Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (13 page)
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.”
“Meanin’?”
“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.
“Mrs. Haymuss, you and Marky help Tony bind that ax where it is so poor Chad doesn’t have to hold it in his own chest until help gets here, if you please. Then have a look at Tony. He’s not exactly doing well himself.”
“Of course, Mr. Conn,” the sturdy woman said. She waded right in. She was as businesslike as he was, in her own way, and since she did the hog-butchering and other such chores as needed, she wasn’t one to let squeamishness get in her way.
“What about me, Mr. Conn?” Potar asked.
“You’re hired, if you want on.”
“I do!”
“Ace.”
“What do you want me to do, then?”
Conn looked over his two bouncers. “Gonna need some more muscle,” he said.
And an upgrade, he added mentally. He didn’t say it out loud. No need to be unkind to his help, especially one who’d taken an ax in the collarbone, and another who’d been beaten lopsided with an ax handle, leaping to his defense. He’d see Tony and Chad done right by no matter what. That was his way.
But his mind, always planning, always reckoning, had shifted into overdrive.
“What now?” Potar asked.
Conn sighed.
“Get this mess cleaned up,” he said. “Get Coffin-Maker
Sam rounded up and taking care of poor Nancy. This other trash, too, I suppose, if their kin want to pay for them. Far as I’m concerned, they can go to the ville dump.
“And then, I think, we need to hunt up Wymie Berdone and have a little talk with her.”
Potar smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. Except to Mathus Conn, under the circumstances, it sort of was. He was starting to see the form their…working relationship was likely to take.
“You gonna settle with her?” the huge man asked.
“Not exactly. I’m goin’ to join up with her. On my terms.”
“Wait, boss,” Chad croaked. Mrs. Haymuss had made him lie back down on the floor while she and her assistant tied the ax in place with some kitchen rags. It wasn’t the most sanitary arrangement, and Chad was making some noise at the necessary way they had to lift and shift him to get the thing bound in place to await the healer. But it was all going to have to do.
“You can’t mean that! Not after she sent these fu— Sent these coldhearts after us!”
“I don’t rightly think she did, Tony. I think young Mr. Sharkey, here—”
He glanced at the former ringleader, who still lay folded back where he was. His face looked like a punched-in and half-deflated predark soccer ball that somebody had splashed with about a bucket of red paint.
“I think he kind of took the bit in his teeth. He was always looking to start trouble, preferably the sort where he got to hurt people. I think she gave him some instructions that he interpreted in accordance with his desires.”
Tony blinked at him. The bouncer was not normally a
feeb—brighter than poor Chad, in any event. But
events
had clouded his wits, somewhat, for which Conn couldn’t rightly blame him.
“Events have happened that we’ve got to deal with. I prefer to do what I can to see that minimum damage is done to you, to Sinkhole and to me. And if I stay in opposition to Wymie—triple crazy as I think she and her scheme are—I’m not going to be in a position to do any of that.”
“But you don’t mean to take orders from her,” Potar said. It wasn’t a question.
Conn smiled and patted the younger man’s muscle- and fat-packed cheek.
“I knew you were smart, Potar.”
From the bushes that fringed the top of the dig-site pit came the tweeting call of an eastern whip-poor-will. Ryan knew it was Jak.
The crickets had stopped, and so had the tree frogs. Only the rustle of breeze in the branches broke the dead-heavy stillness. And that piping cry again.
“Here we go,” J.B. murmured.
“Eyes skinned, everybody,” Ryan said out of the side of his mouth. He kept digging beside the entry hole to the buried facility. “Blasters down, but grab them when I say.”
It was past dark. The six of them labored on—or pretended to—by the pungent, resinous, black-thready smoke and yellow flickering glow of pinewood torches.
Ryan had chosen to size up their unknown foe as being essentially like stickies: sometimes they acted as if they were no more than clever animals. Sometimes they acted people-smart. In the case of the rubbery-skinned muties, it seemed to vary according to tribe. With these white-haired cannies, they just didn’t have enough hard facts to judge. So he assumed the worst—full human intelligence—without getting welded to the notion.
But now they had come, and Jak had spotted them.
Now if only they don’t spot him, Ryan thought.
As he pitched a shovelful of yellow earth from one
place to another, Ryan kept his lone eye in soft focus, to maximize the acuity of his peripheral vision. After a moment, he saw a branch twitch up to his right.
“Wait for it,” he said, barely moving his lips as he tossed away another scoop of dirt.
“I didn’t think they’d come after us so quick,” Mildred said beneath her voice from somewhere behind him. “First night we try—”