Hell's Angel
Page 29
Ka-boooom!
The man didn’t even scream as the gourd-sized fist of buckshot took him chest-high and blew him off his feet and threw him six feet straight back and down in a cloud of buffeting dust. Prophet ran around the well, saw the other man turn to run, limping, for a break between the barbershop and a dilapidated stable. He was screaming as he ran, his hat bouncing across his back by his chin thong.
“Won’t kill you from this distance,” Prophet said, spreading his feet and aiming his barn blaster out from his left hip. “But you’re gonna wish it did!”
Ka-boooom!
The buckshot shredded the running man’s hat. The man screamed and threw his head back and threw his arms wide as he stumbled forward before falling prone.
He lay screaming and writhing.
Prophet walked over to him. Pellet holes oozed bright red blood across his entire back, the back of his head and neck, and his shoulders and buttocks.
“Told ya,” Prophet said, unholstering his Colt.
He cocked the hogleg, aimed, and drilled a hole through the back of the screaming man’s head, silencing his screaming though he continued to kick and claw at the ground with his hands.
“That there was a gift, you son of a bitch.”
Prophet walked back over to where Louisa knelt in the street near her rifle. She was clamping a hand over her right forearm.
“How bad you hit?”
She shook her head as she looked around warily. “Is that all of ’em?”
“All except for Moon.”
Prophet glanced at Moon’s window. The dwarf was no longer staring out. He’d take care of the devil’s half ounce in a minute . . . if he could make it up the gallery steps without passing out. All the recent activity hadn’t done the hole in his side any good.
He looked at Colter Farrow, who was just now climbing to his feet, using his rifle as a crutch. The kid had several nasty bullet burns on his arms and legs and one across his forehead, but the only one that looked serious was the one in his upper right arm.
“Kid, how you doin’?” Prophet asked.
“Flesh wound—I’ll live,” Colter said, glancing around, his long hair hanging to his shoulders. He’d lost his hat in the dustup. “What about Moon?”
As if in reply, a shrill scream rose from inside Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights. It was Moon’s own hoarse, raspy voice. More screams followed. These didn’t sound like Moon’s. They were shriller and higher pitched.
They sounded like the screams of a half-dozen young women.
The angry screams of piss-burned, young women . . .
“Help!” the dwarf shouted, his voice echoing around inside the saloon. “He’p meeee!”
Running footsteps hammered woodenly, echoing inside the place. Prophet, Louisa, and Colter all stared toward the saloon as the dwarf came running out the open front doors to plunge down the steps, leaping awkwardly on his little, bowed legs down each step while holding his bandaged hand, which appeared twice as large as the other one, tightly against his chest.
He wore only red longhandles and dirty white socks. Tufts of his thin hair danced around the dome-like top of his head.
Before he’d reached the bottom of the gallery steps, dark-skinned, black-haired young women dressed mostly in underwear of various styles, some wearing the hair ribbons and feathers that the dwarf had forced on them, exploded out the saloon’s open doors.
“Hep!” the dwarf screamed, running toward Prophet, Louisa, and Colter. “For God’s sakes, help me! I’m an injured man! I ain’t well!”
The girls were too fast for him. They came spilling down the steps in a tightly clumped group, howling, yowling, and yipping like demon wolves, dark eyes flashing the red of unbridled, renegade fury as they swarmed over the little man.
At least one was carrying a large butcher knife that she must have gleaned from the kitchen. When the dwarf and the pack of enraged slave girls ran out into the sunshine, copper light glinted malevolently off the blade. The girls’ running bare feet drummed in the dirt. Halfway between Prophet and the gallery steps, a couple of the girls jumped on the dwarf’s back, one wrapping an arm around his neck from behind and driving him to the ground.
Moon yelped, hit the street, and disappeared from Prophet’s view as all the dusky-skinned Indian girls leaped on top of him. Moon screamed and begged for mercy. The girls screamed and snarled and did not comply with his pleas except, finally, after they’d pummeled the little demon for over a minute, to raise and lower the butcher knife again and again.
That was all the mercy they had in them.
As they continued swarming over the little man, clawing, punching, kicking, and stabbing him over and over, Prophet felt the street rise suddenly and smack both his knees hard.
“Lou!” he heard Ruth and Louisa yell at the same time.
Then he heard nothing at all. The last thing he saw before darkness overtook him was the copper dirt of the street, each pebble and fleck of horse shit clearly defined and growing larger and larger before him.
He woke sometime later to see Ruth and Louisa sitting cross-legged on either side of him, both women scantily clad in thin chemises, bathing his naked body with cool sponges. He was sprawled on a bed in the Rose Hotel and Saloon. Night had darkened the open windows beyond which stars shone.
Lamplight flickered.
Louisa had a thin bandage across her upper arm down which a strap of her thin chemise had fallen. Otherwise, she looked fine.
Both women looked fine . . .
“Feeling better, Lou?” Ruth asked him and pressed her lips to his forehead.
Groggily, Prophet grinned, said dreamily, “Oh, yeah.”
As he let his lids drop gently over his eyes, he heard Colter Farrow grouch indignantly from another room, “I got injuries, too, you know!”
PETER BRANDVOLD has penned over seventy fast-action westerns under his own name and his pen name, FRANK LESLIE. He is the author of the ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet and Yakima Henry novels. Berkley recently published his horror-western novel, Dust of the Damned, featuring ghoul hunter Uriah Zane. Head honcho at Mean Pete Press, publisher of lightning-fast western ebooks, he lives in Colorado with his dogs. Visit his website at www.peterbrandvold.com. Follow his blog at peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.