“Whatever arrangement you may have made, it died with my brother. This is vendetta, Mr. Maizel.”
“But it was a mistake!” The Rider insisted.
“Your mistake, I’d say,” Johnny Shada said from the bar, sniffing at a plain jug of whiskey and wrinkling his nose.
“What about the Hour of Incursion?” the Rider pressed. “Lilith said Adon was a part of it. She wanted me to find him. She said a war was coming.”
“’Fraid you’re going to miss it,” Mazzamauriello said.
There was a violent hiss of cloth being drawn aside and sunlight spilled briefly into the room. It nearly made every gun in the place jump from their holsters.
A leather-skinned, wispy haired old man stood squinting in the doorway in his long underwear and boots.
“What th’ feck is this?” the man hissed, his thick brogue the only thing in his mouth beside his gums.
“Get out of here,” warned the Rider.
“‘Get out of here?’ That’ll be the day. This is my feckin’ place.”
“Look mister,” Mazzamauriello began.
“Just shut yer gob, yeh wee black bowler. I told yeh fellers I didn’t care a wit if yeh beat on that old piano while I went to the jakes, but I didn’t say word one about feckin’ around behind the bar.”
“Get the hell outta here, old man,” Johnny Shada hissed.
The old man stalked across the saloon to the bar, pulling a skinning knife from his belt.
“Póg mo thóin!” he spat. “It’s some can of piss ye are, bucko. Yeh get yer little arse out from behind there, or it’s a prunin’ I’ll fetch ye!”
“No wait!” The Rider shouted, making a grab for the skinny old man as he passed.
Too late, the owner reached the bar and lunged across at Johnny Shada, grabbing him by the kerchief tied around his neck and brandishing the knife.
Shada in turn backhanded the owner contemptuously, but with such supernal force that the old man’s head was knocked from his bony shoulders with a crackling and shearing sound. It tore free in a spray of blood and went bouncing off the ceiling, trailing half its ropy spine like a wild kite twisting crazily in a high wind.
The golden Volcanic loaded with anointed salt-core bullets slid from the Rider’s holster. His gun snapped once and struck Johnny Shada in the middle of his throat, sending him crashing against the rickety back wall. The Rider turned to face Ormzud and Mazzamauriello, but against the speed of the shedim he was an arthritic grandmother.
Ormzud’s pistol was already out and the palm of his off hand slammed rapidly down on the hammer. Four shots, so close together they were almost one, streaked across the saloon and sent the Rider flailing back. One punched wetly through his left shoulder, another skimmed the rib beneath, and a third nicked the top of his left thigh as he fell. He went down on his back, wondering where the fourth bullet went until the blood ran into his eye and he glimpsed the smoking hole in the crown of his hat lying nearby.
There was no time to be stunned however, and he fired wildly back from the floor, chipping away bits of wood from the spool tables and crates in between.
Mazzamauriello sprung nimbly backwards and landed on the top of the piano as the stool beneath him exploded, his two guns snapping away even as he did.
The floor around the Rider burped and clots of earth popped into the air. He rolled quickly behind another table and fired twice. The first shot missed and the second struck the Oriental shed in the shin. Immediately the viscous yellow and black slime of which he was composed gushed out of the wound. He screamed and fell heavily against the piano.
The Rider fired twice more at Mazzamauriello, but the dwarf was too fast, and went scampering off the piano, actually running on the rickety wall, giggling as he pumped his arms.
The Rider wasted another shot trying to tag him, then aimed just ahead and blew a sizable hole in the thin wall through which the dwarf promptly fell cursing.
But it was the last of his bullets.
The Oriental lurched away from the piano and limped slowly towards him, slinging his pistol hand out again and again, flinging the bullets as if to speed their course.
The Rider crawled backwards, ducking behind the tables and crates, letting the unsteady aim of the shed fail on the interposed objects.
The shed’s revolver finally clicked empty and he threw it down and stalked forward, slapping the heavy tables aside like they were made of papier-mâché. The big spools went rolling off. One smashed the bar to pieces and another slammed against the front wall. He drew a thick bladed knife from his belt.
“Gut you!” he promised, too enraged to form a sentence.
The Rider dropped his Volcanic pistol and wrenched the iron Bowie knife from his own belt.
Several men rushed into the saloon, drawn by the gunfire. With no real idea of what was going on, they apparently decided to seize both combatants, and they rushed in to grab hold of the Oriental and separate him from the man on the floor.
“No!” The Rider yelled, but again it was to no effect.
Two men tried to tackle the shed and found themselves flying end over end through the air to crash in a heap with the fragments of the shattered bar.
A third smaller man leapt on his back and the shed gripped the arm crossing his chest until the man screamed and blood began to spread across his shirt sleeve.
The fourth who strode in scooped up one of the crate chairs and broke it over the shed’s skull. The blow actually staggered the Oriental, and he let the man on his back fall whimpering, to scuttle away across the floor, clutching his bloody arm.
The Rider scrambled to get to his feet, but the shed was already lunging at the offender with his blade, displaying once more his impossible celerity. It was a gutting swipe, but the large man sprang back and caught the shed’s knife arm and drew him in, barring the Oriental’s throat with his other arm in an attempt to wrest the weapon away.
The Rider saw it was the long-haired young strongman from the tent show, now dressed in a plain jacket and his derby.
After an instant of struggle, the expressions of both combatants registered surprise.
To the Rider’s amazement, the knife fell from the shed’s hand and clattered to the floor.
The shed twisted sharply and managed to slide his head out from under the powerful arm that had barred his throat. Now the two faced each other head on, trembling in their exertion, the man gripping the shed’s wrists, trying to force his arms down to his sides.
“What are you?” the shed managed to gasp.
The breed in the quilt coat held the other men at the door back. There was a machete in his fist.
“Gersh?” he called to his protégé.
“Stay back, Hash,” the strongman called.
The Rider turned his attention to the hole he’d blasted in the wall. He’d nearly forgotten the dwarf. Fortunately the contest between man and shed had caught Mazzamauriello’s attention as well. The little man was poised in the hole, one pistol out, staring at the strongman and Ormzud. He raised it, looking for an opening to aide his brother.
Suddenly the Rider wished he still had his holdout pistol as he stood, feeling blood pool in his shoe. He stooped to retrieve his Volcanic and quickly began to reload it.
The strongman Gersh had by now pinned Ormzud’s arms down and had him in a bear hug.
“Give!” he shouted. “Give or I’ll break your back!”
Ormzud just laughed and snapped his head back and forward, smashing the top of his head into Gersh’s face. The kid dropped the shed and staggered back.
Mazzmauriello almost took a shot, but Gersh regained himself and gripped Ormzud by his coat. Put off balance by his mutilated leg, the shed found himself flung into the piano with enough force to break the keyboard to pieces and send the strings snapping and twanging within.
The Rider fired at Mazzamauriello through the hole in the wall. The dwarf shrieked and fell outside once more. He then turned towards Ormzud, who was rising stunn
ed from the wreckage of the piano like something that had made its escape from a monster’s maw by kicking out the teeth.
The Oriental was glaring at the young strongman with a face contorted with hatred. The strongman had his enormous arms open like a wrestler to receive him.
Then Ormzud’s left arm whipped out and a small pistol slid from a contraption beneath his sleeve into his hand. The Rider cut him dead center with the Volcanic and squeezed.
Once more Ormzud fell against the broken piano, but this time he screamed and shook as the salt core bullet that had pierced his heart greedily drank up his bodily fluids. Yellow slime bubbled out of the hole in his chest and it seemed like a dry rot spread outward. In seconds it encompassed his entire body, and then he was nothing but a desiccated mummy, a husk crumbling in a puddle of yellow mud.
“I’ll be back, Rider!” screamed Mazzamauriello from somewhere outside. “Dig your grave, you sonofabitch!”
“I’ll dig a little one for you!” the Rider called back.
But his bravado was short lived. He felt a wave of nausea and dizziness, and then suddenly his legs just weren’t beneath him anymore. He tumbled to the dirt floor, and into a jarring, unnatural sleep.
* * * *
When he awoke, he was still on his back, though the scenery had changed. Instead of the patchy roof admitting sunlight through the gaps, he was looking up at fluttering canvas. He realized he was in the show tent from earlier. It was night now, dark through a hole opened up in the ceiling to admit the smoke from the little fire going in the floor. The wind was whistling outside, making the walls breathe and crack now and then.
He felt stiff and cold, like a dying man that had changed his mind at the last possible minute.
His shoulder was bandaged, as was his leg. The talismans that normally draped his body were lying in a tangled pile on the floor nearby.
He saw the breed then, whom the strongman Gersh had called Hash. He was sitting nearby on a rough pallet, inspecting the Rider’s golden pistol.
Gersh himself had the Rider’s bloodstained tallit katan prayer shawl draped over his knees, and was fingering the tzitzit fringes thoughtfully.
The Rider stirred. What time was it? How long had he lain here?
“What I can’t figure is,” muttered the breed, turning the pistol over in the light, “why slap all this wampum on an old thumb-buster like this? S’like puttin’ a steeple on an outhouse.”
Hash looked up as the Rider turned on his side, wincing at his shoulder.
“He’s awake. Guess I’d best go tell them others.”
“It can wait till morning, can’t it?” Gersh said. He spoke with a faint European accent—German, maybe.
Hash eased back into his seat.
“I guess so.”
The big youth looked to the Rider.
“I’m Gershom Turiel. This is Hashknife,” he said in a deep but gentle voice.
“Rider,” he answered, sitting up slowly.
“You saved my life. I will be sure and tell the others.”
“Why should you have to?” the Rider asked.
“They found old Cashion with his head torn off in the bar,” said Hash. “They wanna know if you seen who done it…or if you done it.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Gersh quickly. “It must have been the men you…killed.”
“They wanna know about that too,” said Hash. “Like what kinda bullets can burn a man up like that?”
The Rider sighed.
“It was no man.”
Hash snickered.
“What?”
He closed his eyes. What else was there to say?
“They weren’t men. Not entirely.”
“You’re crazy!”
“He didn’t…seem like a man,” Gersh said.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Hash said, wheeling on him.
“Hash, you’ve known me since I was five years old. In all that time, have we ever found anybody as strong as me? When I was six I could throw a bull by the horns. But that man…I fought him. I really fought him.”
The Rider looked at Gersh with renewed interest. The shed had struggled against him. That shouldn’t have been possible. They were imbued with infernal strength beyond any even the strongest mortal man should have been able to muster. He looked about for his coat, found it, and found the blue glass spectacles stowed within. It was a minor miracle they hadn’t broken. He found the rosette token too, and transferred it to his hand.
“He was big enough,” Hash muttered. “Biggest Chinee I ever seen, anyhow.”
The Rider looked at Gersh through the lenses. There was nothing extraordinary about him that the Rider could see.
“What’s the matter,” Hash said, seeing the lenses, “fire too bright all of a sudden?”
“No,” the Rider said, sliding them off his nose. He folded them and put them in their case.
The boy was no shed himself, or his irises would not have shown up when looking through the seals. It was a puzzle, but not one the Rider had time to figure out. Mazzamauriello had said he would return. That meant everyone in Varruga Tanks was in danger. He would not let these freighters and drifters share the same fate as the Sons of The Essenes. He would not be responsible for leading death to anyone again.
He leaned over and grabbed his talismans. He pulled them closer and began to untangle them.
“What are you doing?” Gersh asked.
“I’ve got to leave. I can’t stay here,” he said.
“The hell you can’t,” Hash said, rising and brandishing the Rider’s own pistol at him. “You leave and they’ll say we let you go.”
The Rider reached out and quickly snatched the pistol out of Hash’s hands.
Hash blinked.
Gersh stood.
“It’s alright,” the Rider said, putting the pistol in its holster and belting it on. “You couldn’t have fired it anyway. Tell them whatever you like. Tell them I said I’d shoot you. But I’m going.”
“You can’t!” Gersh said. “We took care of you for a whole day and you’re just gonna leave?”
“Just let him go, Gersh,” Hash advised.
The Rider stopped.
“What do you mean ‘a whole day’?” A cold sweat popped out in the middle of his back.
“You been out for a day and a night,” Hash said.
The Rider rubbed his beard. His wounds had been the last burden his exhausted body had been willing to tolerate. The taste in his mouth, the extreme stiffness, the crust in his eyes…yes, it made sense. He had slept through the day of the shooting and the day after.
Like it or not then, death was already on its way. How long did they have till dawn? Could he rouse these people and get them to escape? Even if he could, these were professional freighters, most of them, and no man who made his living with a fist of reins and a shotgun beside him was going to be convinced by a stranger out of the wild to take their rigs off the main trail and scatter into the desert where they could easily be ambushed and robbed. If they all left by the beaten trail the shedim would overtake them anyway.
“Then we’ve got to round up everybody. Bring them in here. We’ve got to get them ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“That dwarf, he’s probably already on his way back here, and he won’t be alone. They’re coming for me, but they’ll kill anyone they find here.”
Gersh looked at Hash.
“You saw what they did, Hash,” he said. “The little one ran along the wall. The big one threw men around like hay bales.”
“I did see,” Hash nodded slowly. “Alright mister, how about if you was to go on, and get outta here? I expect we could think of somethin’ to tell them others.”
“You misunderstand,” the Rider said, shaking his head “Even if I leave, and they’re coming here. This place isn’t safe. They’ll torture everyone to find me, and when they find out no one knows where I am, they’ll give this place back to the desert and bury everybody i
n it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what they do. It’s what they are.”
“What are they?”
The Rider was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned forward.
“Do you know how when you’re camped out in the desert at night, and you know there’s no one around, but you still feel like something’s out there just past the firelight? Or that feeling, when you’re miles from anywhere, that makes you look over your shoulder when you’re passing through wide open country? These things…they’re the things you’re looking for. They’re the cold spots and will ‘o wisps and rustles in the grass that make you pick up a stick of firewood or your gun. They’re the little funnels of dust you see spinning in the high desert and the shadows you can’t account for in a dark room.”
“That’s real vivid,” said Hashknife appreciatively. “You can palaver even better’n I can. I wasn’t flat busted, I’d hire you on to introduce the kid.”
“No Hash,” said Gersh. “He means it. I don’t know how I know it, but it’s true. That Chinaman, when I grabbed a hold of him, it was like layin’ hands on a rattler. I mean, he was poisonous like that, you know? Like I knew if I didn’t get him by the jaw, he’d kill me slow from the inside out.”
Hashknife looked at Gersh queerly.
“You know I ain’t afraid of no man, Hash,” Gersh said. “I never had no cause to be. No man’s ever been able to out-fight or out-wrassle me, and you always taught me if I was to get shot there wasn’t nothing I could do about it anyway. But I was scared of that one. Real scared.”
“Awright,” Hashknife said, kicking dust with mangled toe of one boot. “I believe you, Gersh. Hell, I even believe you, mister. I guess I’m white enough to think you’re crazy but Indian enough not to take the chance you ain’t. To put it plain I don’t much care for you. I don’t guess I know what’s worse—that the things you’re tellin’ me are really out there, or that you’re the type of man such things would take an interest in. I’d just as soon put miles and miles between you and me, but if you say it won’t matter…”
“It won’t,” said the Rider.
“Awright. I’ll round ever’body up, but I don’t know what good it’ll do. I sold ‘em lies for the promise of a phony fifty dollar bill. What the hell have you got to offer?”
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 2
