Chapter Thirty-Four

 

 

Ryan watched as a window opened in the second floor of one of the houses that they'd marked down as harboring gang members. A breed with a heavy mustache appeared, looking both ways, not seeing the one-eyed man in the shadows. He climbed out onto the top of the porch, followed by a companion. Both were partly dressed, holding bundles of clothes and both with unidentifiable revolvers in their hands.

 

Ryan waited until both of them were preparing to jump before bringing the Steyr rifle to his shoulder. The light was growing stronger every minute, but the night scope was still useful, the laser image enhancer making everything easier.

 

The SSG-70 barked and Ryan worked the bolt action, readying another of the 7.62 mm rounds, squeezing the trigger a second time, watching through the scope as the two men rolled lifelessly off the porch onto the ground.

 

 

 

THE PLAN HAD BEEN for everyone to separate after the first flush of the butchery, going to other properties where they believed other gang members were staying.

 

Doc was nearly caught by a stocky man with a bush of gray hair and protruding teeth who suddenly jumped down from a low roof, knocking the Le Mat from his fingers, sending him staggering into a green-painted picket fence.

 

"Whodafuckyou?" The snarl turned the phrase into a single word. The man had a bowie knife in his right hand, and he gestured toward Doc with it.

 

"We are the lily white boys, clad all in green," Doc replied, giving a twist to the silver lion's-head hilt of the swordstick, letting the ebony sheath fall to the alley, exposing the blade of the slim rapier.

 

"Fuckin' swordbastard!"

 

He came at the old man in a grinning, clumsy rush, the blade held low in the classic knife-fighter's pose, ready for the lethal cut upward at the unprotected belly.

 

Doc extended his right arm, wrist flexible, keeping the needle point moving in a small circle. "Cursed be he that first shall cry 'Enough,' " he chanted.

 

The man feinted to the left and came in at Doc from the right, hacking away with the long blade of the bowie knife.

 

Only Doc wasn't there.

 

He'd ignored the feint and moved toward it, drawing back the rapier and lunging with all his strength, aiming at the point where the man's throat melted into his broad chest.

 

"A hit, a palpable hit," he whispered, smiling with delight as the Toledo steel slid into the killer like a hot needle through butter.

 

A turn of the wrist shredded the lungs, opening up the artery in the neck. The blade, blood slick, was withdrawn as the man dropped his knife and staggered back, hands to the pumping wounds, eyes open wide with shock at the cognition of his own imminent passing.

 

Doc stopped and resheathed the sword as his opponent sank to his knees. He picked up the Le Mat and turned away, looking back at the dying wretch.

 

"Goodbye cruel world," he said, and moved on.

 

 

 

MILDRED SHOT TWO of the desperadoes as they were running for the livery stable, trying to get mounts to escape the slaughter. Ryan had told her to go there when she split from J.B., and she stood in the center of the main street of Harmony, legs slightly apart, holding the butt of her ZKR 551, looking two-eyed along the barrel of the target revolver.

 

"Hey!" she shouted, halting the fleeing killers in their tracks, about eighty yards away from her.

 

They turned, both holding single-shot cap-and-ball muskets, and started to laugh when they saw a stocky black woman in her thirties, with beads in her plaited hair that caught the rising sun, wearing a quilt-lined denim coat over reinforced military jeans tucked into calf-length boots of black leather.

 

The woman held a small hand blaster, and seemed to believe it threatened them.

 

"You got us real scared, sweetheart," yelled the man on the left. "Little toy blaster might reach about halfway."

 

Mildred shot him through his open, laughing mouth, the full-metal-jacket .38 blowing the back of his head all over the street.

 

His companion turned and gaped at the mist of blood and brains that hung in the air around his friend's skull as the man began to spin and topple.

 

Mildred shot him through the right ear, the bullet tumbling and taking out his left eye, part of his nose and most of the left cheek as it exited.

 

The woman turned and moved into one of the side alleys, continuing the hunt.

 

 

 

KRYSTY AND CARL STAYED together. It had been his idea, pointing out that he knew the ville better than anyone and could take her along safe shortcuts.

 

But when they reached the neat house, with its swinging sign offering Bed and Breakfast, they discovered that the pair of stickies they'd hoped to find had already fled, leaving the married couple who ran the place lying dead in a lake of blood in the kitchen with their three young children. An attempt had been made to fire the house, but the wood the stickies used had been green and it only smoldered.

 

Carl had been nervous while he stamped it out, gripping his hammer so hard that his knuckles were white.

 

"Where do you reckon they've gone?" he asked, his face pale. "Think Ryan and any of the others are still alive?"

 

J.B'S NEXT DESTINATION was the garage where they knew the small armawag was kept, along with the two-wheeled trailer that held spare cans of gas.

 

He used the stock of the scattergun to break off the brass padlock, swinging the Uzi on its sling across his back. He started to pull the door open, when a bullet crashed into the woodwork eighteen inches from his head.

 

The Armorer spun, seeing that two of the gang had the same idea as him, realizing that the wag might give them their best chance of escaping from the massacre that seemed to have taken most of their comrades in the ville.

 

They were half walking, half running toward him, one of them unarmed, the other holding what looked like a remade Model 669 Taurus revolver. He fired again as J.B. turned to face them, the bullet this time hitting much closer. If the killer had stopped and taken careful aim, it was likely that the first shot would have hit J.B., but he was in too much of a hurry.

 

There wasn't a third chance.

 

J.B. fired the M-4000 from the hip, using the folding butt. One of the eight Remington flechettes burst from the 12-gauge muzzle, all twenty of the inch-long darts ripping into the murderer with the Taurus blaster. They tore his chest, lower stomach and groin to tatters of ragged sinew. The whole of the front of his body seemed to turn into a huge sponge, filled with blood, that was squeezed dry in a single soul-stopping moment.

 

His companion skidded to a halt, looking in amazement and horror at the devastated, leaking, whimpering, twitching thing at his feet, which had been his friend only a moment earlier.

 

J.B. aimed the weapon a second time, firing another burst of flechettes that sent the surviving man staggering backward, identically wounded, until his feet got tangled together and he fell in the street.

 

The Armorer calmly inserted another round and waited a few moments, before turning back to investigate the armawag in the garage.

 

 

 

JAK WENT to the trim house that Carl had assured them was the bordello in Harmony, and that was believed to harbor three of the norms. It stood in a neat side street off the main drag, bordering a narrow stream.

 

As soon as he cautiously worked the back door ajar, he could smell the bitter scent of jolt, hanging in the air like a forgotten promise.

 

He recognized it immediately from a dozen frontier pesthole gaudies. For some reason that Jak had never been able to understand, gaudy sluts were among the most addicted users of the heroin, cocaine and mescal mix.

 

The occupants of the brothel were all together in the big front parlors, four women, mostly edging into middle age, and three members of the gang of murderers. All of them were deep in a drugged sleep, oblivious of the shooting and yelling that had been going on in the ville for several minutes.

 

They were all partly dressed, and a potbellied iron stove was still throwing a lot of heat into the room. There was a round mirror, a pair of syringes and some white powder on a small table, along with three empty gin bottles. One of the gang had fallen asleep in the act of copulating with a fat, bleached gaudy slut from behind and he was still draped across her, snoring loudly, pants around his ankles.

 

Jak holstered the blaster, reaching into the small of his back and drawing one of his beloved throwing knives. Holding it by the taped hilt, he went silently from man to man, as gentle as a surgeon, and opened the carotid artery in each of them with the leaf-shaped blade.

 

As the blood spurted ceiling high, one of the men moaned in his drugged slumber, swatting at the neat, deep cut as if he dreamed he'd been stung by a skeeter.

 

Jak went last to the gang member who'd been overcome by the jolt while still in the sex act, cutting his throat with the same professional expertise. Something penetrated through the drugged darkness. The man muttered a few inaudible words and tried to push himself off the woman, sliding down over her buttocks, his limp penis flopping to one side as he fell bleeding and dying onto the flowered carpet. The sudden movement made the woman blink awake, her head turning from side to side as she tried to puzzle out what was happening.

 

The albino teenager wiped the reddened steel of the knife on a cushion and resheathed it, smiling to himself and walking out into the brightening morning.

 

He'd gone nearly a whole block before he heard the start of the screams from the house.

 

 

 

BY THEIR COUNTING, that was the end of all the norms in the gang, nearly thirty human lives snuffed out in the center of a beautiful ville in old Colorado, all done for in less than ten minutes.

 

Ryan met up with Jak, Doc and Mildred outside the main store of the ville. J.B. quickly joined them, reporting that the armawag was gassed up and ready to roll.

 

"Carry all of us back to the redoubt with a bit of a squeeze, "he said.

 

There was no more sign of any threat from the gang, though a few of the honest citizens of Harmony were beginning to appear in the dawn-lit streets, looking like shell-shocked victims of a savage war.

 

"Where's Krysty and Carl?" Ryan asked. "Anyone see them?"

 

"They were supposed to be out to the south, by the park, weren't they?" Mildred said. "Haven't heard any shooting or noise from over that way."

 

 

 

IT SEEMED like it was over.

 

Neither Krysty nor Carl had heard shots for a minute or more, though a group of women screamed somewhere off the main street, and several dogs barked hysterically throughout the ville. A light wind rustled gently through the trees and bushes.

 

"You going to stay here for a while, Krysty?" Carl asked, sighing and sitting on a bench at the edge of the park.

 

"No. I wish I hadn't come at all, Carl. Like I said before, you can never go back. Not really. Good to see you. Wish you well. Truly."

 

"Some folks'll want to see you."

 

"Just tell them hi from me and that I had to get back on the road."

 

She had sat on a bench facing Carl, studying her old friend, seeing in the stark morning light the ravages that time and liquor had wrought in him. She was saddened that such a handsome boy had become so weary and defeated. Krysty ran her fingers through her bright red hair, feeling how tense and coiled it was, responding to the danger that still lingered in the air.

 

"Wish I could get away from Harmony and go on the road like you and Ryan and the others," he said, toying with his short-handled hammer.

 

"It wouldn't work. But you could get away from here. Find a new ville and a new life. Get a good woman and settle and have kids. That's what you should do, Carl."

 

He looked up and grinned at her, revealing a flash of the teenager that had once made love to her. "That'll be the day, pilgrim."

 

"You could" She stopped in alarm as Carl leaped to his feet, his face contorted into a mask of hatred and rage. He moved toward her, the crushing hammer lifted in his right hand.