and killing two men on top of the train swiftly.
"They better hurry!" Lenny shouts while following behind Arthur as they moved further up and took cover behind some trees.
One.
Two.
Three.
Abby successfully takes down a few more men, but instantly takes notice of the weight of her gun becoming lightly every shot. "I see them! They're are coming our way!" Lenny shouts as he takes a peak over the rock, hiding from the multiple flying bullets.
"Thank god!" She shouts, quickly making her way down the hill toward an boulder. "Alright, let's finish those sons of bitches!" She heard Dutch loudly from afar, as more gunfire was heard.
After a few moments of catching her breathe, she removes herself from her hiding spot. But instead of running down with the rest, she slams into the chest of a train guard. Frazzled due to the surprise of it all, she fumbles with her gun. Just as she pulls the trigger to shoot the man, a blank comes out of her gun.
Suddenly fear overtook her as she quickly watched the man raise his pistol at her head. But before he could pull the trigger, she grabs ahold of his arm, and raises it facing towards the sky. As three shots went off, she knees the man in the gut multiples times, before taking him onto the ground with her. Throwing the gun away from the man's grasp, she begins to choke him with her bare hands. But due to her light weight, this made it easy for him to topple her over and push her into the ground instead.
The train guard is quick to de-masks her, and immediately smirks. Before she could scream for help, the man is quick to wrap his large hands around her neck, and tightly begin to squeeze her airway. The powerful grip instantly causes her to panic, causing her arms to frail around frantically.
She gasps trying to pry his hands away from her neck, which only causes him to smirk. "You like that, sweetheart?" The man asks, his tone full of suggestion. Afraid of what might occur next, she instinctively digs her untrimmed nails into his prickly beaded chin, in hopes he'd surrender enough for her to break free. But unfortunately, this only results in him squeezing her neck even harder. Her mouth fully widens, desperately gasping for air as her brain begins to throb due do the lack of oxygen.
The moment she begins to see black spots in her vision, is when she frantically sweeps her knife from her side holster, and swiftly punctures it through his neck. The hands and body weight of the guard body turns limp, before some blood began trickling down and onto her face.
Suddenly Lenny pulls the dead man off of her, a look of fear washed all over his features. If the boy was honest, the sight coming around the corner made him think the guard had killed her—thankfully, that was not the case.
"Are you okay?" He asks worriedly, immediately helping her up from the ground.
"I-Im fine." She slightly stutters out, which obviously didn't sound so promising. She also looked rather frazzled.
"Good shooting, kids!" Arthur shouts from behind, completely oblivious to what had just occurred. Still frozen in place, Lenny quickly wipes the blood off her cheek with the end of his sleeve, before Arthur could take notice.
"I can see why they wanted to bring so many O'Driscoll's out for this." Lenny says, still eyeing the girl with caution.
"You three alright?" Dutch asks from afar, pulling
the girl out of her trance. Before turning to Dutch, she forces a smile up toward Lenny.
"Never better." She responds, before leading the way toward the rest of the group.
"Yeah, lets just get the money and go." Arthur mutters over to Dutch, clearly tired from this entire shit show.
As she looks beside Dutch, she manages to catch a glimpse of Javier, who was thankfully still in one piece. While following behind the group, she casually strolls over beside the man. "Hey, you okay?" She asks, her hand resting above his bicep, which causes him to halt. Javier immediately takes notice of her eyes as they cautiously overlooked his figure for any sign of injuries.
As much as Javier liked the sudden attention, he'd be lying if he admitted he wasn't embarrassed by his tumble moments ago.
"I'm fine, Señorita." He reassures, his hand finding its way onto of her own.
"Are you sure? I mean, you aren't hurt?" She repeats, still adamant in overlooking the man.
"I'm fine, trust me." He confirms again, before caressing her hand underneath his own, before gently removing it.
"We got some fellers hold up on the last car!" Dutch announces causing the two to be pulled away from their conversation.
"Ah shit." Arthur mumbles irritatedly.
"What are you fellers planning on doing in there? Listen to me, we don't want to kill any of ya... well anymore of ya... I gave you my word, but trust me... we will." Dutch shouts at the last room of the train that we needed to get into.
"I work for Leviticus Cornwall!" One man shouts from the train, causing the girl to roll her eyes.
"Come on, boys!" Dutch tries to plead to them.
"We got our orders!" Another man in the train shouts, causing Dutch to loudly sigh.
"Alright you asked for it! Five, four, three... two... one! Seems like our friends have gone deaf! Wake em' up a little." Dutch orders causing every member of the gang to shoot at the barricaded room, hopefully spooking the men from inside. But it still managed to fail.
"Thats enough! Mr. Smith, please give Mr. & Ms. Morgan some dynamite. You two blow that door open." Dutch orders as Charles hands the dynamite towards the two, and allowing them to make their way over. Quickly they placed the dynamite onto the heavy metal train doors.
"Seems good enough; light the dynamite." She tells Arthur who quickly lights it up and runs towards group again. Once the two were in a safe enough distance, the doors blew open, revealing men nervously exiting out with their hands up.
"Alright, come on. Just walk up down here." Dutch tells them as Lenny & Javier raise their guns, and watch over the hostages.
"We don't wanna kill you... we just wanna rob your boss." Bill tells the hostages crouched onto the ground, which made a few of our men laugh.
"Get up on there, and search that train." Micah orders the two siblings, who quickly enter the train without a fuss. Once they searched throughout the train, they ended up with some cash, some documents of some kind.
"What did you find?" Dutch asks the two siblings, who immediately handed him over some papers.
"These... documents." Arthur tells the man, who instantly looks over at them in interest.
"Oh, sure. Bearer bonds. I'm sure we can sell these pretty easily. Well done, both of you. You think you could get rid of this?" He asks Arthur, who turns to face the train.
"The train?" He asks with furrowed brows.
"Yeah, get it out of here." Dutch tells him, clearly wanting to leave him to do the rest of the dirty work.
"What about them?" Abby asks, still eyeing the hostages laying on the ground.
"What do you think, Dutch?" Arthur asks their leader who casually shrugs his shoulder.
"I don't know. It's up to you! Kill them, leave them here, take them with you on the train... just make sure they don't send folk after us." He informs her brother before taking his leave.
"I'll take care of it—you go ahead."
"Just don't kill them." Abby says before mounting her own horse.
"I wasn't going too!" He shouts back at his younger sister almost offended.
"See you later, big brother." She tells him with an smile, while slowly turning her horse around. "And don't die!" She shouts before sprinting off in the direction of the other men.
Once she catches up with the three, she tugs off her bandana completely, and slows down to fit alongside Javiers steed.
"You sure that you're alright?" She asks the man again, causing him to laugh. He couldn't believe that she was that worried about his well-being.
"You worry too much, Hermosa." He says with a smile, causing her to raise an eyebrow in question.
"Hermosa? That's a new one. What does it mean?"
"I guess you'll have to find out on your own." He teases causing her to scoff at his comment.
"No one else speaks Spanish in camp, besides you. So how could I possibly find out on my own?" She sassily comments back to the man.
"You could use your imagination or... you could race me to find out?" He offers with an mischievous looking smirk, which only causes her her to grow one of her own.
"You're on."
( Chapter. 4 : UPDATED 12/27/2022 )