Unicorn Western Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note About This Collection

  Author's Note

  UNICORN WESTERN

  The Hitching

  Delayed

  The Posse

  Decisions

  The Kid

  Bandits

  The Stew Hole

  Dharma Kold

  High Noon

  Trouble at the Otel

  Epic Unicorn Fight

  UNICORN WESTERN 2

  The Pursuit

  Chest Pains

  Sands Coot

  Knee-Slapping Dooners

  Hovel, Heat, and Cold

  The Door to NextWorld

  Lost and Findings

  The Searchers

  Killing

  Darkness and Sty

  Epic Dragon Fight

  Broken Guns, Broken Shackles

  Palaver

  UNICORN WESTERN 3

  Threshold

  Inside the Dinosaur Missouri

  The Bubble of Glee

  A Fistful of Dollars

  Two Bosses

  Rumors

  Down to Business

  Black Church

  Moving Pieces

  ZAP!

  The Underground Cathedral

  The Orb

  The Second Orb

  UNICORN WESTERN 4

  The Realm Machine

  Sly of the Family Stone

  Clown with Shotguns

  By the Seven Spices of Chili

  An Uneasy Palaver

  No Tears For the Paladin

  The Roving Rope Gang

  Tick Tock

  3:10 to Yuma

  Blush Colored Tatters

  UNICORN WESTERN 5

  Bones of an Ambush

  All Seven Spices

  The Bandit and His Murder

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

  What Brews in the Meadowlands

  Big News

  The Birdemic

  Beyond Infuriating

  Street Fight

  Following Orders

  Rolling Fields

  UNICORN WESTERN 6

  Husk

  The Gross of Gringos

  Baracho Gulch

  Intention Matters

  Fist of Fury

  El Feo

  Unwinnable

  The Awakening

  The Magnificent Seven

  C for Concede

  The Battle of Baracho Gulch

  Hero

  Acres of Green

  UNICORN WESTERN 7

  Open Range

  A Fancy Parallel

  Duly Disguised

  Mercy Barlowe

  Worlds Will End

  One Cowboy and One Horse

  Pursuit

  The Truth

  The Dance

  UNICORN WESTERN 8

  The Man in the Mirror

  The Beginning of the End

  Blood and Tears

  Down to the River

  Three Bandits

  A Rainbow Over Main Street

  Machines and Creatures

  Benevolents

  The Orb of Synthesis

  Unforgiven

  UNICORN WESTERN 9

  A Place For Criminals

  The Prophetic Owls

  Memories and PermaBliss

  A Needle Through a Stack of Cloth

  The Red Room

  Realm, Otel, and Salad

  The Room You Want

  Rails and Doorways

  Return to Meadowlands

  The Wild Bunch

  The Crumbling of the Wall

  The Great Battle

  Reinforcements

  In Edward's Cell

  The Family Stone

  The Vial

  The Sounds of Awesomeness

  The New Beginning

  Get cool stuff!

  About the Authors

  Unicorn Western — The Complete Saga (Volumes 1-9)

  by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

  Copyright 2010 Realm & Sands

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover copyright © 2013 by Erin Mehlos.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental. Any resemblance to reality is rendered especially ridiculous by the inclusion of unicorns.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. The authors greatly appreciate you taking the time to read our work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about Unicorn Western, to help us spread the word.

  Thank you for supporting our work.

  For Austin, Ethan, Haley, and Sydney, who we wanted to write for before they got old enough to begin criticizing (or ridiculing) us.

  And of course for Dave, who made the fatal mistake of saying we couldn’t write a western without knowing the color of smoke that came from a gunslinger’s pistols.

  A Note About This Collection

  This collection contains all nine books in the Unicorn Western series — in other words, the entire dagged Saga.

  You are about to read a story about a gunslinger who rides a unicorn. If you think that’s a stupid idea, then we’re on the same page. We’ve decided that this is the most awesome stupid idea that either of us has ever had.

  And as we kept writing — from the first Unicorn Western through the game-changing Unicorn Western 4 and all the way through the epic finish in Unicorn Western 9 — man, oh man did that stupid idea just keep getting awesomer and awesomer.

  The story behind Unicorn Western began when our friend David Wright said we couldn’t write a decent western without doing a ton of research. We replied that if we put a unicorn in the story, we could get away with anything.

  Kisses to you, Dave.

  Author’s Note

  Note from Johnny: I was going to have a say in this Author’s Note, but as listeners to our podcasts will understand, once Sean started talking, he never stopped. I decided to bow out gracefully and turn it over to him.

  One of the first reviews Unicorn Western ever earned referred to it as, “The best book to ever come from a stupid idea.” While I’m not sure how accurate that is — there have been plenty of stupid ideas that have made truly excellent books — I do believe there is truth in that thought. I’m sure Johnny would agree (not that he’s really getting the chance, since I’m totally ball-hogging this Author’s Note).

  No matter what happens with Unicorn Western, we can never change its roots: The entire series, which will finish out at over 600,000 words, started as a joke.

  Unicorn Western was born when Johnny and I were ribbing our friend David Wright during a podcast late last year. This stupid joke has since turned into one of the biggest writing surprises of my life so far, and has given me many hours of “work” where my eyes are wet with laughter.

  What more could a creator ask for?

  I’m not sure if it’s because I have no formal training as a writer, because I’m like a monkey that swings endlessly from one tree to another, or because I came up as a ghostwriter who earned a living by writing everything from sales letters to wedding vows, but I can’t tolerate the thought of sticking to a single genre for the rest of my life. This is a source of frequent debate on both of our podcasts. For the most part Dave isn’t a fan of genre hopping, though I do think he’s slowly coming around, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we wrote something equally ridiculous in the very near future. During one of our playfully heated discussions when I suggested that I would love to someday write a western, Dave made one of his usual noises that sounds as if he’s developed sudden, painful gas
. His reason: research. Writing a western, according to Dave, would be a horrible experience (like life) because of the copious research required to write a quality western. I disagreed loudly through my laughter. Though I’ve not read many westerns, I’ve seen plenty. You need a prairie, a family in danger, and a bad guy in a black hat. I’m not looking to write a Larry McMurtry western; Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite books, but that’s not at all the sort of western I’d be interested in writing. I want to write something simple that sticks to the skeleton so clearly articulated thousands of times already.

  Dave, not knowing he would rue his next words (and deadly serious) said, “Are you familiar with the smoke that comes out of a gun back then?” This only cranked the flames of hilarity. Johnny and I are still laughing six months later — no kidding, I’m laughing right now as I type this. We agreed that the color of gunsmoke didn’t matter. Even if the color of gunsmoke had somehow mysteriously changed color in the last 150 years, a writer can make his gunsmoke pink so long as he builds proper context around it.

  More hilarity ensued until Dave finally raised his giant grizzly bear paws in surrender and growled, “FINE! You all go write your little western. Have fun. There’s gonna be @^#*$!^ unicorns in it.”

  So Unicorn Western was (sort of) born.

  This idea was hysterical, though not taken seriously. Johnny had already started another series, Fat Vampire, based on a separate but equally hilarious conversation during a different broadcast, so the idea of writing a serious book based on a ridiculous idea wasn’t foreign, but I had a full plate with no room to add something stupid. Johnny would be the cowriter if such absurdity were given breath, but he and I had plans for a more serious project. I thought the exchange humorous enough to mention it to my family on the way to school the following morning, and then I put it out of my mind.

  The next time Unicorn Western came out to graze, I was in L.A., speaking on stage about indie publishing. It was my first time on stage and I was a bit rambly. Midway through my talk I found myself discussing genre hopping, and then telling a story about the time I was talking about writing a western with my cohosts and how we thought it would be funny to write a western starring a unicorn. Standing on stage, laughing through the story, I suddenly found myself wanting to write a western with a unicorn. This wasn’t a big deal: I find myself suddenly wanting to write random things many times each day.

  Shortly after starting the podcast, Johnny and I agreed that we would write at least one project together. Dave and I had four serialized series at the time and one series of shorts — all dark horror — so Johnny and I thought it would be cool to write a serialized project with a totally different, albeit still serious tone. We were scheduled to start writing the new project in September, but a week before we were ready to go, Amazon’s horror and sci-fi publishing arm, 47North, invited me and Dave to write a series for their new Amazon Serials division. We signed for two series rather than one and turned our next two months into a tsunami of writing.

  I had to postpone my project with Johnny for those two months. By the time I finally circled back I was spent, still wanting to write something together, but not wanting to think about anything even remotely complicated. Our previous project seemed too complex. I said, “Whatever we do should be stupid simple.”

  It was probably the word stupid that had us crying out “Unicorn Western!” together.

  So Unicorn Western was (totally) born.

  Unicorn Western’s narrative grew really big, super fast. So while each book can be read independently of the others, it wouldn’t make as much sense, in much the same way that you could read The Prisoner of Azkaban” or The Deathly Hallows in isolation and enjoy those books tremendously, but they would be nowhere near as wonderful as if you read them as the third and seventh books in a wonderful series. We knew we wanted to have nine books total, and that we wanted to base each one on an existing western. This would give us a common frame of reference to build a story around, allow us to play with old western cliches, tropes and conventions, and help to ensure that each title could be read as a standalone piece.

  The first book needed to serve as a sort of origin story; we thought the Gary Cooper classic High Noon perfectly served that need. Both huge fans of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, we wrote the first book as a mashup of High Noon, King’s Roland, old Spaghetti Westerns, our own quirky humor, endless in-jokes for podcasts listeners, and solid old-fashioned storytelling. By the end of the first one, we were already in love. We agreed: The book was better than it had any right to be, and we couldn’t wait to see what would happen next.

  With the first one finished, we felt an immediate responsibility and intense desire to take our story of the Sands and Realm and Clint and Edward somewhere special. That need to make our story more daring bloomed with each successive book. By the fourth book we were so in love with our world that we knew it could never be held in only nine entries. So the prequel, Unicorn Genesis, and the series finale, Unicorn Apocalypse, were born. Knowing those two followup series were coming gave us even more freedom to write a completely off-the-wall story.

  We are so thoroughly pleased with the finished book. One of the many reasons Johnny and I were so excited to start writing Unicorn Western, back before we knew anything about Clint and Edward or their epic quest, was because we wanted something to share with our children. Most of our time is spent writing for grownups, and I’m sometimes sad that my kids (both at prime book devouring ages) can’t share my work. Reading Unicorn Western out loud has been an absolute joy. It’s also fun to see how the story works outside my own head. The series has plenty of jokes written specifically for fans of our podcast, but the books should serve the reader just as well without the context of those jokes. I’m glad to see that the story works, even without the foundation to understand many of the gags.

  Johnny and I started writing Unicorn Western for ourselves and for our children, but there is no doubt that the story now belongs to you. We hope you loved reading it as much as we loved writing it.

  We can’t wait for you to join us for the rest of the journey.

  Thank you for reading,

  Sean Platt (and Johnny B. Truant)

  May 23, 2013

  UNICORN

  WESTERN

  CHAPTER ONE:

  THE HITCHING

  Clint touched his guns.

  There were two of them — old, silver, and laced with scratches. Each pistol held seven bullets, as did every gun carried by The Realm’s marshals. Back before Clint packed fourteen bullets, he was allowed to carry a pistol on just one of his hips, and to only fire shots from a six-bullet tumbler, like every other commoner outside The Realm. But those days, for Clint at least, were long gone.

  Most of the Sands’ bandits and outlaws carried two guns or more, even though doing so was as illegal as sipping from a silver flask on Sunday. But getting your hands on a seven-shooter was impossible, unless you were a marshal. Even the darkest of dealers wouldn’t pass them in the shadows behind a saloon, thanks to the taboo.

  In a few hours, Clint would surrender his guns for good, along with his right to marshal in any town, be it inside or outside of The Realm. He’d hand them over along with his badge and go back to being plain old Clint Gulliver, with no Marshal in front. He’d be left with a lone six-shooter, strapped to his right hip since he was a righty, and knew that a straight draw was always better than the crooked aim from a cross-draw done wrong.

  Surrendering his guns bothered Clint something fierce, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He could lose his hat, stubble, and anything else that made him a man, but along with his pistols, the gunslinger would be losing his unicorn. That was an itchy trigger finger’s worth of intolerable.

  And, he thought, it was the last thing he should be thinking about right now.

  Clint sat in the farback of the saloon, staring into the mirror as he did about twice a year. He looked good, so far as Clint Gulliver could look good. He looked pleased,
so far as his crooked, perpetually scowling face could look pleased. Yet he was torn, and that bothered him. The marshal was a straightforward, cut-and-dried kind of a guy. He was rarely conflicted. But now he was torn between two great loves, and the fact that he felt so divided felt like trouble.

  What was more — and this part was as hard to believe as the breaking away of The Realm and the leaking of the magic — he was happy.

  He wore his newfound happiness like another man’s hat, every second assuming he’d have to give it back. It was a mistake, him wearing what passed for a smile. It was only a matter of time before Providence realized the truth, and took back what it should never have given the grizzled gunslinger to begin with.

  Clint had seen most of the sides of the Sands, along with most everything sitting up and down the middle of the Sprawl. He had mostly been solo — and neither happy nor unhappy — prior to Mai and long before Solace. It had been that way since he first rode into the Sands with his back to The Realm.

  But of course, solo didn’t include Edward, the unicorn he wasn’t supposed to have.

  The gunslinger sighed, then pushed the stew in his gut down into his boots. Today was a good day. So what if being happy wasn’t quite familiar? Once upon a time, turkey didn’t go in pie. Things changed. Edward would be happy in his retirement, maybe even write that defamatory book about The Realm that he’d been talking on forever.

  Clint listened.

  Out in the main room, the pianoman was banging out “She’s Got a Way” three or four times faster than the song was usually played, pouring music out from the upright in the front where the gathered townspeople sat, the music drifting all the way into the farback and into Clint’s ears. The pianoman was playing the traditional hitching set, of course, working through “She’s Got A Way,” to “Just The Way You Are” — Clint’s cue to leave, so that he could cross the saloon’s main floor and approach his happily ever after.