​     The man​ on the stagecoach who'd been riding shotgun turned to look down at Estelle, although he wasn't really a man at all. He was a simulate, a puppet controlled by the powers behind Domitika.

​     He aimed his rifle at Estelle's head. "I'm plum sorry. ma'am," he said, "but it looks like I'm going to have to blow you clean to..."

​     Gramps sat right underneath the gun. He reached up and pulled the rifle out of the guy's arms. The guy pitched forward to land in the coach with them. Estelle elbowed him in the skull hard enough to crack it.

​     He didn't even yelp.

     He just dissolved into a silver goo, then into a silver gas, then into nothingness. 

     The other guy, the one who held the horse's reins, turned with his rifle to shoot at Estelle. Gramps used the rifle he held to, first, sweep the guy's legs out from underneath him, the bash the guy's face in with the butt of the rifle. Now that guy did yelp as he rolled completely off the stagecoach to go flying off on to the side of the road.

     "Grab the reins!" Estelle shouted.

     Gramps hopped up to where the driver had been, but it was too late. The reins were down underneath the horse's hooves now. The horses ran free. They veered right, all four of them, off of the road on to what looked to be desert sand.

     "Get up here!" Gramps yelled. "You've got to get a look at this!"

     Everyone rode at them, all the simulates on their horses and Old West clothes and firing their six shooters at the stagecoach. Behind them, Estelle saw a regiment or forty simulate soldiers, and they, too, rode right at the stagecoach. A hundred Native Americans on horseback with the whooping and war paint joined pursuit. 

     "Dang," Estelle said. "We're in a bit of pickle, huh?"

     "I guess you could say." 

CONTINUE