The Gunslinger's Man (31 page)

As if aware of his wayward thoughts, Connie shot him a glance over her shoulder. “We got a problem, Asher?”

“No… No problem.” This
was
what he’d wanted. A Sargasso without vampires, without thugs like Octavian to frighten the population into submission.

Yet when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Ambrose he saw but Blackjack, trying to help his friend with his very last ounce of strength. He saw Nyle, twisted up by other people’s games.

“Anybody notice how quiet it’s gotten?” Asher asked. “All over town, there ought to be people screaming and running for their lives…”

“Like in Redemption,” Connie recalled.

“That’s right.”

Sargasso was as mournfully silent as the valley it dominated. Tumbleweed could be heard rolling down Main Street between the odd scuffle between the few remaining vampires. Malachi’s human gunmen must have been dealt with by now and any who’d escaped would be laying low if they had half a brain between their ears.

“Maybe everyone’s dead,” Wesley grumbled.

Connie smacked him over the head so Asher didn’t have to. “They’ve gotta be in the church.”

“I just came from there,” Asher said, determined not to think about the hours he’d wasted feeling sorry for himself, deluded into hoping that Halloran gave a damn.

“Then, where?” Connie scowled out the window. “Town hall?”

“Maybe. It’s big enough.” All those rooms and stairwells could easily conceal some two hundred people, as long as they didn’t mind being squeezed like sardines.

With the threat of annihilation looming over them like the sword of Damocles, that’d be the least of their problems.

“Great.” Satisfied that there were no more targets to shoot at, Wesley slid down against the wall. “Then we get the ammo from your uncle’s shop and we finish this thing.”

“You wanna kill everyone that’s left?”

“Everyone that’s already died once, yeah,” Wesley snapped. “We do it now, while they’re weak—”

“Guys.”

“We end Malachi like you did his pop and—”

“
Guys!
” Connie seized Wesley by the shirtfront. “There’s smoke rising from town hall.”

Wesley and Asher couldn’t scrabble to their feet fast enough. The broken window only overlooked a narrow wedge of Main Street, but around the corner, around the balconies of the Pony Inn, a thin gray filament stood out against the night sky.

“Fuck,” Asher swore. He hadn’t finished reloading the Colt but he grabbed it anyway. His own ancient revolver was long gone.

“Connie, wait!” Wesley caught her by the wrist. “We don’t know how many are left—”

Connie yanked her arm free. “My parents are in there!”

Fire or not, there was no holding her back now. Asher didn’t think twice about following.

They bolted through the streets, their footsteps both too loud and too slow, the racket inconsequential. Ten feet in, Asher heard Wesley swear a blue streak and take off after them.

If they made it through tonight, he made a mental note to sit his friend down and make sure he understood that if he didn’t fess up to his feelings for Connie, then he obviously had nothing under his hat but hair.
Big if.
Bigger still, once the half-dozen vampires brandishing torches came into view between them and town hall.

One would’ve been bad enough. Asher’s neck stung with phantom pain as he remembered Lucretia’s fangs opening his flesh.

“Hey!” Connie shouted, aiming her revolver with both hands. “Remember me?”

The tall, reedy vampire closest to the saloon snarled. It was Ivan. Someone had taken a swipe at him and left him missing an ear, but it was definitely Ivan.

Asher remembered what Uncle Howard had insinuated—that the vampires from Redemption had been blundering through the valley for some time. No wonder weren’t healing properly. They’d been without bloodbags since the attack. They weren’t as strong as they’d been, but they were still five to their measly, human three.

Connie squeezed the trigger.

The bullet went wide. Running on empty or not, Ivan’s reflexes were still better than a mere mortal’s. He dodged the first shot as though it were child’s play. The next one struck the dirt, courtesy of Connie’s fraying temper. She emptied the clip without a single lucky shot and when that didn’t work, she lunged at him like a stray cat pouncing on a mouse.

Asher made to follow, but the other vampires had finally twigged on to the attack. He nailed one in the shoulder, more by accident than design, and still it came at him.

They slammed into the ground, metal grinding against bone, against vampire flesh. From the corner of his eye, Asher glimpsed Wesley faring little better with his targets. Someone shouted farther up the town hall steps.

A red flare arced into the sky.

Like Redemption, like every other border town, Sargasso was all timber and dirt, flammable when exposed to a lit torch.

Asher got his pistol between his chest and the vampire snapping at his throat and fired. At point-blank range, once was enough. Black blood stung Asher’s eyes as he rolled out from under the quivering creature. He didn’t look. He knew what he’d see if he did.

His friends needed him to keep his head.

“Fire!” someone yelled. “Fire!”

The cry was picked up by a chorus of other voices, all choked with fear and thickening smoke.

Asher barely managed a step forward before the town hall doors blew open. Men and women barged through the narrow gap, stumbling and falling, and picking themselves up again. Fleeing one source of terror only landed them in the open maw of another.

The remaining four vampires stood between Asher and his friends and neighbors. He recognized Connie’s parents in the frightened throng. Uncle Howard, always a little farther back, seemed to have been carried outside by mob. He cut a sharp contrast to Romero, her hair a riot around her head, frozen in her tracks at the foot of the porch. A brass fire stoker gleamed in her hands. She’d been the one to force the doors open.

The roof of the hall blazed behind the press of wild-eyed townspeople. Someone inside was shouting for calm. Asher thought he recognized Malachi’s voice but couldn’t be sure.

With a savage, suicidal bellow, Romero swung her makeshift weapon. She fell upon the vampire nearest to her like a woman possessed.

The creature parried the blow with a torn-up hand. Even weakened, it was stronger and faster than a mere human. But Romero struck again and again, fury boiling in her eyes. She was the first to attack.

She was not the last.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When the dust cleared and morning dawned over Sargasso, the wealth of destruction became impossible to ignore. Furrows in the ground marked the graves of fallen vampires. Their blood had eaten into the dirt, both nourishing and scorching as it evaporated. The dead humans were no less obvious, lying in tortured, unmoving heaps in both street and house.

Those who’d been trampled by the cattle were the first to be buried. The unnaturally warm day that followed the fighting made it an imperative. Humans and vampires alike dug graves behind the church, trading shovels and trowels to crack the hard earth. The carpenter had been killed, so they made do with placeholder crosses cobbled together from broken chair legs and window frames, no two grave markers alike.

If there were tears, then they were spilled behind closed doors. Too much was left to do in Sargasso for anyone to stop and weep.

As darkness fell over town, Asher hoisted himself out of the last six-foot-long hole and wiped his hands on his thighs. It wasn’t enough to cleanse them, but then vinegar and soap wouldn’t have done it either.

“Forty-eight dead.” Wesley sighed, picking up the shovel. “You’d think that’d be enough for the rest of ’em to get the message.”

Two of the town’s men came bearing the last limp body. Scarves covered their mouths and noses, and the gloves on their hands were just oven mitts. “What message is that?”

“Sargasso’s done.” Wesley spread his arms wide. “Look around, man. We’re down a quarter of our population. We got no cattle, no resources. Train’s stopped running ’cause of Ambrose… If it weren’t for Redemption going to the dogs ’fore we did, I’d say we’re fish in a barrel.”

“But Redemption
is
gone.”

“Don’t change the fact that we’ll be starvin’ in a couple of weeks’ time.”

Too tired to argue, Asher pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll take it from here,” he told the two ersatz undertakers. “Think there’s some soup left in the church if you boys—”

“You reckon there’s any liquor left?” asked one of the men.

He was tall but skinny and once he lowered his scarf, Asher saw the multitude of pimples on his face. He was just a kid.

“You’re Ada’s boy, right?” Asher sucked his cheeks in to conceal a smile. “Go on to church before I tell your mama what you’re up to.” He clamped the boy on the shoulder. Ten years ago, that could have been him putting on a brave face while doing whatever it took to keep going.

The only difference—and it was a big one—was that his mother would’ve already been long dead.

“Fucking figures,” Wesley muttered.

“What?”

“Big man in town, huh? That boy’s gonna worship the ground you walk on.”

Asher rolled his eyes. “Shut your mouth.” He knew when he was being mocked.

“I mean it! You should hear how they talk about you when you ain’t around… Screw the Second Coming, you’re their new messiah now.”

“Why? ’Cause I shot Ambrose?”

Wesley nodded. “Amazing what people will forgive if you give ’em what they want.”

“People,” Asher repeated, his mood souring all too easily at the end of a long day. “But not you, huh? Great. Thrilled to hear it, Wesley. You know, it’d be real nice if you could drop that holier-than-thou attitude—you think I don’t know I fucked up? You think I
wanted
to become vampire feed?”

His jaw tensing, Wesley glared down at the shovel in his hand. Asher tracked his gaze, self-control dangerously close to snapping. What did Wesley think, that he was going to hit him with that thing?
Let him try
. Asher was exhausted and thirsty, and so very ready to use his hands for something other than digging graves.

“Guess that means you haven’t found him yet.”

“What?”

“Halloran.” Tilting his head to one shoulder, Wesley dug the edge of the shovel into the mound of dirt at his feet. “I know you’ve been hunting for him. Five times I had to ask you what you wanted to do about moving the reverend.”

“I told you. I was tired.”

“Distracted, more like.” The blood behind his ear flashed in and out of sight when Wesley shook his head. He’d washed up as best he could, but there had been no time for baths.

Asher had spent the better part of the morning scouring the ruins of Sargasso in hopes of finding Halloran hiding somewhere. By noon, he had come to dread pushing past doors for fear of what he’d find on the other side. He couldn’t walk past the concave pit of a vampire’s last resting place without looking for some speck of familiarity in the apparel left behind.

“I don’t blame you,” Wesley added. “Guy kept you prisoner for months. Did—whatever he did to you, I don’t know and you don’t gotta tell me. If I were in your boots, I’d be afraid he’s comin’ back for me too.”

Asher held his stare. It seemed suddenly imperative that he not blink or breathe or move. Wesley was no vampire, to read falsehood in the leap of his heart, but he knew Asher better than anyone besides Connie. The slightest twitch in his expression would give him away.

“Of course,” Wesley went on, sighing, “if he ain’t come back while we’re all too weak to fight him, you probably have nothin’ to worry about.”

“You reckon he bit it?” Asher was almost proud of the surety in his voice. They might have been talking about one of Malachi’s thugs.

There were plenty to choose from. The fracas had left the de facto mayor with only a small handful of lucky acolytes and curiously none of his maids.

Wesley shrugged. “Must have… That one Rider, she’s still around, ain’t she?”

He meant Maud, whom Asher had last seen gathering up her things and saddling Blackjack’s horse. He didn’t know if she’d left already. They had never been close and he wouldn’t have known what to say if she lingered to say goodbye. He had noticed that Charlie disappeared around the same time, but that might have been a coincidence. He nodded.

“Then yeah, I reckon he’s no longer our problem,” Wesley finished. “Hallelujah! Hey, where’re you goin’? We got one more!”

“You can finish up on your own,” Asher tossed over his shoulder.

He felt shaky all of a sudden and it had nothing to do with the bodies they’d been carting around all day. The stench of mortality didn’t bother him anymore. Flesh was just flesh, alive or dead. Someday it would be him in one of those graves. By rights, it should’ve been him already.

He made it around the corner and down the side street that led to his uncle’s shop, before his legs folded under him. Neither machinery nor bone could hold him up. The problem wasn’t physical, though it sure felt like it.

Breaths knifing in and out of his chest, Asher slumped against the nearest wall. He jammed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes as if grit and dust would wipe away the sting.

It stood to reason that if he’d combed every inch of Sargasso in broad daylight and turned every stone with no sign of Halloran, then there was no Halloran to find. Fury had done for him in the end. Or maybe one of Wesley’s bullets. Maybe Connie had beaten him to death like she’d done Ivan. The
how
didn’t matter so much.

Asher sucked his lips into his mouth and bit down until his jaw ached.

“You all right, kid?” Romero’s voice trickled through the screen door. The back of the saloon had weathered the carnage better than the front. Romero’s canary was even alive and well in its cage, wings fluttering against the bars.

“Fine, yeah.” Asher plastered on a weak smile.

“That why you’ve parked yourself on the ground like some guttersnipe?”

Silhouetted behind the screen, Romero looked more ghost than woman. It wasn’t unlike how Asher felt.