Gunlaw

Gunlaw 31

Chapter 19 - Present Day

Mikeos watched their faces, not their hands. You can tell a man is drawing on you from his face. The brain tells those arms to move, tells hands to twitch, fingers to curl, but the message has a ways to travel and the face is close enough to hear the news first. Eyes start to squint in anticipation of the flash, jaws tighten, lips thin.

"Better move it, slinger." From behind him this time. More men, spurs jangling, still catching their breath from the ride that brought them chasing the news in off the Dry. Three more he reckoned. Maybe four.

Jenna turned to watch the new gun-hands. "We should go to the tracks. Come back another day." She breathed it so low he had to imagine some of the words.

"There's no other day for us." Mikeos knew it. White Willis knew it. Even old Marks knew it down in the narrow corridors of his cowardice. The gun had been pointing too long not to be fired. When – that was the only question. The crowd had known for the longest time, in its collective unconscious, thinning, fraying, shedding bodies left and right into better cover. If you've got a line of sight to a gunfight then a bullet has a line of flight to your eye. That's the price of admission. But no need to put your whole body up as a target. The 'Oh-Seven crowd knew that in their bones, though their tongues might have told you otherwise.

The first fat drop of rain fell between Mikeos and White. "Wh—" Willis opened his mouth to speak. Who knew how long that drop had been falling, how many minutes plunging through the blind night before it punctured the bubble of illumination around their standoff. Sometimes that's all the trigger killing needs – one drop. The raindrop passed the line locking their gaze, and White Willis started his draw.

Mikeos found his hands around his grips, hauling both revolvers clear of the leather, each weighing a thousand tons, resisting the call to sudden motion with all the stubbornness of inert matter asked to act quick as thought. The world around him slowed, as it always did in such moments. There's a stillness in each instant of action, and Mikeos had long ago discovered his talent for finding it. White Willis watched him, frozen in the moment, eyes narrowed against anticipation. The raindrop dawdled between them, as if deaf to gravity's siren song. The barrels of Mikeos' twin Thunderers struggled along their predetermined arcs, tearing the air. At the same time, fast as thought and yet far slower than his hands, Mikeos threw himself at the ground, twisting like a falling cat.

Doug Hoffsted once said back in Ansos, "They'd have to cut your arms off before I'd challenge you, Mikey. None of the others seem to notice but you're as fast as you need to be. When you face a quicker draw you just up your game, like pulling more water from a well." And he'd laughed. "Must've got a touch of hunska in you." And looked away.

Six men in front, maybe four behind, Mikeos had never needed to be so fast, and as he dropped he called on everything he had, and hoped the well went deep enough.

The revolver in Mikeos' right hand spoke first, aimed from the hip at the finger-width between White Willis' pale eyebrows. A second and a third shot from the same gun joined the building crescendo, the din of one shell adding to that of the next. The flashes punctuated the rising arc of Mikeos' hand. It took an age for the barrel of Mikeos' inverted second gun had cleared his own shoulder to point back at those behind him. By that time Willis' brains already traced a spattered line from the back of his skull along the first bullet's exit path. The two men to the left, next in line, hung in inertia's vice with holes drilled through their hearts - holes that had not yet taken the time to bleed. Mikeos shot blind with his second revolver, held upsidedown over his shoulder, the thunder of it in his ear. He aimed at the place where the spurs of the closest man behind him had last sounded.