Way of the Wolf

by James Axler

  Mildred led her chosen mount from the stall it was in, and swung up onto its bare back. The horse bucked for a moment, but she fought it into submission, holding the reins tight.

  Doc clambered onto his horse's back, feeling the ridge of its backbone shove insistently into his crotch. The ride definitely wasn't going to be one of comfort.

  "Ready?" Mildred asked.

  "As much as I dislike these animals, I feel I have little choice."

  "Then ride!" Mildred flicked the reins against the horse's neck, causing it to break into a gallop. She headed toward the barn doors, left slightly ajar by the men who had entered the structure after Doc.

  Struggling to lock his legs around the creature he rode, Doc followed the woman. He didn't think she knew the way back into Hazard where the hotel was.

  They burst through the barn doors almost neck and neck. Mildred and her mount slammed into the door and knocked it open still farther. Shots greeted them when they emerged from the barn, drumming a rapid tattoo across the doors.

  Doc thrust the Le Mat at two men running from the back door of the manor house, then pulled the trigger. The shotgun blast drove them backward.

  Mildred's borrowed blaster cracked harshly, dropping another man shooting from a second-story window toward the back of the house.

  Doc managed the manipulations that moved the barrel holding the cylinder of .44 rounds into play.

  He fired at targets, not really hoping to hit any of them, but wanting them thinking he was armed.

  "Which way?" Mildred asked.

  Doc kicked his horse into greater speed. Kirkland's hostile blasters faded quickly behind him. "This way." He led her back through the rutted roads of Hazard.

  "Got company," Mildred yelled up.

  Twisting, Doc glanced back behind them, spotting five riders traveling along in their wake. A bullet ripped through the air above his head. "Then we have no choice but to make haste."

  POUNDING HOOVES caught Ryan's attention. He came to a halt beside the hotel, getting ready to clamber up to his room, then turned and glanced back down the street.

  Two riders rode hard for the hotel, followed by a handful of others. Moonlight glinted from Doc's silvery mane and from some of the lighter beads worked into Mildred's hair.

  "Krysty!" Ryan called, raising his voice.

  "I see them, lover."

  Ryan pulled the Steyr to his shoulder, putting himself against the hotel. He centered the sights over the lead rider of the five pursuers, putting the crosshairs on the man's face. He guessed that Doc and Mildred were still seventy yards out, and the men following them were about another twenty after that.

  Detonations cracked, and Ryan saw Doc's horse stagger slightly before recovering itself. Changing his mind, Ryan put the crosshairs on the lead rider's horse. He let out half a breath and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet sped true, crashing through the animal's forehead and spewing the contents of its brainpan over the rider. Reflexes gone, the horse tumbled in the street, throwing the rider in one direction while it fell in another. The falling horse took out another rider and mount, and became a hazard for the rest.

  Then a barrage of fire chopped into the riders chasing Doc and Mildred. Ryan recognized Krysty's and Jak's blasters, then the high-pitched report of Dean's 9 mm Browning joined in.

  The line of riders wilted at once. But more gunmen joined them from the gaudy house down the street.

  Fifteen yards out, Doc's horse was shot out from under him. The old man and the dead animal went down together, tumbling across the rutted street.

  Ryan lifted the Steyr and blasted two men who tried to urge their mounts over the downed riders. Two horses with empty saddles ducked into the nearest side street.

  Amazingly Doc scrambled to his feet and ran toward Ryan, looking none the worse for wear. "By the Three Kennedys!" the old man yelled. "I thought the next thing these old ears would be hearing was sweet refrains from Saint Gabriel's horn."

  "Get to the hotel, Doc," Ryan ordered. He kept covering fire going, but the return blasterfire was building, as well. Bullets thudded into the wall nearby.

  Mildred rode her horse onto the wooden boardwalk, then abandoned it in front of the doors. She tried the doorknob, but it didn't open. Before she could move, though, Jak was there, opening the door and letting her in. Doc thumped across the boardwalk, as well, keeping his head low.

  "Ryan," Jak called.

  Wheeling, Ryan sprinted to the door and pushed through. The albino teenager fired past him at Kirkland's sec team.

  Inside the foyer, Ryan spotted one of the dead deputies sprawled across a sofa in the waiting room. His throat had been slit from ear to ear, and the blood patterns across the cream-colored antimacassar suggested that he'd been held in place while he died.

  "Mildred," Dean called from the second-floor landing.

  The woman glanced up in time to catch the big blaster Dean tossed down, then she caught the box of shells that followed. With grim efficiency, she broke the pistol open and checked the loads. Then she snapped the ZKR 551's cylinder. "Thanks, Dean. Where did you find it?"

  "Your room," Dean replied. "Reckon the guys who took you overlooked it."

  Ryan reloaded the Steyr from loose rounds inside his shirt. The blasterfire coming from outside continued unabated, letting him know the attackers weren't going to give up easily. The thick walls of the hotel kept the bullets from coming through, but several of them punched through the windows, ravaging the decor.

  "What the hell is going on?" Aunt Maim rolled into view, propelled by Jocelyn. Both of them only wore sleeping robes.

  "Looks like mebbe you're going to get your wish after all," Ryan said. He fell into line beside the window and peered out.

  More bullets crashed through the windows. Spinning shards of glass whipped through the air and rained over the furniture.

  Jocelyn yanked Aunt Maim back, keeping her behind the heavy counter. The maid pulled a heavy double-barreled shotgun from behind the desk.

  "The bastards are shooting up my hotel," the woman shrilled. "That wasn't supposed to happen!"

  Ryan lifted the Steyr and put the crosshairs over a man taking cover at the corner of a building. He squeezed the trigger and watched the man's head go to pieces. More men rode up on horses, muzzle-flashes flaming from their weapons.

  "Where's John?" Mildred asked as she reloaded. Her accuracy with the target pistol was telling, as with all of the companions. The sec force might have gathered dozens out in the street, but none of them appeared anxious to charge toward the hotel.

  "At the gunsmith's," Ryan answered. "Getting the ammo we need. I figure the noise from this is going to draw him soon enough." He sighted on one of the riders, then punched a heavy-caliber bullet through the man's chest.

  The corpse tumbled free of the saddle, and the horse bolted for cover.

  Hooves crashed heavily against the boardwalk outside. Ryan looked frantically, knowing a rider had to have come up on the boardwalk from his blind side. Then he heard Doc's Le Mat blaster cut loose in a full-throated roar. A heartbeat later a riderless horse galloped by his window within reaching distance. A dead man trailed along behind it, his foot caught in one of the stirrups.

  "Hold up, everybody!" a man roared out in the street. "Just hold up and wait! Get that building surrounded and let's hold them there until Kirkland gets here!"

  The blasterfire ceased outside as the newly arrived riders spread out and took control of the sec men's guns.

  Ryan watched as the men moved with grim efficiency, cutting off their every chance of a bloodless escape. "Fireblast!" he snarled.

  "I must apologize, my dear Ryan," Doc said from across the hotel room. "I appear to have brought the proverbial hornet's nest descending upon us like a judgment from a dark and dire god."

  "Not your fault, Doc." Ryan reloaded the Steyr again, weighing the chances of moving during night as opposed to moving after daybreak. "At least you got Mildred back safe and soun
d." He watched the street, seeing lanterns being spread among the men. They hustled in twos and threes, running like wolf packs.

  Ryan sighted on one of the lanterns, led his target a little, then let out half a breath and held it. His finger tightened on the trigger until he felt the rifle recoil against his shoulder.

  Across the street, the lantern exploded into pieces. Oil splashed over the man carrying it, then ignited as the flames caught. He screamed in pain as the fire burned deep, wreathing him.

  Mildred's pistol cracked, adding two more burning men to the pyre. Lanterns started going out all around the ville.

  "Keep this floor covered," Ryan told Jak, Mildred and Doc. "Jak, you take the rear of the hotel. Mildred, you and Doc spread out here. I'll be back."

  Jak faded into the shadows, his pale body lighted for only a moment as he passed. Doc and Mildred took up windows on opposite sides of the hotel wall facing the street.

  Ryan sprinted up the stairs. It was going to be harder than a blue freezie's ass in January to hold the hotel. But it was also going to cost the sec men dearly if they tried to invade.

  He found Krysty upstairs putting ammo for her blaster in small heaps beneath the windows of three rooms facing the street.

  "Guess we stepped into it this time, lover," she said.

  "Been there before," Ryan replied. "We'll see our way clear of this one, too." But at the moment he wasn't quite sure how. "I'm going up on the roof. Get a clearer vantage point from there."

  "Do you want company?"

  Ryan shook his head. "The rooftop's probably going to be the first position we have to fall back on." He gave her a brief kiss, then headed out of the room.

  Chapter Sixteen

  "You got a back way out of this place?" J.B. asked. He stood near one of the barred windows overlooking the main street. The hotel was only a few blocks down, ringed by gunmen who had overturned buckboards and brought out crates from the general store to build a barricade.

  "Your friends are dead," Phillips replied. "They got no way out of that hotel. Whether Kirkland's men get them this hour or the next, it's going to happen."

  J.B. turned a harsh glare on the gunsmith, making the other man drop his gaze. "Mebbe so. But I'm not going to sit down here all high and dry and pretend it doesn't matter to me. My place is with them, and that's bastard sure where I'm going to be."

  Phillips stared hard at him. "Mebbe you think me and mine should throw our hand in with yours."

  The Armorer spoke quietly. "Appears that's what you were asking Ryan to do earlier."

  "It's different. That man is facing a certain chilling in the position he's in now."

  "I don't see it much removed from what you were asking," J.B. argued. "Except that you aren't standing in there with him like you talked like you would."

  "You trying to shame me?" The old man's voice grew harsh and cold.

  J.B. shook his head. "You asked me a question, I answered it. You don't like the answers I give, don't be asking questions."

  "If the plague isn't real," Phillips said, "then mebbe we got a chance of getting shut of this place. Start over somewhere new. Always a place in a ville for a man knows blasters."

  "Can't argue with that," J.B. said. "And I wouldn't want to. But I got to get to my own work."

  "You're throwing your life away, J. B. Dix," Anna told him.

  "They aren't dead yet, and neither am I. We've come out of tough spots before. Probably going to see a few more before any of us catch the last train to the coast." He flicked his gaze back to Phillips. "Come on. You've got to have a white rabbit's bolt-hole around this place somewhere."

  Reluctantly the old man nodded. "We got a tunnel that will get you out of here."

  "Where does it come up?"

  "At the blacksmith's shop next door. Got a corral there, and sells green-broke horses. Times got hard, we always figured a man a-foot wasn't going to make it. Needed him a horse if he was going anywhere."

  "Show me," J.B. said. He readied his weapons as he walked.

  "You're a fool, J.B." Anna grated.

  "I guess we'll see about that after the smoke clears," the Armorer told her in a cool voice.

  THE TRAPDOOR at the other end of the tunnel was heavy with packed earth. It took real work to get it up, and the whole time J.B. had to wonder if one of Kirkland's sec men was going to be standing at the other side of the room waiting for him.

  Nobody was there, though.

  He climbed out of the tunnel and brought up the duffel containing the ammo he'd gotten from Phillips and put together himself, but stopped when Anna grabbed his pants leg. She surged up out of the ground to join him, fisting his shirt.

  "You don't have any idea what you're walking away from," Anna told him, pulling her body close.

  J.B. felt the heavy pressure of her firm breasts against his chest. "I got an idea."

  "And you're still going to walk? Even walk into your own death?"

  "Made a promise," J.B. said, "that I'd be there. I'm not the kind of man to walk out on people."

  "If things had been different, then?" She looked into his eyes wistfully, not bothering to disguise the desire burning there.

  J.B. looked at her, admitting to himself the desire he felt for the young woman. But it was only passing fancy, and he knew himself well enough to know that. What he had with Mildred, there had never been anything like it in his life. She understood him in ways that no woman ever had, while at the same time remaining one of the most vexing creatures he'd ever encountered.

  "Mebbe," he said, just to give her that.

  Anna pulled him close. "There hasn't been a man for me since Eddie died. Mebbe there never will be. But if you get back this way, or you hear of Tinker Phillips's Gun Shop, you come on around for a visit."

  "Sure," J.B. said, and the lie tripped from his lips with no effort at all.

  She pulled his face into hers and gave him a burning kiss that he felt clear down to his toes. Then she broke the kiss and walked back to the trapdoor. Her walk suggested the curves and the passions that burned under her clothing.

  "You put up a hell of an argument," J.B. said in a thick voice.

  "But you're still going."

  "Yeah."

  Anna stepped back into the tunnel and climbed down. "I wish you well, then." She pulled the trapdoor closed.

  J.B. went over to the horses, his Uzi canted at his hip and gripped in one hand. Anybody that came through the door while he was bridling a mount was fair game. Moonlight and lantern light drifted in through the patchwork glass windows.

  He took down a bridle and fitted it over the head of a bay gelding that seemed gentle enough. He didn't bother with a saddle because he felt he was already working on borrowed time. Then he led the gelding to the rear doors of the blacksmith's shop.

  Pulling himself onto the animal's back, he put the duffel across his lap, then thumped the horse in the sides with his heels and headed through the alley. Two men stood at its mouth, peering down the street at the hotel. Both turned to look at J.B., but neither of them recognized him.

  He rode past them.

  "Man, get your fool self chilled out there bastard quick," one of the men said.

  J.B. ignored the warning and rode straight for the hotel, knowing there was every chance he'd get chilled in a cross fire between his friends and Kirkland's people.

  The sec men stared after him as he rode out into the center of the street. They froze, not knowing what to do. A ragged cheer burst out from some of them as they thought one of their own had gotten courageous enough or stupid enough to try another attack on the hotel.

  "Go get them outie bastards!" someone yelled.

  And that, J.B. knew, might very well be the kiss of death because Mildred and Ryan were good enough to empty the horse's saddle even now. He raised his voice. "Rider coming in! It's J.B.!"

  It took only a moment for what was truly happening to crystallize in the sec men's minds. Then they opened fire.

  J.B. s
tayed low, aiming the horse at the front doors of the hotel. He kept his stomach pressed tight against the duffel bag so he wouldn't lose it. Twisting, he brought the Uzi to bear, raking a line of 9 mm bullets across the sec men behind him.

  The bullets chewed through kegs, an overturned buckboard, and tables that had been brought out of various establishments. A handful of sec men went down under the blasterfire.

  J.B. didn't let up until the Uzi was empty. He turned his attention back to the hotel, holding on to the horse's mane as it vaulted up onto the boardwalk. He knew it had taken some hits during the firefight; he'd felt them shiver through the animal's flesh. Two bullets had grazed the Armorer's left side, tearing through skin and glancing off the bone beneath.

  The doors opened ahead of him just before he thought the horse was going to smash into them. The animal struggled to keep taking steps, blood flecking from its nostrils and blowing back into J.B.'s face in warm, wet drops.

  The Armorer tried to pull the animal up short, but it was nearly dead, ignoring the pain in its mouth from the rough handling of the bit. The horse's front legs went out from under it as it fell forward.

  J.B. leaped off his dead mount, pulling the duffel clear. New pain flared through his bruised side when he hit the floor. He skidded across the wooden floor and smashed into a big chair. Bullets ripped through the fabric over his head. The strange thing was, the bullets came from inside the hotel.

  "Hold your goddamn fire!" Mildred yelled. "He's one of us!"

  J.B. glanced across the room and saw the two women huddled behind the counter. One of them sat in a wheelchair, brandishing a huge blaster.

  Muffling a groan as he pushed himself to his feet, J.B. reached for his fedora and clamped it onto his head. He gathered the straps of the duffel and pulled it over his shoulder. His side felt as if it were on fire.

  Doc shoved the doors back together, then put the lock bar back into place. "John Barrymore," the old man said, "I was not sure if we would see you again in this life."