The Vile Village Read online

  Somehow the huge body came to a stop, and the biker looked down at the blood spurting rapidly out of the three wounds like fountains on metal cherubs peeing in a rich man’s front yard, when there had been such things.

  “I’m dead,” he said simply and eloquently. And then he fell to the floor, his legs suddenly giving out from under him like a jack kicked away from under a stalled car. He lay there spasming, his arms and legs jerking around like manic snakes.

  There hadn’t been too many occasions when there had been complete silence in the Get Drunk, but tonight was one of them. Both sides of the room, both gangs, eyed each other furiously, all of them debating whether to go for their guns or not. Then they did, and every single soul in the entire place had some sort of piece or pieces in their hands, ready to send some son of a bitch into the next world. The bikers were sure that Stone was with the Strathers gang, or why was he standing over with them? The Struthers bunch, for their part, were sure that the bikers had decided to take them out and were just using this as an excuse. At any rate, the two groups of mortal enemies pulled their weapons, aimed them, and held them straight out in trembling hands, fingers pulled so tight against triggers that a fly landing on one would have set off.

  But they didn’t pull them. With guns aimed in every goddamn direction in the room, with just about every man clearly going to shoot someone and get shot if they fired themselves. It was like the political situation of the town itself—a stalemate. They couldn’t pull a single trigger because it was pretty likely that a hundred would go off.

  “You killed Pins,” Bronson, the leader of the bikers, finally said with a deep sadness in his voice, breaking the stark silence of the room, which was punctuated only by breathing and an occasional burp or fart from the soused gang members of each camp. “He was like a fucking brudder to me. With me from the start. And you, you little worm who don’t deserve to lick his fucking feet, you come and take him out, after all he’s been through.” Bronson laughed a dark, throaty laugh and rose from the table where he’d been sitting with his cohorts. The rest of them rose, too, all of them equally frightening-looking, though each in his own particular way—from chains around their necks to scars across their chests and arms and backs. Every man had tattooed or disfigured himself in some way. And they were powerful-looking. Stone had hardly seen such muscles on anybody since he’d watched his Wrestlemania tapes on VCR back at the bunker.

  Bronson put both hands up on his tattooed cheeks, and Stone could see by the oil light above him that the man’s whole face was emblazoned with black designs of snakes eating rats, dragons ripping girls’ legs apart and biting them in a soft place. The man was sick—to the core. He was also huge, as Stone could clearly see, when the biker leader rubbed his eyes with his plate-sized hands. Not a gun had lowered; every hand still held a bead on someone across the room.

  After a few seconds the biker topman took his hands away and opened his eyes. He snapped his fingers, and two of his bare-chested minions rushed down and picked up the fallen Pins, who had pretty much stopped spurning by now, his hands already hardening into a rigor mortis of clawed prayer.

  “If we was alone, I’d kill you right now, scum,” the biker said, burning with rage as his eyes shot into Stone’s like laser beams. “But looks like if I go after you, everyone in the damn place gets turned to chop suey.” He swept his hand over the bar as if it were his canvas—and the material wasn’t quite stretched enough for his painting in blood, for carrying out his strokes of death. “So I’m going to take my leave, gentlemen—and assholes.” He bowed a deep, exaggerated gesture, nearly stretching his head down to the buckled wood floor of the place. Stone could see by the man’s flexibility and the way his muscles bulged all over the goddamn place that the biker was tough as fucking barbed wire. It didn’t even look like a slug could penetrate those granitelike scarred arms. But Stone had made his move, and for better or worse, there was no turning back now.

  With Bronson leading the way, guns following them as they exited every step of the way, the biker crew left en masse, not wanting to risk all their property, whorehouses, gin mills, on the turn of a gun barrel, not because of one little bastard who wasn’t a piece of spit on the face of the fucking earth. Bronson paused at the door as his men filed past, holding the dead Pins aloft like some sort of sacred statue.

  “You”—he pointed at Stone from across the smoked-misted barroom—“are a dead man. And on that you can make book.” He spat down at the floor to punctuate the words, then turned and was gone. Outside, the sounds of motorcycles being started filled the late afternoon, and the scent of petrol fumes wafted in through the cracks in the walls. Then, with high-pitched screams and loud roars, the whole crew took off in a cloud of dust down the street.

  Stone stood there in the middle of what was left of the bar crowd and felt every eye in the place on him. He could, suddenly understand why actors got stage fright, as for the life of him, Martin Stone, now that he had center stage, couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say. At last, as no one else spoke up to break the silence and every gun still sort of hung out there as if wanting to shoot something, and he’d do just fine, Stone spoke up.

  “Uh, howdy, folks,” he said, shrugging his shoulders a little. “Sorry if I dirtied up the place.”

  “Who the fucking hell are you?” a voice boomed out from behind him, and Stone turned to see the one the barkeep had called Vorstel holding a sawed-off shotgun aimed straight at Stone’s chest.

  “They call me Preacher Boy, on account of I preach the Gospel with this,” Stone said, patting his Ruger with the other hand. “And I’m here to tell you that many a man has seen the truth from the blinding light of this motherfucker.”

  “I say kill the asshole,” said a man just to Vorstel’s right, dressed in what looked like three or four bearskins sewn together the wrong way. He started to raise his chromed .45, but the leader of the Strathers gang slammed his shotgun down hard on the man’s wrist, and the pistol clanked to the ground.

  “You’re being an idiot, as usual,” Vorstel said, looking annoyed at his underling, who reached down with a pained expression for his weapon. “If it was up to you, you’d shoot every damn asshole who walked in this place. And then there’d be only me and you, and I’d have to shoot you ’cause I couldn’t stand talking to no one but your ugly face for the rest of my days.” For some reason the rest of the Strathers crew thought this statement was quite amusing, and laughter broke out around the place as the men slowly reholstered their weapons. Whatever was about to happen, a gunfight didn’t look like it was going to be next on the agenda. But they all kept their eyes glued on Stone, who walked a few feet down the bar toward Vorstel, keeping his own hands clearly away from his weapons so no one felt threatened or got overexcited.

  He could see as he grew closer that Vorstel Strathers, one of three brothers who ran the hundred-man gang, as Undertaker had told him, was truly ugly. He had seen ugly men before, ugly because their features were twisted or because of some great deformity or injury. But Vorstel seemed to have all of the above and more. It looked like he had had acid thrown all over his face and then put it through a strainer. Everything on the huge face had been moved around and rearranged, like a child’s swirling finger painting. The mouth had shrunk down to something that only an olive could slide through, with but three teeth remaining in the center, so that when the gang leader spoke, he resembled nothing so much as a beaver with terrible acne atop a body that could have gotten work ripping down trees. The biggest of the Strathers brothers gave even Bronson a run for his money. Though not quite as muscular as the biker, Vorstel was, if anything, even larger and with that face, it was hard to believe anyone on the planet would challenge something that looked like that. And then Stone realized that was pretty much what he had just done.

  “Why you done that?” Vorstel asked with a strange expression as he studied Stone. He walked up to him as he reholstered his own shotgun and around the stranger, giving him the up-and
-down with his eyes.“Why you killed Pins? Not that I liked the bastard—in fact, I hated him—but still, what’s your game, mister, Mr. Preacher Man?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly why I sent that man to the Lord,” Stone said, getting a beatific expression on his face. He knew he had to play a part that was overdone but not ridiculous. A front that would not allow them to put a finger on him—to really see who he was. Another trick from the Major. Exaggerate an accent, a mannerism, anything about yourself. It forces the enemy to focus on that and not see the rest of you, what you’re hiding, be it a plan or a weapon.

  “I took out that biker bastard because I wanted to show you that I’m the baddest fucking gunner around these parts. And why you should hire me pronto, before I go sell my services to them Head Squashers, or whatever the hell they call themselves.”

  “Kill the bastard. Kill the fucking scumbag,” voices yelled out from around the room, and Stone heard the squeak of dry leather as metal pistols slid out of them again.

  “Put them fucking dildos away before I blast somebody’s goddamn balls off,” Vorstel screamed. He whipped his shotgun straight up and let out a blast that poured right into the ceiling, sending down a little cyclone of splinters over the whole crew. “You guys is dumber than worms climbing onto a fishhook.” The headman snorted contemptuously. “You won’t even let the man speak before you want to kill him.” He turned back to Stone and nodded his head, letting out a little smile, or what Stone guessed to be a smile, as the three teeth set in the middle of the cellike mouth seemed to curve up slightly.

  “Now, why the hell you want to work for me?” Vorstel asked, sweeping his huge arms around the room. “I got plenty of assholes ready to take out anyone I tells’em to.”

  “That’s right,” Stone said, looking around the room. “Exactly—you got assholes. But what do you do when you need someone smart, W. Vorstel Strathers? When you need someone like me. Billy “Preacher Boy” Pinkus. Gunman, negotiator, strong-arm, I do it all, Vorstel. All.”

  “And what the hell’s your fucking qualifications, Mr. Chairman of the Board?” Vorstel asked, looking edgy again, like his hand might just snap up that sawed-off .12-gauge. Stone glanced out of the corner of his eye for a place to jump, but he knew that if his bullshit didn’t work out, and fast, he didn’t have a chance in this den of wolves, every one of whom was just itching to take his head off and send it down to the land of unidentifiable has-beens.

  “My qualifications,” Stone said with a smirk, trying to act more confident than he felt. His heart was jumping around inside his chest like a basketball on a court, but his face didn’t betray him, it stayed hard and amused by the whole thing. “Worked for the Chester gang out in Amarillo, the Boffords down in Chattanooga, the Spencer twins out in L.A., but they’re all dead now, no fault of my own.” Stone spat out a ridiculous false list of his connections with other gangs, all made up and all far enough away, he prayed, for no one present to know the fucking difference. And no one did, for when he had stopped his spiel, the place was again silent, and Vorstel just kept staring at him.

  “So you came here and killed that asshole just to get a job with me?” the face-twisted gang head asked skeptically.

  “Goddamn right,” Stone said. “Because I’m a man with big ambitions. “I need gold in my pocket to feel secure, and your name, the name of the Strathers brothers, is famous all over the fucking West. Everybody said you want to make big money instead of shooting the toes off every little penny-ante scumbag in the street? Go see the Strathers, they said. So here I am.” He giggled softly, trying to sound like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. “I need money, big money, and you need my gun if you ever want to break the stalemate you and the Head Suckers, or whatever the fuck they’re called, are in.”

  Stone heard grumblings all over the room but no screams of “Get the cocksucker.” He stood there silently as Vorstel’s eyeballs spun around in his head like roulette balls on speed.

  “Famous around the country, you say,” Vorstel said softly, staring at Stone. “Well, that’s mighty nice, mighty fucking nice, indeed.” Stone’s flatteries, as he thought they would, melted the heart of even the toughest asshole in the place. All men are suckers for adulation. And he who knows it can play with them like puppets.

  “Come on, Preacher Boy,” Vorstel said suddenly, pushing some of his slow-moving men out of the way so that they fell backward, sprawling on the floor. “You and me is going to have a few drinks and talk about killing.”

  Chapter

  Eleven

  * * *

  They drank for hours. Vorstel sent over for bottle after bottle of the green and the brown stuff, and Stone had no choice but to keep at it right alongside of the over-grown bastard and pray that they weren’t suckering him into a trap.

  “What’s that on your face?” Vorstel asked him after the first few gulps had been chugged.

  “Radiation bums,” Stone said, trying not to spit out the mouthful of the foul brew he had just imbibed. If the brown, which he had had at the bar, had been fit for pigs, the green stuff was worse. It tasted like mouthwash in which mouths had, in fact, been washed. Or perhaps horses’ hooves. Whatever it was, the liquid had a most unpleasant, long, lingering aftertaste. Yet the whole damn place seemed to swear by the “liquor,” as bottle after bottle was consumed and the barkeep kept having to send down to the basement for more. “Got caught in some high-rad rains,” Stone went on, feeling around his face.

  “You think that’s something?” Vorstel laughed, pulling his tree-sized leg up on the table, which shook around under the weight. “Got me this bum when I kneeled on a piece of metal just inside a nuke crater about fifty miles from here. I figured the radiation would be dead, but—” He pulled up the cuff of his right pant leg and rolled it up to his knee. Stone winced. The entire leg from just above the kneecap down to around mid-calf was bright purple and all scarred with cordlike knots that twisted around it in all directions. It was not the sort of leg that would win many bathing-beauty contests.

  “Damn thing sizzled my skin when I touched it,” the Struthers ganger went on, staring hard at Stone. “Next thing I knew, I smelt my own flesh burning, and I jumped back, but it was already done. Damn thing swelled up to the size of a garbage can. Couldn’t walk on it for nearly six months. But now it works just fine.”

  “Well, that is a nice scar,” Stone said, having taken his fifth big gulp of the green stuff, which he was discovering, to his pleasure—and horror—seemed to taste better with each sip. “But for something long and just plain nasty-looking, check this out.” Stone pulled upon his fatigue jacket and lifted the black sweatshirt he wore beneath it. There was a long, narrow scar that ran from his belly button up the whole side of his chest.

  “Goddamn cannibal gave me that with an ax. Can you believe it”—Stone snorted—“before I made him worm chow.” Vorstel bent over and examined the reddish scar as if a doctor.

  “Nice, nice, I won’t say it ain’t nice,” the gang leader said, sitting back with a look of determination on his three-toothed face, his wisps of black hair combed over the top of his scalp like a few hurredly drawn pencil lines. “But this is a real scar.” He lifted his thick black fur coat back and pulled his own thick zippered shirt back, ripping the zipper right from the material as he did so.

  “Knife wound. Three guys attacked me. Then I attacked them.” The blade had nearly penetrated the ganger’s stomach, for there was a huge mass of tangled scar tissue that curved across the whole width of his stomach. It was almost the kind of cut one would make to commit hara-kari—the Oriental art of self-disembowelment.

  “Oh, yeah, this was a good one, I’ll tell you,” Vorstel said with a wide smile. “I had to hold my own guts in while they ran and got a horse doctor who sewed the damn thing up with fishing line. But it held, didn’t it?” He punched himself hard three times in the stomach where the scar tissue was thickest, then laughed loudly, screaming for more brew as he tossed a bottle back up over his he
ad, not even giving a damn where it landed. In fact, it landed on the head of a trapper who had come down from the mountains looking for some fun. The trapper thought the bloke next to him had tossed the bottle, and so the trapper turned and cut the man’s ear off with a single slice, which started quite a stir at that end of the bar, to which Stone and his drinking partner paid not the slightest heed.

  “Well, you may have me at in the ‘longest’ department, but I know I got the strangest,” Stone bragged as some of the green drink sprayed from the corner of his lips so that it looked like he had just taken a mouthful of green paint. Stone was getting drunker by the minute and starting to lose it. But somewhere in the back of his mind he always knew where his “equalizers” were and just how long it would take him to reach them.

  “Here,” Stone said, lifting the back of his shirt and exposing part of his lower back. “See those five dark dots? Electrodes from an electric stun gun made them. Hurt like a motherfucker, with twenty thousand volts coming in through the goddamn skin.”

  “Now that’s nice, that’s real nice,” Vorstel said with the slightly awed tone of the true connoisseur of such bodily scars. “But still I got me a weird one myself.” He lifted up the pant leg on his left side and showed his own multipronged pierce mark, this one three quarter-sized wounds side by side in a straight line across the huge leg. “Pitchfork. Just lying there on the ground about five years ago. Didn’t see it. Walked right into the damn thing, speared myself like a fucking fish. Went right through, it did. Got the same holes coming out the back too.”

  And so it went, as the two showed their battle scars to one another, exchanged war stories of just who they’d killed and where they’d gotten him, demonstrating it all dramatically using their hands as knives or pistols. The two “killers” got along famously, going at it until they were both so drunk that even Vorstel, who had been known to drink a cow under the table, couldn’t stand up. He had some of his boys help him and Stone, and they were half carried the two blocks to one of the Strathers brothers’ whorehouses, the best in Cotopaxi.