Slash and Burn (35 page)

His razor was a silver crescent cutting the air in front of my face. Swerving round it, I slashed the barrel of my gun at his head, but missed. My heel skidded in the crap, and I heard Huffman’s exultant shout. He came after me, ripped upwards with the hook and the point caught in the trigger guard of my gun and snatched it out of my hand.

Should have shot the bastard, I told myself. Then it was too late for self-admonishment: I had to stop him or die.

His arm went up, the wicked point of the hook poised to slam into my skull. I snatched at the dung on the floor and threw a handful of it into his face. He cried out, blinking to clear his eyes, and I rammed a foot into his stomach, throwing him back against the bars.

Huffman shouted wordlessly, just a ragged scream of fury. He slashed the hook one way, the razor the other, arms like a windmill. Blood from his punctured bicep spattered on my face. He swung again, and this time I dodged inside the hook and jammed the sole of my boot into his extended knee. The patella popped and Huffman staggered in pain. Then I drove my stiffened palm into his nose, smashing the cartilage. In the dim light I caught a flash of white and knew that his eyes were rolling up into his skull. But though semi-conscious he wasn’t finished. Instinct made him slash at me again with the hook and I’d no recourse but throw out my right arm to avoid disembowelment. The metal bar of the hook slammed against my arm, but luckily it was below the curve. I pushed my numb arm against the bar, jamming it inside the inner curve of the hook, and rammed the hook tight up against Huffman’s chest. My headbutt caught him directly in his already smashed nose even as I grappled with him for the razor. I wrapped my hand round his right fist.

Finally I found voice.

‘This is for both sisters,’ I said. ‘You’ll hurt neither of them again.’

‘I’m . . . better . . . than . . . you . . .’

‘No. You’re not.’

There was little strength in his damaged arm.

It was easy enough to wrench his hand up and swipe it across his own throat.

I slashed him so deeply that his throat opened like a second mouth. His trachea was exposed and gaping, his veins and arteries pulsed and jetted blood all over me. His eyes finished their roll upwards into his skull. Then he collapsed. My arm was still entangled in the hook and I felt it wrench away from me. I got a new hole in my jacket and a small nick in the meat of my forearm but I was happy enough at that.

Huffman kicked and shuddered a few times, but I paid him no heed. He was dead, just residual shock animating him. I found my gun ten feet away, but it was clogged with animal dung from where it had slid across the floor. I wiped the gun on Huffman’s shoulder, but I couldn’t trust it to fire without jamming. I stuffed it in my waistband at the small of my back then bent for another weapon.

Just as I did so, an almighty explosion rocked the slaughterhouse on its foundations. All around me the hanging chains rattled like a thousand snare drums.

Larry Bolan was still out there and this wouldn’t be finished until he was dead too.

Chapter 51

The ranch house and the building next to it were engulfed in flames. The third building along was smouldering. Inside was the wreckage of a helicopter and vehicles and there was fuel everywhere. Just as Larry Bolan reached for the dropped M16 the building went nuclear.

Super-heated air blasted him, snatching at his clothing and spiky hair. He felt like he was on fire. But then the initial blast passed and he found that he was still standing: a little singed, but still alive. Smoke boiled all around him, invading his nostrils and lungs and making him cough. Then chunks of wood rained down, thumping to the earth like gargantuan hailstones. He avoided being smashed to pulp by some of the heavy beams that crashed down right beside him. Larry thought he could be blessed. Someone up there’s watching over me, he thought. It couldn’t be Trent: Trent had gone somewhere much lower down the celestial ladder.

Blinded by the smoke, it didn’t stop him reaching for the assault rifle a second time. He found the stock just where he remembered, then hefted it up into his hands. He’d never fired an assault rifle before, but how difficult could it be? Point and shoot, right?

He also remembered where Rink and the black guy had been lying and he pulled on the trigger, spraying rounds at them. The gun bucked in his hands, rattling out rounds until the magazine was spent.

Some explosions erupt outwards, causing a vacuum of displaced air. After the initial blast, the heat and smoke rush back in to fill the void, before mushrooming up into the sky. Larry felt the wind racing back towards the new implosion, the smoke following it like a thousand tattered banners caught in a slipstream. The air cleared surprisingly quickly, and showed him where he was shooting. It was where both men had been lying, but they weren’t there.

‘Shit,’ Larry growled.

Rink was ten feet to his right, the black guy the same distance to his left. Both men had pulled out sidearms and were aiming directly at his head.

‘Fucking pussies,’ Larry said to them. ‘You’re going to shoot me after all this,
you fucking cowards
?’

‘No,’ Rink said. He nodded over Larry’s shoulder. ‘We’re just keeping you busy till our buddy gets here.’

Larry Bolan turned.

Out of the smoke, covered almost head to foot in blood, walked Joe Hunter. His face was set in stone and his eyes were like slivers of ice. In his hand he held a huge butcher’s hook.

Some people would be terrified by the image but Larry only smiled.

Chapter 52

‘You OK, Hunter?’

‘I’m fine, Rink.’

‘Whose is all the blood?’ Harvey asked.

‘Huffman’s.’

‘Hope he didn’t have AIDS,’ Rink said.

I frowned.

‘You want me to drop this piece of shit now?’ Rink asked, his gun on Larry Bolan.

‘No. We have something to settle.’

‘He killed my brother.’ Larry dropped his assault rifle on the ground. He looked at Rink and Harvey, challenging them to disagree with him. ‘I owe him.’

‘Looks like you just tried to kill
my
brothers. I owe you, too.’

Larry lifted his hands to me, wiggled his fingers.

I’d promised Larry Bolan his one on one with me, but I never promised Queensberry Rules. I lifted the hook and ran at him; it kind of evened up our reach. But I wasn’t going to use it on him, not how Huffman had with me. I threw it at his head.

Larry ducked and the hook sailed over the top of him. But that was all I needed.

Before he’d straightened up again, I launched myself in the air and drove my knee directly into his face. Usually it would be insane sacrificing my stability to such a move, but when you’re fighting a giant what else is there for it? My knee, with the full weight of my body behind it, slammed his jaws shut and rocked him back on his heels. I followed him, punching him in the throat and then whipping an instep into his crotch.

Larry swung blindly at me and I dodged out then came back with another punch to his throat. It was like punching a leather drum. His backhand caught me across the chest and it was like I’d been swatted by King Kong. I staggered back, trying to catch my breath. Larry followed, hands reaching for me. He was limping slightly from the kick in the balls, but he was too full of fury to slow down.

He threw a right at my chest, and I slipped it and drove my fist into his ribs. They felt mushy. Larry grunted in agony. Old wound, I guessed, but then he was coming at me with his own kick. His leg was as powerful as a bull’s and if he got a good kick in my guts he’d probably have killed me. I avoided his boot by a fraction of a hair, then, while it was still sweeping upwards, I dropped the point of my elbow into the jumble of nerves on his outer thigh. The force of his kick almost parted my shoulder, but my elbow dug deep, and when he staggered away he was limping even more.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he snarled, slapping at his thigh to get some life back in it.

While he was still numb and ungainly I swarmed him. I threw a right hook into his middle, a left into his softened ribs. Then I trapped an elbow, striking with the other fist at the side of his neck. Lesser men could be dropped by a shot to the carotid sinus, but Larry was a solid wedge of meat. He threw a hand at me and entangled his fingers in my jacket, hauled me towards him. He was frothing at the mouth and I thought he was going to chew off my face. I headbutted him. Not once but three times in quick succession. With each whack of my forehead I saw stars, but it was much worse for him.

But then Larry’s strength became a factor. He got his arms round my back and lifted me in a bear hug. He squeezed, and though I tried not to I roared in agony. My ribs felt like they were in a car crusher, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds before they’d cave in and lacerate my internal organs.

‘Hunter . . .’

Rink’s concerned shout came distantly to my ears and I knew my friend would be running in to help.

‘No, Rink,’ I shouted. ‘
This asshole is mine!
’

Anything goes on a battlefield and this was about one of the most brutal I’d ever found myself on. I leaned in and clamped my teeth on to Larry Bolan’s eyebrow. I bit down with all my might.

Larry roared, throwing me away from him.

I landed on my back in the dirt, feeling like I’d just been in a train wreck. Like last time we’d met. I could barely breathe, but then I spat out the chunk of Larry’s brow and things got a little easier.

‘You dirty . . .’ Larry had his right hand clamped over the gushing wound in his face.

What did he expect? Did he want to shame me into defeat?

I struggled on to my knees. Larry was coming again. He launched a kick into my guts and I rolled with it. It still felt like I’d been hit by a runaway train but I gained space from him. There was a smouldering beam of wood thrown here by the exploding shed and I flung myself over it. Larry stooped and grabbed it. It probably weighed more than I did, but he lifted it, heedless of the embers, and hurled it at me. I staggered backwards, followed by a billowing shower of sparks as it crashed down at my feet.

Rink and Harvey were both shouting but their actual words were lost on me.

‘Do not shoot him!’

But that wasn’t what they were getting at. Our fight had taken us dangerously close to the roaring flames of the ranch and I was too caught up in the adrenalin rush to notice. By the looks of Larry Bolan he didn’t care either. Blood poured from the wound in his eyebrow, but his eyes seethed beneath it. His mouth was clamped in a rictus. He charged me, his hands going for my throat.

I ducked beneath his outstretched arms, sweeping them over my head with my forearms, gave him an elbow into his damaged ribs. He bent in pain and I clambered up and on to his back. I clamped my legs round his waist and one hand in his hair and struck repeatedly with the knife-edge of my free hand in the side of his neck. He began to weaken.

Larry Bolan must have known he was going to die. Even if he finished me, it wouldn’t matter what I’d said; Rink or Harvey would drop him. But he wanted to take me with him.

‘Trent!’ he roared. Then he clamped his arms over my legs to stop me pulling free and ran directly at the burning building like we were in a piggy-back race, intending crashing through the wall of flames and into the heart of the inferno. Neither Rink nor Harvey could shoot him for fear of hitting me. I let go of his hair, forgot all about chopping his neck and I did something so terrible that it would come back to haunt me in nightmares.

As Larry charged towards the flames and I felt the skin on my face begin to roast I reached round and jammed my fingers into the corners of his mouth. Then I hauled backwards, as if I was reining in a mad stallion. Larry’s face split like an overripe melon and his system failed him with the shock of what I’d done. His arms flopped wide, and I sprawled on my back, chunks of Larry’s lips clenched between my fingers.

Maybe what I did was enough to throw him over the precipice of insanity, maybe he had no desire to live any longer with only half a face, but he kept on running and the last I saw of him was a lumbering shadow flailing within the flames.

Next, hands were at my collar and I was dragged unceremoniously away from the building as it crashed down and sealed Larry’s fate.

I lay there in stunned silence. Equally quiet were my friends. In the end, Rink said, ‘You shoulda let me shoot him, Joe.’

I looked at the filth in my hands and was sickened. But then I recalled the threat Huffman had made to Kate. That he’d allow Larry to rip her apart. Larry wanted to eviscerate me, too. Well, what goes around comes around.

Together we moved past the burning buildings and turned into the road. The entire ranch was now a magnificent pyre from which smoke billowed into the heavens. Beneath a shawl of smoke I saw the crumpled form of a man lying on the road. I knew without checking that the smashed-up body was that of Rourke. I felt no pity. He’d died after all, but it wasn’t me who’d killed him. I’d only helped him along in the right direction.

‘Is he the last of them?’

‘I got a man round back, plus another out in the field that I took the rifle off,’ Harvey said.