“Well, now, Albert, my man, you notice that nasty stink in this clean bar?”
“Sure do.”
“Must be the stink of that black pussy and that scaredy little white rabbit I see there.”
“Must be, Elmore. Must be that’s what that nasty ol’stink is in here.”
They stood side by side, facing Ryan and the others, sloppy grins leaking over their raw, fleshy faces, brutish and confident.
The woman behind the bar also had a nose for serious menace and she came out, wiping her hands on the cloth. “Now, we got a nice quiet bar here and everyone’s having a good time. Let’s try and keep it that way.”
“Fuck you, slut! You serve freaks, muties and darkies. Sweet Jesus on the cross knows what them others might be, as well. But they shouldn’t be in a place with decent folks.”
One or two of the drinkers at the other tables were starting to take some notice, and to Ryan’s dismay he caught the whispering of support for the two intruders.
“Yeah, shouldn’t be blacks in with whites. Not the way in Country Row.”
“Then we should mebbe all leave?” Ryan said, surprised at how calm and steady his voice sounded, not betraying the hot rage that was already surging through him, starting to cover his good combat sense.
Elmore thought about that for a little while, hands on his hips, inches away from the etched butts of the Brownings. For a moment Ryan sort of hoped that they might just be able to walk out of this without blood. Sort of hoped.
Then the redneck shook his mane of blond curls. “No. Not just like that.”
“Let’s do it,” Ryan said.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Trader had been a man of many quotes, most of them dealing with the practical problems of surviving in the lethal boiling pit of Deathlands. What most of them came down to was simply a matter of getting in firstest with the mostest.
The collection of rednecks in the Harmony Bar in Country Row were mostly tough men who earned their livings by hard physical labor. And when it came to roughhousing, they would all have chosen themselves as winners against a group of outlanders composed of a one-eyed man, a good-looking redhead, a little guy with glasses and a faggot hat, an old man with a stick, a black woman and a freak kid with white hair.
Elmore and Albert were delighted when they saw that they’d managed to provoke the strangers into some kind of reaction. It would give them the icing on what had so far been a pleasant enough evening of drinking and whoring.
They both drew their Brownings, waving them around like old-time shooters, grinning with gap-toothed delight at the exquisite violence and chaos to come.
Ryan shot Elmore once through the throat, the bullet splintering and fragmenting against the cervical vertebrae, blowing an exit hole so large it very nearly took the head off his shoulders. The peckerwood never even had time to squeeze the triggers on his treasured blasters, dropping them with a clatter on the hardwood floor, going over backward in a spray of blood and a choked scream.
Mildred had been itching for Ryan’s word to draw her ZKR 551, aiming and firing the Smith amp; Wesson .38 round in a single, smooth action.
But Ryan’s speed and the instant destruction of Elmore started a chain of confusion. The blond racist’s upright corpse staggered into Albert as it went down, knocking him off balance, so that Mildred’s bullet hit him in the left shoulder instead of full through the middle of his face.
He let one of the Brownings drop from nerveless fingers, but began shooting with the other automatic, spraying a burst of lead around the small bar.
Ryan dived for the sawdust floor, followed moments later by the others, but the drinkers were slower, most of them rising to their feet, reaching for whatever weapons they were carrying. Albert’s crazed volley took out three of them, killing one instantly with a bullet through the skull, hitting two others through the stomach and chest.
The bartender made the terminal error of not ducking. Standing still, she yelled for the shooting to stop as bottles exploded around her in shards of razored splinters. Albert shot her through the side of the neck, lipping out the big artery, sending her down in a welter of crimson, hands desperately trying to check the flow.