A Lust For Lead (25 page)

Alex and Jim Bening were brothers, both in their late-twenties, both professional killers, and both hired by Nathaniel to serve as invigilators. It had been Jim’s idea. He was the oldest by three years and the most headstrong. He had only to hear of the Fastest Guns to know that he wanted to be one of them. His younger brother Alex had been more cautious but a job was a job, especially since they were hard up for money.
The two of them were now running for their lives, together with a third man, Glenn Short.
When the shooting had started, the three men had gone to bolster a counter-offensive. They had found themselves battling just one man, but that one man alone had wiped out all of their companions. He would have killed them too, but they had had the sense to run away. They had tried to reach the stables but the route was blocked by another gunman, who had fired his revolver with preternatural speed. Fanning his hand against the hammer, he had blazed off a hail of lead that drove them into the mouth of an alley in search of cover. His shots chipped splinters off the wall.
‘What the fuck is going on here, man?’ Glenn spat. He risked sticking his head round the corner and saw that another group of invigilators had blundered onto the street. They looked like they were running from somebody else, but their path took them straight into the fast-shooter’s line-of-sight. He unleashed a volley of shots and the men fell down.
‘No way.’ Glenn said. ‘No way is that fucking possible. No one can shoot that fast.’
Alex grabbed him by the shirt. ‘Forget it!’ he snapped. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’
‘But the horses–’
‘Fuck the horses! I’d rather take my chances with the desert than fight those bastards.’
His brother agreed and they fled down the alley, winding their way from there towards the edge of town. They steered well clear of the fighting as much as possible, doubling-back when necessary and keeping out of sight.
They were almost at the edge of town when a shot rang out. Alex felt as if he had been punched in the back. The pain was so intense that his overwhelmed senses simply went numb and he fell with a cry. His brother turned back to help him but Glenn pulled him into the shelter of a nearby alley. ‘Sharpshooter,’ he hissed.
There was no sign of their assailant. He was on a rooftop more than three-hundred yards away, watching through a Vollmer sight as Alex rolled about on the ground, moaning and clutching at his stomach.
Glenn’s hand tightened on Jim’s shoulder. ‘You can’t help him,’ he said.
Jim shook him off. He was not going to leave his little brother behind. He ran out to get him and the side of his head erupted in a gush of blood. Moments later, the sound of the rifle shot echoed over the rooftops.
Jim sank down to the ground, deaf to his brother’s anguished cries. Alex knew that the sharpshooter had used him as bait to draw Jim out into the open. He understood that he was partly to blame for his brother’s death. He cursed with impotent rage. Clawing through the dirt, he reached out his hand imploringly towards Glenn, but Glenn was not going to risk his life for a man he barely knew. He turned and ran.
He did not look back and so never saw the silhouette that rose up from a distant rooftop, standing tall and taking aim, his finger brushing the trigger with the gentlest amount of pressure. Glenn was shot through the back of the spine, just an inch above his shoulders. He did not even feel the shot that killed him.
On the distant rooftop, the sharpshooter adjusted his aim and finished off Alex with a well-placed shot to the head, then melted back into the shadows.

Shane and Madison ran out the back of the store and into a wide open yard. Behind them, the blazing of gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Madison looked at Shane inquisitively, but he shook his head. He could not imagine that the Cordite had been killed. It was more likely that Whisperer had escaped by some arcane means and that the Cordite had moved on in pursuit of him.
Better him than us, he thought. The Cordites’ interest in Whisperer might just be the break he needed in which to make good his escape.
Glancing about, he took stock of his surroundings. They were close to the edge of town. A few run-down buildings teetering on rotten foundations were all that now stood between them and the open desert. Safety was but a short distance away.
Madison set out hurriedly but Shane held back near the edge of the yard and studied the way ahead with suspicious eyes.
He did not trust it. Covenant was like a spider’s web, its leaning ruins sensitive and almost alive. There was nothing within its boundaries that the Cordites could not sense and there was absolutely no way that they did not know how close he was to escaping from them.
He felt a curious prickling sensation over his skin and decided that, somewhere, somebody was watching him down the barrel of a gun.
He caught up with Madison and drew her into cover against the leaning wall of a clapboard house.
‘We need to split up,’ he said.
She looked at him sharply. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Listen. You heard what Whisperer said. Chastity and I are too valuable to the Cordites. They’re not going to let us just walk out of here.’
‘Then why’d we come this far together? What was the point?’
He grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye so that she would listen closely to him. ‘You remember in the alley outside my cell, the way Chastity looked at me? I said she could recognise her own kind. The Cordites can sense us both in the same way, especially when we’re together like this. If we both try to leave at the same time they’ll come and stop us. I’m going to go back and get the horses. You take Chastity and go on without me. I’ll catch up with you.’
She pouted sulkily. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘But don’t be too long.’
She did not say anything about Nathaniel’s money. Shane guessed that either she had forgotten about it or, like him, she had decided that it was not worth dying for. ‘I left my bag in the stables,’ she added. ‘There’s food and water in it.’
‘I’ll bring it.’ Shane promised. They would need it if they were to survive the journey across the desert.
Madison nodded glumly and set off, leading Madison by the hand. Shane stood and watched her go for a moment, quietly reckoning the distance she had to travel. He had lied to her. He was going back to the stables to fetch the horses, but first he was going hunting.
And he was going to use Madison as bait.

So far as he knew, nobody had ever killed a Cordite before. They killed each other often enough, but as the saying went: he who lives by the Gun, cannot die by the Gun. No Cordite could be slain by a gun fired by anyone other than another Cordite.
But that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be killed. Shane had told Vendetta it was possible and his theory was sound. It had just never been done before.
He broke into one of the crooked buildings nearby and found his way upstairs to a window that gave him a view out towards the edge of town. He spotted Madison picking her way through an old stockyard. She was making slow progress. Chastity was too tired to move quickly and Madison was not strong enough to carry her. They moved clumsily and even though Madison did her best to stay behind cover, Shane knew that they would be an easy target for whichever Cordite was hunting for them.
He suspected that it was the rifleman, Penn. The greater accuracy of his rifle over long range made him the ideal choice to guard the town’s perimeter and to pick off anybody that tried to escape his brethren. Shane hoped that it was Penn anyway. Having only been a Cordite for about a day, Penn was probably still the weakest and therefore the easiest to kill. If it was somebody like Priestley then Shane was in big trouble.
He looked at all the places where he thought the Cordite might be hiding. He figured that Penn would favour a long shot and that he would probably be on a rooftop, balcony or upper storey window somewhere with a clean line-of-sight. Shane failed to spot him but, refusing to give up, he left the building that he was in and moved across the street to another one and continued his search from his new vantage point.
Madison was two-thirds of the way to the edge of town now and Shane focussed his search by drawing imaginary lines from her position out towards suitable shooting points. His rigorous approach paid off. A few streets away, he spotted a shadowy figure creeping across a rooftop at the edge of town. The shadow carried a rifle.
Got you! Shane thought to himself.
He stole quietly from the house and circled around to approach the Cordite’s position from behind. Gunfire crackled from other parts of town and he reasoned that there must still be a few invigilators left alive.
He moved hurriedly but with caution. He did not think that the Cordite would shoot Chastity; only Madison, and she was not so important to Shane that he was overly concerned by the prospect of her dying. He crept up to the house and entered through a downstairs window. It was dark inside but enough grey light penetrated the windows that he was able to find his way to a staircase and climb to the upper storey.
He found himself in a room with a sloping ceiling, whose rafters were bent and crooked and slowly succumbing to rot. The roof had come down on one corner and the floor was littered with debris: warped planks and broken beams, rotted furniture and some empty bottles. The floorboards were dry and they creaked loudly under Shane’s weight.
The noise carried and Shane immediately threw himself to one side, hearing movement above. A shot rang out and a hole was blasted through the roof. The bullet punched down, passing through the empty space where Shane had been standing and put a hole in the floorboards.
The roof flexed, shedding a cascade of dust as the Cordite stalked across it, ejecting a spent cartridge from its rifle and inserting a fresh one into the breach. Shane threw himself into a dive as a second shot punched down. It passed so close to him that he felt its heat in the air.
He landed with a roll and snatched up an old, discarded book that lay amongst the debris on the floor. He tossed it a few steps ahead of himself, in a direction that he might logically have travelled coming out of his roll. The book landed with a heavy thump and a third shot came down through the roof a split second later and ripped the book in half.
Shane stayed motionless where he was, not making a sound. He listened to the Cordite as it paced across the roof above him, the wooden rafters creaking and bending under its weight. It did not believe that he was dead. Its senses were not as finely attuned to the town as its brethren and it could not sense exactly where he was, only that his heart was still beating.
Crouching, Shane reached out for a broken chair leg that lay nearby. His movements caused the floorboards to creak softly and the Cordite stopped moving and turned to listen. Shane froze. He dared not even breathe in case he moved whilst doing so and allowed it to locate his whereabouts.
His muscles burned from the strain of staying in one position for so long. Above him, the rafters creaked, raining dust into the room. The demon was moving again. It had gotten tired of playing cat-and-mouse and was heading towards the place where the roof had fallen so it could climb down and confront him.
Shane moved like a mountain lion. Leaping forwards, he struck the chair leg into the rafters at a place where they looked to be particularly rotten. The wood split where he struck it and there was a crash as the ceiling caved-in. Shane rolled out of the way as it came down around him. The Cordite fell and landed heavily nearby, dropping its rifle. Shane was on it in an instant. His knife flashed in the dim light and plunged down into the demon’s chest.
Shane felt the blade turn as it struck bone and he wrenched it out and stabbed again. The Cordite tried to dislodge him but he batted its defences aside. He had no way of knowing if it would die like a normal man. Its wounds did not seem to bleed and so he kept on stabbing it, burying the blade up to the hilt in its chest, belly and neck. He attacked it with focussed aggression and did not stop hitting it until it stopped moving.
Shane guessed that he must have hit it more than forty times. His attack had left its torso badly mauled. He eyed it suspiciously but there was no sign that it would get back up again. As he had suspected, those who lived by the gun could apparently still die by the blade.

Shane retrieved his knife and limped over to the window. He moved stiffly, wincing at the pain from his bruised ribs. The Cordite had landed a couple of good punches while he had fought with it and the adrenaline was wearing off, allowing the pain to come creeping in.
He looked out and saw that Madison and Chastity had reached the edge of town and were starting out into the desert. It was time he fetched the horses and joined them.
The sound of killing still rumbled across town as Shane made his way stealthily back along West Street towards the crossroads. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night the air was unpleasantly warm. It seemed to clutch at Shane like an unfamiliar hand and left his skin damp with sweat.
The ground was thick with a knee-high layer of gunsmoke that glowed blood red where it surrounded the burning torches. The smoke parted as Shane waded through it, revealing the bodies of dead invigilators. Their guns lay beside them and Shane sensed them calling out to him, inviting him to take them into his hands. It was hard for him to resist them, and he squeezed his hands tight into fists and held them rigidly by his sides, determined not to give in to their siren-like calling.
There was no point in denying that his heart yearned for him to stay. The Cordites offered him more than the world outside of Covenant could ever give him. He would never find anybody else with whom he belonged so rightly. No mortal love could ever hope to eclipse what he felt for them and by denying them he knew that he was consigning himself to a life as a hollow man, deprived of joy and purpose.
But it was the price they demanded of him that settled his decision, as ever. To go the rest of his life alone, denying his heart’s desire, but to be free to make his own decisions and live a life of his own choosing was infinitely better than to become a slave.
It might only be a temporary salvation. He was devil kind. His soul belonged to the Cordites and they would claim it on the day he died, if he could resist them for that long. But for now, even a temporary reprieve was better than the alternative.
He found the stables and made his way in through the back door. The smell of blood from the dead stallion, coupled with the Cordites’ hellish rampage in the streets outside had gotten the horses even more anxious than they had been earlier, and several of them reared and screamed when they saw him. His own horse and Madison’s were calmer but would not stay that way for long with the panic the others were creating.
Shane opened up the main doors and carefully released the horses one by one, freeing them to bolt out into the streets. The stables felt eerily quiet after they had gone. Shane stroked his horse until she calmed down a little, then released her and did the same with Madison’s horse. He found Madison’s carpet bag and tied it onto his saddle.
Gunfire pounded from somewhere not very far away and Madison’s horse stamped its feet nervously, its eyes rolling. Shane tied its reins to the pommel of his saddle and led both horses into the night. He felt something dig into his thigh as he mounted up and checked in his pockets and discovered the two keys that Madison had given him earlier. They were the ones that she had taken from Nathaniel. One was the key to the room in which Nathaniel’s money was stored.
Up until now, the money had not been important to him, but he was not far from the Grande and holding the key got him thinking. The last six years had taught him how difficult it was for a man to live without a gun. People didn’t look too favourably on pacifists in a land where any display of weakness invited trouble, and Shane could scarcely remember a town where his unwillingness to start a fight hadn’t landed him in trouble. With twenty-thousand dollars he could buy himself a place in society, set himself up with some property and a new identity. He could find Chastity a family who would raise and take care of her.
The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that he needed the money just as badly as he needed the food and water in Madison’s bag. It would certainly make his future a hell of a lot easier to bear.
He tethered his horse to a hitching post and went back into the stables to grab a pair of saddlebags off a peg on the wall. He realised that he was probably making the very last mistake of his life, but he turned around and led the horses across the street towards the Grande.