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“It’s good to pace yourself. You don’t want to fill up before dessert.”
“I know about your type. Talkers,” he says. “Talkers are all cowards.”
I check my sides, and while the ground is flat and even, there’s nowhere to run to except the mountains. Besides, I’ll never outpace all these trucks and bikes.
I point at Horned Toad.
“You look like an apple-pie guy. Me too. Except when they put cheese on it. Do you like that? Can toads even eat dairy? Is that why you eat eyes? Have you tried Lactaid?”
“Kill him,” yells the baby-face guy from Horned Toad’s jeep. Other voices join him, chanting for Horned Toad to gut me.
He lunges at me with the giant knife. I dance back and he misses me by a mile. He lunges again and I jump to the side this time. Okay. I can still move. That’s the first piece of good news since I woke up here. I wonder what else I can do?
He lunges at me again, but it’s a fake-out. Instead of going for my gut, he does a second lunge down low. I move out of the way, but he still gets a piece of my left leg. It burns like hell and the sight of my blood gets the peanut gallery going with whoops and catcalls.
When Horned Toad comes for me again, instead of moving back, I dive under his arm and drive a knee up into his lower ribs. I hear him suck in air when the pain hits, but the fucker swings his blade down and slashes me across the back.
“Watch the coat, asshole!” I yell at him. “They don’t make these down here anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll leave your eyes and eat your arms and legs first. Would you like to watch me gnaw your bones?”
“I’d rather watch you do the backstroke in lava.”
He smiles and I smile right back at him. I’m the one bleeding, but he’s the one who just gave me an idea.
We go on like that for a couple more minutes. He lunges and I dodge the blade or the lucky prick gets a piece of me. I knock him back with some decent kicks and a few elbows to the head. The important thing is that I don’t stand still and I keep him moving in the direction of the animal bones nearby.
By the time we make it there, Horned Toad is leaning a little to his left from all the shots I’ve given him to the ribs. On the other hand, every time I move, my blood does a Jackson Pollock mural on the sand, so maybe we’re even at this point.
We trade blows a little more until I’m near enough to the bones that I can make my move. I let him get close and swing at my head. When he does, I give him one more quick kick in the ribs that knocks him back and leaves him open. As he rocks back, I grab one of the half-buried ribs to smash him with.
And nothing happens. The rib is solid in the ground. It isn’t going anywhere. Not with me yanking on it like a mouse trying to uproot a redwood.
I’d like to say that the laughs that go up as I pull on the rib don’t hurt, but they do. Though not as much as all my knife wounds and the feeling that I’m running out of options.
Horned Toad is really feeling good now and runs at me like a lizard-skin freight train. On the ground next to the rib I can’t budge is a big canine tooth from whatever died here. Just as he reaches me, I fall to my knees, grab it, and throw all of my weight behind a lunge at his legs. I drive the tooth deep into his thigh and twist it on the way out. Black Hellion blood splatters on my hands and coat. I roll away as Horned Toad drops to his knees. While he’s down, I jump at him, swinging the tooth down at his neck.
I guess fucking up Horned Toad’s leg in front of his friends really pissed him off because he does what every Hellion does when he’s losing: he cheats. To be fair, I’ve cheated in plenty of fights, too, but he grabs his pistol when I thought this was a knife fight, and, well, it’s a very upsetting moment.
I kick sand in his face, jump, and roll off to his right side. Horned Toad fires blind and ends up popping off a couple of shots at his own people. They scramble out of the way like dusty roaches. I want to scramble, too, but I know that with a crowd like this watching, it’s more important to stand my ground and risk being shot than to back down. With luck, I’ll still heal fast. With all the slices Horned Toad has taken out of me, I’ll know soon.
His Hellion Glock has an extended clip, and with the way he’s shooting, he’s bound to get lucky and hit me. It’s time to take action. It’s time to get strategic.
It’s time to do something really stupid.
I work my way around behind Horned Toad, with just a few feet between him and the skeleton. From what I figure, I was able to get away from most of his attacks, so I have a little speed left. And I was able to hurt the fucker, so I’m still strong. I hope that’s not all that’s left of the old me. But I’ve got to be careful and not give too much away until I figure out all I can do and who this Wild Bunch really is.
While he’s firing in the opposite direction, I run for the skeleton and grab one of the ribs. Like the first one, it doesn’t budge. This time, though, I use the noise of the gunfire to cover me as I whisper some Hellion hoodoo.
For a second, nothing happens and I’m sure that I’ve reached a new level of fucked. Then the hardpack around the rib shatters and I haul it out of the ground like a deranged Fred Flintstone.
Horned Toad stops firing.
“Where are you, mortal? Come and fight me like a man.”
From behind him, I say, “No.”
And swing the rib over my head, crushing Horned Toad’s skull like an anvil landing on a soft-boiled egg. It’s messy, and bloody, and I get toad juice all over my boots, but he’s sure as shit not firing his gun at me anymore. I grab it and his knife as his body blips out of existence and starts the long, nasty fall into Tartarus.
