Dies the Fire (21 page)

M
en on foot were a lot quieter than galloping horses. That was the only way Havel could justify this last-minute dash through the night to himself; he prayed with every footfall that they were going to be in time.

Idiots,
he thought.
They're acting like idiots and it's making my job harder. Doesn't seem fair.

The bandits had flogged their horses on all through the night, even after they'd caught up with Will Hutton, halting only when they'd run into the ranger cabin half an hour ago.

Which meant that he had to stop too, to let them have enough time to lose fear of pursuit. Fortunately he'd been able to follow them through the open patches with the telescopic sight from his old rifle. He hoped it was the right thing to do, but he could feel sand grinding in the gears of his brain; it had been nearly thirty hours of hard effort since he last slept.

“Stop!” he hissed to Eric, sinking to one knee.

He'd blackened the heads of their weapons with mud, and now he held the spear low and level to the ground. From the edge of the pines that fringed the area around the old ranger station he gave the cabin a quick once-over, looking for the men on guard. There was light from the windows, firelight and lamplight, enough to endanger his night vision; he squinted and looked aside. Four horses were hobbled in the clearing near the cabin, looking tired and discouraged and nosing at the rock and pine duff in a futile search for something to eat.

He could see two human figures there: one slumped near the steps that led to the broad front veranda, and another standing on it—a stout figure carrying a bow, but looking through the front window, with his back to the outside world.

A woman's scream probably indicated what was occupying his attention.

“Now!” Havel said, and ran forward. Eric followed.

Will Hutton was sitting on the edge of the veranda, his hands tied behind him around one of the wooden pillars that supported the roof. He'd obviously gotten another beating, but he watched the men coming across the pine needles and rocks of the space between the trail and the cabin with a hunted alertness. He raised his feet and hitched himself around the post silently as the two neared, pressing himself down flat as he did.

Just a second more,
Havel thought.
Just a second and young Jimmie is dead meat and the odds are even.

Eric was making a lot more noise than his companion; he wasn't used to running in the dark. Fat Boy Jimmie turned when they were still ten yards away. Havel abandoned any attempt at stealth at his strangled whinney of surprise and just ran as fast as he could, but it wasn't quite fast enough; the young man managed to draw the bow to his ear.

Havel held the rough spear underarm with both hands, like a giant rifle-and-bayonet combination, hoping that the boy would be flustered or simply miss in the shadowy light with his eyes still dazzled from looking through the firelit windows—the bow wasn't a submachine gun and he couldn't spray-and-pray.

There was no time to be afraid, but plenty to watch the archer's hands stop shaking, and steady with the three-edged blade of the arrowhead pointed directly at Havel's liver. He was using a snap-release glove, which argued for a distinctly uncomfortable degree of accuracy. Havel's snarl turned to a guttural roar of triumph as a foot lashed out and kicked the bowman behind one knee and the arrow flashed out into the night over his head, close enough to hear.

Will Hutton had just saved his life, before they'd ever really met.

Jimmie screamed and tried to dodge as Havel came up the last ten feet of rock path before the stairs to the cabin. The spearpoint took him low in his belly and he screamed again, high and shrill. The impact shocked up Havel's arms as the young man thudded back violently into the logs of the cabin and the point jammed in bone, bending back with the violence of the impact. He snarled in the ferocity of total focus, wrenched the kitchen-knife blade out of his opponent's flesh and then thrust again, with all the power of his arms and shoulders behind it and his weight as well.

It went in under the young man's breastbone and through a rib where it joined the spine and into the weathered Ponderosa-pine log behind, pinning him to it like a butterfly to a board and leaving the spear shaft stretched out like a horizontal exclamation mark.

His scream turned to a squealing babble; half a second later it cut off in a thump and gurgle as Eric's improvised
naginata
slashed down and glanced into the side of his neck before jamming for a moment in his split collarbone. Jimmie's heels drummed on the planks of the veranda, making the dry wood boom like a slack-skinned drum as Eric wrenched his weapon loose with desperate haste.

Havel felt the vibration beneath his feet as he ducked under the spear shaft. It registered, but just as data—like the rest flowing in through his skin and ears and eyes, like the spray of blood that spurted out for half a dozen feet in every direction from the huge flap of skin and flesh sliced off the dying man's neck. Havel's mouth was open too, showing his teeth. He left the spear—too big for close work—and flicked the door catch open, yanking the plank-andiron portal towards him and bouncing back and to the side.

A chair flew through the open door, thrown from close range. The scrimmage on the veranda had been brief but noisy. Havel ducked forward again, stooping under the pole-and-rawhide chair, knife out and flashing up in the gutting stroke. The skinny tattooed bandit named Bob leapt backward in turn, hitting the floor with his shoulders and rolling erect; Havel crowded through the door quickly, before he could block it again, conscious of Eric coming in behind him.

The front room of the cabin was big, nearly thirty feet by fifteen, with chairs and a couch set in a U-shape around the fireplace; there was a blaze going in it, and a Coleman lantern on the mantelpiece over it. The thickset bandit was there, trying to stand and having difficulty with it. That was because Signe Larsson had him around the knees; he was wearing long johns with the front flap open, and she had on panties and a set of scratches and bruises. He was swinging his fists at her head and screaming curses as he tried to wrench free, but she ducked her face into the dirty gray fabric covering his legs and hung on like grim death.

That couldn't last; the bandit leader weighed two-fifty at least, and not all of it was blubber. The blade of Eric's
naginata
came up by Havel's left shoulder; blood dripped off the whole length of the steel, and off the shaft and the arms that held it. The young man's face was white but set, and heavily speckled with red drops.

“Keep him off me,” Havel barked, jerking his left hand at the skinny man.

In the same instant he vaulted over the couch. The bandit chief roared and flailed his arms at Havel, kneeing Signe in the face in his heaving panic. Havel stepped in, delicate as a dancer, taking the clumsy blow on his shoulder. The
puukko
stabbed twice with vicious speed—once up under the short ribs, then up under the chin as the man doubled over like someone who'd been gut-punched. The mattresslike beard parted easily, and the front half of the bandit's tongue flew out of his open mouth in a spray of blood.

Havel knocked the dying man over backward with a grunt of effort as he shouldered past him; he fell with his head and shoulders in the fireplace and lay there with his hair burning and his blood frying and crisping and stinking on the hot iron of the log holder.

That left Eric and Jailhouse Bob on one side of the sofa and Havel on the other, moving fast towards the bandit's end to take him in the rear. The man had been on the attack, ready to take a few cuts to get in under Eric's polearm with his knife and finish him quickly before the two men could gang up on him, just exactly the right thing to do.

He hadn't quite managed it, and there was blood flowing from a shallow cut on his cheek. Now he backed again, moving fast in a straddle-legged crouching shuffle, his head swiveling between the two opponents coming at him. The knife in his hand was nearly a foot long, almost a bowie, and sharpened on the recurve; it glittered in the lantern light as he moved it in small precise arcs at the end of his long arm.

No fancy Ramboesque serrations on the blade or Klingon wings on the plain brass quillions; it was a professional's weapon, and even two-on-one Bob was likely to do some serious damage before he went down.

Behind him Astrid Larsson walked out of the hallway. She was entirely naked and spattered with blood; mostly someone else's, far too much to come from the bite-marks on her small breasts. There was an old-fashioned alarm clock in her right hand, and a collection of small heavy objects in the curve of her other—coffee mugs and paperweights.

She threw the alarm clock, hard; it jangled as it hit Bob's shoulder, and there was a look of dawning panic in his narrow hazel eyes as he flicked them back and forth, darting between the girl and the two armed men.

She followed it with a coffee cup, which missed, and a paperweight, which didn't. The skinny bandit made a sound, a scream of animal rage and fear.

Women scare him,
Havel realized.
That's why he hurts them.

“Kill him,” Havel said to Eric, and moved in to do just that as a mug flew past Bob's head.

The bandit reversed the knife with a swift flip and threw it at Havel; then he turned and dodged Eric's thrust with the point of his
naginata
and jumped straight through the window, arms crossed in front of his face as he smashed through the glass. He was lucky—you were about as likely to cut your own intestines out doing that as not—landed flat on the veranda, and took off running towards the darkness.

Havel twisted to let the big blade go by; you could get hurt by a thrown knife, but generally only by accident. Then he put a booted foot on the windowsill to follow; he didn't look forward to chasing the stick-thin killer in the dark, but he wasn't going to have him hanging around, either.

Astrid walked to where her bow and quiver hung by the door, put a shaft to the cord, drew, and loosed through the window. Her movements had the smooth inevitability of a sleepwalker's.

The arrow made Havel jerk aside in surprise; it went by close enough that he could feel the wind of its passage, and hear the
whhhptt
of cloven air.

“He wanted to rape me but he couldn't,” she said with a calm like ice on a river just before the spring surge cracked it, ignoring the savage lash of the bowstring on her forearm.

“So he took me into Mom's room and he killed her; he said he'd be able to do me after that.”

Havel completed the vault and dropped down onto the broken glass that littered the veranda; it crunched and crackled under his boots.

Twenty yards away, Jailhouse Bob lay in the pathway, pulling himself along on his hands. His legs were limp, and an arrow stood in his lower back. It jerked and quivered as he tried to drag himself along, looking over his shoulder with a snarl. Havel shook himself, as if he were coming out of deep cold water.

Eric Larsson was on his knees at the edge of the veranda, puking with a violence that threatened a pulled muscle in his back, and obviously wasn't going to be much use for the immediate future. He walked over to the middle-aged black man instead, and went down on one knee to cut the rope lashings that held him.

“My family?” Will Hutton asked, working his arms and rubbing at his wrists.

“Hiding out in a thicket by the road with most of your gear,” Havel said. “Should be fine.”

“Lord, but that's good to hear,” Hutton said, slumping in relief. He began to offer a hand, then realized Havel still had the knife in his. “Many thanks . . .”

“Mike Havel,” he replied, and waved the blade slightly. “Consider this my contribution to public hygiene.”

Hutton had a heavy rural-Southern accent, but sharper and more nasal than Gulf State gumbo; Havel thought it was probably Texas originally. The Corps was lousy with Texans of all varieties, and he'd heard that slurred rhythmic twang a lot in some sandy and unpleasant places.

“I'm Will Hutton,” the black man replied, standing cautiously and stretching. “Nothing broke, I don't think.”

He looked out into the darkness. “You going to finish off that skinny peckerwood? He's a mean one, the worst of the lot. Best be careful, like you would with a broken-back rattler.”

“No hurry,” Havel said. “I thought I'd let him ripen a bit; he isn't going to crawl out of reach with an arrow through his spine.”

He looked at his right hand and his knife. It was dripping, and in the faint light the whole of his hand and forearm looked as if they were coated with something slick and oily and darkly gleaming.

Some distant part of his mind realized that the sight would probably come back to him for years—when he was trying to sleep or eat or make love—but right now it wasn't particularly interesting.