make these down here anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll leave your eyes and eat your arms and legs first. Would you like to watch me gnaw your bones?”
“I’d rather watch you do the backstroke in lava.”
He smiles and I smile right back at him. I’m the one bleeding, but he’s the one who just gave me an idea.
We go on like that for a couple more minutes. He lunges and I dodge the blade or the lucky prick gets a piece of me. I knock him back with some decent kicks and a few elbows to the head. The important thing is that I don’t stand still and I keep him moving in the direction of the animal bones nearby.
By the time we make it there, Horned Toad is leaning a little to his left from all the shots I’ve given him to the ribs. On the other hand, every time I move, my blood does a Jackson Pollock mural on the sand, so maybe we’re even at this point.
We trade blows a little more until I’m near enough to the bones that I can make my move. I let him get close and swing at my head. When he does, I give him one more quick kick in the ribs that knocks him back and leaves him open. As he rocks back, I grab one of the half-buried ribs to smash him with.
And nothing happens. The rib is solid in the ground. It isn’t going anywhere. Not with me yanking on it like a mouse trying to uproot a redwood.
I’d like to say that the laughs that go up as I pull on the rib don’t hurt, but they do. Though not as much as all my knife wounds and the feeling that I’m running out of options.
Horned Toad is really feeling good now and runs at me like a lizard-skin freight train. On the ground next to the rib I can’t budge is a big canine tooth from whatever died here. Just as he reaches me, I fall to my knees, grab it, and throw all of my weight behind a lunge at his legs. I drive the tooth deep into his thigh and twist it on the way out. Black Hellion blood splatters on my hands and coat. I roll away as Horned Toad drops to his knees. While he’s down, I jump at him, swinging the tooth down at his neck.
I guess fucking up Horned Toad’s leg in front of his friends really pissed him off because he does what every Hellion does when he’s losing: he cheats. To be fair, I’ve cheated in plenty of fights, too, but he grabs his pistol when I thought this was a knife fight, and, well, it’s a very upsetting moment.
I kick sand in his face, jump, and roll off to his right side. Horned Toad fires blind and ends up popping off a couple of shots at his own people. They scramble out of the way like dusty roaches. I want to scramble, too, but I know that with a crowd like this watching, it’s more important to stand my ground and risk being shot than to back down. With luck, I’ll still heal fast. With all the slices Horned Toad has taken out of me, I’ll know soon.
His Hellion Glock has an extended clip, and with the way he’s shooting, he’s bound to get lucky and hit me. It’s time to take action. It’s time to get strategic.
It’s time to do something really stupid.
I work my way around behind Horned Toad, with just a few feet between him and the skeleton. From what I figure, I was able to get away from most of his attacks, so I have a little speed left. And I was able to hurt the fucker, so I’m still strong. I hope that’s not all that’s left of the old me. But I’ve got to be careful and not give too much away until I figure out all I can do and who this Wild Bunch really is.
While he’s firing in the opposite direction, I run for the skeleton and grab one of the ribs. Like the first one, it doesn’t budge. This time, though, I use the noise of the gunfire to cover me as I whisper some Hellion hoodoo.
For a second, nothing happens and I’m sure that I’ve reached a new level of fucked. Then the hardpack around the rib shatters and I haul it out of the ground like a deranged Fred Flintstone.
Horned Toad stops firing.
“Where are you, mortal? Come and fight me like a man.”
From behind him, I say, “No.”
And swing the rib over my head, crushing Horned Toad’s skull like an anvil landing on a soft-boiled egg. It’s messy, and bloody, and I get toad juice all over my boots, but he’s sure as shit not firing his gun at me anymore. I grab it and his knife as his body blips out of existence and starts the long, nasty fall into Tartarus.
I stand there, breathing hard, but with a dumb smile on my bloody face. I can still throw some hoodoo. That’s the best news since I arrived here. Now I just have to keep all these creeps from finding out until I know how much I can do.
My little ego fest is cut short by bullets tearing up the ground around my feet.
Horned Toad’s pal, the baby face in the jeep, is running at me, firing the rifle. I guess he’s upset because he hasn’t grasped the fact that it’s really hard to hit anything when you’re running and your gun is bouncing around like a rubber duck in a typhoon.
This time, I don’t stand my ground. I run toward the fucker. The way he’s shooting, he couldn’t hit the sky from a weather balloon. When I’m close enough to see his pearly whites, I throw Horned Toad’s knife, and nail Dobie Gillis right through the throat. He falls on his face, gurgling into the sand. It’s an unpleasant sound, so I steal his rifle and drop to one knee.
More than Dobie, what I’ve had my eye on is another Hellion, this one a bit more human looking, in the flatbed of a small pickup truck, swinging a sixty-caliber machine gun in my direction. He has a good position and stable footing and I have a bad feeling that he knows what he’s doing. I can’t take a chance on missing him when I shoot. So I don’t shoot him.
I shoot a jerrican of fuel strapped to the side of the truck.
It explodes with an extremely satisfying whoomp. Satisfying to me, at least. It would be nice to think that the screams from the burning Hellion are him cheering me on for making such a great shot, but that’s probably too much to hope for.
I get a bead on the human torch while a group of Hellions and souls rushes to him with blankets and water to put out the flames. They’re not going to make it in time. I squeeze the trigger.
“Excuse me,” says a very human voice nearby. “Before you shoot.”
I glance over and there’s a small man in a white duster standing on the roof of what looks like an armored ’69 Charger with tank treads instead of wheels. He’s out in front of the pack, like maybe he’s the one leading them through the desert.
“Excuse me,” he says again through a megaphone.
I keep the rifle trained on Johnny Storm and yell, “What?”
“We would all appreciate it if you didn’t kill Megs.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m not aiming a gun at you. And I’m asking you politely.”
I take quick stock of my situation. There are maybe a hundred idiots out there in those vehicles. My guess is that every one of them is heavily armed and eager to kill. There are more high-caliber guns mounted on other vehicles and other Hellion weapons that I don’t recognize. If everybody opens up on me at once, hoodoo or not, I’m going to look like a flank steak shooting out of a wood chipper. Plus, I don’t know where I am. I still don’t know if I’m going to stop bleeding. I’m
