He settled back into position. The riders were moving into a canter now, so there would be no easy shots like before. Victor fired rapidly, pumping the Winchester’s lever smoothly with his right hand, and saw another horseman tumble to the dust, leaving only three riders in their saddles, including Dante.
Everything seemed to slow for Victor. His count told him there was only one bullet left in the rifle, so he had to make it count. If he missed this one, his brother would be gone for good.
Victor aimed at the bearded man holding the reins of Dante’s horse. Just as Dante had on that early morning hunt, Victor slowly inhaled…exhaled…took half a breath…
And fired.
_____
As soon as he’d seen the stretch of road shooting off along the lake like an arrow, Dante had sensed danger. When the bullets started flying, he kicked the horse with his leg in an effort to break the Arab’s grasp of the reins. The big man, however, was too strong. He had the leather wrapped around his fist, and as soon as Dante’s horse started forward, the Arab jerked on the reins and pulled their horses together.
Dante was turned toward the big man when a bullet struck the Arab’s horse. It all happened too fast. Dante’s horse was pulled downward by the Arab’s weight, and as the two horses fell together in a heap, Dante’s leg was pinned to the ground. He did not feel the pain he had expected. No, the entire leg seemed numb now, and that was worse than any pain.
Walker wheeled back. Somehow he was the last man standing in this one-sided shootout. Dante knew who had fired those bullets, and as he watched Walker he prayed for the bullet that would send Walker to the ground as well. If any of these men deserved such a fate, it was he.
Walker’s horse danced a few steps while he stared down at the two men tangled among the horses. He grimaced, looking undecided between helping the Arab and saving his own skin. Another bullet swooped past him, and he turned and fired erratically toward the golf course that seemed to be hiding their attacker.
The Arab was unconscious on the ground beside his dying horse. Dante’s own horse began to roll away from him, trying to build momentum so it could regain its footing. As it did so, the girth came free and the saddle sloughed off the animal’s back. The horse went racing down the road as if all the devils of hell were in pursuit.
Dante turned his head at the sound of footsteps beside him. Walker was looming over him with his knife now. Dante tried to raise his bound arms in a feeble effort to ward the blow, but the knife cut into the ropes rather than his flesh. Walker grabbed his wrist and began dragging him across the road, and the movement of the ground beneath Dante’s body caused him to feel the pain he had been expecting. It moved down the length of his leg like a blowtorch on his skin. He screamed louder than he ever had before.
_____
Victor knew his brother’s voice too well not to recognize the scream. The Winchester was empty, and he was not sure he would have time to reload, so he left it there and sprinted down the hill with the Colt in hand.
He recognized Walker’s dirty hair, the same hair that had made him look so wild when the brothers found him in the forest. It had been a clever trick, but the game was up now. The cards were all on the table, and Victor wasn’t about to let him get away a second time.
Walker was in the road, dragging Dante toward one of the horses. Something was wrong about the way Dante’s leg dragged behind him. It reminded Victor of an injured grasshopper in all the wrong ways.
“Hey!” he shouted, hoping to get Walker to stand still. He was still far enough away that hitting a moving target was far from a guarantee.
Walker raised his head, surprised by the shout, and met Victor’s eyes with the stare of a deer caught in the headlights of a semi truck. He paused only for a fraction of a second, and then, just as the Colt’s hammer fell and the gunpowder exploded, he was leaping to the side in a desperate attempt to escape the path of the coming bullet. Dante’s arm fell to the ground, his fate temporarily forgotten.
Victor thought he saw Walker twist sideways as he disappeared behind the rump of the horse. The animal pinned its ears, gave a little kick, and pelted down the road. Victor waited to see Walker crouched on the ground, maybe with his hands clasped in a gamble for mercy. Or, better still, he might have a gun in his hand. Even a sword would do. Not that Victor needed any extra incentive to kill this man.
But as the horse trotted away without revealing Walker, Victor stared after the animal and saw Walker clinging to the saddle with one arm, his feet performing a stuttering dance as he tried to propel himself over the side of the horse. He nearly managed to slip his foot into the stirrup. Then the horse took a sudden turn and Walker legs tangled with the animal’s, and he fell hard on his back and rolled.
“Vic?” Dante murmured in a dreamy, wondering tone that chilled Victor’s heart.
Victor turned to his brother who lay stretched out on the road, another body among the dead and dying.
“Hang on, brother,” he said, clenching his jaw against the pent-up emotions threatening to break free. “There’s one more thing I need to do.”
Chapter 30: Old Faces
Victor reloaded the Colt as he went, thumbing bullets into the clip without looking at his hands. The act was familiar, even comforting after a week unlike anything he had ever known before.
Walker was slithering across the ground. He had nearly reached the edge of the road, where perhaps he imagined he would hide himself among the thorns and weeds. Victor suspected some part of the man’s spine had been damaged in the fall, preventing him from rising more than a few inches off the ground.
A wheezy grunting sound came from Walker as he dragged himself, scuffing his leather jacket on the asphalt. This sound, like the crawling itself, pleased Victor and he made no hurry to end Walker’s miserable existence. He didn’t deserve to be snuffed all at once. Let him peter out, feel his frailty, go to his death with a tangible sense of his own mortality. It was the least Victor could do for him.
“I told you to leave,” Victor said, slamming the clip into the Colt. “I told you I’d kill for him.”
Walker froze at the sound of his voice. He turned his head, wincing with pain, and uttered a dry chuckle.
“What’s funny?”
“Listening to you. You really believe your own lies, don’t you?” He lowered his head and spat a trickle of blood on the ground. “You ought to thank me.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because this is what you wanted—an excuse to break the rules, to kill. You should have killed me back at the cabin, but you cared too much about what your cokehead of a brother thought. Now?” He smiled grimly. “His only question will be, Did you finish it?”
Victor nodded thoughtfully and stared at the pines crowding the road, watched how gently they swayed in the wind, sensed how easy it might be to forget the violence that had just taken place on this solitary road in the middle of nowhere.
“Just finish it,” Walker said, resting his head on his arm. “Kill me!”
“Fuck you,” Victor answered softly. A few moments passed. Then he said, “I’m not like you, Walker. I don’t care what you think.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell me how we’re different. You only kill for family, is that it?”
“No,” Victor answered, stepping toward him. “The difference is that I’m the one holding the gun.”
He fired two shots that passed through Walker’s brain and thudded into the asphalt. Walker’s face slackened, but his eyes went on staring as Victor turned his back on him, leaving his body to the wolves, the crows, and the maggots.
_____
Victor found his brother just where he had left him. Dante was on his back, staring up at the blue, infinite sky.
“For a second there,” Dante said as Victor approached, “I thought you were going to leave me.” He met Victor’s eyes, but he did not smile. His own eyes, as bright as the sky above them, were filled with sadness and relief.
“Is anything broken?�
� Victor asked, looking at his brother’s injured leg.
Dante shook his head. “No, but I doubt I’ll be joining the Boston Marathon this year.”
Victor gave him his hand and helped him to his feet. For a moment they both stood there, regarding one another wordlessly. It felt to Victor as if months had passed since Dante was taken, and now that they were reunited again, he did not know how he was supposed to feel.
Dante looped his arm around Victor’s neck and pulled him close, pressing his head against Victor’s shoulder as he began to shake with sobs. Victor, who did not often shed tears, felt a few roll down his own cheeks and disappear in the stubble around his chin. Neither of them spoke. In time would come the questions and the explanations, but for now it was enough to know they had one another again.
This was when Victor realized for the first time that he had not expected to ever see Dante again. He had hoped, certainly, but with every mile his belief that it would soon be over had faded. He had hardened his heart, preparing himself for the moment when he would see the brim of Dante’s cap poking out from a roadside ditch, his lifeless eyes accusing Victor for not getting there sooner. Those eyes would have haunted him to his grave.
Just as Dante had initiated the embrace, he was also the one to break it. He pulled back, met Victor’s eyes for a brief moment, and cleared his throat. “We should probably get out of here. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind holing up somewhere for a few days.”
Victor nodded, about to tell Dante he thought that was a good idea, when he heard a tired groan. A horse was on the ground nearby, kicking its legs in a spasm of pain, and beside the horse lay the bearded man who had held the reins to Dante’s horse. He was holding his head in a way that suggested he had hit his head on the ground when he fell.
“Hold on, Champ,” Victor said to his brother as he approached the injured man. He considered saying a few last words, maybe some one-liner from a movie like “So long, motherfucker.” But he was too tired for that now. He and his brother had suffered a world of pain because of this man and his companions, so a bullet was the least Victor could offer in return.
Victor stepped on the man’s arm as it reached for his fallen shotgun. Then he bent low so he could press the cold barrel of the Colt directly against the man’s forehead. It felt good and right to have the means of swift justice in his hands. There would be no court to deliberate over the evidence and perhaps give the wrong verdict. No, this way was cleaner, more primal, cutting out the middleman so nobody stood between he who had wronged and he who had been wronged. If Dante’s leg hadn’t been in such bad shape, Victor probably would have offered for Dante to pull the trigger himself.
Victor locked eyes with the man as he squeezed the trigger. He wanted to see the light go out of his eyes, waning like a dimmer switch as his spirit separated from his body. He hoped that, wherever that spirit went, it would find torment and restlessness, an afterworld to mirror the horror through which Victor had been living.
The man’s eyes were almond brown, a matching color to his skin. There was a whitish scar on the side of his neck, which reminded Victor of a barbershop in a small town in Eastern Europe. He remembered sitting in one of the waiting chairs, idly flipping through a newspaper in a language he could not understand while the barber joked in his pidgin English about how he should open a resort, since people seemed to come to that country from all over the world.
That was one moment.
The next moment (and it all came to Victor in a single flash of memory), the barber jerked the razor downward in a swift motion. The man in the chair cried out, covering his throat. Victor was already on his feet, firing several times into the chest of the triumphant barber who seemed intent on giving a victory speech.
Victor felt his lips part and his eyes widen. His finger released the trigger. “Khan,” he whispered. “No, it can’t be.”
The man with the scar on his neck swallowed hard. “I was hoping you’d remember me, Vic.”
Epilogue
It appeared Dante had been right about his leg. Nothing seemed to be broken. His ankle was badly sprained, and in only half an hour it had ballooned to the size of a grapefruit, but Victor was confident all his brother needed was a little rest.
That did not stop him, however, from wrapping Dante’s foot and lower leg with plenty of duct tape.
“You really think this is necessary?” Dante asked.
“No,” Victor answered. “I just want to see you try getting this off.”
“Bastard,” Dante murmured affectionately.
Victor finished taping the leg and leaned back. “You’re not whole yet,” he said, thinking of how long it might be before Dante could walk without a limp. They were sitting on the porch of the golf course clubhouse, not far from where Victor had set his ambush on the road. The clubhouse was far inferior to the cabin in terms of self-reliance, but for now it provided a roof over their heads and an opportunity to escape from any prying eyes.
“Where do we go from here?” Dante asked in an unusually reflective voice. He was sitting on the edge of a lawn chair with his injured leg propped beside him. Just moving from the road to the clubhouse had caused him a considerable amount of discomfort, and now he seemed to be gathering his strength, absorbing it like a plant with sunlight.
Victor was distracted by the whinny of a horse. He turned his head to where Khan was preparing to mount the horse that had previously carried Dante.
Victor rose from his chair. “Just give me a minute,” he said to Dante. He waited for Dante to nod before he left the porch and joined Khan.
“You’re going to leave just like that?” Victor said. “No goodbye for an old friend?” Despite his words, there was no warmth in his voice.
Khan had started to turn his horse away, but now he stopped. His eyes were as difficult to read as ever.
“That depends,” Khan answered in his measured way. “Are you having second thoughts about shooting me?” If it was a joke, his face did not show it.
“It’s a short list of people I won’t kill, but you’re on it. Just don’t abuse the privilege any more than you already have.”
Khan nodded and studied the horizon. The day was almost over. The clouds had taken on a quilted look as the sun began to dip into the trees.
“I don’t understand what you did,” Victor said. “But my brother and I are both alive, and that’s enough for now.”
Khan did not meet his eyes. “I know I can’t ask for your forgiveness. We crossed a line.”
“You’re damn right you did.”
“But it was Walker’s choice to take your brother, not mine. God knows I deserve my share of the blame. I should have stopped him, should have stepped in before it was too late.” He shook his head sadly. “But what’s done is done.”
They were both silent for a time.
“So who is this Baron you work for?” Victor asked.
Khan finally met his eyes. “You know the answer to that already.”
“And he sent you to do what exactly? Check up on me? Make sure I was getting along alright?”
“I was supposed to deliver a message. He needs you, Vic. People like you and I are a dying breed now. There are others with our skill, sure, but he doesn’t trust people any more. He hardly trusts me.”
“What makes you so sure he trusts me?”
“Do you think he would do so much to find you if he didn’t?”
Victor thought about this. He also thought about Dante lying in the lawn chair with the sprained ankle, about the town of cannibals and the people he had killed there, about Jenny wandering alone through the dark sewers beneath the town, about how far he had come and how much he had changed since the days of surviving with Dante in the cabin. Was there any going back? Could life ever be so simple again?
“You sure I can’t stay a few days?” Khan said. “There’s so much to talk about.”
Victor glanced over his shoulder in the direction of his brother. “I’m not sur
e if he can handle it,” he answered. “Up until now, you were his captor.” And what is he now? he thought. An old friend?
Khan nodded. “If you change your mind, you know where to find us. We’ll be waiting.” Their eyes met, and Victor nodded to the man who had once been his close friend, the man who had nearly bled out in an ambulance while Victor rode beside him, talking to him to keep him conscious. How had everything changed so drastically?
He watched with mixed emotions as Khan trotted across the green, growing smaller until he had disappeared among the trees. Then he returned to Dante, who was rubbing his arms to stay warm.
“Let me find a blanket,” Victor offered.
“Wait,” Dante answered before Victor could walk away. “You really knew that guy? The guy who kidnapped me?”
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 22