Gunlaw

Gunlaw 15

Chapter 6

Mikeos leaned on Jenna as they rose, his weight surprising. His body shielded her though she tried to turn him. "Sniper's gone," she said. "He would have taken the shot by now. So stop playing the hero."

"Ain't no playing about it. You might have to carry me . . . I think I spilled more blood in the dirt than I've got left in me."

She lifted her shoulder under his good arm and walked him on. "He's gone. We're all right." Flies rose from the free-fighters' corpses as Jenna stumbled past with Mikeos depending on her, sweating, all a-shiver, as pale as if he'd taken the hex himself.

The man named Nathan lay where he fell, skinned in black and seething flies. For a missed heartbeat their motion became the dead man's and Jenna flinched away, expecting the remains to rise, jerking to a corpser's memories of life. But the body lay still and only the flies rose, more and more, lifting to reveal the white flow of maggots in place of flesh.

"Quick." Jenna hefted Mikeos forward, staggered under his weight and nearly fell. "Hurry up – something's not right!"

"Damn flies." The gunslinger muttered past dry lips, eyes clenched to slits, as the insects darted in and out, buzzing against his face, seeking purchase. More and more, thick as a locust storm. Jenna batted them away from her eyes, shuddering at the dry tremble of flies in her hair, crawling over her ears, landing on her hand to taste the dried blood there.

Maggots don't grow from the egg in an hour.

"No!" And even as she spoke flies tried to find her tongue. "No!" Spoken past her teeth. She stumbled on, blind and thick with flies, feeling the heaviness of their mass as if it were a second robe dragging. And with the flies, with their crawling, buzzing invasion, came alien thoughts, violet skies, black rock sharp with frozen bubbles. Where the flies tried to drink from the open wound of her hex-mark they died and fell in a dry torrent down across her nose and mouth.

Jenna pulled Mikeos on, expecting to trip at any moment and dreading the thought of rolling beneath a thick carpet of the creatures, drowning in them like Nathan's corpse. She kept her head down, trying not to breath the things in, feeling them buzzing in her nostrils, deafened by the roar of them in her ears. And at the moment she felt sure they would both be eaten alive by sect-born maggots, the swarm left her, spiralling up and away in a dark cloud.

"Damndest thing!" Another free-fighter, this one just yards before the first of the adobe houses of Ansos town, shaking his head. "Never seen the like!" A tall ugly man, he moved to help her with Mikeos. "Easy Mikey." The gunman took the load from her, swatting at the last few flies. "We'll get him to the doc."

They walked the Ansos high street. Like a thousand others it drew a line from the town station out toward the pillar. Ansos though had grown rich and tall, buildings set in pale stone and white-washed adobe. The site had little to recommend it, poor in water, poorer in everything else, but the place had a sense of centre, the first pillar, the alpha, a uniqueness that drew interest, drew people, drew coin.

"Ah. Easy, Doug." Mikeos gasped as the big man shifted his hold and kept him moving.

"All the little pink faces peeking out of windows." The free-fighter snorted, nodding at the twitching curtains up above the storefronts. "All the little people coming out of their holes now they know it's over."

"We lay there an hour before you came out to see who'd died," Jenna said to his back, broad and dark with sweat between the shoulders. She'd given Mikeos over to the gunman and followed on behind now.

"Hunting for the roof-topper, ma'am. Anyhows, it's a fine line between live coward and dead hero, ma'am, very fine indeed."

Doug turned left past the Green Jay and Jenna followed on through the miasma of cheap scent and stale sex that invaded the alley. The narrow way led onto a residential street where moneyed families lived behind pillared porticos with walled and spring-fed gardens to the rear. One alley would take you from high street through whores to high society, all living cheek by jowl, each ignoring the other behind studied ignorance.