Chapter 24
From the upstairs window, Travis could see all
the way across Covenant to the far side of town. South and West
Street divided it into quarters and the old clock tower reared up
at the crossroads, looking like an enormous headstone in the
night.
The streets were bathed in a luminous grey smoke that seemed
oblivious to the shifting patterns of the wind and seemed to flow
instead in whatever direction the strange new gunmen went. Here and
there, Travis saw the smoke light up with muzzle flash and heard
the rumbling thunder of gunfire, and knew that the strangers had
tracked down another isolated group of invigilators.
He saw all of these things, but he could not see the one thing that
he was looking for: the man who was trying to kill him.
Parker and Eddings were both dead. They were the two sharpshooters
who manned the nests on either side of his position. Parker had
abandoned his post shortly after the fighting had broken out. He
had gotten scared and decided to make a run for it. Travis had been
thinking about shooting him himself when Parker’s head had suddenly
split open and the sharp crack of a rifle shot had pierced the
night.
Eddings had died next. It had happened quietly. Travis had heard
the shot and some time later he had noticed Eddings’ arm hanging
off the side of the roof where his body had fallen.
Now Travis knew he was next.
He had expected this. Travis handled a rifle so well that it was
often said that he had been born with one in his hands. He was
proficient enough that he had just recently begun to hear it
whispering at the back of his mind. He knew what was loose in the
town, killing the other invigilators, and he suspected that one of
them – a Cordite rifleman – was coming for him.
There had been rumours that one of the dead sharpshooters, Penn,
had been taken by the Fastest Guns and invited to join their
number. His body had gone missing from the charnel house and Travis
had a feeling that it was Penn who was stalking him now.
He hoped it was. Travis had respected Penn, had been envious of his
talent and the expensive rifle that he carried. He had often
wondered if he could beat him in a fight.
He searched the dark rooftops for him, peering watchfully through
his rifle’s optical sight. He was crouched far enough back from the
window that he felt confident that he could not be seen.
Sniping was a waiting game. Whoever moved first, died; and Travis
was confident that Penn – or whoever it was – would have to come
out into the open in order to take a shot at him. And when that
happened, Travis would get him.
He scanned the line of buildings in front of him, keen eyes
dwelling especially on those places where a man would be able to
get a good shot at him. He saw nothing but shadows.
And then a figure appeared abruptly, stepping from an open doorway
about a hundred yards away.
Calmly but quickly, Travis brought his aim to bear and made a quick
adjustment to take the distance, air temperature and wind speed
into consideration.
Through his scope, he saw the man bring his rifle smoothly to his
shoulder and take aim. He zeroed in precisely on Travis’
position.
‘Shit!’ Travis cursed.
The glass lens of his optical sight shattered into fragments and
the back of his head exploded. He fell down with a heavy thump,
bleeding through the hole where his right eye had been.
Madison regained consciousness with a groan.
She sat up and clutched at the side of her head, which she must
have banged on the floor when she fell. Her head ached and she felt
nauseous.
She saw Buchanan’s body lying only a short distance away and her
breath caught sharply in her throat. For a moment, she had thought
that it was Shane. Groaning, she looked around and saw Shane
sitting against the wall, holding Chastity in his lap. The girl
looked tired. Shane looked exhausted. His face was bruised and
bloody and she could tell that he was in pain.
‘What did I miss?’ she asked croakily.
‘Chastity killed him.’ Shane replied, matter-of-factly. ‘And then
she tried to kill me.’
‘Oh my god! Are you all right?’
‘I’ve been worse,’ he replied with a groan, and rose awkwardly to
his feet, leaning against the wall for support. ‘Can you take her?’
he asked.
Madison nodded and took the girl away from him, leading her gently
by the hand. Chastity was half-asleep and she did not try to resist
her. Shane retrieved his knife from where he had dropped it and was
just about to move towards the door when a figure suddenly appeared
within it.
Madison started in alarm and stepped behind Shane for protection.
There was no time to run for cover. Shane gripped the handle of his
knife and grimly resigned himself to another fight.
The figure moved forward into a dim shaft of moonlight and they saw
that it was Whisperer. He was slightly out of breath and walked
favouring his right leg. He gestured for Shane to lower his
knife.
‘You’ve nothing to fear from me,’ he said. ‘For what it would cost
me to have you, you and Chastity are not worth the risk.’ He saw
Buchanan lying on the floor. ‘Your doing?’ he asked
Shane.
‘The girl’s.’
He accepted Shane’s explanation without question; Whisperer
understood Chastity’s nature perfectly. ‘Yes, of course,’ he
said.
He moved to Buchanan’s side and knelt down. Shane stepped back and
watched while he made a few strange passes in the air above
Buchanan’s torso with his hand. The darkness seemed to thicken
under his palm. It moved like the tail of a tornado, becoming more
and more solid as Whisperer stirred the air.
‘What’s he doing?’ Madison asked, peering over Shane’s
shoulder.
Shane said nothing. He thought he knew but wanted to have his
suspicions confirmed before he said anything.
Buchanan’s body began to twitch. His arms and legs jerked fitfully
and then his whole body began to shake like a fish dragged from the
water, his toes kicking at the floor. The spiral of darkness that
Whisperer gathered under his hand grew more substantial until Shane
thought he could see a face within it. A face that resembled
Buchanan’s. His eyes were wide, like a man trapped in a nightmare,
and his mouth stretched open in a silent wail.
Abruptly, Whisperer clenched his fist and Buchanan’s body became
still. There was a sound, distant and confused, like the howling of
a far off wind, and then Whisperer rose. He lowered his fist and
turned to leave.
‘Nanache was wrong about you.’ Shane told him.
‘Oh, in what way?’ Whisperer asked innocently.
‘He said you were devil-kind but you’re not, are you? You’re the
real deal.’
The tall man smiled knowingly. ‘Now that would be telling,’ he
answered. ‘And these walls have ears.’
Shane understood now why Whisperer scared him so badly. A
full-blooded demon was bad news, and one who openly crossed the
Cordites on their own ground was sure to be powerful. He took hold
of Chastity’s hand and steered her and Madison towards the back
door. He had not gone far when Whisperer called out to
him.
‘This is only the beginning, Mister Ennis. You do know that, don’t
you? The Cordites are young. They have not yet learned the extent
of what they have become, but that will change. They will grow
stronger and they will not forget about you.’
‘They won’t forget you either.’ Shane reminded him.
Whisperer gave a shrug. ‘Maybe not, but by the time they catch up
with me they will have had plenty of time to learn my worth. No
matter who you are, it always pays to have a good merchant on your
side.’
He fell silent, hearing the sound of footsteps on the boardwalk
outside. Grabbing Madison by the arm, Shane steered her behind
counter and they hurried for the back door. Whisperer did not try
to stop him. As Shane glanced back, he saw that the tall man no
longer stood alone. He was surrounded by half a dozen shadowy
figures, each of whom was tethered to him by chains of ethereal
steel. Their bodies looked smoky and insubstantial, naked and
painfully thin.
One of them turned to face Shane and opened his mouth in a silent
cry of anguish. It was Castor Buchanan.
At that moment, the footsteps outside drew level with the shop
doorway and a Cordite strode into the room. Whisperer unleashed his
wraiths and the Cordite’s gun blazed. Shane did not wait to see the
outcome of the fight. He fled out the back door and hurried
away.
Alex and Jim Bening were brothers, both in
their late-twenties, both professional killers, and both hired by
Nathaniel to serve as invigilators. It had been Jim’s idea. He was
the oldest by three years and the most headstrong. He had only to
hear of the Fastest Guns to know that he wanted to be one of them.
His younger brother Alex had been more cautious but a job was a
job, especially since they were hard up for money.
The two of them were now running for their lives, together with a
third man, Glenn Short.
When the shooting had started, the three men had gone to bolster a
counter-offensive. They had found themselves battling just one man,
but that one man alone had wiped out all of their companions. He
would have killed them too, but they had had the sense to run away.
They had tried to reach the stables but the route was blocked by
another gunman, who had fired his revolver with preternatural
speed. Fanning his hand against the hammer, he had blazed off a
hail of lead that drove them into the mouth of an alley in search
of cover. His shots chipped splinters off the wall.
‘What the fuck is going on here, man?’ Glenn spat. He risked
sticking his head round the corner and saw that another group of
invigilators had blundered onto the street. They looked like they
were running from somebody else, but their path took them straight
into the fast-shooter’s line-of-sight. He unleashed a volley of
shots and the men fell down.
‘No way.’ Glenn said. ‘No way is that fucking possible. No one can
shoot that fast.’
Alex grabbed him by the shirt. ‘Forget it!’ he snapped. ‘Let’s just
get out of here.’
‘But the horses–’
‘Fuck the horses! I’d rather take my chances with the desert than
fight those bastards.’
His brother agreed and they fled down the alley, winding their way
from there towards the edge of town. They steered well clear of the
fighting as much as possible, doubling-back when necessary and
keeping out of sight.
They were almost at the edge of town when a shot rang out. Alex
felt as if he had been punched in the back. The pain was so intense
that his overwhelmed senses simply went numb and he fell with a
cry. His brother turned back to help him but Glenn pulled him into
the shelter of a nearby alley. ‘Sharpshooter,’ he hissed.
There was no sign of their assailant. He was on a rooftop more than
three-hundred yards away, watching through a Vollmer sight as Alex
rolled about on the ground, moaning and clutching at his
stomach.
Glenn’s hand tightened on Jim’s shoulder. ‘You can’t help him,’ he
said.
Jim shook him off. He was not going to leave his little brother
behind. He ran out to get him and the side of his head erupted in a
gush of blood. Moments later, the sound of the rifle shot echoed
over the rooftops.
Jim sank down to the ground, deaf to his brother’s anguished cries.
Alex knew that the sharpshooter had used him as bait to draw Jim
out into the open. He understood that he was partly to blame for
his brother’s death. He cursed with impotent rage. Clawing through
the dirt, he reached out his hand imploringly towards Glenn, but
Glenn was not going to risk his life for a man he barely knew. He
turned and ran.
He did not look back and so never saw the silhouette that rose up
from a distant rooftop, standing tall and taking aim, his finger
brushing the trigger with the gentlest amount of pressure. Glenn
was shot through the back of the spine, just an inch above his
shoulders. He did not even feel the shot that killed him.
On the distant rooftop, the sharpshooter adjusted his aim and
finished off Alex with a well-placed shot to the head, then melted
back into the shadows.
Shane and Madison ran out the back of the store
and into a wide open yard. Behind them, the blazing of gunfire
stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Madison looked at Shane
inquisitively, but he shook his head. He could not imagine that the
Cordite had been killed. It was more likely that Whisperer had
escaped by some arcane means and that the Cordite had moved on in
pursuit of him.
Better him than us, he thought. The Cordites’ interest in Whisperer
might just be the break he needed in which to make good his
escape.
Glancing about, he took stock of his surroundings. They were close
to the edge of town. A few run-down buildings teetering on rotten
foundations were all that now stood between them and the open
desert. Safety was but a short distance away.
Madison set out hurriedly but Shane held back near the edge of the
yard and studied the way ahead with suspicious eyes.
He did not trust it. Covenant was like a spider’s web, its leaning
ruins sensitive and almost alive. There was nothing within its
boundaries that the Cordites could not sense and there was
absolutely no way that they did not know how close he was to
escaping from them.
He felt a curious prickling sensation over his skin and decided
that, somewhere, somebody was watching him down the barrel of a
gun.
He caught up with Madison and drew her into cover against the
leaning wall of a clapboard house.
‘We need to split up,’ he said.
She looked at him sharply. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Listen. You heard what Whisperer said. Chastity and I are too
valuable to the Cordites. They’re not going to let us just walk out
of here.’
‘Then why’d we come this far together? What was the
point?’
He grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye so that
she would listen closely to him. ‘You remember in the alley outside
my cell, the way Chastity looked at me? I said she could recognise
her own kind. The Cordites can sense us both in the same way,
especially when we’re together like this. If we both try to leave
at the same time they’ll come and stop us. I’m going to go back and
get the horses. You take Chastity and go on without me. I’ll catch
up with you.’
She pouted sulkily. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘But don’t be too
long.’
She did not say anything about Nathaniel’s money. Shane guessed
that either she had forgotten about it or, like him, she had
decided that it was not worth dying for. ‘I left my bag in the
stables,’ she added. ‘There’s food and water in it.’
‘I’ll bring it.’ Shane promised. They would need it if they were to
survive the journey across the desert.
Madison nodded glumly and set off, leading Madison by the hand.
Shane stood and watched her go for a moment, quietly reckoning the
distance she had to travel. He had lied to her. He was going back
to the stables to fetch the horses, but first he was going
hunting.
And he was going to use Madison as bait.
So far as he knew, nobody had ever killed a
Cordite before. They killed each other often enough, but as the
saying went: he who lives by the Gun, cannot die by the Gun. No
Cordite could be slain by a gun fired by anyone other than another
Cordite.
But that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be killed. Shane had told
Vendetta it was possible and his theory was sound. It had just
never been done before.
He broke into one of the crooked buildings nearby and found his way
upstairs to a window that gave him a view out towards the edge of
town. He spotted Madison picking her way through an old stockyard.
She was making slow progress. Chastity was too tired to move
quickly and Madison was not strong enough to carry her. They moved
clumsily and even though Madison did her best to stay behind cover,
Shane knew that they would be an easy target for whichever Cordite
was hunting for them.
He suspected that it was the rifleman, Penn. The greater accuracy
of his rifle over long range made him the ideal choice to guard the
town’s perimeter and to pick off anybody that tried to escape his
brethren. Shane hoped that it was Penn anyway. Having only been a
Cordite for about a day, Penn was probably still the weakest and
therefore the easiest to kill. If it was somebody like Priestley
then Shane was in big trouble.
He looked at all the places where he thought the Cordite might be
hiding. He figured that Penn would favour a long shot and that he
would probably be on a rooftop, balcony or upper storey window
somewhere with a clean line-of-sight. Shane failed to spot him but,
refusing to give up, he left the building that he was in and moved
across the street to another one and continued his search from his
new vantage point.
Madison was two-thirds of the way to the edge of town now and Shane
focussed his search by drawing imaginary lines from her position
out towards suitable shooting points. His rigorous approach paid
off. A few streets away, he spotted a shadowy figure creeping
across a rooftop at the edge of town. The shadow carried a
rifle.
Got you! Shane thought to himself.
He stole quietly from the house and circled around to approach the
Cordite’s position from behind. Gunfire crackled from other parts
of town and he reasoned that there must still be a few invigilators
left alive.
He moved hurriedly but with caution. He did not think that the
Cordite would shoot Chastity; only Madison, and she was not so
important to Shane that he was overly concerned by the prospect of
her dying. He crept up to the house and entered through a
downstairs window. It was dark inside but enough grey light
penetrated the windows that he was able to find his way to a
staircase and climb to the upper storey.
He found himself in a room with a sloping ceiling, whose rafters
were bent and crooked and slowly succumbing to rot. The roof had
come down on one corner and the floor was littered with debris:
warped planks and broken beams, rotted furniture and some empty
bottles. The floorboards were dry and they creaked loudly under
Shane’s weight.
The noise carried and Shane immediately threw himself to one side,
hearing movement above. A shot rang out and a hole was blasted
through the roof. The bullet punched down, passing through the
empty space where Shane had been standing and put a hole in the
floorboards.
The roof flexed, shedding a cascade of dust as the Cordite stalked
across it, ejecting a spent cartridge from its rifle and inserting
a fresh one into the breach. Shane threw himself into a dive as a
second shot punched down. It passed so close to him that he felt
its heat in the air.
He landed with a roll and snatched up an old, discarded book that
lay amongst the debris on the floor. He tossed it a few steps ahead
of himself, in a direction that he might logically have travelled
coming out of his roll. The book landed with a heavy thump and a
third shot came down through the roof a split second later and
ripped the book in half.
Shane stayed motionless where he was, not making a sound. He
listened to the Cordite as it paced across the roof above him, the
wooden rafters creaking and bending under its weight. It did not
believe that he was dead. Its senses were not as finely attuned to
the town as its brethren and it could not sense exactly where he
was, only that his heart was still beating.
Crouching, Shane reached out for a broken chair leg that lay
nearby. His movements caused the floorboards to creak softly and
the Cordite stopped moving and turned to listen. Shane froze. He
dared not even breathe in case he moved whilst doing so and allowed
it to locate his whereabouts.
His muscles burned from the strain of staying in one position for
so long. Above him, the rafters creaked, raining dust into the
room. The demon was moving again. It had gotten tired of playing
cat-and-mouse and was heading towards the place where the roof had
fallen so it could climb down and confront him.
Shane moved like a mountain lion. Leaping forwards, he struck the
chair leg into the rafters at a place where they looked to be
particularly rotten. The wood split where he struck it and there
was a crash as the ceiling caved-in. Shane rolled out of the way as
it came down around him. The Cordite fell and landed heavily
nearby, dropping its rifle. Shane was on it in an instant. His
knife flashed in the dim light and plunged down into the demon’s
chest.
Shane felt the blade turn as it struck bone and he wrenched it out
and stabbed again. The Cordite tried to dislodge him but he batted
its defences aside. He had no way of knowing if it would die like a
normal man. Its wounds did not seem to bleed and so he kept on
stabbing it, burying the blade up to the hilt in its chest, belly
and neck. He attacked it with focussed aggression and did not stop
hitting it until it stopped moving.
Shane guessed that he must have hit it more than forty times. His
attack had left its torso badly mauled. He eyed it suspiciously but
there was no sign that it would get back up again. As he had
suspected, those who lived by the gun could apparently still die by
the blade.