The look in his eye. He’s seconds away from pulling the trigger.
“You need to be stopped!” I shout.
John Doe glances at me, but he doesn’t turn his stance, doesn’t point his gun at me.
I fire anyhow.
The bullet strikes him, and then his gun goes off, but my bullet hit him right in his hand. His arm drops, and then he drops, crunching over, hunching into a ball.
The bullet he fired, where did it go?
I don’t know, but Sophia is still standing, and she fires a bullet. This one blooms red on John Doe’s chest, and he falls down.
She glances at me. The blood all over her, I can't tell if there's new there or not, but she rushes over to John Doe, who is lying on his back.
He’s writhing in pain, and she grimaces.
“Tell me your plan, what you set into motion,” she demands.
“Fuck…” Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.
She lifts her hand, her gun trained on his forehead, but he’s already dead.
Sophia meets my gaze. “You’re wounded.”
“You?” I take a step toward her.
She grins and touches her wet shirt. “I’m fine.”
“But the blood…” Another step.
“Fake.”
I reach for her, but then I notice a subtle shift in the air. The wind rustles the grass, but then a twig snaps.
I grab Sophia, pulling her toward me, and I have us crouch down, using the dead man’s car as a shield.
A bullet whizzes above us.
“Who the hell is there?” Sophia calls out. “We’ve already wasted three. We can waste more.”
A man stalks around the car toward us. He has a gun in both hands, and he has a wide smile on his face.
“Hello, Sophia,” he says as if they’re good friends.
“Who the hell are you?” she retorts indignantly.
“You really should do a better job learning about the competition,” he mocks.
“You’re a bounty hunter,” she spits out. A muscle in her jaw jumps. She’s furious, and I don’t blame her.
“What’s wrong with there being competition?” I ask. My side is starting to hurt. That’s where I got hit, and I want to remove my shorts because it’s right by the waistline. It’s rubbing against the entry wound, and I grit my teeth.
Sophia glances at me as she stands. I stand, too, my gaze fixed on the ovian bastard before us. The bounty hunter is tall but not nearly as tall as I am.
The bounty hunter ignores me, focusing on Sophia. “Competition is meant to be eliminated.”
“I don’t understand that,” I gripe. The pain is worse from standing from crouching, but I don’t think my voice gives away my discomfort. “Why not just be the better bounty hunter? That’s the one who should get hired.”
“You would think that there would just be a bulletin board with all the jobs and whoever gets to the mark first wins the gold, right?” The bounty hunter shakes his head. “But, no, that’s not how it goes. Instead, the best jobs all go to princess here.”
“I’m no princess,” Sophia says through gritted teeth.
“No? Damn straight you aren’t. You’re a fucking disease, and you give us all a bad name.”
“How so? And why should I care what you or anyone else thinks? You do your work, and I’ll do mine.”
“There’s a bounty out for you, darling,” he says.
“We killed the guy who put the bounty out on her,” I protest. “Or didn’t you realize that John Doe—”
The bounty hunter snorts. “So what? It’s personal.”
“So personal I know the name of the one who’s going to try to kill me,” Sophia mocks.
The bounty hunter slowly grins. He has decent teeth, a slightly off-white color, and his hair is short, almost to the point of being fuzz. His nose is long and wide, and I never saw a jaw as weak as his before.
“My name isn’t of consequence,” he says. “Just know that you got bested by a better bounty hunter.”
“Did I, though?” Sophia asks.
“You’re about to.”
“Think again.”
He lifts his gun, but Sophia yanks out the car door, slamming the mirror right at crotch level. The man’s gun comes flying out of his hands toward us, and Sophia brings down the back of her gun hard onto the man’s temple.
“There,” she says, handing me her gun. “Stay with him.”
She darts into her house, and then she comes back out with a rope. She expertly ties up his wrists and ankles, and then she starts to drag him toward the house.
“I can do that,” I protest, reaching to recover the bounty hunter’s gun first.
“I’m fine,” she grunts.
Knowing better than to say otherwise, I trail behind her. The dead bodies will have to be dealt with, but there’s one body whose owner isn’t dead.
Yet?
Nah, I guess we can turn him over. Sophia must be thinking the same, or else she would’ve killed him already.
Once the three of us are inside, I help her heave the unconscious bounty hunter onto her couch. She locks the front door, and I grimace, reaching for my side.
“You were shot. Are you all right?” she asks worriedly, her hands reaching toward my wound, but then she hesitates and draws her arms back to dangle by her side.
“I just need the bullet out,” I tell her.
“It didn’t just graze you? It didn’t exit?”
She walks around behind me.
“I thought it just grazed at first, but the pain… It must be in me yet.”
Her face white, she nods, and she grabs my hand and directs me to the bathroom. She has me pull down my shorts some and sit on the toilet lid, and she washes her hands first and then the wound. I hiss from the liquid she pours on next.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Disinfectant. I don’t want it to become infected.”
I grunt. Novans seem to be immune to infections and a whole host of sicknesses that Earthlings get. The jury’s still out on how much of that immunity Novans passed onto Kurians, but as far as I know, my friends who have been living on Earth for some time and should have been exposed to their sicknesses
