'Who are you?' gasped the sheriff.
'We rode in from the river.'
The sheriff's passing lacked movie drama. He simply slumped over, his eyes gazing forever into the eternal darkness. He didn't fall or scream or moan; he stopped breathing is all.
Mr. Ed turned. The two old Negroes were clasping each other in fear behind the bar.
'It's okay, fellows,' he said. 'Nobody here is going to hurt you no more.'
'Ain't never seen no shooting like that.'
'It is a night of fancy shooting. Now I am going to sit on the porch a bit and watch all the fireworks. My suspicion is that you'd be well charged to wake up your people. This is the night it all changes in Thebes, and they've got work to do yet.'
EARL had worked well into the sheriff's station compound between the town and the prison. He was alone. The dogs slumbered or moped in their kennel, the only light that burned was in the lockup fixed to the Big House. In the stable, the horses dozed.
It was a quiet Southern night. A soft zephyr of a breeze weaved through the piney woods all about, and the odor of the needles was clean and fragrant. Overhead, the stars, undimmed by moonlight, shone radiant and dazzling.
Charlie noted none of this. His mind didn't work that way. Instead, he visualized his course of action. How he would move, what he would do at each spot, what was important, what was not. He was not a man without fear. But he enjoyed his fear. Perhaps it was even sexual, for he found himself with, among his guns and firebombs and pouches of shells, a rather large boner in his tight jeans. He took a moment to get it adjusted so it wouldn't hang him up one way or the other.
He crouched beside the lock-up, simply breathing, running a last equipment check, flexing and un flexing his muscles, wondering when to start. Earl had said midnight was a good guess, but that it couldn't be counted on. Depended on when the sheriff made his play in town. He had seen the sheriff, alerted by a deputy, mount up and head out with two other men about an hour ago. That was the only action, and it had settled down quickly enough here.
He waited, kept checking his watch. It was now close to 12:30.
Then he heard it. It was a fast crackle of shots?so fast it had to be Ed shooting, for no man could shoot so fast. The sounds were soft and muted, but the wind carried them along. Behind him, in the kennels, he could hear the dogs stir. One or two seemed to pull themselves up and sniff the wind, alerted in that secret dog way to the presence of aggression and fear in the air.
Charlie knew it was time.
He rose and walked around the corner of the lock-up. A fellow came out of it. It was Pepper, the dog man, who usually worked a late shift in the lock-up, though that building was empty.
He saw Charlie.
Charlie saw him.
Pepper?Charlie of course did not know his name?was incapable of imagining an assault on this place. Though the man before him was strange, his assumption was that he was okay. He was fine. He was one of them.
'Howdy,' he said.
'Howdy,' said Charlie, and shot him in the throat.
That report was loud enough and close enough to awaken most of the deputies who slept in the big pine wood station. Lights came on, and the sounds of men struggling reluctantly to consciousness swam from the open windows of the big place.
Meanwhile Pepper sat down slowly, with a stunned look on his face.
Charlie, replacing the revolver to its speed-scabbard, a nifty tight holster made by a Mr. Chic Gaylord in New York City, smiled at him as he died. He seemed to bear him no animosity. It simply had had to be done.
The gun replaced, Charlie walked swiftly to the Big House, reached into his canvas pouch and pulled out the first of his firebombs. He quickly unscrewed the lid, and yanked the cord. Nothing happened. It didn't sputter to life at all.
'Damn,' Charlie said, and threw it through the window into the room, where it came to rest on the floor. He drew, aimed with all his bull's-eye precision and quickly fired.
The firebomb detonated. It wasn't an explosion so much as a kind of burbling, though of intense white flame, not liquid. The flame was so bright Charlie blinked at flashbulbs popping off in his brain as if he were the president just arriving.
Somewhat dazzled, still blinking, he walked along the porch until he reached another window. He removed a firebomb, pulled the cord, and this time was rewarded with the fizz of fuse. He tossed it and it blew, but so close to him it scared him. It sloshed white flame through the room like a spilled pail of milk, and where the fire lit it caught and the room was ablaze in seconds.
Jesus. Charlie wanted exactly nothing to do with the firebombs from then on.
He crouched at the corner of the house, unlimbering the shotgun, that Browning Auto-5 with the duck-bill spreader, and clacked the bolt to hoist a 12-gauge blue whistler into the chamber.
Meanwhile, the fire, as it will, waged a swift campaign of destruction, as various hungry elements of it consolidated with other hungry elements, seeking fuel and oxygen, both plentiful in the pine wood building. The conflagration was close to instantaneous, though in fact it probably took fifteen to twenty seconds before the blaze was universal.
Nothing panics like flame.
Upstairs, the swifter deputies felt the heat scalding through the floorboards, smelled the swift accumulation of smoke as it rose through the stairwell and the heating shafts, and knew in an instant that they had to flee or die.
They fled.
They spilled out into the yard, coughing, screaming, utterly demoralized by the fire that was consuming their world so quickly, propelled onward by the screams of those above not so fortunate as to have arisen on the first report. Outside they fell to their knees, gasping for air, or they hugged each other in ardent premature celebration of their survival, or they squawked gibberish, conjecturing in mangled syntax and stunned stupefaction on what the hell was going on.
Charlie waited 'I'll no one else came out, and went to work with the Browning Auto-5. He worked left to right, fast, instinctive shooting, Blue Whistlers a-whistling. The gun bucked and spewed, lashing out in each shell a blast of eight.32-caliber pellets, which the spreader arranged in a horizontal dispersal pattern while Charlie regained control and moved on to the next.
He just gunned them down in a burst of semiautomatic fire, fast and stunning; it sounded like a sort of tommy gun. The shot patterns at that range were so powerful they didn't penetrate so much as eviscerate.
Deputies were blown backward, illuminated by the light of the blazing building, amid sprays of severed limbs and ripped entrails and detached jaws and faces lost forever.
It was over in four seconds, and Charlie stood there, still locked into his combat crouch, in the rising heat of the flames, his face illuminated madly by their intense glow, the seething smell of gunpowder all around him, a litter of shot shells on the ground, the fallen men before him dead or dying, some twisting in torment, others gone still.
Then he got shot in the left rib. The bullet cracked it, spewed left and not right, cut a track of a few inches, and exited his body, spinning, front ally He turned and threw his shotgun at his opponent on the porch, who was busy trying to cock a lever rifle. The flung shotgun conked him hard enough to knock him off stride, and Charlie drew his Colt and popped all six into him. Two would have been enough, three extravagant, but six did get the job done.
'You goddamn bastard, you shot me,' he said.
He examined the wound. Man, did it hurt like hell. He'd never been hit before. Where the hell had that boy come from?
But Charlie wasn't the sort to panic at the sight of his own blood.
Instead of fear he felt anger, hot and rough like steam. Who were these jazzbos to think they could shoot Charlie Hatchison?
