No Man's Land

by James Axler

  “Did he have black, shaggy hair, the one-eyed man? The other one, I mean.”

  “Yeah.” Norvell nodded convulsively. To encourage him Snake Eye poured him another drink. “That’s the man. Friend of yours?”

  Snake Eye laughed at that. “Not a friend, no. I do know his reputation. His and the white-haired youth’s. What about the others?”

  “Others?”

  “Focus, now.” He moved the bottle away. Norvell’s eyes followed as if attached by strings. “Who else did you see among the coldhearts?”

  “Coldhearts?”

  “Who ambushed you.”

  “Oh. Them. Well, there was a brown slut with her hair all done in beaded braids and titties out to here. And then another woman, hair like fire, built like a brick shithouse, brought up the horses and pack mules.”

  “Pack mules?”

  “Uh-huh. Raiders loaded up some high-value shit, like primer caps, meds, bottles of triple-prime hooch. Weps, including some off the dead guards. And boots off the chills. Everything else they burned. Or blew, in the case of the powder wag.”

  Snake Eye nodded. “All right. Who else?”

  “Who else?”

  Snake Eye held up the bottle enticingly. “The one-eyed man and the white-haired man. Surely they had some other dudes with them? Not just the two women.”

  Speaking of women, in a manner of speaking, a gaudy slut had slouched in and was trying to peddle her wares in a halfhearted way. She wore a patched red dress, which may or may not have been silk and may or may not have been lingerie, but didn’t do much to conceal those wares. Not enough, in Snake Eye’s opinion.

  “Oh,” Norvell said again, “yeah. The others. Lessee. There was a tall, gawky oldie with a cane. A little Mex-looking kid, come out of the bushes by our backtrail holding a funny kinda longblaster with a thick barrel. And a sawed-off little runt with a shotgun, wore specs and a fedora.”

  “Very good.” Snake Eye poured another drink.

  The gaudy slut approached the three deserters in the corner and was rebuffed without so much as a glance her way. Looking around the bar, she spotted Snake Eye and made right for him.

  “Ah,” Norvell said, having pounded his drink as if it was the last he’d ever get. He wiped his mouth. “Yeah, we’re lucky we made it outta there alive. Them was some stone brigands, I tell ya. If it wasn’t for me swapping the tale to them of the secret place my aunt found, don’t think they would let us leave on our pins.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Norvell,” the older driver said.

  Snake Eye sensed the approach of the gaudy slut on his right side, the side away from Norvell. Felt her warmth. Smelled her.

  “Hey, honey,” she said in a voice like sandpaper.

  “Back off,” he snapped without looking around. “Keep your stink away from me.”

  “Aw, honey, that’s just the smell of my love juices flowin’ at the sight of you. A hard man like you is good to find. Let’s me and you—”

  She put her hand on his arm.

  His reaction was immediate—he whipped around, as fast as a striking rattler, and backhanded her onto her bony ass. She stared at him, her eyes murky green pools amid incongruously black and blue paint, her mouth a scarlet smear, her hair hanging in her face like bleached seaweed.

  “I told you to keep away from me!”

  “Here, now,” the bartender said, bustling up behind his important leather-clad gut.

  Snake Eye turned a hard yellow look on him. That was enough. The bartender stopped short, as if bumping his nose on an invisible force field, and found some glasses that needed the grease and muck smeared around on them with a rag as foul as his gaudy slut.

  The drivers with Norvell made protesting noises. One made as if to move toward Snake Eye.

  Snake Eye turned his left side away from the bar to face the two sitting men. His hand swept back the tail of his coat, revealing the black steel gleam of his left-hand blaster. The driver, his eyes huge, backed off.

  “Now,” Snake Eye said, still looking at the two, “what was this about your aunt’s discovery?”

  The older driver moistened his bearded lips. “It’s just a crazy story, mister,” he said. “We don’t want no trouble with you. But no reason to let you think there’s anything to it. Folks who hit our train, they didn’t buy it for one little second.”

  Snake Eye nodded brusque acknowledgment, but he turned back to Norvell.

  “I want to hear more of this story of yours anyway, Norvell,” he said. “I’m a collector of curiosities as well as an independent contractor. So I’d like you to tell me all about it.”

  He gave a final glare to the slut who was scooting her skinny rump backward across the floorboards away from him, throwing up a sort of bow-wave of sodden sawdust. It was purely for show now.

  Though for a fact Snake Eye wasn’t interested in any woman degraded enough to be attracted to him. Even for a commercial transaction. When he needed that sort of relief he bought the services of high-class sluts at one or another place he knew here or there—paid handsomely, as he could well afford to, for the privilege not only of using her sexually, but also of letting her know in intimate detail what a worthless bitch she was. Like all women.

  As long as he paid—and left no marks—the proprietors and proprietresses of those high-class houses reckoned there was no harm done.

  “Somewhere else,” Snake Eye said, clapping Norvell on the shoulder, “where we won’t be subject to so many rude interruptions.”

  * * *

  “IN HERE, MISTER?” Norvell asked at Snake Eye’s after-you gesture. “But this is just an old alley. Nowhere particular.”

  “Nowhere particular is fine with me, Norvell,” Snake Eye said amiably. “It will ensure privacy for me to hear the rest of your story in peace.” Actually, the alley was no darker than the street, to call it that. But its narrow walls did restrict sight lines, which was the effect Snake Eye was looking for.

  The drunk looked back uncertainly over one shoulder.

  “One thing you oughta know right out the gate, mister,” he said. “I ain’t into no funny stuff.”

  Then a dim light of calculation lit his eyes. “Unless you got the jack, of course.”

  “Rest easy, my friend,” Snake Eye said. “I have jack. But all I want from you is the rest of the story.”

  “All righty, then,” Norvell said, and stumbled into the alley.

  Several minutes later Snake Eye stepped out of the alley. He was alone.

  The cut-up wag driver had had little more to tell him. Mostly it served to confirm the late Erl Kendry’s assertion that the lost redoubt entrance was located in the environs, and a hint that it was underground. Which was hardly surprising, really.

  Still, it was a lead. Most important to Snake Eye’s mind was that Norvell had mentioned it to Cawdor and his bunch. They also showed a keen interest in the lost old-days facilities. That was something he’d learned tracking down the rumors about them. It seemed to go deeper than a yen for scabbie, although Snake Eye wasn’t sure what else they might be seeking.

  Norvell’s buddies hadn’t thought the ambushers were interested in Norvell’s wild tale. Snake Eye thought otherwise.

  “Hey, you,” a voice called quietly from behind. “Turn around. Triple slow. Keep them hands where we can see them.”

  A hairless eyebrow shot up. Feeling a smile he refused to show on his thin lips, Snake Eye complied.

  It was the three deserters from the gaudy. One man held a scattergun with both barrels and butt sawed off short. It had to hurt like a bitch when it went off; Snake Eye wondered if the sheer intimidation factor meant the man didn’t have to shoot it often.

  His two pals had revolvers leveled from their waists to Snake Eye’s.

  “You friends of Norvell’s, too?” he asked.

  “Huh?” said the central member of the trio, a tall man with long hair spilling lankly from around a dark slouch hat.

  “I suppose not.” It was a far-fetched
surmise, of course. Still, that others might have been concerned with the driver’s fate was pardonably on his mind at the moment.

  Norvell had been so remarkably guileless. Like a child. And as easy to distract, simply by looking past his shoulder at the alley mouth and saying, “What’s that?”

  Obediently, Norvell had turned and looked. And hadn’t even had time to react when Snake Eye seized his neck from behind and expertly broke it.

  For a further moment Snake Eye wondered if they might be following some triple-stupe quixotic notion of avenging the putative honor of the gaudy slut.

  Then the swag-bellied man made a prodding motion of his short-barreled double gun. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Your valuables, mister. Hand them over. Start by undoing that fancy-ass gun belt of yours and handing it over. Nice and slow.”

  “Very well,” Snake Eye said. “I’m lowering my hands now.”

  “See what I did there?” the paunchy scattergunner said to his friends. “I get him to give us his most valuable traps, and disarm himself. All at once!”

  Of course, had he handed over the exquisitely sewn and hand-tooled leather belt with the matched pair of Sphinx blasters in the holsters, Snake Eye wouldn’t have been disarmed. Not in any sense, although as he liked to put it, even naked on an ice floe he wouldn’t really and truly be unarmed.

  But of course, all that assumed he really planned to comply. As these three stupes manifestly did.

  When the shotgun man turned his beard-stubbled jowls back to bear on Snake Eye, his pig eyes shot wide. It was a half a heartbeat before the orange flash of the blaster that had appeared in Snake Eye’s left hand was reflected in them.

  Even before the muzzle-flare erupted Snake Eye saw the dark hole appear between the would-be mugger’s eyes. Before the man started to fold like an empty grain bag the right-hand gun went off and the tall man in the middle staggered back, his own blaster dropping from suddenly unresponsive fingers.

  The third deserter was faster than Snake Eye anticipated. He fired.

  But not quicker than Snake Eye was prepared for.

  And not faster than Snake Eye. Nobody was.

  The mercie pivoted clockwise on the heel of his left boot. The dragon’s breath of the charge of black powder exploding out the revolver’s barrel passed him by without doing more than giving him a warm air-puff to the face. So did the bullet riding invisibly in front of the rush of rapidly expanding gas and smoke.

  Even as he turned, Snake Eye was raising the Sphinx in his left hand. As if he had all the time in the world, he thrust out his arm so that the square muzzle almost touched that deserter between the eyes. They widened rapidly in horrified astonishment before muzzle-flame hid his face, and the 9 mm bullet blew out the back of his head.

  He fell, reeking of scorched hair and flash-fried skin and eyeball.

  Snake Eye had both blasters holstered before the last coldheart hit the rutty street. Without a backward glance he turned and walked away, not hurrying but neither dawdling, out of the tiny settlement and into the dark, where he’d left his horse hobbled in a dry gulley.

  He reckoned he’d used up his welcome in this place. Then again, so far as he was concerned, he’d used up this place, too.

  His business—and his pleasure—now lay elsewhere.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Yes, Master Thom,” the gaunt, white-haired wrinklie in the balding felt vest said. “It shall be as you direct.”

  He obeyed the landowner’s spoiled and cruel son without the least reaction, inside no more than out. Even the resentment had been whipped from his bony frame, decades before. All he had was his servitude to Colonel Ramie Clark and his family. They were more dirt farmers than cattle ranchers, and seemed all the more touchy about their importance and prerogatives over what their peers among the wealthy of the Association considered a severe social defect.

  But she’s your only granddaughter, a voice inside his narrow, half-hairless skull cried in a degree of anguish the rest of him wouldn’t let himself feel. She’s so young, so innocent.

  The realistic part of Jabez Hawshawe thought without any kind of passion at all that sooner or later, she had to learn the reality of life as a tenant of a Protector baron. Might as well be this night as the next one.

  The front door blew open, or so he thought at first. He cringed a little, knowing eighteen-year-old Thom Clark would have him flogged for his carelessness if he hadn’t closed it tight enough. Or might just beat him half to death with a silver-knobbed cane from the stand by the door.

  Or not even stop at the midpoint. Jabez had seen that happen, too.

  But instead of a wind what came in the door was a stranger. And strange he was: tall and rangy in a coat that flapped around the calves of his blue jeans. He had a single blue eye that burned like a beacon in the light of the oil lanterns hung in the hallway, and a patch over the other.

  “Everybody out!” he ordered, waving the barrel of his cocked blaster toward the door. “Take everybody with you that you don’t hate bad.”

  “What are you talking about?” Thom demanded. “What do you think you’re doing here.”

  “Burning this house to the ground,” the intruder said. “Who’re you? Baron’s puppy?”

  “I am the heir to Baron Ramie Clark!” the young man screamed, his normally sallow face now bone-white. “My father will burn you, when he catches you!”

  And he grabbed for the shotgun hung in brackets by the wall.

  The flash of the big handblaster was as dazzling as its report was deafening, as the ringing in his ears didn’t manage to drown out the panic-hammering of his pulse. Jabez saw the young master take a step back, grease-smeared velvet vest smoldering and stinking. His eyes were wide. Sweat poured down his narrow face.

  “You—” He coughed, felt his chest, then looked down at his hand.

  Thom looked up in amazement from the blood that stained his palm. More ran out the corner of his mouth.

  “How dare you!” he screamed, and threw himself forward.

  The stranger’s second shot caught him in the throat. He fell, kicking, thrashing, strangling on blood.

  “Any other baron spawn here?” the intruder asked Jabez. “Any sec men?”

  Wordlessly, Jabez shook his head. At last he managed to reply, “Only myself, my granddaughter and some tenant servants.”

  A woman with red hair spilling out from beneath her slouch hat stuck her head in the doorway. Despite his years, Jabez’s heart actually picked up the beat at the glimpse he caught of her lush-bodied form, out in the darkness of the stoop.

  “Perimeter’s secured, Ryan,” she said. “No resistance, no guards. Just a lot of frightened tenants.”

  “Anybody liable to show up with blasters in the near future?” the man asked.

  “N-no, sir.” He hated himself for calling this coldheart “sir.” But the whipped-in habit of utter obedience to authority kicked in. And this tall stranger exuded authority, even without the big handblaster and his demonstrated willingness to use it.

  “Okay,” the woman said, and ducked back out.

  “Then get your possessions out,” the man said to Jabez. “You and the rest of the servants.” He grinned. The expression chilled Jabez’s blood. “Rad-blast it, take anything you want. Anything that’s ever caught your eye! We’re not carrying it away with us. And fifteen minutes from now this whole place goes up in a blaze of glory.”

  Jabez heard scuttling sounds from behind him, then excited whispers. Some rose to moans.

  He glanced back. Fat Hattie the cook and Larry the handyman were there, along with a couple Hattie’s kids who helped out. They were all staring in wide-eyed fascination from the body of the Clark heir, lying there with his eyes staring at the wall and his blood soaking into the carpet, and the man who put him there.

  “Mister,” Jabez said, “Baron Ramie ain’t what you’d call an understanding man. He’ll have us all pulled apart by horses when he get
s back and finds what you did.”

  “Then you all better pack plenty of food and water,” the stranger said. “The baron must have some wags here and horses to pull them.”

  Overcome, Jabez nodded. It felt strangely light, as if it might lift his frail old body up and carry it away like a balloon from this unbelievable scene. Was this a nightmare, or a dream come true.

  “Then hitch them up, load them up and head out fast as the horses’ll pull,” the coldheart said. “Me, I wouldn’t so much as slow down until I’d shaken the dust of the Association and this rat-hole little war all the way off my horses’ hooves. Take everybody with you with sense enough to go.”

  He shook his head, looking around the foyer with some emotion Jabez couldn’t so much as guess at.

  “Can’t promise you a better life,” he said, “but looking at you and the rest—and based on my own experience with the Cattlemen’s Protective Association—I reckon there’s a chance of you managing to do better than this. Understand me?”

  “Y-yes, sir,” he said. Somehow he no longer begrudged the use of the title. “Yes, sir!”

  “Then move!”

  * * *

  “YOU SEEM TO HAVE an unfortunate habit of killing sons and heirs of the ruling class, Mr. Cawdor,” Colonel Cody Turnbull said. Mildred thought he looked worried as he poured himself a glass of some dark beverage.

  “I didn’t see that I had much of a choice,” Ryan said. “Come to that, don’t really think Mildred and Krysty did with Buddy Kylie, either. The Clark kid wouldn’t stop coming at me—I’d give him credit for balls, but what I really think is, he was just too arrogant to believe anyone would dare lift a finger against him.”

  He shook his head. “Not that I see either him or Buddy as a tragic loss.”

  “I notice you don’t mention they were both enemies of ours, Mr. Cawdor,” said Al, sitting slouched on his chair.

  Ryan shrugged. “Truth to tell, Baron,” he said, “that didn’t have a lot to do with either chill. It just seemed a matter of doing what was needed at the time.”