update schedule: busy busy busy

Apologies for leaving this by the wayside, but a couple of other projects have reared their heads that might actually yield something should they succeed. This, while fun, just doesn't pay dividends. I'm hoping to update again before the end of the month, and hopefully finish off Mr. LaSalle's tale soon.

Stay tuned.

wiki update #7: it shall be archived

For those following along at home, I've put up the first compiled version of the story, incorporating Part One (in which Howard Wells goes crazy like Shaka Zulu).

The new archive section of the wiki will host such updates. Those particularly sharp-eyed will notice some very minor differences to the version posted up - this is because this is a work in progress.

Enjoy viewing the archive here.

More of Spencer LaSalle to come.

south through the trees

The red-eyed man fled through the forest, and the clerk followed.

The clerk wore an earthy old poncho over the green shirt and black jeans that made up his faded uniform. The flat, wide-brimmed black hat on his head shaded the features of his face. The horse beneath him was an older model with few amenities, and the voice box had been taken out of it so long ago that the corrosion at the neck from that old surgical wound had worked its way up to the base of the skull, and the actuators wheezed and pumped loudly in the stillness of the redwoods.

The clerk made out the red-eyed man's trail as best he could during the day, stopping at the first lowering of the light that he might not miss the slightest trace of his wandering quarry. His target had taken to concealing evidence of his campfires or going the night without them altogether. The clerk appreciated this knowledge, because it betrayed the fact the red-eyed man knew he was being hunted and needed to take time to cover his tracks. Another sort of man might have been infuriated at this, but the clerk, with his impenetrable gaze and his absolutely silent demeanor went about the hunt unperturbed.

Today his quarry was passing closer to the ocean, the clerk could see. The pathway had always been south, sometimes shivering acutely to the east or west, but never doubling back north. It might be an elaborate ruse, but the clerk did not think so. He thought the red-eyed man had somewhere he wanted to go. The clerk had an inkling that maybe he should stop the red-eyed man before he got there – head him off somehow, if only he knew a way to do it. Since he did not, he suppressed that worry when it did rear up in him. There were things worrying didn't solve, and solutions unknowable to even the most inquisitive.

The light was waning as he came to a stream. The red-eyed man had camped there the previous night, he could tell. He'd tried to cover the campfire with silt from the stream, but the scent lingered even still, and the clerk walked about the area in a thirty-foot radius, again finding droppings and the bones of a bird, picked clean but for the last vestiges of black meat and gristle clinging stubbornly to them.

He was gaining despite the nature of tracking. The red-eyed man would throw things about to create a ruse. He would, for instance, canter his horse along one route and then order it to reverse precisely backward in its own footfalls, then he'd blunder it into some thick underbrush where the tracks would not be immediately apparent and continue onward. The clerk would be fooled for the better part of an hour on a few of these occasions, but he would always find the trail again, and if he saw two campsites in a day or a campsite and another good bit of travel, it meant progress.

This was one day behind. Closer than he'd ever been. Tantalizingly within reach – almost worth the risk of another hour's worth of travel. Almost. Even half an hour's worth of messing around in low light meant he could set himself back a day's worth of tracking if he lost the trail.

He tied his horse to a tree and set about making his own campfire. From its sheath in the saddle where it hung next to the big shotgun, he drew out the hatchet. The trees about him yielded first thin branches and leaves for kindling and then an armful of logs.

He doffed the poncho for the work, revealing the skeletal figure beneath. The body thin and white, seeming almost emaciated. Good concealment for the wiry strength in his arms and legs. Not tall enough to be tall and certainly not short. The hair and eyes were the darkest, starkest black. He kept his hair and face well-barbered, taking time each morning to take a straight-razor to his stubble, each movement just so. It spoke more of precision than of prissiness – something that found its root in habit rather than vanity.

Affixed to the chest of his shirt, just as carefully, the name tag that read:

S P E N C E R

The gun sat at his right hip, the holster and the grip oriented such that it was clear he was a left-handed draw. The bandolier hugged his middle snugly, the bullets in their loops casting the occasional glint as a dapple of sunlight caught them through the great canopy overhead. The gun was a monster, seeming too large for so slender a man, until he rested his hand on the butt of it, as he sometimes casually did. Then you could see how well the long-fingers, as if it had been crafted precisely to his spidery hand.

The machete sat in its canvas scabbard on his beltline at his back, the handle protruding from behind his left hip, the blade nearly as long as his arm, sharp at the edge but corroded and patina-covered along its flat. The weapons had the effect of making his lower body appear wide and weighty, his upper body frail and insubstantial. This he could not have cared about.

Wood was never a problem, and so he soon had what he needed. From his saddlebags he withdrew the small electric cooler he had plugged into the outlet in the horse's left ass cheek, and out of that he selected a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch with chunks of rabbit meat inside it and several chopped bits of onion and red and green peppers. With the hatchet he whittled a small branch down to a skewer, speared the ingredients and started the fire with the horse's cigarette lighter.

With the kabob in his stomach and night having fallen, he donned the poncho again and put the hat over his eyes, though it was some time before he could will them to shut. All about him the shadows of the forest quivered in the uncertainty of the firelight, painting for him many grim and intangible falsehoods upon the faces of those things that were somehow still tangible, and he had seen all of it before and so slept through it unmoved.

update schedule: the butcher cometh

I will very soon begin the introductory story arc of the mysterious third clerk. As before, I try to write ahead of what I post so I can keep up with editing, but I've finally come to the end of what I had prepared and from now on we sail by instinct.

The character of Spencer LaSalle has always been a problem for me in past incarnations of The Last Clerks. This is due in no small part to the fact I never really worked the grocery store job I've based the character upon. He is also unlike the other characters in a few fundamental ways, as will be seen.

What I can promise is that the violence in this story will be excessive in ways that make even me question my sanity. A new update should come down hopefully by Friday, but might need to wait until Monday. In the meantime, I'm working on compiling the stuff that's coming before so you can read up.

Until then.

those last parts of her

The clerk's first bullet put out the man like a candle. He stood with his head cocked back, all thought and personality canceled, the face shocked and the powder burns of such a close gunshot only beginning to appear.

The others – some nine men – had rested their rifles on their shoulders or stood with their weapons barely at the ready, and they were not ready to shoot when he executed the man who had grabbed his rifle and thrown him to the wall, and they were still not ready to shoot when he spun about and brought the heel of his left foot into the dead man's side in a roundhouse kick that might have decapitated a teenager – and as that was ending, they had time to process his left hand fanning over the hammer of the pistol and nobody could tell if they were hit or if the blood on them was somebody else's.

He let the empty gun fall without ceremony. It hung stewardless from the strap as he ran low to the ground, snatching up the rifle. He knew about how many paces to the nearest rock large enough to provide cover, and he scrambled for it, swinging behind it as bullets clattered across it and tore into the ground. He'd killed two outright – wounded a third and fourth to the point of dying. There were still too many of them.

From above he heard the high voice of Shep, heard another contingent of them scrambling down the rocks, putting more fire on him, yet another approaching from inside the cavern. He caught a brief glimpse of the store up at the top of the canyon - gouts of flame and smoke darkening the sky. They'd done an old-fashioned Zippo raid on it when they'd found out where he'd gone. He put the ear bud back in, hands working the revolver, flipping the loading gate open and ramming each chamber clear with the speed of a robot.

Saladin. Salaam alaikum.

---

Shep's machine pistol spat in a dangerous arc before him as he stumbled down the rocks alongside his squad of four. The rocks gave under one of his men, and that one went tumbling headfirst along the crags and debris, becoming at some fateful point in that journey an empty sack of flesh. The body crashed into the path of the bullets of those already on the canyon floor, perforated by them.

The marauders paused in horror at what they had done, and in the ringing silence that followed, there came the clear, impossibly loud cry of the falcon diving out of the sun toward the cavern entrance, within which there were still at least ten of Shep's men. Shep watched the grim thing barrel toward its own ruin, the metal of its body and wings searing red-hot as it intentionally cranked more power than the fragile body could handle.

The clerk rose. Six men on the canyon floor, one just emerging from the cavern. The clerk put a bullet in each of the six and ducked down just as the firebird struck the dumbfounded new arrival in the chest and drove him back into the cavern.

---

The man at the head of Shep's spelunkers had lost two men on the way down – stuck in the crawl space, still screaming, hyperventilating with claustrophobia and without any light to guide them. He'd become convinced this was perdition. All of the wandering over the world in Shep's band of demons, all of the murder and pillage and rape, all had added up to this. It was the tribulation, the end of days, and this, here, was his final reward – to wander in blackness unending, without depth or contiguity.

When he saw the light, he praised Jesus. And when he emerged, he saw the tall, golden-haired man destroy the lives of six of his comrades. The marauder stood there, the seven or eight others that had managed to follow him bunching up behind him.

When he looked to see the source of the shriek coming out of the sky, it was upon him. The hawk's face white-hot, the talons that sunk into his chest destroying the flesh that surrounded them. It was not some false construct that felled him, he realized, but the winged messenger of the gods themselves. The others staggered back, the darkness of the cave lit by the searing glow of the falcon for one instant as it opened its beak to unleash a final utterance, and then its valediction became light and concussion.

---

The clerk heard Shep's roar of frustration as the cavern erupted in flames. Man-shaped things came stumbling out of it one by one, each covered in flames that blotted out all distinction, featureless and uncommunicative, but aware. They tried to swat at the flames that cloaked them, and each in his turn fell to the rocks lost in his own agony.

Shep's voice spurred his last three men onward.

Keep fire on him! I want him!

Shep had the sun at his back, and the clerk fired up at them with the rifle, but couldn't get a good sight on them...

The clerk felt a bullet bite into the side of his left arm and the rifle fell out of his grip. He retreated to cover, falling into a sitting position.

Their boots beating down across the rocks, getting closer. He took hold of the pistol as Shep rounded the corner. They were surrounding him, guns up.

Nobody kills this asshole but me! Nobody shoot, got it?!

Shep grabbed the clerk by the vest and dragged him to his feet kneeing him in the stomach and then hurling him to the dirt. You smart now, huh, you fuck? I'll fuckin' fix you. He kicked the clerk in the face, sending him rolling back along the dirt.

Shep. The scraggly-bearded youth calling after him. Get that gun away from him!

Shep whirled around. His face-paint running, the skull-face becoming a dripping two-tone highlight of the sickly-thin contours of his face. The wound in his side from the falcon still oozing. I SAY WHAT GETS DONE AROUND HERE! HE FUCKED WITH US AND NOW I FUCK WITH HIM! DO YOU ALL SEE?!

Shep, the gun...

He shot six times, you fuckhole! It takes a year to reload that piece of shit! Pay the fuck attention!

The clerk stumbled slowly to his feet, hand still on the grip of the pistol. He spat blood out of his mouth. Well, you dress like a girl, and here I see you hit like one. It makes me sorry about having to kill all of you. Though, maybe one or two of your crispy friends over there isn't dead and can see after burying you. This climate is terrible for burn victims, I'm told... but great for consumption. I don't suppose any of you have that.

Shep let out a single laugh and regarded his prey as a mafia don does a shop owner. The three of his men stood bathed in their own cold sweat, their eyes fixed firmly on the clerk, the looks on their faces incredulous as their leader strutted about before this force of nature as if he could ever own it.

I'll forgive everything if you kneel down and beg me for it and promise to join me. I am also merciful.

The clerk had not really been addressing Shep when he'd last spoken, and he turned to the scraggly-bearded youth now, speaking as if Shep weren't even there.

How much is this guy paying you? Or you... yeah, you, with your mouth hanging open. I mean, what does it take to constitute gross mismanagement these days if this isn't it? Weren't there like, ten times as many of you a few minutes ago? How hard do you think it's going to be for me to whittle down the rest of you? I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

The sounds of hoofbeats echoed in the distance – grew closer. The scraggly-bearded youth wasn't sure anybody else was hearing it. Shep... there's a—

Their leader wound his fist back and struck the clerk in the stomach again, flooring him. How you think you're gonna take us now, huh? Tell me how.

Shep...

SHUT UP!

The clerk smiled up at his enemy from his position on the ground on his back. Still he held the pistol in his grip, still hanging from the strap. The same way I do everything – with a seven-shot pistol.

The clerk kicked Shep in the scrotum and put a bullet in the head of one of the last of the three other men. The clerk was up, dropped the gun to dangle again by its strap and had Shep in a human-shield choke hold, stealing the machine pistol from him in a single deft move, unleashing a completely inaccurate salvo at the other two, who leaped to cover.

The horse Saladin jacked thundered into view, and the clerk shoved the barrel of the gun up to Shep's temple. You are a special kind of dumb son of a bitch, and this is the last chance I'm giving you to run away from all of this and clean that stupid paint off your face and take up the ways of the monastery for the rest of your born days. Put my rifle in the horse's saddle.

He released Shep from the choke hold but kept the hand on the collar of his jacket. Finding his breath again, Shep spat out a curse.

Fuck your moth—

The clerk grabbed the man's left hand and twisted it up behind him and Shep's voice went high with pain. My mercy is that pile of original recipe henchmen over yonder. I'm afraid if you want a complete performance, I'm going to need a major credit card. Otherwise, you can put my rifle on the horse, if you see what it is that I am saying to you.

The clerk forced his captive over to where the rifle had fallen to the ground. No sound from the last two men behind their rock. When Shep had the rifle in the horse's saddle he whispered something to the clerk through the redness between just the two of them.

Kill me. Just fucking do it.

I told you how I wanted to see you die. I told you exactly how.

The clerk kicked him over to the rock and got up on his horse. Boy's I'd say it's been fun, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another.

Shep wheeled around. KILL HIM! SHOOT HIM! F—

The scraggly-bearded youth and the other one – a man of forty with a gut and a shiny bald head, clad in a biker's jean jacket – came around the corner. Jean jacket leveled an old M1, but the scraggly-bearded youth brought his police Beretta up and shot him in the head, then turned and put his sights on Shep.

Shep stood there for a moment weaponless and without horde to surround him, the redness gone from his eyes in his panic and all the fragile regalia of his violent empire passed away with the wind. In the light of the early afternoon, he seemed to have shrunk in his biker jacket.

His last underling gunned him down there in the canyon. When the youth had put every last bullet into Shep and the corpse laid in an expanding pool of blood on the ground, he stood over it and kicked it and beat upon it with the butt of the pistol until he had nothing left in him but tears. The clerk watched this with some interest, and when it was finally over, the youth looked up at him and threw aside the pistol.

I'll do anything you want. Just please don't kill me. Please—

Anything?

Shit. Yes. Fuck. Anything, any good god damn thing, I swear it if you just don't hurt me or nothing.

Pick my hat up and bring it here.

---

The gunshot wound would not stop bleeding despite his attempts to bind it, and the injuries he'd suffered at the hands of Shep stung as he thundered out of the canyon into the sun. Eli and the girl had found the horse and made their way westward as he'd instructed. He rode him a lonely journey, all through the night without sleeping again, and his exhaustion brought him to the edge of hallucination.

At length he smelled the coast, if that were possible, and when he crested a hill he saw the great ocean spread out before him. The promised land spoken of in the girl's leaflet filled the horizon before him, glimmering with a billion little lights so many miles distant, all noise of it lost over the grandness and imperceptibility of distance.

He followed their tracks down to the rocky shore that had been created in that great cataclysm, and he found Eli beside the girl and a campfire. The clerk felt he might go into shock at any minute as he sat down.

Thank God you made it.

Thanking him again, are we?

I... I prayed. Like I told you I would.

Thank you.

They coming?

No, I— ahem. No.

I gave her the pill. There's one more. You should take it.

She needs one more dose. She might not make it without it.

Shit, YOU need it.

No. I don't need anything.

They sat in the glow of the campfire, both men staring into it for a time. Eli would cast glances up toward that other continent. The clerk saw that he was looking there.

There's another kind of purgatory in there. Do your best with her out here.

You'll be helping us.

I'm going to lay down here in a minute and I rather think I'm not going to get back up.

I need to help you. Take the pill.

The girl is your salvation. Do you understand? He got to his feet again, shakily, and lead his horse away, tossing the machine pistol to Eli. Do unto her as you would've done to your own daughter, and be saved. I'm outta here.

The sound of the horse's hoofbeats fell off into the night bit by bit until there was nothing to mark the solemnity of his passage. The man Eli sat up a lonely vigil with the girl until morning broke, and her eyes fluttered open.

---

She put flowers in her hair that summer, and when the rains came she could drink water from the leaves that rustled in a great ocean above her. In later years, grey with what wisdom the world had allowed her and toughened by her motherhood, she made the journey alone across the desert back to the white car, finding there the mummified remains of her grandmother and the men that had tried to kill them both. The desert's preservative dryness was almost respectful and apologetic.

The decay of decades had long since masked the single neat little hole that had sent those last parts of her heavenward. The old woman sat down in the driver's seat and took her grandmother's hand, and as she had done in ages long past, she lead her granddaughter along to where next she was ordained to go.

the smiting of necks

(Author's note: We resume the main story, joining immediately after the events of “it always is with heroes.”)

Shep smiled at the rejoinder. Sent a single snarling thought toward the clerk's head, into the shadow beneath the hat, where he knew there resided some equal intelligence to his own.

What do you have, little hero-man? Why are you so special?

Silence. Shep felt his band pawing the earth behind him. Besides the movement of the thumb and maddening motionlessness of his reply to Shep's first taunt, the clerk might have been a mannequin set out there to ward off the otherwise unwary. When it became clear the clerk would contribute nothing more, Shep gigged his horse forward another step, and from the redness in his eyes screamed silently at him.

ARROGANT FUCK ARROGANT ARROGANT PATHETIC —

Hey.

The single syllable from the clerk's shaded mouth cut Shep's rage-garbled thoughts off in the middle.

Didn't your mother ever tell you it's not polite to speak another language in front of people who don't understand it?

Shep would have been caught off guard by the comment enough on its own, but what entered his mind next had the effect of a sledgehammer striking drywall. The shrieks and keens and wails came from every direction. Shep squirmed in his saddle at the dissonant chorus and the screams they seemed to send right into his ears. The other men whirled around in their saddles, rearing their horses around, searching the horizon for the far-off sources of some of those lamentations, jumping at the ones near them.

Shep found himself again as he saw the clerk thrust the gauntleted hand into the air and send the raptor skyward with a tinny stereophonic war cry.

You idiots! It's in your heads! Get him, kill him —

The clerk had doffed the glove with a single violent thrust of his left hand and then had the rifle up, eyes smoldering and there was no telling if his voice came from his own throat or originated in the hellish corner of his imagination, broadcast to his hapless prey.

NOW WHEN YE MEET IN BATTLE THOSE WHO DISBELIEVE, THEN IT IS THE SMITING OF NECKS! SMITE THE NECKS AND SMITE OF THEM EACH FINGER!

There was no accounting for the bullets of the rifle as they spat into the midst of their unknowing prey. He shot at each man one, two, three times in the space of half as many seconds, acquiring another target as one man fell from his horse or slumped sideways in the saddle or sat straight up with his head bent back and the blood dribbling neatly down his face from the hole in his forehead. Each death as neatly thorough as it was swift.

He backed toward the storefront the entire time, and when he had run out, Shep still sat motionless at the head of his scattered crew, untouched by a single one of the clerk's bullets and struggling to free his machine pistol from his belt line. As he liberated it and pulled the trigger, the falcon struck him in the side and raked his armpit with its claws.

That marauder fell stunned to the ground, and in his ears were the screams of his own men. He looked up and saw the clerk ducking into the doorway of the store as bullets shattered the sliding glass doors, clanged off of the derelict shopping carts and puffed into the long untended pile of discount T-shirts sitting on the front-most display.

Shep gained his feet, his own blood cold across his body, and the falcon was tearing open the throat of Johnnyjohnnybobonny, the men blasting at the bird but in their panic dismembering their own comrade. The bird rocketed into the air again, a ropey trail of internal fluid leaking onto the floundering corpse as it fell to the ground with a gut-curdling squelch.

There followed a period of nearly a minute while Shep screamed at them to stop firing into the air after the damn bird, which seemed to be arcing far out over the canyon in an effort to get out of range. When he'd finally gotten them calmed down, the clerk leaned out of a gap in the storefront glass, shouting at them.

I GOT BLISTAS ON MY FINGAS!

His torrent of lead blew out the eyes of two of the horses standing in front and sent them careening into the crowd. The heart, throat, and right eye of the man standing next to Shep all opened up with a fwupfwupfwup like somebody punching a hanging slab of ribs with a boxer's glove, and that one looked over at Shep before falling to the ground. Shep took a step back. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

When the shooting stopped, Shep and the dozen or so of his smarter men had their horses kneeling down, taking cover behind them. One of them, a spindly-legged, scraggly-bearded one maybe twenty years old whose name Shep did not know and had never cared to know dove behind Shep's great black horse and laid there on the searing-hot hardpan, quivering.

Sh-Shep, Christ, how we gonna—

Shut your goddamned mouth. Shep clutched his wound. The tightness of the damned leather jacket creaking and stifling him, making it impossible to figure out how hurt he was. You leave the thinking to me. Reaching out with the redness, he detected nothing. An impossible hole where the hero's mind ought to be. Not fucking possible...

What isn't?

I said shut up, shut the FUCK up! He could hear the sound of bullets clicking into the rifle's tube. He's reloading. Shep found his inner voice again, threw it at the group. Two columns, move up and take him while he's empty—

The clerk's voice came rolling out of the storefront, jolly and clear as a Broadway singer of old.

I never thought that I would climb / over the moon in ecstasy / but nevertheless it's there that I'm / shortly about to be! / 'cause I've got a golden ticket...

He's still got that pistol, Shep...

Yes, indeed, Shep, I've still got that pistol! It's a fine pistol and for absolutely free with your purchase of three rolls of film at five ninety-nine a roll, you too can witness a demonstration!

None of his men moved. He wanted to shout at them, but he couldn't show his enemy that there was hesitation on the part of his gang... couldn't have them back off or they would have left an offense unanswered— HE would have left an offense unanswered and that made him weak, it made him unfit...

A voice whispering at his ear. The voice of the clerk, the words casual and almost friendly.

You're thinking about bluffing to me that I haven't got a chance and I should just give it up right now. Trouble is, my good fellow, that just isn't the case. I have met your kind on many a flat and barren plain such as this, and here I am still. I was a liberal-minded individual before everything fell apart you see, and I believed in equal rights and sociopolitical sensitivity and all that, and the reason I tell you this is so you appreciate the level of disdain I have for you when I tell you that I have seen your worth, and that I have judged you to be a pathetic, pretentious, prepubescent little faggot and it is now my ambition to see you die like one.

Shep stood up, roaring.

Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch!

It was something his men could understand, and they sprayed the storefront with the bullets of their varying and mismatched weapons, exhausting their magazines and loading in more and firing until the brick storefront became pitted with craters and no glass remained in the door frames – the mechanism for sliding them open seized on itself as the misshapen door ground against the track it sat in. No answer from the clerk— neither bullets nor taunts.

Get in there! Fucking get in there, rip his goddamn head off so I can take a shit on it!

He leaped the side of his horse, spitting more bullets into the cavernous darkness beyond the doorways, the men following him, their yells a crescendo following him.

They burst inside, swarming the front of the store with footfalls and bullets. Bottles of nail polish along the cosmetics wall unleashing their own fonts of blood upon the floor. The two registers shattering, bursting open and the dollars within frittering away to dust in the air. Their weapons fell silent amid the mournful fluttering of the greeting cards through the gunsmoke. Through the shivering sound of their settling, there came no retort.

Fan out. Cover each other. He's here. You.

The scraggly-bearded youth straightened as Shep barked at him. S-sir.

On me. You three, too. I'm going to wear his face. You find him, you hurt him enough he can't fight. Nobody kills him but me, got that? He's mine. Move the fuck out.

---

The clerk crawled out from under the rock into the larger cavern, the rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows like a child, the pistol dragging over the rocks with a clatter as the echoes of the gunfire drifted down to him from above. He had maybe two or three minutes before they discovered he was nowhere in the store, and then the smart one, Shep, would certainly find the hatch.

He'd shot down seven or eight men, wounded a few more. He brought out the little flashlight and clicked it on, drawing out the box of bullets for the rifle. They were no larger than thick nails. He had one more reload left, minus three or four shots. He could put a few more of them in the soil with that, but it wouldn't break them. The two boxes of pistol ammo he had sitting in his vest might do it, but that meant letting them get close, and he had no intention of doing that.

Time to move, he said, plugging the ear bud into his ear. Saladin.

Half a mile away, the bird responded. Warning – unit has sustained abnormal trauma. Estimated remaining battery life is one and one half hour.

Assess two equubots with highest functionality, mark as Rowdy One and Rowdy Two. Subvert navigation — set Rowdy Two for rally point two and execute. Rally Rowdy One to my position. Execute.

---

The falcon found the field of battle to be free of hostiles, all having flooded into the store. It ignored as irrelevant the shouts and battle cries and roars of frustration within as they continued to tear the place apart. It alighted upon the saddle of one and leaned in toward the mane. As if to whisper in their silent language of conspiracy.

When Saladin had finished with the two horses, they both came about and thundered along the rim of the canyon, the procedural workings of their manufactured minds as mercifully ignorant of the depth of their betrayal as the winged instigator above them was of its treachery.

---

The clerk came to the steep, low-ceilinged drop that made any ascent through the cold, lightless cave impossible. Tucking the loaded rifle again to his chest and skidding down it, raking his backside with the roughness of the stone. It was fifteen feet down at least, and at the bottom a fully-grown man needed to crawl feet-first on his back to go forward through the dark. That Eli and Fanny were not here proved the man had found some way of conveying her through – probably by dragging her through after first leaving her, crawling out and then subsequently reorienting himself so he could crawl back in and get hold of her ankle, he imagined.

It became easier after he got out from the smaller tunnel. The darkness widened out into a passageway that could be traversed while hunched over. The clerk searched his memory for any recollection of claustrophobia in his former life, and could find none. He saw the sharpness of daylight peeking through the hole up ahead just as he heard a shout from the tunnel far behind him, echoing from the chill of the unreal dark from whence he'd come.

He stepped into the wandering afternoon, the brightness and heat somehow mellowed and completely divorced from the hell that had broken all about it and would still—

The clerk went tumbling forward, the rifle wrenched from his grip, slamming into the canyon wall. He whirled about to find himself staring at a dozen of the filthy men with their ratty weapons, murder in every eye. The one that had thrown him clutched the rifle as a war prize.

Fuckin' dumb you think we are, all of us to bottle up for you like that?

The clerk grinned just slightly.

Gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen, dumb is no barrier.

The pistol was in his hand and pointed at the head of the one who held captive his rifle, and the movement was so fast none of them knew from whence it had come.

Slow... now that might be.

wiki update #6: organizized

I've cleaned up the front page of the wiki so that things are under their own category pages. I wanted to shoot out something more, but things conspired to get in the way.

The conclusion to Patrick's tale coming before the end of the month.