Chapter Nine

 

Jak maintained his hold on his hostage with difficulty as the horse reared and staggered under their combined weight. He kept a steady pressure on the reins, holding the horse from bolting and running. The burning horse raced through the brush ahead of them, leaving fiery sparks in its wake. Some of those sparks fanned to life as fires all on their own.

 

The albino locked his right arm under his hostage's chin. Warm blood flowed down his hand from a wound the leaf-bladed knife had made on the man's throat during the brief struggle. "Move, and die," Jak promised, his lips close to his captive's ear.

 

"Gonna be chilled in a minute anyway," the man argued in a strained voice. "Hiram ain't gonna crawfish. And he don't give a fuck if he kills me, too." But he didn't move against the threat of the knife.

 

Jak watched the man bringing his horse around to face them. The man had lost control over his mount for a moment when the burning man had dropped at his horse's hooves. He pulled his long blaster to his shoulder.

 

The albino kicked the horse in the sides and yanked savagely on the reins. The startled animal, given its head, burst into a gallop. It vaulted over the burning man still rolling around on the grass, then it crashed against the horse carrying the man with the long blaster.

 

The muzzle-flash ballooned from the rifle, reaching out over a foot. Jak heard the bullet break wind beside his ear. Expertly he flipped the leaf-bladed knife at the rifleman. The blade flicked into the man's eye, burying deep into the brain tissue beyond.

 

Before his hostage could try to break away while the dead man fell from his staggered horse, Jak drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python and placed the barrel against the back of the man's head. He pulled on the reins, swinging the horse back in the direction where the surviving coldheart had gone to brush in front of Dean. The man was gone.

 

Jak raked the area with his gaze, but he didn't see Dean, either. Both of them had vanished. Then he spotted movement to the right of the tree where Dean had been. But he had no idea if the movement belonged to friend or foe.

 

 

 

"I THOUGHT WE HAD an understanding between us, Albert," Doc said. "I must point out your present behavior is less than exemplary, to say the least."

 

"This old man talks a lot, doesn't he?" Cobb asked. He stepped behind Doc and grabbed a handful of the old man's hair.

 

Doc managed to hold himself in check despite the pain, but he feared his scalp was going to be torn loose. He kept his hands out at his sides, but he was waiting for an opportunity.

 

"Cobb, I didn't want him hurt," Albert exploded. And Doc thought that was a strange thing for a man to say while holding him at gunpoint.

 

"You shouldn't have brought him here," Cobb said. "I don't know that I can trust him."

 

"Well, I do," Albert growled.

 

"Might I suggest," Doc said, "that you have a most peculiar way of showing it."

 

"It's your own bastard fault, Cobb," Albert accused. "If you hadn't started to tell him about the plague, I wouldn't have had to draw down on him. We could have taken our time about telling him proper and all."

 

"What do you mean about not telling him about the plague?" Cobb demanded. "Shit, everybody around here knows about Kirkland's plague."

 

"Doc don't," Albert said. "And neither do his friends. Doesn't that tell you something?"

 

Doc's mind raced, trembling at the edge of uncertainty by the bizarre turn of events. He struggled to maintain his hold on reality as voices crashed and warred in the back of his fragmented mind. He was reminded of a frigate that he'd shipped on, not knowing where, not remembering why, and certainly without knowledge due to his own patchy history of when that had occurred. The black water seemed to hover around him again, and his arms recalled the strain of holding on to the rigging.

 

Cobb kicked at the back of Doc's knees, causing the old man to drop to the floor. Still holding a handful of hair, Cobb bent to bring his face close to Doc's. "That right, gray hair? You don't know anything about the plague?"

 

"I know about several plagues, sir," Doc answered, locking eyes with his tormentor. "Name the particular one to which you're referring."

 

"Kirkland's plague," Cobb said. "The one he's infected everybody in Hazard with."

 

"I must admit, that is one with which I am not immediately familiar." Taking advantage of Cobb's proximity, Doc swung his head forward, cracking his skull into the other man's face. "However, I must object to such rough usage."

 

Blood spurted from Cobb's nose as he reared back and cried out in pain. He clapped a big hand over his face, dropping the cane.

 

Doc reared to his feet and grabbed the sword stick. Though his mind whirled dizzyingly, he twisted and jerked the cane with practiced ease, baring the hidden blade. Words came to him from Shakespeare's Macbeth as he turned to face Albert. " 'Lay on, Macduff, and damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold enough!' "

 

"Chill the crazy old fucker!" Cobb yelled, glaring up from the bloody mask his face had become. "He broke my goddamn nose!"

 

Doc stepped toward the dwarf, assuming a fencer's stance, the sword blade moving into position before him. "I'll not allow my life to be ripped from me so untimely, and my blade go unsullied," the old man declared. He watched the door from the periphery of his vision. Two men moved into place, blasters in their hands, as well. He could never make it through them.

 

"Doc," Albert said calmly, "I didn't mean any harm. I just didn't want you to go acting stupe when you heard about the plague." Slowly he holstered his blasters. He spread his arms away from his sides, then walked forward until his throat was wedged tight against the sword blade. "I wouldn't chill you. Wouldn't let anybody I know chill you. I owe you and your companions my life. God's truth on that." His Adam's apple bobbed against the sword point, starting a thin line of blood that ran down his neck. "Just wanted to get your attention. Stick me if you want to."

 

Doc stared into the little man's eyes, and Albert had to have seen something there that warned him. The dwarf closed his eyes. Doc drew the sword back. "I have killed many a man in my day, Albert, but I have always known the why of it. I shall know the why of it before I take your life, as well." He turned back to Cobb. "You, sir, shall not afford the same liberties."

 

"Damn you, Albert, for bringing this man here." Cobb wiped his bloody hands across his shirtfront. "I'll be a triple-fucked monkey if I don't chill you myself." He took a step forward.

 

Doc swung the sword stick to intercept the man. "I shall trouble to ask you not to do that."

 

Cobb pulled up short. He snorted in anger, blowing great gouts of blood from his nostrils. His lips were coated with crimson stains.

 

The other men in the room trained their weapons on Doc.

 

The old man showed them a wolfs grin. "I don't believe you gentlemen are any too willing to fire your weapons in the confines of this ville. Otherwise I would have never made it across the threshold. And thatI believe, gentlemenis a double ace on the line."

 

The tension remained in the room for a handful of seconds. Doc was conscious of every tick of it. He was still confused about who was who and what was what, but that was generally the case any time he was away from the companions.

 

"Leave him alone," Cobb stated. He snorted again and cleared out his nostrils. He glared at Albert. "And what are you going to do if he's just somebody Kirkland sent to trip us up?"

 

Albert shook his head. "Kirkland figures he's got nothing to fear from us. Liberty knew I spent my free time here. And what Liberty knew about the inside of this ville was exactly what Kirkland knew. They ignored you even before I came along. You're no threat to Kirkland by yourself, but mebbe with the help of Doc and his friends" He let the thought hang.

 

Doc could tell from the grimace on Cobb's face that the big man didn't like hearing that. He slid the sword blade back into its housing, snapped it closed with a click.

 

"Kirkland's got the plague working for him," Albert said, "and he knows that. Anybody who doesn't like what he's doing in Hazard, well, they get a berth on the last train West."

 

"If you do not mind my asking," Doc interrupted, "but what exactly is this plague you persist in mentioning?"

 

"Nobody knows," Albert replied. "All anybody knows is that any man, woman or child who wanders out of Hazard for more than two days' travel, dies from the plague."

 

"How long does it take inside the ville?" Doc asked. Images filled his head of bloated bodies he'd seen in his travels over the past three centuries. Being trawled through time had the distinct disadvantage of leaving a man's thoughts addled. Some of the images in his head he knew he'd seen himself an Indian village wiped out by smallpox, and a persecuted religious order all dead from syphilis. Others he wasn't sure of, but he thought they were from old vid, or maybe it had been new vid at the time. Names cropped up in his mind Legionnaires' disease, ebola and AIDS, but he could put no real depth to them.

 

"Nobody dies inside the ville," one of the other men said.

 

"If it is a plague," Doc said, "then there should be an attrition within the ville, as well."

 

"There isn't," Cobb said. "Kirkland sees to that."

 

"How?" Doc's mind seized on the implications of the problem.

 

"Man gives out inocinoc" one of the men tried to say. Then he shrugged it off. "Man gives out shots. You know, needles in the arm. That kind of shit."

 

"A cure?" Doc asked. "Well, if he's giving out cures, any of you could get up and leave at any time you wanted to."

 

"That's not the way it works, Doc," Albert said. "Kirkland's inoculations buy you only a little more time. They don't cure you."

 

"But that makes precious little sense," Doc said. "It would be much more difficult for a medical person to design a partial cure than one that would totally counteract the affliction."

 

"But that's what Kirkland did," Albert insisted. "Come on downstairs and we'll talk about it."

 

"Downstairs? I thought we were on the bottom floor." Doc glanced around, noticing how uneasy Cobb was acting. Keeping the big man in sight, he crossed the room and took up the Le Mat blaster from the table where it had been left. "Got a basement level," Albert said. He turned his attention to Cobb. "Show him."

 

"Fucked if I will. Should have never shown you."

 

Albert approached the man. "Cobb, you've been a good thinker, a good planner. But you haven't seen these people operate. I have. Mebbe they're our only chance of getting out of here."

 

Cobb stared hard at Doc, then reluctantly backed down. He walked to the rear of the room and stood behind the counter. The back wall held a carved fish head. Cobb picked up a yardstick and rammed it down the fish's open mouth.

 

A hollow pop echoed inside the room, followed by a clattering noise. Cobb grabbed a lantern off the counter and lighted it. He glared at Doc. "Well, come on, then." He took a step forward and disappeared from view.

 

Doc rounded the counter and looked down at the floor. Cobb climbed through a recessed area, moving slow with the lantern. Doc looked at the inky shadows waiting below and thought about his current position again. He hadn't had the upper hand in his dealings with the other men. But in the narrow tunnel through the bottom of the floor, he would be totally at their mercy.

 

Cobb kept climbing. In a short while he reached the bottom of the ladder and held the lantern up. "Come on, then. You wanted to know." He twisted the wick, turning up the light.

 

And the yellow gold illumination spun out through the hurricane glass, opening up into a cavernous space by comparison to the narrow tunnel. Where there had been a few shelves with tattered paperbacks, hard covers and magazines littering the shelves on the first floor, the hidden floor below seemed covered with books. There had to have been thousands of books in all.

 

"By the Three Kennedys," Doc whispered hoarsely. All thoughts of walking into a trap left him. He stepped through the hole and followed the ladder down.

 

 

 

IN THE FORESTED AREA, Dean moved quietly and panther quick. He kept the Browning Hi-Power in his fist as he slunk through the brush where the man had vanished. Dean wasn't as good in the brush as Jak was, but then nobody was. It scared him some, creeping through the branches and bushes, wondering if he was as good as the man he hunted. But he knew Jak was counting on him.

 

He breathed through his mouth in shallow, rapid breaths that were almost soundless. The man he pursued wasn't as disciplined.

 

The man gasped a few feet to Dean's right, and the boy turned slowly, letting his weight shift to keep his line tight against his chosen cover. He brought up his blaster, following its lead. Once he had the weight shifted properly, making no noise at all, he completed the turn.

 

A footfall sounded in front of him, followed by another. The noise was almost lost in the snorting and blowing of Jak's captured horse.

 

Dean caught the movement in his peripheral vision. He stared at theedges of the shadow that drifted into view in front of him rather than at it. Even before his father had found him, Sharona had taught him the value of skylining. Metal glinted in the shadow's fist. Dean knew it was the long blaster the man carried. He sighted above it, taking another step closer to get around low-hanging branches that might have deflected his shot.

 

The moon moved into a clearer space of the sky between scudding clouds, and the man spotted Dean. He whirled and brought up the long blaster. Coolly Dean moved into the clearest position he found, his finger tightening on the Browning's trigger. The long blaster crashed thunder in front of him, the muzzle-flash looking like it might explode from the barrel and touch him. He felt the heat of a bullet sizzle past his face, then the Browning's hammer fell on the first round. He managed a tight group of three as the man levered another cartridge into the breech.

 

The 9 mm hollowpoint rounds drove the man back, slamming him back through the brush. He stumbled and fell to the ground, sitting with his back to a warped oak tree.

 

Dean moved forward, the Browning leveled at his target. The man struggled to bring up his weapon. Dean fired again, centering the round between the man's eyes. His face went bloody as his brain evacuated his skull and plastered the tree bole behind him. The corpse gave a spasmodic jerk and released the long blaster.

 

Staying careful and alert, Dean reached the corpse and kicked the weapon aside. The missing fragments of the man's head assured that he'd never be back in this life, but Dean had seen too many people with a strain of mutie blood in them that rewired nervous systems. Folks who should have been dead got stubborn about it, like a snake with its head chopped off. He stripped away two handblasters, as well, tossing them to one side. The stink of blood filled the air. Mosquitoes descended in a swarm, settling over the bloody stumps of the man's skull. Night crawlers slithered through the brush and across the ground. A fat, toad-looking creature plopped from the tree overhead and dropped onto the corpse's face. Extending a prehensile tongue into the open mouth, it started feasting on the spilled blood.

 

"Dean?" Jak called softly.

 

"Yeah." Dean went through the corpse's pockets, his quick fingers identifying objects before his eyes could cut through the darkness.

 

"You chill him?"

 

"That's an ace on the line." One of the shirt pockets yielded a handful of 9 mm ammo that would fit the Browning. Dean appropriated it and shoved it into a pocket.

 

"You do, you tell. Get ass shot off, you no yell out." Jak sounded irritated.

 

"Forgot." Dean continued his search, turning up a fancy vinyl case not much bigger than his hand.

 

"Read nice on grave marker," Jak offered. "Ryan pretty pissed off have to write it, though."

 

"Okay, okay," Dean said. "I get the message. Get off my back." He popped the lock tabs on the small vinyl case. A small collection of feathered darts lay on a sponge pad, sheathed by leather straps. "Hot pipe! I found something here."

 

"What?"

 

"Darts for those compressed-air guns." Dean held one up against the full face of the moon. The liquid trapped inside the thin glass walls glowed vile amber.

 

"Tranks," Jak suggested. "Shoot. Make go sleep."

 

Dean looked at the liquid in the dart shell. "I don't think so. Mebbe we got something a little nastier here. Those men opened up on us without warning. I don't think they were intending to take us back to Hazard."

 

"Got one here. Ask him."

 

"Be there in a minute." Dean finished up his search, turning up a box of 9 mm reloads in a thigh pocket of the dead man's pants, a metal box of self-lights that looked waterproof and a packet of jolt. "We'll ask him together." He put the packet of jolt into his pocket. None of the companions used the narcotic, but in a lot of places it could be used in the place of jack for trade. Of course, a man had to watch his back when trading in those places.

 

Dean picked up the two handblasters he'd tossed aside and discovered one of them was a compressed-air pistol. He examined it in the moonlight. The pistol was a single-action, requiring a dart to be loaded into the breech each time it was fired. When he pulled the bolt back, he saw that it was empty.

 

Taking the pistol and the vinyl case of darts, he went back to join Jak. He reloaded the Browning's magazine from the loose 9 mm rounds in his pocket. Firelight from the burning man on the ground played over the albino, his captured horse and his hostage.

 

"Anybody else?" Dean asked.

 

"No." Jak nodded toward the man on the saddle in front of him. "Cover."

 

Dean leveled the Browning, making the man flinch. "Sure. I got him."

 

"He tries run, shoot legs, dick, not head or chest. Only need him live for little while." Jak shoved the hostage to the ground. The horse, relieved of its burden and already spooked, reared and snorted in fear at the new sound. It tried to run, but the albino kept it under control.

 

Dean locked the Browning squarely on the man's crotch.

 

The captive scrabbled at the ground, trying to find purchase to pull himself up.

 

"No," Dean said. He squeezed the trigger and put a bullet through the man's pants at the V of his legs.

 

"Oh, goddamn!" the man shrilled, sitting up to grab himself with both hands.

 

Jak gentled the horse again and hopped down. He tied the reins to a tree, then returned to look at the hostage.

 

The man brought his hands up with a look of perplexion on his face. The animal mewling sounds he made continued. There was no blood on his hands, but clearly the 9 mm round had cored a hole through the loose folds of his pants.

 

"Missed," Dean said. "Can you believe it?"

 

"Mebbe small," Jak suggested. He held his forefinger and thumb a half inch apart. "Splinter dick." He crouched beside the man, a bloodthirsty grin spreading across his scarred face. He held one of the leaf-bladed throwing knives in his hand. "That right?"

 

"Fuck you," the man snarled, his voice still shaking with fear.

 

"Already got it figured," Dean said, "that you aren't equipped for that. Could be you piss off my friend here, he'll use that knife of his to do a conversion on you so you're all set to receive instead of give. If you catch my drift."

 

"Piece of meat," Jak said. "Cutting change all that."

 

"Don't," the man begged. "Don't cut me."

 

"Answer questions," Jak suggested. "Lie, I cut off piece."

 

The man nodded, both hands protectively around his crotch. "Sure, sure."

 

"Tell us about the darts," Dean said.

 

The man swallowed hard.

 

Without hesitation, Jak flicked out the knife and cut across the knuckles of one of the man's hands. The man screamed out in pain, his eyes drawn to the wound across the back of his hand. But he didn't let go of his crotch.

 

"What did you do that for?" he demanded.

 

"You hesitate," Jak replied, "gives time think up lie. I want lie, I ask you question today, come back for answer tomorrow. Tell about darts."

 

"They got the plague in them," the man responded. "They got the plague in them, and that's all I know."