Motherlode by James Axler Page B

hand. Smoke trailed from its upper barrel from the shot that had smashed his cock and balls.
    His eyes went wide as he stared down the lower barrel of the 2-shot derringer. She let him get a good look into it, then she fired.
    The bullet exploded his right eye in a spray of blood and nastiness. Whatever she had chambered didn’t exit the back of his head. Instead it evidently ricocheted inside his skull and turned his brain to jelly to match his balls.
    The back of his head slammed against the bar top as he toppled backward, stone chilled.
    Dark Lady’s action had astonished his two backups at least as completely as it had him. If not as painfully. Or fatally. Yet.
    The greasy-haired guy’s right hand came out of his jacket holding a pitted 1911 blaster. As he turned it toward Dark Lady something flickered from Ryan’s left, where he had no peripheral vision.
    One of Jak’s throwing knives, which he had no doubt palmed the instant he’d seen the Crazy Dogs, punched through the back of the coldheart’s blaster hand. The man shrieked like a wounded horse.
    Mikey-Bob reached a plate-size hand across the bar and wrapped it over the top of the Crazy Dog’s head. Then he slammed it against the edge of the two-inch-thick hardwood slab he’d spent the past few minutes polishing so assiduously.
    The bar was better built than a coldheart’s skull. Ryan learned that beyond any doubt when he saw the side of the Crazy Dog’s head flatten and heard a loud crunch with a back of wet squishing that gave even his vanadium-steel stomach a twinge. The man slumped as lifeless as the boss he’d failed to protect.
    The Mohawk girl was more decisive. She had her big blades out and whirling as she closed on Dark Lady, hissing like an angry wildcat and just as fast. Ryan had his own handblaster out but couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the gaudy owner.
    But she didn’t stand there meek and mild to be sliced to ribbons. Rather she sprang to meet the taller woman. She turned counterclockwise as she did, slapping the Crazy Dog’s right wrist with her left hand, pushing the forearm with her right. That created an opening for her to turn her hip hard into the woman’s flat belly, inside the arc of the left-hand blade.
    Cupping right fist over left, Dark Lady drove her left elbow into the coldheart’s solar plexus. The Crazy Dog doubled over with all her air blasting out her narrow nose and wide-open mouth.
    Dark Lady stood her up again with a right-hand palm-heel strike that flattened the nose all over her hard-bitten face with a crunch of smashing bone and cartilage. That wasn’t a kill-shot, no matter how many stupes still thought it was.
    But breaking her nose did disorient the coldheart. Dark Lady grabbed her left arm and spun out again, straightening it. Holding the wrist with her left hand, she gave a right-forearm shiver to the coldheart’s locked-out elbow, putting a lot of hip into. The joint snapped with a noise like a handblaster shot.
    The Crazy Dog screamed just as loud. Dropping the knife from her right hand she went to her knees, clutching her destroyed elbow and wailing.
    Dark Lady looked past her at Ryan. Her black eyes were wide and wild, her little jaw set. But it was not fearful wild. It was the sort of look Ryan knew well from the inside.
    She simply nodded once. Then she looked down at the whimpering coldheart.
    “Now it’s your turn to listen,” she said.
    She grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and yanked her head up and around to look at her. Tears sheened her thin cheeks. A glistening false beard of blood and snot covered her mouth and chin.
    “Tell Diego to leave this Basin and this ville alone. I am not the baron of Amity Springs, but this ville and its people are under my protection. Anyone who threatens them will die. Nod if you understand.”
    The Mohawked woman shook her head and gobbled something incomprehensible.
    “If you don’t understand my message to take back to your leader,” Dark Lady