James Axler – Cold Asylum

It was an astounding drawn-out scream, high and rasping, sustained on a single endless note, coming from the plump woman on the stairs. Tears coursed through the mascara around her staring eyes.

When it finally faded away into relative stillness, with only a man near the door shuffling his boots as if he were thinking of running for safety, Trader nodded to her. “You’d be the mother of these men.”

It was a statement and not a question.

“You chilled them all, you rotten, murdering bastard! All of them.”

“Not quite. This one” he nudged the youngest of the family with the toe of his combat boot “survives, though if he lives to be a hundred I doubt he could father any more of your vicious spawn.”

“Danny? Danny’s still living, is he? Oh, then spare him to be a comfort to me in me old age.”

Trader stared wordlessly at her, and not even Abe, who had known him for so long, could guess what was going through the older man’s brain.

“Come here,” he said finally, watching while she walked unsteadily down the stairs and across the frozen room, the soles of her tawdry high-heeled shoes making sticky, sucking noises as she stepped through the blood of her five sons.

The boy that Trader had struck in the groin was still deeply unconscious, eyes shut tight, a dark, wet patch spreading across the front of his cotton pants.

“This is your Danny, is it?” Trader asked.

“You killed them all but him. I wouldn’t want to live on if anything happened to him. My youngest and dearest.”

Trader shot her once through the center of the face, a neat dark hole appearing in her left cheek to the side of her fleshy nose. Most of her brains sprayed out of the large hole that the tumbled bullet smashed in the back of her skull.

“You didn’t have to” began the half-breed barkeep, his voice trembling.

“You heard her,” Trader replied. “Didn’t want to live if this boy was chilled. So, I obliged her.”

“But the boy isn’t dead, mister.” The voice came from a tiny man with a large boil throbbing on his neck, just above the line of his collar.

Trader smiled at him, as cold as meltwater. “You’re right, friend. Hadn’t noticed that. What a stupe I am.” He lowered the Armalite and blew away the side of the boy’s head, firing casually, one-handed. “He is now.”

The only sound was Abe reloading the spent rounds in his Colt Python and the young gaudy slut crying in the arms of an older whore.

“We moving?” Abe queried.

“One more thing,” Trader replied. “Never leave a job until it’s all done.”

He walked over to the girl, gently moved her away and looked at her.

“Didn’t mean to,” she stammered. “They made made me say what you done. Sorry for”

“Sorry never pays the bill, girlie,” he said, and shot her once, in the left side of the chest, watching her fall at his feet, blood clotting in her hair.

He turned to Abe. “Now it’s done.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

The chem storm was closing in around them as they ran away from the gates of the ville, grouped together, following on the heels of Ryan Cawdor.

Off to the north the sky was darkened by great bursts of rain sweeping down from high altitude. It looked like it would be on top of them within less than the fifteen minutes start that they’d been given.

The first target was to reach the fringe of the trees across the stone bridge, where the river was close to bursting its banks, taking them out of sight of any watchers within the shadowy windows of the ville.

Ryan held up his hand as soon as they were safe, checking his chron. “One minute and twenty-two secs,” he said.

“Why don’t we try to get back to the redoubt?” Michael asked.

“Wouldn’t make it. The point about this hunt is that there isn’t any way we can win it. Whatever we do they’ll still ride us down and chill us. They got the time, the men and the blasters.” Ryan looked back. “Can’t see us from here. Come on.”