The Six-Gun Tarot (48 page)

“Let him go,” Highfather said to Phillips, hefting the cavalry sword. “You so keen to kick an ass, come try kicking mine.”

The weight came off Mutt’s chest as Phillips stood and faced the sheriff.

“With pleasure,” the deacon said. “I’ve been trying to figure out why everyone in this town is so scared of you, Sheriff. I’m going to enjoy this.”

Suddenly Ambrose was behind Highfather, locking the younger man’s arms into a fierce hold, above the sheriff’s head. The sword clattered to the silver floor.

“Hello, Sheriff Highfather. I was hoping you’d be with us for the end,” the preacher said. His breath reeked of decay. “Phillips, please give me Sheriff Highfather’s heart, if you will.”

“No!” Mutt bellowed. He was staggering to rise, his face a swollen mask, matted with his bloody hair. “Ain’t gonna do nothing to him, you big stupid sumbitch. We ain’t done yet! I ain’t done with your cowardly, crazy ass! Come on!”

Phillips turned back to Mutt, smiling. The deputy was on his hands and knees crawling around, groping across the debris-strewn floor of the vault. Blood spattered in thick, quick droplets from his smashed face. The deacon strode toward Mutt as the chamber shook again and more debris crashed down.

“You too damn dumb to know when to just lay there and wait to die, half-breed?” he said, closing on the crawling man. “Want a little more pain before the end?”

Highfather drove his head back into Ambrose’s nose and was greeted with a satisfying crunch. The old preacher grunted and loosened his grip. Jon slipped loose, spun and drove a powerful right hook into the old man’s jaw. Ambrose gave him a black, bloody grin and launched himself at Highfather.

“It’s fitting it ends with us locked in battle,” Ambrose said, laughing. “Order battling until the last, even as chaos unravels it all at the very seams of creation.”

Phillips stood over Mutt’s crawling form, shook his head and drove a powerful kick into the Indian’s guts. The force of it lifted Mutt off the ground. He dropped back to his hands and knees, gasped and hacked up a huge glob of blood.

A voice in the red haze of pain. Sweet, soft and kind just for him.

“Mutt, I know you can hear me. It’s Maude. Do you want me to take him?”

The deputy shook his head slightly. Blood dripped off the long strands of hair. “No,” he croaked. “Mine…”

“Stubborn man.” Maude’s voice murmured in his ear, like cool water gurgling over rocks, easing the pain, making it bearable for a little longer. “I’ll be your eyes, then. He’s to the left of you … more … more … turn a little more left— Watch out!”

Another savage kick. Mutt’s insides were broken glass and fire. Vertigo. He had no idea where he was … where
Phillips
was. Mutt wanted to retch. He was having trouble breathing. When he did, each ragged breath was etched with a razor blade of pain.

“He’s going to kill you, and then I will have to kill him,” Maude’s ephemeral voice echoed in his ears. “You are being a damn fool!”

“M … mine,” was all he muttered. He didn’t hear her moving through the pain, through the crashing of the chamber’s demise, through the sounds of Highfather and Ambrose’s battle and the world-shattering bellow of a thing never born of woman, awakening. Mutt knew she was, though, by the change in her voice and then the soft thud of a kick and then the tingling sound of metal on metal skittering across the silver floor. Closer to him close. Sliding.

“Your right hand, now!” she whispered.

Mutt’s hands shook as they flailed out across the floor.

“Lose something?” Phillips asked, smiling.

“Um-hm,” Mutt said. “I just found it.”

The deputy sprang to a crouch, his big fighting knife in his hand. He shook his face, spraying blood all over the wide blade, and without missing a beat slashed out at Phillips’s stomach. The giant didn’t bother to try to dodge the blade. Suddenly the smirk left his face. He winced and staggered backward, clutching his abdomen. When he raised his hands, they were covered in his own black blood. More of it stained his ripped shirt.

“Well, now ain’t that a fascinatin’ development,” the deputy said. He whispered to the darkness, knowing she was there, “Thanks.”

“Kick his ass,” the darkness whispered back.

Mutt stood, wiping the blood from his face and rubbing it into the knife’s blade. His face was still a mess, but it seemed to not look as bad as it had a few minutes ago. He managed a smile, even.

“How?” Phillips asked, a look of long-forgotten fear creeping into his visage.

“Remembered something a wise old coyote told me once,” Mutt said. “Well, not that wise. See, you and me, we’re more alike than you know. Both got power in our blood. Me, I’ve jist been a little more afraid to use mine. But you, you done gone and got me pissed off. So I reckon I’m gonna use it. Thanks.”

He moved toward the larger man, the stiffness and pain leaving Mutt’s form with each step, the bloody blade twirling in his hand.

Phillips backed away, hands out, ready to grab at the deputy. “It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” the deacon said. “The Greate Olde Wurm is free now. This world and all others will perish. Death shall reign supreme.”

“Then why you backin’ up?” Mutt said. “You want death? Come and get it.”

Phillips charged Mutt. He was still preternaturally fast and his fear and anger drove him now to even greater velocities. Mutt sidestepped the giant with a hop, a duck and a lightning flourish of the knife. Phillips staggered in pain and now his chest and arm bled. Mutt tossed the knife to the other hand and spit more blood onto the blade. He twirled it, the blade facing downward now, and bounded in for another strike, this time connecting with Phillips’s lower back. The deacon grunted in frustration and pain.

Highfather and Ambrose’s fistfight had carried them near the well. The sheriff discovered that while Ambrose appeared to be far his senior, the blood of the Wurm, perhaps in concert with his madness, gave him a degree of resilience and strength that was unnaturally difficult to overcome. Highfather had landed dozens of blows to the preacher that would have killed a younger man, had broken Ambrose’s nose and most likely his jaw, but he barely seemed to notice.

“Getting tired?” Ambrose said. “The blood of my God sustains me, Sheriff. What do you have to keep you going? Faith, hope, will? They all falter; they all fail you at the end of things, Jonathan—you know that better than most, don’t you?”

Highfather drove another hard right into the preacher’s jaw. Ambrose’s head snapped to the side for an instant. The old man slapped him across the face. Blood sprayed from Jon’s mouth and he flew backward from the sheer force of the blow. He landed on his ass at the edge of the well. Ambrose laughed. A huge shelf of rock crashed down behind him. Several of the sconces jumped from the impact, then smashed to the floor, spilling glowing coals and scattering fire and shadow.

“I wish I had found you first, Jonathan—what a deacon you could have made! The war was so good at turning nice young men like you and Phillips into husks, looking for any way to ease your pain, or inflict it on another. The frontier is full of you—walking wounded, casualties of the war that were never counted.”

Highfather pulled his pistol, cocked it and took aim at Ambrose’s head. He groaned as he climbed to his feet.

“If you had any silver bullets left, you would have used them,” the preacher said.

The gun blasted fire and thunder in Highfather’s hand. The vault shuddered and groaned as the mountain buckled under the strain of an angry god. The bullet blew a hole through Ambroses’s forehead, above his left eyebrow. It blew out the back of his head, igniting a patch of his scalp and white hair as it passed. The preacher staggered backward, driven by the force of the blast.

“It’s a special bullet,” Highfather said. “I’ve carried it every day since the war. Saving it for a special occasion. Figure the end of the world is good enough, don’t you?”

Ambrose’s right eye twitched. He made a gurgling scream and charged at Highfather, even as his hair continued to burn and his brains slid out the back of his skull, splattering on the silver floor. He crashed into the sheriff and grappled with him as they edged toward the pit. Ambrose’s strength was that of a thing kept animate by forces that did not acknowledge reason, did not answer to nature.

Highfather pistol-whipped him with the barrel of the Colt to no effect. As they struggled, Jon felt his boot heels slip against the raised edge of the well. The gun was lost, dropping to the floor. The room dipped and swelled. More debris crashed down around them.

A horrible sound—the essence of skeletal hunger and bone-scraping pain amplified through a billion red-swollen screaming colic baby throats, vibrating like a trapped moth’s beating wings. The sound came from the heart of the void, from the depths of the well. It was an anthem of rage and pain. It was at Highfather’s back, waiting for him after the fall.

Ambrose pushed him backward, another inch, two. The old man no longer felt pain; he no longer spoke. He was beyond such human frailties. His hands tore at Jon’s face; his forearm pushed the sheriff back, back.

Was it today? Was this it? Was this why he lived and so many others, so many better men and women than him, had died? So he could stop this madman? This would do—it was as good a way to go as any, better than most, if only it would end the madness and the death.

Please, Lord, if You’re there, let me be the last one to die today.…

He grabbed hold of Ambrose, tightly, and began to pull them backward toward the well.

“Jon! Catch!” It was Harry, running, dodging, through the stone rain, throwing something to him. He pulled an arm free and reached out. The cavalry saber dropped into his hand, landing like a hunting bird returning to its master. He slashed down at Ambrose’s shoulder. The blade tore the arm cleanly off at the joint in a jet of white fire. The burning arm bounced and fell into the darkness of the well.

Highfather grabbed Ambrose by the collar of his shirt, bent him at the waist and drove the sword deep into his belly. More opalescent fire erupted along the blade protruding from the preacher’s back. Jon sidestepped as he pulled the blade clear and shoved Ambrose over the edge of the well.

The priest fell, burning, tumbling into blackness, the flame guttering, fanning wildly before vanishing, swallowed up by the ravenous dark.

Highfather stood on the edge of the well, panting. The cavern was beginning to collapse. Whole sections of the ceiling were tumbling down, exploding as they shattered against the silver floor. The fire and the smoke from the smashed sconces gave the place the look and feel of Hell’s waiting room. The thing in the well roared again. It sounded like it was coming closer.

Harry was beside him, grabbing him by the shoulder.

“It’s all coming down! We’ve got to go! Where’s Mutt?”

Highfather realized that Harry had Holly’s smoldering body slung over his shoulder. His eyes looked dead. “Damn, I’m sorry, Harry,” he said.

“Jon! Where the hell is Mutt? We have got to get out of here!”

There was a blur of movement on the far side of the chamber.

“There!” Highfather said.

Mutt was knife-dancing. Moving around, under, over, encircling Phillips, the crimson-splattered blade flashing, sparking, as it struck stray pieces of falling rock. The deacon stumbled, but continued, like some damaged machine, to drive blow after blow into the deputy. More missed than landed, but each one that did drove Mutt to the ground with a terrible crash, a spray of dust and blood, but Mutt tumbled, rolled and sprang up anew, knife flashing, with a yip and a snarl.

Once, when Highfather had been a boy, he had sat very still beside his brother and his father and watched a brown bear take on a pack of wolves. The wolves had worn the bear down, a death of a hundred bites. As Highfather watched his deputy now slash and whirl around the deacon, it brought the memory back to him.

“Damn,” Harry muttered. “Look at him go.”

Phillips was bleeding everywhere. His face radiated the pain and humiliation that had rapidly become his world. He swung wildly at Mutt and missed this time. He was rewarded with another ugly slash under his armpit.

Mutt’s face was intent, his eyes dark and focused, scanning each move, each response—predator’s eyes. He wasn’t quite grinning as he cut the man again and again, but there was a cruel slit of a smile on Mutt’s smashed and swollen face.

Phillips groaned and began to sprint toward the well.

“Into Your hands I commit my spirit!” he bellowed as he dived toward the well. Mutt dashed after him, sprang and landed in a crouch. He slashed at the larger man’s legs in a wide, powerful arc of the knife, severing his hamstrings. Phillips gasped in pain and surprise as his legs failed him. He slid to a stop a few feet from the well, the sheriff and the mayor.

“Nope,” Mutt said. “You don’t get to die all fancy. You don’t get to go be with your sick preacher and your slimy god, all special-like.”

He pulled the deacon’s hair, yanking his head up. He spit fresh blood on the blade and put it to Phillips’s neck.

“You get to die just like all those folks you killed—scared and confused and full to the brim with regrets and unfinished business. Just regular folk.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Phillips hissed. “It’s free and—”

Mutt opened his throat from ear to ear with the knife. The stuff that gushed out was black and thick as it splashed out onto the silver floor.

“You don’t get to have the last word either,” Mutt said. “Ain’t that a pisser?”

He dropped the dead man facefirst on the ground, in a pool of his god’s black ichor, and looked up at Highfather and Pratt, panting.

“You done playing?” Highfather said over the groan and crash of the rock buckling.

“Reckon so,” Mutt said. His eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed on top of Phillips’s corpse.

“Damn it!” Highfather said. He ran to Mutt and hefted him up, throwing him over his shoulder. “C’mon, run!”

And they did, as great stone boulders tore loose from the ceiling, tumbled and exploded like bombs across the chamber.

Highfather looked back and saw the stranger with the bandana mask kneeling by the edge of the well, a young girl, maybe Constance Stapleton, slung over the stranger’s shoulder. He waved for the stranger to come. The stranger nodded and returned to whatever task he was about at the well’s edge.