Snake Eye slipped the patch back into place over his right eye.
That kind of moaning scream came from deep down in a man’s bones. It hit other humans the same way. It was designed to be heard and responded to, even above other noise—even the sound of a cannonade and the boom of shells.
And as such the horrific scream would draw other humans like flies, that inhuman, keening wail that barely seemed to pause for breath.
As Snake Eye swung by, his long legs never breaking stride, he drew his left-hand blaster and without even glancing around put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson bullet into the kid’s right eye. The mercie didn’t need anybody else horning in. He had a job to do, and the dust of a ville that’d been snakebit in the dick even before two armies started to bash the hell out of it to shake off his boot heels.
He was a successful chiller. The best. And as such he had a schedule to keep.
* * *
A CANNONBALL HAD created an impromptu skylight in a corner of Ragged Earnie’s cramped and crowded little general store. It was either an iron round or another shell that never went off, as was none too uncommon for the state of modern artillery a couple centuries after the skydark. When it existed at all. It had smashed the glass of a display counter to glittering snow on the plank floor, bounced through a shelf of sundries, leaving cloth bales, hammers and broken-open bags of meal from some baron’s mill strewed everywhere.
Snake Eye trod on a baby doll from the counter that lay on its back staring toward the sky with blank blue eyes. It was predark itself, high-class scabbie and hence expensive. The plastic body was brittle and readily cracked, but the little voice box still managed to croak “Ma-ma” before he crushed it.
He proceeded through a door behind the wooden counter and into the narrow confines of a storeroom even closer packed with canned goods and unique items than the shelves outside. Snake Eye found what he expected: a wooden hatch in the floor. Squatting well to the side, he grabbed the brass ring and yanked it open.
A flash and a boom erupted from the hole. A charge of buckshot shattered a Mason jar full of prenuke glass eyeballs on a shelf six feet away from where Snake Eye sat on his haunches. Allowing himself the briefest of smiles—he liked being right, even if he almost always was—he jumped right through the hole.
The storm cellar beneath was full of stacked burlap bags, eye-watering gunpowder smoke and one terrified fat man huddled by a cot in one corner pointing a long double-barreled shotgun in Snake Eye’s general direction.
“Don’t come a step closer,” he said in a quavering voice. “I’ll blast you soon as look at you. Sooner, you damned mutie chiller!”
Suddenly Snake Eye had skipped the several paces across the hard-packed dirt floor, grabbed the double barrels and twitched the blaster out of Ragged Earnie’s grip.
“So you recognize me, do you?” Snake Eye asked.
“Everybody knows you!” the shopkeeper said. “The coldest-hearted blaster that ever blasted his own mother for pay!”
“I’ll take that as an endorsement of my marketing techniques,” Snake Eye said, grinning. “Even though I barely got more than a crust of dry bread for wasting the bitch who pupped me. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. And speaking of principles, since you know me, you must know I haven’t come to pay a purely social call, any more than I have come to make a purchase at this fine, fine emporium.”
He drew one of his matte-black Swiss-made blasters and aimed it at Earnie’s face.
The old man promptly averted his gaze, closing both eyes tight and throwing up both hands in a ridiculous gesture at self-protection. Snake Eye’s human eye, the left one, which missed damned little, noted a darkness that spread across the brown dirt floor around the seat of Earnie’s baggy coveralls, glistening slightly in the low light of the hurricane lantern on the floor nearby.
After a moment Earnie pried open his nearer eye. It was a startling blue. It reminded Snake Eye of the eye of the sergeant he had just chilled down the street outside: bright, sharp and as clear as a midwinter morning sky.
He liked to remember such details and cherish them in his memories as trophies of his chills. Even the ones he didn’t get paid for.
“Well,” the merchant demanded.
“Well, what?”
“Why aren’t you getting on with it? Why ain’t you blasted me yet and had done with it? You trying to torture me, you triple-rad-blasted taint?”
Under the circumstances Snake Eye found the slur amusing, the more so for its apparently unconscious resonance.
“Are you in a hurry, old man?” he asked.
“Well, why didn’t you shoot me yet?”
Snake Eye shrugged. “Professional courtesy. It’s so important in my business. More so, since it’s so rare in the world today. I find subjects often like to say a few words before I finish the assignment. Unburden their souls, if you will. It seems only decent of me to allow them their final say. So long as they don’t take too long.”
The old man dropped his hands and turned his face back toward Snake Eye. His other eye opened. Into both came a calculating look.
Somehow, that didn’t surprise Snake Eye.
“What’s Big Erl paying?” Earnie asked. “I’ll double it.”
“You know better,” Snake Eye said, “if you know who I am. I always carry out a contract. Integrity is my hallmark. Another rarity in these degraded times.”
“I’ll pay what I owe!”
“Sorry,” Snake Eye said. “It’s too late for that. I made a deal. Besides, you must realize you’ve got more than jack or treasure against your account with Mr. Kendry, now.”
Earnie blew out his gristly gray-pink lips in a sigh. His drooping liver-spotted cheeks were fuzzed with patchy gray stubble.
“It was a mistake setting up Big Erl for the Uplander to ambush,” he said. “I admit it. But it seemed like the best idea at the time. I owed him money. Times turned hard, with the war back on. I couldn’t pay. He was fixing to bring the full entire wrath of his buddy Baron Jed of Hugoville and the Protective Association Army down on my poor chapped old ass. What else could I do?”
“First off, do a better job,” Snake Eye said. “Setting up a rich and powerful landowner like Erl Kendry is one thing. Doing it so shoddily enough that he didn’t die is another. And getting his son and heir Fank iced in the process?” He shook his head. “That, my friend, qualifies as a mistake.”
His finger tightened on the trigger. Earnie flung up his hands again.
“Wait!”
Snake Eye considered the request a moment, then lowered the piece.
“I’m waiting.”
He reached into the watch pocket of the lean-cut black jeans he always wore and flipped open the face of an antique fob watch.
“Fifteen
