James Axler – Cold Asylum

Harry Guiteau lived up to everything that Ryan feared about him. He saw the reality of the danger in a single glance and moved toward the only possible coverthe tethered horses, dodging toward them, firing a dozen rounds from the hip as he ran. He didn’t expect to hit any of them, but knew it would be enough to make them all duck down.

Dean tried to run away from the sec sergeant, but his boots slipped in the wet earth and he fell over, dropping his big Browning.

Guiteau never hesitated, diving like an eagle on a lamb, scooping the boy under his arm before vanishing among the skittish horses.

Dean yelled out, the cry muffled by the sec man’s iron fist. The two of them, along with Marie, were hidden among the dozen or so animals.

“Chill the horses?” J.B. shouted.

“No. He’ll take out the boy.” Ryan had dropped to his knees, holding the Steyr rifle, using the Starlite night scope to try to get a clear shot at either Marie or Guiteau. But all he could see were the kicking legs of the horses, making it impossibly risky.

The flames were now shooting twenty feet from the broken windows of the tower, and they could all hear explosions from the ammo.

Krysty was at Ryan’s side, looking back at the burning building and the sprawled body of the white-bearded baron, his red-clad arms and legs spread wide.

“Looks like Santa fell out of his sled,” she shouted.

Guiteau’s voice rose above the noise of the fire and the storm. “Any moment now and you get a hundred armed men on top of you, Cawdor. Give up and I’ll guarantee the boy lives. Best offer you’ll get all day.”

He appeared, crouched and almost totally hidden behind Dean, the muzzle of the Armalite digging into the boy’s chest, his finger on the trigger. A silhouetted figure in the gloom, lit by the baroque glare of the flames.

“Tell him to go fuck his dead mother, Dad!” Dean screamed. “Run, Dad.”

“Let him go, or I’ll put you down.” The voice, surprisingly, was Mildred’s.

“Even if you could hit me in this light, nothing’ll stop my finger squeezing and blowing the kid away.”

Ryan was aware that time was racing by at twenty times its usual speed, and that what Guiteau said was true. The rest of the ville’s garrison could arrive at any moment, and the standoff would quickly be over.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mildred standing like a statue carved from jet, her right arm extended, the ZKR 551 pointed at the sec sergeant.

“No, don’t,” he said.

“Be all right,” she promised, hardly moving her lips.

“Boy dies,” Guiteau called, crouching even lower, so that she could see very little of his head or body.

But that didn’t matter.

The Czech revolver snapped once, the flat sound totally insignificant against the bedlam of noise that surged all around them.

Ryan was watching carefully, ready to blast the grizzled sec man the moment after he shot his son. He didn’t know how Mildred could possibly take him out while simultaneously preventing him from firing the Armalite. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

At forty paces, uphill, in dreadful light, Mildred had put the Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round precisely where she’d aimed it.

Both Guiteau’s index finger and the trigger of the automatic rifle were blown off.

There was a cry of shocked pain. The Armalite fell to the wet grass, and Dean scampered toward the rest of the group, dodging sideways like a little crab,

Harry Guiteau stood still, blood gushing from the severed joint, shaking his head in amazement.

“Best shot I ever saw,” he said wonderingly. “Best I ever”

Mildred put a second round through the bridge of his nose, silencing his voice forever.

“Dark night!” J.B. breathed reverentially.

“Thanks,” Dean panted, arriving to a skidding halt in their midst.

Ryan looked at the burning ville, the dead bodies sprawled in front of the broken door, the horses, flanks glistening in the rain, the flames making them look like fiery creatures from the spirit world.

“Let’s go,” he said.