Gunlaw

Gunlaw 25

[since you're all reading this in bits I will help your memories out in ways that I wouldn't have to if you read it straight:      The boy here, Remos Jax, is the gunman Mikeos Jones saw fight the sect gunman at the 507 when he was a boy. The other boy, Daveos Jones is ... Mikeos' father. Eben Lostchild is the person Mikeos and the hex-witch, Jenna, were setting off in search of when we last saw them.]                                                                                                

                                                                                               ****

Hemar approached the shack from the west, over the rutted fields where somehow the locals raised cabbage and corn from a mixture of dung and dust. The water came in from the stream along wooden channels. He paused in the shade of the corn where it grew tall, taller than he could stand, and set his hands to the trough where the water chuckled. He liked the feel of wood. The pack had none of it. Every plank must have come in on wagons from the Oh-Two where it had arrived on trains that hauled timber from the Culan Belt where trees grew. Hemar wanted to see a tree. He bet they grew even taller than corn.

Hemar broke clear of the fields and was moving low across the dusty ground when he spotted the figures approaching Heap's shack. Not Ruben Twist this time, but three of the men Hemar had followed from the bar. Warriors all of them. He knew it from the way they moved more than from the guns at their hips. One old, one young, one middling. Perhaps family, perhaps pack. Hemar watched as the old one moved off, leaving the other two to bicker. They barked at each other for another minute before the young one gave ground, slinking away toward the shack whilst the other followed the leader.

Hemar waited until the young one – Purbright they'd called him – went to the door. With the building between them Hemar sprinted for the gap he'd used the day before and threw himself down beside it, still outside the building but with his nose at the narrow entrance.

Purbright had a knife in hand, a narrow skinning knife, cutting glimmers from the air and wickedly sharp. Hemar drew in the smell of the place, sickness and shit, but now with Purbright's scent in the mix, an over-sweet odour of wrongness, more offensive than the honest stink of trapped bodies.

"What's the matter, kid?" Purbright closed on Heap, setting one hand to his board. "Can't get up?"

Hemar guessed the gunman to be twice his weight, well fed, a born killer. He hunkered down in the dirt, tail curled in. In the pack when domen fought it was equal versus equal, the underdog always had a chance.

"Asked you a question, boy." Purbright tipped Heap's board closer to the vertical. Heap's head lolled forward so he could no longer see the gunman. Something garbled escaped his mouth.

"Giving me lip?" Purbright laid the knife across Heap's chest. He flicked the ragged shirt aside to reveal pallid white skin stretched over ribs.

Another moan.

Purbright turned the blade and made a shallow slice across Heap's breastbone. "I'm here looking to see what keeps this shithole safe from the sect. You wouldn't happen to know, would you?" He dipped a fingertip into the crimson trickles coming from the cut. "Because when we find out we can leave – you know? Maybe go somewhere good?" He took hold of Heap's hair in his knife hand and pulled his head up, dabbing blood on the boy's nose, cheekbones, and chin, like war-paint. "Because I am bored as fuck of this place."

A roach scampered from one patch of shadow, bound for the next. Purbright's heel put an end to its journey.

"Crunchy." He lifted his heel and skewered the leaky twitching corpse on the point of his knife, lifting it clear. "You hungry, boy?" Purbright smiled.