Dragon Metal Origins: Gunsmoke Baptism

A short story featuring an early adventure of Gideon and Father Caleb (before priesthood), about 20 years before Jestin Kase and the Masters of Dragon Metal!

Dragon Metal Origins: Gunsmoke Baptism

Two rednecks grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me to my knees. Assholes. They did the same to Gideon to my right. I barely knew the guy-- he looked about 19 or so, with slick black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a square jaw, smoothly shaven.

As for me, I was 22, with hazel eyes, short, wavy brown hair, and black-framed glasses. My name was technically Caleb, but I went by “Cal” instead. Two decades later I would be a middle-aged priest, still working alongside Gideon for some reason. But at this time, I was just a stupid kid trying to do some good. 

A stupid kid who’d just been captured by white supremacists. 

I found myself in the ruins of a small wooden chapel in poor repair, covered with graffiti. Words like “Sinners Die” and “End Times Now” were scrawled across panels of rotting wood. 

On our knees, hands roped behind our backs, we faced the leader of the cult that called this splendid chapel home. Brother Timmy. The man wore a dirty white tank top and dirty jeans. Tattoos covered his arms and neck. He had a scruffy beard and dead-brown eyes that matched his long, disheveled hair. 

About a dozen men joined him, spread around the chapel’s empty floor (no pews, no podium, just four walls and a roof).  

“My, my,” Brother Timmy spoke with a thick southern drawl. “What do we have here? Two pretty boys like you, lookin’ for trouble? Heard you done killed two of my men. That...is not a sin that can be forgiven, not even by the almighty. So…”

The redneck leader pulled a handgun from behind his back. “You’re going to tell me who sent ya--feds, local pigs--and then I’m gonna kill ya.”

Gideon narrowed his eyes. “No,” he said; his quiet voice had a stern sense of power to it. “Let me tell you how this is going to go.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. He is going to get us both killed…

“You’re going to let us go,” Gideon said. “Then you’re going to release all the women and children you keep in your commune. Then, we are going to kill you.”

Brother Timmy bellowed with laughter, a sound that came from his rotten gut. “Oh, oh that’s funny, that’s funny, pretty boy.”

The cult leader pointed his gun at Gideon’s head. “See, that’s the problem with you kids. Think everythin’ is a joke. Well there’s no joking when it comes to the fate o’ your immortal soul, boy. Sinners like you...ya mock god, mock the faithful. Turn your backs on the almighty and wonder why the world’s done gone to shit.”

Gideon didn’t even flinch. 

This kid has balls. 

“I suggest you move your gun,” Gideon said, voice like ice. 

Like I said, I barely knew the kid, but I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen next. 

“Gideon,” I said softly, “there are a dozen people in here. We can’t-”

“I said move the gun,” Gideon said. 

I shook my head. Well...shit. 

Brother Timmy smiled wide; his teeth looked yellow and rotten. 

“After I kill ya…” Brother Timmy said. “I think I’ll cook your face. Get it nice and crispy like. Eat it right off ya--”

Gideon broke from his bindings, sprang to his feet, and grabbed the cult leader’s arm. In the time it took me to blink, my “partner” stood behind Brother Timmy and held the bastard in an armlock with his own gun pointed to his head. 

“Everyone lay down your guns,” Gideon said. “Or your leader gets a bullet in the head.”

I finally managed to wiggle my hands free and toss the rope aside--the cult did not know how to tie knots very well. 

Meanwhile the cultists tossed their rifles, machine guns and pistols onto the floor. Some of them gave us the courtesy of spitting in our direction. Classy people. I walked over, grabbed an assault rifle from the floor and stood next to Gideon. 

“Okay,” I said. “Who wants to tell us where we can find the commune?”

A cultist spat at me. Again. “Eat shit ‘n die.”

Gideon shot that cultist in the leg, aimed the gun back at Brother Tommy’s head. “I’ll pass.”

The injured cultist screamed from the floor. “Ah! Mother--”

Wounded, desperate, and pissed--a bad combination--the cultist grabbed a pistol from the floor and opened fire frantically at me and Gideon. I dove aside and triggered a burst of bullets that blasted the cultist in the head. 

Unfortunately, the idiot's random fire had stuck Brother Timmy in the center of the chest. The cult leader started to sag to the floor, mouth agape with surprise, blood trickling down his chest. 

The remaining cultists screamed and picked up their guns. I couldn’t understand their mad cursing but heard the words “sinners” and “die” and figured they meant to kill us. 

Gideon held onto Brother Timmy’s limp and sagging body and used it as a shield, sweeping his gun and firing head shots that took down one, two, three cultists. Then four. Damn, he was good. 

I moved aside and slammed my rifle in a cultist's face, staggering him backward before he could shoot, and trying to put a body between me and the rest of the maniacs with guns. Not that they seemed to mind--they fired anyway.  

I ducked around the man I staggered--he took a few bullets to the gut and chest--and swept out my gun, dropping two cultists with my first burst of fire.  

I didn’t get to fire a second burst--a bullet struck my right shoulder, shot clean through, and I dropped my gun. Hot pain stabbed from the wound. 

Two cultists lifted their guns to finish me off. But Gideon was on top of them faster than anything I had ever even. He grabbed a gun from a cultist’s hand and smashed the weapon against the back of the man’s head, dropping him to the floor. He swung the gun and killed another cultist with a headshot, then swung the weapon again with another headshot. 

I could have sworn he actually dodged a few bullets as he tore through the rest of the cultists. Kicking their legs, elbowing their heads, and shooting them at point blank range. The two of us should have died--the numbers were against us. 

But that didn’t seem to matter. That day, I learned that Gideon didn’t need to break a sweat to take down 12 guys with guns.

I ripped off a piece of my shirt and used it as a shoulder bandage. After taking out the last of the cultists, Gideon held out his hand and helped me to my feet.

“Thanks,” I grumbled.

“How bad is it?” Gideon asked.  

“Not that bad, I don’t think,” I said as I gripped the wound. I looked over at Brother Timmy, lifeless on the floor. Or at least, he appeared that way. “Is he seriously playing dead?”

Gideon nodded. “He’s not very smart.”

“I gathered that,” I answered. We walked over and stood on opposite sides of the cult leader’s body. “We know you’re not dead. You’re not fooling anyone.”

The cult leader chuckled with spittle, wiped his mouth and opened his eyes. “Just who are you boys?”

“People who know how to kill you the right way,” I told him. 

Brother Timmy wasn’t a normal mortal. Not anymore. He was a thrall, a person enthralled by a demon’s influence. His soul was corrupted and twisted, not quite a demon, but not human either. The process made thralls hard to kill. Conventional weapons did nothing, and even decapitation didn’t work. 

I reached deep into my pocket and pulled out a vial of Artificial Holy Water. Gideon grabbed his lighter. Slowly, I leaned closer to the fallen villain. 

“Tell us where the commune is…”

Brother Tommy narrowed his eyes and started to breathe rapidly, panicked. He sprang up and reached for my vial, but I leaned back and punched his jaw. 

Gideon grabbed him by the hair, lifted him up, and slammed him back-first onto the floor. I opened my vial and spilled Artificial Holy Water on him; it sizzled like acid, and he screamed with pain. 

Gideon flipped open his lighter. “The commune.”

Brother Timmy tilted his head back and laughed. “Up the hill!” he shouted between laughs; the cultist had clearly lost it at this point. “Six miles, near the old mines! Go there ‘n die!”

I glanced at Gideon. “I told you we should have checked the old mines.”

“This was more fun,” Gideon said. 

Gideon dropped his lighter onto the cultist leader’s body; he erupted into heat, so intense, I had to step back. My “partner” lifted his gun and put a bullet in Brother Timmy’s head. 

That was how you killed a thrall. 

***

Gideon and I hopped into my car--a triple black 1969 Pontiac GTO--and drove through the woods towards the old mine. My baby’s headlights barely cast enough light to see the swerves and turns of the road, but I floored the gas anyway, tires kicking up dirt. 

My “partner” didn’t seem rattled at all by my reckless driving, honed after years of street racing. I, however, still felt a little taken aback by the fighting skills that let Gideon take down a group of armed men without getting a single bullet wound. 

“You want to tell me what happened back there?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the road--mostly. 

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Gideon said without a single hint of fatigue. “Things didn’t go smoothly, but we got what we needed.”

“I’m talking about the way you fought,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Are you complaining?” Gideon asked. 

I shook my head. “Not at all. I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t realize I was partnering with Chuck Norris.”

“I could take Chuck Norriss,” Gideon said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t tell if he was joking and decided not to ask. 

“Seriously, though,” I said, “do you have some kind of Relic that boosts your fighting skills?”

“No,” Gideon said. “I’d rather not talk about it. I have a past. But the important thing is, I can fight, and we can help each other.”

I sighed and gave up. I guess I didn’t blame him for not wanting to share. We barely knew each other at the time. So we focused on the job instead. 

“There’s probably another dozen or so men near the mine,” I said. “But we don’t know how many members of the commune they’ve converted into extremists. There were 30 missing people living there. Let’s be careful this time.”

“For sure,” Gideon said as he looked out the side window. Like I said, I didn’t know him very well at the time, so I made the mistake of actually believing him. “Careful.” Right. 

***

I pulled off the side of the road about a mile away from the old mine, where a few ramshackle shacks served as the commune for this particular group of crazies. Cultists had set up barbed wire fencing, and they drove pick-up trucks to and from the mines where they stored their drugs--cocaine. 

Gideon and I scouted the place. The commune looked mostly empty of activity, but we heard commotion deeper in the woods. Voices, mostly. 

We followed the noise through bushes and trees and came to a riverbank, where about 20 people gathered. Most of them looked like civilians, members of the commune, not necessarily violent psychopaths. Yet. But at least six of the men had guns strapped to their hips or slung across their backs. Or both. 

A bearded man waded into the river. He held a book, likely a bible, with the stamp of the Patriots of Eden cult, four crosses, each connected at the base and extending outward like the arms of a compass or clock. 

The man wore a white robe, and he waited in the water as a mother and son joined him. They wore similar robes. Both the boy and his mother looked malnourished, the boy no older than 13. He had disheveled, dirty blonde hair and pale skin that rarely saw the sun. 

The crowd became silent as they watched the bearded man. He lifted his bible and addressed the people. 

“Young Matthew here has come to us today to be absolved of his sins,” he said. “Sins of the flesh. Sins of the spirit. Sins that are an abomination to god. And the lord tells us, the wages of sin is death.”

Gideon leaned forward as we watched and listened through the bushes. 

“I don’t like this,” he whispered. 

I didn’t either. I started thinking about the quickest way to take out the armed men without letting any innocent people get hurt. 

The bearded man continued his ceremony. “Matthew, kneel. And be cleansed.”

Gideon stayed low and darted through the bushes faster than I could stop him. He moved as quietly as a shadow, making his way towards the river below, until I lost sight of him in the darkness. What was this kid? A super-ninja-death wraith? 

I started moving too, although the bullet wound in my shoulder slowed me down. I kept to a steady pace, trying to hurry, but not wanting to make any loud noises that would get me spotted. I, unfortunately, did not have any super-ninja-death-wraith skills like my partner.

Ahead, the boy named Matthew kneeled so that the water came up to his shoulders. The bearded man laid his hand on the boy’s forehead; the mother started to weep. 

“Please,” she said between tears, grasping the bearded man’s arm. “Please don’t hurt him, he’s just a baby.”

“Baby?” the bearded man asked. “He’s a young man. One who has given himself to sin. And that sin must be cleansed.”

The man grabbed Matthew by the face and dunked him into the river. The mother screamed, a desperate panic; the boy flailed in the water, bubbles rising, arms flapping and breaking the surface. The bearded man used his free hand to grab the mother by the arm and hold her back. 

“If he is forgiven, he will live,” the bearded man said. “If he is not, he will be freed of this world, forever.”

I didn’t know much about religion at the time, but even I knew salvation didn’t work that way--baptisms didn’t give you a 50/50 chance of getting killed. I tried to move faster, pulled a gun from my jacket, a Colt revolver I had kept in my car. 

The mother wept, louder, frantically. And the boy’s struggle slowed. If I didn’t stop the bearded man now, the boy would drown. But I didn’t have a clear shot at the cultist. If I shot at this distance, I took the risk of hitting someone innocent. But if I didn’t take the shot, the kid would die. 

Without warning, the water erupted from behind the bearded man, and a dark figure grabbed the cultist in a headlock. I recognized the attacker immediately. It was Gideon. Holy shit, Gideon.  

Militia-men screamed and scrambled into the water. They aimed their guns but held off on firing, not wanting to shoot Mr. Beard by accident.

Gideon dropped back into the water and dragged the bearded man with him. The mother held Matthew and sobbed, but the boy looked still and limp, not breathing. God dammit. 

I opened fire. One day Gideon and I would make a rule about not killing anyone unless they were a demon or thrall. This rule did not exist that night, clearly. I took them by surprise, shooting three of them before they turned their attention away from the water and towards me. 

They returned fire, as I ducked behind a tree near the shoreline. Bullets struck the tree with splinters of bark and wood. I hated being in that position. I hated acting without a plan. But Gideon had acted on impulse, and I needed to adapt.

I took a deep breath to calm myself--it didn’t work--and ducked out from behind the tree, ready to return fire. But Gideon had already moved onto the shore and smashed against the militia soldiers. 

The strange kid moved as fast as lightning, disarming soldiers while bashing them to the ground, switching through several styles of martial arts, from Taekwondo kick combinations, to close-combat Jujutsu strikes. 

Gideon twisted soldiers by their weapon’s arms and triggered their guns, shooting cultists at range. He wiped out the armed men within seconds and tossed the last of their bodies aside. 

I stepped out onto the shore, in shock. Most bystanders had dropped to the ground for safety. None looked injured that I could see, but I walked around and checked to be sure, while Gideon did the same. 

Matthew’s mother had dragged his body onto the shore during the mele. She cradled her son’s body and rocked back and forth, whispering. I moved over to help her, maybe start CPR. But I noticed the odd angle of Matthew’s neck. The bearded man had snapped it. 

I leaned down next to her. My heart sank at the sight of the mother holding her dead child. Parents shouldn’t outlive their children; it defied the natural order of things. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. 

She shook her head. “I don’t need your apologies,” she said. “Leave me alone so I can pray for my son.”

That surprised me. Pray, after a man killed her son in the name of God? How could she do such a thing? These twisted, demented cultists had brainwashed her into joining a commune and killed her boy. 

She must have noticed the look on my face, because she asked. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? After everything these people put me through, that I pray? I still believe, young man. I still have my faith, they can never take that from me.”

“How?” I asked, not meaning to say the question out loud, but it slipped. 

“Because,” she answered softly. “I don’t judge my God by the worst of the people who claim to follow Him.” 

***

Gideon and I drove away from the commune later that night, having liberated its people and defeated the cultists. 

I couldn’t get the mother’s words out of my head: “I don’t judge my God by the worst of the people who claim to follow Him.”

Is that what I did? Yes, I realized. When I thought about God and religion, my mind drifted to some of the worst people. Tele-evangelicals who scammed people out of millions to buy fancy cars and jets. Bigots who preached against anyone different. Militias who used God as a rallying cry for acts of terrorism and hate. 

How did people separate the notion of religion from the atrocities it caused?

Gideon noticed my pensive mood. “There was nothing we could have done for the kid,” he said. “The way he was handled, he was gone as soon as he was pushed under the water.”

I didn’t say anything. The whole mission had me rattled, and not just because of the mother who lost her son. How did Gideon clear the shore so quickly, without getting injured? How did he sneak through the water and attack the bearded man from behind?

“We need to have a serious talk, Gideon,” I told him. “If you and I are going to work together, I need to know how you can do what you do.”

Gideon looked out the window, his face blank. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Then maybe we shouldn’t keep working together.”

I didn’t argue with him. My shoulder still hurt from the bullet wound I needed to get treated, and I didn’t know him well enough to particularly care if he wanted to bail on me. 

“If that’s how you feel,” I told him.  

Gideon said nothing. 

We sat in silence for the rest of the trip, and the mother’s words would nag my mind for years to come. “I don’t judge my God by the worst of the people who claim to follow Him.”

END