After Heck, there was Juicer, who went as fast he could and went clear over to the other side of the room when he was done, where he sat down at a booth and pulled out his knife in nervous silence. Ross took her next, using her hair for handholds and humping her face, all the while sending swift, ambitious little glances at the Dawg. Hagen was the first of the low dogs, naturally, and he put some effort into it, slapping the girl around a little first and then tossing off in her hair to make Dawg roar laughter. Then there was Shiley, and then Shooter, and then Ross again, who yanked her up by the hair and came on her tits this time, working at the piercings there as he told her to rub it in good, it was good for keeping steel lubed up.
This won the first and only remark from the Dark Man during the entire event, and he did it without ever looking up: “You rip those out and I will pull out your beating heart and show it to you.”
Ross dropped the girl and jumped back, banging into Ratchet’s chair in the process, and Ratchet punched him in the head so fast and so hard that Ross was probably unconscious even before Ratchet’s knuckles left his head. Ross hit the ground and Ratchet stomped on him three times, like a man killing a rattler, his teeth bared and spit flying as he panted, then shoved himself back and went rapidly to the bar for more beer.
No one else moved, and Top Dawg, once more furious, ordered Sue Eye to come over and make the girl eat her out. Sue-Eye flat-out refused, even after she took two rights to the face, but then Rosie Harper came over to the table, plopped herself down on the edge of it and spread her legs so you could see all the way up to the back of her throat.
“Do it,” the Dawg snarled, and when the girl didn’t move, he grabbed her by the hair, pulled her across the floor and shoved her face into Rosie’s sour snatch. “Do it, and you better get her off or I’ll put a boot up your ass!”
The Dark Man looked up for a few seconds, still ignoring the Dawg, but watching his girl work on Rosie for a while before glancing at the door and then returning to his map.
The girl sounded like she was starting to cry. One of her hands curled convulsively into a fist, beating slow and not hard at the table while the other pushed at Rosie’s soft belly. She was trying to struggle back, but she quit when the Dawg punched her, once in each kidney, and after a few more seconds, Rosie announced the girl was munching carpet. Rosie kept a play-by-play to the amusement of the few low dogs still into this scene before finally shivering herself to a good cream, and then Dawg hauled the girl back by the hair and threw her facedown on the center table.
“Come on, Hagen,” he called. “I know you still got some in you! Eating Rosie’s thirsty work!”
And Hagen, grinning at the opportunity, came right up with his dick in his hand and pumped it into the girl’s mouth, already humping away.
“Now then,” the Dawg said with vicious good humor. He flipped up the girl’s skirt and gave the round, white cheeks of the girl’s heart-shaped ass a few good smacks, then wedged her legs apart (the Dark Man’s head came up again, and the Cow-Boy stood up and went to the furthest window) and put his hand right up her pussy.
“Jesus Christ!” Dawg said, his face contorting with what looked like genuine shock. “What, have you got a fucking hardware store up here?” He pumped his hand, and Fat Joey could hear the muffled jingle of metal. “What’s this? Oh fucking
Christ
, that’s a fucking
tampon
!” The Dawg yanked his hand back and wiped thin traces of blood on the girl’s thighs with exaggerated distaste. “All right, little girl. Funny fucking joke. You just won yourself an ass-banging.”
“Oh Jesus, no,” Fat Joey heard someone whisper. It was probably himself. He tried to move his chair back, and the legs stuck on a floorboard. He struggled with it, looking back over one shoulder in time to see the Dark Man slide out of his booth and casually stride towards the center table.
It was a testament to the sheer unspoken terror in the room that not one brother skinned a gun and shot the Dark Man. It was a greater testament that at least three backed away.
The Dark Man came up right behind Top Dawg, one arm swinging back with the length of his stride and coming up oddly-curled, kept coming up, rising until it was level with the back of Dawg’s head and only a few inches away. There was a sound, no louder and no scarier than the sound of Dawg slapping the girl’s ass, and the top of Dawg’s head blew away in a red mist.
Things happened very fast after that.
The Dark Man guided Dawg’s slumping corpse down onto the table beside his girl and then reached over and pulled the gun from Hagen’s hip and blew a hole through Hagen’s mouth. The Dark Man spun unhurriedly, his leather coat swirling out and flapping back down around his knees. He raised a gun in each hand, posed like Christ on the crucifix, and shot Charlie as the bartender came up with his shotgun. Charlie sank below the bar with a clatter just as the Dark Man fired his other gun three times at the brothers who had tried to skin. Then he brought both hands together, movie-style, and plugged away two-handed at the Pack dogs who had surged towards the door, and kept right on firing until that kill zone was emptied.
The Dark Man spun, raising one arm over the top of Fat Joey’s head, close enough that Fat Joey could feel the sleeves of his coat brushing over his hair, and fired again. Fat Joey stared at the sleek, black lines of the coat against the Dark Man’s hairless, powerful chest and listened to bodies hit the wooden floor. He kept thinking how much like a movie this was, even as the Dark Man put a hole in the head of every dog that had drawn on him. There were four.
Then silence.
The Dark Man turned again, put one gun carefully down on the table and touched his hand to his girl’s naked back. She stirred, spat several times, and uttered a low groan which the Dark Man answered with some gentle pats. “Easy,” he murmured. His eyes never left the Pack and they never stayed too long on any one face. “Easy, Raven. On your feet.”
The girl clawed back off the table, away from Dawg’s half-headed corpse, and fell on her butt on the floor. The impact knocked another groan from her, this one melting into a sob mid-way.
The Dark Man considered the room while she struggled to compose herself, and then finally nudged his girl with his foot. “You’re done,” he said. “Up.”
She took her hands away from her ears and stood, shaking slightly.
The Dark Man shook his gun like a warning finger. “Get these away from them,” he ordered.
She moved to obey. Heck, nearest to her, tried to reach his out for her and the Dark Man put a bullet right between his bulging eyes. The girl flinched back, swiping at the spray that spattered red over her bare skin, and stepped away from the body as it dropped. She hesitated, then turned to Fat Joey.
He opened his jacket and held it open so she could fetch out his revolver for herself.
It didn’t take long to disarm the Pack. The girl piled the guns and knives on the center table, next to Dawg’s body. It made a pretty good pile. The Dark Man put down his remaining gun and exchanged it for another. While he did this, Fat Joey, still seated at the table, finally got a good look at the Dark Man’s hands and discovered just exactly what was wrong with them.
They had only three fingers. Not as though he was mutilated, but as though he only
came
with three fingers. There was a claw, thick and sharp and cruelly carved, on each tip. In order to fire the guns at all, he’d had to hold them almost sideways, holding the barrel with one finger, aiming alongside with another, and working the trigger with the thin tip of his thumb.
The fucker wasn’t crazy. The fucker wasn’t high.
The fucker wasn’t human.
The Dark Man turned his eye on Joey, sitting there right at the level of the Dark Man’s elbow, and his eyes were empty and considering. “Get up,” he said.
Joey got up.
“Put the dead there,” the Dark Man ordered, tossing his chin at the bar. He put one hand over Dawg’s back. “Leave this one.”
Joey took hold of Heck’s feet and started dragging.
“Line up,” the Dark Man said to the rest of them. “Get on your bellies. Keep your hands flat before you. Females, come here.”
Sue-Eye and Cammy came, obedient as dogs. The bar whores hesitated, but when the Dark Man shot them his irritated glare, they came and huddled at his side, shivering. Sheila was crying, both hands over her mouth to muffle the sound of it.
When the bodies were out of the way and Joey had lined up with the rest, the Dark Man tucked his gun back into his pants and sat down, looking thoughtful, a man patiently puzzling out a thorny problem. “Raven,” he said.
The girl tensed and took a half-step towards him.
“Bring my pack and then find something…” The Dark Man trailed off, then held up his hands, wrists together. “I want them like this.”
“Bound,” the girl said, and looked around, a little helplessly. “You want them bound. Okay.” She went to the Dark Man’s booth, brought him his dark pack, and then took a few aimless steps towards the bar.
Sue-Eye cleared her throat quietly, attracting both the girl’s and the Dark Man’s attention. “Charlie’s got a tool box in the back room. There ought to be some duct tape in it.”
The girl looked relieved. “Okay,” she said again, and went off, returning in a minute or two with the silver roll around one wrist like a bracelet.
The Dark Man looked on with interest as his girl bound each pair of male wrists and ankles with tape, making sure she had good contact with bare flesh. She wrapped their mouths as well, and the Dark Man leaned back when this was done and turned his full attention on the women.
“Should I bind them, too?” the girl asked.
“Mmm.”
The girl didn’t move until the Dark Man nodded. As she bent over Sue-Eye, the Dark Man studied the men again. “You,” he said at last, leaning forward and giving Juicer a thin smile. “You touched her first, after these,” he added, dismissively patting Dawg’s dead arm and thumbing back at the bar where Heck was stacked with the other bodies.
Fat Joey felt something damp seeping into his thigh and turned his head to the right enough to see Ross. The low dog was shaking violently, trying to speak around his duct tape gag.
The Dark Man stood up, strode over and plucked Juicer out from the rest of the men. He backed up a few steps, ran an eye over the row of captives as though silently inquiring whether they could all see him clearly.
There was no sound. Fat Joey could see the grit on Charlie’s filthy floors puffing out with each ragged breath he took, but he couldn’t hear even that. It was as though what he was seeing was so awful, his eyes needed to borrow fuel from his ears to process it all.
The Dark Man bent Juicer double, caught him by the high collar of his jacket, and ripped the back of his head off with a brittle seashell-snap. Juicer’s body convulsed, and Juicer’s eyes went wide. Juicer wriggled, fast at first, and then slower as the Dark Man dropped him and held up the chunk of Juicer’s skull and brain and hair.
Sound exploded back into the room. Tape-muffled screams and the sobbing of the bar whores assaulted Joey’s senses, but he couldn’t focus in on them. Dimly, the thought came to him that even if he weren’t taped up, he wouldn’t be able to run. He couldn’t even close his eyes. He could do nothing but watch.
The Dark Man returned to his table and sat, pulling out another pen-like device, a little thicker than the first. He used it to extract something that looked a little like the pink eraser off a new pencil. The Dark Man capped the device and waited, looking over his females again, until something beeped. Then he uncapped the pen-thing, ejected a gummy-looking, pink raison onto the floor and turned his eyes on Ross.
Ross was shrieking behind his duct-tape gag, and when the Dark Man stood up again, Ross tried to caterpillar himself across the floor to the door. The Dark Man slowed his step, keeping pace beside him until he had reached the exit. There he leaned against the wall and watched Ross struggle to raise up enough to rub his jaw on the doorknob in futile effort to open it.
He chuckled, sighed, and then took Ross by the shirt and dragged him easily back to the center table. The Dark Man faced a couple of chairs together and dropped Ross into one of them. He sat down in the other, leaned back, propped one arm causally on Dawg’s dead back and smiled.
“Yes,” he murmured. Fat Joey could see the Dark Man’s eyes like empty sockets, and teeth, teeth like a wolf. “I saw you. I saw you put your hands on my Raven. I saw you fuck her mouth. I saw you fuck her tits. I saw you piss in her hair just to hear your dead commander laugh.”
The Dark Man raised Dawg’s diminished head and waggled it at Ross. Thick blood poured down onto the table and splashed out over the road brother’s legs. The Dark Man smiled again. “I think he’s through laughing.”
Ross was gibbering behind his gag and after a moment’s savored contemplation, the Dark Man reached out one claw and punched a hole in it so he could speak.
“Please, mister…mister, I’m real sorry.”
The Dark Man was nodding, almost with sympathy. “You know, I think you are, at that.” Then he reached across, seized Ross by his hair, bent him forward and cracked his skull open.
A part of Ross’s brain came away with the knobby hunk of skull and that was bad. The scream shrieking high only to lower into drooling bubbles was worse. Much worse.
The Dark Man sat back, hooking his device into the yellowish ropes of matter clinging to bone, and extracted whatever he was after. The Dark Man waited as it hummed, eyeing his female captives, until it beeped at him. He depressed a button so the device spat out the used bit of pink tissue, then flicked his wrist to bring out a glass ampule filled with pale liquid. He set this in his pack and reloaded his device with an empty vial. When he stood up again, the Dark Man’s eyes came to rest on Fat Joey.
He shook his head hard, trying to project his sincerity, his fucking reason, to this Devil in a black coat, but even if he hadn’t been bound, he couldn’t have run. His whole body felt like the bones had dropped out of it. He felt like he was dead already.