“Come courting, boys?” she asked in a loud, clear voice.
“Fuck’n shit!” one of the Ballinger brothers hissed. Krysty thought it might have been Larry, but she couldn’t be certain. Nor did she much care.
“Why don’t you just get out the same way you came in, boys? And don’t come back again.”
“Amen to that,” Mildred added.
“Don’t much want you, nigra,” said the other brother.
Mildred spoke again, her voice cracking like a buggy whip. “I don’t give a sweet damn what you redneck peckerwood dip-shits want! I want you the hell and gone out of our room.”
“Or else what, slut? Or else what?”
Suddenly Krysty could put her tongue out and taste the violence that was simmering in the room. When she’d first realized that the brothers had come sneaking into the bunkhouse, she’d only felt a vague unease. Now the threat was explicit and dangerous. This wasn’t going to be a clumsy attempt at touch and run.
This was for real.
She heard one of the horses in the corral whinny, high and plaintive.
“You make a move, boys, and you’ll have four blasters in here quicker than goose shit off a greasy shovel.”
“And your Pa’ll likely give you a whipping,” Mildred added, trying to keep the tension out of the air.
There was a snorting giggle from the blackness. “That’s where you’re wrong, nigra. Pa’s got his sawed-off or the Winchester, and he’s sitting out there ten feet from the door of the other bunkhouse.”
“That’s right, Larry. That door comes open and Pa starts blasting. Knocking cans off of a fence post!” Again the giggle, this time doubled. “Pa likes to wait till we had some funnin’, then he comes in after and gets himself some sloppy seconds.”
“That the way it always is, Jim?” Krysty asked, feeling the prickle of fear.
“Sure is. Ever since Ma got caught, we done had good times with harlots come calling here.”
“Must be about a million by now, Jim,” Larry sniggered.
“No. More likelike fifty hundred million! Yeah.”
“And we get to be fifty hundred million and one and fifty hundred million and two?” Krysty said, feeling the reassuring coolness of her Heckler amp; Koch P7A13.
“Sure do.”
“Then what?” Mildred asked. “Go on, boys. Surprise us.”
“Then you get the mallet across the temple and we butcher you, and leave out the remains for the crows and the coyotes,” Larry replied.
Krysty had them placed. One was near the door and the other close to the foot of Mildred’s bed. But the darkness was so total that even her mutie vision couldn’t make out what land of weapons they were carrying. They hadn’t seen any handguns around the main cabin, so knives seemed the most likely bet.
It wasn’t going to be easy.
Ryan came awake, hand already reaching for the blaster by his head.
“What?” he said quietly. The bunkhouse was pitch-dark. The lamp had guttered and gone out before midnight, and there wasn’t the slightest glimmer of light. He couldn’t work out what it was that had roused him.
He swung his legs out of the narrow bed and stood, heels rasping on the boards. The fragile sound was enough to wake both J.B. and Jak.
“What’s up?” the Armorer whispered.
“Doc?” Ryan queried.
“Doc?” Jak repeated. “You fucking sleep, Doc?”
There was a certain irony to a situation that had the sentry asleep and everyone else awake, but right at that moment Ryan wasn’t particularly into irony.
“Wake him, J.B., quiet.”
They were still speaking in hushed tones. None of them knew why they were awake, but all of them were experienced enough in lethal fights to know that you kept quiet until it came time to make a noise.
There was a flurry of restrained movement from the corner where Doc had been sitting, supposedly on watch. Then they heard the old man’s voice.
“Sorry, my friends. I am so sorry. I must have nodded off for a moment. What is amiss?”
“Keep it real quiet, Doc,” Ryan warned. “We don’t know. Something woke me.”
He didn’t reproach the old man. Doc was normally reliable and knew as well as the others that he’d put them in potential danger.