Mountain Man (Book 5): Make Me King

by Blackmore, Keith C.

  Shadows stirred in the depths of the cargo trailer. Chains rattled along the floor. Two pitiful figures staggered into the daylight. Grease-smudged hockey masks covered their faces, the plastic kind a kid might wear on Halloween. They wore clothing that might’ve been washed in rancid animal fat. Their hands and ankles were shackled, a single chain connecting them to one another. They lurched to a stop some three paces outside the trailer and steadied themselves like a pair of drunks trying hard to appear sober. Jake used to call them ‘meat’, or ‘slabs of meat’, before finally adopting the current favorite ‘meat puppets’.

  “Sit,” Jake ordered.

  The two men lowered themselves to the ground, settling down on their hands and knees.

  “Christ almighty,” Jake chuckled and pinched his nose. “We’re gonna haveta get you some new clothes. Maybe something for winter, too. You like that idea? Maybe some sweaters?”

  The two meat puppets nodded energetically.

  “Well, maybe that’s what we’ll do. Do a little early Christmas shopping. Sweaters and some woolly socks. That sound good?”

  More enthusiastic nods.

  “You up for some Christmas shopping there, Top G?” Jake asked a little too loud for Top Gun’s liking.

  Top Gun frowned. The meat puppets made him uneasy. He didn’t like Jake accepting and taking them for this side-quest. But, like before, he kept his mouth shut.

  He feared he wasn’t going to keep it shut for much longer.

  “No?” Jake asked. “Shit. We gotta keep Christmas in mind. That’s the happiest day of the year. Presents for all the good boy meat sticks and good girl meat sticks. That’s my new favorite name for you sonsabitches. Hey, how’s the cargo looking, Jipman?”

  From the rear, the Jipman waved an affirmative. “You wanna let them out for a walk?” he asked.

  “Mmm… yeah, let them out for a bit.” Jake said, studying the puppets on their knees.

  “One took a shit near the door.”

  A look of horror appeared on the Jolly one’s face. “What?”

  “Yeah. Smelled it when I got back here.”

  Top gun sniffed and got nothing. The breeze was taking it away from him.

  “They shit in the back?” Jake demanded, clearly offended.

  “One of them did.”

  “Well, goddammit. That’s just rude. You’d think they would hold it in.”

  “O’Leary blasting the head off the slab might’ve had something to do with that,” Top Gun suggested, and only because O’Leary was currently gravitating to the restaurant section of the recharging station.

  “What? Jake asked. “Scared them that bad? Christ. If they’re like that now, what are they gonna be like after a few days with the Leather?”

  Top Gun didn’t know. Didn’t want to know, really.

  “Well, shit,” Jake said, hitching his hands on his hips. “I’m tempted to let them just fucking wallow in that. I don’t appreciate shit like that. Fucking rude. Shitting in the trailer. You hear that, boys?”

  The two slabs nodded again.

  “Someone dropped some corn fudge in the trailer. Take a guess as to who’s gonna clean that up barehanded?”

  The two meat slabs nodded but didn’t comment, as if they’d been gagged. Truth was, they were gagged, their mouths clogged with plastic balls and kept in place with strips of black studded leather. Oddly enough, Jake had no issue with using ball gags on the meat, but he didn’t like the look of the things. Thank the Lord for their hockey masks, which covered up all that unpleasantness.

  “Fuck it,” Jake declared, changing his mind. “They couldn’t hold it in, they can damn well stew in it. And I’ll tell you another thing—their walking privileges have just been suspended. Let ‘em stretch their legs in the trailer and try not to touch their own shit.”

  “When’s the Leather coming around again?” Top Gun asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “Dunno exactly,” Jake said. “Sometime tomorrow. Hopefully in the morning. The Leather’s weird though,” he continued, turning toward the distant treeline. “He might be around here now. And just watching us.”

  That unnerved Top Gun. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s fucked up like that. Even though we got the merch.” Jake spun around and raised his voice. “You hear that? If you’re out there, we got your merch!”

  “Jesus, Jake, keep it down,” Top Gun winced.

  Jake’s smile reappeared. “Fuck it, Gun my son. Fuck it. What are we worried about? No one around. And if they were, we got the mad dog shotgun surgeon with us. That right?”

  “You got it, Jake,” O’Leary said, weapon slung over a shoulder as he walked back to the truck.

  “You say tomorrow morning?” the Jipman asked from the rear.

  “Hopefully tomorrow morning,” Jake said.

  “What direction is he coming from, you think?”

  “Fuck if I know. So many back roads around here. Why?”

  “That him, you think?”

  The question got the whole group’s complete attention. There was no mistaking what they saw. There, about a kilometer back, on the crest of the open highway, was a pickup truck—the windshield and roof dull underneath the overcast sky.

  “Well, now,” Jake said, snarling good naturedly at the vehicle. “That’s a good question.”

  The pickup wasn’t getting any closer. It was just out there, poised on the absolute edge of their vision, as if sensing it had been detected.

  Top Gun eyed the machine with a questioning grimace. The thing bothered him. He reached for his holstered Beretta and slipped the weapon free.

  “Where are the spyglasses?” Jake asked.

  “In the truck,” O’Leary replied.

  “Get them.”

  “I think it’s a car,” the Jipman said. “The Leather drive a car?”

  “The Leather drives a truck,” Jake reported, holding out a hand and waiting on O’Leary. “The Leather needs a truck. Can’t stuff the merch in the backseat of a Honda Civic.”

  Top Gun supposed not, not when the merch was prone to laying fudge pipe when frightened. “I don’t think it’s the Leather, Jake,” he finally said.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not the Leather,” Jake agreed. He immediately put the binoculars to his eyes once O’Leary handed them over. “Don’t think the Leather would try sneaking up on us, either.”

  “Didn’t you just say they might be watching us?” Top Gun asked.

  “I was only fuckin’ around then. You gotta have more trust, TG. More trust. We have a business arrangement here.”

  “What do you see?” the Jipman asked, half-turned to his companions.

  Jake didn’t answer. He fiddled with the magnification and grew agitated. “Goddammit,” he finally swore. “Who fucked around with these things?”

  O’Leary glared a warning in Top Gun’s direction.

  “One of the doors just opened, I think,” the Jipman said. He disappeared behind the bulk of the trailer. Top Gun did the same, his paranoia alive and thrumming.

  “You hear me?” the Jipman asked, coming into view on the other side, just beyond the box bed and the trailer hitch.

  “I heard,” Jake said, no longer quite so jolly. “Hold on a second, goddammit. All right. Yeah. It’s a truck. Two doors are open. There’s the driver. Getting out.”

  Top Gun saw a stick figure emerge, visible from the chest up, and partially hidden by the door.

  “The fuck is that?” Jake said aloud, adjusting his binoculars again. “All right, all right. Hold on. Okay. I see him. One guy. Wearing—”

  There was a weird spurt and a crinkle of exploding glass, and Jolly Jake flew backwards, his arms flopping as if he were fending off a swarm of mosquitoes. That happened for all of a split second. The curt metallic shriek that followed prompted Top Gun to race for cover, his gun out and poised at his ear. He looked back and saw Jake—ten twitching toes up—and a grisly stew of head cheese spattered across the black top. Black flies
were already making halos around the dead man. The binoculars lay just outside of the corpse’s reach, one lens shattered, the fragments shiny in the daylight.

  “Holy shit!” O’Leary screamed. “Holy shit!”

  “Get down!” Top Gun yelled, and O’Leary, suddenly not so insane anymore, did exactly as he was told. He disappeared behind the front of Jake’s ride.

  “Sweet fuck almighty, Top,” the Jipman said from the other side of the cargo trailer. “Jake’s dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see who did it?”

  “No,” Top Gun replied, his heart and temples pumping in the disquieting silence following the kill shot.

  The Jipman had pressed himself up against the trailer, in between the truck’s tailgate. He swung his head around and carefully tried to locate the attackers. “Fuckers must have a sniper rifle.”

  “You think?” Top Gun snapped off. “Keep your head down.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Jesus Christ’s love handles, I don’t know. Now shut the fuck up and keep your eyes open.” Frustrated, Top Gun stayed low and scanned the road, right up to that crest and the truck beyond. The driver was gone, at least from his sight.

  “They’re coming for the cargo!” O’Leary blurted.

  Probably, Top Gun thought. Theirs was a budding market, and no doubt there would be rival companies seeking a slice of the action. Ones that didn’t mind killing off and robbing the competition. Top Gun no longer cared. They could have it.

  “That’s the Leather and he’s coming for the cargo!” O’Leary continued, his words slowly becoming a rant. “He’s coming for the cargo. He’s coming for the cargo and the meat and he don’t wanna pay for any of it. Decided he's just gonna kill us and take it! Just gonna kill us and take it! That Leather-coated piece of cocksucking shit! WELL FUCK THAT NOISE! I AIN’T LETTIN’ HIM!”

  There was a growl then, of pure uncorked rage and adrenaline. A lethal combination capable of transforming a psychotic gluebag like O’Leary into a batshit crazy superfreak. And O’Leary was working himself through a positively frightening metamorphosis. He panted back there, a loud, gibbering, frothing growl. Loud enough that Top Gun believed today was the day he’d have to put a bullet through the man’s skull. If he was able. Thing was, he might need the fucking lunatic. Might need his extra firepower until they determined who their attackers were.

  Well, shit! Top Gun’s scrambling mind fired off. He’d just been dumped into perhaps one of the most dreadful situations he could imagine—caught between a sniper and a short-circuiting wingnut.

  BOOM!

  The explosion spun Top Gun around. He took aim at the truck behind him. One of the two meat puppets had toppled over; his head looked like it had been fed into a lawnmower.

  Thing was, the sniper out there had no shot of the puppets. The angle and cover of the two pickups didn’t allow one.

  The guy doing the shooting was none other than O’Leary himself.

  “Christ almighty,” the Jipman was saying, but the words were barely audible over the frantic whimpering of the other meat slab, and the schlacking of a fresh shell being racked and readied.

  BOOM!

  A spray of black matter and another fleshy thud. Top Gun clapped a hand over his scalp. “Quit that shit, y’fuckin nipplehead! Those are rentals you’re shootin’!”

  “HE AIN’T GETTIN’ THEM!” O’Leary screamed, hard enough to potentially burst his brain.

  If only I was so lucky, Top Gun thought, his gun held to his ear.

  “There’s only one shooter,” the Jipman yelled. “O’Leary, wait!”

  “That’s the Leather out there!” O’Leary shouted back, steaming red and full-on savage, caught in the middle of refilling his lungs. “Don’t wanna pay for the merch. The Leather’s like a fuckin’ cockroach! A fuckin’ cockroach! And where there’s one—!”

  The Jipman’s exploding head distracted Top Gun then, and he flinched in horror as his companion’s torso pitched forward and dropped out of sight. The Jipman must have given the mystery shooter a big enough target to fire upon.

  Which the unseen marksman had done, to spectacular effect.

  O’Leary screamed, arms flailing as he stood between Jake’s trailer and the front of Top Gun’s truck.

  “They got the Jipman,” Top Gun exclaimed in a panic. He immediately clamped down on that shit, knowing that if he freaked out, he’d be dead in seconds.

  “They got––” Top Gun began just before O’Leary (as he and the newly deceased Jipman so often speculated would happen) finally, mentally detonated.

  Perhaps it was the shock of seeing Jake go down in a decidedly inglorious fashion. Maybe it was the ease at which the Jipman had the top of his own skull surgically removed by a bullet. Top Gun figured it was a perfect, instant crazy-cake mixture of everything O’Leary needed to explode.

  The shotgun surgeon screamed hard enough to blow out his vocal cords. Hard enough that Top Gun pointed his gun in that direction when he knew he should be paying attention to the sniper picking them off. O’Leary screamed again, a death metal peal of unintelligible gibberish, and charged out from between the two vehicles. Red-faced and eyes wide in a ghastly, howling caricature of a Japanese Tengu mask, O’Leary blasted into the open like an armored sumo fired from a cannon.

  And was immediately blown backwards, as if he’d caught an enemy battleship shell square in the chest.

  At least, that’s what it looked like to Top Gun.

  O’Leary’s screaming melded with that familiar metallic buzz for all of a split second, before he landed flat on his spine—some ten feet back from where he was hit.

  Jesus Christ! Top Gun swore and got low. He struggled to think. Screams clawed at his brain, and it took him a moment to realize it was not coming from his head but from the gagged prisoners chained inside the trailer.

  Top Gun fumed. He debated if he should make peace with the sniper for killing O’Leary, attempt revenge for killing the rest of his crew, or just unhook the lead trailer and get the sweet nut fudge out of Dodge.

  It took him a whole second to think that one through.

  And the answer surprised him.

  Someone had gotten the jump on them, but Top Gun wasn’t done just yet. Matter of fact, when he got right down to it, he was getting mighty pissed. As weird as it sounded, despite his earlier misgivings about the whole operation, Jolly Jake, the Jipman, and even batfuck crazy O’Leary were still his crew.

  And Top Gun wanted a little vengeance.

  He crowded the trailer hitch, careful to keep his ass behind cover, and glanced to where the poor old Jipman lay dead and leaking. Top Gun’s partner in crime had well and truly passed on, but the Jipman’s gun was nearby. A Berretta. Not so far out of reach. Top Gun was tempted to try and reach it, but he soon decided an extra sidearm wasn’t going to win this fight.

  He had something else in mind.

  Dealing with the hammering in his chest, Top Gun’s thoughts centered on what he had stashed into the back seat of his ride’s crew cab. The very reason why they called him Top Gun. Though he might’ve been a teacher in the old world, he did have training, once being a part of the Canadian Infantry. Top Gun kept his head low as he pressed up against the rear bumper.

  He took a deep breath.

  Top Gun raced out from around the truck and threw open the driver’s side rear door. A formidable rifle lay on the floor. He grabbed it, clapping an elbow off the edge of the door. A hot buzzsaw of pain licked his arm all the way to his fingers. Groaning, taking in the carbonated sting that enveloped everything below his left bicep, Top Gun heaved himself back onto the pavement.

  Just as a bullet rudely punched through the window of the open door, missing his head by a split second.

  A breathless Top Gun scurried underneath the truck, shimmying along on his belly. He pulled the rifle in with him, despite the angry sizzle paralyzing his left arm.

  Step one down. He struggled to orient himself
. A second later, he clawed his way underneath the crusty chassis, towards Jake’s truck.

  Someone yelled, the meaning lost on him. Then O’Leary answered, risen from the dead, roaring a stream of hot filth that scorched the very air.

  “I’ll kill you, you piece of shit dog fucks!”

  The scream from the pretending nose surgeon caused Top Gun to jerk his head up, right into the metallic guts of the pickup. The connection was brilliant, the effect immediate. He dropped to the ground again while grabbing at his head, the smoldering nerve pain of his left arm pressed against his ear.

  “Goddamn salt flap, sonsacocksmoking bitches!” O’Leary released in a voice frayed and threatening to blow itself out. He rolled over onto his belly, drew his legs up enough that his ass pointed to the heavens, and shuddered from the waist up. Top Gun watched from underneath the truck, and cringed.

  “Get down, you stupid fuck!” he shouted.

  O’Leary did not get down. With one hand pressed against his bulletproofed chest, he somehow got to his feet while still gripping his shotgun. Adjusting his helmet as if he’d just been gorged by a bull, O’Leary was too furious to do anything more than rant and rave.

  And fire his shotgun.

  One-handed, into the air, which stunned Top Gun for all of a second.

  Before a bullet expertly perforated the tempered glass of the man’s face shield in a splash of bright jam. That shot knocked O’Leary back onto his ass a good five feet, splayed out as if nailed to the ground and waiting for the fire ants.

  Even as a potential distraction, O’Leary had failed to deliver.

  Fucking numpty, Top Gun fumed, getting some feeling back into his arm. He checked on O’Leary, confirmed that the man was indeed expired, and considered his next move. He wondered if the killers were advancing. A second later, he resumed crawling towards the front and didn’t stop until he was out from underneath his truck. With his ass on the pavement and his spine against the grill, Top Gun readied his own long-distance cannon with practiced familiarity. He extended the bipod, checked the magazine, and took another breath before priming the Australian-made AUG-20 long-range assault rifle—a superior upgrade from the older, less reliable models. He then considered the open ground to his left, where a meat puppet corpse lay in a blood pool. Jolly Jack was just a few feet beyond that, which caught Top Gun’s eye, and got him thinking.