The Very Best of F & SF v1 (41 page)

“Answer me.”

She rocked in
the chair and the floor trembled. Prayers and garbled bits of jargon flew from
her lips.

He rammed the
barrel of the gun forward. He could feel the terrified wind sucked into her
lungs more than he could hear it. Her hands beat at his head; her legs drummed
against the floor. And at the same time the huge body tried to take the invader
and enwomb it. Outside nothing watched them but the bruised sky.

She screamed
something, high and inarticulate.

“What?”

“Mountains!”

“What about
them?”

“He stops... on
the other side... s-s-sweet
Jesus!...
. to m-make his strength. Med-m-meditation, do you understand? Oh...
I’m... I’m...”

The whole huge
mountain of flesh suddenly strained forward and upward, yet he was careful not
to let her secret flesh touch him.

Then she seemed
to wilt and grow smaller, and she wept with her hands in her lap.

“So,” he said,
getting up. “The demon is served, eh?”

“Get out. You’ve
killed the child. Get out. Get out.”

He stopped at
the door and looked back. “No child,” he said briefly. “No angel, no demon.”

“Leave me alone.”

He did.

XVI

By the time he
arrived at Kennerly’s, a queer obscurity had come over the northern horizon and
he knew it was dust. Over Tull the air was still dead quiet.

Kennerly was
waiting for him on the chaff-strewn stage that was the floor of his barn. “Leaving?”
He grinned abjectly at the gunslinger.

“Yes.”

“Not before the
storm?”

“Ahead of it.”

“The wind goes
faster than a man on a mule. In the open it can kill you.”

“I’ll want the
mule now,” the gunslinger said simply.

“Sure.” But Kennerly
did not turn away, merely stood as if searching for something further to say,
grinning his groveling, hate-filled grin, and his eyes flicked up and over the
gunslinger’s shoulder.

The gunslinger
sidestepped and turned at the same time, and the heavy stick of stovewood that
the girl Soobie held swished through the air, grazing his elbow only. She lost
hold of it with the force of her swing and it clattered over the floor. In the
explosive height of the loft, barnswallows took shadowed wing.

The girl looked
at him bovinely. Her breasts thrust with overripe grandeur at the wash-faded
shirt she wore. One thumb sought the haven of her mouth with dreamlike
slowness.

The gunslinger
turned back to Kennerly. The grin was huge. His skin was waxy yellow. His eyes
rolled in their sockets. “I—” he began in a phlegm-filled whisper and could not
continue.

“The mule,” the
gunslinger prodded gently.

“Sure, sure,
sure,” Kennerly whispered, the grin now touched with incredulity. He shuffled
after it.

He moved to
where he could watch Kennerly. The hostler brought the mule back and handed him
the bridle. “You get in an’ tend your sister,” he said to Soobie.

Soobie tossed
her head and didn’t move.

The gunslinger
left them there, staring at each other across the dusty, droppings-strewn
floor, he with his sick grin, she with dumb, animal defiance. Outside the heat
was still like a hammer.

XVII

He walked the
mule up the center of the street, his boots sending up squirts of dust. His
waterbags were strapped across the mule’s back.

He stopped at
Sheb’s, and Allie was not there. The place was deserted, battened for the
storm, but still dirty from the night before. She had not begun her cleaning
and the place was as fetid as a wet dog.

He filled his
tote sack with corn meal, dried and roasted corn, and half of the raw hamburger
in the cooler. He left four gold pieces stacked on the planked counter. Allie
did not come down. Sheb’s piano bid him a silent, yellow-toothed good-by. He
stepped back out and cinched the tote sack across the mule’s back. There was a
tight feeling in his throat. He might still avoid the trap, but the chances
were small. He was, after all, the interloper.

He walked past
the shuttered, waiting buildings, feeling the eyes that peered through cracks
and chinks. The man in black had played God in Tull. Was it only a sense of the
cosmic comic, or a matter of desperation? It was a question of some importance.

There was a
shrill, harried scream from behind him, and doors suddenly threw themselves
open. Forms lunged. The trap was sprung, then. Men in longhandles and men in
dirty dungarees. Women in slacks and in faded dresses. Even children, tagging
after their parents. And in every hand there was a chunk of wood or a knife.

His reaction was
automatic, instantaneous, inbred. He whirled on his heels while his hands
pulled the guns from their holsters, the hafts heavy and sure in his hands. It
was Allie, and of course it had to be Allie, coming at him with her face
distorted, the scar a hellish, distorted purple in the lowering light. He saw
that she was held hostage; the distorted, grimacing face of Sheb peered over
her shoulder like a witch’s familiar. She was his shield and sacrifice. He saw
it all, clear and shadowless in the frozen deathless light of the sterile calm,
and heard her:

“He’s got me O
Jesus don’t shoot don’t don’t
don’t—”
But the hands were trained. He was the last of
his breed and it was not only his mouth that knew the High Speech. The guns
beat their heavy, atonal music into the air. Her mouth flapped and she sagged
and the guns fired again. Sheb’s head snapped back. They both fell into the
dust.

Sticks flew
through the air, rained on him. He staggered, fended them off. One with a nail
pounded raggedly through it ripped at his arm and drew blood. A man with a
beard stubble and sweat-stained armpits lunged flying at him with a dull kitchen
knife held in one paw. The gunslinger shot him dead and the man thumped into
the street. His teeth clicked audibly as his chin struck.

“SATAN!” Someone
was screaming: “THE ACCURSED! BRING HIM DOWN!”

“THE INTERLOPER!”
Another voice cried. Sticks rained on him. A knife struck his boot and bounced.
“THE INTERLOPER! THE ANTICHRIST!”

He blasted his
way through the middle of them, running as the bodies fell, his hands picking
the targets with dreadful accuracy. Two men and a woman went down, and he ran
through the hole they left.

He led them a
feverish parade across the street and toward the rickety general
store-barbershop that faced Sheb’s. He mounted the boardwalk, turned again, and
fired the rest of his loads into the charging crowd. Behind them, Sheb and Allie
and the others lay crucified in the dust.

They never
hesitated or faltered, although every shot he fired found a vital spot and
although they had probably never seen a gun except for pictures in old
magazines.

He retreated,
moving his body like a dancer to avoid the flying missiles. He reloaded as he
went, with a rapidity that had also been trained into his fingers. They
shuttled busily between gunbelts and cylinders. The mob came up over the
boardwalk and he stepped into the general store and rammed the door closed. The
large display window to the right shattered inward and three men crowded
through. Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire.
He shot them all, and the two that followed them. They fell in the window, hung
on the jutting shards of glass, choking the opening.

The door crashed
and shuddered with their weight and he could hear
her
voice: “THE KILLER!
YOUR SOULS! THE CLOVEN HOOF!”

The door ripped
off its hinges and fell straight in, making a flat handclap. Dust puffed up
from the floor. Men, women, and children charged him. Spittle and stovewood
flew. He shot his guns empty and they fell like ninepins. He retreated, shoving
over a flour barrel, rolling it at them, into the barbershop, throwing a pan of
boiling water that contained two nicked straight-razors. They came on,
screaming with frantic incoherency. From somewhere, Sylvia Pittston exhorted
them, her voice rising and falling on blind inflections. He pushed shells into
hot chambers, smelling the smells of shave and tonsure, smelling his own flesh
as the calluses at the tips of his fingers singed.

He went through
the back door and onto the porch. The flat scrubland was at his back now,
flatly denying the town that crouched against its huge haunch. Three men
hustled around the corner, with large betrayer grins on their faces. They saw
him, saw him seeing them, and the grins curdled in the second before he mowed
them down. A woman had followed them, howling. She was large and fat and known
to the patrons of Sheb’s as Aunt Mill. The gunslinger blew her backwards and
she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt kinked up between her thighs.

He went down the
steps and walked backwards into the desert, ten paces, twenty. The back door of
the barber shop flew open and they boiled out. He caught a glimpse of Sylvia
Pittston. He opened up. They fell in squats, they fell backwards, they tumbled
over the railing into the dust. They cast no shadows in the deathless purple
light of the day. He realized he was screaming. He had been screaming all
along. His eyes felt like cracked ball bearings. His balls had drawn up against
his belly. His legs were wood. His ears were iron.

The guns were
empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into an Eye and a Hand, and he
stood, screaming and reloading, his mind far away and absent, letting his hands
do their reloading trick. Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent
twenty-five years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the
blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak
their own tale.

They were in
throwing range as he finished, and a stick struck him on the forehead and
brought blood in abraded drops. In two seconds they would be in gripping
distance. In the forefront he saw Kennerly; Kennerly’s younger daughter,
perhaps eleven; Soobie; two male barflies; a female barfly named Amy Feldon. He
let them all have it, and the ones behind them. Their bodies thumped like
scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers.

They halted for
a moment, startled, the mob face shivering into individual, bewildered faces. A
man ran in a large, screaming circle. A woman with blisters on her hands turned
her head up and cackled feverishly at the sky. The man whom he had first seen
sitting gravely on the steps of the mercantile store made a sudden and amazing
load in his pants.

He had time to
reload one gun.

Then it was
Sylvia Pittston, running at him, waving a wooden cross in each hand. “DEVIL!
DEVIL! DEVIL! CHILD-KILLER! MONSTER!

DESTROY HIM,
BROTHERS AND SISTERS! DESTROY THE CHILD-KILLING INTERLOPER!”

He put a shot
into each of the crosspieces, blowing the roods to splinters, and four more
into the woman’s head. She seemed to accordion into herself and waver like a
shimmer of heat.

They all stared
at her for a moment in tableau, while the gunslinger’s fingers did their
reloading trick. The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat circles were
branded into the tips of each one.

There were less
of them, now; he had run through them like a mower’s scythe. He thought they
would break with the woman dead, but someone threw a knife. The hilt struck him
squarely between the eyes and knocked him over. They ran at him in a reaching,
vicious clot. He fired his guns empty again, lying in his own spent shells. His
head hurt and he saw large brown circles in front of his eyes. He missed one
shot, downed eleven.

But they were on
him, the ones that were left. He fired the four shells he had reloaded, and
then they were beating him, stabbing him. He threw a pair of them off his left
arm and rolled away. His hands began doing their infallible trick. He was
stabbed in the shoulder. He was stabbed in the back. He was hit across the
ribs. He was stabbed in the ass. A small boy squirmed at him and made the only
deep cut, across the bulge of his calf. The gunslinger blew his head off.

They were
scattering and he let them have it again. The ones left began to retreat toward
the sand-colored, pitted buildings, and still the hands did their trick, like
overeager dogs that want to do their rolling-over trick for you not once or
twice but all night, and the hands were cutting them down as they ran. The last
one made it as far as the steps of the barbershop’s back porch, and then the
gunslinger’s bullet took him in the back of the head.

Silence came
back in, filling jagged spaces.

The gunslinger
was bleeding from perhaps twenty different wounds, all of them shallow except
for the cut across his calf. He bound it with a strip of shirt and then
straightened and examined his kill.

They trailed in a
twisted, zigzagging path from the back door of the barbershop to where he
stood. They lay in all positions. None of them seemed to be sleeping.