Child killer

He retreated, moving his body like a dancer to avoid the flying missiles. He reloaded as he went, with a rapidity that had also been trained into his fingers.

They shuttled busily between gun belts and cylinders. The mob came up over the boardwalk and he stepped into the general store and rammed the door closed.

The large display window to the right shattered inward and three men crowded through. Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire.

He shot them all, and the two that followed

them. They fell in the window, hung on the jutting shards of glass, choking the opening.

The door crashed and shuddered with its weight and he could hear her voice:

"THE KILLER! YOUR SOULS! THE

CLOVEN HOOF!"

The door ripped off its hinges and fell straight in, making a flat handclap. Dust puffed up from the floor. Men, women, and children charged him. Spittle and stovewood flew.

He shot his guns empty and they fell like ninepins in a game of Points. He retreated into the barber shop, shoving over a flour barrel, rolling it at them, and throwing a pan of boiling water that contained two nicked straight razors.

They came on, screaming with frantic incoherency. From somewhere, Edna Nelson exhorted them, her voice rising and falling in blind inflections.

He pushed shells into

hot chambers, smelling the aromas of shave and tonsure, smelling his flesh as the calluses at the tips of his fingers singed.

He went through the back door and onto the porch. The flats scrubland was at his back now, flatly denying the town that crouched against its dirty haunch.

Three men hustled around the corner, with large betrayer grins on their faces. They saw him, saw him seeing them, and the grins curdled in the second before he mowed them down. A woman had followed them, howling.

She was large and fat and known to the patrons of Bosz's as Aunt Neya.

The slayer blew her and she landed in a

whorish sprawl, her skirt rucked up between her thighs.

He went down the steps and walked backwards into the desert: ten paces, twenty. The back door of the barber shop flew open and they boiled out. He caught a glimpse of Edna Nelson.

He opened up. They fell in squats, they fell backward, and they tumbled over the railing into the dust.

They cast no shadows in the deathless purple light of the day. He realized he was screaming.

He had been screaming all along.

His eyes felt like cracked ball bearings. His balls had drawn up against his belly. His legs were

wood.

His ears were iron. The guns were empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into an Eye and a Hand, and he stood, screaming and reloading, his mind far away and absent, letting his hands do their reloading trick.

Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent a thousand years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them?

Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their tale.

They were in throwing range as he finished reloading, and a stick struck him on the forehead and brought the blood into abraded drops.

In two seconds they would be in the gripping distance. In the forefront he saw Almiron;

Almiron's younger daughter, perhaps eleven; Soobie; two male barflies; a whore named Rose Elton.

He let them all have it, and the ones behind them.

Their bodies thumped like scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers.

They halted for a moment, startled, the mob face shivering into individual, bewildered faces. A man ran in a large, screaming circle.

A woman with blisters on her hands turned her head up and cackled feverishly at the sky.

The man whom he had first seen sitting gravely on the steps of the mercantile store made a sudden and amazing load in his pants.

He had time to reload one gun.

Then it was Edna Nelson, running at him, waving a wooden cross in each hand.

"DEVIL! DEVIL! DEVIL! CHILD KILLER!

MONSTER! DESTROY HIM, BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

DESTROY THE CHILD-KILLING INTERLOPER!"

He put a shot into each of the crosspieces, blowing the roods to splinters, and four more into the woman's head.

She seemed to accordion into herself and waver like a shimmer of heat.

They all stared at her for a moment in tableau, while the slayer's fingers did their reloading trick.

The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat circles were branded into the tips of each one.

There were fewer of them now; he had run through them like a mower's scythe.

He thought they would break with the woman

dead, but someone threw a knife. The hilt struck him squarely between the eyes and knocked him over.

They ran at him in a reaching, vicious clot. He fired his guns empty again, lying in his own

spent shells.

His head hurt and he saw large Agri circles in front of his eyes. He missed one shot and downed eleven with the rest.

But they were on him, the ones that were left. He fired the four shells he had reloaded, and then they were beating him, stabbing him.

He threw a pair of them off his left arm and rolled

away. His hands began doing their infallible trick. He was stabbed in the shoulder. He was stabbed in the back.

He was hit across the ribs. He was stabbed in the ass with what might have been a meat fork. A small boy squirmed at him and made the only deep cut, across the bulge of his calf. The slayer blew his head off.

They were scattering and he let them have it again, back shooting now. The ones left began to retreat toward the sand-colored, pitted buildings, and still, the hands did their business, like overeager dogs that want to do their rolling-over trick for you not once or twice but all night, and the hands were cutting them down as they ran.

The last one made it as far as the steps of the

barber shop's back porch, and then the slayer's bullet took him in the back of the head. "Yowp!" the man cried and fell over. It was Mono's final word on the business.

Silence came back in, filling jagged spaces.

The slayer was bleeding from perhaps twenty different wounds, all of them shallow except for the cut across his calf.

He bound it with a strip of the shirt and then straightened and examined his kill.

They trailed in a twisting, zigzagging path from the back door of the barbershop to where he stood. They lay in all positions. None of them seemed to be sleeping.

He followed the trail of death, counting as he went.

In the general store, one man sprawled with his arms wrapped lovingly around the cracked candy jar he had dragged down with him.

He ended up where he had started, in the middle of the deserted main street. He had shot and killed thirty-nine men, fourteen women, and five children.

He had shot and killed everyone in Mono.

A sickish-sweet odor came to him on the first of the dry, stirring wind.

He followed it, then looked up and nodded. The decaying body of Scott was spread-eagled atop the plank roof of Bosz's, crucified with wooden pegs. His mouth and eyes were open.

The mark of a large and purple cloven hoof had been pressed into the skin of his grimy forehead.

The slayer walked out of town. His mule was standing in a clump of weed about forty yards further along the remnant of the coach road. The slayer led it back to Kennerly's stable.

Outside, the wind was playing a ragtime tune. He put the mule up for the time being and went back to the tonk.

He found a ladder in the back shed, went up to the roof, and cut Scott loose. The body

was lighter than a bag of sticks.

He tumbled it down to join the common people, those who would only have to die once. Then he

went back inside, ate hamburgers, and drank three beers while the light failed and the sand began to fly.

That night he slept in the bed where he and Allie had lain. He had no dreams. The next morning the wind was gone and the sun was its usual bright and forgetful self.

The bodies had gone south like tumbleweeds with the wind. At midmorning, after he had bound all his cuts, he moved on as well.

He thought Agri had fallen asleep. The fire was down to no more than a spark and the bird, Jack, had put his head under his wing.

Just as he was about to get up and spread a pallet in the corner, Agri said, "There. You've told it. Do you feel better?"

The slayer started. "Why would I feel bad?"

"You're human, you said. No demon. Or did you lie?"

"I didn't lie." He felt the grudging admittance in him: he liked Agri. Honestly did. And he hadn't lied to the dweller in any way. "Who are you, Agri? I mean."