Spires of Infinity (24 page)

He could do with a shot of something hard, but what he
really
wanted was about twelve gallons of water.

“Water,” Gabriel’s voice was harsh and ragged from his extremely parched throat.

“
Clean
water.”

Raising a hand, Gabriel snapped his fingers in front of the bartender’s blank stare.

“Hello? Did you hear me?”

“I ain’t seen the color of your chits, Lawman,” the bartender said in a voice that sounded like it belonged to a man a quarter his size.

Reaching into his pocket, Gabriel pulled out one of the triangular chits that passed for money, slapping it down on the bar flat under his palm. He would have given all of his money for a bucket of water right about then.

Nodding at the gleaming gold as Gabriel removed his hand, the bartender filled a pint-sized mug from a barrel under the bar. Eyeing it for a moment before picking it up, savoring the sight of it, Gabriel raised the mug to his lips, downing it quickly without pausing for breath. Though warm, and tasting vaguely of wood, it was the sweetest water he’d ever had.

Setting the mug down on the bar, he looked at the bartender and nodded to it.

“Another, and spread that coin around to drinks for all so long as it lasts.”

The bartender complied and this time Gabriel drank much more slowly. When he

was finished he set the mug down upside down.

“So what brings you out this way, Lawman,” Gabriel asked himself. “Oh,

nothing much. Just looking for someone. Oh, really, who might that be? An NVM girl that some bastards named the Children of the Chosen kidnapped with the intention of raping to death. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

He looked up at the bartender with the question.

Abruptly he was seized from behind by several big, strong hands and lifted from the ground. Struggling was futile against so many. Before he knew it, he was thrown through the bat wing doors into the dusty street outside.

Groaning, Gabriel staggered to his feet, feeling stiff, tired, and bruised, not to mention hungry. Dusting his clothes off with his hands he retrieved his hat and picked up Mister Mittens again. As the cat climbed his arm and lay across his shoulders, the music resumed inside accompanied by a great deal of laughter.

“If that’s the way they want to play,” Gabriel jerked his pistols from their holsters with a growl, “let’s do it the hard way.”

Kicking the doors hard enough to break one off its hinges, Gabriel stormed back inside and leveled his pistols at the first two people he saw reaching for weapons.

“Let’s try that again. I’m going to ask nicely where my friend is, and you’re going to tell me before I start shooting.”

Bringing a pistol around toward movement in the corner of his eye, he smiled.

“Are you volunteering to die first?”

Scanning the faces of the men glaring at him with hate filled eyes in a silent, almost eternal moment, Gabriel felt a bead of sweat run down his spine.

“You’re a Lawman. You’ve got them rules to follow. The Code or whatever you

boys call it. You can’t just start shootin’ without cause like that.”

“Oh really,” Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a

Lawman. Last chance. Where are the Children of the Chosen, and where is my friend?”

“You idiot! We’re
all
Children. And your friend is in the Haven.”

“The Haven,” Gabriel asked. “You mean she’s here?”

“Not
that
Haven, dumbass,” a weasel faced man with a horrid skin condition that almost made him appear to have scales replied, pointing downward meaningfully. He caressed three grenades on his belt like he would a woman’s breasts with the other hand.

If he used those Gabriel was going to be dead meat . . . again. “
The
Haven.”

“Take me to her.”

“Well,” the scaled man scratched at a bleeding sore on the side of his bald scalp.

“You see, that’s the thing. Now we know you ain’t no Lawman, killing you won’t get us in trouble with the Empire.”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that,” Gabriel sighed deeply. “All I want is my friend back, no one has to die, so how about you just hand her over before I start shooting?”

“That young whore is ours now,” the bartender said. “Consider her a tax for

crossing our land.”

“Have it your way. Wingless.”

Thankfully the Sa’Dhi in his hand activated, flooding his mind with knowledge

and skills that were not his own. Turning to the bartender, he put a bullet through his hairless skull.

Standing for a second, the enormous man seemed unable to comprehend what had

just happened. A thin trickle of blood ran from the hole in his head down his nose before his eyes rolled back and he fell sideways, crashing loudly onto the wooden floor.

Everyone stood frozen, as if they couldn’t believe that Gabriel had actually killed one of them. Abruptly, everyone was jumping to their feet and drawing knives or swords, and grabbing for spears, throwing themselves at him. Dancing backward, Gabriel fired his guns into them without bothering to aim. With so many of them at such close range, stopping to aim would be suicide, and was completely unnecessary beside.

Several men dropped, spraying blood and tripping others up, giving Gabriel a

chance to turn and hop over the bar for some cover. Setting his pistols on the bar, he freed the shotgun. The buckshot scatter might take out multiple targets per shot.

While blowing away men that threw themselves at him like religious zealots after the blood of an infidel, Gabriel found his mind wandered to a court case he’d passed on to another lawyer where the accused murderer was obviously guilty. The details of the murder had been almost too grisly to repeat. The murderer sat while the prosecution brought witness after witness, and showed the jury picture after picture of a little girl’s dismembered corpse without a single flicker of remorse or humanity. Until now, Gabriel had never been able to understand how someone could take the life of another human being without showing a single sign of sorrow for what he’d done. Now, he understood perfectly. It was easy, really. All you had to do was think of them as something less than human.

Firing the shotgun into the men rushing the bar until it was empty, he shoved it back into its holster before picking up his pistols again. Blood and bits of flesh flew through the air in a manner that Quentin Tarantino would envy. Tables were turned over and the survivors of the barrage dove behind them for cover.

A throwing knife hit him in the chest, bouncing off a rib with enough force to break it. He felt it snap, and the excruciating pain that followed, but he ignored it, holding his pistols at ready, scanning the saloon for anyone willing to show himself. The smell of blood was so powerful that he wanted to gag, but he knew that if he allowed himself to vomit he might not live long enough to regret it.

“Gabriel,” Mister Mittens called from below. “Look here. There’s a trapdoor.”

Glancing downward, Gabriel saw a metal ring attached to part of the floor near some hinges. He remembered the man with the scales pointing downward when he spoke of
the
Haven. It must be some sort of underground facility.

“Can you open it,” Gabriel asked, firing a couple of shots to encourage everyone to keep their heads down. More than a few candles had been knocked over and several small fires were starting to burn throughout the saloon.

“I don’t have any thumbs you idiot! How am I supposed to open it!”

“Fine,” Gabriel fired the last two shots in each of his pistols at the tables. One of them actually penetrated and hit someone, by the pained cry he gave.

Dropping to one knee, Gabriel threw open the small wooden hatch. There was
no
way that bartender had
ever
fit through it. Leading down through darkness was a wooden ladder with distant light at the bottom. Holstering his pistols, he grabbed the cat and jumped down, pulling the trap door closed behind him. He seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, falling through darkness. The light below abruptly jumped up to meet him and he impacted hard, rolling to break his fall, huddled protectively around the cat.

When Gabriel came to a stop he lay flat on his back looking up at the red stone ceiling of an obviously artificial cave. Thick electrical cables ran along the walls with electric lights at regular intervals. One end of the cave was blocked with wooden crates and barrels of liquor. The other stretched on out of sight.

“Sayonara Lawman,” the weasel shouted down to him.

Something small dropped from the trapdoor far above, and Gabriel’s eyes

widened when he realized it was a grenade.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he cried as he forced himself to his feet, Mister Mittens in hand and cursing at the pain of his broken rib as he threw himself down the tunnel away from the falling grenade. He hit the ground at the same time the grenade did, curling around the cat as he rolled. There was a moment of silence that seemed to last a thousand years and then a deafening explosion and a concussion that pounded through the air, making Gabriel feel as though he’d just been, well, hit by a bus.

Picking himself up, Gabriel turned to see the red stone behind him was scorched black, and cracked with the force of the explosion. Several of the barrels of liquor were leaking foul smelling brews into an ever-growing puddle. Holding his hand over the knife wound in his chest to stop the bleeding, Gabriel tried to ignore the ranting voice of his father in the back of his mind. He wanted to scream at it to shut up, but he composed himself as best as he could under the circumstances. They would be coming down to make sure he was dead soon, and he needed to not be here when they did.

“Come on, Mittens,” he grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and started away from the trapdoor. Pain shot up his right leg and he thought he must have twisted his ankle in the fall, but he forced himself to go on. Sam needed him, and he might have hostiles coming at him from behind at any moment.

“That’s
Mister
Mittens to you,” the cat replied, as Gabriel allowed him to climb onto his shoulder.

“Hold on Sam,” Gabriel muttered as he hobbled as fast as his wounds would

allow. On the verge of vomiting, he felt somewhat disillusioned. In movies the action hero never felt sick after blowing away countless bad guys. Of course, any idiot knew that movies of the action variety rarely had anything resembling fact to them. “I’m coming. Just hold on.”

Reloading with the remainder of his ammunition, Gabriel hobbled on, forcing his stomach to stop its churning through sheer willpower. What he wouldn’t give to have a gun out of one of the Governator’s more cheesy flicks, one that never seemed to require ammunition to keep firing.

Chapter 21: The Haven

Slanting steadily downward, the tunnel seemed to move in a gigantic spiral.

Gabriel was not sure how far down he’d gone, but it seemed like he was far below the surface. His broken rib and bruised collarbone screamed at him with every step, every breath, and every heartbeat. Though walking on his twisted right ankle for an hour had caused the pain to fade away to numbness, he could not bend it far in any direction. The joint seemed locked in place, swollen tightly, and his toes tingled with bad circulation.

At least the stab wound in his chest had stopped bleeding, though he could actually see the broken bone through it. A man should never have to look at his own bones, it was just
wrong
! When he got Sam out he was going to need a crapton of stitches.

A large metal door hanging open on massive hinges brought an abrupt end to the tunnel. It could give any bank vault a severe case of hatch-envy. The computer console built into the wall beside it looked to have taken several beatings and the screen was smashed out. With sudden realization, Gabriel moved closer, looking up at the massive door.

“It’s a fallout shelter.”

“Please explain,” Mister Mittens said in his ear. The cat’s whiskers tickled and his nose was cold and wet.

“It’s a radiation proof bunker far underground, usually filled with enough food and water to last until the radiation passes in the event of nuclear war. The name Children of the Chosen makes more sense now. They’re descendants of the people that survived the war in the shelter. After however many generations they must have come to believe that their ancestors were chosen to survive the holocaust.”

Flattening himself against the wall beside the hatch, Gabriel peeked around the corner into the shelter. Through the flickering, dim lighting, he saw a metal corridor strewn with various bits of garbage. After a slow count of fifty, no one appeared down the corridor. Darting through the door, he moved as quickly as his wounds would allow until he came to an intersection and repeated the process.

Sneaking through branching corridors filled with metal doors bearing control

panels to the right of each, Gabriel found himself completely lost. He would have given just about anything for one of those maps that could be found at malls or amusement parks with a convenient icon labeled, “you are here”.

With no clue how large the fallout shelter was, or where to even start looking for Sam, his only real hope was coming across a lone Child of the Chosen that he could beat into submission. Darting from passageway to passageway, he amused himself by

thinking how much it resembled a derelict Starship Enterprise.

Catching sight of a rat the size of a small dog, Gabriel decided that the opposite direction looked far more inviting.

Without continuous movement, the numbness from his ankle faded, letting the

pain of the bad sprain jolt through at his every step, like shards of broken glass in the joint. Beginning to feel lightheaded and somewhat distant, Gabriel knew that he couldn’t go on for much longer. He was going to pass out if he didn’t find Sam soon.

Voices around a corner ahead caused Gabriel to step into a connecting corridor for cover. Peering around the corner, he watched the shadows of two men play across the wall at the end of the hallway. Though he could not make out what was being said, they sounded familiar.