The Shotgun Arcana (55 page)

Memory is a powerful thing, memories of free candy given to children, to jokes told on the front porch of Shultz’s General Store, memories of sick children given medicine when neither parent nor Auggie could afford it. A lifetime of small, decent, good deeds: the sum total of a man’s life.

“That sumbitch done went and shot Mr. Shultz!” a man in the crowd called out.

“Who the hell does that bastard Zeal think he is!” Another shout from the masses.

“No one does that to Auggie!” another angry voice called out. “Let’s tar and feather these dirty dogs and run them out of town!”

The crowd surged, an angry living thing. Gunshots began to ring out as Praetorians fired on the citizens who were pulling them off their horses. Shouts of the wounded and the unarmed dying were everywhere as the soldiers began to methodically pick off the locals. Those locals with irons on their hips fired back and Main Street became a battlefield .

Bick shrugged and the ropes broke around him, not that anyone noticed. He knelt by Auggie’s still form. His eyes burned accusingly into Zeal’s red, furious face. Gillian reached the platform. Bick put a hand on the shopkeeper’s bloody chest. “Bless you and keep you, Augustus Shultz,” Bick said. Gillian knelt by her husband, cradling him in her arms, and stroked his face. The tears fell in hot, heavy drops on Auggie’s placid face. Bick looked for Zeal, but he was already gone.

Highfather lashed out, his hands now free at the height of the distraction. He drove a powerful uppercut to Snake-Man’s chin, while Jim turned and shot two rounds, point-blank, from his pistol into a Praetorian’s belly. Jim handed Highfather a pistol and the sheriff fired and dropped two of the startled Praetorians beside them, while bullets splintered the wooden posts next to Highfather’s head. Snake-Man lunged at Highfather and Jon fired again but the Indian seemed to be made of smoke and lightning, and Highfather’s bullet missed him as the medicine man swung himself around the opposite side of the awning posts on the saloon’s porch. Snake-Man flashed down with one of his hooked finger blades to rip into Highfather’s vulnerable throat. Something struck Snake-Man at the waist and tumbled the medicine man onto the dirt of Main Street. Mutt stood, his blood knife in his fist, only a few feet away from Snake-Man.

“Oh, thank God,” Highfather said, nodding to Mutt. “It’s the sheriff.”

Snake-Man slowly got up, a smile spreading across his face. Mutt grinned, all yellowed snag and sharp, straight fang.

“Don’t know what you’re grinning about, lick-finger,” Mutt said. “I kicked your ass in your daddy’s hidey-hole. Now I’m going to kick your ass up here on my turf.”

“Nuga Togu,” Snake-Man said, and it began.

Both men were blurs, moving faster than the human eye could track, a storm of violence with lightning flashes from hooks and knives, sparks erupting: jumping, ducking, spinning, turning, driving fists into each other when their weapons could touch only blurring air. Coyote and Snake warred in the dirt of Main Street, their blood burning in their sons’ veins.

Highfather and Jim dropped the other soldiers near the platform, grabbed their rifles and moved out. The sheriff and deputy paused, then fired back to back, clearing the street around them. Jon saw Bick run down off the platform and disappear inside the Paradise Falls.

“I was worried about you, boy,” Highfather shouted over the din as he squeezed off a round from a Winchester rifle, dropping another Praetorian on horseback who had been threatening some civilians, south on Main. “Glad you made it home.”

“Me, too, sir,” Jim said. “Sorry I’m late.” Highfather laughed.

“We’ll discuss job attendance after we win the war,” Highfather said. “By the way, where is Constance, before Maude skins you alive?”

“She’s safe,” Jim said. “Safe” was the easiest way to explain right now. Easier than telling the sheriff that a fourteen-year-old girl who could whoop a bear in a fair fight was off alone in the desert, avoiding Zeal’s patrols, riding like a she-demon for Virginia City and help. “We’re still seeing the Elephant here,” Highfather shouted. He dropped the empty rifle and blasted a Praetorian sniper off a rooftop with his six-gun as the sniper’s bullet tossed up the dirt near him. “A lot of folks are going to get themselves killed, unless we get them organized.” Jim suddenly saw a crew of Praetorians rolling out the Gatling gun, off at about seven o’clock from his and Highfather’s position, and preparing to open fire on a wide swath of the rioting crowd that was being led into battle by Gordy Duell, the hotel dick.

“Aww, dammit!” Jim said, and ran straight toward the cluster of soldiers starting to crank up the gun. He fired Pa’s pistol and whooped like a rebel, like his pa had taught him to. Three of the crew fell, dead or wounded. The other men took bead on him, dead bang, when hatchets with green ribbons attached to them materialized into the soldiers’ backs and necks, dropping them where they stood.

Ch’eng Huang’s Green Ribbon soldiers joined the fray, striking quickly and silently against the Praetorians from the shadows and the fringes of the crowd, where they had been waiting for the right time to strike. Jim reached the Gatling gun and Highfather fought his way over to him.

“That was the stupidest thing I ever saw,” Highfather said, slapping the grinning boy on the back. “Good job. Let’s get this thing spinning and pointed at the right folks.”

The gun clattered like a telegraph, blasting holes in the Praetorians’ crumbling lines. Highfather jumped on a riderless horse and galloped to the north end of Main, killing Zeal’s men as he rode. He found a cluster of armed citizens, led by Alton Sprang, owner of Sprang’s Rooms for Rent, pinned down and being squeezed by organized Praetorian fire. Highfather barked orders to the men while angry slivers of lead whined inches from him and his horse.

“You fellas, focus on that group over there behind the water troughs,” Highfather shouted. He cocked and fired another rifle he had acquired from a dead Praetorian. “And you all start picking off that mounted group that keeps riding by, once their cover fire is jammed up. Focus, now breathe, and make each shot count. It’s like shooting a fence post.”

Even as Highfather began to secure North Main, Jim found that Zeal’s troops on South Main were beginning to rally. The street was littered with bodies, but most of the noncombatants were in hiding now. The Praetorian commanders began to direct fire and whittle away at the armed citizens and Chinese hatchet men. Slowly, the momentum of the mob began to turn as the trained and well-armed soldiers cut down the rebelling townsfolk.

That was when the ropes dropped out of the sky, behind the Praetorian lines, and the pirates began sliding down them, firing and screaming as they came, many with burning fuses in their long, wild beards. They dropped from baskets beneath gray spherical orbs that hung silently in the cold, bright sky, approximately a dozen of the bizarre craft, each with a four-man crew. Some of the pirates dropped small black powder grenades into the ranks of the mercenaries from above. Explosions ripped through the Praetorian lines from the small bombs.

“And that,” Highfather said, riding up, “should be Black Rowan’s contribution to the shindig—some of her Barbary Coast associates. She promised me some backup and she was good to her word. I like that in a criminal mastermind.”

“What are those things they’re dropping from?” Jim asked.

“Hot-air balloons left over from the war,” Highfather said. “Both sides used them for reconnaissance. Rowan collected a bunch of them and their pilots after the Union canceled the program. She calls them her Aerial Algerines.”

“Well,” Jim said as he reloaded, “don’t that just beat the Dutch. They’re a sight keener than cowboys, for sure.”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Highfather said, turning his mount to dive back into the battle while Jim spun up the barking Gatling gun again.

The pirates’ pistols boomed as they took the Praetorian emplacements completely by surprise, and as they hit the ground cutlasses, daggers and knives were drawn and the screaming, howling, tattooed, half-naked men cut a bloody swath through the confused and demoralized clusters of mercenaries they attacked. The Green Ribbon Tong warriors took advantage of the confusion caused by Black Rowan’s pirates to strike quickly and silently as well. The bizarre assortment of troops led by Highfather and supported by Jim’s withering Gatling gun fire slowly began to turn the tides of the war along Main Street in the favor of the Golgotha forces.

*   *   *

Inside the Paradise Falls, Maude and Emily drifted silently through the kitchen door, entering as soon as Zeal started making his initial address to the crowds. The small cluster of guards milling at the kitchen entrance never saw Maude coming, and Emily was amazed at the speed, silence and grace with which this masked woman laid low three trained soldiers.

“How, how did you do that?” the girl asked as Maude disarmed the unconscious men and tossed their weapons away.

“More practice than I care to recall,” Maude said. There was a crack of distant gunfire repeated and then another series of discharges.

“The signal,” Emily said. “They got the hostages free!”

“Okay, Emily,” Maude said, “only move when I move and step exactly where I’ve stepped, yes?” Emily nodded and the two began to slowly move across the main floor of the saloon. Everyone was outside, listening to Zeal. Maude thought she heard Auggie Shultz’s voice calling out to the crowd. They reached the second floor as a lone shot boomed out and Maude heard the crowd erupt in anger. A horrible image filled her imagination: Gillian weeping over a wounded or dead Auggie.
No. No, damn you, Zeal. If he brought that down on such good souls …

But for now she had to stick to the plan: get Emily to the office and …

Batra stepped out of an impossibly small shadow to her left and blocked the hallway to Bick’s office. He snapped a knuckle blow at Maude’s throat, designed to crush her windpipe and kill her. Maude caught his hand and jammed a nail into his ulnar artery. He twisted and turned to get free, and as he did, Maude side-kicked him over the railing. As he plummeted toward the floor below, he caught the railing and swung back onto it, balancing on the thin plane.

“Emily! Get what you need in the office,” Maude said.

She jumped after Batra onto the rail and tumbled, hands over feet, toward the assassin.

*   *   *

Mutt and Snake-Man grappled both bloody, cut and battered, raging like angry ghosts, like hot desert winds, instead of men. Mutt’s blood knife tore halfway through a hitching post and stuck there, vibrating. He let go of the knife, as Snake-Man ripped an ugly gash in Mutt’s stomach with one of his hook blades and followed through with a dizzying punch to the side of Mutt’s head. Mutt staggered and Snake-Man pressed his advantage, trying to grab Mutt’s hair and open the lawman’s throat, but as he moved in for the kill, Mutt rallied and drove the heel of his palm into Snake-Man’s chin, while the shaman swept his leg to knock Mutt over, but Mutt jumped clear and followed up by driving his fist into Snake-Man’s face. The medicine man bellowed in pain and stumbled backward. Mutt shoved and tripped him and then dropped on top of the stunned medicine man, pinning his arms under his knees. Mutt punched him again and again, blood spraying from his face. “Give,” Mutt said. Snake-Man began to open his mouth to speak. Mutt drove a fist squarely into Snake-Man’s nose and the medicine man was still.

“Good choice,” Mutt said, slumping.

*   *   *

Jagged tongues of blue-white lightning streamed down Main Street, destroying buildings, starting fires and killing and scattering troops on both sides of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians, Praetorians, tongs and pirates all were burned and killed by the electrical blasts. Several of the hot air balloons were struck and exploded, tumbling to the ground like burning party streamers.

Professor Zenith laughed as he adjusted the dials and knobs on his galvanic emitter and loosed more sky fire on hapless forces along and above Main Street. The Professor’s weapon looked like a massive cylindrical rifle with a tuning fork instead of a barrel. A mass of sparking, knotted wires and cables ran from the back of the emitter to the helpless organic voltic piles that writhed mindlessly in pain in the back of his wagon. Zenith pulled the trigger and called down another electrical strike on the rabble. He was like unto a god, now, and he would wipe the street and the sky clean of the insects who dared to defy his patron, Raziel.

There was an odd rumble and a strange hum from some distance. The lightning seemed to weaken, as if its power was being diverted, drained away.

*   *   *

A few hundred feet farther down the northern side of Main Street, Clay Turlough’s small cart had come to rest. Clay patted the horse that had drawn his wagon gently on the rump and the horse trotted away, free. Clay’s wagon was covered in odd apparatus, much like Professor Zenith’s, and it seemed to be drawing all the destructive electricity the professor was trying to hurl about, down into some kind of multitiered tower of steel and wires, much like a lightning rod, built into Clay’s machine.

“What!” Zenith shouted, “Preposterous! How dare you trifle with the progress of science, sir!”

“How dare you pretend to call that science, sir!” Clay shouted back. “You pervert the very quintessence of science to simply slake your own bloodlust. You are no man of knowledge. I know the most probable source of your voltic batteries as well, sir and you are a madman and a blackguard!”

“You feeble bumpkin,” Zenith hissed. “Your ionic grounding system couldn’t stand up to a strong wind, let alone the unleashed fury of the subtle fluid!”

“Oh, and by the looks of your discharge leakage, your calculations are at fault as well,” Clay called as he pulled down a heavy pair of smoked work goggles over his eyes. “Have at you, sir, may the better design win!”

“En garde!” Zenith shouted, and twisted the knob on his machine to above the safe power threshold, hurling a tunnel of lightning at Clay and his machine. Clay “parried” the blast by modulating and dispersing the harmful energy. What little of Clay’s hair remained stood on end from the discharge.