The man facing him was grinning, stumps of broken teeth gleaming in the dusty gloom. “Do like Brother Isaac says, old man.”
Whatever happened, Doc was definitely a dead roan, drawing on borrowed time with every stolen breath. If he dropped his beloved blaster, then he might live a few minutes longer. More than that if they took him prisoner along with Jak and Mildred, ready to be tortured and butchered. It would then be so much easier for them to fill the inside straight by picking up Krysty and Dean, unaware of the threat.
If he fired, he would certainly kill the fladgie in front of him, to die a heartbeat later, gunned down from behind with no chance to use his rapier. But the explosion would at least give a warning to the others.
“The best surprise is no surprise,” he said.
His finger was tightening on the trigger of the Le Mat, when they all had a surprise.
Judas never liked human beings, seeing them only as potential targets for his spleen. The long-haired, sweat-stinking man with the lump of metal in his fist was less than a yard away from the big mule.
It was too great a temptation.
The piercing scream of shock and agony from behind Doc had the simple effect of making him jump, tightening his finger the necessary fraction of an inch and firing the Le Mat.
The single round of 18-gauge grapeshot had little distance to star out and struck the fladgie in the center of the body, knocking him backward as though he’d been struck by a runaway war wag, ripping apart his chest, shattering ribs, shredding his lungs and tearing his heart into rags of bloody muscle.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, having the presence of mind to drop the blaster to the straw, neatly switching the sword stick to his right hand, and spinning around ready to confront the third of the attackers.
He peered into the darkness to see a strange sight, a miraculous sight. The fladgie behind him had been hefted off the floor by some unearthly power. His bead and shoulders were half inside the nearest stall, bare legs kicking and flailing, his arms waving, his own gun vanished into the straw.
It took Doc several seconds to come to terms with this bizarre apparition, to understand what had happened.
“Judas,” he whispered.
The mule had opened its cavernous jaws and clamped them across the side of the wretched fladgie’s skull, the teeth sinking in on either side of the man’s nose, pulping the left eye and partly severing the left ear. Then it had simply backed away, using its powerful neck muscles to heave its victim off his feet and half into its stall.
Doc stepped carefully past the corpse of the first man he’d chilled, edging around the front of Judas’s stall, thrusting his blade into the struggling figure, the classic blow of the assassin, up between the ribs on the left side, under the shoulder blade. He twisted his wrist as he withdrew the blood-slick rapier, maximizing the damage.
“Touch,” he whispered, finding that being alive wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
The helpless flagellant died far more quickly than he deserved, his bare feet beating a violent tattoo on the scarred boards of the stall. Then his body became limp, hanging in the grip of the mule’s jaws.
Judas was angered when he realized that his sport was over, and he tossed his head from side to side, trying to revive his victim.
“Drop him, Judas.” Doc leaned over and ruffled the mule’s ears, trying to ignore the sound of crunching bone from the skull of the corpse, as the animal ground its jaws together. “You did marvelously and I shall see you well rewarded with an amplitude of fresh provender, picked dew-fresh by mine own self, once this skirmish is satisfactorily completed.”
He pulled back just in time as the wily mule cunningly dropped its malfunctioned toy into the trampled straw and snapped at the old man’s hand.
Doc sheathed his sword stick in its polished ebony casing and picked up his Le Mat, fumbling in the darkness to adjust the hammer over the cylinder of nine .44s, finding that his fingers were trembling rather more than he’d expected.