There wasn’t a third chance.
J.B. fired the M-4000 from the hip, using the folding butt. One of the eight Remington flechettes burst from the 12-gauge muzzle, all twenty of the inch-long darts ripping into the murderer with the Taurus blaster. They tore his chest, lower stomach and groin to tatters of ragged sinew. The whole of the front of his body seemed to turn into a huge sponge, filled with blood, that was squeezed dry in a single soul-stopping moment.
His companion skidded to a halt, looking in amazement and horror at the devastated, leaking, whimpering, twitching thing at his feet, which had been his friend only a moment earlier.
J.B. aimed the weapon a second time, firing another burst of flechettes that sent the surviving man staggering backward, identically wounded, until his feet got tangled together and he fell in the street.
The Armorer calmly inserted another round and waited a few moments, before turning back to investigate the armawag in the garage.
JAK WENT to the trim house that Carl had assured them was the bordello in Harmony, and that was believed to harbor three of the norms. It stood in a neat side street off the main drag, bordering a narrow stream.
As soon as he cautiously worked the back door ajar, he could smell the bitter scent of jolt, hanging in the air like a forgotten promise.
He recognized it immediately from a dozen frontier pesthole gaudies. For some reason that Jak had never been able to understand, gaudy sluts were among the most addicted users of the heroin, cocaine and mescal mix.
The occupants of the brothel were all together in the big front parlors, four women, mostly edging into middle age, and three members of the gang of murderers. All of them were deep in a drugged sleep, oblivious of the shooting and yelling that had been going on in the ville for several minutes.
They were all partly dressed, and a potbellied iron stove was still throwing a lot of heat into the room. There was a round mirror, a pair of syringes and some white powder on a small table, along with three empty gin bottles. One of the gang had fallen asleep in the act of copulating with a fat, bleached gaudy slut from behind and he was still draped across her, snoring loudly, pants around his ankles.
Jak holstered the blaster, reaching into the small of his back and drawing one of his beloved throwing knives. Holding it by the taped hilt, he went silently from man to man, as gentle as a surgeon, and opened the carotid artery in each of them with the leaf-shaped blade.
As the blood spurted ceiling high, one of the men moaned in his drugged slumber, swatting at the neat, deep cut as if he dreamed he’d been stung by a skeeter.
Jak went last to the gang member who’d been overcome by the jolt while still in the sex act, cutting his throat with the same professional expertise. Something penetrated through the drugged darkness. The man muttered a few inaudible words and tried to push himself off the woman, sliding down over her buttocks, his limp penis flopping to one side as he fell bleeding and dying onto the flowered carpet. The sudden movement made the woman blink awake, her head turning from side to side as she tried to puzzle out what was happening.
The albino teenager wiped the reddened steel of the knife on a cushion and resheathed it, smiling to himself and walking out into the brightening morning.
He’d gone nearly a whole block before he heard the start of the screams from the house.
BY THEIR COUNTING, that was the end of all the norms in the gang, nearly thirty human lives snuffed out in the center of a beautiful ville in old Colorado, all done for in less than ten minutes.
Ryan met up with Jak, Doc and Mildred outside the main store of the ville. J.B. quickly joined them, reporting that the armawag was gassed up and ready to roll.
“Carry all of us back to the redoubt with a bit of a squeeze, “he said.
There was no more sign of any threat from the gang, though a few of the honest citizens of Harmony were beginning to appear in the dawn-lit streets, looking like shell-shocked victims of a savage war.