Ralph and Blaine raised their hands. There was a sweat of shock and pain over Blaine’s face, but Ralph was pure scared. He had the face of a man who was ready to give out as much fear and terror as he could, but when the boot was on the other foot, he turned into a teetering pile of anxiety with a backbone deficiency.
“Now, boys, I have nothing to do with this. This isn’t my fight. I have no idea what trouble has been going on back in Casper, and quite frankly I want nothing to do with any ‘who can pee the highest’ contest.”
“Why should I believe you?” Blaine asked through gritted teeth. “When my men get back here, I’m gonna have you strung up in the parking lot.”
“For a man with a broken leg on the wrong end of a shotgun, I’m not sure how you’re going to manage that, Blaine, but I hope not to give you the opportunity to make good on the promise.”
Blaine winced as his loose knee shifted on the sofa and screwed his eyes up as the wave of pain rushed through him. “I am going to enjoy watching you swing, boy. I’m going to enjoy it immensely.”
“One more word out of you and you won’t be enjoying anything ever again.”
Blaine managed a smile. “You shot Ralph by accident. I can see it in your eyes; you’re not a killer, Nathan. You might try to pretend you are, but if you’re so fixed on making me stop talking, why don’t you blow me away?”
Blaine might not believe that Nathan would shoot them, but Short-Fat looked like he believed it from there to kingdom come. Blaine was warming to his speech, though, and he wiped his cuff across his sweating forehead as Short-Fat looked askance at his boss, cold terror in his eyes.
“Blaine…”
“Shut up, you lousy puke! Nathan, in three seconds, I’m going to start shouting for my men. I’m going to scream at the top of my voice and they are gonna come, and I am going to tell them to shoot you in the legs so you can’t run away, and then I can watch you take the drop, boy. No one does this to Blaine Peebles. No one.”
Nathan knew his bluff had been called. There was no way he’d wanted to shoot Ralph in the first place, and he wasn’t going to start shooting unarmed or injured men now, however much one of them deserved it.
So, he stepped forward, turned the 1301 around, and brained them both where they stood and lay. Unconscious Short-Fat crashed to the floor and Blaine sighed, rolling over so that his arm hung limply down into Cal’s blood.
Nathan looked down the corridor that Yellow and the others had gone down not more than three minutes before. They weren’t yet returning—the inn was a big building with many rooms, and a systematic search was going to take them some time, especially if they had to kick down every door to check beyond it. They hadn’t looked like the most fit guys Nathan had ever seen, and he could imagine they were breathing and sweating hard by now.
He looked out of the lobby windows, up the slope to the roadblock. There was a chance that if those cars had been put there today or last night, that at least one of them would have enough fuel to get him and Mary back to the wagon and the others. Maybe.
Further thought or planning was interrupted as a woman’s scream ripped the air apart behind him, just down the corridor from which he’d emerged. Tracking back, 1301 at the ready, Nathan sneaked a look down the corridor.
Mary was being dragged by her hair along the floor by Baxter. He had her blonde locks in one hand and a Remington, short-stocked shotgun in the other. Mary was screaming and struggling. Baxter dropped her to the floor and backhanded her across the chops, busting her nose in a spray of blood before he grabbed a meaty handful of her hair and began dragging her again.
Nathan stepped out into the corridor, his 1301 leveled at Baxter’s midriff. Baxter looked so surprised at seeing Nathan that his first reaction was to pull the shotgun trigger rather than raise his hands. The blast seared past Nathan’s right ear as he moved, pellets ripping the shoulder of his jacket but not drilling their hot lead into his flesh.
Nathan came down in a crouch and tried to return fire, but Baxter pushed his advantage and, instead of pointing his Remington at Nathan, had the presence of mind to point it to where Mary had fallen and push it into the back of her skull.
“Put it down!” Baxter screamed at Nathan. “Put it down or I swear I will paint the walls with her brains!”
Even if Nathan fired and his aim was true, there was more than an even chance that Baxter would pull his trigger and Mary’s blood and gray matter would be spread over the carpet and up the walls of the corridor.
You don’t even know her! She pulled a gun on you! Why are you risking your life to save her? Why?
Nathan couldn’t answer himself. He just couldn’t allow Mary to be shot dead in front of him. He couldn’t. Nathan put the 1301 down, raised his hands, and got to his feet.
Baxter motioned him to walk backward. “Get in the lobby. Now!”
Nathan moved back, and Baxter stalked him, still dragging Mary by her hair as she crawled at his feet.
Moving evenly, Nathan side-eyed Short-Fat and Blaine where he’d left them.
Baxter emerged from the corridor with Mary and got his first view of the carnage there: Ralph’s dead body and Short-Fat unconscious, adding to the pile of bodies of the people they had already cut down. “My god…” he breathed, keeping his Remington trained squarely on Nathan’s body.
Blaine’s eyelids were flickering; he took a ragged breath, groaned, and opened his eyes. There was a trickle of blood running down his forehead from where Nathan had hit him hard with the shotgun. As Blaine lifted his head, that trickle of blood ran into his mouth.
“Well, well, well…” He smiled at Nathan and Baxter, “Well, well, well, indeed.” As he smiled, the blood trickle stained his teeth red and turned his whole mouth into a maw of horror.
3
Blaine was carried out to the parking lot of the ‘Ev’ry-1-Welcome’ on a chair like a South Sea Island Chief from a 50s B movie where, at any moment, you’d expect King Kong to appear over the horizon. The men carrying the chair were straining and sweating under the weight of the huge man, but Blaine himself had ordered them to carry him out so that he could witness the execution.
For a man with a badly busted leg which dangled uselessly from the chair, he was doing remarkably well. The half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels he was taking for medicinal purposes was obviously helping to numb the pain, but it wasn’t softening his resolve for showy violence any.
Cal’s body had been dragged from the inn by Baxter and Reed. They held him by the feet, affording him no dignity or respect. Cal’s head was lolling and bumping sickeningly across floors, down steps, and across the rough tarmac. If Cal wasn’t actually dead, his body was so deep into shock from the blood loss that he might as well have been. Nathan considered it a small mercy that Cal was so out of it.
Man, I wish I was, too.
Nathan and Mary had been pushed out into the wide blustery expanse of the lot, their hands tied with rope behind their backs. Nathan’s right eye was swelling and closing from a punch that Short-Fat, now identified as Riley Peach, had hit him with once he’d woken from unconsciousness and gotten his bearings. The fist that had hit Nathan had landed just a glancing blow, but the thick wristwatch on Peach’s left arm had snagged his eye with considerable force. Nathan figured he would have a beauty of a shiner if he lived long enough to find a mirror.
Mary walked with her head down—resigned, it seemed, to their fate as they approached the forty-foot-high ‘Ev’ry-1-Welcome’ sign by the side of the I-25. Two of Baxter’s men were up ladders, attaching ropes to the high gantry in the air. The ropes were thick blue nylon tow lines on which rough nooses had been fashioned to their dangling ends.
There were three ropes.
Cal’s body was going to be hung alongside those of Mary and Nathan. “If you’re making a statement,” Blaine had said before he’d been carried out into the parking lot, “you might as well do it properly.”
The delight Blaine had taken in pointing that out to
Nathan chilled him completely. It stopped the breath in his throat and sucked any hope from his bones. He was tired and alone, three hours of hard walking from what was left of his family and his friends, and there was nothing left in the tank to help him.
The men sat Blaine down with a good view of the makeshift gallows—near enough so he could have a good view, but not so near that he’d have to crane his neck back too far. He swigged at the whiskey, his gnarly Adam’s apple bobbing like a grizzly yo-yo, then wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “By the power vested in me…” he began.
Mary snorted, throwing Blaine off his stride. “Power? You’ve always been a bully and a coward, Blaine. You couldn’t get any power or influence in Casper because you were smart or kind. No, you had to take it. Stewart is fifty times the man you are.”
“Was. Get your tenses right, Mary.”
Mary began to talk again, but Blaine held up an emphatic hand. “Be quiet. I can’t sit here all day watching you die. I need to see a doctor about my knee.”
Mary wasn’t being quiet for anyone. “You need to see a psychiatrist, Blaine. You’re a weak psychopath, and I’m going to my death cursing you with all my might.”
Mary had lifted her head now, and was spitting the words at him. Nathan had seen some things since the fall of the Big Winter, but this ranked as one of the most remarkable. That Mary could draw on such righteous anger at such a moment gave him at least some comfort, in that there were still strong, able, and good people in this horrific world. People who his two sons, now to be left without either of their parents, would have a chance of meeting as they grew up.
A tear welled in the eye Peach had punched. Anyone looking might have thought the tear was because of the injury, but Nathan would know differently. Even at this time of maximum hurt and danger, there was something here to salve his worn spirit. And Mary was that something.
“Baxter,” Blaine said simply.
Baxter nodded and came up behind Mary. He pulled a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and hoiked her nose back like he was a league bowler lifting his favorite ball. As Mary yelled in pain, he stuffed the cloth into her open mouth.
Mary’s eyes blazed with all the anger in the world, but her tongue was stilled.
Blaine nodded, took a swig from the open neck of his bottle, and continued, “By the powers vested in me during the emergency session last night in City Hall, I hereby sentence the three of you to death.”
Electricity leaped from Mary’s eyes directly into Nathan’s heart. “On what charge?” he asked.
Blaine thought about it, and then nodded to himself and grinned. “No charge. It’s a freebie.”
Baxter, Reed, and the others laughed and clapped. Like every extra-judicial lynching in history, there was only need for a cursory nod to the idea of due process or justice. This was pure bloodlust brought about by the dereliction of morality. Nathan knew there was no point arguing this out with Blaine along logical lines. He wouldn’t be interested in that. All he wanted was to see Nathan swinging and his legs jerking.
“So, for the third, and last time, of asking—powers blah blah blah, defense of the City of Casper blah blah blah, sedition, mutiny, blah blah blah, and aggressive jaywalking without due care and attention, I decree we get this party started. Get ’em up the flagpole, boys—let’s see who salutes!”
Nathan and Mary were pushed to the base of the sign. Reed and Baxter dragged Cal’s corpse behind them.
“Start with the dead boy first,” Blaine ordered. “Let them see what’s coming. They’ll enjoy the instruction.”
Cal’s body was lifted high enough to get the noose around the neck, and then the men on the gantry hauled him up hand over hand until he was dangling five feet above the tarmac.
Nathan looked away as Mary began to sob through the handkerchief. Nathan’s arms were being held from behind by hard hands which bit like claws into his skin. Even if he bothered trying to run, there was far too firm a grip on him.
“I’m trying to decide whether it should be ladies or gentlemen first,” Blaine crowed. He snapped his fingers as if he’d had an idea. “No, I have a better notion. Two for the price of one. Take ’em up together!”
Two more men from the gathering swarmed up the ladders to join the other two on the gantry. Nathan and Mary were pushed under their nooses, Nathan’s eyes coming level with Cal’s gently swinging boots. He’d shown no sign of resisting the lynching, and that at least was a now confirmed blessing. The drag across the parking lot had apparently finished him off.
Nathan was surprised at how clear and precise his thinking was at this moment. He’d faced death a dozen times since leaving Glens Falls, but seen nothing on the scale and finality of this. Perhaps it was freeing, knowing the end was coming and there was no obvious route of escape. There was no point to being angry or giving Blaine the satisfaction of seeing him panic and lose it.
“Can we just get this over with?” Nathan asked. “I’m freezing.”
Blaine looked angrily at two of his men, who laughed appreciatively at Nathan’s wisecrack. It suddenly looked like all the fun had gone out of the process for Blaine, though. His face deflated like a punctured balloon. “Get on with it!” Blaine ordered curtly, and Nathan felt he could at least go to his end knowing he’d scored one last satisfying field goal.
The nooses were placed around Mary and Nathan’s necks and tightened at the back, and then the men charged with pulling them up took the strain into their hands.
Nathan felt the rope bite into his skin, and his throat constrict. He shook his shoulders and tried to pull his hands apart, thinking that perhaps even at this late stage there was a chance the knots around his wrists might have slackened.
But they had not.
Nathan was pulled up onto tiptoe and then lifted off the ground. His eyes felt like they were deforming, and his head was filled with images—Cyndi laughing. Tony smiling; Brandon in his arms. The house in Glens Falls. His daddy.
Family first, son. Family first.
Nathan’s feet smacked to the floor, and such was the unexpected shock of it happening that he continued all the way down to his knees. The rope attached to his neck snaked down around him like an Indian Rope Trick gone wrong.
Mary was also back down, but still standing, trying to cough the handkerchief out of her mouth as her rope fell around her, too.
Blaine was screaming, “Get them! Get them!” to the men left on the ground. Peach had begun looking around wildly, trying to get a bead on something.
“Where are they? I can’t see anyone!” Peach fired blindly in the direction of whatever threat was bringing a halt to the lynching.
Nathan didn’t know exactly what was happening, but he got a pretty good idea of what it entailed as a body fell from the gantry above, smashing into the tarmac face-first.
A second body thumped into the tarmac behind the inn’s sign and Blaine howled, “Get me inside! Get me inside!”
But the men around him were already running for their own lives. Peach was backing away, firing into what seemed like empty space at the top of the slope of brush lining the highway. A bullet punched a hole through his forehead and blew the back of his skull off. He spun backward and crashed to the ground, the brisk wind flapping his clothes with thrumming vibrations. Two more men who were running and firing as they did so were felled before they made it to the entranceway of the inn.
Shots rang out from the gantry above as the last man able to fire tried to get some idea of where the killshots were coming from.
Nathan, keeping his head down, got to his feet. He didn’t know if he was next on the menu, if this was retaliation for Blaine’s takeover in Casper or a rescue mission. Whoever was firing on the group was doing so with the impunity of deadly accuracy. Baxter was shot on the steps to the inn’s entrance. Reed made it to the door before he was felled.
One more body plummeted with a scream from the gantry above the sign, and suddenly Nathan, Mary, and Blaine were the only ones l
eft in the parking lot, the wind cutting down out of an iron gray sky that was threatening rain across the Wyoming prairie, or something even colder.
Mary had finally gotten the handkerchief out of her mouth and spat it to the ground. “Who the hell is firing at us?”
Nathan shook his head. “No idea. But I’m not complaining. Thought it might be friends of yours.”
Mary shrugged. “Not a clue.”
An agonized yell from Blaine made Nathan immediately think that man had been shot, but as he looked back at him, he could see why he’d called out. The pain in Blaine’s leg had come back like all the angels in hell.
Blaine, terrified that he’d be the next victim of the sniper, had thrown himself off his Chieftain’s Chair and was trying to pull himself over the tarmac. His nails were already bloody and broken, his chin grazed and his broken knee lagging behind. He didn’t have the strength to get up on his good knee, and so he moved like a dry swimmer in a desperate miming of movement. His breathing labored, his eyes full of tears, whispering to himself, “Don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me…”
A screech of tires took Nathan’s attention away from the pathetic sight of Blaine trying to drag himself to safety. As long as he wasn’t shot any time in the next hour, the man might make it.
The gray Ford Taurus LX from the roadblock up the highway skidded in a wide circle to take the shortest route toward Nathan and Mary. The windshield was reflecting the sky and burgeoning clouds, and there was no way to see who was driving, but within ten seconds, the car had negotiated the low-curbed strips of scrub that had once been the grassy areas between the parking areas and bumped to a stop.
The door opened and Free hopped out with a SIG in his hand. He covered Blaine and the building across the roof of the Taurus and shouted, “Come on! Get in!”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 53