“See where there was an orchard,” Jim said over his shoulder to the others.
“Still just the one set of tracks going in.” Paul McGill had the Krieghoff Ulm-Primus rifle, carrying it at the high port, ready for action.
Jim had his Ruger Blackhawk Hunter, Nanci the Port Royale machine pistol, Mac his Brazzi 16-gauge. Jeff was holding the nameless .38, the only firearm that Nanci would allow him to carry, refusing him either the Heckler & Koch or one of the SIG-Sauer automatics that the McGills had brought with them.
It occurred to Jim that if he were inside the house and saw this scruffy, ferocious, armed band of renegades coming down the hill, he’d immediately open up on them with everything he’d got.
“I feel sort of vulnerable,” said Henderson McGill, pausing to run a finger inside the collar of his anorak. The drizzling rain had turned to very fine snow, cutting down the visibility. They were less than two hundred yards from the house.
“Typical of a man,” snorted Nanci.
“How’s that?”
“Feel like you’re walking into a patch of poison ivy with your dick in your hand?”
Mac laughed. It was almost the first time that Jim had heard him do that since they met up again. “You could say that, Nanci. Just that I have the feeling someone’s going to open up on us from the house, and there isn’t an awful lot of cover around.”
The land was totally bare, the snow only marked along the trail that led directly to the front door of the isolated farm.
Jim held up a hand. “Fine. It’s far enough for us all. I’m going in on my own.”
Nobody argued with him.
He considered what Nanci had said and decided that he felt more like a man sticking his dick into a guillotine. That thought carried him along for over half the distance to the building. The smoke continued to rise into the pewter clouds. He noticed some kind of shutters over most of the windows, but nothing like the serious fortifications he’d seen elsewhere.
Jim bolstered the big revolver and stopped, hands down at his sides. “Yo, the house!” he called, his voice vanishing into the vast nothingness around him.
He caught a flicker of movement from the attic window and saw the barrel of a rifle slowly emerge. “Come to get killed, have yer?” cackled a voice.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Time stopped for Jim Hilton.
He could see the barrel of the gun, about eighty yards away, pointing straight into his face. It seemed as if he could almost see past the rifling to the tapering point of the full-metal-jacket round ready to blow his skull into shards of bone and brains and blood, turning out the lights forever.
“There’s eleven of us out here,” he said, licking his dry lips. “We don’t mean any harm.”
Again came a cackle of laughter. “Sure, you don’t. I just squeeze down on the trigger of Maria here, and they’ll be pickin’ up bits of your head in the next county. That sure as shit means you won’t harm me.”
“Then do it.”
“What?”
Jim felt a sudden surge of bitter anger. “Bloody well do it! Then the rest of them come down and there’s shooting and killing and you get burned out. You and everyone in there. I’m fucking tired of being—”
“Hold on, hold on, stranger. You sure got an ornery temper on you.”
“I don’t give a shit about it. Just pull that damn trigger, you hick asshole, and get on with it.”
“You got a name, stranger?”
“Captain James Hilton, late of the United States space exploration vessel the Aquila, now back on this blighted Earth and mad as hell!”
The mad, cackling laughter came again as the barrel of the rifle wobbled from side to side. “I heard about you. Went up not long before the pink flowers bloomed. Must’ve been a shock, finding what Earthblood had done.”
“It was. Anyway, what the fuck is your name, mister? I told you mine.”
“You did, you did, indeed you did. And I sort of believe you. One more question, friend. You got a badge about you anywheres? Kind of arrow and the sun?”