by James Axler
“What does that mean?” Nancy asked.
Conn’s jaw tightened. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, and apparently the fact one had a scattergun pointed at her vitals only made her less inclined to suffer him.
“Time to get with the program,” Gator said. “Stop gettin’ in our way.”
“I’m not in your way,” Conn stated, in as patient and calm a tone as he could muster. He didn’t try sidling toward the front door, not edging back the way he’d come, even though he had a Winchester carbine loaded and waiting in his room, for serious emergencies. Lem gripped that blaster so hard it quivered like a leaf in a hailstorm. The slightest extra pressure would set it off for sure.
“Not in Wymie’s way, either. I just haven’t agreed to go along with her.”
He noticed Tupa was screwing up his enormous face in a funny way. Tough guy though he was—lead rival to Potar Baggart, both as ville bully and at the limestone quarry where both of them worked—he was prone to allergies. And in a place like Sinkhole and its environs, this time of year something was always blooming. Under the circumstances it registered on Conn as nothing more than a minor, passing detail.
“She said, you’re with us or against us!” Lem barked. “You don’t join up, you’re standin’ in our way!”
“Here, now,” Conn said, “that’s no-how reasonable. How does it matter a whit whether I—”
Tupa sneezed.
Lem jumped and jerked. His reflex action yanked the twin barrels of his blaster up and to his left. At the same time his finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. The scattergun went off with a head-shattering roar, blasting both its charges into Conn’s ceiling.
Lem fell right straight on his skinny rear end.
Nancy started to dive behind the bar. Conn knew at once she was going for the 10-gauge scattergun, likewise double-barrel, Conn kept there.
“Nancy, no!” he shouted. His own reflex was—now that Lem’s once triple-lethal blaster was no more than a not very effective club—to try to defuse the situation. Talk everyone down and ease these bad boys out of here with nothing more getting broken.
Apparently Ike realized what she was doing, as well. He lunged for Conn’s assistant, grabbed the back of her shirt and flung her back bodily toward the center of the room. At the same time Gator swung his ax in a whistling horizontal arc, stopping both Chad and Tony, who’d started to make their own moves, dead in their tracks.
Flailing her arms for balance, Nancy teetered in a half circle. It brought her almost face-to-face with the looming Tupa.
He was rubbing his nose with the back of his left hand. With his right he backhanded the woman across the face with the stoneware stein, almost casually.
Her head whipped around with unnatural speed. She fell straight to the floor in a loose-limbed, random heap.
For a moment everybody froze in place: Lem, still clutching his empty blaster, halfway through scrambling back to his feet; Gator and the two bouncers he was menacing with his ax; Ike standing big-eyed by the bar with his ax handle in his hand. And most of all, Tupa staring blankly down at the body sprawled by his booted feet.
Mathus Conn didn’t know why it had happened, but he knew what had happened.
“You fat coldheart bastard!” he shouted. “You chilled her!” And just like that, abandoning years of carefully maintained level-headed self-control, he launched himself at the big quarryman.
Still clearly stunned by the results of his blow, Tupa just managed to get his hands up to fend off Conn. The gaudy owner had been a brawler of sorts in his time, and a noted wrestler in friendly contests, and some not-so-friendly ones. But it had been years since he had practiced any of those skills. He found a calm manner and polite yet businesslike speech, combined with a willingness to pay fair value for what he got, tended to get him anything he really wanted with much less wear and tear than fighting did.
But now he had lost control. He flailed his arms. A forearm caught Tupa across the nose. Conn felt it break, just as he was starting to come out of his fury-fugue.
Roaring, Tupa slammed his cannonball dome forward and head butted his attacker. Conn’s skull filled with sudden swirling darkness, shot through with lightning. He dropped, stunned.
Through eyes that had gone blurry except for a circle of clarity in the center of his vision, he saw Chad and Tony spring forward at the four invaders. Through the roaring in his ears, he heard one of the bouncers bellowing anger.
As if it were happening to someone else, somewhere in the middle distance, Conn saw Gator slam his ax down into the front of blond Chad’s chest, just to the right of his neck. The burly bouncer sank to his knees with a groan. Blood fountained, splashing across Gator’s shirt and lumpy face.
Tony got close enough to Tupa to rock his head back with an overhand right. Tupa lashed out with the mug with which he’d inadvertently chilled Nancy. Ike landed on Tony’s back. He tried to grapple with the black bouncer, hampered by the ax handle he was still holding in one hand. He seemed as if he’d forgotten all about it.
Tupa brought his ham-hock-sized left hand up in an uppercut into Tony’s downturned face. The bouncer’s knees bucked. He toppled backward onto his ass on the floor. Ike scrambled to jump free.
Off to one side, Conn became aware of Lem Sharkey sitting up with his shotgun cracked open. He was muttering to himself as he fumbled in his pockets, apparently for fresh shells to load into the wep.
Tupa, his brown eyes bloodshot, wagged his head from side to side like a bull cornered by a pack of wolves. He noticed Conn lying almost at his feet, still dazed. He reached down, grabbed a handful of the front of Conn’s shirt, and hauled him up bodily back to his feet as if he weighed no more than a rag doll.
“Wait,” Conn tried to say, “can’t we talk about it?” But a fist like a dark moon eclipsed his vision and slammed into his face. It struck just a glancing blow, but it was enough to send fresh sparks shooting behind Conn’s eyes, and his stomach sloshing to a fresh wave of nausea.
Suddenly an arm like a pale tree trunk coiled around Tupa’s enormous neck from behind. The huge fist cocked back for a second try at caving in Conn’s face instead grabbed for the forearm. The other let go of Conn’s shirt and dropped him back to the floor.
The sharp crack on his tailbone roused Conn from his fog. A second hand, no smaller than Tupa’s own, appeared around the round head from the other side, grasped the man’s jaw and yanked it hard to the left.
The bull neck snapped with the sound of a dry hickory branch broken over someone’s knee.
The smell of fresh, wet shit hit Conn like another, invisible fist as the huge man’s bowels voided. The arm released his neck. He slumped into an oddly shapeless heap.
“That’ll teach you, you taint,” Potar Baggart snarled. “Where you get off, laying hands on Mr. Conn?”
Mathus Conn was more astonished than relieved, but as his scattered wits pulled themselves back together, he realized Lem Sharkey was crawling, open-breeched blaster in hand, across the floor toward a pair of brown waxed-paper/black-powder shotgun shells that had rolled away from him.
Urgency filled the gaudy owner. He rolled onto his own hands and knees. As he did, his vision swept the sprawled body of his assistant.
Her blue eyes were open, and staring right into his. Nancy…
Through his mind flashed an image of them standing by a stream—Stenson’s Creek—when she was eight and he was mebbe ten, watching her swing back and forth on a sling made from a length of scrap deer hide from her father’s tannery, watching her long blond hair stream out behind her as she flew against the clear sky, to splash down into the brown-green water. How the droplets turned into a spray of tiny rainbows…
Then he saw Chad, still on his knees, with the ax embedded in his shoulder, clutching at it with his right hand. His square-jawed jock face slumped forward, eyes wide and blanked with pain. The skin had grayed and hung on his face like an old man’s.
No blood on his mouth, the cool
er part of Conn’s mind said. No froth from his nostrils. Lung isn’t hit. Likely he’ll live.
But he didn’t indulge himself wallowing in that thought, either. He scrambled toward the gap past the end of the hickory bar that led to the doors to the kitchen annex out back—and to the back of the bar. As he moved, he willed himself to push up off the floor. His brain was still spinning, his stomach seethed with nausea, and his limbs seemed made of lead and connected loosely with wet bar rags.
But though he was no man of action, Conn had dedicated his whole life to doing what needed to be done. And now, despite the unlikely and timely intervention of Conn’s near-nemesis, Potar Baggart, in taking down the monstrous attacker, the odds were nowhere near even yet. He knew they were fixing to get worse once that little snake Lem got his scattergun recharged.
As he ran, more or less, in a bent-over wobbling rush, he saw Ike Sharkey straddling a supine Tony, pummeling his face, while Gator whacked at his arms and legs with his ax handle. The second Sharkey brother was clearly looking for a shot at the bouncer’s head. Conn knew such a hit from a hardened hickory club like that could prove just as lethal as a blow from the head of a full-on ax. But Gator’s flying if inexpertly targeted fists were getting in his way.
Like a granite boulder falling from its ancient perch and starting to roll downhill, Potar moved forward. Like the boulder he resembled, he gathered momentum as he went. Conn saw him as he caught himself, just on the verge of pitching back onto his face, on the end of the bar.
As he thrust himself upright, biting down hard against a columnar rush of sour vomit, and turned around behind the long counter, Conn saw Potar catch the younger Sharkey with a mighty booted running kick in the small of the back. Bones snapped. With a wail of agony, surprise and what sounded like frustration, Ike was flung right off Tony and hurled against the bar.
Conn was a man on a mission. On the barroom floor Lem clapped his hand over the rolling double O shot-shells. Trapping them with his palm and triumphantly scooping them up, he reared up on his haunches and stuffed them right into the yawning breeches of his piece.
Gator swung his ax handle frantically at the charging Potar’s red-moon face. The enraged man raised a forearm like a senior branch of the tree the ax handle had been cut from, and like a thick oak branch, it snapped the hard, seasoned wood right across it.
Gator screamed as if it had been his own ulna and radius Potar had snapped.
“Gotcha!” Lem howled. He closed the barrels of his blaster with a snap, then raised his head to target Potar’s vast back. The shotgun’s sawed-off barrels came up.
Conn’s double-barrel shotgun was full-length, which made it harder to wield, but also made it marginally less likely to blast bystanding customers with incidental .33-caliber pellets. It was bad for business to put holes in hides that didn’t deserve it.
His target did. He snugged the steel buttplate against his right shoulder and squeezed the double triggers hard.
The flames that erupted from the 10-gauge tubes were yellow and dazzling in the gloom of the gaudy house, deepened by the greenish cloud of smoke from Lem’s earlier, missed shots, settling back down from the rafters as they cooled. A fresh billow of smoke gouted out with the fire.
But neither flash, nor smoke, nor the recoil that kicked the big blaster upward despite its heavy barrel prevented Conn from seeing the double column of shot hit Lem full in the middle of his skinny face.
The heavy spherical double O pellets pulverized the young man’s cheekbones and blasted through into the brainpan beyond. Conn actually saw Lem’s look of gloating triumph turning to horrified surprise, his features collapsing in on themselves like water down a drain with the plug fresh-pulled. His whole head expanded and distorted like an elk bladder inflating on a blacksmith’s bellows.
Lem’s blaster dropped from suddenly lifeless fingers, unfired. As the powerful recoil from the double discharge kicked Conn’s barrel toward the ceiling, the gaudy owner saw the young man simply fold back over his lower legs where he knelt on them.
Potar had grabbed Gator by the front of the shirt, shaken him like a terrier with a big brown rat, and now was slamming his body again and again against the floorboards, roaring in word-defying rage as he did so.
Conn slumped forward onto his bar. He felt suddenly drained. The nausea in his stomach and weakness in his knees was subsiding, but now he felt a pounding headache coming on.
None of that stopped him from cracking open the breech of his shotgun barrels and fumbling out a pair of fresh shells from the cubby under the counter to reload the weapon. Business was business, after all, and there was nothing more businesslike than a blaster reloaded and ready for action.
“I think you can stop now, Potar,” he said to the angry man, who was still whaling on Conn’s floor with Gator’s totally limp body. “I’m pretty sure he’s chilled now.”
Potar had such a head of steam worked up that he pounded the young man against the planking three more times before he stopped, straightened and looked down at what he was holding in his hand. Gator lay completely sprawled downward from his massive grip: head, hands, legs. Even his body hung in a backward bow as if some of the key structural bones were busted all to nuke.
“Huh,” he said, panting a bit but in a normal tone. “I guess he is.”
He dropped him. The body thumped, flopped, lay still. Conn saw the dark eyes rolled up in their sockets.
Leaving the reloaded and relocked blaster on the bar, he forced himself up. It took all his strength of will as well as body. He wanted nothing on this Earth so much as to just slump down to the floor, curl up in a ball and sleep.
But now was not the time for that. There was business to attend to.
Though both his eyes were blacked, the bruises already purple against his dark skin, and his right cheek was puffing out all swollen, Tony knelt beside Chad. He murmured, “You’re gonna be all right, man. You’re gonna be all right.”
Walking like a reanimated chill, and feeling about as poorly, Conn teetered out around the bar. Even though Tony looked none too steady, he put a hand to the bouncer’s rock-solid shoulder to help him hunker down next to him.
“Right,” he said. He cupped Chad’s chin with his hand and raised his head.
“Sorry…boss…” the bouncer said.
“No problem, son.” He braced on Tony and pushed himself back up. It was hard going.
Potar stepped up, gripped him by the arm with surprising gentleness and hoisted him back to his feet as if he were ten years old again.
“Thanks,” he said. “For everythin’. Tony, I need you to run into town and round up some help. Tell I’m payin’.”
“But Chad—”
“Is beyond our helpin’, I calculate. Fetch Granny Weatherwax. She’s the best healer in the western Pennyrile. She can set a bone with the best of them, too—even a collarbone. Along with all her herb-lore and such. Make sure she brings her special moss to pack the wound.”
For a moment Tony just stared at his boss. His face was ashen where it wasn’t bluish-purple—and now starting to show the yellow and green of serious bad bruising.
“Pupils the same size,” Conn remarked. “Likely not concussed. You up to it?”
After a moment Tony nodded, then stood up.
Conn looked at Potar. The big man had let his arm go, but still stood close by, poised to grab the gaudy owner if he toppled.
“It’s lucky you happened by,” Conn said. It turned into a croak. His throat was suddenly dry. “When you did and all.”
Potar nodded. Then he looked Conn, a strange gleam in his eyes.
Almost as if he, too, were calculating.
“Reckon you owe me now, boss,” he said with a grin.
Conn stared back at him a minute, just long enough to see doubt appear in his blue boar-hog eyes.
Then he nodded. “Reckon I do,” he said, deliberately. “And you’re a smarter man than ever I reckoned. I can use that.”
“Meani
n’?”
“Take it…out,” Chad suddenly said. “Please?” He clutched the handle of the ax right above the head with both hands, as if he cherished it and didn’t want to let it go. “It hurts.”
“Shouldn’t we take it out?” Tony asked.
“No.” Conn shook his head. “Leave it. We’ll bind it up first.”
“You sure that’s the right thing?”
“No. I’m not the healer. But I do know he’s not bleedin’ out as double fast as he was, and I suspect if we yank that thing free, he’ll start right in again.”
A scream came from the door. Tony and Conn jerked. Potar turned his massive head with equally massive deliberation.
Mrs. Haymuss stood just inside the front door, with a couple of kitchen helpers also coming on shift with her, and her hands pressed to her plump cheeks.
“¡Dios mío!” she exclaimed. “What has happened? Senorita Nancy!”
“Dead,” Conn said grimly. “These bastards murdered her.”
He staggered around the bar, bracing himself with his hands.
His foot nudged something soft right in front of it. It stirred and moaned.
“Help…me,” Ike muttered.
Conn picked up the shotgun by the long twin barrels. They had cooled down enough to touch now. Without even glancing at the man, he slammed the buttplate down, hard.
He felt and heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage as Ike’s Adam’s apple imploded. He commenced to thrash and make strangling sounds.
Still not looking down, Conn replaced the blaster on the bar. His eye fell on his cousin’s huddled form.
That one’s for you, Nance, he thought. I’ll do my grieving later. Right now there’s much to be done.
“Tell you what,” Conn said. “Carlos, you run and fetch Granny Weatherwax the healer. You run faster than Tony at the best of times, and he’s none too steady on his pins right now.”
He filled in the same instructions he’d given the battered bouncer. The slightly taller and darker of Mrs. Haymuss’s helpers nodded and dashed out the door.