by Brett Riley
Troy’s band ducked into an alley and huddled up. It was time to separate.
Stransky laid a hand on the shoulder of the Troubler nearest her, a man with thick blond hair and a scar on his neck. Y’all goin with Troy—remember that today, an order from him’s as good as one from me. Any questions?
No one had any. The Troubler with the neck scar said, Thanks for choosin me, Lynn.
Stransky waved him off. I figure all I’m doin is gettin you killed. Still, good luck. And good huntin.
Good huntin, they replied.
Stransky took her twelve troops and exited the far end of the alley. Troy looked over his group—eight men and four women, bony and dirty-faced and armed to the teeth, their expressions fierce and angry.
I know we don’t like each other much, he said. But this is our principality, and ain’t nobody gonna drown it while we can still fight. We gotta watch each other’s backs and kill every outlander we see. But unless we get cornered, nobody shoots until we free my deputy. He knows who he’s recruited. They’ll reinforce us. Questions?
Again, no one had any. Troy motioned for them to follow him.
31
Stransky’s posse passed Hobbes’s house once, stepping past and over and around the people in the streets. Every block or so, a single guard, two, a cluster of six sweltered in the damp heat. They were armed with handguns and shotguns. Stransky frowned. Sheee-it. We gotta take em out fast. Still, the numbers looked promising. Surely some of those prisoners could still fight. If her people could overwhelm the guards at one end of a block, they could confiscate weapons and use them against the next group, and if Troy came through, several waves of reinforcements would arrive. Every block they took would bring more weapons, more support.
And if Troy’s troops faltered or betrayed them, at least Stransky would no longer have to tolerate the prisoners’ god-awful smell.
Some guards they passed were clubbing a skinny, filthy man. The victim hung on to their ankles and pleaded for water, no matter how many times they punched him or kicked his ribs or pistol-whipped him. One guard caught Stransky’s eye. He had red hair and carried what looked like a genuine cutlass on his belt. God knew where he had found it. He grinned, his front teeth missing.
If I can find you later, I’ll slit your throat for you, fucknuts. We’ll see how you smile then.
They passed sandbagged corner positions manned by jovial and inattentive guards. In the outlanders’ minds, they were already home. They paid Stransky’s bunch little mind.
Soon she angled across Hobbes’s yard and into his driveway. Two guards at the front door, another two on either side of the house. Probably at least two more in the back yard. The troops on the porch saluted them. Stransky saluted back.
You must have gotten your orders mixed up, said the man on the right. We’re on until dark. Or the evacuation, whichever comes first.
Stransky grinned. Ain’t that the goddam shit?
She drew her knife and buried it in the man’s abdomen and clapped her other hand over his mouth, stifling his scream.
The second guard tried to pull his sidearm, but one of Stransky’s men had already drawn his weapon and jammed it against the man’s testicles. Say one fuckin word and you’ll sing alto for the rest of your short-ass life, the Troubler whispered.
Someone opened the front door. They filed inside, dragging the prisoner and the dying guard with them. Stransky shut the door. Nice and quiet. As long as the others don’t wander around the house, we got a little time. Her people cut both Crusaders’ throats and left them crawfishing on the floor. Then they followed Stransky into Hobbes’s den. The deputy lord sat in a straight-backed chair. He wore his boots and his good sidearms. All around him lay ripped-up floorboards and what Hobbes had hidden under them: a shotgun and rifle on shoulder straps, bandoliers of shells and a pouch of sidearm ammunition, three or four canteens, and a sack of jerky.
He stood. Bout time. Gabe alive?
Stransky peered out the nearest window. He’s goin after Tetweiller. How you gonna signal your people?
Let me take care of the other guards and I’ll show you. Pass this stuff out, except the pistol ammo.
As the whispering Troublers argued over who should get the guns, Stransky followed Hobbes to a bedroom with windows looking onto the side yard. The guards were visible through thin white curtains. Hobbes reached into his shirt and pulled out a pistol fitted with a long screw-on barrel.
Nice, Stransky said.
He aimed at one sentry’s head and pulled the trigger. The gun barked, the sound still too loud in the quiet house. A neat round hole in the curtains, the tinkling of broken glass. Hobbes shot the other guard as the man stood over his fallen friend. It took perhaps two seconds.
He turned to her. Gotta hurry in case the others heard.
He trotted to the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard, Stransky on his heels. He unlatched them and threw them open. Two Crusaders turned their way. One managed to spot the weapons and draw his sidearm before Hobbes shot them both between the eyes. As they fell over on their backs in the ankle-deep grass, Hobbes was already moving back through the house. Stransky stopped in the living room and shushed her people.
No sound from outside.
A moment later, Hobbes burst into the room. Ain’t nobody out there, he said. Must have heard us. Gonna have company soon.
He dashed down the hall.
Stransky turned to her group and shrugged. Well, okay. I reckon we’ll just stay here and wait on em to shoot us then.
Hobbes returned, carrying a bag that rattled as he walked. He dragged a spool of string, playing it out on the floor.
Damn, someone said.
Shit, said Stransky. You ain’t fuckin around.
Hobbes winked. It was like watching a rattlesnake walk upright. Let’s make some noise, he said.
What’s in the poke?
Two hatchets and a load of hacksaws.
She nodded at a Troubler, who took them from Hobbes. About ready?
Almost. He took a paper out of his back pocket and handed it to her. Here.
She opened it. He had drawn a crude map with positions throughout the city marked with a series of X’s. What’s this?
Locations for my caches, Hobbes said. In case I get blasted.
You’re too pretty to die, Stransky said.
Hobbes turned to the others. Got a fast fuse here, so hit the street shootin. Kill every Crusader you see and free as many prisoners as you can. Take any weapons you find and arm the freed folk.
A scraggly-looking man with a long black beard said, You ain’t gotta tell us shit. We been waitin on this day all our lives.
All right then. Hobbes took some matches out of his pocket and struck one on his boot. He lit the fuse and backed away.
You ready? Stransky asked.
Reckon so.
Outside, they fanned out toward either end of the block, shooting and reloading. Crusaders gathered at the intersections fell to the pavement in silence or screaming and holding their guts, their throats, their shoulders. Two or three returned fire. One of Stransky’s men cried out and fell on his face, his gun clattering on the street.
Stransky took the bag of blades from her man and tossed it toward the nearest captives. Free yourselves, she said. Grab the first weapon you can find and follow us.
And then, with a thunderous roar like what the ancients’ city-killing bombs must have sounded like, the house blew up, raining fire and brick and burning wood into the street.
32
Troy’s band was still approaching Tetweiller’s house when the explosion rocked the city. Guards and detainees alike turned to watch the ball of fire, the smoke. Even the men stationed outside Tetweiller’s front door ran to the sidewalk and pointed, arguing about what they should do. And in that moment, Troy drew his silenced weapon and sho
t them in the head. They fell like the two-hundred-pound sacks of meat they were and moved no more. A Troubler woman nearby raised one finger to her lips and winked. Troy trotted up the walk and opened the door, leading his little flock into the den, where they found Tetweiller prying up the floorboards with a crowbar and hauling out weapons, food, canteens, ammunition.
He looked up at them. You get the ones around the house?
No, said Troy. We just walked on in.
Tetweiller screwed a silencer on a Glock. Good to see you again, Gabe. Troy clapped him on the back and started loading down the Troublers with supplies while Tetweiller went from room to room, dispatching the guards through the windows as Hobbes had done. When he returned, he took his gun belt and favored sidearms from a Troubler. Sorry, boy. These have stood me in good stead longer than you’ve been walkin the earth.
Come on, Troy said. We got a lot of city between us and the lakefront.
Hang on, said the old man. He disappeared down the hall and came back with a set of burlap sacks filled with hatchets and hacksaws. He doled them out. Y’all distribute these to yonder chain gang.
Troy opened the front door, saw what was out there, and slammed it again, shouting, Duck!
He and Tetweiller hit the floor as a volley of shots splintered the door. Troy jarred his sore knee and groaned as the man behind him cried out. Blood spattered the floor, the wall. More grunts and moans. Troy looked up. The man who had been standing behind him and a bullet-riddled woman lay twitching as the rest of the Troublers crawfished into the den. Troy grabbed the dying woman’s hatchet and followed, crawling over her and through her blood.
What the hell? panted Tetweiller.
They’re convergin on your driveway. I reckon they saw the bodies.
Shit.
They let us bottleneck ourselves. We’re lucky we lost only two.
Stupid. Stupid.
Everyone gathered around the wounded. The woman made a horrible gurgling sound. She had been shot in both lungs and the abdomen. Part of her jaw had been blown away. Her tongue flopped about. The man died, his jugular vein and femoral artery pumping macabre fountains. The woman passed a moment later.
The Troublers looked to Troy. What now? said a man with a sandy beard and one eye clouded in cataracts.
Troy closed the dead Troublers’ eyes. The guards we passed out yonder? Some of em are probably headed this way. We gotta push through em and be gone before anybody else gets here. You bunch keep em busy while Ernie and me—
A series of explosions close by rattled the walls. A chorus of voices shrieked in pain. Troy ran to the nearest window and looked out.
The Crusaders who had formed a skirmish line on the walk now lay everywhere, some dead, others alive but shattered. It looked like one of them had erupted and taken the rest with him, along with several nearby prisoners, some of whose ruined limbs still hung, disembodied, from their chains.
What the fuck? Tetweiller said.
No idea, but we gotta move.
Ignoring his stiff knee’s protests, Troy led them through the foyer and outside, guns drawn. They fanned across the yard, stepping in blood and onto bits of flesh and bone. One by one, they dispatched the wounded.
Willa McClure and Bandit sauntered out from behind a house across the street. The girl stopped in the center of the carnage and observed, thumbs hooked in her gun belt.
Where’d you come from? Troy asked.
McClure spat on a dead guard’s forehead. After we reconnoitered the lake, we snuck over here and holed up in yonder house. Figured you’d come for Ernie, seein’s how Stransky’s taken a shine to Jack.
Troy indicated the bodies. I reckon you did this?
She reached down and rubbed Bandit’s belly. The dog rolled about in the street, mindless of the gore. You reckon right. I buried a cache of grenades and such a couple blocks down. Same time y’all started hidin your own supplies. This bunch was so focused on y’all, they never seen me walk over and roll four grenades up under em. Too bad about these other folks, but I figured it was them or you.
The street was an abattoir, a sodden arabesque of war. She just killed at least a dozen folks and wounded twice that many, but it don’t faze her. I reckon that kind of coldness comes from growin up hard, with only killers for friends. There was nothing to say, no platitude that could rekindle the girl’s lost childhood, the story of which Troy himself had helped author. So he tossed his hatchet to a nearby Troubler, who began hacking away at the locks. The rest of Troy’s band passed out their blades, all of which were snatched up in emaciated hands.
What do we do when we’re loose? someone asked McClure.
Find a weapon and start killin, she said. Or run. Or die.
Lord, girl, Troy said.
The child wiped blood off her dog’s coat. What?
Troy opened his mouth to reproach the kid, but he closed it again. On a killing field, lecturing about the virtues of compassion and empathy seemed too hypocritical even for the damned. So he turned back to the Troublers. All right. Just like we planned. And don’t forget where I hid my caches. They’ll help.
The group split in two and set out toward opposite ends of the street, McClure and Bandit trotting at Troy’s side with half the Troublers. Tetweiller led the rest toward whatever might come.
33
Bullets struck the wall with a sound like axes falling on thick logs. Someone shoved a cloth onto Royster’s wound hard enough to crack bones. He groaned and gritted his teeth as the world went gray. The cries of the injured rose like the calls of strange birds. A Crusader lay on his back fifteen yards away, a flaming arrow in his heart, his uniform and flesh sizzling like a beefsteak in a hot skillet. The acrid smoke burned the envoy’s eyes and nose.
Benn and Clemens had climbed a ladder and were firing on the Conspirators from up top. Ford and Long stood on either side of the gap. Every so often, one of them would lean out and return fire, but neither seemed all that eager.
Are they faltering or conserving ammunition?
Melton and Glau cowered ten feet away, backs against the wall, both pale, both watching Royster with wide eyes. Jerold Babb knelt in the dirt and prayed aloud. Gordon Boudreaux watched Royster bleed, his face an inscrutable image carved in a granite cliff.
Royster grabbed the sleeve of the guard tending his wounds. How is it?
The guard’s face was pale and wan. The bleeding’s slowed, sir.
Help me get up.
You’re liable to make it worse.
Royster shoved him away. And the Troublers are liable to overrun us. If you’re not going to help me, go shoot someone. Gordon, your assistance, please.
Boudreaux hauled Royster up by his good arm, the envoy groaning and wincing and hissing through his teeth. He caught Long’s eye across the way and motioned her over. She waited for a lull in the fire and then sprinted across the gap, bullets spattering the dust and grass at her feet. When she passed Ford, he fired once more and followed her.
Hear me, Lord, Babb cried. Deliver us.
Gordon, Royster said. Please scale that ladder and ask Misters Benn and Clemens to join us. Then go find my highest-ranking officer present, not counting all of you or those two weaklings over there. He nodded at Melton and Glau.
Boudreaux left without a word. Somewhere up there, Benn and Clemens crouched behind the blast barriers running four feet high on both sides of the wall. Moments later, all three men descended and gathered round. Babb said his amen and crawled over.
Highest-ranking man present, except us, is Aaron Listerall, Benn said. He’s down that way, unless he’s dead. He nodded to Royster’s right. The envoy flapped a hand at Boudreaux, who ran off in that direction.
Very good, Royster said, wincing. For a while, no one spoke. Royster rested his good hand on Benn’s shoulder and prayed.
I hate this town, Clemens said to no o
ne in particular.
All right, Royster wheezed, looking them over. I want the four of you in town. Take no troops. You will find plenty of Crusaders willing to kill or die for you along the way. Your mission is to reach the lake. Blow the charges.
Benn’s eyes widened. Do we allow our personnel to retreat, sir, and trail the fuse behind them, as we planned?
Royster groaned. Could no one think but him?
If such can be done, yes, he said. If they must choose between saving their own lives and doing God’s work, their path should be clear. Either way, I want these streets flooded within the hour. Send any laggards to meet the Lord ahead of us.
Babb looked as if he had seen his mother naked. You’d let the Lord’s own die with the heretics?
Benn cleared his throat. I understand your sentiment, Mister Royster, but—
Do not argue with me, Royster said. He leaned forward, his shoulder wound dribbling onto the ground and Benn’s boots. We find our whole purpose here at hazard. If the Lord requires our lives today, we shall give them, and gladly. Go.
Benn, Clemens, Ford, and Long ran to catch their horses, leaving Royster and Babb alone. Benn kept looking over his shoulder, eyes bugging. The gunfire and explosions and death cries continued unabated, contrapuntal music from hell. Babb cringed every time someone fired, which, given the frequency, made him look like the victim of a nervous disorder.
