Power Mage 4

by Hondo Jinx

  “Die, fucker!” Jarvis roared, stomping down with a giant boot.

  Brawley jerked his head quickly aside.

  The boot scraped painfully along his face but did no real damage.

  Brawley raised the MDR, but Jarvis was too fast. His sledgehammer slammed down, snapping Brawley’s forearm and knocking the bullpup aside.

  Brawley lashed out instinctively with his left hand. It was an awkward punch, thrown impulsively while lying on his back.

  There was no triumphant cracking of bone, but the punch landed squarely against the inside of Jarvis’s knee, and the giant’s leg buckled slightly.

  It brought Brawley a quarter of a second—and that was all the time he needed. He rolled, popping onto all fours and drawing the Peacemaker as Jarvis raised the sledgehammer overhead.

  Brawley pulled the trigger. The Peacemaker bucked in his hand.

  A third eye opened at the center of Jarvis’s forehead, and the back of his big skull blew out in a red cloud.

  “Ruby crown,” Brawley said as the hulking Carnal dropped dead beside him.

  All across the enemy line, muzzle flashes popped like a strand of exploding firecrackers.

  An even brighter flash leapt away from the northern corner, and a line of blue-white light raced across the prairie, spreading into a cone as it shot toward Remi.

  Even twenty yards to one side, Brawley heard the crackling ice and felt the cold.

  An instant later, a loud crack sounded behind him, and Remi’s AK stopped firing.

  Brawley jumped to his feet and swung the Peacemaker, hunting the cryokinetic asshole.

  Bullets sizzled past Brawley’s head.

  Brawley rushed forward through the lead rain and spotted the cryokinetic hustling between two trucks, heading toward the ranch house.

  Brawley brought the Peacemaker to bear, waiting for his target to emerge from cover, a thing he had done countless times, hunting deer and hogs.

  There.

  Brawley’s shoulder jerked, hit by another bullet, and his arm went numb.

  But it wasn’t his shooting arm. The Peacemaker bucked, and the cryokinetic’s head popped wetly.

  Ruby crowns all around.

  The ground shook and what sounded like a flash flood came rushing past from behind him as a hundred head of murderous cattle stampeded straight at the parking lot.

  Brawley beamed the charging bulls and steers and heifers with a simple command as they flew past, stirring the air with thick dust.

  Kill them all.

  He sprinted after the cattle. Half a second later, he was among them, grinning in the chaos. The forwardmost bulls bellowed and slammed into the enemy ranks.

  Everything was screaming and gunfire and the thunder of the stampede, which rushed forward in a tidal wave of enraged bone and muscle. Angus are naturally polled, so there was no goring. But Cherry’s men were butted and tossed and trampled; kicked by bucking beasts and smashed against trucks by nineteen-hundred-pound bulls moving at twenty-five miles per hour.

  Brawley moved within the stampede, jostled by raging steers and half-blinded by dust. A killing frost had settled over him. Calm amidst the chaos, he emptied the Peacemaker, picking shots as enemies appeared, some of them peeking up from within truck beds, others firing from cover.

  He holstered the empty revolver, plucked and chucked three grenades just beyond the farthest trucks, and had the XDS in his hand by the time the grenades detonated loudly, lighting up the night, rocking the back row of trucks, and cutting off a good deal of enemy fire.

  Part of the herd sheered away, startled by the explosions. The heifers, Brawley knew.

  He let them flee, doubling down on his message to the remaining bulls and steers.

  Kill them all.

  Brawley pulled the Gerber, flicked open the short blade, and wove rapidly through the decimated vehicles, shooting and slashing and disemboweling.

  He moved quickly and without hesitation, catching most of these men by surprise. Before they could scream, holes opened in their bodies: third eyes like he’d given Jarvis opened in their foreheads; cavernous slashes spilled stinking innards from their abdomens; new mouths yawned in garish crimson lines across their throats, allowing their shocked faces to roll backward with the impossible flexibility of Pez dispensers.

  For several minutes, Brawley rode the chaos, stalking men and strewing carnage.

  Sidestepping a rampaging steer and circling around an overturned pickup, he whipped his blade instinctively upward, his body reacting a fraction of a second faster than his mind as someone came surging at him.

  He stopped the blade half an inch from the throat of his lovely wife, who roared laughter, glancing to where her own blade had stopped just short of his own jugular.

  29

  They mashed their bloody mouths together, kissing fiercely among the dead and dying, then broke apart, knowing they still had death to deal.

  “Fucking cryo froze me half to death,” Remi complained, “and shattered my AK. On a lighter note, the whole cow thing? Nice work.”

  Bulls circled the lot huffily and lumbered between the trucks, treading upon the fallen.

  Brawley scanned the area for enemies, thinking of them not as people but as threats, and felt a flicker of dread emanating from just beyond a beat-up Dodge.

  Reaching out to a bull spinning and bucking nearby, he directed the angry beast around the Dodge.

  A second later, a scream split the night. Then a snort and a thump. Brawley saw the bull’s head whip skyward, and a man flew into the air, spinning like a tossed hat.

  Brawley fired from the hip, snapping off three quick shots, punching holes through the dead man’s torso.

  The flicker of dread wicked away.

  Brawley released more Seeker juice, hunting Cherry. To his surprise, he picked up a faint flicker in response.

  Cherry was just over yonder. Not in the ranch house as he had expected but somewhere among the cluster of new-looking outbuildings.

  Cherry must be losing his shit. Or maybe he’d been injured. Whatever the case, something had rattled his cloak.

  Which meant Brawley should try to finish the job without using another telekinetic blast. Because if Cherry’s personal cloak was faltering, the overarching whole-ranch cloak might be fucked up, too.

  So be it.

  “What now, handsome?”

  “I’m going to kill Cherry,” he said, nodding toward the outbuildings.

  The shape of a man’s head darkened the lit-up window of the large equipment shed and whipped away.

  “Sounds good,” Remi said, scooping a rifle from the carnage. “Let’s roll.”

  Brawley shook his head. “I got him. You go check on the girls.”

  Then, as if emphasizing Brawley’s point, a rip of gunfire sounded to the south, kicking off the pop, pop-pop, pop-pop-pop-pop of a small-arms firefight.

  “On it,” Remi said, and sped off in that direction.

  Brawley pocketed his knife, reloaded the Peacemaker, and swapped mags on the XDS. He holstered both pistols and snagged a stubby little Mossberg pump from the ground.

  Finding the dead asshole who’d previously owned the twelve gauge, he rifled through the corpse’s pockets and unburdened it of a dozen shells. He plugged the three cartridges into the Mossberg then racked the pump, ejecting a spent shell and loading a fresh round into the chamber. The he thumbed one final cartridge into the shotgun and double-checked the safety to make sure it was ready to roll. You never knew what stupid shit some of these assholes would do in the heat of the moment. Like dying with two rounds in the magazine and another dozen in his pockets. How in the world did this dumbass decide on that plan.

  Grinning at the thought, he untethered the cattle, freeing them to charge off onto the range.

  Many of them were injured, he knew, and others had died, but he couldn’t allow himself to connect with their pain now. He would see to their needs soon enough.

  Similarly, he was concerned for h
is wives but had to trust them now to fend for themselves. Him worrying wouldn’t do them a lick of good and might just get him killed in the bargain.

  So he cleared his head and refilled his arms with telekinetic force. Using it might draw unwanted attention from beyond. But if he ended up needing it, he’d rather deal with the consequences than go to his death cursing himself for being a fool.

  Walking toward the outbuildings, he released a trickle of juice to double-check his suspicions.

  Yup.

  Blanton Cherry’s presence throbbed within the big equipment shed, pulsing like a pinched nerve.

  Mop up time.

  As he passed the ranch house, he grinned at the sight of three dirt bikes parked beside the porch.

  But a bullwhip of dread cracked in his mind, and Brawley dove to the ground.

  Overhead, a rifle boomed. The bullet skipped off the ground nearby.

  Brawley rolled and popped to his feet, spinning and bringing the shotgun around, firing before he even had the target in his sights. The first blast went wide, missing the man he now saw in the upper window, but nonetheless did its job, startling the would-be sniper and buying Brawley time to rack the pump, adjust his aim, and fire.

  The man jerked backward, pitching blood, and crumpled from sight. The threat of him vanished with him.

  Another man opened fire behind Brawley. This shooter crouched behind a four-wheeler parked beside the equipment shed, firing at Brawley with a handgun.

  Brawley lurched hard to one side and returned fired. It was a stretch with the scattergun, especially a short one like the Mossberg. Shot pinged off the four-wheeler’s chassis and rattled across the sheet-metal shed.

  The man jerked back out of view.

  Not a killer, Brawley’s gut told him. This man is willing to kill but doesn’t have the balls to stand his ground.

  Brawley checked his surroundings for other attackers, sensed none, and strode forward with the shotgun shouldered, waiting for the man to fire again.

  Detecting movement, he rushed forward with Carnal speed, cutting a sharp angle.

  The man’s hand slithered over the quad and squeezed off half a dozen wild-ass shots with the pitiful, bucking rapidity of an overexcited virgin blowing a premature load.

  Brawley could see the man now and had the angle on him. He swung the shotgun and sent the gutless piece of shit to hell.

  He pressed up against the shed wall, reloading the shotgun.

  Cherry remained inside. He could sense him in there.

  Question was, who was in there with him? Brawley queried his Seeker strand and received an unequivocal answer.

  No one.

  Cherry was alone.

  Still, better safe than sorry. The fucker was a truth mage, after all, and a master of concealment. Cherry might could have a whole bunch of shooters with him. He might not even be in there at all. Might be luring Brawley into a trap.

  It was a chance he had to take.

  But not stupidly.

  He could see only two ways into the equipment shed, a wide set of double doors and a single door down at the far end.

  If he was Cherry, he’d lock both, stay well back, preferably behind cover, and be ready to blow the hell out of anybody who came through either door.

  Brawley tried to verify this theory with Seeker juice but came up empty. He could only sense Cherry inside. Beyond that, he was blind.

  Remembering his fight with Junior Dutchman in Key West, Brawley tapped his Seeker strand and readied a doppelganger image.

  He yanked a grenade from his bandolier, pulled the pin, and tossed it beside the single door. Then he ran like hell, sprinting down the shed to the opposite side.

  When the grenade exploded, he launched his doppelganger through the smoking hole where the door had been. At the same time, he jumped through a window, smashing straight through the glass, counting on his Carnal strand to deal with any cuts.

  He slammed into the shed floor, cuts burning on his arms and face and across the top of his skull. The floor was hard and rough, comprised not of dirt or cement, as he would have expected, but cobbled in stone.

  He rolled into a crouch and saw that he had been misled.

  Cherry was nowhere in sight.

  Half a dozen men were unloading on the door he’d blasted… despite the fact that his doppelganger was nowhere to be seen.

  He saw Roscoe and another of the men he’d thrashed in the bar. The others were strangers. Thanks to the explosion, none of the trigger-happy assholes had heard him crash through the glass.

  As they turned, Brawley went to work. He killed the closest man first, firing and working the pump and swinging the barrel toward the next target with the smooth speed of a man who had spent his whole life around firearms. But by the time he pulled the trigger again, wasting another bad guy, Brawley understood that something was wrong.

  Yes, his movements were smooth and efficient. But they lacked Carnal speed. And his body no longer thrummed with vitality. Unhealed cuts still burned on his face and arms, draining hot blood onto the stone floor.

  Cherry’s men opened fire.

  One of them lurched backward, chest blown wide open by Brawley’s shotgun.

  Then Brawley’s leg jerked beneath him, exploding with pain, and he fell to the ground. The Mossberg clattered away, and he pulled his pistols.

  His femur was broken, and he was losing blood. There was no rapid healing or mending of flesh.

  What the hell?

  Shots whined off the stone all around him. A bullet sliced through his earlobe, spraying his cheek with hot blood. He saw Roscoe behind the other two men, hurriedly reloading his shotgun.

  Growling through the pain, Brawley dropped one man with the Peacemaker and the other with his XDS.

  Roscoe’s shotgun boomed, and Brawley’s body burst into flames. Or so it seemed as pellets chewed through his flesh, mutilating his legs and skipping off the stone floor to pepper his body and face.

  He winced, going blind in one eye, and the shotgun fired again.

  Brawley fired at the same instant.

  Shotgun pellets tore into him, filling him with pain beyond the world. But Brawley kept his good eye open and swept the Peacemaker back and forth, searching for Roscoe. He couldn’t seem to lift the XDS off the floor.

  Roscoe was down, twisted strangely on the ground, one arm jutting weirdly up like a sagging flagpole.

  None of the men moved.

  Brawley had killed them. Had killed all six of them. A wave of relief rolled over him, coaxing a sigh from his burning lungs, which labored, filling with hot jelly.

  Not good.

  Nonetheless, a sense of well-being settled over him like a warm blanket, almost blocking out the pain.

  He’d done well. Everything was okay. Now, it was time to rest. Just shut his eyes and—

  Fuck that! Brawley thought, rousing himself back to full consciousness.

  This was not over. Blanton Cherry was still out there somewhere.

  Meanwhile, Brawley was hurt bad. Exactly how had, he couldn’t say. Pretty bad, though. His whole body throbbed from head to toe.

  He lifted his head, surveying the damage.

  Holy fuck. I’m bloodier than a hog.

  He holstered the Peacemaker and laid the XDS in his lap. Moving jerkily, he managed to pull a fresh mag from his belt. But his cold, clumsy hands dropped it.

  He cursed and set the pistol on the floor and rolled onto his side, reaching for the dropped mag. He could only see out of one eye, and his vision was blurry. Oddly, his pain was fading to a distant thunder, replaced by numbness that fell over him like freezing rain.

  He was shaking and cold. So damned cold.

  His fingers found the mag, pawed awkwardly, and finally closed around it. He tried to seat the magazine.

  Failed.

  Cursed, trying again.

  Dropped it.

  This time, leaning close, he noticed the floor.

  Son of a bitch.

&
nbsp; The floor was cobbled in the same rosy stone that made up Pink Bluff, where he’d earlier lost his psionic powers.

  That’s what Cherry was mining. And that’s why, when the bouncing truck had filled the air with dust, his drone had lost control.

  Now, Brawley knew what to do. Forget the magazine. If he stubbornly fixed his sights on that, he’d die hunting it.

  He had to get the hell out of here. Had to crawl out of this shed.

  Outside, his strands would reopen, just as they had when he’d left Pink Bluff, and a second or two later, his wounds would heal.

  Moving brought the pain back. With a vengeance.

  But if Brawley Hayes, world champion bull rider, knew one thing, it was how to push through pain.

  He climbed awkwardly onto all fours and wobbled like a table with three busted legs.

  His body was all fucked up. The meat, the bones, even the nerves.

  These sons of bitches had shot him all to hell.

  There was no way he could climb up to the window or open the double door. He had to crawl all the way to the blasted door.

  As he glanced in that direction, his vision went swimmy and tightened down, darkness encroaching as if his working eye was staring down the wrong end of a telescope with a dirty lens.

  It looked like a damn mile to the door.

  So be it, he thought, digging his fingers into the rough stone. Get your ass down there before you bleed out.

  He hitch-crawled toward the hole where the door had been. Despite its horrific injuries, his body lurched forward, propelled by sheer grit and the burning desire to kill his enemies and save his women.

  He crawled for a long time, hurting and wobbling and berating himself every inch of the way. Keep going, you son of a bitch, keep going!

  He passed the first bodies and struggled on, spent casings rolling beneath his palms.

  Fuckers ought to police their brass, his mind squawked, and he roused himself again, recognizing this joke as a sign that he was toeing the edge of unconsciousness.

  The door drew closer and closer.

  Five feet.

  Four.

  Three.

  And then a huge figure dipped its head and stepped through the scorched and ragged hole.