Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

“Whin we-awls fust laid down, you could hear them ponies awn the track, Long Willy, but whin sumbody he tole ole Johnny Skinhaid, old Johnny ’llowed he heared ’em, too. Thin he said won’t nobody but Strowng Tom and his mens and not to wake him up no more till theyed done got there.”

Long Willy sighed and shook his shaggy head sadly. “Wai, I must of got my brains awf my maw, ‘cawse pore ole Johnny nevuh wuz too lowng in thet d’reckshun. Did you say whin you fust come in you’d seed ole Johnny go down, One-ball?”

The survivor nodded once and then spoke around the mouthful of catfish he was masticating gingerly, favoring his loose, rotting teeth. “He’d stood up and wuz a-pullin’ out his sword. And I knows it wuz him, ‘cawse I seed the light ‘gainst his shiny haid. Enyhow, thishere stranger awn whut lookted like a Kuhmbuhluhn hoss rid up aside of him and basted him with one them iron clubs the Kuhmbuhluhn mens fights with lots of times. I din’t see no more, aftuh thet, Long Willy, I skeedaddled. But Stinky Parsons, he laid low lownguh, he did, and he tole me ole Johnny, he wan’t kilt outright; he said the feller whut had bashted him down come back aftuh everbody elst was done fer and sliceted ole Johnny up with a knife.”

Long Willy looked around, then demanded, “Where be Stinky, now? He din’t ride in with you.”

With great effort, Sierrason swallowed the half-chewed chunks of fish, and replied, “Naw, Long Willy, soon’s we two rode by where the firesticks kilt so many fellers, Stinky allowed as how he ’uz gonna cut wes’ and head fer Buhbuh’s camp. He wawnted me to come along of him, but it’s two, three days longer a ride, and I ’uz so hongry. My pore teeths the way they is, I cain’ eat roots and stuff no more, or nuthin’ whut ain’ been cooked.”

While One-ball again filled his mouth with catfish, Long Willy sat in silence, thinking hard. So, that Plooshuhn-damned bug-tit bastard of a Stinky Parsons had been one of Buhbuh’s spies all these years, and now was on his way to report the costly failure of Long Willy’s folly to the Kleesahk. Which meant that there now remained only four, possibly five, days for him to learn the secrets surrounding the uses of the firestick. And he must learn, for strong and quick and deadly as he could be with sword or club or longknife, he freely admitted that the Kleesahk was more than he could take on and expect to live.

Although he had allowed the other men only one rape apiece, Long Willy himself had been making use of his prisoner whenever the mood struck him, day or night. So when he strode into the small, cramped cabin and jerked off the rotting deerskin covering her naked body, the dark-haired young woman cringed, whimpering, then sobbed and began to cry when she saw that another man was behind him. Nor did the demented, sadistic cackling of Lizzie Flat-chest, crouched in her corner niche on the other side of the cabin, in any way comfort the memoryless woman.

But when the tall rapist had taken from him the armload of burdens he had been bearing, the other man went back to stand just inside the open door. Trembling all over like a foundered horse, the nameless woman waited for this too-familiar man to remove his clothing and once more subject her to the horrors of his lust.

But he did not. Instead, he tugged her by one arm up into a sitting posture, jammed the butt of a smoky, sputtering torch into a ready-made hole in the dirt floor, then squatted before her, talking earnestly… and almost comprehensibly.

At length”, he unwrapped from a cocoon of cloth and hide a vaguely familiar device. She knew that she should know just what the long, oddly shaped, shiny thing was called, knew that at sometime she had used this thing or something like it, but like all other memories, this one too eluded her grasping mind.

After talking on and on for some time, often pointing a long, dirty finger at different parts of the object and at the torch, her frequent ravisher offered the nearly remembered object to her, signed that she was to take it into her hands. At last, as the shaggy man became more insistent, she took the long, heavy device into her hands and turned it over and over, studying the differing shades and textures of metals and wood, pummeling her unresponsive brain to try to dredge up some dim memory that might explain to her its function or utility.

The dirty, cracked-nailed finger of the man jabbed at a certain area of the object, and his speech became vehement. So she concentrated her tactile examination on that area, eventually crooking a finger about a rounded projection of metal and experimentally pulling… and the projection slid smoothly back, drawing with it the larger bit of metal of which it seemed a part. But then the rounded projection slipped from her hold and it and the larger piece all slammed back into the original position with a loud clanking noise.

At this, the man grabbed the thing back from her and spat out an excited-sounding stream of almost-meaningful words. He talked on and on and on, becoming more and more agitated of demeanor and, finally, almost shouting at her. Then, all at once, he jumped up, screaming something at the bewildered-looking captive. One big foot, shod in heavy hide, lashed out and sped toward her. The toe struck her between her breasts and slammed her back against the wall of unpeeled logs, and all the world exploded for her in a flash of white-hot pain succeeded almost immediately by black oblivion.

Long Willy excitedly handled the now fully charged rifle, for he was certain that he had seen a flash of yellow fire—actually, he had seen the momentary reflection of the torchlight on the brass cartridge case as the bolt fed it into the chamber—deep within the bowels of the firestick. Placing the larger, flat end against his belly, he thrust a forefinger through the metal ring below the place where he had seen the spark of fire and jerked it toward him, as he had seen some ‘of the strangers do.

But no fire and noise resulted; pulling on the triggerguard does not fire a rifle. There was only a faint click as the pressure of his finger released the cross-bolt safety.

Snarling his rage and frustration, the Ganik leader took the piece by both hands gripped around the barrel and swung H with all his strength against the doorjamb.

And that was the end of the road for ambitious Long Willy Kilgore. The heavy-caliber explosive bullet struck him in the pit of the stomach and bored through the soft organs almost to his spine before exploding.

The woman stayed unconscious for bare seconds, then sat back up, her head filled with an all-encompassing agony.

However, there was now more in her head, much more, and that more boded deathly ill for many of her captors, those who would fall before the wrathful rage of Dr. Erica Arenstein.

First to follow Long Willy into death was Flat-chest Lizzie, still cackling even as the exploding bullet turned her misshapen head and its contents into wall-festooning gobbets. The crone was followed almost immediately by Strong Tom, whose fatal error was to come through the low door as Erica turned from the body of Lizzie. Recalling in full just how cruelly he had used her when finally Long Willy had let him at her, Erica shot him in the groin, the force of the projectile flinging his solid body outside to flop and shriek in the dust until, after a time, he bled to death.

No other presences darkened that doorway, so Erica crawled—she still felt too wobbly to stand for long—back over to the foul and filthy mattress on which she had lain and suffered for so long. Part of the armload that had been brought in was all of the equipment that had been hung and belted on her body when Braun had clubbed her down there in the defile. From one of the pouches on her belt, she took a thirty-round magazine and used it to replace the smaller one in the rifle. Then she sat and waited for another Ganik to come in.