James Axler - No Man's Land

Or just staying out of the way of random bullets and other trouble. A few sec men from both sides had had the poor luck, or worse judgment, to wander into Taint. Now, as Snake Eye left his brief shelter and turned onto the block where his subject had his store, a pair of them were carrying on their own miniature war right in the damn street where Snake Eye needed to go.

Actually, the kid in the hayseed canvas shirt and trousers, with a green Uplander armband tied around an arm, was an obvious conscript who might as well still have sheep feces on the heels of his boots. He was lying prostrate in the street, and the man standing above him getting ready to shove a bayonet into his belly was obviously a veteran. The guy’s status as a sergeant was made obvious by the fact that he wore an actual uniform, if of blue-dyed homespun rather than pricier scabbie.

The long, narrow blade made a wet sound going in. Walking calmly down the street toward the little drama, Snake Eye heard the bayonet grate on the hapless kid’s spine. The Uplander let loose a gagging, strangling, squealing scream and thrashed wildly.

The Protector leaned on the rifle, driving the bayonet deep. Even without currently being able to see the bearded face, Snake Eye knew he wore a big old grin beneath that blue kepi-style cap. The bluecoat’s posture made it clear how much he was getting off on his victim’s unbearable agony, as a red stain spread across the kid’s shirt.

Smiling, Snake Eye reached up and flicked his eyepatch onto his forehead with a thumb.

The sergeant heard the crunch of boots in the mostly dry mud behind him and looked over his shoulder. Blue eyes went white in a face that showed hard years and harder mileage, even through the wiry black beard and the grime and soot caked onto it.

He looked Snake Eye in his hidden eye and screamed.

Frantically the soldier began to tug on his weapon. He assumed anyone who looked like that, much less a man who would so boldly approach a sadistic murder being carried out under the guise of warfare on an open street in the middle of the day, could mean no good.

And rightly so. But in his sadistic glee he’d plunged his bayonet all the way through the howling boy’s skinny body and deep into the mud below. It was hard enough getting a blade out of flesh; that was a big reason Snake Eye preferred a blaster. Now the sergeant’s main weapon was well and truly stuck.

Snake Eye was always fast on the draw, but he never rushed. That was part of what made him the deadliest blaster in the Deathlands.

The faster-than-human speed and reflexes didn’t hurt, either.

He pulled his right-hand Sphinx autoblaster from below the black duster he always wore, brought the weapon to eye level and shot the sergeant through the face. He smiled, slightly, as he saw the man’s eyes go wide and then start from their sockets to either side of a black hole that appeared between them. A divot of skull, like sod with black grass, flew out behind in a spray of blood and brain matter.

The Protector fell right down across the body of his victim, who continued to struggle and screech.

Snake Eye slipped the patch back into place over his right eye.

That kind of moaning scream came from deep down in a man’s bones. It hit other humans the same way. It was designed to be heard and responded to, even above other noise—even the sound of a cannonade and the boom of shells.

And as such the horrific scream would draw other humans like flies, that inhuman, keening wail that barely seemed to pause for breath.

As Snake Eye swung by, his long legs never breaking stride, he drew his left-hand blaster and without even glancing around put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson bullet into the kid’s right eye. The mercie didn’t need anybody else horning in. He had a job to do, and the dust of a ville that’d been snakebit in the dick even before two armies started to bash the hell out of it to shake off his boot heels.

He was a successful chiller. The best. And as such he had a schedule to keep.

* * *

A CANNONBALL HAD created an impromptu skylight in a corner of Ragged Earnie’s cramped and crowded little general store. It was either an iron round or another shell that never went off, as was none too uncommon for the state of modern artillery a couple centuries after the skydark. When it existed at all. It had smashed the glass of a display counter to glittering snow on the plank floor, bounced through a shelf of sundries, leaving cloth bales, hammers and broken-open bags of meal from some baron’s mill strewed everywhere.

Snake Eye trod on a baby doll from the counter that lay on its back staring toward the sky with blank blue eyes. It was predark itself, high-class scabbie and hence expensive. The plastic body was brittle and readily cracked, but the little voice box still managed to croak “Ma-ma” before he crushed it.

He proceeded through a door behind the wooden counter and into the narrow confines of a storeroom even closer packed with canned goods and unique items than the shelves outside. Snake Eye found what he expected: a wooden hatch in the floor. Squatting well to the side, he grabbed the brass ring and yanked it open.

A flash and a boom erupted from the hole. A charge of buckshot shattered a Mason jar full of prenuke glass eyeballs on a shelf six feet away from where Snake Eye sat on his haunches. Allowing himself the briefest of smiles—he liked being right, even if he almost always was—he jumped right through the hole.

The storm cellar beneath was full of stacked burlap bags, eye-watering gunpowder smoke and one terrified fat man huddled by a cot in one corner pointing a long double-barreled shotgun in Snake Eye’s general direction.

“Don’t come a step closer,” he said in a quavering voice. “I’ll blast you soon as look at you. Sooner, you damned mutie chiller!”

Suddenly Snake Eye had skipped the several paces across the hard-packed dirt floor, grabbed the double barrels and twitched the blaster out of Ragged Earnie’s grip.

“So you recognize me, do you?” Snake Eye asked.

“Everybody knows you!” the shopkeeper said. “The coldest-hearted blaster that ever blasted his own mother for pay!”

“I’ll take that as an endorsement of my marketing techniques,” Snake Eye said, grinning. “Even though I barely got more than a crust of dry bread for wasting the bitch who pupped me. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. And speaking of principles, since you know me, you must know I haven’t come to pay a purely social call, any more than I have come to make a purchase at this fine, fine emporium.”

He drew one of his matte-black Swiss-made blasters and aimed it at Earnie’s face.

The old man promptly averted his gaze, closing both eyes tight and throwing up both hands in a ridiculous gesture at self-protection. Snake Eye’s human eye, the left one, which missed damned little, noted a darkness that spread across the brown dirt floor around the seat of Earnie’s baggy coveralls, glistening slightly in the low light of the hurricane lantern on the floor nearby.

After a moment Earnie pried open his nearer eye. It was a startling blue. It reminded Snake Eye of the eye of the sergeant he had just chilled down the street outside: bright, sharp and as clear as a midwinter morning sky.

He liked to remember such details and cherish them in his memories as trophies of his chills. Even the ones he didn’t get paid for.

“Well,” the merchant demanded.

“Well, what?”

“Why aren’t you getting on with it? Why ain’t you blasted me yet and had done with it? You trying to torture me, you triple-rad-blasted taint?”

Under the circumstances Snake Eye found the slur amusing, the more so for its apparently unconscious resonance.