James Axler – Cold Asylum

“Ready when you are, Miss Wyeth,” he said.

“Mind showing me your blaster?” J.B. asked.

“Sure.” Guiteau pressed the silver catches and flipped open the lid.

“Dark night!” J.B. took off his spectacles and polished them with a white kerchief, whistling softly between his teeth as he replaced the glasses, adjusting them on the bridge of his narrow nose. Then he peered into the custom-made case.

Ryan also looked in, seeing one of the most beautiful and unusual handblasters he’d ever encountered.

“What is it, J.B.?”

“Colt Whitetaler, Mark Two. It’s triple-rare. Seen pix of them in the old specialist catalogs. Never dreamed I’d see one.”

“More and better than that in my collection, Dix,” Nathan Mandeville called. “Perhaps after breaking our fasts in the morning, we could take a look.”

“I’d love that, Baron,” the Armorer replied.

Guiteau took the weapon carefully out, handing it to J.B., who ran his fingers over it as though it were a genuine fragment of the true Cross.

“Eight-inch barrel, .357 Magnum. King Cobra. Combat grips, black rubber. Lovely balance. Stainless steel. The sight’s brushed aluminum. One and a half to four times Burris scope. Millett satin nickel mounts. Made in about 1984 or so?”

“Eighty-six.” The sec man smiled. “Only one thousand of the suckers were ever made. Baron reckons that this little beauty is probably the only one left in the whole world.”

“Probably right,” J.B. agreed. “Better be on form against this, Mildred.”

“Not the size of what you got, it’s how you use it that counts,” she replied, walking calmly to take her place on the marked line.

The silvery scope set on the top of the Colt was markedly longer than the actual barrel, making the revolver look a little clumsy.

But Guiteau showed it wasn’t clumsy by putting every one of his first six rounds into the small circle over the heart of the thirty-yard mutie.

Mildred took her time, lowering and raising her own revolver between each shot, standing sideways on, firing two-eyed, placing every one of the big .38s into the target.

She repeated the feat at the next distance, and a third time, producing a perfect performance at one hundred paces.

It was brilliant shooting with a handblaster.

But Guiteau managed to match her.

He squinted through the scope, firing a little faster than Mildred, but achieving a flawless score of three hundred and sixty from a possible three hundred and sixty,

He hadn’t exchanged a word or a glance with Mildred, simply taking up his position and doing his job.

Now it was over, polite applause greeting each of the competitors. It didn’t surprise Ryan to realize that Harry Guiteau didn’t rank all that high in the popularity stakes at Sun Crest ville.

“Another draw,” Mandeville called. “And I doubt that any man or woman in the whole of Deathlands, from the New York Well, anywhere, could do better than these two marksmen.”

“Why not find some way of splitting them, father?” Marie said. “I’m sure that the sergeant would want to defend the honor of his baron until the bitter end.”

“I’ll go on,” Guiteau replied.

“Me, too,” Mildred agreed.

“Let them fight a duel.”

Michael snatched at Marie’s arm when she made the suggestion, but she shrugged him off.

“No,” Mildred said firmly.

“Scared?” Guiteau was sweating, though the sun was mostly gone and the afternoon was becoming much cooler. The eastern skyline was dappled with menacing purple clouds that warned of a building chem storm.

“I’ve killed people.” She bolstered her empty revolver. “When there was a reason. I won’t kill you because some spoiled brat wants to get her kicks over it.”

You could have taken the silence and sliced it thin with a straight razor.

Guiteau broke it, speaking directly to the baron. “I can’t fight her if she won’t face me.”

Marie pushed Michael out of her way and leaned across her father, whispering intently in his ear. All the time she was talking, her brown, slanted eyes were fixed on Ryan, who stared back at her, wondering what was going on.

Mandeville nodded once, then shook his head, opening his mouth as though he were about to speak. He closed it again, then nodded twice more.