James Axler - No Man's Land

The big man went rigid with terror. His hands gripped the arms of his comfy chair fit to pop the tendons. For a moment his mind went white in sheer panic. A stranger with a razor to his neck!

Then he relaxed. He recognized the stoneheart he himself had hired a week or two back to transact certain...business for him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you mutie bastard!” Erl yelled, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to startle the man, to call him that, as a body probably oughtn’t, taint that he was.

The thin lips smiled. “Ease your mind, Mr. Kendry,” he said. “I just wanted to report the successful completion of my mission. And receive my payment due, of course.”

He continued to shave Big Erl’s cheek with a steadier hand and smoother motion than his servant managed after almost two decades’ practice.

“But—Watkuns—my servant...”

“Don’t worry,” Snake Eye said.

That was the chiller’s name. Erl remembered it now. A notorious man. A man who always fulfilled a contract.

That was why Erl hired him. That old sag-bellied bastard Earnie had a way of slipping out of the tightest places. For various reasons connected to his important position in the community Erl couldn’t act against his former partner directly. And none of the men he’d paid to chill Earnie before had come through. Erl reckoned the bastard had bought them off.

“I persuaded your servant to let me take his place this morning,” the assassin went on, as easily as if he was discussing a fair day’s weather.

Erl scowled deeper. He was going to need to have words with Watkuns over this. More than just words, mebbe.

“Tell me about it,” he said, anger and residual fear making his voice husky.

Snake Eye briefly tipped his head in what Erl took for a form of shrug. The chiller had on a black hat and a white shirt with a black velvet vest over it. He and the clothes smelled clean, not of days, if not weeks, of accumulated sweat. That was an unusual thing in itself, and Erl chastised himself for not noticing the man who shaved him smelled differently than his servant before now.

“He was in the shop he ran,” Snake Eye said. “Cowering in the basement. Not that I blamed him overmuch. Both your army and your opponents were busy shelling the stuffing out of the place. I found him there. He tried to buy me off. I reminded him of my invariant policy and dealt with him accordingly.”

Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.

“And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”

“In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”

“Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.

“It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”

“Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”

The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.

“No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”

Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!

“I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”

“Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.

“There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”

The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s lame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.

“Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”

Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word erstwhile when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.

“Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”

“Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”

The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.

“But he’d said too much. They always do.”

“He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”

He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.

The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”

Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.

“You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”

“Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”

Tap-tap against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.

“Against me?”

“Who else? I told him who sent me, after all. It was the courteous thing to do. Not to mention the fact that you specified he would know why he was being chilled, and who was responsible.”

“But...but—that’s ridiculous!”

“How so? I place my services on the market for anyone to purchase, so long as they have the wherewithal to pay. As Earnie did have.”

Erl’s thoughts flew like bats caught in a Deathlands twister. He tried to will them into some kind of plan. Some kind of way out.

“I can pay you to cancel the contract!” he blurted. “Pay double! Triple.”

Snake Eye reached up and twitched the patch onto his forehead. Erl froze in shock.

The eye that was revealed was fully intact. And fully inhuman. Perfectly circular, staring and lidless, it was a blazing yellow with a black slit pupil.

A rattlesnake’s eye.

Snake Eye smiled regretfully and continued to tap the cold, thin steel edge against Erl’s quavering, helpless throat.

The last of Erl’s resistance evaporated.

“Listen, I can take you to the place! The hidden treasure! It’s not twenty miles from here.”

“Is that so?” The blade was withdrawn.

Erl almost melted in relief. His thoughts, contrarily, suddenly came together.

“You’ll never find it without me,” he said in firmer tones.

He felt a sudden sting across the front of his neck. It wasn’t until a red mist of his own blood sprayed out before his horrified eyes that he realized Snake Eye had slashed his throat with a single rattlesnake slash.

“Why?” his lips said. All that came out was air gurgling from a cut windpipe, bubbling through blood.

“I beg to differ, Mr. Kendry,” said the chiller, who had stepped neatly aside, out of the way of the pulsing blood. It was already dwindling before Erl’s eyes as he gagged and fought for breath. “If two idiots such as you could find the treasure once, I can find it now. And I’m sure I can track down other rumors about it to narrow the location further.”