"The Devil in a Red Dress"
by
William H. Chang

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Foreward:
This story was loosely based on a dream I had one night. Around that time I wanted to write a western story since it's the genre on Fiction Press with the fewest pieces of writing (less than three hundred at the time of this first chapter's original publication here), so I started to write out the first few chapters of the story while on one of my many train rides. The original handwritten manuscript contains the first three chapters of the story, but I've added a lot more to them since then, and I'll continue to publish them on Fiction Press until the tale is done. Until then, enjoy.

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I
GISELLE

Giselle Woods had been making her way through the desert for three days now. She had not seen a single person for at least a week, nor did she expect to see anyone where she was going. No one would dare cross the badlands during the dry season, the time of year when the sun overhead remained in the sky for a longer stretch of time. Besides, where she was going ... well, not many people even knew of the place.

It was hot, way too damn hot for anything to survive out here, other than the cold-blooded lizards and the occasional vulture. Giselle hadn't seen either for hours. Not a good sign.

She trudged through the blazing sand, her thick, leather boots nearly shin-deep in the stuff. It was like marching through drying mud in a bog. It made the journey slow, and in the long-run time was something one simply couldn't afford to waste.

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Nightfall arrived, a welcome and pleasant sight. Giselle stopped to rest for the first time on that third day. She was incredibly tired, but she knew that there was still work to be done before she was able to even think about relaxing. A fire needed to built, and fast, before the chill of the desert night could overtake her.

Giselle gathered some twigs from the surrounding area, though how those twigs came to be in such a vast, empty place was beyond her. The small fire was barely the size of her fist, but it warmed her flesh, and that was enough. It served its purpose.

Once she warmed up a bit, Giselle sat back and pulled off her boots, setting them on the sand next to her. They had seen better days and nights; there was a hole in the front of her left boot, and the heel of the right boot sometimes dug painfully into her ankle, which was scraped a dull crimson in the light of the small fire. Her small feet were rough with blisters and callouses, the nails hard and chipped. What she wouldn't have given for a hot tub of water to soak them in at that point.

She reached for her knapsack and pulled out a small tin container with a lion's head engraved on the top. Inside were a couple of sheets of thin paper and a small stash of old tobacco that she had collected off a drunk in some town, the name of which she'd already forgotten. In less than a second she rolled a cigarette and stashed the closed container back into her knapsack. The fire was more than capable of lighting the cigarette, and soon Giselle was breathing in the taste of the tobacco, letting it fill her lungs with its sweet yet bitter flavor.

The wind was beginning to pick up from the east, kicking the sand into the cold night air. Giselle moved so that she could protect the small fire from being blown out. She couldn't afford to lose the fire, no matter how little it was. The wind was like a thousand tiny knives being driven into her back, but she continued to sit there, smoking her cigarette slowly, taking in every breath of it. It was going to be a long night, no doubt about that.

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Nearly an hour later the winds died down. The sky was now littered with stars and a thin moon that resembled a clipped nail. The desert was silent, and pitch black except for a small spot of light in the middle of nowhere. A small fire was still burning brightly in a sea of darkness, with Giselle Woods sitting upright less than a foot away from it.

She let out a small sigh, the slightest hint of a smile creeping across her lips. Her back had long gone numb, and the feeling in her bare arms was starting to go as well. At least it had ended, instead of forcing her to stay up until dawn.

Giselle unrolled a leather sleeping bag that she kept tied to her knapsack. The leather was the finest leather one could get in the west, though like her boots, the sleeping bag had seen better days and nights. There were holes of all shapes and sizes along the faded leather that had once been decorated with various images that Giselle no longer remembered, and stains of unknown origins which she could never quite remove. Still, it did its job. There was no need for anything fancy in this day and age. It just wasn't practical, and Giselle Woods was a practical kind of gal.

She slept like a rock that night. And all the while the small fire that she had spent nearly an hour protecting never went out, though it did falter once or twice. The heat warmed her face as she slept, and at some point in the night a smile flashed across her face.

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Giselle woke at least an hour before dawn. She yawned heavily as she got to her tired feet, resisting the urge to sleep for just another hour or two. No, that would waste too much time, and it would be harder to travel once the sun came up. There was work to be done before she could resume the journey, and set to it right away.

The fire that she made the night before had died hours ago, and what was left was a charred black mess.

She wished she could take a long, hot bath. Her mocha-colored skin was now a dark brown combination of dirt and long hours of exposure to the blazing sunlight. And her hair was a grimy mess, a series of black wires that just touched the tips of her shoulders.

Unfortunately for Giselle, there wasn't a hot bath to be found for miles, and the water she carried in her three leather skins was specifically for drinking purposes. She had to ration it carefully, or risk running out for the return trip - if there was going to be one. First she had to get to her destination, and there was still a ways to go.

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As Giselle Woods continued to make her way across the desert on that fourth day, she knew that she was close to her destination. Another two or three days perhaps, at the most. Somehow she could feel it, could taste it in the dry winds that blew across the vast, empty badlands.

Push on, she kept telling herself. Push on.