Get Stitched Or Lie Dying

Hogwash

Colby could not escape the ravenous wolf called heat. How in the Dickens could he generate it while succumbing to it? Curse the Deuce, life was unfair. Then again, he had known this all along, but this time around, Life decided to kick him while he was down with both boots.

This Stockwell had answers. This Seer had answers, right down to the percentage of afflictions. Colby stormed down dusty lanes, yelling, demanding from passersby the location of these two famous scientific interlopers.

Words voiced in terror directed him to Seer's watch shop. Located in a three-cornered brick building, it held no charm, no line of persons waiting to be told the vapid details of their recently generated 'inoculations'. Instead, he found the hanging image of a pocket watch, tarnished by the weather.

"A dang watchmaker..." he shoved the door open, unaware the doorknob turned red hot.

"Mister Settler, you are on...!" Seer, old yet spry, leaped from a worktable cluttered in mechanical shenanigans to elude the charging trail boss. The shop, full to the brim with gears and brass and trinkets and grandfather clocks in various stages of repair or entropy went invisible as carbonic fumes slithered over every instrument.

"Settler!" Samuel Stockwell, even quicker, pulled a wheeled rack of mantle clocks in front of him, just in time to keep Colby at bay. "What in the hell are you--?"

"Stockwell! I've got no time for mysteries or big words! You're gonna talk to me now! What's can I expect? Facts! Not theories!"

"Mister Settler, please!" Seer begged as he scurried about opening windows, gagging.

"Facts? For a cowhand? I can only degenerate scientific discourse but so much!" Stockwell continued slamming everything in front of him. The old sofa. A sledgehammer collecting dust. He raised a pair of scissors as a weapon, all the while knowing it would do him no good.

"How long do I got?!"

"To do what?" Stockwell asked.

"To live!" Colby's eyes leaked black, charcoal liquid that blurred those eyes as heat rose. He stared at the blond scientist, his scraggly five o'clock shadow, heat making Stockwell's face red.

"Oh." Stockwell lowered the scissors. "I understand you now. Please. Relax. Relax before you burn everything down."

"Whuh--?" Colby felt his gut seize up. The heaving tied up his intestines like a lassoed calf. He leaned forward.

Seer, windows up, gasping, reached out by voice since he dared not by hand. "Mister Settler, listen to me. Your particular alteration is based on the blood, so far as we can visualize. Your aggression is increasing blood flow, thus your output of the burning ash. In effect, your ire makes it hotter, flare more! You must breathe, young man. Breathe deeply, slowly. Exhale slowly. Find a pleasant thing in your mind and settle."

Colby ejected ash from his mouth in a stream, causing Stockwell to curse up a storm as he jumped up onto the rack and then onto a table as the rack melted and collapsed. A cantankerous rain of clocks and parts hit the floor. Ash dissolved much of the parts, save for gears and steel coils. The sofa caught fire, as did the paisley wallpaper.

"Good grief!" Stockwell ran for the water barrel and a bucket. He threw water all over in a panic, sometimes casting hate glares at the trail boss, who was on hands and knees, gagging.

Seer cleaned off his spectacles, only to witness the metal had tiny holes along the frame from ash particles. His entire shop was dotted and besotted, tiny plumes of black and gray smoke as if the entire downstairs had been washed in acid.

"Dearest, is everything well down there?" asked his wife from upstairs, also coughing.

"Yes, my dear. Please open all of the windows and keep the doors up there shut. Place a roll of blanket or towel along the door slit."