James Axler – Cold Asylum

The word “this” was said with no particular emphasis, so the outburst of violence was totally unexpected.

Except by Abe.

His reflexes had been honed to a singing needle point since the six Byrne brothers had arrived at their table to harass them for jack.

Despite his age and his illness, Trader wasn’t a man to mess with.

During the brief conversation, he’d been weighing up the opposition, judging them as small-ville bullies, thugs who were good at picking on a storekeeper and hassling him for some protection jack.

But not up to serious combat.

Trader’s left hand cut back like the edge of a two-by-four, into the groin of the youngest brother, who was standing close to that side of the table, crushing his genitals up against the sharp leading point of the pubic bone. The boy didn’t even get time to scream before his lights went out and he dropped unconscious to the barroom floor.

Long before he hit the planking, two of his brothers were done for. Trader always used to say that the most important thing to do was take out the leader of the pack.

While his left hand was pulping the manhood of the littlest Byrne, his right hand was bringing up the Armalite. He used it as a club, swinging the butt around and into Brandon’s face, splitting his lips, splintering seven of his jagged front teeth and filling his throat with his own blood.

Almost simultaneously Trader kicked the table out of the way, into two more brothers, slowing their reactions to his sudden attack.

Abe was a shard of a second behind his old leader, relying on his Colt, able to take advantage of the fact that none of the Byrnes was bothering much with him, taking his silence and stillness for passivity and fear.

The four-inch barrel cleared the greased holster and the first of the six .357 rounds struck Dermot Byrne smack through the center of his muscular chest.

Abe’s second round hit the brother on his immediate left, who was staggering off balance from the tumbling table. It was aimed just above belt height.

“Close action and you don’t fuck with clever tricks. A hit’ll put anyone down. While they’re down you can think about what you’ll do next.”

He could almost hear the Trader’s voice at one of their old regular war wag crew meetings, distilling the advice that had made him among the most powerful, feared and hated men in all of Deathlands.

Less than three seconds had clicked by and four of the six men were out of the action, though Brandon was still upright, spitting out fragments of teeth in a spray of watery blood.

Now the Trader was on his feet, and the Armalite was braced against his right hip. Two triple bursts and two men went down, chests torn apart, blood spraying over everybody within fifteen paces.

Abe looked at the man he’d shot in the belly, who was down on his knees, both hands trying to hold his looped intestines from spilling in the dirt, looked at him and then carefully put a round between his eyes.

Three of the six were clinically dead.

The man that Abe had shot in the chest had staggered as far as the bar, where he was leaning hopelessly, blood trickling steadily down his legs. Trader turned on his heel and brought the blaster to his shoulder, switching to single fire, blowing half the brother’s face over the flyspecked mirror behind the bottles and smeared glasses.

Abe was standing now as well, both of them watching the reactions of the rest of the room, the muzzles of their blasters raking across the line of men and whores, most of whom raised their hands or shrugged as a sign that they weren’t going to get involved in the slaughter.

“Who the fuck are you?” Brandon mumbled through his broken teeth.

“You don’t need to know that,” Trader replied, shooting him once through the heart at point-blank range.

As the sixth body went sprawling in the lake of blood, Trader and Abe became aware for the first time of a strange, monotonous sound in the gaudy, keening above the gasps of the onlookers and the weeping of one of the sluts, the one who had played the part of the aggrieved sister of the Byrnes.