Chapter Thirty-Six

 

 

 

While hastily preparing his makeshift booby trap, J.B. had broken open several of the cases that held samples of explosives or grens, hoping that the explosion would scatter the flames and set fire to the whole gallery.

 

It succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

 

Within a dozen heartbeats the dry wood and the elegant draperies were ablaze. Even with the power on to work the pumps, it was doubtful that much could have been done to save the ville. The damage might possibly have been limited to the north tower if there had been light for the defenders to work out what was happening. And work together to fight the inferno.

 

But the place was in almost total darkness, most of the servants massed in and around the main courtyard and hallway inside the front entrance.

 

Within seconds there were more muffled explosions, one of them blowing out a row of windows on the topmost floor, splinters of glass showering around Ryan and his companions. Slavering tongues of fire protruded from the shattered casements, licking hungrily at the damp air.

 

The chem storm seemed to have sucked all the light from the sky, leaving the land midnight black.

 

"To the trees, quick!" Ryan shouted.

 

The one-eyed man led the way, the others tumbling out of the narrow doorway onto the muddy grass, among the frightened horses and panicked hounds.

 

"Take mounts?" J.B. yelled.

 

"Too spooked. We got the blasters and they're in chaos. Once we get in the trees we head to the redoubt and watch our backs. I don't think they'll follow us too close."

 

Both men had paused on the side of the cleared land nearest to the ruined mill, having to raise their voices above the roaring of the swollen river.

 

"That blood-eye bitch and her father might want to hunt us down, whatever the cost," the Armorer shouted.

 

At that moment there was another cataclysmic flash of lightning and a demonic peal of thunder that made the earth shake with its violence.

 

Simultaneously Harry Guiteau raged from the doorway, followed by four sec men. A second later Marie Mandeville was out, with her father a few steps behind her.

 

Ryan was closest to the forest, J.B. at his shoulder. Because of the size of the entrance and the broken wood that blocked it, the others were strung out, Doc and Dean only a few yards ahead of the sec sergeant.

 

On the heels of the thunder and lightning, the downpour of torrential rain began anew, cutting visibility to less than fifty paces, blurring the action.

 

"Take them!" Marie screamed, her hands raised as if she were about to claw her own eyes out of their sockets.

 

But now the scales had tipped radically in favor of the outlanders.

 

The sec men were both outnumbered and outgunned. They skidded to a halt, Armalites only half-raised.

 

The baron had drawn his revolver and was steadying it, aiming toward Ryan, who was about to gun him down with the SIG-Sauer. Only Doc was quicker.

 

His ornate, gold-plated Le Mat boomed, its lower barrel firing the single 18-gauge round at the baron at almost point-blank range.

 

The scattershot ripped through the man's curling white beard and opened up his throat, slicing the arteries apart and flooding his lungs with his own blood.

 

He staggered a few steps backward, tripping over his spurs, crashing down, hands reaching out helplessly toward the doorway of his ville.

 

The shot was the signal for everyone to open fire.

 

Ryan put down one of the sec men, while a burst from the Uzi destroyed two more.

 

Krysty chilled the last of them with a couple of well-aimed rounds from her snub-nosed, double-action Smith amp; Wesson 640.

 

But not everything went the way of the outlanders.

 

Marie dodged to the right, stooping and picking up her father's fallen blaster, snapping off two rounds toward Michael's crouching figure.

 

Harry Guiteau lived up to everything that Ryan feared about him. He saw the reality of the danger in a single glance and moved toward the only possible coverthe tethered horses, dodging toward them, firing a dozen rounds from the hip as he ran. He didn't expect to hit any of them, but knew it would be enough to make them all duck down.

 

Dean tried to run away from the sec sergeant, but his boots slipped in the wet earth and he fell over, dropping his big Browning.

 

Guiteau never hesitated, diving like an eagle on a lamb, scooping the boy under his arm before vanishing among the skittish horses.

 

Dean yelled out, the cry muffled by the sec man's iron fist. The two of them, along with Marie, were hidden among the dozen or so animals.

 

"Chill the horses?" J.B. shouted.

 

"No. He'll take out the boy." Ryan had dropped to his knees, holding the Steyr rifle, using the Starlite night scope to try to get a clear shot at either Marie or Guiteau. But all he could see were the kicking legs of the horses, making it impossibly risky.

 

The flames were now shooting twenty feet from the broken windows of the tower, and they could all hear explosions from the ammo.

 

Krysty was at Ryan's side, looking back at the burning building and the sprawled body of the white-bearded baron, his red-clad arms and legs spread wide.

 

"Looks like Santa fell out of his sled," she shouted.

 

Guiteau's voice rose above the noise of the fire and the storm. "Any moment now and you get a hundred armed men on top of you, Cawdor. Give up and I'll guarantee the boy lives. Best offer you'll get all day."

 

He appeared, crouched and almost totally hidden behind Dean, the muzzle of the Armalite digging into the boy's chest, his finger on the trigger. A silhouetted figure in the gloom, lit by the baroque glare of the flames.

 

"Tell him to go fuck his dead mother, Dad!" Dean screamed. "Run, Dad."

 

"Let him go, or I'll put you down." The voice, surprisingly, was Mildred's.

 

"Even if you could hit me in this light, nothing'll stop my finger squeezing and blowing the kid away."

 

Ryan was aware that time was racing by at twenty times its usual speed, and that what Guiteau said was true. The rest of the ville's garrison could arrive at any moment, and the standoff would quickly be over.

 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mildred standing like a statue carved from jet, her right arm extended, the ZKR 551 pointed at the sec sergeant.

 

"No, don't," he said.

 

"Be all right," she promised, hardly moving her lips.

 

"Boy dies," Guiteau called, crouching even lower, so that she could see very little of his head or body.

 

But that didn't matter.

 

The Czech revolver snapped once, the flat sound totally insignificant against the bedlam of noise that surged all around them.

 

Ryan was watching carefully, ready to blast the grizzled sec man the moment after he shot his son. He didn't know how Mildred could possibly take him out while simultaneously preventing him from firing the Armalite. He couldn't believe what he saw.

 

At forty paces, uphill, in dreadful light, Mildred had put the Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round precisely where she'd aimed it.

 

Both Guiteau's index finger and the trigger of the automatic rifle were blown off.

 

There was a cry of shocked pain. The Armalite fell to the wet grass, and Dean scampered toward the rest of the group, dodging sideways like a little crab,

 

Harry Guiteau stood still, blood gushing from the severed joint, shaking his head in amazement.

 

"Best shot I ever saw," he said wonderingly. "Best I ever"

 

Mildred put a second round through the bridge of his nose, silencing his voice forever.

 

"Dark night!" J.B. breathed reverentially.

 

"Thanks," Dean panted, arriving to a skidding halt in their midst.

 

Ryan looked at the burning ville, the dead bodies sprawled in front of the broken door, the horses, flanks glistening in the rain, the flames making them look like fiery creatures from the spirit world.

 

"Let's go," he said.

 

"No."

 

"No, Michael? Why not?"

 

"The woman."

 

"Leave her be."

 

The teenager shook his head, staring, stone-eyed, at the horses, with Marie Mandeville lurking somewhere among them, still holding her father's revolver.

 

"Got to finish it, Ryan."

 

"No time."

 

"Time for this." He started to walk back toward the burning north tower, bolstering his own Texas Longhorn Border Special .38.

 

"Chill her if she appears, Mildred," Ryan said. "Don't wait. Just do it."

 

There was a crack of thunder and a brilliant magnesium flare of vivid chem lightning, almost blinding everyone.

 

"Shit?" Mildred cursed. "Done my sight for"

 

They all heard the vicious crack of the baron's revolver, held in the hands of his vengeful daughter.

 

The ribbon of azure silk had fallen out, and her hair tumbled unchecked, soaking wet, reaching below her waist. The white blouse was transparent in the rain and she stood spread-legged, the spurs on her maroon boots gleaming in the firelight.

 

"You bastard little fuck-brain!" she screeched, her face contorted with a blind rage, eyes narrowed to razored slits.

 

The gun flashed twice, bucking in her hand. Michael never deviated from his path, walking slowly and steadily toward the woman.

 

Ryan had the Steyr to his shoulder again but, against all his impulses, he didn't shoot, instead waiting and watching.

 

Another shot. This time the bullet visibly kicked up a clod of mud a yard to Michael's right.

 

"It's an Iver Johnson Cattleman model," J.B. said. "Sounds like it's firing a .44. Five rounds gone. Just one more to go."

 

Now the gap between them was less than ten yards, and still the bare-handed teenager didn't hesitate.

 

The revolver was steady in her gloved fist, centered on his chest.

 

"No," Krysty breathed. "She's going to miss."

 

Marie Mandeville fired the blaster a sixth time. Michael seemed to sway to one side, like a cobra dodging the charge of a mongoose. Ryan felt the wind of the bullet passing him by, like the warm breath of the hooded man with the scythe.

 

The somber sky lowered over the last act of the drama.

 

Marie stared at her nemesis, pulling the trigger on the empty blaster, again and again, the dry clicks barely audible to the six watchers. With a sob of frustrated anger she threw the revolver at Michael, now less than five paces from her. His hand plucked the gun from the air, throwing it over his left shoulder without a single glance.

 

"Should we not do something to deter the young lad from this act of murder?" Doc asked, answering his own question. "No, I suppose in conscience that there is no valid moral reason for the woman to carry on defiling the earth."

 

It was more melodrama than drama the backdrop of the burning building, the rearing, frightened horses, the skulking, terrified hounds, the bodies on the grass that streamed with rainwater, the thunder and lightning seaming the sky around them, the beautiful woman, in her tight, elegant leather pants, falling to her knees in front of the inexorable figure of vengeance, face turned up to him.

 

The young man, his black hair pasted flat to his skull by the storm, reached out to her with his pale, strong fingers.

 

Only the two of them heard that last brief exchange of words. Only one of them could possibly have told it to anyone else. But he never did.

 

The passing of Marie Mandeville, mistress of the mighty ville of Sun Crest, was blessedly brief, far more brief than her corruptly evil and perverted life merited.

 

They heard the small noise of a brittle bone snapping, then the lifeless head lolled to one side, the eyes staring blankly.

 

Michael laid the woman on the grass.

 

"May the Lord have mercy upon the richly deserved ending of the life of milady," Doc said.

 

"Amen," Mildred breathed.

 

"Now let's go," Ryan repeated. "Once we get safe into the woods I don't believe that the sec men'll have any stomach for following us. Not with their home burning down about their ears and their leaders stiffening in the dirt."

 

J.B. touched his arm. "Look. We got company."

 

A number of ragged and filthy men and women stood in the shrubs at the fringe of the forest, watching them in motionless silence.

 

"Wildwooders," Dean said, hefting his recovered Browning.

 

"Easy." Ryan laid a hand on his son's shoulder, gesturing to the scene behind him. "It's over," he called.

 

Krysty murmured in surprise. "Remember that curse."

 

One or two of the hunting dogs, bolder than the rest, had sneaked, belly-down, to where the corpse of their master lay, his head almost severed by Doc's Le Mat, and started to lick the blood from the body.

 

 

 

THE WILDWOODERS HAD FADED back into the shadows beneath the dripping trees as mysteriously as they'd appeared, without a word or a sign.

 

It was time to be moving on.

 

The glow from the fire lighted the sky behind the seven friends as they crossed the stone bridge over the south fork of the Antelope, heading back toward the distant redoubt.

 

Ryan had been right.

 

Disheartened by the reversal in their fortunes, all in the space of an hour, the inhabitants of the ville made no effort to pursue the destroyers of their lives.