The shouts of his comrade followed him into the dark of the west. PUNK BITCH! SISSYASS PUNK BITCH! He didn't care. The eyes of he that had been given the honorable name of bitches. Blank, the right one staring left, the left one staring right, neither seeing anything nor moving.
He kicked the side of the horse again, swearing at it to run faster, to put the bloodied form of his comrade behind him.
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It tackled the hill, the actuators straining to run up the steep grade. He didn't look back at the campsite in the gathering dark. The sun blazed in his eyes as he crested the next rise. A wide plateau before him, bathed in the golden light. Another rider sat astride a horse, larger and more aggressive than his own. The other man wore a proper gentleman's suit. Something out of the nineteenth century – cut foppish and material black.
The gentleman and his horse made a move toward him, and he panicked and swerved, pressuring his horse to gallop in a wide arc around the gentleman. No, you ain't gettin' me you ain't, leave me the fuck...
A single shot. Scything into his ears with its piercing roar. The bullet caught his horse a front leg, and he felt it stumble and seize and pitch him forward. Horse and rider tumbling over the edge of the plateau that they might have avoided had he any control over the steering. Sailing downward to the illuminated side of the plateau, gravity crushing first one arm, then another. His ribs. His pelvis. His nose. The world spinning about him in a blur of blood and dust. The pain too fast for him to register. Had an accident? It happens to the best of us! Bandito Bob's Equubot Repair can solve everything from a lube job to a failed transmission. So come on in to Bandito Bob's, over one hundred locations in The District.
He couldn't move his head. Blood in a widening pool before the one eye that could still see. Tried to move his hand to reach for the sawed-off shotgun at his back. No good. His wrist was something unnatural. Radius and ulna split perfectly – the ends of the bones laying on top of the other ends so that instead of going in a straight line from wrist to shoulder his arm did something like an S. He was laying on the other arm. He did not try to move his legs.
The sun bathed his face. Scattered rainbows through his tears. He did not move. Instead laid in his own blood and the inevitability of what would come next and wept. The shoes of the gentleman scattered some of the alkali in a brief cumulus of dust as he approached. He could not look up at the gentleman because his neck wouldn't move. He was glad. The gentleman spoke in a voice bored and unconcerned, like a civil servant's.
So I assume that's it for Randy and bitches?
Labored breathing. No attempt to speak. He didn't look at the gentleman, didn't move his mouth at all. Fuck you. I tell you nothing.
You don't need to answer me to tell me what I want to know. I can just take it. You don't have a choice. You should be honored that I'm even allowing you the option. Was he more dangerous than Unk?
The customer looked away. He was the devil himself.
I doubt that very much. Though I must say, I'm surprised there is still one of them that has the will left to take down even such a miserable bunch of lowlifes as you and your bros. What was he armed with?
Not telling double pistols you fuck you looked like forty-fives piece of shit.
Forty-fives. The gentleman said it so nonchalantly, but the dying customer could hear the hesitation. Something fancy and bygone I suppose?
He gave it everything he had and looked up at the gentleman, into the face shaded by the backlighting of the setting sun, wreathed in some glorious and hellish halo. The eyes red in the hidden obscurity of the face. He looked into the gentleman's face and spoke.
Jack. Diamonds. Jack.
The gentleman shuddered and he saw it and he laughed flecks of blood. Laughed as the gentleman pointed the revolver at his face and for one unnerving fraction of a second after the gentleman pulled the trigger and sent the bullet through his brain. The laugh already halfway out and unable to go back, hurried along by the death rattle that chased it.
The gentleman wanted to do more to the faithless minion that lay dead before him, but knew, intellectually, that it would do no good. He prided himself on intellect, among other things. Knew it was why they'd put him where they had. Knew it was why they had entrusted him to deal with potential problems like this.
He closed his eyes. The two points of red winking out in the expanding twilight. It was an honor that they answered him so quickly.
Report.
We have number 21701209328. Send everyone.
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