James Axler - Homeward Bound

"What, Nate?" Ryan asked.

"If'n I didn't know better, I'd figure they've all done a runner on him. Heard of the massacre and fucked off. That's my guess."

"One way to find out," Ryan said. "I can't figure it for a trap. No reason. Let's go see."

Doc Tanner clung to the bars, terrified that he might faint. His brain creaked with the effort of trying to do something. He knew the man was hopelessly mad, but he had to find the words that might save Lori.

Harvey stood against the door, his grotesque bulk blocking it. One of his pretty little pistols was in his right hand, pointing at Lori's stomach. The man was whistling tunelessly to himself, gesturing for her to hurry. His cloak hung open and he had unzipped his hunting breeches, revealing his tiny, budlike penis. Lori had taken off her top, showing her breasts, and she was now, slowly, stepping out of the skirt.

"She is my daughter, Baron Harvey. A child. Can you not spare her?"

"You croak on like some raven, old man. Mebbe I should close your beak," Harvey sneered, pointing his pistol at Doc's anxious face.

Lori was naked at last, hands by her sides, making no effort to cover herself from the baron's stare. His cock was struggling toward a partial erection, and there was a thread of spittle hanging from a corner of his mouth.

"I'll not..." Doc began, nearly weeping in his helpless frustration.

"Don't, Doc," she called out. "Don't hurting me. I'm used fit. Don't watch it, Doc."

Lori was crying.

"Like tears and fears, child." The baron laughed. "Lie down and spread 'em."

"Beware of the teeth," Doc shouted, voice cracking with emotion.

"Keep her mouth shut. Mebbe fill it later, know what I'm meaning, huh?"

"Not the teeth in her mouth, my lord!"

"How's that?"

"Shames me to admit it to a great noble like yourself, and you ready to do her honor, but the girl's a mutie, my lord. Don't show much. Normal, apart from the teeth in... in her... you know, my lord. Can do fearsome harm to a double-stud in the coupling."

"Teeth... inside her... in her... teeth in... teeth for... You mean she could bite my cock off with?.. You can't..."

"Try her, my lord," Doc babbled. "Times they only close a little. But they have razor-sharp points to 'em and... she can't help it, my lord. It's being a mutie."

Harvey drew back, reaching down to zip himself up again, the gun wavering. "Muties should be shot and killed," he muttered.

"She is a good girl, my lord."

"So many dead today," the baron said, letting himself out of the cell, leaving the key dangling in the lock. Without a backward look he left the guardhouse.

Doc let go of the bars, finding great weals across his palms.

Lori started getting dressed again, unconcerned by what had nearly happened. "Doc?" she asked.

Somehow there wasn't enough air in the cell for him to answer. So he cleared his throat and tried again. "What is it, child?"

"That about teeth in my... you know?"

"Yes, Lori?"

"Ain't true, is it?"

Doc laughed, feeling suddenly a great deal better than he had for some time. When he'd finished laughing, he pointed out the key to the blond girl.

Ryan led the way, now only a few paces from the end of the drawbridge. There was still no sign of any threat to them. The ville seemed utterly deserted. Jak was behind him, carrying the M-16. Then came Krysty, followed by

Nathan with his blaster in his hand and J.B. with his drawn knife.

The sky was darkening, and the air over the Shens seemed heavy and threatening. The wind rose and fell, driving a whirling column of dust ahead of Ryan's boots, which collapsed in on itself as it reached the water of the moat.

"See any guards?" Ryan asked. Nobody answered him.

Suddenly, with no warning, there was a figure in the main gateway to the huge house, under the spiked portcullis, a staggering person in burned clothes that shone and glittered. Ryan's first thought was that he was seeing some monstrously fat, drunk old gaudy whore. Then he saw the two matched Colts pointed at him.

And he realized.

"Harvey!" he shouted.

"Farewell, brother!" Baron Harvey Cawdor bellowed, opening up with both blasters.

A small-caliber pistol — like Harvey Cawdor's pair of .22 Colts — wasn't the most accurate of weapons over any kind of distance. And it took a lot of skill and control to hit a target under any kind of pressure.

It didn't help much if you were stark mad, either.

Ryan dived to the cobbles, hearing the pettish snap of the blasters, bullets kicking off the stones around him. As far as he could tell, none of them went within three yards of him.

The others also took cover from the shooting. Before Nate Freeman or Jak could return the fire, Harvey had dropped one of his guns and darted back into the inner courtyard. He was pursued by Ryan, knife gleaming in his hand.

It was a bizarre chase from the present into the past.

Just inside the main gate, by the guardhouse, Ryan bumped into Doc Tanner and Lori, but there was no time for conversation. Harvey knew the ville like a rat knows its burrow, and Ryan knew he had to keep close if he wasn't to risk losing him. There was just time to throw a message over his shoulder, for the others to retrieve their own clothes and weapons as swiftly as they could. And to watch out for any ambush.

"Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber." That was the rhyme that one of the old servants of the ville used to sing to little Ryan to try to lull him into sleep. In his mind's eye he always saw it literally, imagining himself following the twisting passages and blind corners of the mansion, taking himself inside his own head into every room and staircase of Front Royal. It had been an exercise that had saved his life when he'd had to run for it the night Harvey had come to kill him. Now, all those long years later, the memories were still there, and he followed after his brother like a loping timber wolf after an elk.

His brother had a good head start, slipping through one of the entrance doors to the main body of the house and across the courtyard. Harvey had time to slam the door shut and slide across the bolt. But Ryan knew other ways. It struck him immediately that the ville was deserted. Not only the sec men had fled. Every single person who had served the Cawdors had left. The fires in the kitchens were dying, food prepared but uncooked. Bowls with eggs broken in them stood on scrubbed tables. Piles of washing dripped in the sinks. A cooling iron rested on its stand.

It helped Ryan. When he heard a distant slamming of a door, or feet pattering along a corridor a floor above him, he knew it could only be Harvey. It crossed his mind as he ran silently through his childhood home to wonder where Lady Rachel had gone, guessing she had either run with the pack or lay sleeping off her latest lines of jolt. Probably she had fled the doomed ville.

Once a fluffy white kitten came gamboling from an open doorway, fighting a large ball of yellow wool. Several times Ryan heard the unearthly noise of the wild boars in their cellar pens.

And all the time he drew closer to his brother.

"Closer, brother, closer."

Once he entered a long room, lined with dull paintings of muddy European rivers, just as Harvey was at its farther end. Ryan dodged back at the waspish snap of the small handgun, hearing the bullet whine into the wall some yards away. It wasn't likely that Harvey was carrying a spare magazine, and ammo must be running low.

He still had only the dagger to face his brother with. And that was how he wanted it. Face-to-face. Blood spurting hot against his hand. Looking into Harvey's piggy little eyes as they blanked in death. That would settle the debt.