Old Jed took another big gulp out of his canteen. Bloody hell but the sun was exceptionally hot today.
"I’m too old for this crap", he told himself and couldn’t help but laugh at the cliché he had become. His pappy should’ve seen him now – a bounty hunter, who would have thought?
Jed shifted his weight in the saddle; it felt like he was glued to the damn thing. His horse seemed unabated by the heat and he was thankful that he was good enough at what he did to afford this type of breed.
Christ almighty, he should’ve gotten himself a sombrero. His ten gallon hat did it’s best to keep him from melting away in the desert sun but the more shade the better, even if he’d look silly.
He had been on a horse’s back for the majority of his adult life, always bounty hunting. It’s been an interesting life with lots of places to see and fascinating things to experience but he was indeed getting too old for this, cliché or not.
Just this one, then he’d quit. The bounty for this catch combined with his savings would be enough for him to retire.
"To somewhere cool", he muttered under his breath.
"Oh well", he said louder, to no-one in particular, "time to get the show on the road".
Jed turned his horse around and rode through the time-space wormhole, hot on the heels of the refuge energy vortex that he’d been tracking across twelve planets.
"Just this one."
1 comment:
One thing I "learned" from Pulp Decameron was to screw around with genres and I'd like to think that I did a pretty good job with this one.
I choose a western setting because they are, to me at least, the easiest ones to twist as almost everyone has a very stereotypical and well known view of what a western is.
That means I don't have to write as much in order to conjure up a very vivid image of an old cowboy on his horse in the desert heat. It also means that it's quite easy to skew this image, in this case with the science-fiction elements.
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